"I think they are all homosexual communists in Satan's army...I espect as well they all live together and bathe together every morning and have the anal sex with one another, with the fisting and the guinea pigs." - Manuel Estimulo
"I can never quite tell if the defeatists are conservative satirists poking fun at the left or simply retards. Or both. Retarded satire, perhaps?" - Kyle
"You're an effete fucktard" - Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom
"This is the most pathetic blog ever..." - Ames Tiedeman
"You two [the Rev and el Comandante] make an erudite pair. I guess it beats thinking." - Matt Cunningham (aka Jubal) of OC Blog
"Can someone please explain to me what the point is behind that roving gang of douchebags? I’m being serious here. It’s not funny, and doesn’t really make anything that qualifies as logical argument. Paint huffers? Drunken high school chess geeks?" - rickinstl
While I have not yet read Masha Gessen's The Brothers, her investigation into how the Boston Marathon Bombing happened and what followed, her column in the New York Times this morning is well worth the time to read and think about for a while. Trials are usually unsatisfactory in that they focus on the guilt or innocence of the defendant. That is what the law is for. Why something happened and how it came to happen is where the problem gets more complicated, and yet gets us closer to the reality, to the thing itself. As she says:
"There are other questions, big and small. But these two are clearly essential to understanding what went wrong in Boston two years ago. Yet in the course of the trial they were barely discussed. Arguably, they shouldn’t have been. An American criminal trial is designed to assess guilt and administer justice, not to look for truth — and truth and justice are not synonymous. Sadly, other authorities have also failed to fully account for what happened or what can be done to prevent it from happening again."
Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and author. She is both Jewish by heritage if not by practice and a lesbian. Her parents brought her to the US during one of the periods when the Soviets allowed Jews to emigrate to Israel, and she holds dual-citizenship. She returned to Russia in the early 90s when it looked like perhaps things were going to achieve some sort of positive democracy and pluarlistic Society. Obviously, that didn't happen.
Both as a journalist and as an activist, Gessen was active covering demonstrations and problems in Putin's Russia. She adopted a child with her partner, and they were happy. However, she began to find herself feeling alienated from her homeland, and found that she had problems keeping jobs and getting freelance assignments in Russia. She wrote an exceptional book about President Putin which raised her FSB profile I suspect. She then chronicled the Pussy Riot debacle, both advocating for the women and placing their actions in context. Ultimately, about two years ago as the homophobia in Russia hit crescendos similar to the 1813 Overture and the government became more and more unfriendly toward any dissent, she brought her family back to the United States. Long a contributor to the Times, which is where I first encountered her, she writes a monthly piece on the Op-Ed page as well as writing for The Guardian and other serious publications.
I strongly recommend her work here and on Pussy Riot and on Putin as Autocrat to anyone who is interested in and open-minded about what's happening in that most troubling and confusing nation.
I went to see the doctor of philosophy With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee He never did marry or see a B-grade movie He graded my performance, he said he could see through me I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper And I was free. -- Ray and Saliers
When I turn to philosophy and pick up a new work, the technical stuff makes me think that perhaps the idea to burn the Great Library of Alexandria was not such a bad one after all. Langugae that serves only to drive the potential reader away deserves to be forgotten. Of course, doctoral disseratations don't succeed so much by provoking new thought as by providing variations on an accepted theme of bullshit. The great thinkers succeed in reaching us by doing other things that producing tomes suitable more for tombs that thought, realization and excited discussion.
Daniel Dennett is an interesting and provocative thinker; while I like his simile about human beings as "moist robots", he seems here to be edging away from that. The robot part takes us so far, and then there's an entirely different set of functions,problems and issues. Two things I liked here is the issue of intentionality -- free will requires philosophical intention, that is, conscienious direction and awareness and it requires the ability to recognize and prevent manipulation. The moral actor has to go into situations with eyes wide open and a poker face. The other, which I think is implied, is that the initial reaction to radically new perspectives seems to be to regard it as either naive or cynical, until you think about it.
My other thought is simple. I find Dennett's technical philosophy, the neuroscientist-philosopher stuff incomprehensible, but when he writes or speaks to communicate with actual living people, he's very good indeed. Is that a trend? Crispin's thought is much the same way, although since he doesn't babble about neurons and synapses and blood volume and all the rest, he's more approachable. Sartre was the same way -- you can read "Being and Nothingness", or you can read "The Words" or "No Exit and three Plays" and the first will drive you to distraction, solitary despair and isolated absinthe sucking through a sugar cube; the others will engage, provoke conversastion and maybe...cause thought.
Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war.Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: War is such a dangerousbusiness that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst. --Clausewitz
So, not much happened. Congress is willing to abdicate authority again; President “Beware of Unintended Consequences” warns of unintended consequences if we do act, or if we don’t. Talking heads ask irrelevant questions and focus the discussion on the acts of terrorism against individuals. My fellow Holy Cross alum Chris Matthews worries, no agonizes, that if we attack ISIL that they’ll behead more of our people. We’re not really engaged in the War of Jenkins Ear and the fate of one American or two is not justification to kill thousands. It might be good, if we were good and never evil, to say with Lord Palmerston that in today’s world being an American provides some level of extraterritorial protection. “Civis Romanis Sum!” or “I am a Roman citizen “meant a lot in the time of Caesar, Diocletian, Marcus Aurelius and so on.
What is true is that ISIL’s tactics represent a really horrific turn toward the Dark Ages. Bill Mahar was on Matthew’s show tonight, and responding to a Republican complaint that “Gee, Obama has been President for six years, so you can’t blame Bush for what’s going on now!” with a bit weary shock at the stupidity of people. “That’s six years and that’s what we’re going to use as a measure? This has been going on since the 7th Century.!” Mahar pointed out that as a nation we’re not really all that well informed, learning our history and geography by the wars we fight. I tend to agree with Harry Reid that the resurgence of Dick Cheney as the Republican Oracle on Foreign Policy in the middle East is terrifying.
It seems that the President is keeping it all very fine, seemingly well calibrated. I have a T-Shirt on at the moment with the formula for Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Theorem on It. The theorem which along with Schrodinger’s cat is what makes us think Quantum Physics is really DA Bomb! as opposed to tired old Newton’s approach, is fairly simple to state : The closer something is observed, the harder it is to describe accurately or to predict. Specifically, that the more accurately you know a particle’s position, the harder it is to know it’s momentum and vice versa. This President tends to be a guy who measures efforts in terms of a micrometer but doesn’t seem to get it that the target keeps moving and it’s really squirrelly up close. I prefer a President who thinks about the things he thinks about, but this measure it with a micrometer and then turn it over to someone else to mark with chalk and then cut the wood with an axe doesn’t really satisfy. Isn’t there a hacksaw or something around to do that?
Matthews had a good point during post speech autopsy on MSNBC, that he heard the necessary steps from the President, but didn’t hear the sufficient ones. Mahar said earlier that he thought the President was going to be in a bind because most Americans are ignorant and don’t pay attention. Both were right and we know it. This is a complicated issue and between Ukraine, ISIL, NATO, the fate of the Wild Cards in the Two Baseball Leagues, the problem of whether it’s worse to choke and kill a dog or beat up your fiancé and on and on and on, how the hell are we supposed to think about this?
Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. -- Clausewitz
OK, here’s my take: It’s really pretty simple –
ISIL is the modern equivalent of a gang of pirates plundering and looting the seas. If you claim to be a nation, you need to do something about it.
The fact that the seriously local problem of the Islamic schism between Shi’a and Sunni has empowered a gang of murderous thugs to kill, torture, rape, plunder, blackmail and anything else they want to do – understand they turn left on red and spit on the sidewalk – and the Islamic world is capable only of hand wringing says a lot about the Islamic world. Monolithic it ain’t.
The 475 military personnel sounds suspiciously like a Ranger Battalion with a beefed up Ranger Support Element and Intelligence people. Or, possibly a SF battalion with massive augmentation. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you’re familiar with these guys and what they can, you’re talking a major battle changer.
Oh, they’ll train and advise and shoot and call in artillery and air and do everything else that leaders should do because they’ll be leading and training and advising by doing. That’s what they do. “This is how to blow up a bridge. Now let’s go blow up a bridge.” ‘This is how to laze a target for a drone. Let’s go laze a target or ten.” During Vietnam, there was a corps level organization, Military Assistance Command Vietnam that did just this. Read over Col Jack Jacobs MOH citation to get idea of what training in this kind of environment means.
