Follow Us
Showing All Blog Posts
Tuesday, June 17th 2014
Tom Weiss
Working together just to get results helped create this mess.
Posted Tue Jun 17 2014 17:00
1 of 1 liked this
At National Journal, Ron Fournier has a piece, titled "How Malpractice May Kill Our Politics", about the latestPew Research reportreleased last week. He starts off melodramatically: "Picture two old men sharing an ICU unit--fatally ill with a little-known disease, and surrounded by their large families.Now imagine that the relatives (many of them research physicians) don't spend a minute or a dollar to find a cure. Instead, they squabble over which guy will die first."
The two old men are representative of the Republican and Democratic parties, Fournier explains, and the families they're surrounded by are hard core political partisans. Fournier goes on, "Are they looking for a cure? No, almost all of the energy on the Left and the Right is spent parsing blame. Yes, Americans hate us, but they should hate the other guy more!"
Fournier's argument is with these partisans who are parsing blame, "the GOP's share of blame is 20 percent or 60 percent or 80 percent. Who cares? Not the average voter who merely wants her leaders to work together and get results."
Work together and get results. There are an awful lot of political value judgements inherent in that sentence fragment.
A few years ago I started to investigate skepticism and theskeptic movement. Skeptics are people dedicated to fighting pseudoscience and paranormal claims, among other things, with science and reason. Good skeptics carefully distinguish their political value judgements - those opinions which cannot be measured, quantified, or scientifically determined - with things that can be investigated using the scientific method. But a rabid strain ofliberalskepticshas poisoned the movement in recent years and have injected their partisanship (mainly using the Krugman "facts skew left" fallacy) into what should be a non-partisan endeavor.
(Interesting side note, I've been banned from commenting at each of the two websites I mention above, even the Orwellian named "Free Thought Blog". Tolerance is not their forte.)
For a movement like skepticism, this unnecessary detour into polarization and partisanship distracts from the goal - fighting pseudoscience with science and reason. They can't work together and get results if they'remocking libertarians. But this is an organization with amissionand a common set of principles.
Congress isn't. The constitution grants Congress legislative powers - then endeavors to limit those powers as much as practicable - but doesn't give it a mission.
The definition of "working together and getting results" depends upon what you expect our representatives to work on and what results are desirable. And even my last sentence assumes that results, in and of themselves, are in fact desirable. In the skeptic movement, or in any movement properly defined, that goal is clear. In Congress, it isn't.
There has been a meme on the left for a long time about the "do nothing Congress." Always invoked when the right controls the chamber, they complain about how many things just aren't getting done. For many people on the right, however, inaction is itself a victory. Washington rarely screws things up by doing nothing. But even inaction is less preferable to action that rolls back the policies which hurt the people they are intended to help (i.e. Obamacare).
So in one sense I have to agree with Fournier - I do want the Democrats and Republicans to work together to roll back or repeal some or all of these hurtful policies and regulations. But my guess is that's not exactly what Fournier had in mind.
The polarization Fournier laments suggests to me that we're coming to a crossroads in our political evolution. People are increasingly polarized because our political choices are increasingly stark. Are the first principles of the constitution (things like limited government and federalism) to be upheld or are we to continue heading down the road of European style democratic socialism (as a result of "working together and getting results")?
By all means lets have this debate about first principles. Where do we want to go, and what means should we use to get there? Working together just to get results hasn't fared very well, in fact it helped create the polarization that we see today.
So three cheers for polarization. We should all welcome the coming debate about our national character and priorities.
Michael Sheldon
Jack is back. Right when we need him most.
Posted Tue Jun 17 2014 14:11
3 of 3 liked this
Today we see al Qaeda resurgent in Syria, Lybia, and now Iraq. This is mostly attributable to our government, which is indifferent at best. As Obama prepares to huddle with Iran, it gives new meaning to the phrase, "the terrorists are us."
And so it feels appropriate that the chief villains on this season of 24 are a fanatical, blue-eyed British woman and her hatefully indoctrinated children. We may not yet be our own worst enemy, but we're getting there.
A fear of being called racist now prevents most Americans from calling our enemies by their true name. So, when Jack says, "I hate these people," it sends a shudder up and down your spine, because he's telling the truth on prime time television.
Revisionists now claim that Winston Churchill wasn't much of a leader, but he did make pretty speeches. Personally, I agree with Tom Brady's comment that the only statistic that matters is the score at the end of the game.
Currently, our leader is no geo-political strategist, and if his speeches are boosting anyone's morale, it can only be the Islamofacists. He's certainly no Winston Churchill.
At least we have Jack Bauer.
