re: "Punching Down"

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna (" At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war. ") provided examples of why free speech rights shouldn't be optional for governments to respect.

Money quote(s):

"Fear is in the air.

Fear of what Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff had to say about Islam prompted the Austrian authorities to prosecute her for “denigrating” the Religion of Peace."

There are crucial differences between the free speech rights of the Anglospheric tradition, enshrined in our Second Amendment, and those permitted under continental European constitutions. Shouting "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater is permitted, for instance, when the movie theater is actually on fire.

"Fearing the truths told by Geert Wilders, the Dutch government prosecuted the PVV leader, and when that failed, prosecuted him again.

In Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Australia, and Belgium, ordinary citizens and politicians alike have been harassed or prosecuted for speaking out against Islamization and mass immigration."

Some opinions are clearly too dangerous for citizens or even lawmakers to possess or express. Perhaps expressing the desire for Holland to remain a country inhabited by the Dutch is example of this.

"(W)hen the decent law-abiding people are thrust aside, driven into obscurity, and jailed, what sort of activists will remain?

The current system is nearing its endgame, and will not persist much longer. Who will take the reins of power when the dominant paradigm falls?"

Both Ralph Peters and Tom Kratman have explored this "what-if" and neither path is pretty.

"(B)y denying decent, honorable, law-abiding people the right to preserve themselves, their families, and their way of life — the Powers That Be have cleared the deck for the emergence of forces that are much darker, much more ruthless, and far beyond their ability to control.

Something wicked this way comes."

1/4

re: "Lt. Col. Ralph Peters Goes Off On Media And Government’s ‘Rush To Condemn Troops’ Over Photos"

Noah Rothman at MEDIAite provided great coverage of a Ralph Peters detonation.

Money quote(s):

"After White House condemnation of the L.A. Times for publishing photos of uniformed military posing with the bodies of suicide bombers, Fox News contributor and retired United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters described himself as “furious” at the L.A. Times and the civilian military leadership for their handling of the nascent scandal. Peters told Megyn Kelly this controversy was an example of the “moral cowardice of military leaders who never stick up for our troops but protect their own careers.” " (Emphasis in original post. - CAA.)

That's not all he said, but that was the cherry at the top.

"Kelly asked Lt. Col. Peters what his take on the controversy was, and Peter’s said that he believed the L.A. Times was complicit in a “terrible scandal here,” but that scandal has “nothing to do with our troops in combat.”

“No terrorists were harmed in the taking of those snap shots,” said Peters. “The real scandal is that the L.A. Times, desperate to survive, creates a scandal, publishes those pictures over the Pentagon’s objections. The real scandal is that the establishment media leaps on another chance to trash our troops. The worst of the scandal is that our leaders, in and out of uniform, rush to condemn our troops – no explanation, no context.”

“I suggest the White House spokesman Jay Carney join the military and see what it’s like himself before he condemns our troops,” Peters continued. “I’m especially appalled that those in uniform, General [John R.] Allen, our commander in Afghanistan, just jumped to trash our troops.”

“The Greatest Generation sent Japanese skulls home to their girlfriends,” said Peters. “I’m not condoning it, but I’m trying to make the point that our soldiers out on the front line and our marines are under tremendous stresses. War is not a ladies auxiliary tea party, and it’s all too easy for people comfortable in Los Angeles, or New York or the White House to condemn the troops without context.”

Peters said that there should have been a formal reprimand for the soldiers in question but little else. He went on to criticize the impact that this budding scandal has already had on the civilian leaders of the military as a sign that the mission in Afghanistan is poorly defined.

“If our strategy and doctrine is so pathetically weak that it can be derailed, destroyed, shattered, by a few burning Koreans or a few photographs – the dead body parts of terrorists – well that’s not much of a strategy or doctrine,” said Peters. He became visibly agitated and said that he was “furious” at the “moral cowardice of military leaders who never stick up for our troops but protect their own careers.” "

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if we didn't have Ralph Peters out there, safely in retirement, saying the outrageous and offensive (but true!) things that needed to be said, we'd have to invent him. He's just too useful in keeping things from getting too comfortably (and stupidly) politically correct.

------

Hat tip to KG at Crusader Rabbit ("For Liberty").

4/18

re: "That's An Excellent Point, LTC Peters"

TSB at The Skeptical Bureaucrat ("From deep inside the foundations of our Republic's capital city") listened, as we all should, to the inimitable LTC (Ret.) Peters, speaker of uncomfortable truths.

Money quote(s):

"While channel-surfing TV news programs this morning, I caught a few seconds of the retired Army officer and writer/columnist Ralph Peters commenting on the Afghanistan situation and how it forces us into a highly troubled relationship with Pakistan.

Quoting him from memory, he said this:

“When I went to Command and General Staff College, I would have flunked out if I proposed to put 100,000 troops at the end of a single supply line that ran through a thousand miles of hostile territory.”"

This why we keep having to put up with Pakistan.

"After ten years, we still haven't found an alternative to routing all our Afghan-bound truck convoys from the port of Karachi through the Khyber Pass, thereby putting ourselves at the mercy of Pakistan's ISI and its Taliban allies. Shouldn't the CGSC have revoked some diplomas by now?"

Not having a Leavenworth diploma to put at risk, I will venture that the decisions, and the decision-makers, that are relevant are not at the CGSC-graduate level. They are at the war and electoral college level. These are policy and grand strategy-level questions, and they are putting the operational cart in front of the logistical horse.

9/24

re: "Soldier Murders Afghans, Generals Murder Soldiers"

Ralph Peters at Accuracy in Media ("For Fairness, Balance and Accuracy in News Reporting") pulled no punches in telling us what he thinks.

Money quote(s):

"For a final analysis we’ll have to wait until all of the facts come in, but it appears that a soldier who had served honorably during multiple tours in Iraq broke down and went mad in Afghanistan. We should not be surprised that this happened. We should be surprised that it hasn’t happened sooner and more often: The shock of this incident after a decade of hopeless, meandering efforts that have thrown away the lives and limbs of our troops while ambitious generals lie about progress, seek promotion, and engage in military masturbation is actually a tribute to our men and women in uniform out on the front lines (to the extent that “front lines” exist)." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Let's get up front, as LTC Peters does, that suspects and defendents are innocent-until-proven-guilty.