Air power doesn’t win ground wars. If it did, we won in Vietnam. We didn’t win. If it does, the Israeli amputation of the Egyptian and Syrian and Jordanian Air Forces in 1967 mean that they didn’t have a ground war. They had a very vicious ground war, and a lot of the problems we have there now, come from that Israeli victory.
The Kurds are good fighters as are the Turks. But, I suspect that the Saudis and the rest will sit on their hands and wait for the US and Britain and France to clean this up. Which in a war based on real good gunfights, we could. But, those wars tend not to happen so much any more. We’ll win; and we’ll get to do it all over again.
We need to get a good choke collar on our client states, especially Israel and keep them on a tight leash. Now, we need to start doing that anyway to minimize horrors like the latest atrocities in Gaza using this struggle as a distraction and excuse. But the first time a major Islamic leader with some clout decides to pull a Karzai or a Malaki and bitch about the USA, the allies, or any of their other nonsense, either we leave the theatre with a soldier’s farewell or they leave office to spend more time with their families, and don’t come out until it’s over.
So, we’ll see. I think this is not what we want to do, or ought to do, or need to do. It’s something that we have to do, and Obama’s outline makes a lot of sense. However, Clausewitz’s disciple Moltke the Elder was pretty clear, “No plan survives the initial contact with the enemy”. In this case, we are engaging in a war with a partisan war and an election that nobody wants to jinx. So, get out the popcorn and the beer and enjoy the show. See if you can get some bets down with the bookies in England and Dublin and New Zealand.
Getting the Damned Dogs of War Back in the Kennel –Trying to Retake the Moral High Ground, If Anyone Cares
It's hard times in the new milleniumGettin' by on just the bare minimum
Everything to lose and nothing to spare Going to hell and nobody cares
Ain't the future that Kennedy promised me In the 21st century
Finally come to the age of Aquarius And if we live through the Mayan apocalypse
There'll be pie in the sky above lemonade springs
A goddamn American utopian dream
If you believe that, you're more optimistic than me--Steve Earle
You know, events overwhelm me at times and the on-going military crises-circuses we have blasting around the world make my getting a handle on them especially difficult. It occurs to me, however, that the old Buffalo Springfield line about “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear/ There’s a man with a gun over there, Telling me I got to beware’ really telling in the 21st Century.
If you caught the John Oliver Show, Last Week Tonight, on July 27, you caught an excellent piece on the utterly screwed up US Nuclear Program. While the problems with officer morale and performance, failure to do systems maintenance or upgrades, and general nuttiness – talking about an Air Force General who was relieved for a variety of things culminating on his activities on a trip to Russia where he was pretty much continually drunk on his ass, Oliver pointed out that he’d been “too drunk for the Russians…the Russians!” Telling of one escapade when the general demanded that his staff accompany him to a Mexican Restaurant because he wanted to see the Beatles cover band there and then got them basically thrown out for demanding to be allowed to play guitar in the band, Oliver pointed out that we should consider the chain of bad decisions leading up to that event – drunk, in a Mexican Restaurant in Russia someplace, vomiting a half-eaten Chimichanga over the drum kit of a White Russian Ringo. Of course, his boss – a Vice Admiral -- had been relieved for trying to use counterfeit chips in a tribal casino in Council Bluff, Iowa. Oliver again pointed out that any Vice Admiral should be smarter than an Iowa Pit Boss.
The most telling point in the bit was a brief segment of Colin Powell saying that after 30 years of involvement with the planning, deployment and potential use of nuclear weapons, he had become convinced that they were useless. So, we have over 4800 of these things, capable of blowing ourselves and everyone else to ash, and we can neither protect, maintain, nor figure out a rationale for them.
Reminds me of the old Davy Crockett jeep mounted nuke – you’d orient the jeep so that you were facing away from the target with the missile pointed out the back of the trailer, light it off and drive like hell to try and get out of the blast zone…what exactly was the genius who invented it thinking?
Well, one thing he was thinking was that the actual use of the thing wasn’t his problem. When Generals and Colonels talk about the strategic corporals, they’re thinking that that two-striper is going to be doing their job and “Ain’t it Great?” However, the most critical tool for that grunt’s ruck sack, a strong moral compass, is probably missing, broken or poorly designed.
