On tonight's episode of "Our Idiot President": "HVPI"

When I was a grunt medic we had a cynical nickname for ourselves: "high-velocity projectile interceptors".

Because we knew that in a real shooting war - a war against a peer enemy - that was very likely what was going down on our Field Medical Cards.

GIs, specially grunts, get shot. Or fragged by random artillery rounds. Or step on mines. Or get blown up by command-detonated boobytraps (now we call them "IEDs" like they were something new, but they're as old as gunpowder). 

So when Our Idiot President demanded that GIs be deployed to our own cities (at least the ones he hates, like Chicago and Portland and D.C.) I had two genuine fears.

The first, and most obvious, was the reason for 18 U.S.C. § 1385; that using soldiers against your own people is bad for the soldiers and bad for the people. Bad for the people because, duh, military dictatorship. But bad for the soldiers because they become associated in the public mind with military dictatorship.

Soldiers are poor "peacekeepers", at best, and the worst examples of military occupation have always been fraught with the danger that the soldiers, trained to respond to threat with immediate, lethal, as-overwhelming-as-possible force, will go ballistic on the civilians around them.

That's bad enough when those civilians are "foreigners". When they're your own people?

Fuck that noise.

(As an aside, when I heard that the Nitwit-in-Chief was kicking around the idea of sending one of the battalions of the 82nd Airborne Division I facepalmed so hard I knocked my cap off. Infantry in general and paratroops in particular are reeeeally bad domestic occupiers; they're among the most kinetic of infantry soldiers by both training and inclination. It comes as no surprise that among the most lethally idiotic moments in recent Western occupation operations - the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" shooting in Derry, and April 2003 protest fusillade in Fallujah - both had paratroops on the occupying side doing the murdering.)

But the second was for the troopers themselves.

Because they had only two options, both of them exceptionally poor.

Option 1 was to treat the city and the citizens where they were deployed as an active and dangerous enemy. In other words, like the paras in Derry or the 325th in Fallujah. Treat everyone as a potential guerilla, treat every encounter as a combat patrol. Go out of the wire locked and loaded and looking for trouble.

That would have set up a Bloody Sunday or Fallujah April as surely as the sun rising. At some point there'd be one of those "checkpoint shootings" that were a daily routine in Iraq, and all Hell would break loose.

But Option 2 was to treat it like what it is; a ridiculously pointless piece of political theater. Loaf about in a gaggle or three, scroll on your phone, pass the time, just kinda hang out...like this:

That's a "One grenade'll get y'all!" clusterfuck if ever I've seen one.

But how else can you "occupy" one of your own cities that's not in open revolt? Without creating a 100% chance of the checkpoint shooting inevitable in Option 1?

Since this is The Land of The Free and the Home of the Insanely Over-armed, that was also inevitably leading to this:

You knew where this was going, right?

Of course Felony Fats has seized on this grim little horror his own stupidity and incompetence set in motion to help push his little Nazification project of ridding the precious pure American blood and soil of the taint of evil foreigners, dusky invaders, liberal traitors, and...well, every other fucking thing the bloated sonovabitch hates.

I have no idea what the poor GIs were doing when they were ambushed, but I'll bet you all the money in your pocket that it was some version of "standing around with their thumbs up their asses"; something utterly worthless. They were torn apart - or killed - for nothing. 

Nothing.

There's nothing about any of this that makes any kind of sense. There's almost nothing about it that can be made to make sense; it's all just a hollow shell of nothing.

I have no idea what any possible value there is in any of this; Trump's lunatic war on blue cities, whatever his legionaries are supposed to be doing, what happened to make an Afghan drive from Washington state to D.C. to kill two randos in tree suits, the larger war on "immigrants"...any and all of it.

It just looks from here like stupidity running head-on into angry assholishness then bursting into flames and sailing off a cliff into a cesspond.

And we've got three more fucking years of it.

Christ, WASSSSSSSF... 

"Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien apprendre."

 

Well, it's That Day again.

I'm not going to bother going over all this nonsense again; it's bad enough that my country will, for the twentieth time, wave the bloody shirt of the towers and the Pentagon and the farm field where the fourth airliner went down to try and draw the audience's attention from the mountainous heap of death and destruction it built on those ruinous foundations.

I've already talked that sonofabitch to death and there's nothing more to say.

Instead I want to think about the original pile of corpses harvested from that day twenty years ago; the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

By pure coincidence, one of the books on my nightstand the day the last U.S. troop walked up the ramp to the evac bird was Andy Krepinevich's The Army and Vietnam.

Krepinevich is supposed to have been moved largely by another Vietnam post-mortem, Harry Summers' On Strategy, that posited that the problem was that the U.S. wasn't WW2-enough, that the real problem was that the Army never really went full-D-Day on the Communist forces and defeated them militarily.

Krepinevich's analysis, though, suggested that the opposite was true; that the Army have never really stopped trying to D-Day the war. That what he calls the "Army Concept" - "a focus on mid-intensity, or conventional, war and a reliance on high volumes of firepower to minimize casualties" (Krepenevich, 1986, p. 6) - was central to the reason that the U.S. failed to realize either it's military or political objectives in Vietnam.

Krepinevich's assessment of low-intensity (call it "guerrilla war" or "counterinsurgency" or "foreign internal defense"...) conflict is that the ultimate objective of the counter-insurgent forces has to be to separate the rebels/insurgents/guerillas from the bulk of the local people, and then to weld the locals to your local proxy through...well, a bunch of stuff, but basically by making the proxy attractive to the locals.

You do that, you eventually win.

He writes that while paying lip service to this objective that, outside a small and relatively powerless group of low-ranking officers (largely in the Special Forces and advisory cadres), the Army hierarchy had no interest in doing this. They wanted to meet the NVA and VC Main Force units in open combat and smash them.

So the low-level, day-to-day, grinding work of securing the population was left to the South Vietnamese, from the ARVN down to the Regional Force and Popular Force paramilitaries and the National Police.

And this crippled the actual counterinsurgency. The ARVN and the police were a corrupt mess even where they were militarily competent, the RVN government was, if anything, worse, and the RF/PF (the "Ruff-Puffs") starved for resources and unsupported so at the mercy of the local VC.

The "contribution" of the US and ARVN maneuver forces was to swing through in a "big sweep", shoot the fuck out of the landscape, create a bunch of refugees among the survivors, and then move on, leaving the locals to get re-occupied by the local force VC and the political cadres that had largely gone to ground before the sweep.

That pretty much tallies with my reading of the conduct of the war, and Krepinevich in his conclusion, says that:

"Low-intensity warfare represents the most likely arena of future conflict for the Army, and counterinsurgency the most demanding contingency. As in the period following the Korean War, (after Vietnam) the Army is erecting barriers to avoid fighting another Vietnam War...instead of gaining a better understanding of how to wage counterinsurgency warfare within the unique social, economic, political, and military dimensions comprising that form of conflict, the Army is trying...to transform it into something it can handle." (op. cit., p.274-275)

That, fundamentally, the Army Concept "won" the war for the U.S. Army's hearts and minds. Instead of being in Vietnam one year twelve times, the Army tried to forget that the nasty interlude even happened so it could return to the sort of high-kinetic warfare it was good at.

Fast forward thirty years, then, and the U.S. Army gets dragged into southcentral Asia.

I won't pretend to have read any tactical or operational studies of the ISAF mission in general, but the impression I get from what I have suggests that not only did the US operational command not review or learn from the lessons of Vietnam, it actively repeated the mistakes that it had made before.