Monday, June 16th 2014
Site
Posted Mon Jun 16 2014 09:44
In praise of pulp fiction.
Sunday, June 15th 2014
Stephen McDonald
... or at least see the potential upside.
Posted Sun Jun 15 2014 07:41
2 of 2 liked this
PJ Media's David Solway has a column up arguing Obama's presidency only makes sense when viewed through the lens of Cloward-Piven.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy:
In other words, politics as a continuation of war by other means."seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse." Choking the welfare rolls would serve to generate a political and financial meltdown, "break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down." The fear, turmoil and violence accompanying such a debacle would provide the 'perfect conditions for fostering radical change.
Solway's insight isn't particularly new--I've seen columns arguing that Obama was a horseman of the Cloward-Piven apocalypse since at least the 2009 (non-) Stimulus bill. But it's well worth the read since, six years in, he has more data against which to measure Obama. One is hard-pressed to think of a single Obama initiative that hasn't harmed the economy or diminished American standing in the world. What emerges is a portrait not of a good-hearted but ultimately naive dolt (even an idiot would realize what he's doing isn't working and correct course) but of someone at war with the nation that made the mistake of putting him into office.
We should hope for the best, of course, but one wonders if even a President Cruz/Perry/Walker/Paul/Jindal and a Republican party that discovered some modicum of courage could reverse our present drain-circling. Even if in the unlikely event you had both these, there would still be an army of leftoids infesting government agencies, courts and the press, each doing their small part to ensure that the march towards Cloward-Piven singularity is never stopped. Against such a backdrop, the smart bet is on some kind of Cloward-Piven collapse sooner or later. We have to continually check their efforts to hold onto some semblance of the old United States yet they, like terrorists, only have to complete their suicide mission once to "win".
Yet increasingly, I have to wonder how much of a win Cloward-Piven would be for them. As things stand, those that have helped guide the decline such as Obama, Eric Holder, Harry Reid, and their accomplices such as the disgusting Lois Lerner, will never see the inside of a courtroom. Once a true collapse hits, the color of legal legitimacy that both gives them authority and makes them for the moment untouchable is washed away. With the old order's restraints gone, whose to say those that midwifed the collapse shouldn't swing listlessly against the backdrop of a pewter sky?
To be sure, those who fought against collapse are the more likely ones to receive the worst of an America gone red in tooth and claw. Property confiscation at a minimum, reeducation camps a probability. If that wasn't the probable outcome, leftoids wouldn't be pushing for a Cloward-Piven result in the first place. For that reason alone, the sane among us hope the Cloward-Piven apocalypse is somehow avoided.
Yet at this point we have little say in whether or not it happens. We may only get to choose our response when it does. If the wheels truly come off the American experiment, then, why not make the most of it? To borrow from Rahm Emanuel:
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
The country in ruins, the old establishment--which anymore is leftoid at its core--having failed, why shouldn't everything it held dear be swept away? Why let the opportunity for real, structural change go to waste? Why not correct what they broke so spectacularly?
The sky is the limit. The welfare state, Section 8 housing, SNAP, etc.? Sorry, but using the State to enable theft from your fellow citizens was part of the old, illegitimate system. Gay marriage? Old order--no longer valid. Lo siento, my illegal immigrant friends--back home you will go, and take with you those that wanted to replace our votes with yours.
Mindset means more than any tips one will find on a survivalist board. The most powerful thing in the world is belief, father as it is to action. And since you can bet that the other side will be following their beliefs to their natural conclusions (see Khmer Rouge; USSR; etc., histories thereof), you should similarly weaponize your beliefs. Understand that in a crisis things can be changed. That you can change them. That nothing of the old leftoid order was legitimate. That those that have made this all necessary deserve to be punished. That a rebuilt nation would be a better one, and that this is worth fighting for.
I don't expect many on the conservative or libertarian side to like this suggestion. But, paraphrasing Trotsky, while you may not be interested in Cloward-Piven, it is interested in you (and your families). If it's going to happen, one should do more than prepare against it. With the rule of law suspended anyway, weshould be prepared to make the most of it.The goal not mere survival or escape, but a society remade in our image, not theirs.
And who knows? I doubt it, but maybe the possibility of such a non-leftoid outcome will dissuade Cloward-Piven enthusiasts. At any rate, it's chances of avoiding catastrophe have to be at least as good as the play-by-the-rules GOP politics that has been just a speed bump on the road to ruin.