"(T)he amazing thing is how disciplined, patient and tenacious our troops have been. Given the outrageous stresses of serving repeated tours in an environment a brand-new private could recognize as hopeless (while his generals fly back and forth congratulating themselves), it’s remarkable that we have not seen more and even uglier incidents. The problem in Afghanistan isn’t our troops—although craven generals routinely insist that everything is the fault of “disrespectful” soldiers—it’s a leadership in and out of uniform that is bankrupt of ideas, bankrupt of ethics, bankrupt of moral courage—and rich only in self-interest and ambition.

If there’s a “battle cry” in Afghanistan, it’s “Blame the troops!” Generals out of touch with the ugly, brute reality on the ground down in the Taliban-sympathizing villages respond to every seeming crisis in Afghan-American relations by telling our troops to “respect Afghan culture.”

But generals don’t have a clue about Afghan “culture.” They interact with well-educated, privileged, English-speaking Afghans who know exactly which American buttons to press to keep the tens of billions of dollars in annual aid flowing. The troops, on the other hand, daily encounter villagers who will not warn them about Taliban-planted booby traps or roadside bombs, who obviously want them to leave, who relish the abject squalor in which they live and who appear to value the lives of their animals above those of their women. When our Soldiers and Marines hear, yet again, that they need to “respect Afghan culture,” they must want to puke up their rations." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Ralph Peters is one of the few military intelligence officers to make something of themselves once he took off the uniform. He's widely respected, in and out of uniform, as someone who at least tries to learns the lessons of history, who has walked a lot of this ground years before any of the rest of us, above all, who is unafraid to call a spade a spade, a bad idea a bad idea, and an enemy an enemy.

(If he had not invented himself, we should have had to invent him ourselves.)

"When I was a young officer in training, we mocked the European “chateaux generals” of the First World War who gave their orders from elegant headquarters without ever experiencing the reality faced by the troops in the trenches. We never thought that we’d have chateaux generals of our own, but now we do. Flying down to visit an outpost and staying just long enough to pin on a medal or two, get a dog-and-pony-show briefing and have a well-scripted tea session with a carefully selected “good” tribal elder, then winging straight back to a well-protected headquarters where the electronics are more real than the troops is not the way to develop a “fingertips feel” for on-the-ground reality."

From my reading about the Vietnam War, we re-invented the "chateaux generals" at least that early.

After all, there's a reason BG McMasters wrote his famous book.

"(O)ur troops are being used as props in a campaign year, as pawns by dull-witted generals who just don’t know what else to do, and as cash cows by corrupt Afghan politicians, generals and warlords (all of whom agree that it’s virtuous to rob the Americans blind).

What are our goals? What is our strategy? We’re told, endlessly, that things are improving in Afghanistan, yet, ten years ago, a U.S. Army general, unarmed, could walk the streets of Kabul without risk. Today, there is no city in Afghanistan where a U.S. general could stroll the streets. We may not have a genius for war, but we sure do have a genius for kidding ourselves."

As much a disciple CAA is about the multi-dimensionality of warfare (i.e., DIMEFILS, &tc.), it seems as if the object of the thing has morphed into more of an on-going development project, sort of like re-claiming a slum or ghetto, than is safe or sane. Re-fighting the Vietnam War was never the Republican's idea, after all; it always seemed to be more of a Democratic obsession.

(CAA always assumed this was because certain among the Democratic Party faithful wanted America to lose. Again.)

"Now we’re told that we have to stay to build the Afghan military and police.

....We’ve been training and equipping the Afghan army and the Afghan cops (and robbers) for ten years. In World War II, we turned out a mass military of our own in a year or so. The problem in Afghanistan isn’t that we haven’t tried, but that the Afghans are not interested in fighting for the exuberantly corrupt Karzai regime. Right now, our troops are dying to preserve a filthy Kabul government whose president blatantly stole the last election and which has no hope of gaining the support of its own people. Meanwhile, despite repeated claims that the Taliban is on its last legs, the religious fanatics remain the home team backed by Afghanistan’s Pashtun majority. (If the people didn’t back them, the Taliban would, indeed, have been long gone—we need to face reality.)" (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Afghanistan isn't really a country, as we understand countries to be. It's a patchwork of tribal regions located between neighboring countries. The king or president is essentially the major of Kabul, with the limited power and influence that suggests. That mayor's influence beyond the Kabul city limits is a function purely of force projection and bribery. And this is nothing new. The tenure of each mayor of Kabul lasts exactly as long as he can avoid calling down the wrath of a tribaly power base.

"Sure, we whip the Taliban every time we catch them with their weapons (if they’re not holding weapons, we can’t engage, even if they just killed Americans). But we dare not attack the Taliban leadership in Pakistan, where it’s protected by our “allies.” And no matter how many Taliban we kill, they still attract volunteers willing to die for their cause. The Afghans we train turn their guns on us.

It appears that the staff sergeant who murdered those Afghan villagers had cracked under the stresses of a war we won’t allow our troops to fight. But the real madness is at the top, in the White House, where President Obama can’t see past the November election; in Congress, where Republicans cling to whatever war they’ve got; and in uniform, where our generals have run out of ideas and moral courage." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Aside from the congressional buffoonery where Gen. Petraeus was mocked and called a liar (by whom? do you recall?), the average American holds our generals and admirals in some regard. Having learned some of the lessons of the Vietnam War, the citizenry is typically in something of a hurry to treat our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen with respect and dignity. And I think we over-do that for our top-ranking service members, giving them a double-helping of that respect rather than being properly skeptical or at least not unduly credulous.

If Ralph Peters is taking our top-ranking military leaders to the woodshed in this fashion, then perhaps this is deserving of some attention. It's not just emperors who lack rainment sometimes.

"That staff sergeant murdered sixteen Afghans. Our own leaders have murdered thousands and maimed tens of thousands of our own troops out of vanity, ambition and inertia. Who deserves our sympathy?

In war, soldiers die. But they shouldn’t die for bullshit."

Not being a creature unduly burdened by vaulting ambition, CAA finds within himself an abyssal dearth of sympathy for flag and general officers (not to mention SFSOs) who go-along-to-get-along and are too timid to tell their bosses what their bosses don't want to hear.

3/13

re: "How Will It End?"

Dymphna continued hosting Zenster's guest-posting, Part the Third, at Gates of Vienna ("At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe.We are in a new phase of a very old war.").

