Tag: war

The logic of neocon rage

John Podhoretz, who has advocated war against Iran and Iraq, is outraged by the evil in Norway:

The monstrous events today in Norway—as of this writing, word is that a gunman slaughtered at least 30 kids at a youth camp who had gathered to hear about the earlier bombing of government offices in Oslo—have stirred in me a kind of rage I haven’t felt this viscerally since the days after 9/11, when my apartment in Brooklyn Heights looked out directly on the violent purple gash in the sky that hovered over the wreckage like a demonic counterimage of the holy cloud that followed the Jews through the desert in the aftermath of the Exodus. Perhaps it is that my own daughter is, as I write, at her own day camp outside New York City, and so there is something visceral, primal, in my sense of connection to the dead and dying and their parents. This rage, which is accompanied by all manner of violent thoughts about what should be done and could be done to the living body of the depthlessly evil monster who committed this Satanic act, is disturbing in its intensity. I would like it to go away. But it won’t, and it shouldn’t, because without it–without a stark response to something so purposefully awful–we are unilaterally disarming ourselves. The monster and his comrades have the passion to commit their foul deeds. If we respond with dispassion, we are ceding to them part of the animating force that makes us human. If we decide to intellectualize our emotions rather than allow them to influence us, we are turning our back on our responsibility to those whose lives were stripped from them.

So, it’s evil for Saudis to kill Americans, it’s evil for Norwegians to kill Norwegians and nominal Norwegians, but it is a moral imperative for Americans to kill Iraqis and Iranians. Got it? Let’s compare the bodycount to date:

9/11: 2,996 deaths. VISCERAL RAGE!
Oslo: 92 deaths. DEPTHLESS AND SATANIC EVIL!
Iraq: 135,369 deaths. NOT ENOUGH DEAD SUNNIS! (1)
Iran: ???? deaths. KILL AMALEKITES FOR ISRAEL! (2)

(1) “What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?”

(2) “If Barack Obama wants Israel to pull back to the 1967 borders, a position that could not be politically achieved today. If he thought that would solve everything, the best way for him to do that is to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. If the US takes out Iran’s nuclear capacity and Obama goes to Jerusalem and says, ‘I have saved you from Amalek, I have saved you from the revival of the greatest threat to the Jewish people, you do something for me.”

Needless to say, Podhoretz the Younger is not only selective about what sort of deaths fill him with BOUNDLESS RAAAAGE and what sort he would like to see more of, but he also supports the very sort of immigration policy that appears to have led to yesterday’s lethal attacks in Norway.

“[A]s a Jew, I have great difficulty supporting a blanket policy of immigration restriction because of what happened to the Jewish people after 1924 and the unwillingness of the United States to take Jews in.”

So, Norway should permit Sri Lankans and Tunisians to settle in Norway because the USA didn’t permit Jews to settle in the USA in 1924. Got it? Podhoretz’s emotional histrionics are particularly ironic in light of the way the logic of his various positions suggests that the U.S. military should have attacked the Utoya Worker’s League camp and slaughtered everyone “between the ages of 15 and 35” in order to save Norway from Cush. The amusing thing is that there is a very good chance that at least one of the deaths that so outrage him now was that of a male Sunni between 15 and 35.

It also strikes one that perhaps the Iranians should consider rethinking their strategy vis-a-vis Israel. Instead of pursuing nuclear weapons, which is, per Podhoretz, bad, Tehran should simply order a few hundred thousand of its citizens to peacefully immigrate to Israel, which is, per Podhoretz, good. No doubt this will cause Podhoretz the Younger to abandon his call for war with Iran and joyfully embrace the new Persian-Israelis.

UPDATE – One wonders if Podhoretz will soon express similar rage over the death of a 35-year old youth who was gunned down in Tehran today.

The brilliance of U.S. strategery

Jim Lacey on the death of U.S. military strategy:

I teach strategy to Marines and other military officers for a living. The classes hear ad nauseam that if your plan does not include any directions as to how to carry it out, and how to obtain resources for it, then you do not have a strategy. You have an aspiration. The NMS has a lot of aspirations. There are several dozen of them in the first few pages alone. One has to wade through eight pages of aspirations before coming to: “The core task of our Armed Forces remains to defend our Nation and win its wars.” Wow! I would have led with that one.

Military strategists might wonder why the authors of the NMS made them wade through a third of the document before getting to the crucial reason of why we maintain a military in the first place. One might even wonder if the NMS authors really mean that winning wars is job number one, since elsewhere in the document you find: “Lastly, we will be prepared to act as security guarantor — preferably with partners and allies, but alone if necessary — to deter and defeat acts of aggression.” Lastly? Really? Since page one says, “Our foremost priority is the security of the American people, our territory, and our way of life,” one wonders what activities are so important that the military has moved defeating aggression to last in its order of concerns.

