WTF??!!

Did he really say this?!?

"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

Fantastic?

Romantic???

I've always understood that part of Commander-in-Chief Codpiece's enthusiasm for war and killing had to do with the his lack of the most distant experience of it. But this...this...adolescent fantasyland he's describing, where the hard, grinding, thankless and brutal work of hunting some of the world's most vicious tribesmen for a chimera of "democracy" and "development" is transformed through some wierd conservative magic into romance and adventure? This, more than anything I've heard him say, exposes him as a hypocritical Blimp of the most revolting sort, a Vietnam draft dodger who now talks of "service" and Sacrifice" from his heavily guarded office, where he eagerly speeds glum heroes up the line to death.

If this is what he believes - and it does - we as citizens have no business trusting him being senior private in a two-man guard post at the far edge of the ass-end of an abandoned ASP, much less the CINC of the most powerful military in the world. If military life is his idea of romance and adventure I'm sure we should look further into why he missed out on all the fun back in the Sixties and Seventies...hmmm?

Or, better yet, Fred Kaplan has the right idea:

"He won't be employed in the White House for much longer. He is 62, too old, alas, to join the military. But a spot could probably be found for him on an A.I.D. mission, a Provisional Reconstruction Team, or, perhaps through his vice president, some contractor's expedition. He put our soldiers over there, and, as we all know, there aren't enough of them. If he pines for a taste, let him have one."

Men, muj and mountains

I mentioned the other day that I wanted to talk about the geopolitical prospects for our current wars in the Middle East. I do, but on reflection I wanted to concentrate on the lesser known of the two. We've talked a lot, here and all over, about Iraq. Afghanistan, when it's mentioned at all, is usually conceded to be the "better" of the two; many of my fellow liberals who will rain down curses on Dubya and his cabal of idiots for the Iraq misadventure will pull up short on the 'Stan. "Well...it really needed to be done...it was just that we lost our focus when that dumb bastard Cheney started pushing "Iraq, Iraq..."

You've probably heard something similar. It's become the CW of Afghanistan: the noble project that failed because Dougie Feith ("the stupidest fucking guy on the planet"), Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney's OSP ginned up a war based on nukes that weren't there.Well, I want to disagree.

Not that we should have hammered the guys who planned the attacks of 2001, or the Taliban state that harbored them. In fact, that sort of thing is practically tradition in Afghanistan - the British made punitive exeditions into Afghanistan the "most popular Central Asian outdoor sport of the Nineteenth Century" - and even the bombed and strafed Afghans seem to find them more a violent and nasty sort of diversion than "total war".

But spending years, lives and billions occupying and "building" a "democratic" Afghan government and the Afghan state?

This is foolishness.

What's more than foolish, this is a "foreign occupation" mission that probably has not been accomplished since the last Macedonian hoplite left in 323 BC and not well even then.

It boggles my mind that were are trying to "secure" and "democratize" the place. Do we think the locals will thank us? That with a few hundred years of occupation they will turn into Framingham, Mass., only with goats and Chitrali caps?

Everyone who talks about Afghanistan (except the wingnut Dick Cheney branch of the GOP, but they're still hoping that if we kill enough wogs one at a time that Usama & Co. will show up on the foredeck of the U.S.S. Missouri in morning coats and surrender - good luck with that one, Dick) pretty much accepts two broad facts-on-the-ground about it:

1. It's an unreconstructed tribal shithole where smuggling, skulduggery and intra- and intertribal warfare are pastime, hobby and career and have been since Philip of Macedon was a kid.

2. No military social or political force since Philip's time has had any significant, long-term effect on Fact #1.But the reactions to these facts seem to fall into two general types as well:

A. People - like me - who look at this stuff and say, sweet baby Jesus, trying to "establish government authority" or "keep these guys neutral" is gonna take forever and a day and is gonna last until the first GI turns his back, or the monthly bribe gets cut off by Congress to fund some fucking porkbarrel project in West Cornhole, Tenn. Why would we want to try and do what Alexander, the Mughals, Mongols and Soviets couldn't do back in the day when wholesale slaughter did nothing worse than get you on the cover of "Modern Genocide" magazine?

B. People like John McCain and Hillary Clinton (and so on...), who straightout admit all the above...but then end the sentence with "...so we'll just have to try harder/smarter/longer/more cunningly."