(Advisory to readers: The following excerpted passages incorporate several prime examples of "thinking-about-the-unthinkable." Old "Cold Warriors" will be familiar with the concept. Others may have difficulty wrapping their minds around the idea that not thinking about something may actually increase the likelihood of that "unthinkable" something actually coming to pass.)

Money quote(s):

"Islam has cozened its way into Western civilization and, parading under false colors as an alleged religion, it flies a counterfeit Liberal standard of interfaith Multiculturalism. Besotted with its own temporary successes and newfound “purity” ― through a recent reformation leaving it even more violent, intolerant, misogynistic and puritanical ― Islam is in the process of infiltrating Western civilization to an unprecedented degree."

More and more in the West the reality that Islam more than simply a religion, as we in the West have come to understand what a religion is.

"Islam imprudently brings itself into proximity with danger and eventually this will prove its own undoing. Suffused with delusions of adequacy, Muslims think nothing of constantly antagonizing Western powers who long ago perfected industrialized warfare to an extent that Islam can only dream of, despite its supremacist fantasies."

Writers and thinkers such as Ralph Peters ("Uncle Ralph" would smile to see himself so characterized.) have explored the possible consequences of an Islamic "misunderestimating" of Western ruthlessness in the scientific application of industrialized violence.

"Islam casts outsized shadows which too many in the West mistake for genuine military potency. The exact opposite is true and it is only by using the asymmetrical warfare of terrorism that Islam holds any sway."

Terrorism, like sarcasm, is the weapon of the weak.

"One glimpse of how Islam remains almost entirely reliant upon Political Correctness to drive its Western agenda reveals that this parasitic entity’s success wholly depends upon the frailty of a civilization debilitated by Multiculturalism and self-doubt. This is underscored both by the physical compulsion and violence that lies beneath so much of Islamic doctrine and the fact that no nation in history has ever voluntarily adopted Islam without an application of force being involved."

Don't believe that last part? Read history.

"Little do Liberals understand how they will be among the first who go to the wall should Islam prevail. Nor, in their haste to disarm the world, do they understand that such military ineptitude on their part will see them left with few responses other than nuclear Armageddon when confronted by WMD terrorist strikes. Through appeasement and facilitation, Liberals are Islam’s most dangerous “friends”."

Conventional warfare, particularly if waged on a global basis, is simply too expensive a proposition (for even a continental power with a population in the hundreds of millions) if it has the already developed and weaponized a nuclear capability.

The start-up, R&D, and production infrastructure costs are huge, but once they become sunken costs, the unit costs for nuclear weapons are, relative to mass conventional armies, smaller for a larger "bang."

"This inordinate cost of conventional war needed to obtain even a modicum of peace is, perhaps, the grimmest thing about Islam’s future. As the mask slips and “radical” or “fundamentalist” Islam are revealed to be mainstream and fully compatible with regularly accepted Islamic doctrine, Total War ― something Muslims continue to boast of declaring against the West ― looms evermore probable. However, the economic factors alone point directly away from conventional war.

Truth be told, in the absence of that $96 trillion dollars, there is only unconventional warfare left as a survival option. Nuclear weapons represent the sole existing and cost-effective way of managing hostilities with some 1.6 billion people. Like a proverbial trout in the milk pail, this one simple fact is difficult to ignore. Basic economics dooms perpetually hostile Islam to utter annihilation.

Any expectation of Islam pacifying, moderating or reforming itself must be dismissed out of hand. Islam has already undergone a recent reformation from which it emerged as an even more intolerant, more violent, more puritanical and more misogynistic creed. Those Muslims who do seek any pacification or sincere moderation of Islam’s violent doctrine are usually put to death by more devout believers." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

The figure of "$96 trillion dollars" is arrived at by Zenster through a calculation, based upon the costs of the conventional campaigns waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, if extended to the other fifty Islamic countries.

(CAA does not vouch for the math either way.)

Those hoping that Islam will, in a parallel with the history of Christianity in the West, undergo a moderating reformation have obviously missed how Islam's reformation had already taken place within the past two generations, and representated many awful steps backwards.

(CAA's knowledge of Orthodox Christianity is, alas, somewhat spotty and imperfect. Did the Eastern Orthodox Christian churches undergo anything paralleling the Western Reformation?)

"Recent events in Norway show that long before Muslims manage to demographically displace native Europeans there will begin a serious backlash against the Multiculturalists who have imposed this lethal burden upon the West. It is rather doubtful that American and European culture will go quietly into the Politically Correct Islamic night.

Ironically, as Muslims continue to financially drain the West ― through exorbitant military campaigns, increased security measures, petroleum sales and abuse of social benefits in host countries ― they only increase the eventual appeal of cost effective measures that will be required to subdue Islam. There will also come a time when Western nations begin to recoil at the prospect of sending any more soldiers to die for the sake of letting Muslims erect yet another shari’a government and terrorist production facility.

Complicating all of this is how the concept of military deterrence is essentially nonfunctional as regards Islam. A culture that glorifies and worships death is more than difficult to deter. For every bit that the West shrinks from waging Total War, the necessity of posing an existential threat to Islam only increases. When it comes to the ineffectuality of deterrence, no better example exists that of modern day Iran. The ramifications of Ahmadinejad’s tutelage under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pose some serious issues."

CAA does not fall into the analytic bias that suggests Iran (more precisely, Iran's governmental and non-governmental leadership) is an irrational actor.

Nonetheless, CAA holds that any deterrence analysis of Iran must consider that the rationality of Iran's leadership is not based upon the sort of academic and think-tankery games theory so-beloved in Western capitals.

Mirror-imaging is not your friend!

"(M)ost of his cabinet have little to no military experience. With their being so unlettered in war fighting doctrine, could it not be possible that these appeasers might abruptly discover ― after repeated military budget cuts ― that massive nuclear retaliation was their sole playing card? Again, pro-disarmament Liberals rate as the most dangerous kind of “friends” that Islam could have.

Repulsive in the extreme is how truly avoidable this looming Muslim holocaust really is. A far less costly program of “wetwork” style targeted assassinations directed at the top echelons of Islam’s clerical, political, scholastic and financial aristocracy could see global jihad quickly screech to a grinding halt." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Here you really see some more of that "thinking-the-unthinkable" about which CAA cautioned, over and above considering the nuclear possiblities.

Statecraft, and strategy, ain't beanbag.

The United States' proscriptions against assassinations are, essentially, self-imposed.