The United States Army used to be proud of its moral stance. We didn’t torture prisoners, we liberated them. We didn’t kill children, we fed them. We didn’t kill civilians, we freed, fed, clothed and took care of them. Somewhere that went wrong. We held ourselves up as a role model, and some people paid attention. That ethic matched where they were at – the IDF, for example, prided itself on minimizing collateral damage and civilian casualties. And then, they also lost the way.
There’s an interesting article in The Guardian this morning. Yuli Novak is a former pilot and operations officer in the Israeli Air Force, and she comments that when she was a young captain, the Israel Defense Forces prided themselves on being the “most moral military in the world.” She describes an incident where the Israeli Air Force employed a 1000 pound bomb on a house in Gaza to take out a Hamas military commander. She says that it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to consider what that weapon did to the building and the target. They killed him, but they also killed twelve civilians including eight children. She describes the outcome this way:
After the assassination, Israel shook. Even when the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) insisted that there was operational justification for the attack, public sentiment could not accommodate this assault on innocent civilians. Israeli intellectuals petitioned the supreme court, demanding it examine the legality of this action. A few months later a group of reservist pilots criticised such elimination actions....As soldiers and officers used to carrying out our missions without asking unnecessary questions, we were affected by the public reaction…my friends and I trusted our commanders to make the right moral decisions, and returned our focus to the “important things” – the precise execution of further operations.
She goes on to point out that such trust is utterly impossible today. She sees what’s happening in the Gaza Strip as nothing less than a series of war crimes originating at the operational planning level, with no effort to minimize casualties, collateral damage and maintain the moral high ground. Israel Armed Forces are to her mind no longer able to claim any moral suasion; they have become as amoral as any other invading force and are engaging in things that remind her of the SS or the Red Army rampaging in Eastern Europe.
Interestingly, she places the responsibility for regaining a moral force not on the shoulders of the military but on the public. That in fact makes a lot of sense in Israel, where everyone serves except those religiously exempt. Those exempt are largely the most bloodthirsty, which is something I find amusing, of course. In a nation that sees itself as living in a continual state of Total War, those most reluctant to find a peaceful solution are a permanent class of REMFs. Anyway, Novak sees it as a public as well as a military challenge:
I know how hard it is to ask questions during times of conflict as a soldier. The information that the officers get in real time is always partial. That’s why the responsibility for drawing the red lines, and alerting when we cross it, lies with the public. A clear, loud voice that says that bombing a house with civilians in it is immoral must be heard. These killings cannot be accepted without question. Public silence in the face of such actions – inside and outside of Israel – is consent by default, and acceptance of an unacceptable price.
Novak is now the Executive Director of “Breaking the Silence” an organization of Israeli veterans who have served during and since the Intifada and want to educate the Israeli public as to what the military is doing in their name. I find that admirable, and rather similar to a lot of what we do over at Veterans Today. I’m hoping they are more successful. But, I’m not terribly confident in either case.
One of the problems that we face is the inability to define end-states. What exactly is the end state for Israel and the Palestinians? What is the end state of our involvement in Iran or Afghanistan? What do the Russians want to accomplish in Ukraine? What do the separatists want to accomplish; what do the Ukrainians want to accomplish? If you have some sort of idea as to where you want to go, you might get there. But otherwise, you’ll get wherever you end up, and it will undoubtedly be pretty lousy.
For example, as I was writing this, news broke that the Israeli Air Force has targeted a hospital and a park where children were playing. Israel denies this, claiming that Hamas had hit these targets due to malfunctioning rockets. Frankly, I don't care -- my initial reaction was that the targeting team at IAF HQ was operating off some intelligence that the hospital was being used for storing rockets and ammunition, and that the kids playing in the park were really Taliban soldiers training on the monkey bars.
Based on the casualty data available from the Gaza authorities, I tend to think the Israeli story is probably correct, but the result will remain; they are already convicted in world opinion. This is really madness --
Convergence of Liberal, Moderate and Conservative Writers Agreeing on Iraq
Universe Coming to an End!
Mike Farrell, Veterans Today Columnist, Futurist and Socratic ProvocateurI haven't been writing a lot lately, largely because events in areas that I'm interested in are moving so fast that any comment by me would be overtaken by events almost before I could complete a sentence. A great case in point is the situation in Iraq. At some point, people will stop, look at each other and say, "Joe Biden was right!" about the loose federation concept. Same approach might work for Afghanistan since that place is made up of groups of people who really hate each other; geographic divisions might at least let them cluster into bombs of intolerance and rage which could be turned inward. It's a thought.
