The Middle--Not Top--Kingdom

I have consistently written about the China threat while tempering worries about what China can do in their own region to harm our allies and interests with reassurance that we are far stronger than China and are likely to remain far stronger for a long time:

The fundamentals of China’s economy are stronger than those of the old Soviet Union. It has the world’s largest population, a rapidly expanding middle class and a frightening amount of US bonds — but again, in comparison with America, its weaknesses are legion. The one-child policy has created a rapidly ageing population and, in common with the old Soviet leaders, the Beijing elite is painfully aware of simmering ethnic tensions on its own border regions.

Beijing faces periodic riots in Xinjiang and Tibet, daily worker unrest, unruly provincial leaders, and mounting ecological catastrophes. It has three enduring rivals (Japan, India and Vietnam) as neighbours. Its allies — North Korea and Myanmar — are sources of international embarrassment. And for all the fuss about Chinese cyber-attacks, internet experts agree that the United States possesses more ‘online offensive capabilities’ than any other country in the world. Even more than the old Soviet Union, China is both a great power and an extremely poor country.

The positive assessment of our cyber-war capabilities is heartening. But more broadly, recall all these problems that could hobble China, and hold off on handing off the leadership of the world to China until they actually take it from us.

Indeed, I don't assume we will ever relinquish our lead to China. At worst, we will be the leading power simply because we will always retain the most uncommitted miltiary power on the planet:

I don't lose sleep at night over China's rise in power and wouldn't change places with them. Oh, if China is able to focus their power on a localized area, like Taiwan, they can generate local superiority for a short time--perhaps long enough to win that battle--but if we are able to mobilize and deploy our power, we can beat China on any battlefield. And we'd likely have powerful local allies to help us. China is a threat to our interests even now, but only if they catch us off guard.

Remember that geography (and our completely dominant Navy) means our power is free to deploy worldwide while China is hemmed in by hostile or potentially hostile neighbors. It's the Expeditionary Kingdom versus the Trapped in the Middle Kingdom.

Why some analysts have man-crushes on the Chinese government is beyond me.

The Last Jihad

I have no doubt that we can defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. I think we could have done it without the surge, honestly. The surge speeds up the pace we can win, in my judgment. The surge is not reversing a looming defeat of our forces.

The key, since 2006 or so if memory serves me well, has been the rise of the Taliban in Pakistan which has seemed like more fertile ground for the jihadis rather than trying to reverse looming defeat in Iraq and gain traction in Afghanistan where the locals learned to hate the Taliban and their al Qaeda hired guns. It is in Pakistan, then, that we (relying on the Pakistanis, but helping them with intelligence, financial aid, training, and Predator strikes) will win or lose the war against the latest jihad against us:

Al Qaeda has, as in Iraq, made itself very unpopular in Pakistan. That is increasing their casualties, and causing more security conscious al Qaeda to seek another sanctuary. But there are few left. Somalia and Yemen are more dangerous than Pakistan, and offer fewer amenities, or good targets. Thus Pakistan may prove to be the end of the road for al Qaeda. Ironically, it was in the tribal territories of Pakistan that al Qaeda was founded in the 1980s. In some cases, you can go home again, if only to die.

I speculated about this outcome nearly 2-1/2 years ago:

If Pakistan may finally realize that they cannot make deals with jihadis, al Qaeda and their jihadi Taliban allies may be waging war on Pakistan because they have no choice.

If Pakistan will fight this war with no quarter, this could be the final jihad.

 
I do give credit to the Obama administration for keeping Pakistan on the line and in the fight--and for intensifying our efforts on the AFghan side of the border. But there is no partial credit in war should our progress be reversed. We need to see this through to victory.

Don't Let Up

We ovethrew the Saddam regime and created a pro-Western government that won't be seeking nuclear weapons.

We've won on the battlefield in Iraq against Baathists, al Qaeda invaders, Sunni nationalists, and Iranian sponsored Sadrists.

And we've won the debate on how to set up a democratic Iraq.

So we've achieved a lot already. Which explains why the country and the war have dropped off the radar screens of our press and domestic politics. In many ways, that's a good thing, given how badly our press covered the war.

But we have to keep paying attention to Iraq and working to entrench democracy and rule of law; and to defeat neighbors like Syria and Iran that wish to undermine democracy and exert influence over Iraq.

General Odierno is generally optimistic about the future of Iraq, while recognizing that we have to work the problems to achieve that.

