Paus-Ex for EER Season

CAA will take a pause in posting (pip?) for the next two weeks in order to give full and due attention to EERs.

Those who know, will understand. Others must be patient.

That is all.

re: "diplomacy"

CAA (that's me!) continued his response to Jeff Emanuel's post at RedState:, responding to Jack_Savage's comment of Friday, February 10th at 8:40 AM EST(link).

Jack Savage said:

"When we are in a foreign land, aren’t we ALL diplomats?"

My response:

"Only when we screw up.

Seriously, I got that same briefing as a Private (E-2) in Germany back during the Bad Old Days (TM) of The Cold War as well.

So in a broad-swath philosophical sense that’s true.

From a perspective of international law (specifically the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations), anybody we send over on a diplomatic passport (IF THEY ARE GRANTED A DIPLOMATIC VISA BY THE IRAQI GOVERNMENT) is a “diplomat.”

But in terms of reality, it’s our Foreign Service Officers (FSO; both from State, USAID, and Dept. of Commerce “Foreign Commercial Service) and Foreign Service Specialists (FSS) who are “actual” diplomats by training and profession.

You could add to that some (but not all) of the various attaches (such as military ones) from other government “tenant agencies” as they get specialized training for working in a diplomatic environment."


2/11

re: "Jihad in Manhattan"

Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs ("Evil is made possible by the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction.") shared an eye-opening essay:

"It is illuminating of Muslim attitudes and assumptions in New York City in the 1990s -- attitudes and assumptions that are likely to be only more, not less, prevalent today".

1/31

re: "RQ: What Do FSOs Do When Not At Work?"

OSB at The OpSec Blog ("focused on security issues, safety overseas, and privacy online… and perhaps a few tidbits here and there about being a Specialist if I’m feeling uninspired") answered a reader's questions:

"What do Foreign Service Officers/Specialists do when they’re not working? How is the social scene? Do FSOs tend to clump or do they “go local”?"

Money quote(s):

"(I)t depends a great deal on where one is posted. Those serving in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan (AIP) will not be going off the compound very much. Each post has its own unique social culture. Even in places I wouldn’t consider very dangerous, sometimes the current work force just isn’t interested in going out much. Other times the embassy community is very tight knit and very supportive of one another (there’s something about being trapped together in Lagos that really brings a group of Americans together…)."

True. Oddly, the worse (for relative values of "better") a post is, the more likely that post will have a more closely-knit embassy community. The fewer opportunities there are for activities (travel, sight-seeing, safety) outside the embassy, the more they will fall back on their own resources. Some really nice Western European posts don't have that cohesive a community simply because the people assigned there have so many other things to do, either traveling out of town on a weekend or on the town after work hours.

"In my opinion, holing up in your government housing is a good way to go crazy during your tour. Participating in the embassy community, while not only one of the Foreign Service dimensions, is a good way to network both for yourself and your family."

In the Army, we called people like this "barracks rats." Don't be a "barracks rat."



9/22

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: "For Rick Perry"

Ace at Ace of Spades HQ had some commentary on the Republican primary candidacies.

Money quote(s):

"There are two main sorts of primary voters: Those who know too little, and those who know too much. As for the former -- there's not much I can do about them. They don't read this site, or probably too much of any political source.

Maybe they read Time. Bless their hearts." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

CAA is often asked, by persons preparing to take the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT; the computer-based exam that replaced the FSWE), for advice on how to prepare for it. Now, in olden times, when dinosaurs walked the Earth and the essay portion of the FSWE involved a "blue book" style handwritten essay, CAA took a fairly standard approach to get his brain right before test day.

A lot of the approach involved developing and maintaining a good situational awareness of current events, both domestic and international, and not just about politics. One of the specific suggestions for doing that is to read a weekly news magazine, such as TIME, Newsweek, or U.S. News & World Report.

Not so much anymore, at least as regards TIME. And I say that with sadness.

CAA grew up in a household where we got the Washington Post delivered in the morning, the Evening Star delivered in the afternoon, and every week the mailman would bring a TIME magazine, and I'd read it cover-to-cover.

It's just not the same magazine, although perhaps it never was.

"The online community consists mainly of the latter -- we know a lot about the candidates, and are each making complicated decisions about trade-offs between electability and agenda (and likelihood of advancing that agenda).

My belief is that we know so much that the secondary and tertiary level things we know are crowding out the primary things we know. That is, that we know a bunch of second- and third- order things and knowing so much is crowding out consideration of the top-level, major bullet-point, controlling facts."

Ace makes an interesting point here. People who are wonks and geeks about politics and elections tend to get fairly far down in the weeds about candidates, their positions, and their histories. To the point where we'll drop references in normal conversation that garner puzzled looks from those around us, since it may not have been covered in the broadcasts of American Idol, Dancing With The Hasbeens, Real Housewives, or other trash TV like the Daily Show or the current latenight successors to Johnny Carson.

While I may not be enthusiastic about the relative treatment of dogs by either the Republican front-runner versus the Democratic incumbent, in neither case will they be dispositive regarding my vote come election day.

"(B)iographical and character details. Much of the More Informed cohort of the party seems to be giving these factors short shrift. I would suggest to such folks that a certain type of candidate tends to prevail in elections, and that type of candidate tends to have a positive narrative in biographical and characterological traits."

I like the point Ace makes here. Consider Reagan in light of this, likewise Clinton (to a degree). Optimism sells.

"I can only say so often that the swing voters in the center of the country are among the least-informed voters on the planet. Every survey demonstrates that, despite their claims to be all about "the substance" and "the issues," they know less about the substance and the issues than partisans on either side of the aisle.

Being apolitical, they're not very interested in politics. Stands to reason. This means, then, that they don't read much about politics.

Their decision-making is very superficial."

See how Ace builds an argument here. Crafty.

"I would suggest that we should not get too hung up on fighting the last war, because the media will simply change the rules of engagement."

Well, duh.

"Barack Obama did not serve in the military. That is perhaps the most understated sentence in the history of communications, but since people are interested in drawing contrasts, consider that one."

This passage followed one contrasting the various service (and non-service) records of the various Republican candidates at the time in was written. It wasn't a stand-alone potshot at the president, although it certainly would serve as one.

"I cannot and will not say that brainpower is unimportant. I would however say that character matters too."

