At ease, cats. Back to grim politics.

By now you've probably all heard about the Antifa/New Black Panther riots savaging my city, and held in check only by the mad riot control skilz of Portland Police Bureau and their support echelons from the Federal Agencies That Shall Not Be Named. As you know, we white folks are huddled in our basements, eyes red from the tear gas smoke, dreading the knock that means the BLM Revolutionary Guard has arrived to deliver swift and final Social Justice.

It's true. It's all true, and I have pictures to prove it.

See? There he is! There's 's the black-clad Antifa terrorist, surveying the site of his next atrocity.

It's hell, I tell you, a dystopian hellscape, the American Carnage our President warned us about three years and more ago. We're all doomed.

Ooookay, now, let's quit kidding around and talk some simple facts.

No, there's no mad riots going on downtown. No, there's nothing that Trumpy and the Junior Freikorps need to "save" us from. He's full of shit, they're full of shit, and the Portland Police Bureau is, as usual, full of shit.

No, here's what's going on:

That's the "Wall of Moms" confronting our heroic Law Enforcement Heroes with...a lullaby.

So of course the fucking cops and feds shot them with tear gas and flashbangs.

Here's what you need to know about Portland cops; they're shit, and they've been shit for decades.

Triggerhappy? Check. Racist? Check. Brutal n' stupid? Check. Nazis? Ummm...yeah. That, too; a Portland copper who had a Hitler fetish back when he was a sergeant in the Nineties and Oughts? He made Captain by the mid-teens when his youthful Nazi...ummm..."indiscretions" were erased in 2014. He retired/ with a full pension and some sort of cop medal, presumably to go with his Iron Cross.

So people here in Portland are reeeeally sick and tired of these worthless coppers. We'd like them to be less stupid, brutal, racist, and generally worthless, but we'll settle for burning the fucking plague ship to the waterline, hull and sticks, so something more useful could be built in it's place.

That's why we're SO done with them.

I'm not sure what Trump and his cosplay Guardia Civil want, but my guess is just red meat for the base. He's completely screwed the COVID pooch, so he needs to distract the rubes from the fact their kids are wheezing and Gamma's dead...so, look! Antifa! Ooh! Bad! Scary! Evil!

On the other hand...there is a precedent for this sort of damn thing, paramilitaries doing the dirty work the caudillo can't trust the police or the Army to do for him. The brownshirts - and before them, the real freikorps, in Germany and the blackshirts in Italy. The "dignity battalions" in Panama. AAA in Argentina.

These feds don't have the sack to bring on the Ford Falcons. Yet.

But if you're a small-r republican, you should be alarmed and infuriated that your supposed republic is flirting with making it's very own little Falangist Civil Guard.

I sure as hell am.

But, sadly...I'm too old , too slow, and too liable to the plague to be out there beside the Moms. So you're not going to read a "Letter from Wapato Jail" from me anytime soon. I'll stay boring and safe in my little house in my little job doing my boring little things.

Just wishing the moms and them the best of luck. It's not that I don't WANT to be out there.

Because fuck the worthless goddamn Portland Police Bureau and all its works.

And - this is a larger political point worth making here - it's really time to break up the damn "Department of Homeland Security" (and as an aside I think we can all agree that "Heimatsicherheitsdienst" sounds better in the original German) and restore it's Frankenstein parts back to their original pieces; FEMA to, well, FEMA. The Coast Guard to Transportation. Customs back to Customs, The INS back to Justice (or, better yet, to Labor where it really belongs).

There's no real reason for this monster to exist other than the stupidity and panic that resulted from 9/11. In it's existing condition it is entirely too useful for some Mussolini wannabe like Trump to turn into his goon squad, and it's too sprawling to be useful for actual "security", as the recent goon squad adventures in my hometown show quite plainly.

So while I hunker down in North Portland, let's all see about defunding the damn Portland cop and dismembering the damn DHS.

Time and past time, I'd say...

Lying swine lying like a rug, or, The Moral of the "Pershing and the Moros" Story

"They were having terrorism problems, just like we do," Trump said, according to an account in the Washington Post. "And he caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem. Okay? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem."

Actually there is a problem, because the entire tale is a goddamn lie.

Apparently the "Moros" are the trouble children of the Philippines. They fought the Spanish, they fought the Americans, they fought the Japanese, they fought and are fighting the Philippine government. Fucking Moros fight; that's what they do.

I suspect that the lure of Islam for them isn't as much that it promises Paradise as much as it offers a form of religion much more enjoyable than the public piety of Christianity for a people less enamored of hypocrisy. Fight? Sure, where? Sign me up!

