Sic Semper Tyrannis

National Journal Blog on the Elephant Walk

Col. W. Patrick Lang Responds to What Should Be the Key Issues in GOP Debate on Foreign Policy??.

This blog comment may or may not be recognized as a paraphrase of something or other from "Tristram Shandy" but alas I grow weary of the ponderous solemnity of the foreign affairs clique.

One of my colleagues sought a couple of weeks back to demonstrate the power of his students on the "I love You" meter.  Let us now show the heathen the power of SST in modern media.  pl 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristram_Shandy

 

 

Sarko says Bibi is "a liar."

""I cannot bear Netanyahu, he's a liar," the French president was heard to say. 

In response, according to the account by Arret Sur Images, Mr. Obama sympathizes with Sarkozy's frustration, saying, "you're fed up, but I have to deal with him every day.""  CBS News

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Pardon, mais est-qu'il y a quelqu'un qui croyait que Bibi n'est pas un menteur?

You can work that out.

Of course he is a liar.  He thinks it a great honor to lie for his cause and a great amusement to deceive the goyim by screwing them using their own guilty consciences and willingness to be screwed as tools.

More power to him!  Let the professionally gullible be lied to and screwed.  They deserve it.  pl

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-57320340-503543/sarkozy-to-obama-im-fed-up-with-netanyahu/

Puncturing the Counterinsurgency Myth: An Interesting Essay

Adam L. Silverman, PhD*

I just wanted to take a quick moment and direct everyone to an interesting and thoughtful new essay that the Strategic Studies Institute (full disclosure: SSI is part of the US Army War College, as one of our research institutes and centers, and is housed here at Carlisle Barracks, I do not, however, know the author of this piece) has just published.  It takes on what the author describes as the myths of counterinsurgency, especially those supposed lessons from the British approach.  The monograph, entitled Puncturing the Counterinsurgency Myth: Britain and Irregular Warfare in the Past, Present, and Future is by Dr. Andrew Mumford.  Click over and give it a look - its a free download in pdf format.  I think our SST community will find it of interest.

*Adam L. Silverman is the Culture and Foreign Language Advisor at the US Army War College.  The views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Army War College and/or the US Army.

"Flags of our Fathers" a review by Alan Farrell

At risk of overloading the circuit and in view of looming Veterans' Day (that apostrophe variously disposed), probably should add this review to polish off (in the various senses that expression) the Asia/Pacific/World War theme:

Flags of Our Fathers. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Produced—it’s worth noting—by Steven Spielberg, who’s appointed himself Custodian of World War II (and Moral Tutor to the Planet: Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Schindler) and written by William Broyles (go-to guy for Rhodes Scholar, former Marine cachet on this kinda thing: to his credit and to our relief, he does not put words—read: hamfisted Hollywood kerygma—on the lips of his dying Marines, a small dignity but significant). Starring Ryan Philippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, Barry Pepper.

Two heraldic American icons: the flag on Iwo Jima and the crag on Clint Eastwood. This flick is like Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ: wouldn’t have to be much of a movie for its sacral nature to override cavilling objections of pusillanimous critics. It’s more a visualization than a movie, though, but workmanlike and worth the watch …one time, taken the above caveat (Latin for “No, squirrel, watching Platoon is not the same as being in Vietnam, Republic of”).

"Letters from Iwo Jima" a review by Alan Farrell

Pursuant my Asian motif, third film about unpleasantness in the Far East (oh, and the war, too...):

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Starring Ken Watanabe… yeah, and then? Go ahead: name two Japanese movie actors. That’s what I thought (I was gonna say Omar Sharif and Chow Yun Fat, but I think they’re Chinese… or worse).

Clint got away with this because he’s Clint. Expiating the Dirty Harry pentalogy (which is, like, five pictures of the same thing… only different), he’s definitively migrated to the (Two) Third(s) World; where once he played the quintessential dumb, violent, but ultimately decent gringo, now he flays him. Somewhere in the evolution, though, he did pick up some notions of technique if not of narrative. This picture isn’t a bad war movie. Nor unworthy spectacle. It has a beginning, a middle, an end; a couple of followable characters; a ticket to sell. It’s that ticket, though, a feller may find hard to swallow (to mix metaphors).