It's not that those of us in column A disagree with the folks in column B about how terrific this would be if we could do it, or the connection between the lawless shithole parts of the world and the hard men who emerge from them ready to do dirty deeds dirt cheap. It's just that we look at all the times that OTHER smart guys have said this - I'll bet that Lord Auckland and Bill Macnaghten thought they had it wired, too - and ended up in bits all over Kabul bazaar and wonder, OK, are we that much smarter, faster and stronger? Or have we just forgotten all the other nifty schemes that came before us.

If what we heard back was something truly inspired; some really innovative ideas of how to turn this clusterfuck into something else it'd be a worthwhile conversation. But instead we read about the boys from Battle Company and the supporters of their efforts describing the same process that took Elphinstone and Co. to their doom - except with tac air - and wonder...

...why?Any fool can invade - it takes a real fool to try and occupy incoherant, semivicious, impoverished Third World "countries" whose history, pastime and primary entertainment is either dictatorship or tribal warfare.

I have no doubt that most people in Afghanistan don't want to live under a repressive theocratic dictatorship, any more than I want to live in a Benedictine monastery. Not wanting to be a takifiri jihadi does NOT mean that they want to be an Enlightenment Western liberal OR an American ally, which seems to be the point of all this standing around playing whack-a-muj in Central Asia, any more than not wanting to pray at midnight makes me want to be a porn star.

I'm sure that the inhabitants of Central Asia want to be as modern and First World as they can be. What I'm also sure of is that they are unlikely to become intellectual heirs of Western Enlightenment irreligious political liberalism. Or fans of Israel. Or forget that Europeans (and now Americans) have tromped around their countries in seven league boots. The point of "nation-building" and "democratization" seems to be that if these people can just get the vote, Blu-Ray, Cosmo and Wal-Mart they will become free-trade globalists and stop attacking us.

Since our politial elite decided that the end of the Cold War meant that America's new calling was to bucket around solving the world's problems we've spent a great deal of cash and more than a couple of young lives fucking with places like Kosovo, Somalia, the 'Stan and Iraq. We seem to have managed to avoid the lessons of them all, which boil down to; no, they won't be grateful for your good intentions; yes, there will be some form of blowback eventually, and; yes, you can mortgage your treasury to the Chinese and get your young people killed and still come out with little or nothing twenty or thirty years down the road. The Talibs are in the mountains and our boy Karzai has the keys to the executive bathroom in Kabul. Time to give the logbook and lock key to the Humvee to the Afghan Army and return home...

...to try and develop our OWN country for a change.

Foxy Grandpa

This is for you, Carrie.
You see, when I was little - maybe first grade or so - my teacher caught me squinting to see the chalkboard. Since this would have been something like, oh, 1963, little kiddies were expected to actually see the chalkboard in order to learn stuff.

So she dimed me off to my mom, who dragged me in to the opthalmologist, who diagnosed me as mildly nearsighted and recommended glasses.

I wore the goddam things all through grade, middle and high school and into college. The top picture is my sophomore dorm floor buddies in 1977. The "Mack" cap belonged to the owner of the room and I disavow any responsibility for it. The horrible tinted lenses and goofy facial hair, alas, are all mine.

As I aquired a veneer of sophistication - what used to be known as a "university manner" - from maturity and exposure to those wiser than myself I got a little more picky about my glasses stye. The clipping is a publicity still from "Romeo & Juliet" my junior year. Note the better beard and the part-in-the-middle Seventies hair, what I would eventually come to designate a "reefer part" in the Army because of its purported association with smoking weed. Not that I would have known - I wasn't nearly cool enough in 1979 to have smoked weed...

I hated glasses. I truly did. I was forever losing or breaking them, cleaning them, buying and repairing them. They were annoying and expensive and ugly, and finally in the Army they became such a pain in the ass that I stopped wearing them.

And, guess what? Abso-fucking-lutely nothing happened. I shot expert with pistol and rifle, seldom ran into things, passed my drivers' license vision test without them.

For twenty years I lived happily without glasses.

Until...several years ago I noticed while reading that my right eye in particular had difficulty focusing. It seemed to have a blurry spot in the center; I had to shift the text around to get good definition. My vision in the right eye got noticibly worse over the next couple of years. Eventually, just on a whim, I stopped at the little magnifying glasses kiosk at Fred Meyer and tried on a pair.

They worked.

Well, damn.

So now I'm officially "Foxy Grandpa" when I put on the glasses. Mojo finds them endlessly amusing, Sheadon considers them a toy, and Missy enjoys seing how far she can bend them or twist them before they will break (NB - this is not very far).

Youth is a struggle for attention: old age a struggle for dignity. Not sure where on this scale these damn reading glasses fall, but I'm betting "attention" isn't it.

I'm touched

Some would say in more than just one way. But I deeply appreciate the props, y'all.