Let's not pretend to be innocents, or saints, or savages. This wasn't the Noble Moro against the Rapacious American Imperialists.

Yes, the U.S. had no fucking business being in the Philippines.

But the Moros were a damn hard lot, and the "Moro Rebellion" that set these hard guys against the U.S. Army was a fight that both sides were happy to have. The U.S. was turgid with imperial ambition, and the Muslim inhabitants of the southern portions of the Philippine archipelago, well...like I said; "Moros" in general liked to fight.

The peoples that The Donald lumped as "terrorists" and Filipinos termed "moors" are, in the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"...classified linguistically into 10 subgroups: the Maguindanao of North Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat, and Maguindanao provinces; the Maranao of Lanao del Norte and Lanao del Sur provinces; the Tausug, mostly of Jolo Island; the Samal, mostly in the Sulu Archipelago; the Bajau, mostly in the Sulu Archipelago; the Yakan of Zamboanga del Sur province; the Ilanon of southern Mindanao; the Sangir of southern Mindanao; the Melabugnan of southern Palawan; and the Jama Mapun of the Cagayan Islands."

These folks fought each other when they had nobody else to fight, but probably in the way of tribesmen everywhere ascribed to the "me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the stranger" school of politics.

They ran a thriving slave trade, did a little pirating when the spirit moved them, and were generally a pest to everyone who couldn't put a bullet- or sword-shaped hole in them.

It's not surprising that they fought against the U.S. forces under Pershing.

But here's the thing; the most distinctive characteristic of Pershing's strategy in hammering these tribes wasn't brutality and pig's blood. It was his craft and diplomacy.

This isn't to say that American officers didn't try that pig stuff; they did. One naval officer recalled that a GI trick for persuading the locals not to go on a theological killing spree (called a juramentado) was

"...the custom of wrapping the dead man in a pig's skin and stuffing his mouth with pork. As the pig was an unclean animal, this was considered unspeakable defilement."

Another gimmick was recounted in the 1938 book Jungle Patrol attributing to one COL Rodgers of the 6th US Cavalry:

"...a system of burying all dead juramentados in a common grave with the carcasses of slaughtered pigs. The Mohammedan religion forbids contact with pork; and this relatively simple device resulted in the withdrawal of juramentados to sections not containing a Rodgers."

However, all this pork didn't stop the Moros. They kept fighting then and are still fighting - albeit sporadically and ineffectually - today.

Pershing, on the other hand, took a longer view. Assuming that the United States would be the ruling power in the Philippines for generations he had little or no interest in starting American-Moro blood feuds with the locals. He took the time to learn the local language and reportedly did his best to puzzle out the local politics and leaders.

"Pershing’s strategy has often been described by historians as one of divide and conquer. But the Moros, by the very nature of their societal institutions, were already divided. Rather, Pershing focused on sorting out who were his friends, who were his enemies, and who were in between. He sensed that at some point (correctly) he would have to fight some of the most recalcitrant datus. Unlike Baldwin, he knew he could not fight everyone, and it would be most unwise to fight someone he did not have to and unnecessarily add more enemies as a result." (Fulton, 2007)

During Pershing's tenure as governor of Moro Province he sent U.S. troops to fight several times; against Tausug tribal forces at Bud Dajo in 1911 and, again against Tausug tribes at Bud Bagsak in 1913. Both times the Moro dead far outnumbered the American (and Moro Scout troops) losses.

Pershing found what every American satrap in Moroland found; that trying to civilize Moros with a Krag was just nuts to the Moros; they liked to fight - ummm...did I mention they liked to fight? - and they continued to fight long after Pershing and all his troops gave up and left. There was fighting and killing, a lot of killing, and ruin and hatred.

But pig blood and pig parts were nowhere to be found.

If Trump was anything but a great fool he would have learned from the tale of Pershing and the Moros what I learned in just a few hours of brief research of the story. That of all wars - which are all generally insensible, wasteful, and unprofitable - religious and racial wars are the least sensible, the most wasteful, and the least profitable. That talking fondly of imperial wars in Muslim lands is at best idiotic and at worst criminal, in that the resulting butchery is almost inevitably going to include horrific atrocities and the deaths of noncombatants.

That what the tale of Pershing and the Moros teaches us is that we do best for ourselves and for others when we tend to our troubles and leave the others to their own.

But Trump, and those who now roar for him, are indeed great fools and will not heed the lesson.