"Page Eight,' a review by Pat Lang

A splendid film.  My one criticism is that humans cannot speak with all small talk edited from their discourse.  pl

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Eight

 

Several Points

I have made a number of arguments and observations over the years and months that it seems I must repeat: 

-  Israel is not necessarily a "rational actor."  Fear drives them and they may well do something foolish and wildly destructive to all including themselves.

- Using non-nuclear munitions Israel is incapable of inflicting anything like conclusive damage on the Iranian nuclear program, whether or not that program is specifically and purposively intended to produce deliverable nuclear weapons.

- In that knowledge Israel and its 5th Column all over the world are engaged in "perception management" designed to bring the US into war with Iran.  Thus far they have not succeeded in spite of their influence in the US Congress.

- If Israeli attacks Iran unilaterally that will constitute a decisive failure of the NPT, not so much on the side of the putative proliferator, but on the side of the Israelis.  If that occurs than non-proliferation will have to be enforced by sheer force of arms.  If not by the US, then, by whom?

- Biological weapons are more a nightmare than a reality.  Even in an encysted state, the bugs are unreliable and are likely to die rather than to cause a pandemic.  In the case of the use of micro-organisms against a modern state that has well organized public health and emergency services, the probablility of causing existential damage is very small.  The famous anthax spores incident of '03 is a good example.  It was a flop.

- Toxin weapons derived from biologicals are really more serious in the case of an attack against a water supply, but here again, the volumes necessary to kill off the population of a city are prohibitive.  Death of a lot of people?  Yes, but real strategic destruction of the kind that conventional weapons deliver?  No.

- People are far too fearful about these things and self limiting with regard to our daily lives and liberties.  We are all going to die.  I know that is not a popular thought in Califirnia but it is the truth.  Enjoy life.  Try to enjoy life.

- Americans!  Don't let anyone drag us into war.  If you are going to wage war, do it for your own good reasons.  pl

Wars and Rumors of Wars by Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars 

I just received the following this morning from a former senior US intelligence source. 

US officials are concerned that Israel is close to reaching an Iranian attack decision but a senior Defense Department official is worried that The Israelis may not warn the Americans before taking military action against Iran's nuclear facilities. US officials thought they would receive warning from Israel if it did take military action against Iran, which is the belief of the political side of the Obama Administration, but some military think that assurance is now not the case. In his recent visit to Israel, American Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta did not get a clear commitment from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak that Israel would not take action against Iranian nuclear facilities without coordinating any such operation with the United States.

Fires on the Plains - a review by Alan Farrell

Directed by Kon Ichikawa (variously pronounced). Starring… yeah, right, like you’d know.

This is an old flick (1959 or so) but just now out on video and a worthy watch (to borrow the current usage by which a book is a good “read”). It’s made by the same guy who did The Burmese Harp (which see, by the bye), about a Japanese infantryman shuffling through, well… Burma (which is now Kampuchea or Burkina Faso or Botswana, depending on what you can’t pronounce, at any rate the [Two] Third[s] World cesspool currently butchering its mountain tribes… Oh. Oh. They all are? Well…) disguised as a bonze (which is, like, a priest except not) and registering for us the face of war and desolation. Message (in case you miss it, you dummy): “War is bad” …so bad, in fact, that it doesn’t matter who starts one or why or how it’s executed or toward what end or against whom on account of there’s no Right or Wrong and the Japanese soldier with the baby skewered on his bayonet in the ruins of Nanking and the Marine sharing his K’s with the little girl on Saipan rate the same in the Grand Scheme of Things. Hug me. Write that down, will you? ‘Cause I’m getting the flock tired of having it poked up my nose in war flicks and maybe we can turn some movies where the guys who do not bayonet babies wind up better than the guys who do. A thought. Harp has long been a staple of movie festivals and, like, sensitive war-is-bad art film groupies; Fires is less well known. Like Letters from Iwo Jima, it’s apparently based on first-hand accounts and, like Letters, owes its scenario to a fee-male scriptwriter: a woman’s view of what a man sees, for what that’s worth.

City of Life and Death - a review by Alan Farrell

Directed by: Le Chuan (evidently written by him, too). Starring: Yeah, right… like you ever heard of two Chinese actors. Well, okay, Jackie Chan (think that’s the other China). Oh, and Chow Yun Fat… and Jet Li …none of whom, turns out, could save Nanking.