The maneuver forces leaned hard on firepower and air-and-vehicle mobility. Units rotated in and out without ever spending enough time to truly learn the ground and the people they fought over. The primary focus seems to have been trying to find, fix, and finish the Taliban field forces rather than securing the population.

The Afghan military and police appear to have been as bad or worse than the ARVN; vastly corrupt and randomly brutal. The ISAF command doesn't seem to have been particularly picky who it sponsored, and that ended up putting a lot of the same people whose bad behavior had encouraged Joe and Molly Afghan to support (or, at least, tolerate) the Taliban in the first place - Anand Gopal's The Other Afghan Women does a good job of detailing the problems this created.

From what I can tell - and it's worth noting that whatever truth is there in the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan it's surrounded by an imperial guard-size bodyguard of lies - what horrifies me the most is that having had twenty years to learn the fundamentals of suppressing a rebellion in Vietnam my Army, the U.S. Army, not only didn't learn those lessons but actively turned their back on them and spent another twenty years reapplying the methods they knew, they should have known from the beginning, had failed before.

And that, for me, sums up my personal connection to the tragedy of the twenty years that began this day.

My Army, my country, We, the People, forgot none of our outrage and fears and grievances.

And then we proved that we had learned nothing, as well.

You can argue about whether we should have sent an army into Afghanistan. I tend to agree that the occupation was not a bright idea...but I also understand why it happened.

But once that Army was there...how the hell did we manage to do things not just catastrophically wrong, but catastrophically wrong in nearly the identical way we'd done them - and knew we'd done them - wrong fifty years before? 

We knew - we should have known - what would happen when we did the things in Afghanistan we did (and the way we did them) because we'd done them that way before - in Vietnam - and ended up with a heap of ashes.

And yet, here we are again.

That seems to me the bitterest legacy of the lake of bitterness that is this day.

“...disunited, undisciplined, ambitious, faithless...”

Worth noting, as we drift unmoored through the final days of the Republic, that we're showing as many indicators of a late-stage political dissolution abroad as we are at home, one of these being an increased dependence on mercenaries to fight our cabinet wars.

I'm not going to pretend that these hired guns are going to have anything like the negative domestic effects Niccolo Machiavelli reported they had on the Italy of the Renaissance:

"Mercenaries...are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were."

The United States is not the Florence of the 1500s; we will neither be conquered nor ruined by these mercenaries.

But a putative republic should be concerned with the interests of its citizens. When it increasingly becomes, through using hired troops to further divorce its actions abroad from its people at home, more of an imperium it furthers the conditions that make all the more likely that - although the standards may still read "The Senate and People" - that the orders that move those standards do not reflect any actual intent to do good for, or further the interests of, We the People.

I wish I could, as I so often do, make this into a partisan problem. It's not; the desire to make the nation's military adventures less fraught with political consequences has been sought by the "leadership" of all factions outside the tiny genuinely Red Left (such as it is) and the equally tiny isolationist Right.

No, it's not a Democratic or Republican problem.

It's an "American" problem, and one generated by the massive indifference We the People have shown towards holding our "leaders" accountable to us for their indifference towards...I won't even say "our interests"; it's an indifference towards even trying to honestly and openly assess what those interests are.

Any truly rational evaluation of the value of spending blood and treasure to send soldiers - any soldiers - to chase the ragged aspirants of a theocratic fantasy around a disputatious and chaotic foreign region would quickly conclude that value is utterly nil. All the bullets ever cast cannot kill the notion of Islamic hegemony any more than they could kill Christian dominionism when it was the animating force of the West. It took an Enlightenment to do that, and by our part in discrediting and destroying the secular authorities in the Islamic lands we've done a hell of a fucking good job ensuring that the Islamic Enlightenment is further away than ever.

I have not desire to see my fellow soldiers thrown into this pointless abyss.

But I have even less desire to see my country continue to sow the dragon's teeth simply because I and my fellow citizens are too lazy and disengaged to bother with that sowing when it's done not by our "own" hands but by hired ploughmen tilling foreign fields with the seed my taxes have bought.

Those underneath the harrow are not too stupid to know whose money is behind the rifle, regardless of who is actually carrying it. If we do not understand that, if we do not understand the idiocy of trying to use those hired rifles to divorce ourselves from our cluelessness and geopolitical stupidity, we will never understand that we can never hire enough of those rifles to ever prevent being continually nipped by the dragons.

"...he who told us that our sins were the cause of it told the truth, but they were not the sins he imagined, but those which I have related. And as they were the sins of princes, it is the princes who have also suffered the penalty." ~The Prince, Chapter XII

Mr. Thucydides on Line 1...

I want to add a note on just how geopolitically moronic this is.

Leaving aside the purely moral questions of murder-by-drone (and I suspect that a drone is more likely to have been the Angel of Death here rather than an Army aircraft...) any politico-military act by a Great Power can and should be judged by the cost versus the benefit of the action. So, let's look at those here; first, what are the benefits?

1. Taking a powerful Iranian piece off the board.

Fred Kaplan has a pretty good summary of the larger view of this action here (he also calls it an "act of war" eliding, I think, the reality that the U.S. and Iran have been in a cold war since Trump's abrogation of the JCPOA). Bottom line is that the Dead Guy was effectively the combined Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the CINC of Special Operations for Iran. This was a decapitation strike and, as such, a successful one.

2. Reminding everyone, especially everyone in the Middle East, and especially everyone in Iran, that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Not that anyone really needed that reminder. But this is an in-your-face example of the Ledeen Doctrine. As such it raises as many questions as it answers, and we'll discuss that below. But there's no question that this is a sort of "you're not safe anywhere" gesture to anyone thinking about giving Uncle Sammy the side-eye.

3. Aaaaand...that kinda runs me out of "benefits".

Seriously. I'm not sure what else this does, other than ratchets up the US-Iran cold war.

OK, so...what are the (direct) costs?

1. Rachets up the US-Iran cold war.

Which in itself isn't a good thing, but my real concern is that it could lead to a US-Iran hot war, and there's simply no "good" result of that.

Look, the United States at this phase of it's existence is a "status quo" Power. Stability and regularity are its friends, chaos and uncertainty its foes. Like any status-quo Great Power, it benefits when it can work with smaller regional powers to exert its influence. When it's forced to respond to troubles thrown out by regional instability it risks - as it has found - getting mired in endless sapping brushfire wars and profitless imperial adventures. Status-quo Powers are not usually good at "responding", they're not designed to be nimble or flexible. They do best when they can surround themselves with buffers of client and proxy states that can be bribed, wheedled, intimidated, or some combination of all three, into doing the Power's dirty work for them.

What We the People should have learned from the last 19 years is that "regime change" in politically un- or under-developed polities is unlikely to produce more stability. The Clintonistas tried to "save" Somalia and just knocked it further into the tules. The Bushies knocked the Saddam cork off the Iraq bottle and produced the unholy clusterfuck that this move is part of. The Obamites went along with defenestrating Ghaddafi in Libya and produced an even-more-failed-state.

Removing the mullahs from Iran won't produce a "better" Iran (from a US policy standpoint). Whoever follows is going to be 1) Persian, and, as such, convinced of Iran's place as the regional middleweight power, and 2) reminded that the US has not been a good thing for Iran since back in the 1950s - he, she, or they will remember Mossadegh and the Shah and the Gulf War and, now, this.