He also mentions the de-Baathification issue that has raised worries recently over candidates being banned by a body suspected of too-close ties to Iran:

One of the things that's concerning to me now is in the early stages of this process, I think the story's been diverted a bit and I think it's been diverted trying to drive it more down the sectarian line which I think is unfortunate today, based on the de-Ba'athification, disqualification of some candidates.


It's not the fact that we believe there shouldn't be de-Ba'athification because we all agree there should be de-Ba'athification, but it's about is it transparent, is it going by the Rule of Law, and so what's happened is the early part of the campaign process has turned in -- has turned into mainly about de-Ba'athification and trying -- in fact, in some cases driven some people towards back to sectarian issues.

What I think we'll see, though, as we get closer to the elections, I think we'll see a drive away from that and I think we'll see it return to what are the issues of the people which goes back to do I feel secure, am I getting the services I want, do I have the job I want, how is the economic development going, and how are these political leaders representing me regionally, and I think it will go back to those issues over time.

 
That seems about right. De-Baathification is a legitimate goal. But there needs to be rule of law in carrying it out. Iraq will stumble as they seek a path forward. We have a role in helping them find the right path. But don't forget that we stumbled too in defining how potential enemies could participate in our government.

Warmists Still See the Heat at the End of the Tunnel

The "settled" science of global warming keeps taking more hits:

The climate-change campaign is in catastrophic free fall.

Nearly every day brings a new embarrassment or retraction for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the supposed gold standard for "consensus" science. The withdrawal this week of BP, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar from the main US business lobby for greenhouse-gas controls is the latest political blow to the campaign.

The anti-warming lobby long demonized skeptics as the moral equivalent of Holocaust deniers while warning of climate "tipping points." Now, the "Climategate" scandal that broke in November is looking like a true tipping point: The leaked e-mails have done to the climate-change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam War debate 40 years ago -- changed the narrative decisively.

And I proudly wrote early on that Watergate comparisons were not appropriate, and that the Pentagon Papers was the proper way to look at the potential for the revelations.

The climate science may not be settled, but the panic sure is settling in.

Getting Out of the Good War

The Dutch coalition government has fallen over its plans to continue to deploy troops in Afghanistan. Their departure could set off a chain reaction of retreat:

Some 2,000 Dutch soldiers have been stationed in Afghanistan's southern Oruzgan Province since 2006.

Twenty-one Dutch soldiers have been killed in the restive province and the Afghan mission is hugely unpopular among the Dutch.

According to initial plans, the troops were to have returned home in 2008, but the Dutch government extended their deployment after no other NATO country offered replacements.

Earlier this month, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen asked the Netherlands to take on a new training role and remain in Oruzgan until August 2011. The Christian Democrats said today the future of the Afghan mission now depends on forming a new government. An early election is expected to take place later this year.

Experts warn the Netherlands' potential decision not to extend its Afghan mission could have a domino effect among other NATO nations with troops with Afghanistan.

I thought that NATO was supposed to be a collective defense organization--not a collective retreat organization. It is pretty sad that the departure of one small--but valuable--ally could cause a stampede for the exits by our NATO allies.
 
I guess we can finally lay to rest the idea that it was Bush's fault that the mission in Afghanistan is so unpopular in Europe.

The Limits of Compassion

Operations continue in Marjah and the surrounding region. We move slowly to avoid killing civilians, and decline to use firepower when we could to save our own lives in order to avoid killing civilians. So far, 12 NATO troops and one Afghan soldier have died. We estimate 120 enemy have been killed.

President Karzai really annoys me by his enthusiastic embrace of his role as "good cop" by placing America and NATO in the "bad cop" role over civilian casualties:

On Saturday, President Hamid Karzai had urged NATO to do more to protect civilians during combat operations to secure Marjah.

NATO forces have repeatedly said they want to prevent civilian casualties but acknowledged that it is not always possible. On Saturday, the alliance said its troops killed another civilian in the Marjah area, bringing the civilian death toll from the operation to at least 16.

Though NATO had made progress in reducing civilian casualties — mainly by reducing airstrikes and restricting combat rules — more needed to be done, Karzai said.

"We need to reach the point where there are no civilian casualties," he said. "Our effort and our criticism will continue until we reach that goal."

I understand that he is reacting to the incredible ability of the Taliban to buy and threaten local journalists into writing about the non-existent carnage from our air strikes (and counting on our idiot Western press to parrot that line). The fact is, our efforts are very careful and historically speaking very few Afghans die because of us. Far more die from Taliban violence directed at civilians and more die from Taliban use of civilians as human shields. Both of those tactics place the responsibility on the Taliban. Very few civilians die from accidental US/NATO weapons--which are our fault, if not crimes--let alone deliberate murders.