I still need to think about what this blog is all about, what I'm doing with it and where I want to go.
(Which always makes me think of my old boss, Dave Newton. He wanted a vision statement and, by God, didn't he get it, goofy "We love it!" crap and all (for the thousands of bucks he paid Bill Simonds' wife, the numbnuts...) I've always been sorry he didn't include my comment about the whole "let's craft our vision statement like a beautiful ship to sail our company away to our dreamlands of fun and profit" bullpuckey in it somewhere: "When you're pulling an oar on the slave deck it doesn't really matter whether you're rowing to Dakar or Disney World, now, does it?")

I write this thing because I enjoy it. I'm sure glad that there are some Blue Blazes out there that enjoy an occasional visit here with Team Banzai, though.

In that spirit, let me close with some words from the Perfect Master himself:

"You can check your anatomy all you want, and even though there may be normal variation, when it comes right down to it, this far inside the head it all looks the same. No, no, no, don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."

and...

"Hey, hey, hey. Don't be mean. We don't have to be mean because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are."

Word.

These are not good things: Iran and AFRICOM

The officer currently in charge of Central Command (the major military command - or MACOM - that oversees actions in South and Southwest Asia and the Middle East), Admiral William "Fox" Fallon announced that he will resign at the end of the month.

I can't do anything but add to what others have said about this. The CW around the Beltway was that Fallon was the principal grown-up trying to take Bamm-bamm Cheney's club away from him to keep him from pounding on the coffee table already overburdened with the brunch-litter-of-the-damned left behind by our apparently endless imperial doodlings in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Wednesday's topic will be just exactly what I see as the geopolitical possibilities of these farragoes. But for now, I direct your attention to one of the lesser known moronic ideas that this Administration has engendered: AFRICOM.Wonder why we're talking about "bomb-bomb-bomb(ing) Iran? Look no further than this assload of cluelessness.

What will this thing be doing? I get the sense that most of the political nabobs along the Potomac have little or no idea what would be in the U.S.'s best interests - and would be politically, economically and militarily do-able - in Africa.

I mean, yes, it'd be lovely if all the subSaharan "countries" were stable, prosperous liberal democracies. It'd be nice if I had a big brick house and a pony. I can't get what I want from where I am now and neither can we. Formulating an actual geopolitical plan would posit that we've done some actual thinking about 1) where these "countries" are and how they got there, 2) what would be the best outcome - and the most likely outcome - if we did X versus Y or Z, and 3) would the benefit of this action be worth the cost (compared to the worst outcome if we did nothing...or the next worst if we only did A and B).

Any conventional military adventures we get into in Africa, any military adventure we embark on with Iran, will be indivisibly tied to political and economic complications we have absolutely no fucking idea how to anticipate, plan for or, God help us, control. The lesson we should have learned in Afghanistan was, as Sun Tzu would have put it: "In failed state; kick ass then grab hat."

All the blood and treasure in North America cannot solve Africa's problems. Only Africans can do that. To help them we already have the expeditionary capacity. Putting a MACOM in Africa will simply whistle up a couple of thousand headquarters drones looking for missions. That we need like a hole in the head.

And...

Putting a loyal Bushie in charge at CENTCOM will simply whistle up another couple of thousand headquarters drones planning gee-whiz missions over Tehran. Think Tommy Franks and the glorious march to Baghdad - look at where that ended. The potential for blowback (remember blowback? The Afghans sure do...) is fucking nucular, as the Decider himself would say

Trust me: we need a war with Iran like we need another hole in the head. We need it like...like we need "AFRICOM". A war - and a headquarters - based on faith and hopes and blind wishful thinking, desperately in search of a purpose, like Amanda Feilding desperately drilling into her own head in hopes of finding something better than her own thoughts.
But in these sadly diminished days of our Republic we can't even do the bloody work ourselves. We seem to be content to hand the Black & Decker to the mad trepanners we have elected and close our eyes, hoping that some classic rock will be playing on the Sirius satellite radio to drown out the scream of the drilling inside our skulls.

Crossroads

I'm at a bit of a stand at the moment, and I'm not sure which way to go.

I started this blog back in August of 2006 as an outlet for my writing. I enjoy writing as much as I enjoy reading, which is to say as much as I enjoy, say, breathing, or arterial circulation, or the uninterrupted functioning of my blood-brain interface. And the blog has been good fun, for a long time, and has been both enjoyable and a good outlet for built-up literate pressure.

But now I'm not so sure.