But, when I initially saw the excerpts from Pope Francis' interview with a Spanish magazine and then tracked down the complete text, I figured that it along with several other articles, should be tossed into the intellectual cauldron at Veterans Today and anyplace else that will have me.
What I'm seeing is a weird convergence of thought on the role of America in the 21st Century and the role of thought. There were some great columns in the weekend's NY Times and then the inimitable Ana Marie Cox had a marvelous insight over at The Guardian. When Friedman, Douthat, Kristoff, Cox and the Pope are all basically saying the same thing, maybe we ought to listen. Now, to steal a phrase from Molly Ivins, it's probably too much to hope that the Congress-critters obsessed with a misunderstood version of machismo and "American Exceptionalism" can drag their heads away from looking at their own prostates, but as citizens perhaps we should.
Pope Francis first: In many ways, he is really the most interesting man in the world as opposed to a guy from Queens who sometimes drinks Dos Equis. Bit by bit, he's chiseling away at the accrued bat guano of greed, insanity, power and privilege stretching back to the Milvian Bridge and Constantine's vision. Helluva challenge; since I don't believe in God, I can't see him succeeding ultimately but as one of his predecessors as prince of Rome, Marcus Aurelius wrote, "Any improvement, no matter how small,is no mean accomplishment." Besides, how can you not find interesting someone who in his position can say something like this, when asked about his legacy..."I have not thought about it, but I like it when someone remembers someone and says: “He was a good guy, he did what he could. He wasn’t so bad.” I’m OK with that." I have trouble imagining recent popes saying anything like that or using common language, or, for that matter, having the interview in the first place. Popes are diplomatic, slow and deliberate; Francis is gentle, quick thinking and open.
The interview is worth reading but his comment on fundamentalism is critical, and extends further than he perhaps consciously intended. Responding to the interviewer on the issue of faith-based violence in the world and the nature of fundamentalism in the world, he said this, which should be required posting on all political, religious, economic and social magazine mastheads. Not, of course, that anyone pays attention to the masthead anymore...
Violence in the name of God dominates the Middle East. It's a contradiction. Violence in the name of God does not correspond with our time. It's something ancient. With historical perspective, one has to say that Christians, at times, have practiced it. When I think of the Thirty Years War, there was violence in the name of God. Today it is unimaginable, right? We arrive, sometimes, by way of religion to very serious, very grave contradictions. Fundamentalism, for example. The three religions, we have our fundamentalist groups, small in relation to all the rest. And, what do you think about fundamentalism? A fundamentalist group, although it may not kill anyone, although it may not strike anyone, is violent. The mental structure of fundamentalists is violence in the name of God.
Now, I think it's worth noting that Christians continue to practice fundamentalism in various places and times. But, the nature of fundamentalism is the idea of absolute adherence to established doctrine, and the elimination of any dissent from that doctrine. The nature of violence is such that it can be intrinsic as well as extrinsic, psychological as well as physical, social as well as military. My old friend Mary E. Hunt, co-founder and Executive Director of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) has written repeatedly of the intrinsic, economic and psychological violence directed against women and the LGBT communities in the Catholic Church specifically.
However, we see fundamentalism at work in the Republican Party, where the Tea Party has its own thought police run by Glenn, Rush, Laura and Annie, Sean and Bill. When politicians talk about litmus tests for the Supreme Court or for nominations for office, they are reacting to a form of fundamentalism. The idea that there are multiple sides to issues simply doesn't compute with these folks.
Of course, what we see in Iraq today is a conflict over a different view of fundamentalism. The Sunni fundamentalism of ISIS and al Quaida is matched by Shiite fundamentalism of Maliki and Iran. Now, this is in many ways the old Churchill dilemma of putting nations where what we're really dealing with are tribes with flags, or tribes forced into flags. Interestingly, the religious argument between them has it's roots not in the Holy Koran but rather in the succession of the Caliphs in the 7th Century. Everything else springs from that -- clerics, politicians and people in general feel fine with slaughtering each other over what in fact is a conflict over the drawing of an org chart but doing so in the name of God.