Yet Karzai acts as if he is the defender of his people against sloppy (at best) Western firepower.

Let me just say that his criticism will continue until the point that his own soldiers are routinely on point against the Taliban. When it is an Afghan unit out there with their lives on the line, with American advisors holding a radio able to call in firepower, my bet is that Karzai won't be nearly so worried about civilian casualties and will instruct his guys to call in the orbitting planes with their JDAMs.

This is the hand we've been dealt. We have to play this hand until we can counter with our own information operations the Afghan belief that our firepower kills too many civilians --if we can do that, of course. Until then, we have to fight the war we're in and not the war we'd like to be in.

Shy Town?

Let me just say that I understand that wonderful thing called the InterTubes can carry email from Chicago to Ann Arbor with reasonable reliability.

Just sayin'.

Party Time!

I took Lamb to a classmate's birthday party yesterday. She had a grand time (she's quite the social butterfly).

Luckily, amidst the massive number of boy classmates and cousins present, Lamb had three of her classmates to form a girl's table. I jokingly told them that they should go rescue one of the other rare girls (one of the cousins) from a table filled with boys.

Oh, and last week Mister participated in Orchestra Night at Hill Auditorium. They all sounded good--especially the two established high schools. I was very impressed. Although since I'd gone straight from work to the science fair (And let me add that I saw Lamb warmly congratulate her classmate for winning the science fair trophy that she really wanted to win, when I picked her up from school on Friday)  and then off to orchestra, by the the high schools played I was just ready to drive Mister back to his mom's (after dropping off the cello at the school), get home, and peel off suit and contact lenses.

One aspect that was kind of funny was that all the schools pretty much played classical music (or close enough with the Pink Panther theme and 2001: A Space Odyssey), my son's school played one classical piece and then a medley of Queen songs. The audience reacted well to it, but it just smacked of a bad movie where the plucky urban school goes into the alien world of the established suburban schools and wins snooty hearts with their authenticity and unexpected skills.

Ah, I'm a lucky dad.

You'll Put Your Eye Out, Kid

Iran will likely get nuclear weapons. President Bush failed to attack, but the state of Congress and the loyal opposition was such that he would have been impeached for that good deed and our country would have been splintered very badly. President Obama could get a second Nobel Peace Prize for doing the deed, but he won't. And the pressure he'll put on Israel to refrain from striking may well be strong enough to stop that hope for stopping Iran. We won't even try to overthrow the mullahs. Our only salvation is luck, counting on the still-narrow opposition to topple the Iranian mullah regime.

It astounded me that our intelligence agencies could conclude a couple years ago, in that infamous National Intelligence Estimate summary made public, that Iran had halted nuclear weapons work and that there was no evidence they'd restarted it. Even if they were right about just the warhead issue, disregarding the weapons implications of enrichment and missile work just astounded me.

But guess what, Iran didn't stop warhead work:

The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency now not only admits that Iran's at work on nuclear warheads, but acknowledges that Tehran never stopped working on them -- despite no end of pleas, pledges and promises.

Burned by its miscall on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the US intelligence community has played it too safe on this one, long insisting that Iran halted warhead research in 2003.

There were plenty of dissenting voices. But President George Bush didn't want another fight, and President Obama's already punch drunk.

Now the genie's out of the bottle of isotopes. With the departure of anti-Israel IAEA chief Mohammed el Baradei, the UN's nuke monitors can finally tell the truth.

And the truth is that Iran wants nuclear warheads badly.

President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and the Tehran regime never stopped declaring their intention to destroy Israel. Inconvenienced, our diplomats and the White House insisted those funny-ha-ha Iranians were just kidding. Now even the UN's taking them seriously.

Will we?

We debate endlessly the precise place Iran is on in the path to nuclear weapons, pretending that knowing where Iran is now is right now the key question rather than understanding the ultimate objective--possession of nuclear weapons--is the key piece of knowledge.

Mark Steyn has the answer for whether we will take the Iranian problem seriously, sadly noting that our governments will "protect" us from the sharp corners of everyday life, but won't address Iran:

This is a perfect snapshot of the West at twilight. On the one hand, governments of developed nations micro-regulate every aspect of your life in the interests of “keeping you safe.” If you’re minded to flip a pancake at speeds of more than four miles per hour, the state will step in and act decisively: It’s for your own good. If you’re a tourist from Moose Jaw, Washington will take preemptive action to shield you from the potential dangers of your patio in Arizona.