2. Replaces the Dead Bad Guys with...some other bad guys we don't know.

The Trumpkins make much of how the Dead Guy was a Bad Guy, but...c'mon. Seriously? This was fucking Napoleon? How "irreplaceable" a military-political genius was this joker? It's not like the IRGC is some sort of modern-day Alexander's Companions. They've made trouble in the Middle East and...what? Like it's that difficult to make trouble in the Middle East? Like it takes some sort of 12-dimension-chess-master? The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable men.

And - as we found with Ghaddafi and Saddam - sometimes the people who replace the guys you kill are madder, badder, and more dangerous to know.

I said this succeeded as a decapitation strike. But who knows? It may turn out to be a "Yamamoto shootdown"; a little revenge drama that has no impact on the military organization it's targeting. Only this one wasn't in the middle of buttrump nowhere Southwest Pacific but at the freaking Baghdad Airport, which brings us to...

3. Punks the Baghdad government and every Iraqi regardless of political affiliation.

Imagine how you would feel if your neighbor kicked your door down, walked into your kitchen, and shot dead the guest your cousin had invited in.

You might not like the guest, or your cousin all that much...but that? That's a punch in your face. That's utterly contemptuous of you and your home. The neighbor has, to put it bluntly, just shown that you are his bitch. If you don't respond with force, well...you are.

It's one thing to know that the strong do what they can. It's another thing to have your nose rubbed in it.

Seriously, I have no idea how the current government in Baghdad survives this if they don't make every American persona non grata and order the whole nutroll out of their country within 30 days. Hell, you'd think that they'd demand the extradition of the drone operator and everyone in their chain of command on murder charges. They won't...but why not? I mean, it kinda WAS premeditated murder.

3. Bogs the US even further in the Middle Eastern/Sunni-Shia War of Religion mire.

The one thing that everyone here has tried to make a Trump Positive is his supposed longing to #endendleswars. How the hell does this do anything to do that? I mean...you want to whack this dude? Fine. You can't find a way to get him to turn up in the Baghdad Marriot with a fatal heart attack, two labradoodles and a boy toy wearing a full wetsuit and stripper heels? Instead you choose the most ridiculously in-your-face fuck-you to every Masud and Amina between Gibraltar and the Celebes?

-----------

We've had discussions here that always seem to come back to the "Well, sure, Trump talks bugnuts shit, but that's just Trump..." thing. But I think this is a perfect example of WHY it's a problem. This doesn't strike me as something that was the result of some sort of deep foreign policy analysis. This feels like Trump gets pissed off at these pesky little Persians fucking with HIS embassy and making the news like he was a girly-man Jimmy Carter sorta wuss and calls down to his CIA Iran desk and says "Goddamn it, find me some Iranian sonofabitch to kill!" so he can look Strong and Commanding. This really is Foreign Policy by Tweet.

I'm not trying to say that he's somehow breaking U.S. Middle Eastern policy. That's been a shitshow since we stepped into the French and British colonial shoes after 1945.

But the feckless bastard has found ways to make it an even bigger shitshow, and after Bush I wasn't sure that was even possible.

What a fecking mess.

Update 1/4/20: Oh, for fuck's sake...

OK, so...the part where this whole idiocy is "Foreign Policy by Tweet"?

1) Fifty-two hostages? The 1979-1980 "Hostage Crisis"? Seriously?

2) "Iranian culture"? You're advertising that you're gonna war crime Iran by targeting cultural heritage sites? Why not bomb Coventry Cathedral, too, bubba, so you can bag the sweep. Jesus wept.

3) No more threats, hunh? I guess you're King of the Playground now, Spunky.

IF one of my troops had actied this stupid I'd have had the sonofabitch pulling extra duty until he ETSed. Since the POTUS is in the chain of command,...

Update 1/5/20: No, duh.

Like I said; this was fucking inevitable.

Anyone but a complete goddamn moron or goddamn Donnie Trump - but I repeat myself - could have seen this coming. KNEW this was coming the minute the warhead of the Reaper missile detonated. Does it mean that the GIs will have to do a Saigon-embassy-un-ass the joint? Maybe. The Baghdad government knows damn well that the GIs are the only militarily effective force in their country, and that if the GIs go it'll be a matter of time before the Sunni rebels re-rebel (the ridiculous Islamic State panic masked the reality that, in Iraq, anyway, the IS was more-or-less just the continuation of the Sunni resistance to the US occupation that began in 2003.

But the hell with tomorrow; today the Iraqi pols have only one choice, and that's between giving Uncle Sammy the finger, or being his tool. No Iraqi pol is stupid enough to think that being a Quisling is going to get him anywhere after this past week. Trump has made it cleat that his entire geopolitical approach to the Middle East is summed up in the sort of thing one of his goobers would wear on a T-shirt at one of his Nuremburg rallies; "Kick the ass. Take their gas."

IF I thought that Trump was serious about #endingendlesswars, that he'd simply tell the guys to grab a hat and not let the door hit them in the ass?

Fine.

But whacking Solemani and sending paratroops to Kuwait and not even feinting towards repealing the AUMFs?

Nope. He's not even trying. He's pulling your leg just like he pulled the poor bastards' legs who "invested" in his fake university. That's who he is. That's what he does.

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSF.

V-USA Day

On this day eighteen years ago today another war began, a war that continues to this day, a war that was, eventually subsumed and engorged by lies and fear, driven by greed and stupidity and hubris, and that ended up covering the bodies piled up here - in New York City and Washington D.C. and a field in Pennsylvania - with piles and heaps and mountains of bodies; bodies of innocent women, of small children, of innocents without so much as a drop of blood on their hands, with young men and women sent to fight and kill and die for those lies and that fear.

And those who shed that blood and took those lives?

"Don't you wonder if they ever pause on September 11 every year and ponder how they all used the dead of that awful day for their own purposes, to fulfill their long-held desires for empire-building in the countries of oil, to use other people's children in service of their profane desires? Don't you wonder if they ever pause on September 11 and ponder how they'd all screwed up so badly throughout the summer of 2001 when, as Richard Clarke recalled, "all the lights were blinking red"? Do you wonder if they make the connection, in the softening dark of the early morning, between their own incompetence and the use they ultimately made of it?

Of course, you don't wonder. Because they don't. Introspection was never a priority with this crew. And as we see so many of them on television today, deeply troubled by the actions of another underprepared, incompetent president*, and using the dead of 9/11 as protective camouflage for all their deception and bloody blundering that occurred beginning that very morning, we should all take time to mourn the dead of that day, and all the days thereafter, and, yes, say, Never Again."

The country we live in today; the country of security gates and drones and surveillance and national security letters and yellow-ribbon patriotism was built, bloody brick by bloody brick, from the foundation these people laid on that day.

THAT's what we should never forget, on this day, every year.

Damn them.

Damn them all to Hell.

Somebody's smoking Hemp for Victory

THIS stuff is what drives me nuts about the current American pash for tongue-bathing soldiers.

When speaking of the Americans who are going to take it in the shorts because of the trade wars with the PRC that are fun and easy to win Senator Tom Cotton (R - Arkansas) consoled them that:

"There will be some sacrifices on the part of Americans, I grant you that, but I also would say that sacrifice is pretty minimal compared to the sacrifices that our soldiers make overseas that are fallen heroes that are laid to rest in Arlington make."

Except those farmers and manufacturers and Sears customers getting hit with these costs didn't ask to be dragged into a pissing contest with the PRC over Fitbit parts any more than those GIs asked to be walking the streets of Kabul trying to remake Afghanistan into Belgium.

To equate these trade wars with the "blood of heroes"?