In related news, the U.S. Army recently reported that its officers will no longer utilize wargames as part of their military training, but will instead incorporate a rigorous program that includes The Ungame, “a non-competitive learning game of conversation that fosters listening skills as well as self-expression”, Dance Dance Revolution, and the popular teen party game Spin the Bottle. Two card games, Uno and Mille Bournes, were also given serious consideration, but the former was rejected as being “too competitive” while the latter was deemed to be a potentially negative influence on young officers due to its glorification of excess speed and failure to respect legal speed limits.

When asked for comment, Brigadier General Shaniqua Rodriguez expressed reservations about the new policy, saying: “The Ungame be cool and I rockin the hells outta DDR, but I ain’t kissing no mans nohow. I don’t play that shit. And what the White Man got against Uno? It be too brown and shit? They raciss!”

UPDATE: General Martin Dempsey, U.S. Army Chief of Staff, announced that “Uno, Chinese Checkers, and that African game where they clap and hop over sticks” would be added to the Army’s new training schedule, effective immediately. He also announced that he would not attempt to kiss Brigadier General Rodriguez even if the bottle pointed in her direction, commenting that “while she is fly, she is one crazy-ass Lebanese.”

WND column

The Rise of the East

Supporters of the ongoing Bush-Obama wars have often said that one of the reasons the United States needed to attack Afghanistan and Iraq (and now Libya and Yemen and Somalia) is because failing to do so would exhibit weakness and encourage our enemies. Now that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is into its 10th year, intrepid supporters of American empire are claiming that American troops must continue to occupy Afghanistan (and Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Somalia) because the post-withdrawal collapse of the indigenous forces presently being propped up by the U.S. military will exhibit weakness and encourage our enemies.

These childish arguments reveal that the bellicose neocons who have been pushing foreign military adventures for more than a decade are not only chickenhawks innocent of any military service, but also know nothing about military history or the military aspects of geostrategy.

WND Column

9/11 is now a joke

Although a few cynical observers anticipated that Barack Obama, the erstwhile peace candidate, would not end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – remember, he beat out Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination largely on the grounds of her pro-war positions – no one was cynical enough to foresee that his occupation of the presidency would lead to the U.S. military fighting no less than six wars in its third year under his command.

Republicans who have resolutely supported the ongoing wars of democratic imperialism over the last 10 years are long overdue to answer some very serious questions about the strategic sanity of America’s continuous military aggression, particularly now that American troops have returned to the site of their last military defeat in Somalia.

More and smaller wars

The post-WWII period has not been as peaceful as is usually presumed:

We may think the world enjoyed periods of relative freedom from war between the Cold War and 9/11 but the new research by Professor Mark Harrison from at the University of Warwick’s the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy, and Professor Nikolaus Wolf from Humboldt University, shows that the number of conflicts between pairs of states rose steadily from 6 per year on average between 1870 and 1913 to 17 per year in the period of the two World Wars, 31 per year in the Cold War, and 36 per year in the 1990s.

Professor Mark Harrison from the University of Warwick said: “The number of conflicts has been rising on a stable trend. Because of two world wars, the pattern is obviously disturbed between 1914 and 1945 but remarkably, after 1945 the frequency of wars resumed its upward course on pretty much the same path as before 1913.”

One of the key drivers is the number of countries, which has risen dramatically – from 47 in 1870 to 187 in 2001.

As the historically aware observer increasingly gathers, the second-worst president in the history of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, has an awful lot for which to answer. It is largely his pre-neocon vision of world democratic revolution and declaration of U.S. support for tribal self-determination around the globe that is behind this increase in the amount of international conflict. I note that this study does not take the rising amount of intra-national violence into account, or the historical picture would likely look even worse.

The Costs of War

All the clueless, self-styled “conservatives” who think they can simultaneously support small government and foreign wars need to have “$4 trillion” stamped on their small, sloping foreheads. No amount of militarily and historically illiterate blathering about how “we gots to kill dem ober deah so’s dey doan kills us heah” is going to change the fact that borrowing trillions of dollars in order to kill a few hapless goat humpers is demonstrably neither a sustainable nor an effective approach to war:

Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come, according to a study released Wednesday. The final bill will reach at least $3.7 trillion and could be as high as $4.4 trillion, according to the research project “Costs of War” by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

In the 10 years since U.S. troops went into Afghanistan to root out the al-Qaida leaders behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, spending on the conflicts totaled $2.3 trillion to $2.7 trillion. Those numbers will continue to soar when considering often overlooked costs such as long-term obligations to wounded veterans and projected war spending from 2012 through 2020.