Furthermore, in light of the increasing popularity of "targeted killing" within the closed circles of our national decision- and policy-making elites, do not represent so much of a policy-reversal as a nearly-natural progression.

"It is more than safe to say that an industrially and militarily unlettered Islam is not going to take over the world using such a feeble tool as terrorism. As was also noted in Part II, Islam is assembling too many enemies too fast and that pace far outstrips any ability of theirs to perfect the mass production of intricate nuclear weapons nor muster fighting forces of even marginal proficiency. Chronic overreach is a hallmark of Islam and its habit of poking at the Western nuclear dragon with its terrorist pointed wooden stick bodes especially unwell for Muslims everywhere." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Like those who see declining fertility rates in North African (and other majority-Muslim countries) as signs that the Western demographic collapse need not mean replacement by an Islamic majority within the next several decades, this estimate may be overly optimistic.

"Remember that for eight long years, Iran and Iraq fought to a bloody stalemate using chemical weapons and even ten year-old boys as human minesweepers. Less conservative estimates cite up to a million Muslim fatalities with both nations sending the flower of their youth into an insatiable meat grinder. Now, consider how America rolled up Iraq’s sidewalks in two weeks. This is the “reality gap” confronting Islam and its delusory vision of world domination. No such thing will ever happen.

Given that the global caliphate is forever out of reach, whither Islam? What of its obsessive quest for global supremacy? Handily, Israel provides us with a micro synopsis of the macro global problem. Imagine a tiny nation like Costa Rica routinely beating America’s military posterior like a cheap dime store drum. That is the equivalent of Israel defeating the combined military might of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Please remember that, in Arab culture, humiliation is worse than death. Abandoning conventional warfare in favor of terrorism, the Arab nations intentionally selected a strategy of low-intensity conflict whose upper limit would not trigger direct intervention by the global community." (Emphasis in the original text. - CAA.)

CAA would quibble about that "upper limit." A repeat attack against U.S. targets on par with the death tolls from 9/11 seems to me to be as likely to invite a devastating and disproportionate response as one whose casualties were orders of magnitude higher.

CAA suspects that the American public's reaction, even in the face of presidential pronouncements about Islam's inherent peacefulness, would be more on the order of "fool-me-twice, shame-on-me."

"Few people understand that any sort of “negotiated peace” with Israel would serve to unravel the entire Islamic Arab consciousness. Reaching even the least sort of peace agreement would be a frank admission that jihad had failed. Furthermore, any recognition of a Jewish state would contravene the genocidal doctrine that is a cornerstone of Islam. Acceptance of Israel’s continued existence contradicts Islamic canon on so many levels that any such thing is unimaginable.

Piled on top of this is Israel’s continuous string of military victories against often overwhelming Arab forces. How then to explain that away without an indisputable annihilation of Israel tucked under their Islamic belt? Deprived of any concrete proof that Islam actually can prevail against the eternally hated Jew, please do not begin to imagine that there will be any near term cessation of hostilities, if ever.

Thus we are presented with the micro model of global terrorism. Withdrawal, surrender, in fact, peace of any sort with Islam is simply out of the question. In reality, Islam offers nothing that remotely resembles an actual “peace treaty”. Instead, there is only hudna, a temporarily cessation of hostilities that is specifically designed to permit Muslims the rearming needed to then break that “truce” at their convenience. Whither Israel … whither the global community where Islam is concerned.

So long as the West does not pose an existential threat to Islam’s continued presence on earth, there will be no accommodation of any sort. This is the bottom line. That degree of political will is sorely lacking in the West and, even if it existed, there is little likelihood that anyone involved would appreciate how any such pact with the unbelievers would be broken at the first instant of advantage for Islam."

9/21

re: "Are These the Labour Pains of a New Renaissance?"

Seneca III had an essay posted at Gates of Vienna ("At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe.We are in a new phase of a very old war.").

Money quote(s):

"(T)the giant Ponzi scheme that is European monetary union is on the verge of a well-deserved and long overdue collapse. It was always going to fail, of course, because it is a false construct designed not for the financial and fiscal benefit of the ordinary men and women of the Union but in order to enable the ushering in of a continent-wide socialist police state by means of subterfuge and stealth.

And, as is always thus with false constructs, it never did need to be destroyed from without, for the seeds of its destruction were sown in its very foundations by those political pornographers who created it. These legislative and executive elites, drunk on the dopamine of power, wallowing in hubris as they looted the coffers for their personal benefit — they exalted in the mutual masturbation of their own egos as the little people were left to go about their meaningless lives ignored or at best humoured, of no consequence to the peddlers of this embryonic New World Order.

Fatefully for the deconstructionists, they forgot about or refused to acknowledge the inherent power and utter ruthlessness of the desperate, of the people of whom for so long they had been so contemptuous, and who are now in the process of casting off their chains."

The "European Project" began with the most noble of aims, the prevention of future intra-European conflagrations such as the two world wars of the 20th century.

It can be argued that it's been successful, but it must also be admitted that it did not operate in a vacuum.

Little things like NATO, the United States, "containment," the Marshall Plan, nuclear weapons, and two generations of U.S. soldiery standing watch along the intra-German frontier (that sort of thing) had more than a little to do with it.

"(T)he great Global Warming scam (a revealed belief system built on nameless fear and used to justify and enable the transfer of the fruit of our labours into the pockets of Multinational Industrialists, third world kleptocrats and offshore bankers) is now in its third incarnation, and stumbling as more and more of its premises are exposed as creative wishful thinking rather than the rational analysis of a few and often contradictory physical facts."

For the millions who now get their news primarily from the internet rather than through the traditional major media outlets (primarily TV networks and daily newspapers), this will not come as a surprise. Still, like any ancient religion, the beliefs die out only when the believers (eventually) do.

I still cringe when I hear otherwise genuinely bright people talk about AGW, &tc., as if were "settled science." It's embarrassing. I'm embarrassed for them.

"(T)he collective atrocity that is Multiculturalism, asylum-seeking, and immigration — those seemingly innocuous categorisations of the deliberate, iniquitous process of our ethnic cleansing — is more and more being seen for what it is, and more and more of us have lost our fear of saying so in public and on public forums. For the vanguard and principal protagonist, Islam, events are moving in such a fashion that under cover of the coming storm it is quite likely a non-Westphalian solution will come to pass. They would be wise to leave now, whilst they still can."