It's despicable on it's face, but, worse, it makes taking issue with the trade wars to a level of Dolchstoß comparable to betraying the Noble Soldiers. It's a version of Godwin's Law, a rhetorical trick designed to put a stop to debate.

Worse, it's deeply dishonest, if for no other reason than those "fallen heroes" didn't "fall" as "sacrifices" in a war declared by the People in Congress, or to any sort of existential threat to the United States, or, for that matter, for any sort overarching national interest, but in a bog-standard squalid little imperial expedition in the global hustings that has been ginned up largely by lies, misdirection, fear, and pants-pissing panic.

I love my Army brothers, but the guys holding down a slot in Asia or Africa today aren't holding back global fascism, or facing the might of a hostile superpower. They're doing the dirty business of empire. If my country wants them to do that business that's one thing. But if Tom Cotton - or my country - wants to drag me and every other American into a trade war in Asia and justify it by comparing it to that service?

He and it need to come to me first and make a case for that trade war and that service, not simply assume that they're worth blood and/or treasure and demand I respect that because some poor bastards are getting hosed wasting a year-and-a-half in fucking Helmand Province playing whack-a-muj.

Because if you gave me the choice between:

1) "Sacrificing" in a boneheaded trade war with China because I "support the troops", or
2) Skipping the trade war AND ending the expeditionary wars in Asia and Africa and bringing those troopers home?

I'd go with Door #2.

It'd be bad enough if We the People really were Army-mad, but in a nation where barely anyone bothers to give up a couple of years to the tree suit it REALLY drives me nuts when I run across this faux-militarism stuff.

Spy vs. Spy: Bay State Fathead Edition

Well.

Good to know that only the most cunning and hardest-core of the fiendishly cunning hardcore Mooslim evildoers lurking behind the arras of Islamofascism can evade our highly trained Homeland Security colossus and harm us;

"After being read Miranda rights, the Boston bombing suspect in custody, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has stopped talking to authorities, officials tell the Associated Press. "The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings acknowledged to the FBI his role in the attacks but did so before he was advised of his constitutional right to keep quiet and seek a lawyer, U.S. officials said Wednesday,"

This guy has been in the U.S. since he was nine and has never, EVER watched a TV police show. Or cop movie.

Ever.

Had NO clue that crime suspects lawyer up and dummy up.

Until they told him.

Remind me - how the hell did this fucking idiot figure out which side of the pressure cooker to put the boomy-stuff in?

And this is the latest Fiendishly Cunning Mooslim Evildoer? Man, they gotta be vacuuming the bottom of the gene pool over there in Scary Islamofascistic Caliphate-wannabe Terrist Land^TM.

(h/t to Doghouse Riley for the update.)

They will be with us always

The house is quiet now. Missy jogged out of her bed to the couch in the front room but immediately curled up there and went back to sleep; the other two - my Bride and the Boy - are our slow risers and have yet to wake. So I get to site here at the laptop near the front window and watch the gray Sunday begin.

I'm not sure whether the brown-streaked song sparrow is one sparrow or two, but it (or they) have been coming regularly to the platform feeder my family has set up outside the window. One of the few gains from the loss of Miss Lily is that Fat Nitty has never been an enthusiastic huntress, and with the Terror of the Backyard biding safe in a ditch we can resume putting out treats for the local birdlife. Nothing exotic; the song sparrows, a pair of chickadees I suspect of nesting in the Oregon grape, and a single massive scrub jay that arrives to standoff with the other local gourmand Mister Eatee the squirrel.

I was watching this little bit of Nature and thinking about the end of the Boston Bombing Week.

With the older brother - who seems to have been what passed for the "mastermind" of this business - full of holes as a colander we may never find out what the hell was going on and why. Certainly the likelihood of some sort of international jihadist conspiracy seems...unlikely. All the jihadi groups have denied these mooks, and their oddball odyssey Thursday and Friday - ambushing a campus cop, carjacking and careening through the streets tossing homemade demo out the car windows - makes them seem more and more like the couple of homicidal losers that Uncle Tsarni called them.



This hasn't stopped any- and everyone from using this episode as a platform for calls for this, that, and the other. My pals Lisa and jim over at RAW have a post up scolding the local security folks for their slipshod laxity in not securing the Marathon finish area better. Various pundits have drawn all sorts of inferences from this; everything from questioning the mental health system, the immigration system (despite the simple reality that the younger Tsarnaev was nine when he arrived here - nine!), to other calls for better security and more thorough assessment of the "threat".

I'm going to add to that but to perhaps something of a different end.

I'm going to suggest that we will ALWAYS have a Tsarneaev or two to strike at us.



For two reasons;

First, because we are and, I hope, will remain a relatively "open" society. I agree with jim and Lisa; the Boston Marathon organizers could have done more to make the route secure. When I go to soccer matches my bag and every bag is searched at the gates, and the gating and exclusion at public venues has become fairly standard. The price of safety is eternal inconvenience.

But I think back to the other big urban events like Seattle-to-Portland. The finish area is almost unsecurable; you have people arriving and departing all through the day. Riders with saddlebags, supporters with backpacks. Vendors, journos, and the whole thing ends in the park right between a mall, a big movie theatre, and the tram stop. To make that area secure you'd make a traffic jam and bottleneck that would make STP and everything around it slam to a stop.



Flick through the pictures I've posted. This is just one year's accumulation of the public events I've attended; me, personally. In one year, in a single mid-sized American city. And every single one of these events was just as open as the Marathon finish area. You could drive right up to them and park within car-bomb radius of a crowd of several hundred. You could walk amid the crowd with a backpack or tote bag competely un-inspected or unexamined.

Street fairs. Bike races. Sunday Parkways. Bridge Pedal. Saturday Market.

COULD make all of them utterly secure? Sure, you could.

But there's a cost there, not just in access but in thought. To really secure all of those venues would be a great deal of cost and personal committment; I'm not sure that anyone has any real idea of how much it would cost.

But, even more significant, you have to get the people, all the people; the organizers, the attendees, the competitors, the law enforcement and security agencies...into the sort of mindset that Israelis have to have; you have to have everyone on the constant lookout for the slightest hint of a threat. Every package, every backpack, every empty vehicle, every "odd stranger" has to be considered a danger.

You have to build that "fortress under siege" mentality into your people. Into your culture.

You have to see every venue as a potential massacre, and everyone as a potential enemy.

And we can do that. Of course we can.

But do we want to?



But, second, the other reality is that there will ALWAYS be human beings who want to do us harm.

They may be simply violent losers, more Tsarnaevs, more Columbine or Newtown shooters. There is almost no way to prevent a person from killing people if they're willing to work hard enough. You can make it more difficult. But stop them? Never.

And - giving consideration to the "Islamic" angle so many people have thrown at this - there are also some mindsets that will never live easily alongside each other.

Think about it this way; even if we stopped the "War on Terror" this minute. If we pulled every drone and every covert agent from every Middle Eastern country. If we halted every dollar and every round of ammunition sent to some loathsome dictator we support because he's friendly to the U.S. or supports our Middle Eastern policy. If we backed away from reflexively supporting the Greater Israel conservative faction. If we became scrupulously "neutral" in the great secular versus sectarian conflict over Islam now ongoing.

Would that bring us "peace" with the sorts of people who want an "Islamic Caliphate" in the Muslim world, the sorts of mad dreamers who founded outfits like Al Qaeda and Hizb-ut-Tahrir?

How could it?



