Obviously, Smart Diplomacy

Instapundit notes:

IS THIS GOOD FOR THE U.S., or more “Weak Horse” consequences? Japan embracing China?

Japan is reaching out to China. I do hope that the Obama administration isn't getting nervous. Remember, Prime Minister Hatoyama is a member of the Democratic Party in Japan. Clearly this is just nuanced reaching out to a rival at the expense of a loyal, longtime ally. How can President Obama oppose that bit of nuanced, smart diplomacy? Except to critique the utter lack of bowing and apologies by the Japanese.

And I'm not worried. China will do something aggressive and remind Japan's PM that China is no potential friend and America is still needed as a friend and ally.

Saving Actor Hanks

As an actor, Tom Hanks has always seemed like a decent man.

But what am I to make of Hanks' claims that America tried to wipe out the Japanese because of racism and that our current war is similar in motivation?

Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

Why attack America in such a manner?

One, a little thing like the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor gave us a little more motivation against Japan.

Two, we did not actually attempt to wipe out the Japanese, instead forging a post-war alliance with Japan. Even on the battlefield, the fights often turned into a battle of annihilation because Japanese soldiers (and even civilians) would fight to the death, neither accepting nor offering quarter.

Third, our propaganda images of Germans portrayed them as monsters just as we portrayed Japanese as sub-human.

Fourth, Japan depicted their enemies, whether the Chinese or Americans as monsters, too. Like this:

Source: https://www.msu.edu/~navarro6/srop.html

The source of the above poster notes:

Japanese propaganda art did not neglect to target the enemy. In a manner similar to what American did by depicting the Japanese as subhuman apes, the Japanese countered with their own depiction of Americans (and the British as well) as hairy, demonic mongrels.

Yes, racism was part of our society back then. We've come a long way. But of all the things our more leftish citizens want to assert is American exceptionalism, racism is not one of them:

During World War II, propaganda produced by Japanese and American artists reflected and shaped the emotions and attitudes of that era. The messages that these two nations conveyed through their graphic propaganda reveal a good deal more about those cultures than was intended by either nation. Graphic propaganda on both sides revealed an undercurrent of racism that affected how the war was conducted and perceived on both sides.

And as for "differences" inspiring us to kill them all in our current war, WTF? Our use of firepower has been very limited and, in the current Afghan campaign, is so limited that we risk American casualties to avoid killing innocent (and not so innocent) "different" civilians. At home we debate what kind of rights that terrorists we capture should have! Indeed, it is our enemies who try to kill us because we are different. Though to be fair to our jihadi enemies, racism isn't involved since they kill far more Moslems than Americans in their war to establish their Heaven on Earth.

Somebody needs to go out and save Hanks from killing his reputation as a nice guy and a decent man.

It may be regrettable, but it is common for enemies in long and brutal fights to be dehumanized. But hey, Hollywood has been fighting those bitter God and gun clingers in middle America for so long that you can hardly blame them, eh?

UPDATE: An actual history professor gives it a shot.

Once More, With Even More Feeling!

Greyhawk notices that the anti-war Left is stirring in Congress to compel us to retreat from Afghanistan.

You didn't really believe all the Leftist nonsense about how Afghanistan is the "good war" we neglected in order to fight in Iraq, did you?

Greyhawk is confused, however, in his amazement that the anti-war side claims that we "finally" need to debate the war.

Doesn't Grayhawk realize that as far as our Left is concerned, "debate" over war can never end until our helicopters are evacuating our last diplomatic personnel ahead of an advancing enemy army about to take the capital? Debate isn't about resolving a question. It's just another tool to lose a war.

Personally, I think that once we declare war, we owe it to the military personnel we send to fight it to fight until we achieve victory. Declarations of war should not have an expiration date.

Still, it is nice to see that elements of the Left have gotten over that stifling notion that opposing President Obama is the highest form of racism. A lot of his supporters are going to have trouble with the whole question of fighting in Afghanistan.

I mean, when even the emperor of elite conventional wisdom has concluded the bloody obvious that we've achieved something good in Iraq, what's a good leftist to protest if not Afghanistan?

The Charge of the Heat Brigade

A poem to honor the 4,000 "scientists" of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

With thanks to Iowa Hawk for inspiration and apologies to the brave lads of the Light Brigade.

Hide Decline, Hide Decline,
Hide Decline onward,
All in the valley of Consensus
Wrote the four thousand.
"Forward, the Heat Brigade!
Charge for the credits!" Gore said:
Into the valley of Consensus
Wrote the four thousand.


"Forward, the Heat Brigade!"
Was there a climatologist dismay'd?
Not tho' the warmists knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to cap and trade:
Into the valley of Consensus
Wrote the four thousand.


Denier to right of them,
Denier to left of them,
Denier in front of them
Fact check'd and FOIA'd;
Storm'd at with reason and logic,
Boldly they wrote and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Wrote the four thousand.


Flash'd all their models bare,
Flash'd as they pull'd stats from air,
Proxying the tree rings there,
Charging at Climategate, while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the peer review
Right thro' the  media line they broke;
Hansen and Al Gore
Reel'd from the data dump
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they wrote back, but not
Not the four thousand.


Denier to right of them,
Denier to left of them,
Denier behind them
Fact check'd and FOIA'd;
Storm'd at with reason and logic,
While models and data fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Denial
Back from the mouth of actual Science,
All that was left of them,
Left of four thousand.


When can their consensus fade?
O the wild charges they made!
All the world wondered.
Honor the models they made,
Honor the Heat Brigade,
Nobel four thousand.

UPDATE: Thank you to Mad Minerva for her kind words of approval.

Cap, Trade, and Duck!

Clearly we need a system of Higgs boson offsets to prevent the end of the world.

So what if the plaintiff was "unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about." Has that stopped the global warmers from wetting their pants on a daily basis?

"Overwhelming scientific consensus" isn't as comforting as it once was, eh?

Good News and Bad News

An energy hungry world hasn't exhausted our planet's potential for oil and natural gas, even in conventional forms:

Seismic tests over the past 50 years have shown countries up the coast of East Africa have natural gas in abundance. Early data compiled by industry consultants also suggest the presence of massive offshore oil deposits. Those finds have spurred oil explorers to start dropping more wells in East Africa, a region they say is an oil and gas bonanza just waiting to be tapped, one of the last great frontiers in the hunt for hydrocarbons.

The bad news is that notwithstanding that this is good news for energy users, oil and gas finds in East Africa may just provide bigger wads of cash for local corrupt elites to fight over, with few benefits reaching the people.

I Guess We Got Lucky

Rare earths could be a bottleneck in the production of certain post-Carbon energy sources.

China is in the driver's seat on current production and stockpiles, which could make a multi-state OPEC stranglehold on oil look positively great by comparison.

But with a massive find on the Idaho-Montana border we seem to have caught a break:

Recent USGS figures estimate that the U.S. holds rare earth ore reserves of up to 13 million metric tons. By contrast, the entire world produced just 124,000 metric tons in 2009 - but it would take both time and money for the U.S. to become self-sufficient in producing rare earths.

Unless environmentalists manage to screw it up by finding some endangered rat species there and blocking all mining.

You never know.

So, The Debate is Over Lying? Fine

This gentleman persists in peddling the falsehood that President Bush lied about Iraq's WMD status, disputing Karl Rove's defense of the president:

But the problem with Rove’s account is that not only did Bush oversee the twisting of intelligence to justify invading Iraq in March 2003 but he subsequently lied – and lied repeatedly – about how Iraq had responded to United Nations inspection demands.

So, while it may be impossible to say for certain what Bush believed about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, it can’t be argued that Bush didn’t know that Iraq declared that it had destroyed its WMD stockpiles and let U.N. inspectors in to see for themselves in the months before the invasion.

Rove's account is faux history, Mr. Perry claims.
 
Oh, really? Sorry, Parry, But President George W. Bush did not lie.
 
Cue the transcript, where the United Nation's Hans Blix in January 2003 explains how Saddam Hussein had not, in fact, provided evidence that he had destroyed its WMD stockpiles in Iraq's final, extensive declaration in December 2002:
 

Regrettably, the 12,000-page declaration, most of which is a reprint of earlier documents, does not seem to contain any new evidence that will eliminate the questions or reduce their number.

Even Iraq's letter sent in response to our recent discussions in Baghdad to the president of the Security Council on 24th of January does not lead us to the resolution of these issues.