Friday, June 13th 2014
Posted Fri Jun 13 2014 17:01
4 of 4 liked this
My apologies for all of the Iraq themed posts this week - but as it's related to my fiction writing (hopefully seen here shortly) I'll attempt to make one more point without boring the everloving crap out of you in the process. I'll have my analysis of the latest Kardashian wedding in light of Bruce Jenner's transgender conundrum complete sometime next week.
In all of the coverage of the collapse of the Iraqi military over the last week, I've not seen many people - not even at the far-left Salon.com - asking a simple question. Why, if the US military trained and advised Iraq's security forces, did they fold so quickly in Mosul, Tikrit, and elsewhere?
The answer is complicated but it can be boiled down to one word - culture. Iraq's culture in many ways, big and small, is not receptive to American-style military training. I'll lay out what I consider to be the largest factors below.
Non-Commissioned Officers. The strength of the US military is in its NCO corps. A commander delegates a significant amount of responsibility to his NCOs, from basic discipline to training to the freedom to execute missions in the most effective manner. Officers are often forced to give orders with incomplete information and trust that their junior officers and NCOs will complete the mission within the commander's intent.
Iraq's military does not have a comparable NCO corps. Their military operates on a principle of "wasta" - an Arabic word that loosely translates to "influence." Where the US military promotes officers and NCOs as a result of merit, many middle-eastern militaries promote people because of their influence, their relatives, or their tribal affiliations. One Iraqi Brigade Commander I advised allowed his 15 year old son to tag along with him to work - sometimes on patrols as well - where he would issue orders to enlisted soldiers. He had no authority to do so other than his father's "wasta."
The results were predictable. Iraqi units were - when compared with their US counterparts - far less disciplined. Without NCOs empowered to uphold standards and make corrections everything from simple uniform discipline to actual mission execution suffered. Iraqi NCOs were paralyzed and chose not to take the initiative in any sense of the word. To do so would be to risk punishment - even if it was the right thing to do. Junior Iraqi officers as well as NCOs would often tell American advisors that they couldn't address an issue without an order from their superior officer. This led to a strange dynamic within the advisor community. We often asked senior American officers to address issues with their counterparts that no senior officer should have to address (and they often refused).
Tribalism/Sectarianism. This affected all Iraqi units to one degree or another. Army and police units were often manned by men from the same region in which the unit was operating. There were good practical reasons for this - soldiers were paid in cash and used that money to support their families, meaning they needed to be close by. And due to the nature of the counterinsurgency fight, a soldier who has grown up in a specific neighborhood is more effective patrolling that same neighborhood. He knows the people, knows the land, and knows when something is out of place.
I would often observe checkpoints in Baghdad and when I asked soldiers why they chose to search some cars and let others pass through, in many cases it was because they didn't recognize the people in the car.
But because people of common background and religion tend to live near each other - especially in post-Saddam Baghdad - this meant that many units were either decidedly Shia or Sunni. Some Iraqi units would, instead of upholding the law regardless of religious differences, go out of their way to harass a specific religious group within their area of influence.
Tribalism itself was less of a factor the closer you came to a large metropolitan area, but it was a large factor in rural provinces like Anbar. So much so that the turning point in Anbar came when the tribes turned against Al Qaeda. The extent to which they have allied in recent months with ISIS is likely a comment on Maliki's leadership and his unwillingness to make political concessions to the Sunni.
In his remarks today Obama used this as an excuse not to consider returning US troops to the region, but in my opinion it was precisely the presence of US troops which brought Sunni tribes to the table in 2006/7. They may not trust Maliki, but they did trust the US to be a neutral arbiter and to keep Maliki honest.
Lack of combat multipliers. As good as the American Infantry is, it would be nothing without the other branches of the military. Artillery, Armor, Aviation, Engineers, Intelligence, and Maneuver Support elements all play a part in an effective combined arms operation. With the exception of their Infantry, Iraq is deficient in every other area. To the extent they have an Armored force, it's comprised partly of old Soviet-era tanks and partly of M1 Abrams tanks. Their rotary and fixed wing air assets are not nearly as numerous or effective as they need to be. Their artillery is almost nonexistent, and their intelligence capabilities, while heavily weighted toward human assets, does not come close to approaching our capabilities. There aregood reasons for this- Iraq simply didn't have the infrastructure to support many of these assets.
"Inshallah."This is an Arabic term which means "If God wills it." There is a strain of fatalism in the Iraqi culture. Inshallah is a way to avoid making a firm commitment to anything because Allah may intervene at any time and change the circumstances. Meetings never start on time and timelines are always fluid - two things anathema to a good military unit. Any advisor who's ever worked with an Iraqi unit has had this conversation at some point or another:
You: "Did you talk to Colonel X?"
Me: "Yes."