The United States ideal represents everything that that sort of person finds appalling and dangerous. A nation founded on the ideal - often violated in practice, yes, but, still based on the notion - of personal and religious liberty. Open to "dangerous" ideals like the legal and social equity of men and women, the acceptance of homosexuality, even atheism. Tolerant of sexual liberties to the point of libertineism. Women in uniform. Personal choices on everything from abortion to educating women. You can almost hear the conservative mullahs shudder.

So in that sense they do, and will, always "hate us for our freedom". But not in the way that someone like Limbaugh or Coulter or Beck mean it; indeed, the sorts of Islamists who would like to bomb and shoot Americans for ogling nudie pictures and cuddling up to feminists and gays would probably get on famously with Operation Rescue and the boys down at the local John Birch Society.



And to make "peace" with these sonsofbitches really would be to have to change our society in some very fundamental ways, ways I cannot see happening if we are to remain true to our national ideals as I see them.

I hope that the nasty business of last week will, in some way, produce something of value. Some better way, perhaps, to help prevent this sort of brutality from striking somewhere else some time in the future.



But it may not.

Update 4/21: And this sort of idiotic crap doesn't help. "The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorists trying to injure, maim, and kill innocent Americans." And you know this, McCain, how? By your extraordinary political ESP, the sort of brilliance that gave us Backwoods Barbie? And King, do I remember you calling for this when your IRA pals turned up in Boston back in the day? And Graham - is this what you had in mind when you were quoted as saying ”We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” back in August?

Fuckadoodledoo, you gormless pinworms, we don't even know what these two gomers were in business to do, much less why. And you're already insisting on replaying the worst-selling of "Dubya's Greatest Hits" as covered by Obama?

Christ, but we're screwed.

Perilous Seas

I'd like to blame the lack of posting on business, or writer's block, or harmonic convergence.

The sad fact is that I've had a post simmering on the hob here and just haven't had the heart to finish it.

Because it depresses me just to look at it, for what it says about my country.

The roux that started it is found here; the now-public Department of Justice "white paper" laying out the grounds for executive killing of U.S. citizens in league with "Al Qaeda or its associates."

Let me start off by saying this; this isn't "news" in the sense that it is nothing new and nothing startling. The bit about eliding the legal limits on extra-legal killing of citizens is, a bit, but as the position paper spells out there are precedents there for the recommended military actions. This is who we are, and where we've been, since 2001. All this memo does is recapitulate the current views of the executive agencies of the U.S. government regarding the "law of war" of the "War on Terror".

No, what I find so miserably bleak about this is not what it does but what it promises.

For a moment let's step away from the specific circumstances involved, the "non-international conflict" between the United States and whatever it may define as "Al Qaeda and its associates". Let's try and remove the self-fanned furnace of fear and suspicion that fuels the sorts of flights of conspiracy-theory and terror-fantasy and look at the specific acts that this paper justifies.

It posits that the U.S. government can, and should, deploy military force against an individual if

"...an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.”

Most commentators have remarked, and worried, about the implications of the vague definition of such terms as "informed, high-level" and "activities". The primary concerns of the critics seem to be about both the very limited sorts of oversight on who gets be the Chooser of the Slain and what "evidence" they need to have to make that choice.

I want to suggest that our concerns, as citizens of a republic that is technically a "government of laws not of men", should be broader and deeper.

Because I want to argue that this memo is simply another link in the chain, the chain we have forged link by link since 2001, that is dragging us closer to a place we may not want to go, a place where the fundamental relationship between the nation-state, our nation-state, and individual people are sharply redefined.

First, I would posit that since the codification of the concept of the modern nation-state a system of law and the status of legal authority differentiates how states deal with each other and how they deal with individuals, persons subject to their own authority as well as foreign nationals.

Relationships between nations are dominated by the reality that there is no higher authority that can bind or loose those nations.

"Higher" levels of organization which do exist, such as the United Nations, have no legal authority, and in practice lack the power of force majeur, to impose conditions or judgements on contending nations.

Rulers of those nations, therefore, often have (or see themselves as having, which comes to the same thing) no practical recourse outside of armed force when dealing with disputes with other nations. There is no functional way to impose legal constraints on a sovereign state outside those imposed by the state itself. Ideally those nations find some way short of force to solve their issues, but failing that force of arms has and presumably will remain the ultimate argument of sovereigns. So we say that "in times of war the law falls silent".

But this rule has a corollary; nations do not make war on individuals, even during wartime. They may kill or maim those individuals as part of that conflict. But AS individuals, when taken as individuals - even as spies - they are dealt with under law, albeit often the laws of war.

A nation-state, at least in theory and typically in practice, that has a disagreement with one of its own citizens will prosecute that conflict through its legal system. Such a system might be corrupt, or misused, or ineffective, or biased...but the very basis of civil society, the place beyond Hobbes' "war of all against all" is that the individual can - must - feel secure that the nation must pursue him or her through the forest of the law.

And this even applies to persons citizens of or subject to foreign nations.

During wartime captured enemies may be tried for violations of the laws of war, or as spies. During the Cold War both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens were tried and convicted and even executed under the law for their actions.

Such citizens may be pursued through the laws of their home country, or may be extradited (or their extradition pursued) to face the rigors of the law of the pursuing nation.

But they remain, as individuals, within the boundaries of the law. Not before this time has the U.S. attempted to deal with individuals or groups of individuals as it has with other nations, arguing that no law exists, that such people should be attacked as a nation may be attacked because there is no alternative.

What I want to suggest that this memo should remind us, and warn us, of the deep, dark, dangerous waters we have ventured out upon with the passage of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force that give the President of the United States the authority "...to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

Because, as the DOJ paper merely echoes, this is a revolutionary change in the way the United States defines war, nations, and individuals.

By making "organizations" and "persons" subject to military force this law gives the Executive the power to, in effect, define anyone as an enemy of the state, and as such unprotected by the traditional measures that have shielded individuals from the monstrous power of the modern industrial nation.

And - so long as this law remains in force - there is no legal recourse for any of us who are so defined.

Worse; given the veil of security around the entire process of collecting "evidence", of determining what are "future acts of terrorism", of what constitutes "aiding terrorists" it is entirely likely that an individual's first intimation that he or she was a terrorist would be the arrival of a missile through the living-room window.

We have all read of the recent fulminations of those Americans who are beyond incensed by what they see as the U.S. government's frightful plan to violate their rights under the Second Amendment. Groups, often angry groups, have rallied, protested, are even now speaking out in strident tones at the dreadful spectre of the loss of individual liberty inherent in the proposals now debated in various public fora.

But this...this vast and restless expanse of unlimited power, this immense, lethal sea-change in the relationship between the individual, whether foreign or citizen, and the U.S. government...remains there in public view largely not just unfought but unexamined. The broader implications - implications that frighten me when I consider the possibility that actions that I might take, say, to protest some act of my government or its allies might place me beyond all legal safety into that Hobbesean bourne from which few travelers may hope to return safely - are taken simply as an accomplished fact, the new reality of our world, the fixed bounds of the power of our nation and the settled relations between it and us.

I know this, and yet, like most of us I pass through the days without thinking about it, like a sailor who sails calm seas and gentle breezes, never considering what might happen if the winds began to rise and the sea turn rough. It is only when I am forced to contemplate the perils of the deep waters charted by such documents as this one that I am fearful of the storms we may be brewing for ourselves.

And, of course, these are the wastes to which these storms will drive you; from Charles Pierce's observations on the Brennan hearings today:

"It was most clear when Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a persistent critic of the administration's drone program, asked Brennan point-blank whether the president could order a drone strike on an American citizen inside the United States and Brennan didn't — or couldn't — give him an answer. What evidence, Wyden asked, does the president need to engage a drone strike? And could that power be used inside the United States?