I shall only give some examples of issues and questions that need to be answered, and I turn first to the sector of chemical weapons.

The nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic ever developed. Iraq has declared that it only produced VX on a pilot scale, just a few tons, and that the quality was poor and the product unstable.

Consequently, it was said that the agent was never weaponized.

Iraq said that the small quantity of [the] agent remaining after the Gulf War was unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.

UNMOVIC, however, has information that conflicts with this account. There are indications that Iraq had worked on the problem of purity and stabilization and that more had been achieved than has been declared. Indeed, even one of the documents provided by Iraq indicates that the purity of the agent, at least in laboratory production, was higher than declared.

There are also indications that the agent was weaponized. In addition, there are questions to be answered concerning the fate of the VX precursor chemicals, which Iraq states were lost during bombing in the Gulf War or were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.

I would now like to turn to the so-called air force document that I have discussed with the council before. This document was originally found by an UNSCOM inspector in a safe in Iraqi air force headquarters in 1998, and taken from her by Iraq minders. It gives an account of the expenditure of bombs, including chemical bombs by Iraq in the Iraq-Iran War. I'm encouraged by the fact that Iraq has now provided this document to UNMOVIC.

The document indicates that 13,000 chemical bombs were dropped by the Iraqi air force between 1983 and 1998, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were consumed during this period. Thus, there is a discrepancy of 6,500 bombs. The amount of chemical agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tons. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must assume that these quantities are now unaccounted for.

The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at the storage depot, 170 kilometers southwest of Baghdad, was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved here in the past few years at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. The investigation of these rockets is still proceeding.

Iraq states that they were overlooked from 1991 from a batch of some 2,000 that were stored there during the Gulf War. This could be the case. They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve, but rather points to the issue of several thousand of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for. The finding of the rockets shows that Iraq needs to make more effort to ensure that its declaration is currently accurate.

During my recent discussions in Baghdad, Iraq declared that it would make new efforts in this regard and has set up a committee of investigation. Since then, it has reported that it has found four chemical rockets at a storage depot in al-Haji. I might further mention that inspectors have found at another site a laboratory quantity of ... a mustard [gas] precursor.

While addressing chemical issues, I should mention a matter which I reported on 19th of December last year concerning equipment at a civilian chemical plant at al-Fallujah. Iraq has declared that it had repaired chemical processing equipment previously destroyed under UNSCOM supervision and had installed it at Fallujah for the production of chlorine and phenols. We have inspected this equipment and are conducting a detailed technical evaluation of it. On completion, we will decide whether this and other equipment that has been recovered by Iraq should be destroyed.

I turn to biological weapons. I mention the issue of anthrax to the council on previous occasions, and I come back to it as it is an important one. Iraq has declared that it produced about 8,500 liters of this biological warfare agent, which it states it unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.

Iraq has provided little evidence for this production and no convincing evidence for its destruction.

There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared and that at least some of this was retained over the declared destruction date. It might still exist.

Either it should be found and be destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision or else convincing evidence should be produced to show that it was indeed destroyed in 1991.

As I reported to the council on the 19th of December last year, Iraq did not declare a significant quantity, some 650 kilos, of bacterial growth media, which was acknowledged as reported in Iraq's submission to the Amorim panel in February 1999. As a part of its 7 December 2002 declaration Iraq resubmitted the Amorim panel document but the table showing this particular import of media was not included. The absence of this table would appear to be deliberate, as the pages of the resubmitted document were renumbered.

In the letter of 24th of January this year to the president of the Security Council, Iraq's foreign minister stated that, I quote, "All imported quantities of growth media were declared." This is not evidence. I note that the quantity of media involved would suffice to produce, for example, about 5,000 liters of concentrated anthrax.

I turn, Mr. President, now to the missile sector. There remain significant questions as to whether Iraq retained Scud-type missiles after the Gulf War. Iraq declared the consumption of a number of Scud missiles as targets in the development of an anti-ballistic missile defense system during the 1980s, yet no technical information has been produced about that program or data on the consumption of the missiles.

There has been a range of developments in the missile field during the past four years, presented by Iraq in the declaration as non-proscribed activities. We are trying to gather a clear understanding of them through inspections and on-site discussions.

Two projects in particular stand out. They are the development of a liquid-fueled missile named Al-Samud II and a solid propellant missile called Al-Fatah. Both missiles have been tested to arrange in excess of the permitted range of 150 kilometers, with the Al-Samud II being tested to a maximum of 183 kilometers and the Al-Fatah to 161 kilometers. Some of both types of missiles have already been provided to the Iraqi armed forces, even though it is stated that they're still undergoing development.

The Al-Samud's diameter was increased from an earlier version to the president 760 mm. This modification was made despite a 1994 letter from the executive chairman of UNSCOM directing Iraq to limit its missile diameters to less than 600 mm. Furthermore, a November 1997 letter from the executive chairman of UNSCOM to Iraq prohibited the use of engines from certain surface-to-air missiles for the use in ballistic missiles.

During my recent meeting in Baghdad, we were briefed on these two programs. We were told that the final range for both systems would be less than the permitted maximum of 150 kilometers.

These missiles might well represent prima facie cases of proscribed systems. The test ranges in excess of 150 kilometers are significant, but some further technical considerations need to be made before we reach a conclusion on this issue. In the meantime, we have asked Iraq to cease flight tests of both missiles.

In addition, Iraq has refurbished its missile production infrastructure. In particular, Iraq reconstituted a number of casting chambers which had previously been destroyed under UNSCOM's supervision. They had been used in the production of solid fuel missiles.

Whatever missile system these chambers are intended for, they could produce motors for missiles capable of ranges significantly greater than 150 kilometers.

Also associated with these missiles and related developments is the import which has been taking place during the last two years of a number of items despite the sanctions, including as late as December 2002. Foremost among these is import of 300 rockets engines which may be used for the Al-Samud II.

Iraq has also declared the recent import of chemicals used in propellants, test instrumentation and guidance and control system. These items may well be for proscribed purposes; that is yet to be determined.

What is clear is that they were illegally brought into Iraq; that is, Iraq or some company in Iraq circumvented the restrictions imposed by various resolutions.

Mr. President, I have touched upon some of the disarmament issues that remain open and that need to be answered if dossiers are to be closed and confidence is to arise.

That's quite a lot of Iraqi failures to confirm that Iraq verified its disarmament and hardly a defense of the notion that the UN could see for itself that the confirmation was true. Forgive the lengthy reproduction, but I felt it necessary to knock back the persistent errors of the "reality-based community" that will not let their errors of logic and facts be corrected.

And the issue back then wasn't only whether Saddam would cooperate in verifying disarmament. Let's hear from Hans Blix again:

While Iraq claims, with little evidence, that it destroyed all biological weapons unilaterally in 1991, it is certain that UNSCOM destroyed large biological weapons production facilities in 1996. The large nuclear infrastructure was destroyed and the fissionable material was removed from Iraq by the IAEA.

One of three important questions before us today is, How much might remain undeclared and intact from before 1991 and possibly thereafter? The second question is, What, if anything, was illegally produced or procured after 1998 when the inspectors left. And the third question is, How it can be prevented that any weapons of mass destruction be produced or procured in the future?

Did you catch that third one? Only the elimination of Saddam's regime could provide that. And this is beyond the failure of Saddam to address the first two as Mr. Parry wrongly claims Saddam verified.

So while it may be possible to conclude that Mr. Parry is suffering from advanced Bush Derangement Syndrome, it is impossible to conclude that Mr. Parry is telling the truth about Saddam's claims.

The Quality of Quantity

Early indications are that the election results will generally be good for Iraqis and the concept of democracy:

I asked how he viewed these elections in light of his personal calamities. “The rest of the Middle East is in a stage of political infancy, adolescence at best,” he answered. “Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, even Lebanon, they are all juvenile. But we are passing this stage of a politics about ‘who you are.’ This election in Iraq is about the politics of ‘what you want.’ And we want an end to sectarianism.”

I continued my tour of a city that seemed to be enjoying its election holiday. A Christian car-parts dealer outside the Syrian Catholic church in Karada, which is largely upper middle class, told me he would be voting for whoever would end the religious violence. (The deaths of nearly 40 people on Sunday attest to how difficult that task remains.) Nearby, the manager of Baghdad Polling Station No. 7 said voting was normal for Iraqis now — “This is our fifth time in five years,” he pointed out — and he would be voting for security, jobs and public works, not religion.