Now, Christianity has had it's share of these orgies of blood, hate, bile, and self-satisfaction. But, over centuries the perpetrators of such insanity on the violence side have been marginalized. However, what religion has done in Iraq is cover for tribalism. The middle east is really a number of ethnic groups largely captured by a single religion with multiple warring denominations and agendas that are fine-tuned with regional, ethnic, and socio-historic divisions. The US has responded to it as if it's a collaborative of rational actors, in sort of a geo-political application of the idea of rational markets. So, not only are we using the wrong mental model to look at the area, we're using a mental model that doesn't work. What could possibly go wrong with that sort of intellectual foundation? Besides everything?
It's rare that I can read Tom Friedman without having my eyeballs bleed. However, in his column on Sunday, Friedman was perceptive, reasonable and direct; we have no dog in the Iraq fight except the dog we've largely ignored. He writes:
... in Iraq today, my enemy’s enemy is my enemy. Other than the Kurds, we have no friends in this fight. Neither Sunni nor Shiite leaders spearheading the war in Iraq today share our values.
The Sunni jihadists, Baathists and tribal militiamen who have led the takeover of Mosul from the Iraqi government are not supporters of a democratic, pluralistic Iraq, the only Iraq we have any interest in abetting. And Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has proved himself not to be a friend of a democratic, pluralistic Iraq either. From Day 1, he has used his office to install Shiites in key security posts, drive out Sunni politicians and generals and direct money to Shiite communities. In a word, Maliki has been a total jerk. Besides being prime minister, he made himself acting minister of defense, minister of the interior and national security adviser, and his cronies also control the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry. Maliki had a choice — to rule in a sectarian way or in an inclusive way — and he chose sectarianism. We owe him nothing.
He goes on to discuss the two places that are in fact working well in the region: the Kurdish region in Iraq and Tunisia, pointing out that we've pretty much left these areas to their own devices while we've been being "geo-political" somewhere else. They have functioning, somewhat inclusive and effective governments, and the people aren't trying to kill each other. They reflect in so much as any Islamic nation can those values of Jeffersonian Democracy that we had planned to impose on the region by forcing them on Iraq and then having a "thousand blossoms bloom." From this, Friedman comes to an interesting revelation: it's not about the US or the West or Russia and the Geo-Political stuff we love so much. It's about the people of the region. As he says, "Arabs and Kurds have efficacy too..."
This leads him to another major insight:
The Middle East only puts a smile on your face when it starts with them — when they take ownership of reconciliation. Please spare me another dose of: It is all about whom we train and arm. Sunnis and Shiites don’t need guns from us. They need the truth. It is the early 21st century, and too many of them are still fighting over who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad from the 7th century. It has to stop — for them, and for their kids, to have any future.
Friedman then wonders about Iran, and comes to the conclusion that the Iranians who plotted with Maliki to get us out so they could "help" weren't quite so smart. They're looking at a long, involved period of support in a nasty, sectarian civil war with the inherent explicit and implicit costs as opposed to having US and NATO propping up their henchmen in Baghdad. Interesting issue, and one that I find very ironic. I envision the US and some other nations providing logistical, intelligence and related support to a largely Iranian "Peace Keeping" force for a long time. If we're smart, we'll get Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Dubai to pay for it along with the Iranians; that's probably a bit to Jesuitical for the State Department and Congress, but it makes a lot of sense.
Friedman finishes on a very high level of perception, especially for him. He surveys the situation, and asks a couple of very telling questions and gives a somewhat unexpected answer for someone usually so conflicted about Iraq and the Islamic world.
Finally, while none of the main actors in Iraq, other than Kurds, are fighting for our values, is anyone there even fighting for our interests: a minimally stable Iraq that doesn’t threaten us? And whom we can realistically help? The answers still aren’t clear to me, and, until they are, I’d be very wary about intervening.
I think that Friedman has the root of a new US doctrine of global involvement; if you're not fighting for something that fits in our values or in our true strategic interests we shouldn't consider getting involved. And, if we can't figure out a good way to help effectively, we shouldn't get involved either. I'm a retired soldier and an activist by nature, but after 63 years I've finally learned that there's no need to save the bad guys from destroying themselves by uniting everyone against US! Be nice if we all learned that...sometimes we're the windshield, but we can always make like the bug if we're not careful.
Peters was accused by some of flacking for the Pentagon, which given Peters relationship with the Defense establishment is kind of funny, that he had drawn the map the way the US wanted it redrawn. Actually, as Douthat points out, Peters felt and still feels that US policy makers have a vested interest in keeping the old Franco-British lines in effect, and he thinks that's stupid. Douthat agrees, and has a clear, concise and effective argument as to why but shows the rational side of letting the status quo stands.