"I have been a string proponent of being as open as possible," Brennan answered. "I believe we should optimize transparency and optimize secrecy and national security concerns. We can do both. The Office Of Legal Counsel advice established the boundaries, and we don't operate at those boundaries."

The man whom the administration has put up to head the CIA would not say whether or not the president of the United States has the power to order the extrajudicial killing of a United States citizen within the borders of the United States. (And a thousand heads on conspiracy websites explode.) And the hearing, remarkably, went on as though nothing untoward had happened.

He also couldn't answer straight out whether waterboarding is torture. He hid behind legalities as Carl Levin fumed. "I am not a lawyer," Brennan kept saying. People kept congratulating him for the blunt, straight answers he was giving. It was like watching an exotic tribe worship in its native tongue. This was not America as it would recognize itself. This was the worship of a different god."

And not, needless to add, a god of the bright shallows and clear skies, but a deity of an entirely different, and frightening, ocean.

Disappearing up our own ass

There are, seriously, there are times when I fucking despair for my country:

"We have so contorted ourselves that earlier this month a military judge ruled that the man whose real-life torture is described in the movie, Mohammed's nephew Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, will not be allowed to describe his torture at trial. The methods used to extract information from captives is a state secret, the judge said, as are the victim's recollections of it."

So not only are these despicable acts so critical to the very survival of our Republic that they may not be revealed to We, the People, the putative sovereigns of that Republic but the very memory of being tortured by those acts is no longer the property of the victim of our crimes but of the state, our state, which tortured him.

I cannot fathom how to describe the Kafka-like quality of this nonsense. But if there is any sort of justice other than vae victus we will surely see this come back upon us in ways that we cannot but rue.

Not Very Pret-y

Let me qualify this several ways; first, I am not a huge Tom Ricks fan - I find that his default setting is way too often "stenographer for guys with cool guns" - and, second, that Ricks himself states in the article that his information appears preliminary and fragmentary.

That said, back in November Ricks posted this article to his blog, his lead being that the 2nd Cavalry Regiment (Stryker) was reamed in an Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) collection report for its performance at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center (JMRC) in October 2012.

I am also not familiar with JMRC, but I am guessing from both it's designation as a Readiness Center, and the exercise that the 2CR participated in, that it is the USAEUR equivalent of the National Training Center (NTC), where maneuver units are evaluated for their ability to perform their core tasks to Army standard.

The original CALL document is worth a glimpse for the unsurprising conclusion that 2CR's conventional warfighting skills have...shall we say, slipped a trifle in the past decade they've spent chasing raggedy-assed muj around the less-paved parts of southwest Asia?

What is most dispiriting to me as a sergeant are some of the first observations that CALL team made of the general-issue 2CR joes and their buck sergeants. This wasn't some sort of minor slippage of high-speed mad supertrooper skilz we're talking about here. Some of total fails on the 10- and 20- level tasks the evaluators dinged 2CR elements for included:

- Priorities of work for occupying a position are not established or adhered to.
- Sleeping areas established prior to preparation of fighting positions.
- Vehicles, fighting positions, CP’s, and tents not camouflaged.
- Field sanitation standards not enforced, Soldiers defecating randomly on top of the ground in unit positions.

- Range cards not prepared or inaccurate.
- Lack of uniform and personal hygiene standards.
- A lack of small unit leadership and on the spot corrections.

Read the CALL document; trust me, things get worse at the higher levels. It sounds like resupply, troop discipline, planning and training, medevac, commo, and TOC operations were fucked up like a football bat. These guys sound completely ate up, and if you read the whole thing it sounds like the 2ACR is a really effed-up unit.

But what it's NOT?

What if the problem with the higher-level tasks isn't the unit but, rather, what it's been training to do and doing for the past decade.

Here's the commander of the JMRC as quoted by Ricks:

"...the actions reflective of Soldiers who have operated in a COIN only environment over the past several years, and a training environment designed to challenge leaders at multiple levels."

Emphasis mine.

Hmmm.

OK. I'm willing to cut these guys some slack on the higher-level tasks. I can well understand that going from being coiffed and blow-dried in a FOB for a 12-month rotation in Afghanistan to having to figure out how to work a jump TOC, and retrans sites, and ambulance transfer points doesn't happen overnight.

But, c'mon; stuff like priorities of work? Camo? Laying out the fartsacks before digging ranger graves? Casually shitting all over your positions like a herd of cows?

That ain't rocket science. That's a bunch of goddamn sergeants not doing their fucking jobs.

You've all heard me lament the damage done to my branch, the Field Artillery, by these pestiferous little wars we've been enjoying over the past ten years. Now this little bit of bad news makes me wonder - what ELSE the Army has been doing to itself while the Nation has been out Shopping for Victory and Supporting the Troops?

Shitting at random inside your own positions, boys?

Really?

For This Relief

I would like to claim that I have not been posting much because it's been too fucking hot to sit over a whirring hard-disk fan.

Or because I've been up before dawn and often home after dark.

I've had a month of those, yes.

But that isn't why I haven't been posting.



It's because every so often I look outside my little world; my home, my work, my immediate friends and family, and see what my country has become and I'm just dog-sick and tired.

I just don't have anything decent to say, I don't have anything at all to say other than a long string of expletives, and even though I'm proud of my gift for bad language I'm not sure you really come here for that.

For example, just this week I happened across a couple of news items - one local, the other national - that made me want to throw something heavy and breakable, like a coffee cup, against the wall.

One was the ridiculous tizzy over the whole "legitimate rape" statement of the GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri.

And my furor was probably not about what you'd think.

Of COURSE Todd Akin doesn't really think that there's a magical "off" switch in your uterus that locks out rapist sperm but lets in sweet-lovin'-baby-makin'-daddy sperm.

Todd Akin thinks that every damn sperm is sacred.

Which makes him no different that forty zillion other Republican douchenozzles that have nothing better to do than blabber on to everyone within earshot about what happens north of women's labia minora as if it's their own personal safety deposit box and Christmas present.

Todd Akin is a Christopathic bag of wind.

That's NOT the problem.

No. The problem is - what the FUCK are we doing talking about rape and pregnancy in the first place?

Or abortion?

Or anything ELSE having to do with "who puts what where" during an election for the U.S. Senate?

Is rape, pregnancy, or abortion now a Federal crime?

Did someone make Senators obstetrician/gynecologists by fiat when I wasn't looking?

Is the World's Supposedly Greatest Deliberative Body now also running a 24-hour-rape-crisis-hotline-and-VD-clinic?

I don't think so.

So...what in the thrice-damned name of Sumner Brooks are we talking about this crap for?

Why would any sane American, let alone a sane American who aspired to membership in the nation's senior legislative body, want to have anyfuckingthing to do with legislating what happens inside a woman's womb?

Are we fucking mad?

Until fetal viability what happens there, frankly, in my opinion, is between the woman and her conscience. Or the woman and her partner. Or her family. Or whoever else she chooses to involve.

The rest of us - as people, as her neighbors, as her fellow citizens, can drink a nice hot cup of shut the fuck up and let her get on with what she needs to do. If she's a competent adult, that's both her privilege and her right.

But...this isn't about private citizenry.