Marwa, a 24-year-old accounting student whom I spoke to on Sunday as she voted with her mother, noted that this was her fourth time going to the polls, and that while it was no longer exciting it was certainly her duty to her country.

At the Karkh Hospital I met Jassim, a 39-year-old Army sergeant whose lower leg had been blown off the day before (soldiers voted on Friday so they could provide security over the weekend). Recuperating in his bed, he showed me a purple-stained forefinger and said Iraq needed a leader to serve “the whole nation.”

Most Iraqi politicians have caught the anti-sectarian mood. That is why Prime Minister Maliki, a Shiite, had the confidence to break with the big coalition of his co-religionists that dominated in 2005 and run alongside several major Sunni tribal leaders. It is why once virulent Shiites like Fattah, the former Sadrist, now see Mr. Allawi’s party as a good bet. It is why the Iraqi National Alliance includes not only Salaam Smeasim, a pro-American Shiite in a veil, but also Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, a Sunni cousin of Iraq’s last king and the chief claimant to the long-vacant throne.

This is good. And it highlights the good effects of inculcating a habit of voting. The fifth major vote and it is no longer exciting. It is just duty.

More important than being no longer exciting is that after a fifth vote, Iraqis are gaining confidence that future elections will happen. That is a key development.

When you don't know if the current vote will be your last, you may be tempted (rightly) to vote for your own clan, tribe, or sect in order to make sure your group comes out on top when the musical chairs of voting stops and the ones left standing have no place at the table for dividing the spoils of victory amongst the victors. Voting in post-dictatorship countries could too easliy be seen as merely another way to steal--but without messy gunfire--until you are sure that more votes will take place that allow you to reverse your losses.

Iraqis are coming to see their votes as just one more in a line of voting. So they can afford to think of broader national issues and not just narrow concerns of tribe and sect.

Our presence in Iraq must continue for decades to make sure that the certainty of future votes is entrenched and more solid than mere hope.

UPDATE: Austin Bay lauds the vote and has hope for the future of Iraq. And yes, the ability of the so-called liberal part of our citizenry placed Arabs in the category of  "not able to appreciate let alone carry out democracy" has been proven wrong so far:

It is regrettable that so many privileged citizens in free societies dismissed and denigrated those groundbreaking elections. The 2010 elections provide an appropriate time for the cultural and ethnic snobs (and snob is a kind word) who declared that democratic politics were beyond Iraqi capabilities to issue a series of abject, groveling apologies. The most reprehensible faction in this defeatist crowd is the ignorant clot of hard-left propagandists and faculty-club chumps who swore the Iraqis were better off under Saddam Hussein's vicious tyranny. The election serves as a teaching moment for these purveyors of fascism and inhumanity.

I admit that a number of isolationist-leaning conservatives similarly argued that Iraqis--and Arabs generally--are incapable of operating within a democracy and "need" a brutal strongman like Saddam to keep them in line. But as with many things, the media only reflected and amplified the leftist ideas which the media agreed with.

Iraq has a long road ahead (and so will need our help for years or decades to come, in some form), but so far so good. It took a long time for Germans, Italian, and Japanese to achieve democracy. Iraq can, too. And as I've written numerous times, if democracy is so unimportant to Arabs, why do Arab despots bother to carry out even fraudulant elections?

UPDATE: And here's a libertarian screed with lots of loopiness. What is it with some libertarians who believe we should never do anything, anywhere, anytime, about anything, and believe the unseen hand of something will automatically make things work out for us?

Honestly, they're as loony as the Lefties. Remember, the bad things in Iraq did not happen because we liberated Iraqis from Saddam's reign of terror. Bad things happened because Iran and Syria aided Sunni Arab terrorists and pro-Iranian Shia death squads, funneled in foreign terrorists for suicide bombings, and provided refuge for Baathists with lots of looted money and a will to kill in order to return to power.

I never ruled out that the new Iraqi government would have to defeat an insurgency. But i assumed that any reistance would not have the numbers of assets to win. What I didn't anticipate was that Iran and Syria would be so bold about aiding terror and that we'd let them get away with it. And I didn't see the problem of massive arms already inside Iraq that the terrorists and insurgents could tap to wage war, meaning they didn't have to smuggle weapons into Iraq to fight and kill. We won anyway--but at a higher price--but we did indeed win this war. Is this so hard to grasp?

The successful elections are another win that could make this a strategic win for us if democracy becomes an appealing and realistic alternative for Middle East countries rather than just a tactical win of flipping Iraq from enemy to friend.

Never Mind

Remember how proper internationalists worked themselves into frothy outrage over the many crimes of the Bush administration?

Sure you do.

So now that the Obama administration is continuing many of the unilateralist, constitution-shredding, poet-torturing security measures from the last administration, why is the international community and the Global Left so silent?

Apparently the world’s elites piggybacked on the liberal domestic bandwagon stereotype of Bush as the swaggering Texas white male cowboy, and are now OK with Obama, the Nobel Laureate and postracial internationalist, continuing his policies unchanged, albeit with a few requisite sops and empty gestures like the KSM trial-balloon, the faux-deadline on Guantanamo, and the loud inquisitions of former CIA interrogators.

There is a bright side, of course. As I've long thought, President Obama could nuke Iran and get a second Nobel Peace Prize for unilaterally reducing our atomic arsenal--and no matter that we got rid of them by detonating them over Iran.

But it is a useful reminder that cries of "why do they hate us?", whether speaking of jihadis or members of the sainted international community, are pointless to answer given that it isn't our actions at all that rile the Global Left into moral preening and baseless accusations hurled at us.

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish?

The planned Dutch withdrawal of their small contingent from Afghanistan is leading to talk of a fraying alliance.

The talk is mixing up cause and effect. Recall that the far more serious French withdrawal from NATO's military structure in 1966 did not wreck NATO. But the mere withdrawal of a small Dutch force from a distant war can do worse damage?

And yet NATO efforts continue to revolve around getting members in Europe to build niche capabilities that can be deployed overseas to help us. This is what is killing NATO. Too many countries think they have no dog in this fight in Afghanistan. I think they are wrong, but I'm not a European voter.

For the stress we place on NATO, what do we get? British and Canadian troops fight with us and endure serious casualties, but nobody else--even those who fight--tip the scales as much as these two countries as far as seriously helping us.

We should stop asking NATO to help us in Afghanistan. NATO should be geared to defending the continent from internal and external threats. Our interest in NATO should consist of the long-standing goal of preventing the continent from being controlled by any hostile government--and that means the Kaiser, Hitler, the Soviets, or Brussels (the Europeaan Union). We would be in a world of hurt if the economic, scientific, and military power of Europe was directed against us.

If NATO's Afghanistan mission causes Europeans to shrink from participating in NATO and turning to the EU, we will have suffered a strategic loss. It would be better to have a NATO strong and secure on the continent and uninterested in minor contributions to overseas (out of area) missions that cause more damage to our alliance than help.

By all means, we can ask individual countries to help us; and I'd bet Britain and Canada--and even France--would help us just as non-NATO Australia helps us. But whether a country does or does not help would not be a matter that frays NATO ties.

I'm happy with a NATO that preserves our gains in Europe made at such high costs through two World Wars and a Cold War. This alone is valuable and allows us to focus resources on the rest of the world without worrying about this very important continent. Why risk that gain by insisting on minor help that costs far more than we should be willing to pay?

A Pattern of Behavior?

Well now those tea party protesters have gone too far!

UN chief Ban Ki-moon and Washington led calls for restraint on Monday after the slaughter of more than 500 Christians in Nigeria, as survivors told how the killers chopped down their victims.

Funerals took place for victims of the three-hour orgy of violence on Sunday in three Christian villages close to the northern city of Jos, blamed on members of the mainly Muslim Fulani ethnic group.

Islamist beliefs must be fought. Usually other Moslems are the victims of Islamists. But non-Moslems are the target of choice.

Show Me the Friedman!

"Friedman’s alchemist’s brain transmutes the dross of the banal into the bullion of bull."

Thank you, Jonah. Shut up, just shut up. You had me at "Friedman's an idiot."

And a Pony, Too!

The Army has put out its wish list for a new infantry fighting vehicle, called the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV), to replace the Bradley:

It is envisioned to have greater lethality and ballistic protection than a Bradley, greater IED and mine protection than an MRAP, and the cross country mobility of an Abrams tank. The GCV will be highly survivable, mobile and versatile, but the Army has not set specific requirements such as weight, instead allowing industry to propose the best solution to meet the requirements.