The estimates do not include at least $1 trillion more in interest payments coming due and many billions more in expenses that cannot be counted, according to the study.

I’ve heard some say that the “isolationism” of Ron Paul and others is dangerous and crazy. The fact is that if you do not subscribe to that “isolationism”, you are without question historically illiterate, militarily ignorant, and a complete, unmitigated financial moron. That $4 trillion spent on the unnecessary Bush-Obama wars could have been used to completely eliminate all of the state and local government debt in the country while reducing outstanding federal debt by 16 percent.

What profit it a nation to guard the borders of Germany and South Korea while leaving its own unmanned?

Send Congress home

Why, exactly, are we bothering to elect Senators and Representatives in the first place now that they have handed hand over control of the money supply to a private bank and war powers to an unholy combination of the executive branch, NATO, and the United Nations? Not only is this not democracy, it’s not even representative democracy, much less in accordance with the Constitution.

In an effort to satisfy those arguing he needs to seek congressional authorization to continue US military activity in accordance with the War Powers Resolution, President Obama wrote a letter to congressional leaders this afternoon suggesting that the role is now so “limited” he does not need to seek congressional approval.

“Since April 4,” the president wrote, “U.S. participation has consisted of: (1) non-kinetic support to the NATO-led operation, including intelligence, logistical support, and search and rescue assistance; (2) aircraft that have assisted in the suppression and destruction of air defenses in support of the no-fly zone; and (3) since April 23, precision strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles against a limited set of clearly defined targets in support of the NATO-led coalition’s efforts.”

A senior administration official told ABC News that the letter is intended to describe “a narrow US effort that is intermittent and principally an effort to support to support the ongoing NATO-led and UN-authorized civilian support mission and no fly zone.”

“The US role is one of support,” the official said, “and the kinetic pieces of that are intermittent.”

From the beginning of the U.S. military intervention in Libya, the Obama administration has cited the 1973 War Powers Act as the legal basis of its ability to conduct military activities for 60 days without first seeking a declaration of war from Congress. The military intervention started on March 19; Congress was notified on March 21. Those 60 days expire today.

One merely wonders how a military target being clearly defined or in support of a coalition effort makes bombing it any less an act of war.

Generals just aren’t that bright

Apparently they’re no longer teaching “never reinforce failure” at West Point.

In his first interview since becoming second in command of the International Security and Assistance Force (Isaf), General James Bucknall told the Guardian “now is not the time to blink”, and pleaded for more patience in the decade-long campaign because progress was being made.

Here’s the first hint that you need to give up on a war. If it is going on longer than it took to wipe out the Axis, it simply is not going to happen. It’s time for Americans to accept the reality that the Taliban are going to win in Afghanistan for one very simple and inevitable reason. They care a hell of a lot more about it than Americans do. And throwing away $100 billion on a foreign hellhole makes absolutely zero sense for a bankrupt nation, especially one that has permitted a 25-year invasion of its borders.

Overestimating the military

Fred presciently cautioned the nation several weeks prior to America’s somewhat exaggerated celebration of its SEALs:

When I was at Parris Island in a previous geological epoch, a large sign in Third Battalion conspicuously said, “The Most Dangerous Weapon in the World: A Marine with his Rifle.” This didn’t rise to the level of nonsense. Few Marines are as dangerous as a hydrogen bomb, and Marines in general are just pretty good light infantry, well-equipped as an expeditionary forces.

But you can’t tell fresh young troops, “You’re maybe a bit above average, but the Afghans are much tougher people, having been raised fighting and living on dried goat-meat, and they know the terrain, whereas you will have no idea where you are and your equipment and tactics are badly unsuited for the region, so it’s going to be hard slogging.” Not optimal for recruiting. More profoundly, men in combat arms want to feel inexorable, deadly, the best. Whether they actually are doesn’t occur to them until the war starts. A satisfying state of mind is what is wanted.

This preference for mood over reality runs through their careers. Constantly they are told that they are “the best trained, best equipped, most powerful and effective fighting force the world has seen.” This is not a statement of fact but of mandatory enthusiasm. The Pentagon’s record since WW II has been a sorry one. Further, effectiveness, training, and so on are relative to a particular situation: a force well-equipped for desert war against aging Iraqi armor is not necessarily equipped to fight guerrillas in Quang Tri or Helmand.

But soldiers, romantics pretending to be realists, do not think in these terms…. In their elevated estimation of their powers, (which is not personal egotism) militaries routinely underestimate the difficulty and duration of their wars.