While the USA values diversity and inclusion, the facts don't belie that. In Europe, the tendency has been toward exclusive states; states that are more cosmopolitan in their makeup -- Yugoslavia, the Austria-Hungary Empire, the Ottoman Empire -- have largely failed and been split. More coherence has allowed for more national identity and success and what we observe in Europe is the result of several generations of Ethnic Cleansing and two World Wars. While it might make sense to redraw the map in western Asia and North Africa, Douthat points out that process is not going to be peaceful and believes it's underway now. Are we ready for generations of bloodshed and chaos to get there? In the long run, perhaps we should be, but it's always worth remembering that in the long run, we're all dead. Douthat writes:
This was true even of the most ambitious (and foolhardy) architects of the Iraq invasion, who intended to upset a dictator-dominated status quo ... but not, they mostly thought, in a way that would redraw national boundaries. Instead, the emphasis was on Iraq’s potential for post-Saddam cohesion, its prospects as a multiethnic model for democratization and development. That emphasis endured through the darkest days of our occupation, when the voices calling for partition — including the current vice president, Joe Biden — were passed over and unity remained America’s strategic goal.
This means that Iraq is now part of an arc, extending from Hezbollah’s fiefdom in Lebanon through war-torn Syria, in which official national borders are notional at best. And while full dissolution is not yet upon us, the facts on the ground in Iraq look more and more like Peters’s map than the country that so many Americans died to stabilize and secure...Our basic interests have not altered: better stability now....But two successive administrations have compromised those interests: one through recklessness, the other through neglect. Now the map is changing; now, as in early-20th-century Europe, the price of transformation is being paid in blood.
Douthat is one of the more conservative writers on the Times OP-ED and he takes the opportunity there to take a slap at the Obama administration. Since I have a different lens and see this as the fruits of an absurd policy to begin with, I think his analysis is dead wrong. You deal with reality as it is, not as you wish it could be and demanding doesn't make it so. The US may have wooed the Sunni warlords during the Surge but in reality, we were all in on the Shiites, and they wanted us out. And so we left and here we are. Ana Marie Cox seems to think that was not only inevitable but a good idea.
Cox is an interesting writer. She started the satirical blog Wonkette, worked for Time starting their Swampland Blog while covering the McCain Palin campaign; she left Time and worked briefly for Air America before that enterprise cratered; wrote a blog and column for Gentleman's Quarterly and since 2011 has been a correspondent, blogger and columnist for The Guardian. My theory is that she no longer appears on the Rachel Maddow show because of the famous "tea bagger" incident where she reduced Maddow to blushing giggles and tears. She still appears on the rest of MSNBC.
She remains unapologetic about her progressive tendencies and while less whimsical, she continues to write with clarity and fairness. In her column on June 15, she discusses the Republican complaint about Obama's imprecise and indirect foreign policy; while seeing substance in the complaint, she looks at it in a different way, that at the moment vague imprecision the best policy for the US and complaints apart, the only one the nation really wants.
Cox has the same yearning for clear choices and a certain trumpet that many on the right argue for but, she points out very lucidly, we really need to be careful in what we wish for. Iraq is a mess, largely of our own making and we need to step carefully, not ape Uncle Teddy in Arsenic and Old Lace, charging down the stairs to bury more laborers on the Panama Canal in the basement. Rather, she asks us to remember how we got into that mess in the first place.
But let's remember the way we got in too deep: it wasn't by underestimating the threat Iraq posed to US interests, it was byoverestimating it. "Overestimating" may even be too generous. We created a threat when there was none, not out of whole cloth so much as a web of pride, avarice and insecurity. Obama's haters on the right – and maybe even some formerly hawkish apologists on the left – need a refresher course on just how much of the Iraq invasion hinged on ego and imagined taunts.... That the Bush administration misled the American people about the reasons for invading Iraq is now all but common knowledge; what we talk about less is why Americans were moved so easily from concern about possible attacks from overseas into almost pornographic nationalism. Clearly, we were intoxicated by some heady perfume of testosterone and saddle leather that pulled along George W Bush by the nose. When the Iraq war began, nearly 80% of Americans thought it was a good idea.Almost as many approved of how the president was handling it. Irrational exuberance is not just for markets. How we have sobered since then!