Is that all? Why not ask for magical weapons that don't need ammunition and the fuel efficiency of a Smart car? I mean, as long as we're wishing really hard.

On the bright side, at least the miltiary didn't insist on an upper weight limit designed to make it seem like it is air transportable on C-130s. So we've learned something from the Future Combat System experience.

I said before that we couldn't build the wonder tank to replace the M-1 Abrams, and I'll go out on a limb and say we can't build the wonder infantry fighting vehicle. Can't we just focus on building something better than the Bradley?

And why must we insist on a single vehicle capable of handling all threats? Is it really necessary to have a single vehicle able to fight heavy armor and insurgents? But then, I don't understand why the Marines can't have a system to get them ashore where they board other combat vehicles that take them inland to fight. No, we have to have the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle to do it all and any price. And a new GCV that can face all threats rather than different vehicles for different threats.

What could go wrong?

UPDATE: I keep forgetting that the stand-alone PDF of my article in the May-June 2002 Military Review (cited in the wonder tank post linked above) is dead. You have to go to the archives for the whole issue, which takes a while to download. See here for that issue. "Equipping the Objective Force" is on page 28, if you are interested.

Yin and Yang

China will soon have a weapon that we have to pay attention to (from my Jane's email update):

The US naval intelligence community believes that China is getting close to fielding the world's first anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM), prompting concerns as to the survivability of United States Pacific Fleet carrier strike groups in the face of such a threat. Identified as the DF-21D - indicating its lineage in the DF-21 medium-range ballistic missile - the ASBM would be fired from mobile, land-based launchers and be capable of achieving a range in the order of 1,500 km[.]

This does not mean that our Navy is suddenly about to become inferior to China.

What it does mean is that our carriers are at risk if they approach within range of these weapons and risk letting China take the first shot. This is relevant for racing to Taiwan to help the Taiwanese hold off a Chinese invasion.

Assuming that China has solved the problem of finding and targeting our carriers (not insignificant tasks, I should add), we will need to use long range missiles to take out the Chinese DF-21Ds before our carriers approach within range. So our forces will need to find and target the mobile missiles and strike China itself in order to minimize the risk to our carriers. We don't want to rely on Aegis anti-missile systems as our first line of defense.

The result is that our Navy will be slowed down in reaching Taiwan should China attack Taiwan. That's bad enough. But in order for our ships to operate within range of the DF-21Ds, China will force us to escalate a US-Chinese fight from one fought in the Taiwan Strait and over Taiwan to one that from day one is fought on Chinese soil (in the air anyway,as we attack ground targets).

China hopes that their new weapon will keep us at bay. It may just compel us to escalate from day one of the fight.

We Got the Loser

An American Al Qaeda who has become the public face of al Qaeda has been captured:

Pakistani intelligence agents have arrested Adam Gadahn, the American-born spokesman for al-Qaida, in an operation in the southern city of Karachi, two officers and a government official said Sunday.

The arrest of Gadahn is a major victory in the U.S.-led battle against al-Qaida and will be taken as a sign that Pakistan is cooperating more fully with Washington. It follows the recent detentions of several Afghan Taliban commanders in Karachi.

Well, even if we can't waterboard him for informaton, I do believe we can still execute a man for committing treason.

I'm guessing the worm is singing like a canary.

UPDATE: Different loser, unfortunately.

The Purple Revolution

Iraqis continue to vote today, with the general population heading to the polls today to send representatives to parliament. Our enemies continue to view elections as a threat to them:

Despite mortars raining down nearby, voters in the capital still came to the polls. In the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah in northern Baghdad, Walid Abid, a 40-year-old father of two, was speaking as mortars landed several hundreds yards (meters) away. Police reported at least 20 mortar attacks in the neighborhood shortly after daybreak and mortars were also launched toward the Green Zone — home to the U.S. Embassy and the prime minister's office.

"I am not scared and I am not going to stay put at home," Abid said. "Until when? We need to change things. If I stay home and not come to vote, Azamiyah will get worse."

Many view the election as a crossroads where Iraq will decide whether to adhere to politics along the Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish lines or move away from the ethnic and sectarian tensions that have emerged since the fall of Saddam Hussein's iron-fisted, Sunni minority rule.

The violence has created individual and family tragedies without having a strategic impact. So mourning will be for the human losses. Our enemies are sick and surely enjoy that aspect, but their purpose was to disrupt the election, and in that they've failed.

I'm not all that worried about making Iraqis moving away from ethnic and sectarian lines as a result of voting. I just want Iraqis to accept using ballots instead of bullets as they compete even across those lines. More important than even elections, I want enough Iraqis to reject corruption and embrace (or at least accept) rule of law to break with the past.
 
If Iraqis see politics and lawyers as the way to resolve differences and not death squads and IEDs, we will have achieved another great success. This success could be the greatest after the successes of destroying Saddam's Baathist regime and making sure he never got nukes; creating a pro-Western Iraq; and defeating al Qaeda, Baathist, Sunni nationalist, and pro-Iranian Sadrist insurgents and terrorists after the fall of Saddam.
 
We simply do not have to compel all Iraqis to love each other and sing Kumbaya. I don't know how the meme that they all have to hold hands and smile got started. Given the history of the country--and I'm talking centuries and not just the last seven years of terrorism or even the last forty brutal years under the Baathists--it is too much to ask of simple elections.
 
If one day purple fingers spread throughout the Moslem Middle East, that will be the greatest success of all. Even if Vice President Biden embraces that outcome, much of the credit will lie with George the Liberator.

UPDATE: President Obama rightly congratulated the Iraqis:

"I have great respect for the millions of Iraqis who refused to be deterred by acts of violence, and who exercised their right to vote today," Obama said in a statement. "Their participation demonstrates that the Iraqi people have chosen to shape their future through the political process. "

Another step in the process of accumulating more wins.

Blue on Ice

I've been meaning to take Mister to a University of Michigan hockey game the last couple of years. I couldn't find a convenient day, unfortunately (school nights are basically out). So I was pleased to get an email from the alumni association letting me know that tickets for CCHA games against Lake Superior State University were available this weekend. After asking Mister if he was interested, I called up for tickets on Friday and we watched the Wolverines on ice beat LSSU 6-0. We were right behind Michigan's home net (so probably were on TV, actually, I'd guess:

We didn't have proper hockey garb, so had to rely on our football gear to support the maize and blue. It was interesting to hear the hockey cheers at Yost, which were different from the football cheers.

And the band was there! Well parts of it. I guess I kind of assumed that the band played football games and when the season is over, that's it for them. Do they play at wrestling matches, too? What other teams do they back up?

Anyway, it was a fun game to watch and I hope we'll get to others.

And we really need to catch soccer, too. Going to all the home football games last season made it too difficult to find a home game we could go to.

We still have a couple Red Wings games to go to this year that we can look forward to.

Prelude to Stupidity

A common attack on the military is that they stupidly prepare for the last war. This charge is usually leveled when a military must fight a war for which it did not prepare. Usually winners of wars are charged with this, on the assumption that the winner had no incentive to change what works. And stupidly and blindly ignored evolving reality.

So you might wonder, how does a military that is capable enough to win a war then fail to prepare for the next war? How does a military foolishly prepare to fight the last war?

Behold:

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outlined a new U.S. approach to war in a series of speeches this week that replaces overwhelming firepower with more restrained use of force to safeguard civilian lives.

The speeches, delivered at Kansas State University and the Army's Fort Leavenworth, amount to a formal effort on the part of the chairman to codify how a decade of combat is changing the military's understanding of its role in battle and, more broadly, its place in U.S. foreign policy.

"In this type of war, when the objective is not the enemy's defeat but the people's success, less really is more," Mullen said. "Each time an errant bomb or a bomb accurately aimed but against the wrong target kills or hurts civilians, we risk setting our strategy back months, if not years."

Embedded in Mullen's new doctrine is the somewhat controversial notion that troops should assume greater physical risk in order to protect innocent civilians in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. "We protect the innocent," Mullen said. "It is who we are."

We've been fighting two wars where the primary mission is to protect friendly civilians from enemy insurgents and terrorists and we are apparently assuming this is the face of war--period. 