You: "Is he going to do Y or Z?"
Me: "He said Inshallah."
You: "Is that a yes or a no?"
Me: "Inshallah."
New advisors always got agitated by that answer until they came to realize it was usually the only one they were going to get.
This brings out another point that US advisors had trouble wrapping their minds around. Religion permeates every facet of Iraqi life. Something as simple as answering a phone call requires thirty seconds of praising Allah before any real conversation can begin.
There's a little known book titledThe Quranic Concept of War,written by Pakistani General S.K. Malik, which discusses this intersection of warfare and the Islamic faith.
Writing in the introduction, LTC Joseph C. Myers states the themes of the book:
"Critical themes of Malik's work is that 'just war' or jihad in Islam is inherently spiritual warfare, religious warfare, and to the extent that Islamic forces have spiritually prepared themselves, they will 'strike terror into the hearts' of Islam's enemies. This terror as Malik describes in detail, is both physical and metaphysical, because Islamic warfare is intrinsically part of a cosmic struggle for the reign of Allah's will on the earth between the forces of God, dar al-Islam, and that of dar al-Harb, those who dwell in ignorance and darkness of the true knowledge of God."
Here Myers hits on the key to understanding ISIS' barbarism in Iraq - terror serves two purposes. It removes a physical threat (killing an ISF soldier, for example) and at the same time the terror (beheading, execution, etc.) causes those who are not killed to question their faith. If you can only win a battle through faith then the ability to decrease or shake your opponents faith is of the utmost importance.
Of course neither Malik nor the Jihadis of today address how a godless American military can be so proficient in battle, but in our current discussion it's also irrelevant. Our culture doesn't reward religious purity. Their culture does.
There are many other minor points I could make, but I've covered the major ones. US advisors in Iraq had their hands tied in many ways and were unable to create as much change as we would have liked. This was yet another argument for a prolonged military presence in the country - cultural change takes a considerable amount of time, much more than the 5-6 years we were able to give it. There were glimmers of hope and soldiers who "got it." But these were generally junior soldiers who didn't have enough "wasta" to affect any change within their unit.
Here's another depressing thought - nearly all of the criticisms of the Iraqi military I lay out in this piece also apply to the Afghan military in one form or another, except that the Afhan military is in many ways less developed than the Iraqi military was when we left. If we abandon Afghanistan in the same way we abandoned Iraq, we would in all likelihood see a similar result in that country.
UPDATE: Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker echoes my thoughts about Maliki and sectarianism:
"Those were important reasons to stay, but the most important went largely unstated: it was to continue to act as a restraint on Maliki's sectarian impulses, at least until the Iraqi political system was strong enough to contain him on its own. The negotiations between Obama and Maliki fell apart, in no small measure because of a lack of engagement by the White House. Today, many Iraqis, including some close to Maliki, say that a small force of American soldiers--working in non-combat roles--would have provided a crucial stabilizing factor that is now missing from Iraq. Sami al-Askari, a Maliki confidant, told me for my article this spring, "If you had a few hundred here, not even a few thousand, they would be cooperating with you, and they would become your partners." President Obama wanted the Americans to come home, and Maliki didn't particularly want them to stay."
David Churchill Barrow
What were some of the factors that made us so different?
Posted Fri Jun 13 2014 12:17
3 of 3 liked this
We've reached the point in our "road" where we begin to diverge from our British brethren - for though, as Burke said, a nation is "an idea of continuity," by the 18th century we were clearly building something new and unique upon the legal, cultural, economic and political foundations brought from across the sea. Burke's Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,given at Commons 2 March 1775, was an attempt to explain Americans to his bewildered fellow MPs.
So how did a New England "Joe Rumkeg" (no sixpacks back then!) differ from his counterpart in Old England? First, it is almost a certainty he could read, and a solid chance he owned land - thus qualifying him to vote. The white male literacy rate was over 90%, while in England it was 50-60%, and the land ownership figures were even more divergent. This was in large part was due to his religion. Burke described the New England faiths as "...a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion," giving him "a fierce spirit of liberty." It was obligatory for him to know his King James Bible front and back. To insure this, New England had the first public school system in the New World. Land was plentiful, and his KJV taught him to "be fruitful and multiply.," which he viewed as an economic command as well as a biological one.
Either he, or his immediate ancestors, possessed enough guts and gumption to make the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic, and start a new life on a frontier, with all that entails. The weak of body, mind or character either didn't go, died before producing many children, or quit and went back. (Notice the word "weak" here, not "sound" or "good" character. Many an emigrant to the colonies was of the rougher sort, and many were escaping one fix or another, but that just gave Americans an edge when matters came to tomahawk blows and musket shots. Rogues can be useful.)