On the other hand, when it comes to “keeping you safe” from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing. There aren’t going to be any sanctions, because China and Russia don’t want them. That means military action, which would have to be done without U.N. backing — which, as Greg Sheridan of the Australian puts it, “would be foreign to every instinct of the Obama administration.” Indeed.

The problem isn't that our governments think that saving you from an improperly drained hot tub is a higher priority, but that ordinary Westerners agree. I swear that it drives me nuts when I read Lefties arguing that more Americans die in auto accidents than in terrorism incidents. Other than the retort of, well yeah, now that's the case--what would the friendly body count be if we didn't fight them, strict body counts isn't the real issue. Auto accidents, tripping while running with pancakes, and even horrible hot tub accidents are part of the sharp corners of life that we live with. Being gunned down in a mall shouldn't be one of those ordinary sharp corners of life. And it isn't progress to learn to live with terrorism as a normal thing to endure along with food borne ilness at the salad bar from bad bean sprouts.
 
Sure, we calculate the balance between freedom to risk life and limb driving and safety regulations that constrict freedom or raise costs, but we accept the risks of living and having fun, rather than strapping ourselves into pillowed suits and staying at home. There are some Westerners who really think that the risk of dying in a car bombing of a mall is no different than the risk of slipping in a bath tub, and so if the government reduces the risk of bath tub slipping, that will reduce the body count more than killing jihadis. So it would be best to focus our resources on padding those sharp edges of life. Halting a highly speculative Iranian nuclear threat pales in comparison to reducing the dreaded pancake flipping fall.
 
So we'll let Iran go nuclear. It's logical. It avoids giving in to unreasonable fear, they say. And when Iran goes nuclear, we'll finally put in some toothless sanctions. But the new power that nukes give Iran will mean that sanctions will erode quickly (remember how even Saddam eroded sanctions by the beginning of the Bush administration?). And who will dare retaliate against even common explosives-based Iranian terrorism?
 
But we'll comfort ourselves that we can deter Iran from using nukes. We'll have a nice intelligence estimate that tells the president that the nuts don't actually control the nukes, so Iran will behave rationally--as we define rational.
 
Eventually, I'm sure that the Congressional inquiry into the slagging of Charleson or Tel Aviv will do a wonderful job of explaining where we went wrong. 20:20 hindsight is like that.

The Rhythms May Change But the Trees Will Survive

Does anybody but me find this article funny?

Parker's data, which showed the trunks gradually fattening over time, indicated that many of the trees were growing two to four times faster than expected. That raised questions about climate change's impact on the age-old rhythms of U.S. forests.

Got that? Global warming (notwithstanding that even Phil Jones admits there has been no statistically significant global warming for the past 15 years) may be causing these trees in the eastern United States (Group A, let's say) to grow faster.

But wait!

In the tropics, however, some studies have seemed to show trees growing more slowly: It might now be too hot for some trees there.

Got that? Global warming may be causing other trees (call them Group B) to grow more slowly.

Which means, of course, that prior to global warming, Group A trees were growing more slowly; and Group B trees were growing faster. But we pine for the days before so-called global warming kicked in?

So why are we so anti-Group A? Was it really a better climate when Group B trees grew faster but Group A tress grew more slowly?

This is just one of my problems with the global warmers. We have to cripple our economy if  necessary to maintain the current temperature, at worst allowing no more than a degree or two of more warming. By chance, the Golden Age of Temperatures was apparently in the late 1970s or so.

Yes, yes, I know that the warmers say that it isn't that we had ideal temperatures then, but that we adapted to that particular temperature and so it would be too disruptive to adapt to further climate changes. But how disruptive would wrecking our economy be to avoid the purported disruption of a couple degrees warming?

Perhaps I'm just lucky, but my home manages to keep me comfy through a range of temperatures throughout the year, from sub-zero winter nights to 100+ August afternoons. Indeed, sometims over the course of a day the temperatures outside can swing wildly from 4:00 PM to 4:00 AM. Yet I do not suffer.

So yeah, in some places plants may suffer if global warming is taking place (which is a completely different question than wondering if we are the cause of it), but in other places plants will do better.

Is it really being a denialist to think we can probably adapt if the planet is warming? Or cooling? Or weirding? Or whatever term you want to invent to scare me into letting the global warmers run the economy and my very life?

Democracy Upbraided

Ukraine will get their pro-Russian satrapy:

Ukraine's embattled premier Yulia Tymoshenko said Saturday she has withdrawn her legal challenge to the results of the presidential runoff election that she lost by a narrow margin earlier this month.

So Viktor Yanukovych will take office in 5 days.