We need to be prepared for that old-fashioned type of war where organized units clash with other professional military units in a traditional battle for territory and the destruction of the enemy armed forces. Victor Hanson doesn't assume that big wars are over:
 

Events of the last half-century seem to have confirmed the notion that decisive battles between two large, highly trained, sophisticated Westernized armies, whether on land or on sea, have become increasingly rare. Pentagon war planners now talk more about counterinsurgency training, winning the hearts and minds of civilian populations, and “smart” interrogation techniques—and less about old-fashioned, “blow-’em-up” hardware (like, say, the F-22 Raptor) that proves so advantageous in fighting conventional set battles. But does this mean that the big battle is indeed on its way to extinction? ...
 
In short, if the conducive political, economic, and cultural requisites for set battles realign, as they have periodically over the centuries, we will see our own modern version of a Cannae or Shiloh. And these collisions will be frightening as never before.

 
Indeed. Although in the article he expresses doubt that the Iran-Iraq War had conventional battles. Yes, the Iran-Iraq War had major conventional battles.

Certainly, as long as Iraq and Afghanistan absorb most of our ground resouces, winning the wars we are in take priority over preparing for a conventional war that will come at some point in the future.

But it is a tremendous error to say that current wars define our future universe. We have indeed fought conventional campaigns in our recent history:

So when was Iraq (the post-major combat phase) deemed the most likely type of war we will fight in the future? It seems that it was once a condemnation of the military that they always prepared to fight the last war. And now it is the height of sophisticated analysis to disregard conventional warfare because the Army should assume it will only need to fight more wars like the current one in Iraq?

It was a conventional assault that took down Saddam's army--twice. It was a conventional assault that overthrew Noriega's regime. It was a conventional air assault that compelled Milosevich to capitulate. And a conventional army prepared to invade Serbia marched into Kosovo after that. A conventional force took down the Marxist regime in Grenada. And it was a conventional Army that held the Soviets at bay and kept the North Koreans quiet throughout the Cold War.

It is folly to downgrade preparing for conventional war after we can afford to do so when the burden of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan declines (because the escalation in Afghanistan will not outweight the decline in our Iraq commitment).

It is amusing in a way, that advocates want to prepare for counter-insurgencies since I have doubts that there is much appetite to fight a new COIN campaign any time soon, after the last 9 years of war. And it is mighty convenient that preparing for COIN only means we don't need to spend as much money on expensive weapons systems only needed for conventional war against organized armies, navies, and air forces. These are dangerous ideas.

And even if we do need to prepare only for unconventional warfare, why are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the template? Remember, as I wrote above, these wars have generally been  ones where we defended a friendly population against common enemy insurgents and terrorists. In Iraq, this happened only after the Sunni Arabs of Anbar effectively surrendered and defected. Had this not happened, the fight would have gone on far longer in Anbar at much higher levels of intensity until the Iraqis could grind down the insurgency. And in Afghanistan, it has only been true in the areas outside the southern Taliban regions. We are fighting extra gently there in our new offensive because we hope that Pashtuns will abandon their traditional support for the Taliban. If we can, the template of protecting friendly civilians will continue.

But if we can't flip these Pashtuns, we'll have to grab them by the balls and hope their hearts and minds follow (note the Sri Lanka experience). Fighting that type of COIN campaign against a hostile population is way different than the bulk of our experience thus far in two COIN campaigns. So why don't we plan to fight COIN against conquered people? That could be our next war, too, you know.

Have no doubt, we need to prepare for unconventional warfare as we've fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and perhaps as we will fight against hostile populations. But this is something that a good conventionally focused Army can handle as long as the officers are prepared to fight both conventional and irregular wars.

The safest thing to do is prepare a military capable of operating anywhere on the full spectrum of conflict--from training and humanitarian relief all the way to general nuclear war. The next war will surely fall somewhere in that spectrum.

Trying to predict the form of the next war just sets our military up for the charge that it foolishly prepared for the last war. I'm not willing to predict where that next war will fall. And I don't trust anyone to predict where it will fall.

Overview of the Marjah Operation

This is a nice overview of the Marjah operation, and clarifies some of the numbers issues:

I think most of you are aware that D-Day went on the 13th of February. RCT-7 (Regimental Combat Team) under Colonel Randy Newman inserted three companies of Afghan and U.S. Marines between the hours of zero-two and zero-five on that night. They were inserted by our aviation combat element led by Colonel "Beak" Vest and the U.S. Army Combat Aviation Brigade, Paul Bricker, and supported by Colonel John Simmons in our combat logistics regiment.

What we wanted to accomplish very quickly was to go big, strong and fast, get into the center of Marja, occupy the spine of Marja if you will, and start clearing out. We were able to insert all of our heliborne forces without incident, and at first light -- we wanted to wait till first light to begin moving our ground forces in. We were prepared to breach at several different sites.

We had a deception operation in the sense that we amassed forces at areas we had no intention of breaching on, and at first light we moved swiftly and, using the Assault Breacher Vehicle, we were able to get through the minefields, which were significant, and the enemy had lots of time to plan and shape those. But we were able to move in relatively unencumbered. So we got about 4,000 Marines, Afghans and soldiers into Marja relatively quickly.

I also see the number 15,000 thrown a lot, and that might include all of the support that is involved in the operation. But within Marja today, we have about 2,500 U.S. Marines and about 1,500 Afghan soldiers. In addition, we have about 600 ANCOP, or National Police.

We did a little shaping part of the operation, and Stryker Battalion -- U.S. Army Stryker Battalion 423 Infantry did a great job of holding 11 bridges that connected Marja from Nad Ali on a canal there.

The briefer also notes that the Afghan forces represented from a third to a quarter of the total, including a battalion that operates independently rather than being essentially attached to US forces, in contrast to the last big operation that had Afghans as only about 10% of the total force.

The enemy boasted they'd defeat us and stop us. They did not. Now we need to show that we can absorb the area and not just deny it to the enemy.

Good Within Its Limitations

I was critical of the Stryker vehicle when it was rolled out. I, like many critics, had great worries about its vulnerability to hand-held anti-tank weapons. I based this worry on the history of thin-skinned armored vehicles in combat.

But Stryker has done well in Iraq and Afghansitan (although off-road limits of a wheeled vehicle--another of my criticisms--means the vehicle doesn't do as well as in Iraq), seemingly showing critics to be way off the mark. Strategypage sets out this misleading defense of the vehicle's armor protection:

The initial 2004 combat actions in and around Mosul were not as intense as they were down around Baghdad. But there were heavily armed Baath party diehards and al Qaeda terrorists up in Mosul. Thus the Stryker brigade saw a lot of action, some of it quite heavy. It was thought that the Strykers would be very vulnerable to RPGs, but only two vehicles were lost that way in the first year. In some actions, platoons (four vehicles) of Strykers had dozens of RPGs fired at them with no serious damage. The protection on the Strykers has been up to the job, but the troops, and hostile Iraqis, have also noted that the Strykers were faster, and quieter, than other armored vehicles.

Note that I did not dispute that the Stryker has done well in the road-based fight in Iraq. It did do well. We shall see how the Stryker does in Afghanistan if it is deployed away from the roads.

But I do want to take issue with the protection issue. The Stryker that critics (including myself) expressed worry about in regard to armor protection is not the same as the Stryker that has shrugged off RPG hits. The Army (thankfully) recognized that criticism of the Stryker's armor protection was valid and the Army added those cages you see around the vehicle. The cages are what have made the vehicles resistant to RPG strikes. The cages detonate the warheads away from the hull and dissipates the energy. Without that additional armor protection, Strykers would have been lost if hit by even a single RPG.

Critics were right about the armor protection--and the Army addressed that. And critics were right about cross-country mobility (which was just common sense since nobody is going to argue tracks are worse than wheels cross country).

The vehicle does have strengths notwithstanding the weaknesses of armor and cross-country mobility), and as long as we don't try to use it like a Bradley, it is a good weapon.