For one thing, I read a lot of others' work and realize that, frankly, they're a lot better than I am at this blog thing. Mostly because many of the blogs I read specialize in being one "thing" - Phil Carter over at Intel Dump does the military, foreign affairs and politics. So does Jeff Huber, Jason Sigger and "Fabius"...hell, and that's just a random slash at my bookmarks. If you want the domestic insights of a Jane Austen-ish sort you can check in with Carrie or "Mrs. Vandertramp" or, if you were lucky enough, a couple of delightful essayists whose blogs are hidden behind the veil of privacy but whose sensibilities are worthy of publication (that's you, by the way, C1 and AM...).

And then there are people who are really professional grade, like Karen of "The Naked Ovary" - required reading while we were riding the CCAA bus to Nowhere back in 2007.

So here I am thinking: who the hell needs another goddam crappy little blog? Others do politics, military affairs and foreign policy better, others do domestic life, emotional "interiors", adoption and child-raising better. Unless you're interested in my life - and, outside of my family, why would you be, why bother?

Not sure what the answer is. But I'm not feeling as excited about the blog as I have been, and I'm not posting as much. So I think that the answer is trying to knock on my thick skull. I'll get back to you in a bit.

Speaking of "my life", we had a nice visit last week from Millicent and Nola (from Different Dirt)Talk about a gal who is working too hard to blog... We loved seeing them; Millie was her warm and clever self and Nola was full of business as always. I enjoy Millicent's dry wit - she's never so brilliant as right after you've missed it - and find myself laughing (or thinking, or just agreeing) half a beat behind her. I wish I had that quicksilver intelligence and the ability to deliver it so gracefully. As you can see, the Peeper captures Mom and Missy's enjoyment of our guests.But Millicent as also racked by a vicious cough, the remnants of the nasty cold we have all had since some time back in February. And she sounded very tired; working full time and caring for a active little girl is tearing at her foundations. I found myself nodding at that, too: it's the hardest job in the world, and the rewards, when they come, are emotional and not practical.

I don't want to make things sound dire. Millicent is strong, Daddy Floyd is there giving both gals lots of love and support and Nola is a loving little girl. But I think they're finding what we and every other parent finds out - that raising these little people calls for more courage, energy and effort that you ever imagined.One thing that strikes me every time I see them together is the differences between Missy and Nola. Nola is Earth; burly, strong, determined, stumping about in a concentrated fury of intent - the girl is a cute little tremor of energy. Missy is Air; slight, silent, observant and pliant, watching everything with her thumb in her mouth and the other arm twined around Mommy or Daddy. I think they could be good friends, and learn a lot from each other, if we could ever make the time to see our friends and their little girl more often...

But it was lovely to see the two of them - and another pair of friends that dropped in a day later Friday evening for limongello and cheesecake. So after all this frantic socializing the weekend we spent doing lots of...nothing.Yep. You see the evidence. Sleeping as late as possible; puttering about the house, laundry (how many times a day does this family change clothes, anyway..!?), jaunts to the pool and the "coffee store" (Starbucks). The small change of family life.The one nice thing is that Spring is arriving in the Northwest. The above is the view from the Barbur Boulevard viaduct last Thursday at work. Below is the red flowering currant (ribes sanguineum) that has suddenly come all over blooms in the sideyard.
And the picture at bottom is Sam Collinsen (Sang-ko-lin-sin), the cement garden god in the middle of the vinca.

He's a quiet little warrior, unlike his fierce Manchu namesake, but he seems happy enough to squat amid the blooming groundcover and enjoy the warm sunshine of the first tentative days of Spring.

You use your "Open Portal" spell and...

I have been meaning to post something about the passing of Bill Buckley and a reflection on his place in modern conservatism and conservatism in general when I came across the news today that Gary Gygax had died.And I got to thinking: who really had more impact on my life? I mean, sure, Buckley pretty much resurrected "conservatism" from it's post-Depression ash heap and set it on the path that ran through Goldwater and Reagan and finally to Coulter, Limbaugh, Dubya and Darth Cheney, but...

Did I spend hours of my youth and young adulthood painting miniatures of Whittaker Chambers and Ayn Rand? Creating tiny armies of free-market economists and think tank neoconservatives? Could I recite pages from "The Conscience of a Conservative" the way I knew my hit dice tables and my saving throws?

So here's a last roll of the dice to you, Gary. You were The Man when I was just a kid, and I learned a lot from you.

Okay, mostly that your Fifth Level character is wasting his time running from the Old Red Dragon. He's just gonna die crispy AND tired...
But it was a hell of a ride and we have you, as much as anyone, to thank.