Seneca III is clearly expecting another greater European war, and his "non-Westphalian solution" phrase puts me in mind of the differing viewpoints on the "Eurabia myth" discussion, as regards Ralph Peters, Mark Steyn, and Tom Kratman.

In other words, somewhere that Western Civilization would really rather not ever go again.

Not to say it won't or can't, given that Western Civilization remains stubbornly composed of hundreds of millions of individuals (perhaps even a billion or more) daily making their choices and decisions, on a planet where billions more of folks follow their own lights about things.

It's an ugly place where signposts are marked "internment," "ethnic cleansing," "displaced persons," "internal refugees," and ultimately "concentration camps" and "genocide."

So it would be well worth the effort to find some other alternate courses of action (so long as they aren't categorizable as either "surrender" or "civilizational suicide").

11/3

re: "European pickle"

The Phibian at Cdr Salamander ("Proactively “From the Sea”; leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.") notes the epidemic of rapes committed (in Europe) by immigrants.

Money quote(s):

"Now and then we have to remind everyone - do not confuse our immigration issues with Europe's.

The only problem I have with the USA's is our lack of enforcement of our laws."

He said a mouthful with that one. Just enforce the laws on the books; just don't spend all our time finding ways not to do what the laws already require.

"Eventually, they will have enough - and they will deal with it in the old European way."

That has been Ralph Peters' argument. Timing (and demographics) will tell.

re: "Muslim Immigration into the UK: Part Three"

El Ingles (writing as Pike Bishop) at Gates of Vienna ("At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe.We are in a new phase of a very old war.") fleshes out Ralph Peter's scenario for Britain.

Money quote(s):

"Normally, technologically and economically more advanced peoples colonize peoples who are less advanced in these regards. This is why, try as they might, the native American Indians could not effectively oppose, much less reverse, the colonization they underwent at the hands of the British and other European peoples. However, in our case, the opposite will be true, as our colonization will be taking place at the hands of technologically and economically inferior peoples who, barring the odd Afghan on the back of a truck, have to be let in by our immigration apparatus to be here at all.

What this means, in a nutshell, is that this colonization will take place only as long as we allow it to, and we will not allow it forever. Eventually we will completely cast aside the various psychological restraints that have been imposed upon us (and without which said colonization could never have occurred at all), resist it, and, at least to some extent, reverse it. There are only two ways this can happen: a) in a relatively orderly and civilized fashion, when a government with the political will to deal with the problem finally comes to power, or b) in an exceptionally violent and brutal fashion, with government playing by no means the only role, and perhaps not even a particularly large one.

It would be asinine to argue that something of this nature could not happen in modern Europe when we have so recently witnessed similar events in the Balkans."

Ralph Peters surfaced this possibility in his much-discussed New York Post article.

"The war that awaits us is tribal war, and we assure our readers that it does not consist of generals exchanging pleasantries before battle, folk riding forth and shooting at each other a bit, and some backslapping over a glass of port at the end. Rather, it consists of people identifying entire communities as their enemies and more or less indiscriminately killing them off until the threats they are perceived to constitute have been reduced to acceptable levels, whatever those levels may be. It is surely one of the greatest failures in the history of (supposedly) democratic government as an institution that so many otherwise prosperous, peaceful European countries have been deliberately hurling themselves along this path despite the fact that the eventual outcome must have been reasonably obvious from the start, and is painfully so now.

When such tribal conflict breaks out in Britain (and it certainly cannot be avoided without radical changes to immigration and other policies), the only way for it to come to an end will be for the overwhelming majority of the Muslim population of Britain to leave permanently. There will be no Good Friday Agreement to bring it to an end, and, for deep structural reasons, no equivalent agreement can exist."

Tom Kratman explored a similar possibility in his 2010 novel Caliphate.

"It will be clear to the British people in the case of tribal conflict between them and their Muslim fifth column that defeat will result in the disappearance of their civilization, their way of life, and their existence as a people. Accordingly, they will have to win it, which means they will have to do what needs to be done to win it, which means they will have to do a great many violent and unpleasant things, things that, though quite inconceivable to many at present, will seem right and obvious to most when the nature of the conflict has become sufficiently clear.

We would like to avoid this, but feel that the window of opportunity is closing rather more quickly than some might imagine. Our greatest concern is that, despite the growing anger and alarm on the part of the British people with respect to mass immigration in general and Muslim immigration in particular, these feelings might not give rise to the necessary coalescence of political will on the part of our elected representatives in time to try and prevent the horrendous future that otherwise awaits us. We say again that the only course of action that gives us the slightest chance of avoiding the horrors outlined here is that of shutting down Muslim immigration and refusing to subsidize the higher Muslim fertility that is pushing us towards the brink."

Boldface added for emphasis.

"There is no theological or legal distinction in Islam between ‘moderates’ and ‘radicals.’ These terms are part of a Western discourse which seeks to grapple with the alarming possibility that a religion adhered to, more or less strictly, by approximately 20% of the world’s population, is fundamentally antithetical to everything good in our way of life. Trying to define a moderate Muslim is an exercise in futility."

Moderate Muslims are some of those things you know when you see them. Like my former uniformed comrades-in-arms, serving their adopted country whether it makes their imam happy or not.

"(L)aws, treaties, and the like are human constructs and therefore open to being changed by human efforts on the basis of human concerns. And changed they will be, sooner or later. If it disapproves, the EU will just have to invade us and show us the error of our ways."

El Ingles raises a good intellectual point. Only the the Ten Commandments were carved by the finger of God onto the faces of stone tablets. Pretty much everything else is the creation of mankind, and subject to revocation, rebuttal, or revision.

(To those who would assert that the Koran, in its classic Arabic version, is the literal perfect word of Allah, I must demur, since that is a matter of faith and I am not a Muslim.)

"It must be observed that all real debts have certain characteristics, most obviously principals (initial amounts owed), and interest rates. If one believes that, once upon a time, Britain owed a debt of some sort to recently independent peoples in ex-British Empire territories, then one must give some idea of the size of the debt, the rate at which that debt accrued interest, and the conditions that would have to be satisfied for that debt to have been fully paid off. In the absence of this information, the ‘debt’ becomes nothing more than an instrument of moral intimidation."

The parallels to the perennial issue of slavery reparations are obvious.