Healing Our Foreign Policy

Despite a lot of worries that I have about our president's foreign policy, he has enacted some that give me some hope. One "bright spot" pushing the president toward such actions has been that no matter how much our president sincerely believed that we could make friends out of our enemies, the actions of our enemies serve as a clue bat which can bash hopeful nonsense, and shape our actions despite the initial desire for change:

Despite the Obama team’s early promises to break with the policies of their predecessors, nearly every day brings a headline suggesting the reverse. Last year’s eagerness to engage with Iran has given way to a policy “tough enough to actually change behavior,” in the president’s words. Last year’s linguistic cleansing of the phrase “war on terror” has been supplanted by a national security team (including the previous administration’s defense secretary) that speaks routinely of a nation at war and which is “surging” more troops into Afghanistan than President Bush controversially surged into Iraq in 2007—even as it steps up aerial attacks in neighboring Pakistan. The Obama team’s timetable for withdrawing from Iraq all but mirrors President Bush’s. The administration’s defense budget is the highest ever. Russia, China, Taiwan, the Gulf States—the initial distancing from President Bush’s defense priorities in these places, where not closed entirely, have been reduced to a cosmetic gap.

Reacting to our enemies more realistically is only one part of repairing the damage that a flight from reality will cause. We also have to bolster our allies. Our allies don't do anything comparable to our enemies to compel a more realistic assessment of our relations. So our administration can continue to do things, like screwing the British, that alienate our friends and allies even as we adjust our policies toward enemies and foes to confront them.

On the bright side, a more realistic reaction to enemies does have one positive effect on allies even if we don't work to bolster the friendships. Where we have common enemies, even friends who we ignore a bit can have a little more confidence that we will jointly confront those enemies.

I've never doubted our president means well. But he has a lot to learn about his silly college student notions of America's place in the world. He at least seems capable of learning.

Hey! I finally get that whole "hope and change" thing!

The Horror

This is just awful:

Around 50 ships, including large ferries carrying thousands, were stuck in the ice in the Baltic Sea Thursday and many were not likely to be freed for hours, Swedish maritime authorities said.

And this isn't a cheap shot on global warming, with perhaps a polar bear angle. Read this horrifying news:

Sweden's TT news agency first reported that the two largest ferries, the Isabella and the Amorella, were in total carrying 2,630 passengers, but later revised the number to 1,841.

What happened to 789 passengers? "Revised" is such a cold term to describe the loss of that many people.

Clearly, stranded passengers have resorted to cannibalism on a massive scale to survive!

Talkin' Bout Whose Generation?

George Will slams the Baby Boomers who reveled in 1960s radicalism for dereliction of duty in raising a generation of perpetual adolescents (tip to Mad Minerva):

Although Cross, an aging academic boomer, was a student leftist, he believes that 1960s radicalism became "a retreat into childish tantrums" symptomatic "of how permissive parents infantilized the boomer generation." And the boomers' children? Consider the television commercials for the restaurant chain called Dave &  Buster's, which seems to be, ironically, a Chuck E. Cheese's for adults—a place for young adults, especially men, to drink beer and play electronic games and exemplify youth not as a stage of life but as a perpetual refuge from adulthood.

This is, of course, a pet peeve of mine. The Baby Boomers were a wrecking ball cutting a swath of destructioni through our society. Well, to be fair, not all Baby Boomers--just the self-appointed spokesmen of the generation who glorify their unwashed, selfish, protest days as the height of social progress and enlightenment. They were not all of the Boomers. Boomers like my brother who was drafted into the Army and didn't go to Canada, my other brother who served in the Air Force in Vietnam, or my sister who didn't whine about life but set about building a life for herself and her daughter. I'm immensely proud of them. But they aren't considered to be representative of the idiots who got to define that generation.

And I must say that for those who want to jam me into the Baby Boom generation by ending that blighted period in 1964, I say BS. I'm proudly a Generation Xer. One of the oldest, I'll grant, but still of Generation X and not the Boomers. Although I remember well the latter part of the Vietnam War (with a brother over there, even a child knew), and the 1972 election was formative when I saw George McGovern as an alternative to lead us against the Soviets, I stand in the 1980s and 1990s, for sure, as my age of growing up. My war was almost Desert Storm (with a minor in Bosnia possible), and my military service spanned Presidents Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton, on either side of the Berlin Wall.

The Boomers will loom over us even as they pass from leadership and cultural hegemony. As our media defines the generation, I say don't let the door knob hit you in the butt on the way out.

For the other boomers who were not of the counter-culture and who accepted responsibilities and adulthood even as your peers were celebrated for their flower power and rejection of the system, you have my deepest thanks for preserving something good through that Dark Age of Adulthood.

A Whole New Era Accomplished?

Who knew that Operation Iraqi Freedom had freedom as an objective? From Newsweek (!):

Bush's rhetoric about democracy came to sound as bitterly ironic as his pumped-up appearance on an aircraft carrier a few months earlier, in front of an enormous banner that declared MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. And yet it has to be said and it should be understood—now, almost seven hellish years later—that something that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq. And while it may not be a beacon of inspiration to the region, it most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East.

Iraq's democracy could represent a whole new era? Funny, Newsweek doesn't look Neoconish.

And yes, it was hellish for the Iraqi people who endured Baathists, Sunni nationalists, Shia death squads, and al Qaeda all doing their best to slaughter civilians, as we attempted to defend Iraq from this evil campaign of terror and build an Iraqi government that could stand on its own. But given the hellish nature of Saddam's reign, could anyone say that the last seven years would not have been hellish anyway under Saddam or one of his demon spawn sociopathic sons? Would you really like to revive those idiot claims that Saddam really wasn't so bad?

At least now, Iraqis have a better existence and the hope of an even better future. And their neighbors might see the example of Iraq and be inspired to build that whole new era in the region.

Mission accomplished, indeed. But we have more missions to accomplish.

People Unclear on the Concept

I heard this news on the radio this morning (89X out of Detroit) on the way to work, and had to find it:

PRISON bosses are about to open the world's most luxurious jail with flatscreen TVs, its own recording studio - and even a climbing wall.

The £160m prison, near Oslo, Norway, gives 252 lags a single en suite cell with its own bathroom and windows without bars.

And then there's the art work. Although since it is described as "modern art" perhaps that is the punishment (modernartboarding?).

I almost made some snide comment about wall climbing exercise being a great training regimen for breaking out of the prison. But one, I'm sure you'd just have to go over the hedge to leave. and two, why'd anyone want to leave?

I just don't get the world. I've spent time in less appealing accomodations while on friggin' vacations!

Vanguard of the Jerkatariat

Greeks aren't happy about their financial crisis and austerity measures to escape the crisis.

This is the picture used to illustrate the unrest:

Grrr. He has that typical upper middle class pampered college student commie look, doesn't he?

It's a look that just begs for a tear gas grenade and a plastic bullet put right into his backside as he runs back to his dorm room.

Or at least this treatment (the original embed died so I found another):



Yeah, that would work. Although I'm sure he cares.

Sorry.

Voting While Shia

It is disturbing that so many in our government, think tanks, and press have absorbed the Sunni Arab view of Shia Arabs as nothing but Iranian pawns.

I really have few worries that Iran could come to dominate Iraq because of religious ties. When Iran was alone in providing support to the Shias who were oppressed and slaughtered by Sunni Arabs led by Saddam Hussein, can you blame Shias in Iraq for having at least some positive views of Iran? (And can you see how we'd have been much better off had we supported the Shia uprising in the south in 1991 after the Persian Gulf War?)

But Shia Iraqis killed (and just as significantly were killed by) Shia Iranians in massive numbers during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988. The Arab-Persian divide is real. Sympathies for past help will fade under the reality of that divide.

So read this article for a little perspective on the issue as the pre-Iraqi elections hand wringing gets into full panic mode over here. Bad things could happen, but good things are far more likely at this point.

For God and Country?

This author dresses up his faith in global warming with an appeal to national defense awareness:

Skepticism about climate change is going mainstream, and that is worrying. One-third of Americans now say global warming doesn’t exist – triple the percentage of three years ago.

This defiance of science isn’t just harmful for the environment. It’s also distracting us from growing threats to US national security. Actual – not theoretical – effects of climate change are turning the Arctic into a potential military flash point.

So we're supposed to halt global warming to avoid war in the Arctic Circle. Ah yes, the last refuge of a climate scoundrel is truly false patriotism. And for the record, even a skeptic like myself is aware of the military implications of a thawing Arctic.

The really funny thing about the author's appeal to national security grounds to battle global warming is this part:

Major melting has spurred Russia, Canada, Denmark (via Greenland), and Norway into a new gold rush, except this time it’s about staking claim to huge reservoirs of natural gas, petroleum, and untold deposits of minerals previously inaccessible because of the polar ice shield.

Huh. It's a gold rush? It's almost as if none of those countries expect anything at all to be done to combat global warming. So who's the denier now?