Yes.

None of the candidates, no matter what one may be influenced to think by the media, are particularly dumb. They may have worldviews and political perspectives far to the left or right of what you consider to be smart, but that doesn't mean they're dumb.

Presidential debates, public speeches, and the like are hard to do. Which is why most people don't do them. Most people don't like to do them. Some people make them look easier than others. This only means they're better at making speeches (or reading teleprompters, but I digress). I would submit that the particular set of talents and personality traits that help make a good public speaker or debater may or may not make a good president. Still, practice will help. Minor slip-ups in public speaking shouldn't be made too much of though.

"America, and especially the Republican party, has long favored elevating governors to the presidency. Governors are, after all, the presidents of single states. They have nearly the exact same duties and functions (including even maintaining and controlling the state national guards). They have similar executive powers and set the agendas for their respective legislatures. In the case of border states such as Texas, they even require some foreign policy making duties.No job in the world really prepares someone for the Presidency. But one job, more than any other, comes fairly close to doings so."

While the U.S. Senate is famous for housing one hundred politicians who earnestly believe they should be president, the fifty governor's mansions house the people who are most likely to be better chief executives. Or if not better, at least better tested, so the voters can examine a record of leadership in office rather than that of a legislator. Being the "chief legislator" is only a part of the president's job, and it's a part of every state governor's job as well.

"The stakes in this election are enormous. The next president may well appoint five justices the Supreme Court, essentially choosing our basic jurisprudence for the next 30 years. This will be the presidency in which we make fundamental decisions about debt, and spending, and entitlements. Decisions on those may decide our fiscal policy for the next 20 or 30 years, too.

But while those are the stakes of this election, the election will actually turn on... Jobs.

Unemployment is at 8.6%, with real unemployment around 16%. For the sake of comparison, unemployment during the Great Depression hit 25% at its high. We are not there yet, but we've consistently been at around 9% for years (with real unemployment higher).

Primary voters tend to be strongly ideological. We have very strongly held beliefs about abstract notions of government and "The Good." But general election voters -- especially those swing voters -- do not have strong opinions about such matters. Otherwise they would be partisans for one camp or another. They tend to be pragmatic, rather than abstract, thinkers. They do not have any prevailing theory of governance, which is what gives them the flexibility to vote for George W. Bush in 2004 and then an all-but-declared socialist four years later.

They care almost entirely about results, because they have no underlying theory that might explain away failures"

CAA is torn between deciding whether this should be considered a bug or a feature. I suppose it'll have to simply be accepted as something that simply is.

"If you think the unaffiliated, mostly apolitical voters in the center are going to be swayed by full-throated announcements of steadfast ideological commitment, you're guilty of universalizing from your own experience.

If they thought that way, they would not be independents. They would, like you, be declared partisans and ideologically-motivated voters.

Speeches are nice but facts are what change minds." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA)

Ace is describing a sort of cognitive bias, the version of "mirror-imaging" to which political geeks may fall prey.

"I will say this without fear of contradiction: A president can only really push 3-4 major initiatives in his first term, and 1-2 in his second. By the last half of his second term, he's a lame duck, and is chiefly clocking time and fighting off efforts to undo whatever he's done in the first six years."

&

"(T)hat impulse -- the idea that the first questions should always be "Wait, does the federal government need to do this? Is it even constitutional that they do this?" -- is the right impulse."

1/3

re: "Overpaid Bureaucrats"

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway ("an online journal of politics and foreign affairs analysis") tackled the topic of an over-popular punching bag.

Money quote(s):

"Federal government employees include the 1.6 million members of the uniformed military, FBI agents, CIA officers, NSA analysts, and all manner of other dedicated professionals that Americans actually like. And then there are the vast numbers of engineers, accountants, and other technical experts that most people don’t even know about. At the state and local level, there are legions of schoolteachers, cops, firefighters, safety inspectors, and others who provide valuable services. For whatever reason, they’re not what people think of when they’re villainizing the “faceless bureaucrats.”

People have come to despise “government bureaucrats” because of bad experiences with the DMV and the Post Office and a general sense that governments employ a lot of lazy people with bad attitudes who are impervious from being fired. And they’re right! Then again, so does the private sector."

Just to clarify, DMV (Division of Motor Vehicles where I come from, your state may have a different name for this agency) is not a federal agency.

Come to think of it, the U.S. Postal Service has hived off from the federal government and semi-privatized and the postmaster-general both removed from the cabinet and deleted from the line of presidential succession.

"Any of us with experience in the government sector have stories of the “retired on active duty” senior NCO or the GS-12 who spends her days reading the newspaper and surfing the Internet. Whether those people are any less prevalent in the private sector, I couldn’t say; but we naturally resent the government workers not pulling their weight more, since they’re on our payroll. And maybe the system should be fixed to get rid of the bad apples–although making it too easy to fire people is not without costs.

But the deadwood are far outnumbered by dedicated professionals doing incredibly important–and sometimes, dangerous–jobs that even most of us “small government” types want done. It’s useful to remind ourselves of that from time to time."

Not that CAA hasn't had his share of run-ins with the "retired-in-place" community, but they're thankfully in the minority in every agency or service in which I've worked thus far. Keeping my fingers crossed on that one.

8/30

re: "US Embassy Iraq Staffing: To Slash or Not to Slash, That is the Question"

Domani Spero at Diplopundit ("an obsessive compulsive observer, diplomatic watcher, and opinionator who monitors the goings on at ‘Foggy-Bottom’ (i.e. the State Department) and the “worldwide available” universe from Albania to Zimbabwe") looked at the problem of right-sizing AmbEmb Baghdad.

Money quote(s):

"One of the most expensive part of Embassy Baghdad’s operation is security protection. So when the spokesperson says that the embassy is “currently too dependent on contractors” and that “we can do more with Iraqi staff” in one breath, one has to wonder if this includes having Iraqis provide local security protection for the embassy. Are armed Iraqi guards protecting our unarmed diplomats around the Green Zone and across Iraq, an option on the right-sizing table?

See, if State slashes the number of expensive contractors but won’t slash the number of diplomats, who will perform the necessary security protection? I understand that there are 200 Diplomatic Security Agents assigned in Iraq (where a traditional embassy normally gets 2-3), but that number won’t be enough to provide security protection for 1,600-2,000 diplomats.