But hey, that's what the Ukrainian people want. They're free to be stupid and self destructive as much as any people on this planet. Though you have to put a good deal of blame on the Ukrainian Orange Revolution leaders to govern well and deprive voters of the hope that a man who can suck up enough to Moscow will solve their problems.

Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic. Perhaps democracy in Ukraine will survive this one vote and not deterioriate into the mockery of elections that Russia now has. Perhaps Ukraine won't fall into Russia's orbit and become just a bigger version of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Perhaps. But if I was a betting man, that's not how I'd bet.

Going for the Gold!

Foolish me. I thought that Iraq's Sunni Arabs couldn't possibly be so stupid as to boycott next month's national elections despite some controversy over the banning of alleged Baathists from participating in the election. As I wrote only yesterday:

Having ended their war because they were losing and losing badly, the Sunni Arabs are in no position to re-start the war. They'd face complete expulsion from Iraq. They'd be fools to boycott another election. And they don't appear to be leaning toward that level of self-destructive behavior.

Another day, another stupid decision:
 

Iraq's main Sunni party said Saturday it is dropping out of next month's national elections, seizing on U.S. concerns about Iran's influence in the political process as proof that the vote will not be legitimate.

A statement from the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue stopped short of urging Sunni voters to boycott the March 7 parliamentary election. But the party called on other political groups to join it in withdrawing from the ballot.

Saturday's announcement raises the likelihood that the results of the vote will be called into question. U.S. and United Nations diplomats have expressed fears that a Sunni boycott that hands victory to Shiites would throw the results of the election into doubt. In turn, that could open the door to a new round of violence and delay plans for American troops to leave Iraq.

 
Note that the Sunni Arabs seem to have been decisively influenced by our statements (including General Oderno's warning), saying the vote might not be legitimate without Sunni Arab participation. That is false, but if the Sunni Arabs believe it, they won't vote thinking they'll get a better deal outside of democracy. Now that's smart American foreign policy!

If the Sunni Arabs were smart, they'd understand that their only option is to participate in elections to the fullest extent possible. If road blocks are in their path--even grossly unfair ones--they still need to participate and work to earn the trust of Shias and Kurds to remove those blocks within the system. Resorting to war with the Iraqi government will just result in the rest of the Sunni Arabs being killed or expelled from Iraq. Terrorism and violence didn't work in 2005 and 2006 when the Sunni Arabs were much stronger and the Iraqi government much weaker. It won't work now.

But I guess I can't assume the Sunni Arabs won't act stupid and make decisions so self-destructive that you'd have to assume it is all a Zionist plot. How else could they commit community suicide when they have options that make sense?

I was stunned and amazed pre-Awakening at their persistent stupidity in allying with the jihadis and angering the Shias and Kurds. Truly, the Sunni Arabs of Iraq are trying to become the new Palestinians.

We're even encouraging the Sunni Arabs of Iraq to wallow in their purported victim status! And the press is going along with this fiction, ignoring the years of Baathist-funded al Qaeda bombings against Shias, the decades of Baathist repression and mass murder of Shias and Kurds, and the centuries of dominance by the Sunni Arab minority. The Sunni Arabs have the burden of proof to show they are worthy of participating in free elections and a democratic Iraq rather than suffering the traditional Middle Eastern consequences of losing a war (repression or destruction).

While I may have been very wrong about whether the Sunni Arabs are capable of mass suicide, I at least did get it exactly right on the press attitude in that three year old post above:

Iraq's Sunni Arabs may be stupid in their choices, but they will continue to get a sympathetic Western press eager to portray them as victims.

This could all be a negotiating ploy by the Sunni Arabs to get a better deal from the government, under pressure from us. But if the Sunni Arabs really do boycott the Iraqi election, they will once again--as they did after the 2005 boycott--regret their decision and vow to participate the next time. And when next time rolls around, the itch to be really stupid will demand to be scratched, and the Sunni Arabs will truly prove that the Palestinians are not the most stupid, self-destructive people in the world.

But hey, if they follow that course, they'll always have that victim status to cling to. They'll always have the comfort of that to explain away their sorry state of affairs.

Challenges--Not Doom

As we face the problem of helping the Iraqis carry out a new national election next month while coping with the problems of Sunni Arab resentment and possible over-exclusion from political life, Shia anger at past Sunni Arab atrocities and worry that the Sunni Arabs would love to run the show again, and Kurdish worry that any Arab regime--whether Sunni or Shia--might abuse them, let's not forget that we are a long way from fall 2006 when Iranian- and Syrian-instigated sectarian violence threatened to plunge Iraq into the chaos of a civil war:

[General Odierno] met with the secretary shortly after the publication of that front-page Washington Post story -- you know, the sky is falling; sectarian violence is about to break out again; we're going to have a repeat of 2005, 2006 in Baghdad -- and he just couldn't disagree any more strongly with the story and can point to any number of examples of why it is not akin in any way to the horrors that we saw in 2005, 2006.