Our "Joe" might not be a lawyer, but there were plenty around, and Burke said that even the non-lawyers were at least "smatterers in law." And why not? "Joe" would have no trouble understanding laws - he and his neighbors made most of them at a town meeting at one time or other. Laws coming from the Crown or the Colony were, at first, also easy to get - don't murder, don't steal, etc.; commonsense Ten Commandments stuff. That is until the tax thing got out of hand, and out of HIS hands, which angered him more than the taxes themselves.
Oh, and one more thing - He was a good shot.
So after a few generations, it came to pass that "Joe" and his neighbors would learn to "...augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze." As the 1770s wore on, that "breeze" was starting to smell like a three day old codfish.
Thursday, June 12th 2014
...Or How I Learned Michael Jackson Was Dead
Posted Thu Jun 12 2014 17:25
2 of 2 liked this
While the recent events in Iraq are extremely troubling and illustrate the folly of this administration's approach to the country, one development in the past few days should not be a cause for worry. This New York Times article portrays the Peshmerga advance in Kirkuk as deepening the fracturing of Iraq and puts it on par, in a sense, with ISIS' advances in Mosul and Tikrit.
That kind of thinking is wrongheaded, and here's why.
I'll admit my bias up front, I'm very partial to the Kurdish people. I spent close to eight months with them in 2009. Our battalion was responsible for the security of the city of Kirkuk and the areas to the north and east, which encompassed mainly Kurdish regions. I'll get into the geopolitics of our mission in a bit, but I want to relate a couple stories first.
The Kurds love Americans. The day Michael Jackson died I was headed to a city council meeting in the city of Chamchamal, east of Kirkuk. Our patrol pulled into the city, parked in our normal spot, and I dropped my flak vest and helmet and walked toward the meeting. We had nothing to fear from the Kurds - not a single US soldier has ever been killed in Kurdish territory to my knowledge - and I did not want them to think I was afraid of them.
While walking toward the city council building, I was approached by a ten or eleven year old boy. This happened often, usually they just want to say hi and shake my hand.
This time he bowed slightly and said, in English, "I'm sorry."
I said, "Sorry for what?"
He raised his head, "I heard he died this morning. You must feel terrible."
This stopped me in my tracks, "Who died?"
He looked at me, confused. "Michael Jackson. He died this morning. Haven't you heard?"
I turned to the group around me and asked if that was true. No one else had heard it either. You don't get to consume as much pop culture as you'd like when you're deployed.
The boy told us what he knew about Jackson, and I thanked him before he left. If this exchange illustrates anything - beyond how popular Michael Jackson is outside of the United States - it's that it could not have happened anywhere but in a Kurdish controlled area.
I've been asked, in all seriousness and more than once, about the possibility of Kurdistan becoming the 51st state. When we pulled into villages or towns children would flock to our vehicles just to wave and say hi. I've had to disrupt more than one impromptu soccer game between our soldiers and Kurdish children who wanted to play. When one of our vehicles had a mechanical failure in Kurdish territory we spend an enjoyable evening waiting for maintenance to show up by playing with what appeared to be every child in town. I still have a video of that night.
The Kurds hate Arabs. Saddam tried his best to kill as many Kurds as possible, conducting an endless series of operations against them in the mountainous region north of Kirkuk and gassing them in Halabja and elsewhere. One of the most popular television shows in Kurdish regions was an hour long drama, produced in Sulaymaniya, that detailed Iraqi Army atrocities against the Kurds. Think of the TV series "V", but with Saddam Hussein as the invading alien overlord. Everywhere I went, if they weren't watching American movies or television shows, they were watching this show.
The police chief of a town called Shwan, north of Kirkuk, drove me through his district one day. I asked him to give me a tour and show me anything he thought was noteworthy. He'd fought against Saddam with the Peshmerga and showed me where they used to ambush Iraqi Army patrols. He took me to the aptly named "Valley of Death" on the road to Taq Taq. Showed me the homes the 12th Iraqi Army division had destroyed and were being rebuilt again.
The Peshmerga commander of the Brigade east of Kirkuk tried to teach me the Kurdish language. I'd gotten pretty good with Arabic on a previous tour but couldn't get the hang of Soriani Kurdish. He spoke four languages, including Farsi, and would laugh at the dumb American. He'd taken Kirkuk almost 20 years earlier after the 1991 Gulf War and as we drove through the city he pointed out the "bad neighborhoods", which almost always meant the Arab neighborhoods.