I have to admit, I have been more than a bit underwhelmed by the supposedly exemplary performance of the strike team that is reported to have killed Osama bin Laden. All of the congratulatory posturing on the part of civilian America strikes me as more than a bit ignorant. While I’m glad there were no American casualties, if you manage to lose a $15.6 million helicopter in exchange for killing a few elderly, unarmed men, it’s not exactly indicative of superlative performance in the mode of Hannibal at Cannae.

What many Americans don’t realize is that many militaries sincerely believe they are the best in the world. The British can’t mention their armed forces without reflexively adding “of course, man for man, the best army in the world.” The Canadians think their air force is the best, the Israelis think that defeating Arab armies some 40 years ago makes theirs the best.

The fact of the matter is that the quality of a military force and its material is significantly less important than how it is utilized. Mahan’s historical treatise on sea power makes it abundantly clear that there were numerous occasions when the French, or the French and the Spanish, had better ships and more of them, but failed to seek battle at the crucial junctures and therefore lost what were eminently winnable wars. Indeed, the French could have easily become the dominant sea power and were well on their way to doing so, but the Sun King, Louis XIV, was fatally distracted by trivial continental endeavors and thereby threw away the formidable naval machine that Colbert had built up for him.

The more military history one reads, the more one realizes that much of the discussion of the spear’s head is virtually beside the point. This isn’t to take anything away from the heroism and the personal sacrifices made by the soldiery, but rather, to point out that such things should not be permitted to go to waste by an overly politicized officer class and politicians who blithely decide to invade foreign countries regardless of the level of the national interest.

And it is impossible to argue with Fred’s observance that the U.S. military is no different than any other in its inability to realistically forecast the difficulty and duration of its engagements.

Who is in charge of the White House?

Is it Valerie Jarrett or Leon Panetta? Either way, Obama doesn’t sound so much over his head as completely disengaged in this description of the evolution of the attack on the compound in Pakistan:

What happened from there is what was described by me as a “masterful manipulation” by Leon Panetta. Panetta indicated to Obama that leaks regarding knowledge of Osama Bin Laden’s location were certain to get out sooner rather than later, and action must be taken by the administration or the public backlash to the president’s inaction would be “…significant to the point of political debilitation.” It was at that time that Obama stated an on-ground campaign would be far more acceptable to him than a bombing raid. This was intended as a stalling tactic, and it had originated from Jarrett. Such a campaign would take both time, and present a far greater risk of failure. The president had been instructed by Jarrett to inform Mr., Panetta that he would have sole discretion to act against the Osama Bin Laden compound. Jarrett believed this would further delay Panetta from acting, as the responsibility for failure would then fall almost entirely on him. What Valerie Jarrett, and the president, did not know is that Leon Panetta had already initiated a program that reported to him –and only him, involving a covert on the ground attack against the compound….

I have been told by more than one source that Leon Panetta was directing the operation with both his own CIA operatives, as well as direct contacts with military – both entities were reporting to Panetta only at this point, and not the President of the United States. There was not going to be another delay as had happened 24 hour earlier. The operation was at this time effectively unknown to President Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett and it remained that way until AFTER it had already been initiated. President Obama was literally pulled from a golf outing and escorted back to the White House to be informed of the mission. Upon his arrival there was a briefing held which included Bill Daley, John Brennan, and a high ranking member of the military. When Obama emerged from the briefing, he was described as looking “very confused and uncertain.” The president was then placed in the situation room where several of the players in this event had already been watching the operation unfold. Another interesting tidbit regarding this is that the Vice President was already “up to speed” on the operation. A source indicated they believe Hillary Clinton had personally made certain the Vice President was made aware of that day’s events before the president was. The now famous photo released shows the particulars of that of that room and its occupants. What that photo does not communicate directly is that the military personnel present in that room during the operation unfolding, deferred to either Hillary Clinton or Robert Gates. The president’s role was minimal, including their acknowledging of his presence in the room.

This might offer several alternative explanations to the inexplicable decision to immediately get rid of the body, the dithering over the evidence of the corpse’s identity, as well as the bizarre nature of the compliments that the various White House officials were paying Obama after the operation concluded successfully. They struck me more like an uncertain little boy being patted on the head than as soldiers complimenting their commander; no one who has read the deferentially enthusiastic reactions of the English captains to meeting Admiral Nelson before Trafalgar is likely to mistake the various statements from Washington officials with the admiration of warriors for their victorious commander. Nor, in the picture of the temporary situation room, does Obama look like he’s anything more than a passive observer. That means nothing in itself, but it is certainly in line with the perspective provided in the insider’s account.

Obviously, other than checking on the weather patterns on the night of the aborted mission, we have no ability to ascertain the truth of this supposed insider’s account. It could simply be a complete fiction inspired by the photo. But if it is true, it is further support for my contention that Obama is likely going to be replaced by the Democrats next year.