Further, in the U.S. we're not subjected to this particular version of guilt infliction, but rather assertions of the obvious and unassailable virtues of "diversity."

Uh huh.

"(M)any ex-British territories have either stagnated or gone backwards since the Union Jack ceased to fly over them. Many of their people are desperate to leave them, which means that they are desperate to leave the conditions that they and their people have created."

Blaming colonialism will only get you so far.

"If the people of these countries are to flee them and, officially or unofficially, take refuge in a Western country like Britain, then they must, in some fashion, convince the British people to let them in. But given that they already have their own countries, they will have to come up with something especially persuasive. This is the ‘debt.’ None of the people who insist that they should be allowed into Britain because of this supposed debt have ever given the slightest thought to whether or not this debt might already have been paid off, because they have never taken their own argument seriously in the first place. It is simply what these folk say when they feel that access to the UK, for them or their compatriots back home, might be jeopardized."

Thus far, it is not yet a principle of international human rights law that guarantees free movement of peoples irrespective of sovereign national borders. Yet.

"None of this should be taken to imply that there never was any debt at all. Rather, it means that when this debt mysteriously refuses to go away no matter how many immigrants are allowed in, and no matter how much Britain is demographically transformed, then it has become a fake debt, an instrument used to cudgel the ex-imperial master around the head and induce him to allow the ex-imperial subjects to escape the squalor, corruption, poverty, and violence that, they now realize, tend to ensue when they are left to their own devices.

Our ex-imperial peoples wanted to be independent of us. Now they are, with everything that that implies. We wish them the best of luck in their own countries. But all debts are now paid."

I do rather like this simple, bookkeeping approach to debt. If someone is going to imply a debt is owed in order to collect some benefit from the debtor, then by all means lets quantify the current balance of that debt, and any rate of increase. That should be done before paying even a cent.

"(I)f Turkey ever becomes a full member of an EU that Britain is still a member of, with the Turks being granted full freedom of movement across all the EU member states, then the British people will simply have to revolt. If this be treason, rest assured we shall make the most of it."

Britain has already had the joy of seeing many thousands of non-EU citizens crossing the whole of Europe to the coast of France in order to find some way to cross the channel into Britain's welfare state. That's to say nothing of the EU citizens who flock to take advantage of generous salaries, standards of living, and eventual unemployment benefits.

"If there is any particular reason for the British to allow themselves to be colonized by Muslims, whatever their provenance, now is the time for it to be explained."

re: "Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars"

Hat tip to the Small Wars Journal editors ("facilitates the exchange of information among practitioners, thought leaders, and students of Small Wars, in order to advance knowledge and capabilities in the field") for bringing this Ralph Peters article to my attention.

A word about Ralph Peter first.

Ralph Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer, a strategist, an author, a
journalist who has reported from various war zones, and a lifelong traveler. He is the author of 24 books, including Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World and the forthcoming The War after Armageddon, a novel set in the Levant after the nuclear destruction of Israel.

Retiring as a lieutenant colonel, Ralph Peters was a military intelligence officer. He's written (and obviously read) extensively on the topics of strategy and conflict in the world that's come to be since the end of the Cold War.

LTC Peters is, in some respects, sort of like that crazy uncle in the family who says the impolite-but-true things at family gatherings. If we didn't have him around to say those things, to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable, we'd have to invent him.

During the Cold War, there came to exist whole professions of people whose business it was to think the unthinkable and plan for the unspeakable. By and large these were decent, educated, moral people, trying to keep their countries and their families alive and free. Their moral and spiritual heirs exist today throughout the military and intelligence services.

The opener:

"The most troubling aspect of international security for the United States is not the killing power of our immediate enemies, which remains modest in historical terms, but our increasingly effete view of warfare. The greatest advantage our opponents enjoy is an uncompromising strength of will, their readiness to “pay any price and bear any burden” to hurt and humble us. As our enemies’ view of what is permissible in war expands apocalyptically, our self-limiting definitions of allowable targets and acceptable casualties—hostile, civilian and our own—continue to narrow fatefully. Our enemies cannot defeat us in direct confrontations, but we appear determined to defeat ourselves."

Allowing attorneys to pronounce on the acceptability of targets and objectives is an awful misstep, very difficult to retract, and incredibly has become necessary due to the scapegoating-in-hindsight which has come to be the norm in American politics today.

Some money quotes:

"(I)rregular warfare is not new—it is warfare’s oldest form, the stone against the bronze-tipped spear—and the crucial asymmetry does not lie in weaponry, but in moral courage. While our most resolute current enemies—Islamist extremists—may violate our conceptions of morality and ethics, they also are willing to sacrifice more, suffer more and kill more (even among their own kind) than we are. We become mired in the details of minor missteps, while fanatical holy warriors consecrate their lives to their ultimate vision. They live their cause, but we do not live ours. We have forgotten what warfare means and what it takes to win."

"(C)ollective memory has effectively erased the European-sponsored horrors of the last century; yesteryear’s “unthinkable” events have become, well, unthinkable. .... I am stunned by the common notion, which prevails despite ample evidence to the contrary, that such horrors are impossible today."

Rwanda. South Sudan. Democratic Kampuchea. Darfur. Teheran. Mexico.

"(E)nding the draft resulted in a superb military, but an unknowing, detached population. The higher you go in our social caste system, the less grasp you find of the military’s complexity and the greater the expectation that, when employed, our armed forces should be able to fix things promptly and politely."

Thank CNN, gun camera footage, and video games. Everything looks like it's neat and settled and then cut to commercial break. Mysteries are solved and the inscrutable unscrewed in either 30 or 60 minutes time.

"Our rising generation of political leaders assumes that, if anyone wishes to do us harm, it must be the result of a misunderstanding that can be resolved by that lethal narcotic of the chattering classes, dialogue."

Intelligence analysts have lots of terminology for the sort of mental biases endemic to this sort of thing: mirror-imaging, rational actor bias, &tc. Long before I ever heard of such a thing, it was very apparent to me that some of our national policy leaders seemed to think that their counterparts had all attended the same seminars at Harvard's Kissinger School or something.

"(H)istory is no longer taught as a serious subject in America’s schools. As a result, politicians lack perspective; journalists lack meaningful touchstones; and the average person’s sense of warfare has been redefined by media entertainments in which misery, if introduced, is brief."