But Mr. Rodgers is loyally defending the faith that Al (Gore) the Captist has reaffirmed in these dark days of wavering faith. So as a bonus, read this article.

Membership Should Have Its Privileges

I've worried that our newest NATO members in the former Soviet sphere are second class citizens. Increased Russian assertiveness, including their 2008 invasion of Georgia, heightens my worries.

This article argues for strengthening the defenses of NATO states oppositie Russia and otherwise bolstering the front against Russia should they get all nostalgic for their lost empire, including:

Finally, the United States should look for opportunities to field alliance military assets on the territory of newer NATO member states. Low intensity basing options, such as relocating NATO headquarters and training facilities, rotating equipment and prepositioning fuel and ammunition stores could prove to be a cost-effective risk mitigation tool, discouraging instability and conflict on Europe's periphery by demonstrating a commitment to the region.

Hear, hear. I called for prepositioned stocks in eastern European NATO states, like our REFORGER stocks in Germany during the Cold War, as part of a more robust American presence in Europe:

In addition to maintaing sufficient forces deployed in Europe able to move east to reinforce the eastern European NATO frontline states, we should establish American, British, and German equipment depots for additional heavy brigades in southern Poland. If we can fly in troops to man these forces, in a return of forces to Poland (REFORPOL) concept, we'd enhance deterrence without forward deploying powerful NATO offensive units that would scare the Russians in reality instead of their faux fear of Georgians and Latvians. Those units could swing north or south or stay put once manned and fielded.

Right now, the newest NATO members are in a gray area of being able to call for alliance help in case of Russian aggression but with NATO having no planning and little capability to answer that call. That is not good for any NATO member.

And if you think that more robust defense preparations will cause Russian hostitlity and paranoia, don't worry--that ship sailed long ago. Russia stokes anti-Americanism for their own purposes completely detached from what we actually do.

Look, I doubt Russia would overtly attack to exploit that gap, since their military is going to be hollow for quite some time even if they start rearming now; but who knows what the future could bring? Better to have our alliance capable of offering a defense to every member.

A Spasm is Not a Strategy

Iran could attempt to retaliate if they are attacked by either Israel or America (and France?) seeking to take out their nuclear facilities.

This author believes Iran could retaliate against any air offensive against their nuclear facilities with programs to ramp up insurgents and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Iran has a history of supplying surrogates to do its fighting. Along with Syria, Iran provided Hezbollah sophisticated weapons used against Israel in the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Perhaps of most concern to Israel was a variety of rockets with ranges of 20 to 100 kilometers. During that war, despite the best efforts of the Israeli Defense Force, the daily barrage of rockets did not end until the cease-fire took effect.

Hezbollah also employed high-end antitank guided missiles, which took a heavy toll on the Israeli Army, as well as air-to-ground missiles [NOTE: I assume the author means ground-to-ground rockets], anti-ship missiles and even unmanned aerial vehicles. None of these weapons has shown up in significant numbers in Iraq or Afghanistan—yet.

If Iran did introduce them, the level of violence and the risk to civilians and military installations would escalate significantly. Air-to-ground missiles and antitank guided missiles, integrated with improvised explosive devices, would dramatically increase risks for U.S. and coalition soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Particularly worrisome would be the introduction of portable air-defense missiles, commonly known as MANPADS, into Afghanistan. Mobility in Afghanistan depends upon airplanes and helicopters. Threats to flight would severely hamper current operations.

In this regard, we should remember that what unhinged the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was a similar increase in enemy capability when the United States gave the Mujahedeen Stinger missiles. The battlefield, including cities, could get much deadlier.

Iran can accomplish this without directly engaging coalition personnel with its own military forces. In essence, it can deliver a Lebanon-like war to Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a scenario the United States and Israel must seriously consider before pulling the trigger.

I think the author's worry about Iraqi insurgents and terrorists replicating what Hezbollah did in Lebanon in 2006 is seriously flawed.

Really, Hezbollah won not because of their weapons or tactics were great but because they were good enough to fight off an Israeli attack that was botched at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. Troops weren't ready for combat and the leadership didn't order any type of ground offensive suitable for anything but token resistance. And reliance on aerial attacks (that killed civilian Lebanese) quickly exhausted the world's patience for Israel to harm Hezbollah. Israel screwed the pooch, as I wrote back then.

One, none of our enemies in Iraq or Afghanistan has the status of being a virtual state controlling a sanctuary as Hezbollah did in southern Lebanon. That is the reason Hezbollah could import and accumulate longer range rockets. In Iraq, it was too difficult for insurgents and terrorists to carry around anything other than the short-range 107mm rockets that they did use to bombard the Green Zone from Sadr City until we pushed out our security zone to cover launch areas. (See the chart here for rocket sizes)  Do you really think insurgents or terrorists can lug around 122mm or 240mm rockets except for maybe an occasional television operation? And why would terrorists even bother to use long-range rockets (or any rockets, really) when IEDs have worked just swell to slaughter civilians?

Nor would anti-tank missiles do the enemy much good. They learned the hard way not to take us on in conventional operations and instead they rely on IEDs. Hezbollah's success also relied on poor Israeli tactics and troops ill-trained to take on Hezbollah fighters who used light infantry tactics to hold fortified positions.

The notion of either Iraqi or Afghan (especially, being landlocked) terrorists successfully using anti-ship missiles or UAVs is laughable. Even Hezbollah only got off a lucky salvo when they used anti-ship missiles and their UAV use was a novelty item. Neither affected the outcome of the campaign.

I will grant that surface-to-air missiles could have an impact against helicopter operations. But with most of our air power flying higher because they use GPS bombs and missiles, man portable missiles are worthless against them.

We did shut down insurgent flak traps that used heavy machine guns in Iraq in the latter days of the insurgency. Also consider that we use parachutes (including GPS guided ones) a lot to send supplies to outposts and that our helicopters are more resistant to damage and have better counter-measures than the old Soviet choppers. And our Stingers are much better than anything Iran can hand out. Plus we have some Ospreys that have a speed advantage over helicopters. In short, while even portable SAMS would compel us to operate differently, it would not cripple our operations to the point of changing the outcome of the war.

Remember that we did beat Iran and Syria when they were trying very hard to support insurgents and terrorists in Iraq. Why didn't Iran supply those wonder weapons to either Afghan or Iraqi terrorists back then if they could be so decisive? And even if they could have been decisive in Iraq in 2006-2007, the security situation in Iraq is far different today. And if Taliban forces in Paksitan where they have territory to hold did not manage to get portable SAMS, could insurgents and terrorists in Iraq or Afghanistan use them effectively?

Iran also has to worry about crossing a line that could cause us to retaliate overtly. We did once or twice against Syria, recall, for their support for terrorists in Iraq. And we may have quietly done so in Iran, if rumors I read back in the day are correct.

So there are numerous reasons not to take this worry about Iranian retaliation in this manner seriously. Sure, violence could rise in Iraq or Afghanistan for a while if Iran tries to carry this idea out, but if we refuse to panic we can respond effectively.

A spasm is not a strategy. Although it does make for some good headlines breathlessly speaking about a "resurgent" enemy.

UPDATE: I'd forgotten that actual SAMs didn't work out so well for the Sunni Arab insurgency early in the war in Iraq:

These missiles were used in Iraq, without much success. Early in the war, up to a dozen Russian made missiles have been fired in Iraq a year. Few aircraft were hit, and most were able to land. It's uncertain exactly how many missiles were fired because several are known to have been duds (because of missile parts found), and other duds have probably not been found. So the missiles are still a threat, but not a large threat, at least judging by the damage these missiles have actually done in the last two decades. There were lots of viable SAM-7s in Iraq because Saddam had bought new ones, and tried to keep older models in good shape.

Could Iran really do a better job than Saddam's boys managed?

"Kick Me" Sign?

Assuming the whole thing wasn't just a botched operation because somebody in charge just wasn't thinking straight, is this the right interpretation for Iran's strange decision to put their Uranium out in the open?

Last month, Iran moved its enriched uranium from underground facilities, to an aboveground building. This made the enriched uranium, which could eventually (once enriched sufficiently) be used in a nuclear weapon, an easy target for an air strike. It's as if the Iranian leadership was inviting Israel (which Iran often and loudly vows to destroy) to come in and attack. Very curious behavior, but understandable. That's because the government of Iran sees an attack on that enriched uranium as one of the few things that can save the government from being overthrown.