As an aside, we’ve been training and arming Afghan soldiers in Afghanistan who in turn have used the guns and the training we’ve provided them to kill our own soldiers and coalition forces. And those are not isolated one or two cases. I just feel the need to mention that."

Going local with our embassy security services in Iraq is just chock full of fail. CAA sincerely advises against it and hopes that whomever, if anyone, is considering it do so swiftly and decisively in the negative.

"Iraqi staff at the US Embassy only need a year of service before qualifying for special immigrant visas to the United States (in other places, local employees need 15-20 years of service before qualifying for SIVs). Which means American officials are not the only ones learning on the job with each new rotation into Iraq. Local employees, traditionally the backbone of an embassy operation, are on Iraq’s case, in a state of perpetual training. Just as soon as they learn their jobs, they’re off to a new life in the United States. Then the embassy in Baghdad is off to recruiting and training new local employees to replaced the ones who left."

CAA doesn't find fault, exactly, with our Special Immigrant (SIV) program designed to save the lives of our local staff, as well as the military-employed folks for whom it was originally intended. Another situation chock full of good intentions that bites us where it hurts in terms of ongoing operations. This amounts to a self-inflicted brain drain.

2/9

re: "The graveyard of Empires"

Chuck at From my position... On the Way! ("These are my own poorly arranged thoughts. They usually come to me during periods of when I can’t sleep and when under great stress.") assessed goals in Afghanistan.

Money quote(s):

"Empires throughout history have fought in Afghanistan.

I think that is the key thing to understanding these people. Their cultural/genetic memory is
imprinted with the idea that everyone else in the world can come here and kick
their asses until they get bored and go home.

I think it's really their driving factor, and why they seem so unwilling (beyond cell phones) to pull themselves out of the 13th century. Granted, they realize (and use to tremendous effect) that the US will pay, and pay, and pay, for their ridiculous "projects" to make this a better place. They'll likely end up with the third world's best infrastructure by the time we leave--and given their insecurity, animosity towards each other, and general bat-shit insanity, they'll quickly devolve into internal warfare. Warlord vs. Warlord in a winner takes all
cataclysm.

The winner of course, will get to take over all this wonderful infrastructure--and will likely tear it out and sell it to the highest bidder."

Particularly if it hurts a rival tribe. Tribalism is a reality in Afghanistan; it's not too much of an overstatement that, outside of Kabul, there really aren't too many people who would self-identify as Afghans ahead of their tribal identity. Tribalism, and the inevitable zero-sum game perspective, of this sort goes hand in hand with the lack of a social contract necessary for modernity.

"I don't really think of this place as a graveyard of empires--not the kind of place where empires come and are destroyed. It's more like the kind of place that empires come, see what it's like, realize that the only real solution outside of outright genocide is to dump prozac in every source of water and wait twenty years, realize that probably wouldn't work either, and then try to figure out the best way to just leave.

Unfortunately, we aren't there yet. I think we're getting closer to the "What's the point?" point, though. Staying here won't stop the spread of terrorism. Staying here won't make Afghanistan a stable democratic republic. Staying here won't remove the corruption, crime, or poverty. Staying here has no benefit to the US that I can see, long-term. The question that keeps popping into my head is "What's in it for us?" And I just can't seem to find an answer."

Goals and objectives. They are necessary for the development of any sort of strategy, at least if you intend for success to be anything but pure accident. And that's pretty much where we are after a decade; if we're "successful" in Afghanistan at anything (or possibly including) more than a retreat-under-fire from there when we finally pull out, it'll be a complete accident rather than the success of any one strategy, doctrine, policy, or negotiation.

"The second question of "is it worth it?" is even harder to answer. How do we quanitfy that? Is it worth it in terms of cost to the taxpayer? That goes back to "What's the point" and "How does this benefit the US?" What, exactly, are our strategic goals here? If being here is rooting out terrorists, we're playing whack-a-mole."

Nothing wrong with whack-a-mole, up to a point. But it's not a strategy for anything but marking time.

12/14

re: "The EagleSpeak Suggested Way to Reduce the Military Force"

Mark Tempest at EagleSpeak ("The main focus of this blog is maritime security. Other matters may appear.") wondered where some of these people have been hiding for the past decade.

Money quote(s):

"There will come a time, soon probably, that there will be a call to reduce the
size of the military services (excluding the Coast Guard, which is too damn
small anyway). I offer up my thoughts on how to approach the problem in
two steps:

Identify every member of the military* who has not received combat pay** for
any of the last 10 years that we have been at war.

Once these people have been identified, fire them. If they are flag
officers, fire them twice. "

You'll get no argument from me on this.

_____

* Who has at least 10 years service

** Meaning "imminent danger pay" or
submarine pay and/or whatever AF missileers get.

8/30

re: "Magic 43%; Citizens and soldiers"

Dr. Jerry Pournelle at Chaos Manor ("The Original Blog and Daybook.") approaches the civil-military nexus with the long view of an historian.

Money quote(s):

"One effect of the Fluke affair has been to draw attention to just how onerous Obamacare is even in its early phases. It is becoming clear that the government is expecting the general population to pay for more and more services through their taxes, and it is slowly becoming obvious that putting the cost onto insurance companies and employers merely masks the fact that nothing is free: the companies required to give entitled services must pay for them somehow. They raise rates, or they ask for subsidies, or, probably both."

TANSTAAFL,* as some of you will already know.

If you're getting something for "free," that means either someone else is paying for it or you're over-paying for something else.

"Kandahar

.... professional citizen soldier was deployed four times in his eleven years of service. I doubt they will find any warning signs – particularly in comparison to the warning signs displayed by the Muslim psychiatrist.

Incidentally, the official Pentagon description of the Fort Hood murders is “a workplace act of violence.” The word massacre is used in the Kandahar murders. Again, the international implications are considerable here. but one wonders if the top layers of the military understand just what is happening here.