Iraq hasn't conducted a census in Kirkuk since 1957 because no one really wants to know who lives there. The last census numbers say the city is about 48% Kurdish, 29% Arab, and 21% Turkish. I suspect the Arab number has gone up while the other two numbers have gone down, but that's not based on anything other than Saddam's murderous reign and a feeling. The Kurds don't want a new census because they stake their claim on the old one: Kirkuk is a Kurdish city. Arab Iraqis wouldn't be thrilled with a new census because it might validate the Kurdish claim, and they don't want to lose the oil revenue Kirkuk brings in. The Turks just wish the other two would just stop fighting. Incidentally, I visited one of the few Christian churches in Kirkuk while I was there but I don't know if it still stands, there have been bombings since.
Our mission in 2009 was to act as a buffer between the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga in Kirkuk. Iraqi Police were responsible for security in the city, neither the Iraqi Army or the Peshmerga were allowed inside the city limits. Part of my job was to get the pulse of the Peshmerga - there were fears that full scale conflict between them and the Iraqi Army was eminent. But as long as we were there the two sides were going to play nice. They knew we'd step in if anything were to happen.
In 2011 the "Golden Lions" made their debut. This unit was made up of both Peshmerga and Iraqi Army forces which were designed to build trust while keeping an eye on each other. But a battalion of 380 folks would have a hard time securing a city the size of Kirkuk so undoubtedly that job remained with the Kirkuk Police. If the stories of Iraqi soldiers deserting their posts are true, those desertions likely came from this unit, and it is therefore not surprising that Peshmerga troops would shoulder the burden after they left.
The Kurds have always had designs on Kirkuk, but were dissuaded from acting on those designs by American presence and the likelihood of full scale conflict with Iraqi Army forces. If the 12th Iraqi Division has folded in the face of ISIS, which seems likely based on news reports, then the only logical step for the Kurds would be to secure Kirkuk.
In many ways this is a good thing, both for the Kurds and for the country of Iraq. The Kurds and ISIS will never cooperate - there is too much hate there. But the Kurds may cooperate with the Iraqi government to push ISIS out of Kirkuk and Nineveh province. If Iraq gives them Kirkuk city.
In a way the ISIS offensive may be the catalyst that helps the Kurds and Arabs solve the problem of Kirkuk. Except for the oil - and their hatred of Kurds - the Arabs don't much care about Kirkuk. But the Kurds consider the city part of their territory, their homeland, and they'll never give it up. I can see a very plausible scenario where the Iraqi government enlists the help of the Peshmerga to fight ISIS, and in return the city of Kirkuk is given over to Kurdish rule.
This would be a step forward for Iraq, not a step backwards. The Kurds may want to separate themselves as much as possible from the rest of Iraq, but at least they are very pro-American and decidedly anti-jihadist. The Kurds aren't perfect - I have a few stories I haven't written about their backwards belief system - but in a region of bad choices they are our best bad bet. If the city of Kirkuk is in their hands that is a good thing for Iraq.
Wednesday, June 11th 2014
Posted Wed Jun 11 2014 17:00
3 of 3 liked this
I've been following the news over the last couple days of the striking advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (ISIS) in northwestern Iraq. By some estimates they now control fully one third of the country and are dangerously close to Baghdad. Time will tell if they're capable of holding their recent gains in the face of what will hopefully be a robust Iraqi response, but the situation in both Mosul and Tikrit in recent days looks very grim.
I was initially going to write a blog post noting the failure of our cut-and-run strategy in Iraq, focusing on the meme, popular with people on the left during the last decade who'd never actually been to Iraq, that American soldiers were a destabilizing influence in the country. But as soon as I started my research I came across a piece which not only states that meme, but displays along with it such a staggering combination of stupidity and ignorance that I couldn't let it go without comment.
The piece appears today in Salon and is written by gentleman named Tom Engelhardt. I'd never heard of him, but he runs a website named TomDispatch.com, is a fellow of The Nation Institute, a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, and is, from what I can tell, a pacifist of sorts.
I can understand a pacifist. As a libertarian leaning conservative, I understand the desire to avoid government persuasion at the barrel of a gun. But I also understand that there are bad people out there who want to do really bad things and if I have a choice between an armed and an unarmed good person, I know which one I'm going to go with every time.
Getting to the meat of Mr. Engelhardt's argument, he lays out "five straightforward lessons...drawn from the last half century":
"1. No matter how you define American-style war or its goals, it doesn't work. Ever.
2. No matter how you pose the problems of our world, it doesn't solve them. Never.
3. No matter how often you cite the use of military force to "stabilize" or "protect" or "liberate" countries or regions, it is a destabilizing force.