I've heard it said a lot that Iran would welcome an attack as strengthening their regime. I doubt that. But then, Saddam apparently thought that he'd endure anything we could dish out in 2003 and Osama welcomed our attack on the Taliban and al Qaeda in 2001. So even if Iran welcomes an attack, that doesn't mean they're right.

An interesting conclusion of this interpreation is that regime preservation trumps nuclear weapons. Would Iran really trade their raw material for nukes in order to get the public to rally behind the regime? How long would the rallying effect last? how long would it take to replace the enriched Uranium?

Further, if Iran is willing to make that trade, why have negotiations failed over the past several years? Implicitly the West has offered security for abandoning nukes, yet Iran has stubbornly pressed forward on nukes. And we have the North Korean parallel example of a nuclear state refusing to exchange nukes for an American guarantee of peace. Why would iran be different?

So if Iran didn't screw up with their positioning of their Uranium, why did they do it?

What if it was a Red Herring designed to get America or Israel to attack and lead us to believe we'd crippled Iran's nuclear drive? What if Iran's Uranium enrichment program (and their Plutonium program) are meant for the long term and not for getting their first atomic bomb, because they know that sufficient progress in either is a red line that could trigger an attack?

The problem from Iran's point of view is that they can't know if crossing one of these lines could trigger an American or Israeli preemptive strike out of fear that further delay in attacking would be too late to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. And if I was an Iranian nutball, I wouldn't assume the Americans and Israelis couldn't knock out my infrastructure.

Were I an Iranian nutball, under those circumstances, I'd want at least a few atomic warhead on hand before I announce capabilities to produce atomic weapons-grade material. Which would mean I'd have had to have bought some from either North Korea or Pakistan--or possibly even from some broke custodian of Russia's arsenal.

If Iran can announce both the ability to make nuclear bomb material and the possession of actual nuclear weapons--perhaps by detonating one in a test on their own territory--Tehran would quite possibly deter an attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

We're not dealing with idiots. If the Iranian mullahs believe there are red lines that trigger Israeli or American action, why wouldn't they take counter-actions rather than just blindly cross those lines and provide a pretext for military action against them?

We could be dealing with at least an idiot who had the authority to move the enriched Uranium, but not the common sense to realize what could happen.

But with if we're not dealing with idiots? What if the Iranians have a few purchased nuclear warheads and just need time to get them on missiles? What if the mullahs fear we're on the verge of attacking them successfully, and Iran isn't quite ready to make any announcements that could stay our hand? What if they think that sacrificing their enriched Uranium to an attack by Israel or America--and any outrage the Iranians can gin up--will buy them that time?
I'm reasonably sure we're dealing with nuts (from our point of view) in Tehran. But they aren't stupid.

Cuba's Colony

How inept is Hugo Chavez that importing Cubans of all people to run the place is seen as a step up from his bizarre notions of Bolivarian socialism?

According to the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, about 30,000 Cubans hold posts in dozens of ministries, state bodies, and public enterprises. Cuban officials now occupy senior positions in the Venezuelan armed forces and secret police. The Economist reported that Cubans “are helping to run Ven-ezuela’s ports, telecommunications, police training, the issuing of identity documents and the business registry.” In January, Venezuelan vice president Ramón Carrizales and his wife, Yubirí Ortega, the environmental minister, both resigned in protest at the increasing Cubanization of the military.

The Axis of El Vil is evolving into a Cuban empire designed to ensure cheap oil imports to maintain Castro's rule. My, how the hero of the American Left has fallen.

So Now We Know They'll Kill

So two parents in Argentina commit suicide, after they shoot their 2-year old son, but only wound their 7-month old daughter.

Why? The parents feared global warming.

The global warmers are trying to scare people into socialist policies, but they aren't succeeding as more people see that the science is far from settled and the offered solutions are ridiculous even if the science is right.

But on the bright side for their marketing people, the global warmers are scaring their own gullible supporters into suicide and murder.

These people need medication--not carbon credits.

If idiots want to exit the gene pool, they should feel free. We're better off without them. But it is mind boggling that parents would try to slaughter their own children because they are convinced the poor polar bears are doomed.

It will be fascinating to see how this couple will be treated compared to the lunatic who smashed his plane into an IRS building recently. I wonder if broad conclusions will be made about their confirmed beliefs?

Think About It. Plan for It. And Do It.

These authors argue we should not attack Iran, but should contain them, deter them with our own nukes, and apply sanctions when they get nukes. Indeed, they think the idea is so bad that we shouldn't even think about it.

I don't buy the line that military strikes (as long as we're talking a weeks-long campaign and not a one-shot strike over in a matter of minutes or hours) can do no good. We can definitely buy time at the very least. I don't even rule out that a relatively short-duration strike could buy at least some time.

Nor do I buy the idea that Iranians will automatically rally to the regime. Or at least they won't rally for very long before returning to opposition and perhaps opposing the regime even more for inviting attacks on them. And as I've written many times, if we fail to strike, I'll take no comfort knowing that most Iranians are really, really sad that their mullahs nuked Charleston using a nuke in a box (or some other port city).

Further, I don't think the threat of Iran retaliating in Iraq or Afghanistan is much of a threat. If Iran could destabilize the situation more in either place, they'd have done it, in my view. Especially in Iraq, the fact is we beat the Iranians and stopped their best efforts to destabilize Iraq.

I also don't think that Iran can be deterred much. Even if Iran never uses a nuke, given how much terror they sponsor now without nukes, how much more aggressive and dangerous would they be if they had the protection of their own nukes to deter us? At worst, the usually cautious Persians might be controlled by mullahs proud to take an Israeli nuclear retaliation for the Islamic team if they get to go down in history as the ones that smashed Israel in a nuclear fireball.

As for applying sanctions, by 2001 Saddam in Iraq had undermined sanctions so much that we were about to lose them. That was the impetus for our whole "smart sanctions" proposal. Knowing that Saddam had successfully portrayed our sanctions as killing babies in Iraq, the will of the international community (bolsetered by oil-for-food bribes paid by Sadddam) was breaking and not Iraq. How much more effectively will Iran be able to break sanctions when they have nuclear weapons to brandish?

And we haven't even touched on the proliferation issue. Even if it is safe to allow Iran to go nuclear (perhaps arguing that Israel has never used their unacknowledged nukes), what will the risk of atomic war be when Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, and Egypt all have nukes? And Pakistan and India are nearby, too, adding to the danger of one nuke setting off chain reactions.

I'd much rather risk the wrath of Iran for attacking their nukes than risk that Iran is a sane regime that can be deterred or that we can contain the results of Iran getting nuclear weapons. If sanctions don't stop Iran soon--or if we can't get hard sanctions now because of Russian and Chinese objections--we need to start the clock on bombing Iran.

And if it makes you feel better, I bet President Obama would get another peace prize for bombing Iran.

Operation Iraqi Rule of Law

We surely have reason--and authority based on our sacrifice of blood and treasure to birth the new Iraqi democracy--to influence what Iraq does so the elections next week come off smoothly.

But remember that we should not focus on specific results, as if we are better qualified to make decisions that Iraqis should make. What we should focus on is process. As long as we promote rule of law, even bad decisions can be accepted if not corrected. We seek legitimacy for the evolving Iraqi government.

If we focus on results even if it undermines the process of rule of law, we provide an excuse for worse leaders to do what they want--no matter how awful and against our interests--law be damned.

If we're going to change the name of the war to reflect a new post-fighting mission, let's call it OIROL.

UPDATE: This is the attitude we need to change:

Far from bringing peace, the March 7 parliamentary elections could bring disputes over the results that could undo reconciliation efforts between Sunnis and Shiites, or worse, provoke a new wave of attacks.

"If they feel their rights have been robbed, it might lead to sectarian violence," Anbar province First Deputy Gov. Hikmat Jasim Zaidan, said of Sunnis in an interview in Ramadi, the region's capital.

"In the West, when your right is robbed, you go to the courts. But in Iraq, it's different — when your right is robbed, (you) resort to violence," he said.

We will need a presence in Iraq for many years or decades even after our agreement on keeping forces in Iraq requires us to leave. I assume we will negotiate something that keeps tens of thousands of US troops in Iraq for training, external defense while the Iraqis train and equip for that mission, assisting in ongoing operations against the smaller terrorism problem--and serving as a road block to resorting to violence to seek redress for grievances.
 
I don't care if they love each other. I care if they shoot each other to resolve their differences.