This is about a goddamn election for the U.S. Senate, at a time when that body is confronted with a five-year Depression, a runaway financial industry, rising long-term joblessness, a declining manufacturing base, multiple undeclared foreign wars, secret prisons, who-the-hell-knows-what-covert-nonsense-all-over-the-globe, along with a grab-bag of other assorted idiocies like corkscrewing over "Second Amendment Rights", immigration nuts, Kenyan socialism, death panels, Medicare-vouchers, deficit tomfoolery, and the popularity of pseudo-science or flat-out weapons-grade moron-"science" like anti-vaccination hysteria and young-Earth creationism.

Jesus fucking wept, people! And you have time to natter on about "legitimate rape" and this idiot's ideas of magical contraception?

And - worse - you STILL want to vote for this fucking idiot?

So that was the national story.




And then there was the local story: "...the 34th local family to have a son die in Afghanistan since the war began."

I could barely hold onto the World's Worst Newspaper as I read this, a public keening for the young trooper from Tigard, Oregon, killed on some sort of what-the-fuck mission ("a 48-hour mission to secure an observation post") in Charkh, a part of Logar Province that is described in its Wiki entry as the "Bab al-Jihad" or "Gates of Holy War" dfor the ferocity of the region's religious nuts during the Soviet years.

And let me note that - as a purely personal military observation - what the fuck does "securing an observation post" mean?

An OP is an outpost for a larger defensive position; it helps provide security for that position and, as such, is not generally intended to be secure, defensible or defended, much less fought to establish. If you're fighting to set out a fucking OP, what the hell does that tell you about the security of your main perimeter?

It surprises me not a bit that later in the article the author admits that "...Andrew's unit was pulled off that hill in Charkh after his death because it was deemed too risky for anyone to be there."

Damn.

But what really got to me was the writer's conclusion:

"I stood in his family's home watching as they wrestled with their son's brave desire to serve his country and their gut-twisting grief. I kept coming back to that flight before boot camp. I hope the passenger sitting beside Andrew in Row 17 turned and thanked him.

I hope someone thanked him for us all."

And it made me want to vomit bile and flame.

It made me want to find my oldest pair of field boots (the ones with all the black worn off to the point where they look almost like the ones the young men like this young man wear walking the barbarous land down to their graves) and find this writer who thinks that the casually meaningless thanks of strangers will return the heart ripped out by grief to the chests of the fathers and mothers, the sisters, and the lovers, and stomp the living shit out of him so he can feel a tiny particle of the pain of those thus bereft by another mite added to the heap of death that is central Asia.

I don't hope someone had thanked this poor bastard.

I wish the hell that someone had grabbed him by the arm and pulled him off of that damn 80-pax on the way down to the departure airfield.

I wish like a sunofabitch that all the precious political savants and military geniuses that thought that it was a good idea to send young men from the suburbs of Portland to fight a goddamn war of imperial pacification in one of the most turbulent and unruly parts of the world were airdropped naked into the hills of Logar Province with a charred Koran shackled around their necks and the words "Fuck You Allah!" pained in Pashto on their asses.

I wish that there was some way to take the round that tore apart the universe that lived inside this young guy's skull and hammer it point-first, misshapen and clotted with the blood and brains of his last moments of life, into the goddamn forehead of every parlor patriot and bumper-sticker Rambo and gung-ho Congresscritter that every talked about "sacrifice" and "heroism".

I wish young Andy was home right now in Tigard, fooling his young life away texting bullshit to his bros, fishing all day, and screwing his pretty fiancee' giddy all night.

I wish a lot of things. I wish my country was smarter, braver, more decent, less greedy and stupid. I wish that I didn't look ten and twenty years into the future and see a harder, meaner, bleaker, stupider United States and feel comforted by the fact that I will likely be too dead to loathe it.

But right now I really wish that I didn't have to think about those things.

So for the next three days I am going away with my family. To a little cottage in an old coastal fort, whose warring days are long past. We will listen to the wind in the shore pines, and the sound of the seabirds crying, and the boom and rush of the surf at night. We will play silly games, and comb the beach for shells.

My daughter is obsessed with going to "Agate Beach", and so - since there are no agates on the beaches of southwestern Washington - I have slunk away to the rock shop and purchased a small bag of "genuine Oregon beach agates" to salt the sands for her to find some treasures.

I will read, and sleep, and laze about. I will make love to my bride, and cook and eat whatever I please and not worry about my diet. I will, I hope, find a still, silent place within to armor myself against my next rude encounter with the rough beastliness of my nation and the large number of its people who seem to want to make it a place I would not choose to inhabit were it my choice to make.

And for this relief, much thanks, for it is bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Any man's death may diminish me but I'm prepared to accept that there are cases which may be an exception to that rule.

I find a delicious irony in that yesterday two gravely ill patients finally died: Chris Hitchins and, officially, the U.S. "Operation Iraqi Freedom".

Hitchens never wavered from his love for the Third Gulf War, and, in retrospect, he might have done better to have gone to fight and sought a more merciful death there, stopping his ears before the inevitably dirty and sordid little finale to this ridiculous mess of hubris, treachery, lies, foolishness, and error made something tawdry and mocking of his ferocity in fighting the "war" from behind his keyboard.

I wonder (because I can't and won't ever know how ill he was at the end)...did the news of the official ignominious retreat from the Bush Salient contribute to ol' Hitch's willingness to depart this Vale?

Because if so he might well be included in the wretched toll this reverse-Machiavellian nonsense exacted from the West.

And as for OIF, well, that sucker was shot in the head eight years ago, when a clown-car full of rage-drunk idiots and cynical thieves tried to sneak into a foreign land and steal it on the cheap, justifying their theft with lies and evasions, muffing the thievery with ignorance and arrogance, and then taking years and years to accept that they couldn't change thousands of years of human history and hundreds of years of poverty, misgovernment, sectarian hatred, and Ottoman incompetence by their pure will alone. The entire mess was doomed from the start, it just took eight years for the fantasists in D.C. to recognize it was walking dead, and the only beneficiaries of its zombie progress since then have been the various outfits that have made millions looting the Occupation and the Malikist strain of Iraqi Shia who now stand to consolidate their kleptocracy with the help of the pals to the northeast.

It's not "over" for the ordinary Iraqi, mind you. The mess that Dubya and Dick created when they knocked over the Baathist toybox in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates won't be "over" for years, or decades. The social, economic, and political disaster that the idiots who truly believed that they "made their own reality" will haunt the poor bastards that live in that haunted land for generations.

What a congeries; Saddam, Dubya, Darth Cheney, Hitchins...can you imagine a more seedy and disparate group when they foregather in Hell twenty years from now?

Saddam peering at the others with his shifty, bluffing eyes hard in his dough-face, looking, as always, for the openings of fear or avarice that bullies always recognize, even after years of devilish torment still the Tikriti hardman.

Cheney snarling and defiant, knowing that he's still the smartest guy in the room, even in Eblis.

Dubya, still his patrician bobo, with that look of earnest and clueless vacancy still on his mug, at the same time gormless and venal - he can't understand why a Good Christian Man like him should be here with the Devil getting red-hot pokers shoved up his jacksie three times a day.

And Hitchins, drink in hand, fleering and mocking the other three idiots while, perhaps, just perhaps, recognizing the same hint of bully and grifter in himself; for all his faults he was a perceptive man. He may well have the worst of it; lacking the supreme egotism of the dictator, the dupe, and the schemer beside him he may just have a dark glimmering of the disaster they helped create between them and, worse, feel some sort of dim shame at the results.