Even within the military, intelligence, and foreign-policy services, the poverty of our educational system has resulted in a deficit of historical knowledge and perspective among the people who need it most. The good ones spend their careers playing catch-up, trying to fill in the intellectual potholes which are the legacy of public education in America.

"We have cheapened the idea of war. We have had wars on poverty, wars on drugs, wars on crime, economic warfare, ratings wars, campaign war chests, bride wars, and price wars in the retail sector. The problem, of course, is that none of these “wars” has anything to do with warfare as soldiers know it. Careless of language and anxious to dramatize our lives and careers, we have elevated policy initiatives, commercial spats and social rivalries to the level of humanity’s most complex, decisive and vital endeavor.

One of the many disheartening results of our willful ignorance has been well-intentioned, inane claims to the effect that “war doesn’t change anything” and that “war isn’t the answer,” that we all need to “give peace a chance.” Who among us would not love to live in such a splendid world? Unfortunately, the world in which we do live remains one in which war is the primary means of resolving humanity’s grandest disagreements, as well as supplying the answer to plenty of questions. As for giving peace a chance, the sentiment is nice, but it does not work when your self-appointed enemy wants to kill you."

In war, the enemy gets a vote. The truism about no battle plan surviving contact with the enemy is true for a reason. The enemy has his own plan and it's not one you're likely to favor; that's why he's called "the enemy."

"(O)ur expectations of war’s results have become absurd. Even the best wars do not yield perfect aftermaths."

A truly brilliant opponent would melt away before a Western invasion, shower the liberators with roses, pop-up with a democratic collaborationist government, and then quickly usher the Westerners back out of the country. Sort of a double-reverse Grand-Fenwickian strategy.

"Expecting Iraq, Afghanistan or the conflict of tomorrow to end quickly, cleanly and neatly belongs to the realm of childhood fantasy, not human reality. Even the most successful war yields imperfect results. An insistence on prompt, ideal outcomes as the measure of victory guarantees the perception of defeat."

Lack of clearly communicated objectives in war only makes it easier for the media and for opposition politicians (but I repeat myself) to move the goalposts and declare a quagmire.

"We have the power to win any war. Victory remains possible in every conflict we face today or that looms on the horizon. But, for now, we are unwilling to accept that war not only is, but must be, hell. Sadly, our enemies do not share our scruples."

The American political public really only has a visceral grasp of the last half-dozen of the nation's war. Anything earlier than World War II is essentially pre-history not quite rising to the level of mythology, other than Washington crossing the Delaware (why didn't he cross on one of the Interstate highway bridges?) and Martin Sheen losing at Gettysburg.

So our national knowledge of war is limited to World War II (a global, existential struggle between good and evil), Korea (reruns of M*A*S*H but nobody's quite sure why we were there), Vietnam (we lost and that's a good thing, right?), &tc.

No wonder there's ignorance and confusion about the nature of war.

We're supposed to win, except when we're not, and the enemy population should greet us a liberators (none of them were really nazis). And in the hindsight of three-score years things like the Marshall Plan and the German economic miracle look easy.

"The willful ignorance within the American intelligentsia and in Washington, D.C., does not stop with the mechanics and costs of warfare, but extends to a denial of the essential qualities of our most-determined enemies. While narco-guerrillas, tribal rebels or pirates may vex us, Islamist terrorists are opponents of a far more frightening quality. These fanatics do not yet pose an existential threat to the United States, but we must recognize the profound difference between secular groups fighting for power or wealth and men whose galvanizing dream is to destroy the West."

Islamist terrorists do not yet post an existential threat to the United States, but.....

They'd like to.

(Honor the threat.)

"The problem is religion. Our Islamist enemies are inspired by it, while we are terrified even to talk about it. We are in the unique position of denying that our enemies know what they themselves are up to. They insist, publicly, that their goal is our destruction (or, in their mildest moods, our conversion) in their god’s name. We contort ourselves to insist that their religious rhetoric is all a sham, that they are merely cynics exploiting the superstitions of the masses. Setting aside the point that a devout believer can behave cynically in his mundane actions, our phony, one-dimensional analysis of al-Qaeda and its ilk has precious little to do with the nature of our enemies—which we are desperate to deny—and everything to do with us."

Having taken prayer out of the schools in homage to the second-most-easily-offended religious group (i..e, atheists), with the Ten Commandments taken out of the courthouses, Christmas displays from out of the town squares, and memorial crosses out of national and state parks, it's no wonder that our political classes are so clue-less about religion.

"The notion of killing to please a deity and further his perceived agenda is so unpleasant to us that we simply pretend it away. U.S. intelligence agencies and government departments go to absurd lengths, even in classified analyses, to avoid such basic terms as “Islamist terrorist.” Well, if your enemy is a terrorist and he professes to be an Islamist, it may be wise to take him at his word."

Honor the threat. It's not up to us to define our adversaries; our adversaries will do that nicely enough for themselves. It is up to us to avoid willful blindness in that regard.

"To make enduring progress against Islamist terrorists, we must begin by accepting that the terrorists are Islamists. And the use of the term “Islamist,” rather than “Islamic,” is vital—not for reasons of political correctness, but because it connotes a severe deviation from what remains, for now, mainstream Islam. We face enemies who celebrate death and who revel in bloodshed. Islamist terrorists have a closer kinship with the blood cults of the pre-Islamic Middle East—or even with the Aztecs—than they do with the ghazis who exploded out of the Arabian desert, ablaze with a new faith. At a time when we should be asking painful questions about why the belief persists that gods want human blood, we insist on downplaying religion’s power and insisting that our new enemies are much the same as the old ones. It is as if we sought to analyze Hitler’s Germany without mentioning Nazis.

We will not even accept that the struggle between Islam and the West never ceased. Even after Islam’s superpower status collapsed, the European imperial era was bloodied by countless Muslim insurrections, and even the Cold War was punctuated with Islamist revivals and calls for jihad. The difference down the centuries was that, until recently, the West understood that this was a survival struggle and did what had to be done (the myth that insurgents of any kind usually win has no historical basis)."

Even some of the insurgents believed in common knowledge to have won, did not, as a matter of history, do so in fact. The Viet Cong did not defeat South Vietnam and the U.S. military. After the Tet Offensive in 1968, the Viet Cong were essentially obliterated and rendered permanently non-combat effective. Most of the "insurgents" from that time forward were actually NVA regulars infiltrated south from the DMZ. South Vietnam fell to armor-heavy regular forces from North Vietnam.