The dark waters that separate Japan from mainland Asia have seen their share of malevolent passages from West to East (Kubla Khan), then again from East to West (Hideki Tojo)… and, know what? …if the Japanese do not watch out, next trip may be a return visit from West to East and won’t no Divine Wind intervene this time around. Payback is a bitc an annoying supposition. Anyhow. This film, retrieving the horrific events to surround the 1937 Japanese invasion of what we used to call Nanking (now for some reason—I darkly suspect the Yale Department of Asian Studies—and world without end called Nanjing or in the transliteration I’ve seen Nanjing! Nanjing!, more perhaps a wail of despair even at this remove than a constatation), manages somehow to subdue what might seem a comprehensible, a justifiable instinct to focus on atrocity (does that sufficiently but not obsessively) in favor of a depiction solely of… what? …a …a puzzlement, let’s say, at what could inspire inhumanity (and what inhumanity could inspire) on such a scale among human beings, an approach which has netted the film good reviews as film, not just indictment. In somber black and white (actually, it’s mostly gray, a wash of colorless tableaux appropriate to the benumbed stoicism of the Chinese victims of the Japanese investment—infestment might be the better word—of their city), City of Life and Death wants to know (viewers will decide the answer to this question) how the terror visited upon the city has touched the agents of that terror.

More Israeli "logrolling"

"The officials, citing secret intelligence provided over several years to the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the records reinforce concerns that Iran continued to conduct weapons-related research after 2003 — when, U.S. intelligence agencies believe, Iranian leaders halted such experiments in response to international and domestic pressures."  Joby Warrick

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The reference in red above is the only opinion or information in this article that refers to US intelligence positions.  IMO the rest of it is all Israeli opinion fed to the MSM and particularly to this reporter as part of their "perception management' effort in support of their effort to politically force the US to attack Iran in obedience to their own fears.

I think we Americans have reached a point in this political farce at which we should declare clear "red lines" to the Iranians, the Israelis and everyone else.

The rule should be that any country that in the future achieves deliverable nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them will have those weapons and facilities destroyed by the US. 

The caveat n this should be that this decision will be based on the conclusions of the US intelligence community, not a foreign service with its own axe to grind.  pl

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/iaea-says-foreign-expertise-has-brought-iran-to-threshold-of-nuclear-capability/2011/11/05/gIQAc6hjtM_story.html?hpid=z1

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15515091,00.html

On thanking soldiers...

"I remember the first time I was thanked by a stranger for my military service. It was February 2006, and I was on the way home for mid-tour leave with a planeload of other troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Our plane stopped in Bangor, Maine, like thousands of similar flights before and after ours. One by one, garbed in dusty camouflage, we walked into the terminal."  Philip Carter

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In the context of the way Americans treated soldiers of my generation, the "problem" of an excess of "thankingness"  is amusing in a sick, stupid way. 

Farther down the page in today's Post, a psychiatrist explains that soldiers want to tell their story to the people they meet.  I think that is profoundly true.  It is also true, I think, that civilians in general do not want to listen to soldiers.  To listen is too difficult for them.  To do so would require actually abandoning the selfish little parameters of their lives for a few minutes or hours.  That is beyond their level of interest.  It is so much easier to offer "the thanks of a grateful nation."

Pathetic.  pl

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-veterans-is-thank-you-for-your-service-enough/2011/11/03/gIQA67hZmM_story.html?hpid=z6

Libya and the Art of UW

Special Forces doctrine, organization and training has traditionally centered on UW and the mission "to develop, organize, equip, train, and direct non-US forces in the conduct of guerrilla warfare."  However, US foreign policy and our military operations have increasingly gravitated towards the other side of this COIN. The pun, though unintentional, describes the problem perfectly. In Viet Nam SF worked the UW mission with the Montagnards, Hmong and others while the Viet Cong conducted their own brand of UW. In Central and South America, SF more frequently worked with government military forces to combat local insurgencies. After 9/11, the focus became even more solidly on defeating insurgencies. The cult of COIN and the SOF operators reigned supreme.

With this year's Arab Spring and the near textbook example of a successful insurgency in Libya, I suggest that US foreign policy will be better served if it dispenses with its distrust of all insurgencies and releases its death grip on the status quo. As Thomas Jefferson advised us, a revolution now and then is a good thing. In this article I will point out a few salient points of current US doctrine on insurgencies and then examine the Libyan revolution through the lens of UW.

MG Fuller fired.

Fuller characterized Afghan leaders as erratic, ungrateful and isolated from reality. The interview quotes him as saying Afghan leaders don't fully recognize America's sacrifices on their country's behalf.