The typical tour of duty in Viet Nam was 12 months, with various incentives given to those who would voluntarily extend their tour. Many of the extensions were taken by personnel in positions that put them in heavily fortified enclaves where they were relatively safe. Of course no place in country was completely safe, but after the end of the Tet offensive campaign of 1968 the native Viet Cong effectively ceased to exist, and the rear areas and much of the countryside in the south was statistically not particularly dangerous and nearly all casualties outside those actual combat areas were due to the same factors that affect people of military age anywhere including in the US. Indeed, accident fatalities were lower in Viet Nam than in many parts of the US due to the superior medical capabilities there. That has not been the case in Iraq or Afghanistan."

No. It certainly hasn't.

"Through history there have been many kinds of armies. There are armies of citizens in arms, literally armed men, often peasant farmers, who turn out to fight at need. That was the army of the Roman Republic for most of its history. The Legions were raised by conscription and served for the duration; but they were not paid except for rations and the like, and they expected to go home when the war was over. This lasted until the Gallic invasions caused Marius to raise armies of non-citizens and slaves, who became long term professionals who, if they survived, might hope to be given a patch of land and a chance to become a peasant and citizen, and whose children might be citizen soldiers. In fact, though, the era of the citizen soldier was just about over, and after Marius came the civil wars, the Cataline conspiracy, Caesar, and then Caesar Augustus. The citizen army was lone gone by then; the Legions of the Principate were paid professionals.

Over time the differences between citizen soldiers and long term professional soldiers has been closer or looser depending largely on wars and deployments. Some professional soldiers became palace guards, citizens in all but name and sometimes in reality, even though their units had begun as imported mercenaries. Sometimes the professionals were kept in barracks when not actually deployed, in part to keep the citizens safe from them, but also to protect them from the citizens. There were the periods in the late middle ages and renaissance when mercenary soldiers dominated. Machiavelli argued in favor of citizen soldiers with conscription.

Professional armies, he argued, could ruin you by losing a battle, or by looting the paymaster. France developed a three tier system, with the Foreign Legion that would never set foot in European France, a professional army of long term service, and conscripts. Switzerland kept the professional component of its army small by rigidly enforcing universal male conscription and requiring a very long term of compulsory reserve service after conscription. Sweden employs much the same system to this day (as does Switzerland with some modification).

Between the World Wars the United States had regular forces, but the troops were generally kept in barracks and not expected to mix in with the general population; and of course the regular army was small. In World War II the entire nation took arms for the duration of the war, and quickly disbanded when it was over. Conscription continued until after Viet Nam.

When the United States went to an all volunteer service there were diverse opinions about its makeup. The old British regular army consisted essentially of long term volunteers – at one point two four year terms ending with an invitation to a further 12 year hitch. Britain had an empire to govern, and it needed all kinds of soldier."

And so the British supplemented their (relatively) small regular army with militia (essentially what is now the "Territorial Army"), colonial troops, native troops, and other sorts of auxiliaries. Folks like Dr. Pournelle and Col. Kratman have suggested, from time to time, that we do something similar.

"Students of military history have always understood that Republics, which typically had short and intensive wars interspersed with long periods of relative peace, need a different kind of army than does an Empire, which needs Legions, but most of the fighting is left to Auxiliaries. The US had such need during its imperial periods following the Civil War and particularly during the Philippine pacification.

It takes a different kind of soldier to withstand long periods of war and danger in hostile places, as opposed to the long term citizen soldier who lives among the population and is often indistinguishable from the citizen. Machiavelli was generally correct, citizens make the best soldiers for a Republic, but he also knew that the professional condottieri and their troops – such as the English Sir John Hawkwood who saved Florence in exchange for a memorial stature – could be very effective. Some like the Sforza became the leaders of the state and made the office hereditary. Hawkwood was unusual in that he was a man of his word. (Florence determined that while it was grateful for Sir John’s service, it could not afford a bronze or granite statue, and Sir John had to settle for a painting of his statue on the wall of the local cathedral. It’s still there.)

The Kandahar massacre will and should be punished; but it was predictable. Of course the Afghani will ask for the head of this soldier."

They may feel free to not hold their breath, as there are considerably more Afghani heads owed to us, and to themselves, that should be surrendered first.

"The ability to endure long term service in a hostile environment under constant danger is not often coupled with the temperament of the citizen soldier, long term husband and father and expected to take part in civic life. Professional soldiers may in theory know they may be deployed four times in eleven years in hostile and unpleasant environments, restricted in action by rules of engagement imposed by bureaucrats over the objections of their officers – they may in theory know that when they volunteer, but few think it can or will happen. When it does, some of the best will crack. It is inevitable." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

It's not that our citizen-soldiery is broken, but there's a lot of wear and tear on organizations and individuals.

"This kind of war is not the kind of war that can be fought by a long term professional citizen army. Conscripts won’t do it well, but conscripts in a Republic have political means of protesting the situation. The Constitution of the United States never really contemplated the kind of service that we have been demanding of the troops since we ended conscription. We had no business sending a large army into Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, just as we had no real mission in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The United States was fortunate to have good results following World War II, in which our occupation armies were citizen soldiers, most of them volunteers but not long term professionals; but the circumstances were very different. We have forgotten the horrors of our Korean occupation in the period after the Japanese surrender and before the invasion of the Inman Gun in 1950, and few Americans will remember that period. For the most part the occupations elsewhere went well because the occupied countries had been thoroughly defeated, we had trained companies of military government specialists, and the Cold War soon threatened occupiers and occupied alike with something a lot less pleasant than a US constabulary."

That last is something I'd never heard mention of before, and bears some investigation.

"We were not prepared for the kind of war that we undertook in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we never did prepare for it. Our citizen soldiers did wonders considering the enormity of the task. It is a wonder that we have not had many more instances of horror.

We have lost a citizen soldier. The Afghans have lost women and children. There are no winners here."

Too true. And some will try for gain from this nonetheless.

* TANSTAAFL: "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch."


3/13

re: "The Republican Debate; Assassinations; and more"

Dr. Jerry Pournelle at Chaos Manor ("The Original Blog and Daybook.") spoke of the shadow world.

Money quote(s):

"They’re not calling it an assassination yet, but it sure looks like one. The son of an important Iranian official has been found dead in a Dubai hotel. It’s all remarkably similar to what happened to a Hamas official not all that long ago. It’s possible that this wasn’t a strike by Mossad, but I sure wouldn’t bet much money on it.

Note that this happens as there is news of explosions in Iran at bases connected with the Iranian nuclear program."