4. No matter how regularly you praise the American way of war and its "warriors," the U.S. military is incapable of winning its wars.
5. No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is "the finest fighting force in history," the evidence is in: it isn't."
2. No matter how you pose the problems of our world, it doesn't solve them. Never.
3. No matter how often you cite the use of military force to "stabilize" or "protect" or "liberate" countries or regions, it is a destabilizing force.
4. No matter how regularly you praise the American way of war and its "warriors," the U.S. military is incapable of winning its wars.
5. No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is "the finest fighting force in history," the evidence is in: it isn't."
There is so much wrong with each of these 'lessons' I'll only be able to scratch the surface in this post. But before I start I want to try to understand Mr. Engelhardt's thought process a little better. I think it can be illustrated by this passage, "but keep in mind that we are inside an enormous propaganda machine of militarism, even if we barely acknowledge the space in our lives that it fills. Inside it, only certain opinions, certain thoughts, are acceptable, or even in some sense possible."
I wonder if those citizens of Mosul or Tikrit who are still alive today realize that they're really just inside a propaganda machine of militarism. But I digress.
Mr. Engelhardt is against war - all war - which in Berkeley I would imagine is a safe opinion to have. ISIS isn't lying in wait a few miles away with designs on the city. The problem with his logic is that a "propaganda machine" can't produce ISIS' recent atrocities, nor could it conjure out of thin air Putin's land grab, nor could it blow up airports in Pakistan or take two hundred innocent children hostage in Nigeria. People do these things. Turns out the only propaganda we'll see is from Mr. Engelhardt.
"Nomatter how you define American-style war or its goals, it doesn't work. Ever."
In supporting this claim, Mr. Engelhardt reverts to the tried and true leftist meme that Bush created more terrorists after 9/11. As his first bit of evidence, he cites a WSJ article which reports that "between 2010 and 2013 alone, jihadist groups grew by58%, their fighters doubled, and their attacks nearly tripled." Which would be all well and good except the man who wrote that op-ed and the RAND report it cites actually argues the opposite point, that our disengagement from Iraq and our pending disengagement from Afghanistan have emboldened these jihadist groups and swelled their ranks. Perhaps Mr. Engelhardt hopes his readers don't actually subscribe to the Journal and won't read that part of the piece.
He then tries to use America's disengagement from Iraq as evidence of our failure to pacify the country. Here he - along with many of the partisans on the left - makes a fundamental mistake. To the extent Iraq is "lost", it is so because we left. We didn't leave because we lost. If the US military lost anything, it was the political support necessary to see the mission through. That loss of support can be laid directly at the feet of people like Mr. Engelhardt who make arguments like these.
"American-style wars don't solve problems."
Earlier in the piece Mr. Endelhardt says these are lessons drawn from the last half-century, but uses only examples from the last few years to support this claim. First he repeats his claim that we create more terrorists than we kill. Then he cites the fake hepatitis B vaccination operation the CIA conducted in an effort to gain intelligence on bin Laden, saying that perhaps 100,000 cases of polio will result (yes, you read that correct). Putting aside the fact that one of the citations he uses in support of these claims says "Taliban opposition to vaccination campaigns predates the bin Laden raid", and the fact that the preponderance of anti-vaxxers in this country are on the left these days, Mr. Engelhardt really isn't making any kind of coherent argument here.
America's liberation of Kuwait didn't solve any problems? Operations in Grenada or Panama solved nothing whatsoever? Taking down the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq were useless? Preventing North Korea from invading the south again was a waste of time? Fighting the Cold War contributed nothing to the human condition on the planet? What about Bosnia in the 90s? Mr. Engelhardt has quite a few questions to answer before he can claim that American-style wars (whatever that means - he likely can't define it himself) don't solve problems.
"American-style war is a destabilizing force."
Mr. Engelhardt started off horribly, but here he goes off into Alec Baldwin Batcrap Crazy territory. The American military has been, over the course of the last 100 years, the single greatest force for stability and progress the world has ever seen. From WWI on, wherever we have extended our security umbrella peace and prosperity have followed. Dr. Thomas PM Barnett (a Democrat) has proven this point pretty conclusively but you don't need to read his books, you just need to look at a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night. Only where we've taken it away, as in Iraq and soon in Afghanistan, have we seen destabilization. Mr. Engelhardt could perhaps be forgiven for thinking Iraq was a peaceful country filled with gumdrops and butterflies before 2003, or that Afghanistan was a model of progress and prosperity under the Taliban, but as critics of the United States military often do, he only has a problem with America using force. Saddam, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Putin, etc., are all absolved of guilt. Their actions mean nothing. The thinking goes something like this: Al Qaeda (or insert any other group here) wouldn't exist if we weren't assholes in the first place. On second thought I should probably apologize to Alec Baldwin, I'm not sure even he is this crazy.