I mean, fundamentally, let's remember the context. We are now a few weeks away from a major election in Baghdad -- in Iraq. This is -- as horrific as some of these attacks have been, it is -- it is not unexpected. This is the kind of pre-election tension and violence that had been anticipated. Frankly, it has not been to the levels that some might expected.

We are clearly heartened by the fact that unlike 2005, there is no credible call for boycotting these elections by any noteworthy politician. In fact, the leading Sunni politician, al-Mutlaq, is actually encouraging widespread Sunni participation in the election as a means to redress some of their concerns. I think all the major coalitions involved in the election understand the importance of trying to form a government as quickly as possible after the election, so that there is not this period of uncertainty and potential turmoil in the wake of it, and that they all recognize that it's going to have to be some sort of coalition that's built among competing parties.

I think -- and by any objective measure, the number of security incidents is down dramatically and that even ethno-sectarian violence remains extraordinarily low.

And we're always heartened by the fact that the -- that there is no evidence thus far that the Iraqi people are in any way losing confidence in their security forces or that Shi'a militias are starting up or that the Sunnis are turning to al Qaeda. And even if they were to, al Qaeda has been so decimated, they aren't in a position to undermine things to the extent that they -- that they did back in 2005, 2006.

So I -- yes, I come back to the same point we've made time and time again: that al Qaeda has been diminished to the point that they have to husband resources, ammunition, personnel and launch high-profile attacks with less and less frequency and attempt to reignite sectarian violence. And time and time again they have done it, and time and time again it has not resulted in the outcome that they had wished.

Having ended their war because they were losing and losing badly, the Sunni Arabs are in no position to re-start the war. They'd face complete expulsion from Iraq. They'd be fools to boycott another election. And they don't appear to be leaning toward that level of self-destructive behavior.

So worry about the challenges we face and continue to work the problems. But don't worry that it could completely undo our success so far.

Make the PLA Fight For Every Inch of Ground

In the debate over how Taiwan can prevent China from conquering it, I find this advice to be ridiculous:

Tamkang University's Lin argues that Taiwan needs F-16s and submarines. But as a last resort, it should also develop a lower-tech deterrent to dissuade China from attempting an occupation of the island.

"Taiwan needs to develop its asymmetrical capabilities, because we cannot confront the PLA head-on," he says. He envisions home-grown, perhaps US-trained "cement jungle guerrilla warfare" units, consisting of trained reserves and snipers who can operate independently and harass PLA occupiers.

"When the PLA comes, let them in – don't engage in bloody, Stalingrad-type warfare," he says. "Give them one shot today, two tomorrow, and three afterward, so they cannot conclude a war." [emphasis added]

Excuse me? I think it is fine to prepare for guerrilla war as a last resort. But the idea that the Taiwanese should fight in the strait but basically fold their hand if the Chinese make it ashore in force is folly. The Taiwanese darned well better engage in bloody urban warfare. Even if the Chinese get ashore they have the task of holding against counter-attack and bulding up their forces faster than the Taiwanese can knock them out.
 
If the Taiwanese surrender their cities and people, China will win. Do you seriously believe China is unwilling to be as brutal as possible to suppress Taiwanese resistance? Do you really believe the Chinese could find no collaborators to form a "Taiwanese" puppet government? Shoot, if I was in charge in Peking, I'd ship out native Taiwanese by the millions to become involuntary colonists in Tibet and the Moslem west where the disloyal Taiwanese will find themselves viewed as "Chinese" with the choice of becoming the de facto instrument of Chinese ethnic cleansing of those ethnic minorities or suffering at the hands of the angry locals. I'd ship in ethnic Chinese to replace those Taiwanese expelled.
 
It is folly for the Taiwanese to think in any terms other than fighting as hard as possible, from the Chinese ports and airfields from where the invasion force will come, to the strait, to the air, to the airfields, beaches and ports in Taiwan where the Chinese will land, in the cities, and--yes, just in case--behind enemy lines as irregulars. Do all that and the Chinese will think twice about even starting an invasion.