(Note: For those interesting in learning more about the Moro Rebellion, Moroland, and the history I've sketched out here the blog Moroland is a terrific resource and has both readable accounts of the events of the early 20th Century as we as a terrific library of pictures. Huge shoutout to Robert Fulton, the author and blog curator, for his good work...)

Sigh

So the Wikileaks people have done another infodump regarding the Seven Years' War in central Asia, a.k.a. the Third Gulf War (counting Iran-Iraq as one and 1991 as two) or, if you insist on the silly DoD "code name" (a "code" which would have a hard time fooling Shaggy and Scooby), Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As usual, there is no shocking revelation here. There is nothing we haven't heard of, seen, or suspected, since the days when the shock came with a side order of awe.What is just depressing to me as an old soldier, though, is the pure predictability of the information we're seeing in the sitreps and TOC logs the Wikileaks people have amassed.

1. Iran was heavily involved in messing with our operations in Iraq. I'm shocked, shocked! After the way the Chinese left us alone in Korea in the Fifties and the Chinese and Sovs stayed out of our hair in Vietnam in the Sixties and Seventies, who'd have thought it?No wonder the finest geostrategic minds within the Beltway were utterly blindsided by this!

2. The Iraqi "government" we sponsored - in a crude, post-Ottoman, ethnically-divided, bitterly impoverished, historically kleptocratic- and thuggish pseudostate, mind you - turned out to be as or nearly as brutal and arbitrary as Saddam's.Well, Damn.

Didn't see that one coming.

3. We killed more hapless civvies at places like checkpoints and from the air than we did the muj. I predicted this one from back in '03, knowing what I did about our Army's obsession with force protection. If you capped an Iraqi mama-san you risked at worst a slap on the pinkie. If you let a car-bomb do one of your roadblocks? Kiss that OER goodbye, sir. So we capped assloads of innocent people.

No, duh?

The cumulative thing that makes this frustrating is the same-same-ness of it all. Back in the Seventies Dan Ellsberg took a pretty huge personal risk to expose the mountain of lies that the Vietnam War was built over and the national response was a collective yawn.

Now we're reading - again - that this fucking Mess-o-potamia was built on lies and lies about lies.

Don't get me wrong here. My country has lied its way into war, lied about its conduct in war, time and again. No, the Mexicans didn't invade the Nueces Strip, the Spanish didn't sink the Maine, and the the Vietnamese didn't attack the C. Turner Joy, either. Yes, we bombed civilian targets in WW2, we burned out downtown Panama in 1989 and lied about it. Churchill, no stranger to the politics and strategems of war, said that in it truth needed a bodyguard of lies.

But, as these documents remind us - again - this damn war didn't just have a bodyguard of lies. It had a recon and security screen of lies - lies about smoking guns and mushroom clouds and model airplanes filled with death from above. It had a main line of resistance of lies, lies about flowers and candy, lies about easy peasy, lies about body counts, lies about Iraqi exiles and Iraqi politics, lies about reconstruction and "coalition" provisional authorities. It had reserves of lies, lies about Shiites and Sunnis, lies about weapons and where they went, lies about Al Qaeda and muj and Sadrists. It had a logistical and support base of lies, lies about no-bid contracts and mercenaries and political and diplomatic conditions. It had a no-bid contract of lies, an entire Third Shop of lies, a theatre-level of lies, an entire Base Section and CONUS-full of lies and spin and bullshit.

And all these lies, for what?

Yes, Saddam is gone. In 1918 many an Englishman or Frenchman would have told you that the defenstration of the Kaiser was the best thing that could happen to Germany and that they couldn't imagine anything worse, and many a Russian, a Pole, or a Ukranian would have told you that the fall of the Tsar was a victory for Everyman everywhere inside the old Russian Empire.

And within twenty yearstwo menwould make those wishful-thinking optimists long for the old autocrats.

We had an uneasy arrangement with Saddam for decades. It wasn't good, it sucked for the Iraqis, it was expensive and irritating and we wanted things to be better. So in a moment of hubris and willful ignorance we kicked it to splinters and had to lie our asses off to do it and what did we get in return?

I don't think we even know yet. I think we will have no idea what we will see there for a decade, or two, and whether it will make us long for Saddam's mere brutality as a zek perishing in Stalin's lead mines may have pined for the Tsar.But this leaked pile of crap reminds us that what we do know is that whatever rough beast is slouching towards Baghdad to be born was engendered and midwived by lies, fucking lies, piles and heaps and mountains of lies upon lies.

(cross-posted from MilPub)