Because all around them, the shades; the children ripped to pieces in a Ramadi street, the women buried in rubble of a Fallujah home, the trooper missing a leg that the landmine tore from his body, the widow dead of suicidal despair, the orphan raped and murdered by his captor, the hopeless, the fool, the martyr, the criminal, the lost, and the devoured.

And for what?

This fucking disaster is now just another day for most of the rest of the world, and I have little hope that it will be long remembered or regarded in my own country, either. Saddam and Hitch are beyond penalty, and neither Dubya nor Dick will ever pay the price they should. It's just done and dusted.

So all I can hope for is that somehow my vision might be accomplished; that in some future afterlife these dead men find a little of the misery and despair of the ghosts their evil created. That it penetrates the group around that table there in Hades, and that the sorry bastards enjoy a long, bitter draught of it before their tormentors herd them back to the Fires that they so deeply deserve.

Infamy II: Electric Boogaloo

Apropos of the last post, here's a nice article in Naval History Magazine about the problem that governments and militaries have, not just in assessing threat capabilities, but in assessing their own.

As Parshall and Wenger (2011) point out;

"In the case of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Navy had no real inkling of Japanese carrier warfare capabilities and therefore could not accurately assess likely operational targets. Not only that, but Japan’s carrier force—known as Kido Butai—was evolving so quickly on the eve of the Pacific war that almost no naval intelligence organ would have been able to track, internalize, and gauge those capabilities."

Even the Japanese Navy wasn't really able to understand their own strength.The article correctly notes that

"Indeed, the Japanese themselves did not seem to understand clearly the nature of the weapon they had created, or how best to wield it. Within six months of the opening of the war, poor strategy on the Imperial Japanese Navy’s part would end up committing Kido Butai’s component carrier divisions piecemeal, first at the Battle of Coral Sea and then at the Battle of Midway. During the latter, Kido Butai was decisively defeated—with four of its carriers sunk. Japan’s overwhelming early war numerical advantage was thus erased. Shortly thereafter, America’s superiority in production began asserting itself."

My friend seydlitz likes to talk about how the lack of strategic vision in the 2011 U.S. has contributed decisively to our frittering away our blood and treasure pursuing impossibilities in Central Asia. But I think one of the important lessons of Pearl Harbor, as well-discussed in Parshall and Wenger (2011), is how extraordinarily difficult trying to understand even one's own military and geopolitical strengths and weaknesses is.

How much more so trying to integrate all that into an overall assessment of potential threat capabilities, friendly political and military capacity, national interests, and geopolitical variables.Especially in a domestic U.S. political climate of increasing polarization and magical thinking.

Not saying that this shouldn't happen, or can't happen. But just pointing out that all our historical examples show how extraordinarily difficult it is.

...but for Wales..?

It's early in the pre-dawn. Or late in the night, I'm not sure, but I'm up to go to work early. I checked the weather to see how fucking cold it is (it's fucking cold!) and made the mistake of checking in to a couple of blogs only to find this.

I'd seen this bill mentioned over at my pal Labry's place - she was spitting fire about it, good woman that she is - and it occurred to me that what I feel is just a sort of tired, sad, inevitability.

How many times in history have we watched this play out?

The frightful, desperate "enemy" that must be "defeated" at any, and ALL costs. The populace tittilated and terrified by tales of that enemy's desperate frightfulness. The group (or groups) that insist that "the old rules don't apply". The rush to "do something" that results in granting power upon power without a moment''s reflection of whether that power can ever be taken away.

I know I use this quote a lot, and, yes, I understand the irony of making that rigid old tartar Tom More into a petty saint of restraint and good government (the man who delighted in the aroma of crackling heretic, honestly...) but the words spoken here are NOT the words of Thomas More but of Robert Bolt, his playwright:

ROPER Then you set man's law above God's!

MORE No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact-I'm not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can't navigate. I'm no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I'm a forester. I doubt if there's a man alive who could follow me there, thank God . . .

(He says this last to himself)

ALICE (Exasperated, pointing after RICH) While you talk, he's gone!

MORE And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

ROPER So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on ROPER) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast-man's laws, not God's-and if you cut them down-and you're just the man to do it-d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

And yet we are so fucking terrified of a bunch of raggedy ass Allah-pesterers that we won't give THEM the benefit of law for OUR safety's sake.

I'm so tired. Just tired.

And I haven't really even been all het up about this nonsensical "War on Terror" and the way it's got us hitting ourselves on the head, the way my pals Jim and Lisa have, say, over at Ranger Against War, ringing the changes of our eagerness to put down our legal trousers and hand the rod to our "leaders" and policemen and soldiers like a firebell in the night.

Or the way Greenwald has.

Or the way a hundred better writers, better bloggers, better citizens that I am have decried this silliness, this mouse blown up by shadows and smoke to the size of an elephant.

Because, really, I mean, people?

The fucking "War on Terror"? How stupid are we, collectively, to buy into this? We're supposed to be the adults here, the "We, the People" that those guys in the wigs supposedly put in charge to sort things out. We're supposed to remember things like that in wars, or lovemaking, capabilities count, not intentions. We're supposed to be able to see that these ridiculous villains are no more capable of actually "warring" on us any more than a sneak thief can "war" on your television set, or a Newberg high school freshman of making love to Angelina Jolie.

And that for all that he may masturbate frantically over her picture and describe the business as a "love affair" that it is not, and will never, be in HER best interests to describe it as such or act as if it were in fact.

And that a pack of reasonable adults should be able to sort this out about this idiotic "War" on some-forms-of-terror-perpitrated-by-some-groups-we-don't-like-but-not-others-that-we-sorta-do before their coffee get cold.

But we don't, we aren't, and we haven't.

And what the fuck more can I do?

I elected the goddam Democrat three years ago, worked for all my local sane guys, people like my Senator Merkeley, wrote letters to the paper, talked to anyone who would listen...

...and for what?

We're stuck right where we were about five years ago. A third of the U.S. public recognizes the insanity of this idiot's tale. But - and despite that more than three-quarters of the same public is more than ready to end the misadventures that the active pursuit of the "war" brought in train - the Third Gulf War and the God-Knows-How-Manyth-Afghan-War - the other third is still all about killin' us some ragheads.

And the final third is just too fucking stupid, lazy, poorly-informed...or something. To care.

So...what the hell will it take to make the point to the ignorant third and the radical-conservative-wingnut third that Sun Tzu sussed out, like, two thousand years ago - that fighting long wars is NEVER good for the combatant...even if it "wins"? That war makes people and nations do incredibly stupid things to themselves because those things seem "right" at the time?

I have no idea.

But just thinking about makes me tired.

I guess I always thought that if my country was to go to hell it'd be in some dramatic fashion. We'd hand ourselves over to the devils of authority and oligarchy in the midst of some titanic struggle with the Great Foe; the Soviet Union bristling with nukes or the Chinese hordes of Asia. We'd go down in a monumental crash of great rhetoric and epic protests, with the last defenders of the old outmoded liberties herded into the cattle trucks for the journey to the Utah camps. I never pictured my countrymen lying about on our dead asses while we drift along in a state of perpetual "war" with a bunch of sorry ass Islamic fantasists...I mean, can you THINK of a stupider way to give away the gift?

Bolt again:

MORE I have one question to ask the witness. (RICH stops) That's a chain of office you are wearing. (Reluctantly RICH faces him) May I see it? (NORFOLK motions him to approach. MORE examines the medallion) The red dragon. (To CROMWELL) What's this?

CROMWELL Sir Richard is appointed Attorney-General for Wales.

MORE (Looking into RICH'S face, with pain and amusement) For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for Wales..!