Not that high energy physics or explosive-related facilities or bases might not have a tendancy to go 'splody all one their own, but this seems to go beyond the normal distribution curve, even when factoring in for the Third World.

"As to what’s going on:

Iran has long had a policy of providing strong incentives – positive and negative – to its smartest kids to study nuclear engineering and go into the Iranian nuclear program. It has long been thought that one way to make sure there is no nuclear program is make sure there aren’t any really bright nuclear engineers.

This rather drastic policy has been applied in the past, and neither Syria nor Iraq ever got nuclear weapons. Note that hostility toward Iran having nuclear weapons is universal in the Arab world with the single exception of Syria. The obvious author of the Iranian explosions and the death of the smart young man in a Dubai hotel is Mossad, but Israel is not the only country happy with these recent events, nor is Mossad the only intelligence agency capable of using these techniques. Welcome to the shadow world."

When look for those with motive, the operative question must always "come from the Latin." To wit: cui bono or "to whose benefit?" Dr. Pournelle gives a nice precis, although he thoughtfully omits the U.S. from those who might have a claim check in this particular dead pool.

11/13

re: "These things happen for a reason"

Lemuel Calhoon at Hillbilly White Trash ("Commenting about politics, religion, firearms, food, Celtic music, beer, science fiction and the Asheville Vortex. Home of the Hillbilly Ecosystem.") is experiencing some existential-level cognitive dissonance. And with good reason.

Money quote(s):

"America went to war with two nations in response to Islamic terrorism and we have killed or captured most of the top leadership of al Qaeda, including bin Laden himself. However our failure to identify the nature of the problem (which is nothing more or less than Islam itself) and our suicidal fealty to the culturally lethal ideologies of multiculturalism and political correctness have rendered us almost defenseless against this kind of home grown jihad and seriously hampered our ability to deal with the problem on an international level.

Right after Sept. 11 president Bush hosted Islamic religious leaders at the White House to prove that the US was not at war with Islam. Then it came out that most of those imams were tied to terrorism in some way. TSA screeners at airports are told not to pay any special attention to people who look Arab/Middle Eastern for fear of being accused of profiling."

Islam's problem seems to be either that it never underwent a reformation (which might have shifted it from its medieval moorings) or that the reformation it has undergone took it in the wrong (from Western perspective) direction.

I understand that Pres. Bush took pains to emphasize that the West, and the U.S. specifically, was not at war with Islam so as to head-off initiating the sort of Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" that Osama Bin Ladin dreamed of waging. Not playing into what Al-Qaida wanted is a pretty good argument for Bush's policy there, whatever else you may think of the former president.

As for TSA screening guidance.... from a security perspective, you don't want to necessarily exempt non-Arabs/Middle Eastern persons from security screenings since that sort of loophole creates a security vulnerability that just begs to be taken advantage of.

But that doesn't seem to be how things are actually done; TSA gives the appearance of being more afraid of CAIR's press releases than is healthy or helpful. Going out of the way to avoid paying attention to the patterns and indicators of likely terrorists is a losing proposition and indicates a lack of courage of conviction.

That's a recipe of losing the larger war.

"Christian and Jewish clergy must be banned from the 9/11 memorial service at Ground Zero but a building ruined by wreckage from one of the 9/11 planes (making it as much a part of Ground Zero as the WTC site) must be torn down so that a giant Islamic Victory Mosque can be built.

The United States has helped to bring about regime change in Egypt and Libya (actually going to war in Libya's case) to replace governments that were bad but not currently supporting Jihad terrorism with far worse governments that are connected with organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda.

The United States and Western Europe (that part of the world once known as Christendom) has seemingly lost faith in itself. In its value to the world. It is very likely too late for Europe but not for the US. That is if we screw up our courage and face facts and take appropriate action."


8/28

re: "Costs"

CAA (that's me!) continued his response to Jeff Emanuel's post at RedState:, responding to snowshooze's comment of Friday, February 10th at 2:00 PM EST(link).

snowshooze said:

"Are you guys really thinking there is any sanity in that?"

My response:

"Building an embassy complex to securely house not only our diplomatic mission but the management of a national reconstruction effort in a combat zone where they take indirect fire every day (including during construction) is going to cost a lot.

A lot.

And when I say “house,” I mean not only their working spaces (and warehouses, workshops, &tc. to support that work) but actual living quarters BECAUSE NONE OF IT MAY BE SAFELY PLACED OUTSIDE OF YOUR SECURITY PERIMETER.

For some perspective, take a look at The Skeptical Bureaucrat’s latest post: http://skepticalbureaucrat.blogspot.com/2012/02/and-another-thing-about-that-baghdad.html

TSB and I go way back. He knows whereof he speaks and is a security professional second to none."



2/11

re: "Obama Has Been Hurt by the Media's Leniency"

rdbrewer at Ace of Spades HQ remembers a time when the media gave less deference to power.

Money quote(s):

"Remember the days when the press rudely shouted questions at Ronald Reagan during news conferences? I do. There were times when they seemed angry and wouldn't let him answer. Now they won't even hit-up Obama over something as serious as, say, Operation Fast and Furious where lives were lost and the trail of dirty deeds appears to lead all the way to the White House. When they do venture close to a topic not on the official White House approved topics list, they are sheepish, almost apologetic. Pathetic, primitive, in-group territoriality. I'd call it childish if it weren't so reptilian.

Republican administrations have to stay on their toes. Democrat administrations do not."

This actually seems to changing, or at least shifting a bit, as the presidential election campaigns (and politicking, to include class- and race-warfare smokescreens) begin to gain momentum.

Nonetheless, it doesn't seem to have penetrated into the White House press corps.

8/28

re: "What the Immigration Debate Needs Is -- More Discrimination"

Dafydd at Big Lizards ("Please enjoy the blog while you wait with breathless breath and baited hook for the rest of this fershlugginer web site.") had a reasonable enough suggestion.

Money quote(s):

"I mean that quite literally: We need to discriminate between different classes of illegal alien.

Patterico has for some time pushed -- desultorily, to be sure -- a welcome policy suggestion; he calls on the feds to "deport the criminals first."