"The US military can't win it's wars."
Mr. Engelhardt says this is so obvious it shouldn't need to be explained, "Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq ranged from stalemate to defeat and disaster." He's full on into revisionist history here. And silly revisionist history at that. Was Korea a stalemate because we successfully beat back North Korea's attempt to annex the south and returned the boundaries to where they were at the start of the war? Were not Saddam and the Taliban ousted in Iraq and Afghanistan? If Mr. Engelhardt wants to see an example of a superpower being defeated in Afghanistan he needs to look no farther than the 1980s and the Soviet Union. I promise it looks nothing like Afghanistan today. He also conveniently leaves the 1991 Gulf War out of this argument because it doesn't fit his narrative.
But I would argue that Mr. Engelhardt does have a point, although it's likely not the one he intended.
We could have declared victory early on in both Iraq and Afghanistan and brought our men and women home for good. Why didn't we? Because as a nation we care about what happens in each of those places once we're gone and wanted to give them the best chance to thrive after taking out their oppressive regimes. In both places we risked our initial military victories to chase longer term political ones. We didn't have to do that. Likewise, ISIS and the Taliban and Boko Haram can use the political mechanisms in their respective countries to bring about social change, but they choose to murder, rape and pillage instead. With nary a peep from people like Mr. Engelhardt.
"No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is "the finest fighting force in history," the evidence is in: it isn't."
I can't actually fault Mr. Engelhardt for this claim. If he's stupid enough to believe he's proven his first four claims then this one logically has to follow. He actually gives up trying to prove his point here, which is fine with me because I find it hard to believe I made it through his first four attempts.
In the final paragraphs Mr. Engelhardt tells the reader that "peace" is the answer. We should pour billions into planning for peace.
Ok.
In pursuance of that goal I think Mr. Engelhardt should work with the Peace Studies departments of al Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, Boko Haram, and/or any of the dozens of other jihadi groups which have sprung up around the world. Let's really get a grass roots peace movement going. The suicide bomber who killed and wounded dozens in Sadr City yesterday just wanted peace and freedom after all. And isn't it perfectly obvious that all of the beheadings reported in Mosul today were done out of love? They're just all caught up in the propaganda machine of militarism, they don't know any better. Mr. Engelhardt could help.
I wished we all lived on this fantasy planet, but unfortunately there are bad men in the world who do very bad things. And almost none of them are members of the United States military.
Todd Seavey
Today at 2:30pm Eastern, Val D'Orazio, who has a new comic out about Edward Snowden, will talk about Snowden and the Vegas shooters with libertarian conspiracy theorist Alex Jones at Infowars.com.
Posted Wed Jun 11 2014 12:36
Like This?
Embarrassingly, the male half of the insane (emphasis on insane) Las Vegas spree-killer couple was both a quasi-libertarian _and_ a comics fan.
Today at 2:30pm Eastern, comics writer Val D'Orazio, who has a new comic out about Edward Snowden, will talk about Snowden and about the Vegas shooter with libertarian conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (at http://Infowars.com), who holds the strange belief that such spree-killers are created by the government to make guns and liberty look bad.
Will either subculture emerge looking good? I'm afraid you are obliged to listen in and find out what happens.
Tuesday, June 10th 2014
Erich Forschler
Posted Tue Jun 10 2014 07:26
1 of 1 liked this
Don't look now, but tensions are easing in #Ukraine (a country in #Europe). According to #Reuters, #Ukrainians see "#understanding" with #Russia. #VodkaShots time?
Well, our #StateDepartment may as well celebrate the win, right? After all, it was our hard-nosed and relentless Twefforts and #Diplomacy which laid the groundwork for #negotiations. Think about it - if we didn't openly #StandWithUkraine on Twitter, then how could #Putin have known we were #Serious???
And you #Repukericans need to lay off, #OK? #Diplomacy has a long history of success. For example:
#NaziGermany would have become #NaziWorld if it wasn't for this famously brave tweet by #PresidentRoosevelt in 1941:
Or how about Truman's use of #Intimidation in defeating #ImperialJapan?
Look - this stuff #Works! Meaning, every time a # is #Tweeted, someone gets #Freedomed!
Personally, I'm most looking forward to the success of the newest campaign against chocolate milk bullying, #YesAllMilk, and also:
Look at those facial expressions! They're #DeadSerious. Better do what they #Say.