Referring to Karzai's recent assertion that Afghanistan would side with Pakistan if Pakistan got into a war with the U.S., Fuller was quoted as calling the comments "erratic," adding, "Why don't you just poke me in the eye with a needle! You've got to be kidding me . I'm sorry, we just gave you $11.6 billion and now you're telling me, I don't really care?"  Press

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How did this guy get to be a two star without learning to keep quiet?  He  must have been really pissed.  Some will say he didn't know any better because he isn't a ring knocker.  Nah.  The winners in the "mainstream" are all the same, basically careerist sycophants.  Before you say "sour grapes," remember that I was an SES-4.  Allen is a marine.  That must have made this a little easier. but not that much.

We need to "get out of this place, if it's the last thing we ever do."  pl

 

The Iran Plot fraud?

"The most suspicious aspect of the administration’s case, in fact, is the complete absence of any direct quote from Arbabsiar suggesting interest in, much less advocacy of, assassinating the Saudi ambassador or carrying out other attacks in a series of meetings with the DEA informant between June 23 and July 14. The deposition does not even indicate how many times the two actually met during those three weeks, suggesting that the number was substantial, and that the lack of primary evidence from those meetings is a sensitive issue. And although the FBI account specifies that the July 14 and 17 meetings were recorded “at the direction of law enforcement agents,” it is carefully ambiguous about whether or not the earlier meetings were recorded."  Gareth Porter

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IMO the real question here is the motivation of the Obama White House.  pl

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero110311

pl

 

 

Neocon angst over Iraq

Krauthammer today bemoans BO's "failure" to pressure  Maliki into granting American troops permanent legal extraterritoriality in Iraq.  He clearly believes that Iraq was willing and eager to be a satrapy of a growing American/Israeli imperium.  That imperium has always been the desired end state envisioned in neocon efforts over the last decade.  All their protestations concerning modernity, democracy, etc. are just chaff.  These lies are and have been distractions, dust thrown in the eyes of the gullible.

The Iraqi Shia Arabs have now asserted the ownership of the country that the US neocons bestowed on them.  Proof of that ownership has been delivered in the form of effective expulsion of US forces.  pl

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-lost-iraq/2011/11/03/gIQAUcUqjM_story.html

US to defund the UN

"But that's only the tip of the iceberg. The Palestinians could seek membership in more prominent international organizations, which could result in the United States defunding or even withdrawing from institutions such as the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The AP reported today that the Palestinian Authority was examining seeking membership in 16 more U.N. organizations"  FP

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(irony alert)  By God that'll show those Palestinian bullies.  They can't force the US to act even handedly.  "Fifty Four Forty or Fight!"  "Remember the Maine!" "Remember Fort Sumter!"  or something... 

Graham and McCain will save us from that Palesymp in the White House.  Michael Oren for president!  HE was born here.  pl

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/11/01/senators_predict_massive_us_withdrawal_from_international_organizations

Out of Town

2-5 November  pl

 

Tears of the Sun a review by Alan Farrell

Starring Bruce Willis, Monica Bellucci (spelt different and no relation), Malick Bowens.

Heart of Darkness again. Gringos fumbling around (Two) Third(s) World. Been there. Done that. In Dark of the Sun, Rod Taylor and Alain Delon (an actual French paratrooper, by the way) snatch Yvette Mimieux (variously pronounced) out from under the Mau-Maus. In The Wild Geese a paunchy Richard Burton and his burnout buddy Richard Harris (who recently burned out, more’s the pity) rescue a statesman from the Simbas. In Claude-Bertrand Audibert’s Charlie Bravo we even have a French commando team (and yeah, one of them is a chef) hustling a nurse out from captivity with the Viets. Now it’s Tears of the Sun (which I think is what the Aztecs—or the Incas, one of them—called gold, but, hey…) and Bruce Willis, bald and painted green (like you-know-which overweight icon from you-know-which Vietnam flick except mercifully he ain’t quoting Thomas Stearns Eliot and they appear to have left poor old Conrad to his rest this time), fetches up with the mission to spirit some whites out of Nigeria (still called Nigeria I think and not to be confused with Niger nor Congo still called Congo nor… ooopsy daisy: think that might be the last country still called what it used to be called) in the path of ferocious rebels as terror threatens to engulf the Gringos (and Gringas) of a jungle dispensary.