No, he's not saying that, since all illegal aliens are by definition "criminal," we should deport them all immediately; by contrast, Patterico says that there already is a subgroup, within the larger group of illegal aliens, comprising those illegals who commit crimes apart from the crime of being here illegally (and its associated crimes of document fraud and such)... and that we should focus first on deporting those who come to this country in order to live a criminal livestyle.." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

This idea has much to commend it; such as The Principle of Low-Hanging Fruit.

Which is to say that criminals, being that class of people prone to commit criminal acts, are more prone (than the merely law-abiding) to come to the attention of law enforcement, whereupon their illegal alien status can come to light and be addressed by our immigration enforcement apparatus.

(So midnight raids and the sorts of police-state actions that alarm the citizenry are unnecessary to implement this kind of program.)

"It makes a lot of sense, and it's a perfect example of discrimination: Patterico discriminates between illegals who want to try to fit into and contribute to American society, and illegals who see America as a vast piggy bank to be looted, abused, and despoiled." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

This also serves as an exemplar of both The Principle of Low-Hanging Fruit and The Principle of Self-Defense, plus The Principle of Practicality. While more-or-less law-abiding (leaving aside their immigration violations) illegal immigrants aren't to be encouraged, it's just good sense to prioritize or, as Dafydd says, discriminate between the two classes of illegal aliens.

"I hereby initiate my own program that I believe complements Patterico's pontification noted above. He says, "deport the criminals first;" I say, legalize the most innocent first.

Who are the most innocent of all illegal aliens? Those who were brought here as little children, too young even to understand what a national border is or what it means to cross without permission, let alone mature enough to consent in an informed way to illegal entry. Such innocents need a name, so let us call them "unwitting aliens," UA -- they illegally entered the U.S. without their own consent or even knowledge.

(Do you want to call it amnesty? I don't mind; I don't even care. Does anybody deserve amnesty more than a person who never even committed the crime of which he stands convicted, since he was a little kid when it happened?)

There are a great many such UAs, in raw numbers; and for nearly all of them, the United States is literally the only country they have ever known. They grew up here, went to school here, made friends and enemies here; they are completely assimilated into American society; they think of themselves as Americans; they have no recollection of having lived in Mexico or Argentina or El Salvador; and likely in quite a lot of cases, they don't even speak Spanish or Portuguese. Their parents may have falsely told them all their lives that they were born in the United States; they may even have shown the UAs a false American birth certificate.

Should we really tell these kids that they don't deserve in-state tuition, even if they have lived in one American state all their conscious life, because they're criminals? Do we want these young men and women to be forever barred from living legally in the only home they remember, the only country to which they feel loyalty, unable to establish residency anywhere in that country because of something their parents did when the UAs were still infants? Do we for God's sake want to deport these very American "illegals?" Deport them to where -- a country they cannot even remember, whose citizens speak a language the unwitting aliens might not even know?" (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Dafydd raises several excellent points as well as asking some (possibly) rhetorical questions along the way. I'll address them in damnall order:

1. "Who are the most innocent of all illegal aliens? Those who were brought here as little children, too young even to understand what a national border is or what it means to cross without permission, let alone mature enough to consent in an informed way to illegal entry."

Question asked and answered, with enough justification that he makes it stick. The consular officer in me wants to ask though, how old? Where are we going to draw the line, specifically, because if implemented, some person on our side is actually going to need guidance and a legal basis and authority to make a hard and permanent decision that's going to have a decisive impact on another person's entire life.

2. "Such innocents need a name, so let us call them "unwitting aliens," UA -- they illegally entered the U.S. without their own consent or even knowledge.".

The use of the term "unwitting" appeals to former counterintelligence professional who lurks just below CAA's surface, since "witting" and "unwitting" are CI terms of art having very long standing.

3. "Do you want to call it amnesty? I don't mind; I don't even care. Does anybody deserve amnesty more than a person who never even committed the crime of which he stands convicted, since he was a little kid when it happened?"

In consular work, unlawful presence by a minor (under age 18) doesn't count in terms of constituting a visa ineligibility. That is, if someone walks up to the visa interview window at a U.S. consular section and applies for a U.S. visa, none of their unlawful presence (if any) prior to their 18th birthday counts as an automatic visa ineligibility. Unlawful presence that counts begins acruing on their 18th birthday, and an automatic visa ineligibility doesn't trigger until six months of unlawful presence are achieved.

Now, the fact that someone lived in the U.S. illegally as a minor and, presumably, may have strong ties in the U.S. (and, presumably, correspondingly weak ties in their county of citizenship) are certainly factors that a consular officer has to (and will) consider in terms of evaluating that former illegal alien minor in terms of their being a likely visa overstay. And that will get them a visa refusal under INA Sec. 214b.

But it's not automatic; it's based on the interviewing (and adjudicating) officer's best judgment considering the totality of the visa applicant's circumstances. So it can go either way. CAA has encountered more than one of these situations himself and made visa decisions each way.

Frankly, CAA has tended to be favorably impressed by young persons who, upon reaching age 18 as illegal aliens in the U.S., made sure to leave the U.S. before acquiring six months of unlawful presence as an adult. They took the trouble to learn the law and, as legal adults, comply with it.

(As a general rule, consular officers are inclined to view positively those instances where someone takes the trouble to comply with our sometimes opaque or arbitrary immigration law. That sort of law-abiding behavior is to be encouraged.)

This also can cut the other way; encountering those sorts of responsible acts by former illegal aliens has made CAA much less patient and understanding when he encounters someone who didn't hie themselves out of the U.S. before reaching the age of 18 and six months, but stuck around until they themselves ran into trouble and found themselves deported.

4. "There are a great many such UAs, in raw numbers; and for nearly all of them, the United States is literally the only country they have ever known. They grew up here, went to school here, made friends and enemies here; they are completely assimilated into American society; they think of themselves as Americans"

This the part that pulls your heartstrings, assuming you still have them. And most consular officers still do.

(CAA must be excepted from those ranks since he has no personal feelings on any subject. Okay, that's a lie.)

They say that most FSOs come into the Foreign Service with a fairly (politically) liberal outlook, and that after doing their first consular assignment, particularly visa work, they're still liberals, but not when it comes to illegal immigration.

(They are always saying things.)

I don't know if that's wholly true, but I do think that nobody joins the Foreign Service because they hate foreigners, because they're xenophobic and don't like other countries. Since we're all volunteers in this profession, we're a group self-selected to be at least interested in foreign countries, and at least respectful of other cultures and peoples.