"When the United States is forced to go to war—or decides to go to war—it must intend to win. That means that rather than setting civilian apparatchiks to calculate minimum force levels, we need to bring every possible resource to bear from the outset—an approach that saves blood and treasure in the long run. And we must stop obsessing about our minor sins. Warfare will never be clean, soldiers will always make mistakes, and rounds will always go astray, despite our conscientious safeguards and best intentions. .... we must return to the fundamental recognition that the greatest “war crime” the United States can commit is to lose."

I pray for the safe return of American citizens trying to exit some of the Middle Eastern countries which are now experiencing uprisings and other instability. Some of our fellow citizens may well experience something of what it's like to "lose" in a war, as four yachters recently experienced off the coast of Somalia.

"Yet another counter-historical assumption is that states have matured beyond fighting wars with each other, that everyone would have too much to lose, that the inter-connected nature of trade makes full-scale conventional wars impossible. That is precisely the view that educated Europeans held in the first decade of the twentieth century."

Globalization is not new. It wasn't new when Marco Polo was working the issue. It's a process and a tendency. It's not a panacea or an immunity.

"(W)e need to remember that the apparent threat of the moment is not necessarily the deadly menace of tomorrow. It may not be China that challenges us, after all, but the unexpected rise of a dormant power. The precedent is there: in 1929, Germany had a playground military limited to 100,000 men. Ten years later, a re-armed Germany had embarked on the most destructive campaign of aggression in history, its killing power and savagery exceeding that of the Mongols. Without militarizing our economy (or indulging our unscrupulous defense industry), we must carry out rational modernization efforts within our conventional forces—even as we march through a series of special-operations-intensive fights for which there is no end in sight. We do not need to bankrupt ourselves to do so, but must accept an era of hard choices, asking ourselves not which weapons we would like to have, but which are truly necessary."

Recall that in 1929 Germany was doing everything in its not-inconsiderable power to hide its ability to rearm and to make war. It did so quite successfully, with horrific results for its neighbors and the world.

"Whether faced with conventional or unconventional threats, the same deadly impulse is at work in our government and among the think tank astrologers who serve as its courtiers: An insistence on constantly narrowing the parameters of what is permissible in warfare. We are attempting to impose ever sterner restrictions on the conduct of war even as our enemies, immediate and potential, are exploring every possible means of expanding their conduct of conflicts into new realms of total war."

If you don't believe this, start reading some of the stuff posted over at Opinio Juris. Those are some big-brain lawyers over there, who really know their international law (if there can be considered to be such a thing, which is another debate), and some of what they write about amounts to a handicapping system weighted against Western powers involved in armed conflict. I know they mean well but they really need to go on some patrols on the bad side of Basra for a few weeks, or take a long field trip to the Kandahar valley in winter.

"Our homeland’s complex infrastructure offers ever-increasing opportunities for disruption to enemies well aware that they cannot defeat our military head-on, but who hope to wage total war asymmetrically, leapfrogging over our ships and armored divisions to make daily life so miserable for Americans that we would quit the fight. No matter that even the gravest attacks upon our homeland might, instead, re-arouse the killer spirit among Americans—our enemies view the home front as our weak flank."

Adm. Yamamoto understood the risk, and paid the ultimate price, for awakening the sleeping giant.

"Our potential enemies believe that anything that might lead to victory is permissible."

And so it is. The laws of land warfare and other codes of conduct clustering around the various Hague and Geneva conventions are Western artifacts, not laws of nature. The American experience fighting practicioners of, for instance, the code of Bushido, was very instructive in this regard. These strictures are not meant to be suicide pacts (at least not the earlier ones) or strait jackets, but ways to minimize the suffering of innocents during wartime. When fighting an adversary who, in the main, respects these norms, we should by all means return the courtesy. When not so fortunate, we must dust-off those articles of war dealing with reprisal and apply them with strict interpretation.

"Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media."

The unbiased media. On my way out of Iraq in 2004 was when I was first exposed to "unbiased" and "objective" journalism as it was then practised by such networks as CNN and MSNBC. Their reporting was so at odds with the reality of Iraq as I had just spent the prior year experiencing, the cognitive dissonance so awful, that I became an immediate convert to the Fox News Channel. I had colleagues who, upon their return home, actually broke their television sets they were so angered by the biased reporting. Most just turned them off.

"The phenomenon of Western and world journalists championing the “rights” and causes of blood-drenched butchers who, given the opportunity, would torture and slaughter them, disproves the notion—were any additional proof required—that human beings are rational creatures."

Daniel Pearl. Lara Logan.

"Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.

The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish monsters."

&

"We need to regain a sense of the world’s reality.

Of all the enemies we face today and may face tomorrow, the most dangerous is our own wishful thinking. "

NYP - HANG 'EM HIGH!

The reality-based Ralph Peters, had a good article at the New York Post the other day.

Money quote(s):

"Fake states, such as Somalia, Afghanistan or even Pakistan, may be the most vexing strategic problem of our time - even more challenging than Islamist terrorism. Throughout Africa and the greater Middle East and on to Southeast Asia, European imperialists drew boundaries in cynical ignorance."

"Deprived of heavy weapons by the Clinton-era Pentagon, our military nonetheless shattered the warlords' hold on Mogadishu, the pretend-capital of the pretend-state. Instantly, Bill Clinton, perhaps our most cowardly president, took fright and ran away, humiliating our military and encouraging al Qaeda to believe that the US had lost its will.

The clan wars that followed "Black Hawk Down" might be called "medieval," except that there was no chivalry involved and the weapons were deadlier. The country splintered into its organic parts. In the far north, the region known as Somaliland self-organized and sought independence from the badlands in the south.

But the "international community," led by our bumptious State Department, insists that every border in the world today has been in place since the Paleolithic Era and can never change. We told the people of Somaliland, who were struggling to live decent lives, that they had to remain a part of the lawless state we all pretend exists.

Pretty much the same thing happened in Puntland, another northern territory. The locals wanted to break free of the warring clans and terrorists to the south. We told them they "belong" to Somalia.

This isn't strategy. It's deadly moral sloth."

&

"We can't fix Somalia. But we could help ourselves by getting over our fantasy that it's a "sovereign state." We can fix the pirate problem: By sinking pirate vessels, hanging pirates (in accordance with the traditional laws of the sea), striking their bases and sinking every vessel in their harbors."