Dilberthu Akbar

Thank you to the dipwad who slammed his plane into a government building yesterday:

A software engineer furious with the Internal Revenue Service launched a suicide attack on the agency Thursday by crashing his small plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, setting off a raging fire that sent workers running for their lives.

We may "only" be looking at one dead victim. But it could have been worse if the plane had been packed with explosives.

We don't have enough trouble with jihadis, eh? Thanks for showing those nutballs how to go about exploiting our freedoms to strike a blow for the caliphate.

UPDATE: This article explains how small planes are a real problem:

"It's a big gap," said R. William Johnstone, an aviation security consultant and former staff member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "It wouldn't take much, even a minor incident involving two simultaneously attacking planes, to inflict enough damage to set off alarm bells and do some serious harm to the economy and national psyche."

But what do we do? Shut down private aviation? That would be a mistake.

I don't know what we do, quite honestly. But we'll probably do nothing until a jihadi uses this method. And then we'll react stupidly.

A Silver Cloud and a Dark Lining

Ok, first the good news for American foreign policy:

One of the more remarkable international stories of the past year has been the fate of Honduras. Somehow this tiny, plucky, and extremely poor Central American country managed to outwit and outmaneuver the regional authoritarian, the United States, and the much-ballyhooed power of “international opinion.”

I salute the Hondurans for preserving their democracy in the face of the odds they faced:
 

[The] United States did everything short of invading Honduras to see the “coup government” fall.

 
This, of course, is the bad news amidst the good news of Honduras remaining a pro-American government despite the odds, in a bizarre tale of Hondurans defending their democracy in the face of ridiculous claims that Zelaya was the wronged party and not the scoundrel out to wreck Honduran democray.
 
It is bad news because Hondurans quite literally had nobody on their side but a relative handful of writers who wrote about the affair. Yet despite our own government weighing in against the isolated Hondurans, we were unable to achieve our objective.
 
Consider that. We attempted to reverse what we called a coup and could not--even though Honduras is weak and reliant on our aid and trade. Mind you, I'm glad we failed. We were on the wrong side (Chavez and Castro). But we were unable to achieve our objective. How inept is our foreign policy establishment?
 
At some level, that failure is disturbing. After all, I can't rule out the possibility that our government will try to achieve something actually in our national interest.

Not All Canadians are in Vancouver

We've opened up our National Training Center to prepare an entire Canadian brigade as Canada prepares to rotate a new unit into Afghanistan:

The unique experience will last six-and-a-half weeks, because Canadian Soldiers will conduct two training rotations, back-to-back. It's the first time the NTC has hosted a brigade-size element from a coalition partner in the war in Afghanistan for a full training rotation, let alone two. The U.S. military facilitates training of coalition partners, but not to the extent that the NTC is currently performing.

"We conduct training for coalition partners at combat training centers routinely, primarily at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center at Hohenfels, Germany, but not to this magnitude," said NTC and Fort Irwin Commander Brig. Gen. Robert "Abe" Abrams. "This is the first time we've had an allied brigade come and train at a combat training center. So, it's a first for the combat training center program. It's a first for the National Training Center."

Canadian military conducts NTC-style trainings for battalion-level rotations at its Canadian Maneuver Training Center (CMTC) near the town of Wainwright in Alberta, Canada. But, because the area is covered in several feet of snow at the moment, and because the NTC had an opening this month and the next, the opportunity to train here was not passed up the Canadian Army.

Good luck and thank you, Canada.

Not the War We'd Like to Have

The marjah offensive is highlighting the fact that the Taliban use human shields:

Taliban fighters holding out in Marjah are increasingly using civilians as human shields, firing from compounds where U.S. and Afghan forces can clearly see women and children on rooftops or in windows, Afghan and U.S. troops said Wednesday.

The intermingling of fighters and civilians also has been witnessed by Associated Press journalists. It is part of a Taliban effort to exploit strict NATO rules against endangering innocent lives to impede the allied advance through the town in Helmand province, 610 kilometers (360 miles) southwest of Kabul.

Well, yes. That's what the enemy does. I complained bitterly about it a while back.

Another article (in the New York Times, no less!) notes how this enemy tactic--which only works when the media advertises civilian casualties and then blames us for them--restricts our use of air power:

American and NATO military leaders — worried by Taliban propaganda claiming that air strikes have killed an inordinate number of civilians, and persuaded by “hearts and minds” enthusiasts that the key to winning the war is the Afghan population’s goodwill — have largely relinquished the strategic advantage of American air dominance. Last July, the commander of Western forces, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, issued a directive that air strikes (and long-range artillery fire) be authorized only under “very limited and prescribed conditions.”