Of course, a year or so of having people lie to you, bold-faced and un-embarrassed, every single day of visa work can tend to wear on one; plus, working on the implementation side of U.S. immigration law does at least produce someone who's become educated about the issues and implications of illegal immigration.

My second point (and I do have one) is about the nature and essence of citizenship.

Citizenship is like unto love and marriage; everyone thinks they know what they are but definitions are hard to pin down and there's a broad spectrum of them.

Consular officers have to implement the laws and regulations as they're written (and not as they would have written them themselves). That means we don't have discretion about facts and rules; our only areas of discretion are in areas where we are required to exercise judgment, as in when making adjudications.

So if the 14th Amendment and the relevant portions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) lay out the definitions of U.S. citizenship in lawyerly and orderly fashion, then those are the criteria we have to use. And we don't have discretion in terms of extending the privileges of citizenship (and I'm talking specifically about the right to reside within U.S. territory) to people who feel American.

That being said, I think that our Founding Fathers, the Framers, and even our congressional legislators today understand that citizenship, if it means anything at all beyond residential permission or preferences, involves a personal attachment beneath purely legalism. This goes under the heading of allegiance, which is a personal attachment or feeling that goes beyond the simply rational and enters the realm of the mystical and spiritual.

So forgive me if I don't get too upset about establishing a "path to citizenship" for persons who grew up in the same country I did and love it just like I do. Rules (and laws) aren't written to be broken, but some laws were just written to be amended.

Which brings be to this:

5. "Should we really tell these kids that they don't deserve in-state tuition, even if they have lived in one American state all their conscious life, because they're criminals? Do we want these young men and women to be forever barred from living legally in the only home they remember, the only country to which they feel loyalty, unable to establish residency anywhere in that country because of something their parents did when the UAs were still infants? Do we for God's sake want to deport these very American "illegals?""

Minor children can't be criminals because they're minors, unless a court says otherwise. This is where Dafydd goes a bit off the beam; illegal alien children don't generally get charged tuition until they're old enough (i.e., no longer children or "kids") to attend tertiary institutions such as universities or community colleges.

As I discussed in my "3." above, once illegal alien children reach age 18 they're legal adults (at least for purposes of this discussion) and thus responsible for their own actions and immigration violations.

That being said, the topic of in-state tuition for illegal aliens is muddied by the competing notions of resident status within states and that of legal (or illegal) residence in the U.S. as a whole. These are separate concepts, and under our federal system each state gets to decide not only who qualifies for "residence" within that state but who qualifies for "in-state" tuition for that state's public (i.e., state-funded) universities.

States are free to decide that persons who are unlawfully in the U.S. but physically residing in their state deserve (or don't deserve) to receive the benefit of reduced university or college tuition, presumably since they pay taxes in the state in which they physically reside. But there may be a political cost to individual politicians in those states (such as governors or legislators) who chose to take that stance.

(They knew the job was dangerous when they took it.)

"Most American family courts, in the case of divorce, will take the ages of the children into consideration when determining custody; when a child is deemed old enough to make an informed decision, he can decide whether to live with the father, the mother, or under some joint custody plan. Certainly any adult child (over the age of eighteen) can freely decide whether to live with one of his parents or move into his own place.

I call for the same sort of program for unwitting aliens as we have for the children of divorce: If a UA's parents are discovered and ordered deported, and if the UA is deemed old enough to give informed consent, he should be allowed to freely choose which country he will live in; and we should grant him permanent residency in the United States, if that's what he chooses.

That doesn't mean his parents get to stay as well; if they're subject to deportation, they're still subject to deportation. The UA can be raised by a legally resident relative, or in the extreme case, can be made a ward of the court and sent either to a foster home or adopted out. But any good parent should want the best for his child, correct?

If a UA comes to the authorities' attention by some other means -- say by applying for university and claiming, in all innocence, the in-state tuition of the local state university -- then the same applies: He is told that he is an unwitting alien and that he must choose.

In either case, once obtaining permanent residency, he is eligible to work towards citizenship, just as would be any other legal permanent resident.

(If such a law is passed, and a reasonable period of time elapses -- time for people to understand the system -- then UAs who don't apply for residency but instead take criminal steps to conceal their alien nationality should lose their UA status; they are no longer "unwitting;" they have become co-conspirators with their parents.)" (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

It's a thought. What do you think?.

10/2

re: "See No Evil"

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club described some uncomfortable truths.

Money quote(s):

"When Admiral Mike Mullen told the Senate that Pakistan directed the attack on the US embassy in Kabul it probably surprised no one. And when the Spectator sadly concluded that the Euro has finally been proved a swindle, probably not many were shocked many either. America has been stabbed in the back by it’s allies; its ‘partners against terrorism’. And Europe has been misled by its leaders."

Pakistan is, like unto it's near-neighbor Iran, is not a monolithic unitary entity. Not just within its governmental structure, but even within its military and intelligence organs there are factions and competing power bases, each with their own sets of interests and agendas.

So yes, Pakistanis.

(As for Europe's leaders, well, that's what you get for electing prime ministers and the like through a parliamentary system rather than the way we do it here. Our accountability mechanism isn't so diffuse as theirs is.)

"Did anyone expect the US to reorient its position away from Afghanistan and confront Pakistan? Does anyone believe the EU will give up the Euro, even if it is manifestly ruining them? Policy is no longer the art of doing the right thing. It is the craft of carrying forward a narrative.

Mullen said that “with ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy,” and “we also have credible evidence that they were behind the June 28th attack against the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul and a host of other smaller but effective operations.” Most tellingly he added “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.” Pakistan attacked the national territory of a country at which it was at peace, that had supported it in the past diplomatically and from which it receives billions of dollars in aid. It was an act as perfidious as the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Nor is this the worst of it. It is not inconceivable to think that al-Qaeda was also a “veritable arm of Pakistan’s ISI, though perhaps with assistance from the Middle East."

Politics is the art of the possible. As long as we remain engaged in Afghanistan, we need Pakistan. So Pakistan, and its sub-entities, get cut a lot of slack.

That being said, anyone who thinks we're in Afghanistan for the long haul is much more optimistic (if that's the right word) than CAA has been since 9/11. So Pakistan should enjoy its "immunity" while it can.

(In a more civilized age, I'd be confident that somewhere, in a Quiet Room, someone is making a little list.)

"(J)ust as the appeasers have now about abolished the last remaining justification for national self defense and as the Left continued to operate on the Western side of the Berlin Wall in the guise of their transnational schemes, nothing in recent history indicates that being correct about an issue settles anything. Being right has nothing to do with politics. It’s what you can sell that counts."

Once the Berlin Wall came down (and after the Left completed a period of ritual mourning), the reds re-branded themselves as greens, social democrats, &tc. It wasn't, for them, a very far walk after all. (And continued their struggle against human liberty, &tc.)

"The market is writing down the value of the world economy. Right across the board. It is making a judgement on what they think the future is worth. By recent numbers, not much. Not just because policymakers have gotten it wrong about the “root cause” of terrorism, or the Euro; but also about “Too Big To Fail”, population policy, multiculturalism, a crippling environmentalism and Global Warming, to name a few. The financial, national security and educational systems of the world are in utter collapse because they are stuffed with lies, which even when they are shown to be obviously false suck up trillions of dollars in their pursuit. And nothing will turn the global elites from continuing their ruinous path until they have spent the last nickle and dime they can lay their hands on. Certainly not the media." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Garbage in, garbage out. And if you find enough ratholes to throw enough money down (e.g., "“Too Big To Fail”, population policy, multiculturalism, a crippling environmentalism and Global Warming"), you ought not be surprised that there's an economic cost.

"Neither the BBC nor any of the similar organizations which have jointly created our fantasy world will return to honesty. Not until it annihilates itself into bankruptcy along with all the other causes it touted and supported."

9/22

re: "How funny"

CAA (that's me!) continued his response to Jeff Emanuel's post at RedState:, responding to duncer's comment of Thursday, February 9th at 2:39 PM EST(link).
duncer said:

"Few people are aware of those numbers partly because outside of their immediate family, few people miss the diplomats. The generals are a real loss to the nation as are every enlisted man that has put himself in harms way for love of country,not a career behind a desk."

My response:

"How funny you think that diplomat’s don’t put themselves into harm’s way while serving the country they love."




2/9

re: "The New Old Europe"

Victor Davis Hanson at Private Papers ("Victor Davis Hanson ON THE WEB") shared the big picture about Europe.

Money quote(s):

"Nearly ten years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provoked outrage by referring to “Old Europe.” How dare he, snapped the French and Germans, call us “old” when the utopian European Union was all the rage, the new euro was soaring in value, and the United States was increasingly isolated under the Bush administration."

My how times change. Or remain the same. Or something. Whatever.

"The island of Britain is, and is not, a part of Europe — carefully pulling out when things heat up, terrified that it will be pulled back in when things boil over. British prime minister David Cameron knows the old script well, as he adamantly and publicly insists that Great Britain is still a part of the crumbling European Union while privately assuming that it is not." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Great Britain remains in the increasingly minority (at least in the western part of the EU), party of those nation-state who are part of the EU but not part of the "common currency." Unlike many other countries, the UK just couldn't seem to part with its legacy monetary unit, the pound sterling.

(Given the size and importance of London's financial sector within the British economy, this was a supremely rational decision for them to have taken.)

"No need to mention the German “problem”: Whether the year was 1870, 1914, 1939, or 2011, Europeans always have feared a united Germany, whose people, for a variety of cultural reasons, produce more wealth than the nation’s size might otherwise suggest."

Hmm. It's not like Prof. Hanson to sugar-coat or beat-around-the-bush. For the first three dates (of four), the "problem" with Germany wasn't so much it's economic reach but it's military one. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad no one's (not even the Greeks, for all their public hysterics) actually worried about German militarism anymore. That's, mostly, a really good thing.

"(T)he more France talks of the glory of Gallic culture, the more it seeks to restrain its too-powerful next-door neighbor or, in humiliating fashion, seeks to appease Germany."

France has issues. It takes, approximately, the same bipolar approach to its immigration (and immigrant community) problems.

"The squabbling European family has always feared two great rivals — Russia and radical Islam. From 1453 through the 18th century, Europe lived in fear of the Ottomans, who twice reached the gates of Vienna. Huge European armies invaded Russia twice, and both Napoleon and Hitler destroyed their own empires in their failed attempts at preemption. Russia occupied half of Europe for almost a half-century and now tries to leverage with gas and oil what it used to with missiles and tanks. Europe is as dependent on the oil of Muslim nations as it is terrified of millions of new Islamic immigrants." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Frankly, until those "(h)uge European armies invaded Russia twice," I'm not sure that Central and Western Europe had much reason to fear Muscovy.

(Which doesn't fully apply to Eastern Europe.)

But if you poke the bear enough times, he will come after you.

(CAA wrote an [unclassified] paper not that long ago about Russia's use of its economic leverage, particularly in the "near abroad" as a more subtle exercise of national power than how they used to roll. So I don't exactly disagree with Prof. Hanson's point here.)

(Digression: My professor said "I disagree with your analysis but I like your reasoning.")

"After the Revolutionary War, Europeans both flocked to America and damned it as uncouth and crass, even as they looked to it for money and military help. Nothing has much changed here either, despite the utopian pronouncements of the European Union"

Not only for money and military help. America was a target for investment. Rich Europeans could buy land, companies, stocks, and they were safe, at least from the American government. Their value might rise and fall (as investments do), but unless they (like Germany or Japan) actually went to war with us, their properties were safe. Never nationalized.

(IIRC, when British investments were seized in the U.S. during one, or both, of the World Wars, it was the British government which did it, to raise hard currency.)

"Like clockwork every few decades, some self-described European “visionaries” swear that the continent can either live in peace under utopian protocols or, more darkly, be united under one grand — and undemocratic — system, willingly or not. But for all the noble pretensions of the Congress of Vienna and the European Union — and the nightmarish spread of Napoleon’s Continental System and the Third Reich — and for all the promises of European-born fascism, Communism, and socialism, the result is always the same: disunion, acrimony, and infighting.

That schizophrenia is what we should expect from dozens of cultures and histories squeezed into too small a continent full of lots of bright — and quite proud — people. Every new Europe always ends up as old Europe."

1/2