So in a modern refashioning of the obvious — that war is harmful to civilian populations — the United States military has begun basing doctrine on the premise that dead civilians are harmful to the conduct of war. The trouble is, no past war has ever supplied compelling proof of that claim.

This over states the problem, I think. We have not relinquished the strategic advantage of air power. We retain exclusive use of the air for resupply, movement, and persistent reconaissance. We can still use air power for strike roles, despite the limitations we place on ourselves.

Remember, too, that we may be extra restrictive in the Marjah offensive while the world watches and the locals wait to see if we are better than the Taliban. I wouldn't say that our restrictive rules of engagement are counter-productive at this time and in this place.

As I have mentioned before, while it would be good to erase the heightened sensitivity of Afghans to what are historically low civilian casualties with our own information campaign, in the short run it is pointless to complain of how unfair it is that we can't use bombs (or artillery) out of fear we'll kill civilians that the Taliban deliberately expose to our fire in the hopes we'll kill them. This may not be the war we wish we had. But it is the war we have. We have to deal with the fact that Afghans are very sensitive to civilian casualties that can be blamed on us--it doesn't matter that it is an unfair perception. Ignoring public opinion is a recipe for alienating Afghans--especially Pushtuns who will be extra hard to win over because they are the base of the Taliban. And ask yourself if the Soviets failed in Afghanistan because they used too little firepower?

We may well loosen up our restrictions in the months to come as the campaign evolves. Or maybe the rules of engagement are too strict. If so, I have no doubt we'll tweak them to be more effective while keeping our goal in mind.

The Flying Nicetryski

Much is being made of the so-called Russian F-22ski:

In an open-source assessment of Russia's Sukhoi PAK-FA, aka the Raptor Killer, Air Power Australia concludes, "once the PAK-FA is deployed within a theatre of operations, especially if it is supported robustly by counter-VLO capable ISR systems, the United States will no longer have the capability to rapidly impose air superiority, or possibly even achieve air superiority."

I'd have been more comfortable with having enough F-22s to maintain two full squadrons for the next 30 years or so (requiring enough spares for accidents and some combat losses over that period), but let's not make too much of the Russian plane. So far, it is a Potemkin plane:

Russia's effort to develop an F-22 class fighter (the PAK FA) is going to require a lot of work. The prototype, that took its first flight recently, was clearly the basic Su-27 airframe modified to be stealthier. This included changing the shape of the aircraft to be less radar reflective, and providing internal bays for bombs and missiles. But there's much more to do in order to achieve anything close to the stealthiness of the F-22.

Russia may convince some buyers that they'll get something good enough to smash our Raptors, but reality is not likely to be as kind as the flashy brochure portrays the plane.

OK, Now I'll Worry

I've been skeptical that the complaints about banning Baathists from next month's election in Iraq are a real issue. But when General Odierno is worried, I'll pay attention:

Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, in a speech, accused Ali Faisal al-Lami, the executive director of the Accountability and Justice Commission along with Ahmad Chalabi, the panel's chairman, of being "clearly influenced by Iran."


Gen. Odierno said both men, according to intelligence reports, were in close contact with Abu-Mahdi al-Muhandis, the top Iraqi adviser to Iran's Quds Force commander. The Quds Force comprises Iran's unconventional military units, which have orchestrated anti-U.S. paramilitary and political operations in Iraq.

In one sense, it makes sense for Iraqis to get information on Baathists from Iranians since the Iranians have been tracking Saddam's boys for decades now in order to exact revenge for the Iran-Iraq War. So I wouldn't automatically assume something is really wrong.

It all depends on whether the close contact with the Iranians involves more than just receiving information on Iraqis tied to Saddam.

But until I read more about this issue, I'll worry about the election commission and give the Sunni Arabs a little more of a hearing. Not that this would justify the Sunni Arabs resorting to violence. They should pursue all options within the law.

UPDATE: And I'd like to clarify that I really don't worry that the Iranians can take over Iraq in a stealth campaign of seeking influence. If they could have done that before, they would have rather than trying to bomb their way to power by arming the Sadrists and inflitrating their own astro-turn Shia rebels. We should seek out Iranian agents and work to minimize their efforts to infiltrate Iraq.

But I don't worry we'll lose Iraq to the Iranians. Especially since I think we'll be in Iraq long after 2011. The Iraqi government will renegotiate our presence in Iraq before the current status of forces agreement compels us to get out completely. We're still needed there to train the Iraqis, deter the Iranians and Syrians from making too much mayhem, and setting limits for domestic entities as they jockey for power within the new Iraqi system.