Cox points out that governments are not people, and that the mechanisms of government are supposed to grind slowly, not jump on the first impulsive concept that comes to mind. She believes that Republicans think that Americans want smaller government, by which they understand governments that act like people. Fortunately, that isn't possible. T
he more we expect government to produce magic beans capable of solving some immediate problem, the less capable the government ultimately is to respond to the next one. Using the economic analogy again, if the rational actor in the marketplace is your drunken uncle Bernie or schizo cousin Pearl, you can't trust the market to make rational decisions. Thus in government -- the idea that, as some Republicans claim, the administration considers all options and chooses none strikes her as superior to the alternative -- grabbing the first option that fits you underlying desires whether or not it's going to be effective and going all in on it.
Cox sees an almost metaphysical transformation in the American electorate. After Bush, as a group we no longer see the President as the personification of the state. Part of that is probably due to the difference in attitude, intellect, personality and race between this President and most of his predecessors. A large part of it is due to the results of the Iraq invasion; as a people, we're sick of conflict with no end, no logic, no goals and no plausible outcome. Leaving Iraq was inevitable and Maliki screwed himself because he made out exit so abrupt and complete; Afghanistan will probably be slower but still, inevitable. The Islamic world will figure it out or not. As Cox says with much the same insight as Friedman and Douthat, and the Pope, "It is most certainly a function of having seen so many lives lost, but the American people are comfortable with inaction. Barack Obama's foreign policy is less of a doctrine than a stance – guarded but cautious, careful but alert ... just like us."
The news that the United Auto Workers lost a union election at a Nashville VW plant has sent the labor movement into something of a what the hell just happened spin. Unfortunately, I think that the results were preordained, back in about 1863. We have an interesting history in this country of well meaning northerners going into the backward and dirty south to enlighten these poor sons and daughters of Dixie, and it just doesn't work because the Northerners aren't trusted and the track record hasn't been all that great.
Hell, the post-union industrialization of the South wasn't by VW but it was by Northern Manufacturers who realized that they could make a lot more money moving steel from Pittsburgh to Birmingham and screw the workers in Birmingham a lot less than they were being screwed by their own boss class, but screw them a lot more than they were screwing over their own workers in the North. One might write an interesting history of American Expansion and Exception as a race to exploit the more easily exploited at cost to the somewhat less exploited. Now, the industrialization of the South screwed over a lot of people, and the big companies took the blame; it was possible to find Southern bosses and they did. Reconstruction ultimately turned out OK for the Southerners although not ideal from their point of view; hence the 100 year affiliation to the Democratic party although not necessarily the party of Roosevelt and Johnson but something else entirely.
Corn in the fields. Listen to the rice when the wind blows 'cross the water, King Harvest has surely come I work for the union 'cause she's so good to me; And I'm bound to come out on top, That's where she said I should be I will hear every word the boss may say, For he's the one who hands me down my pay Looks like this time I'm gonna get to stay, I'm a union man, now, all the way The smell of the leaves, From the magnolia trees in the meadow, King Harvest has surely come -- Robbie Robertson, the Band
Billy Yank and Johnny Reb compare resumes There's a wonderful moment in Gettysburg when an Officer of the 2oth Maine is talking with some Southern prisoners, primarily with a private. It's pretty interesting in that I think it's incredibly real and captures something that we miss at times. They ask each other where they're from, and the Rebel says, "Tennessee. How about you?" The Yank says, "Maine. I've never been to Tennessee." The Reb says, "Don't reckon I've ever been to Tennesse either." The Yank officer says, " I don't mean no disrespect about you all fighting, but I have to wonder, what are you fighting for?" Reb private responds, "What are you fighting for?" Yank responds, "Why to free the slaves, of course. Preserve the union." Reb says, "I can't talk for anyone else, but I don't care about no darkies one way or the other. I'm fightin' for my Raaattts." Yank has no clue what he means, and says "What?" Rebel says, "My Raattts. That's what all of us are fighting for." The conversation continues, they agree that the war is an awful thing, they wish it was over and the Rebel admits to some acceptance that since he's a prisoner, he'll get to sit the rest of it out. They wish each other good luck and say "See you in Hell, Billy Yank." "See you in Hell, Johnny Reb." And one marches off to prison camp, and the other to Little Round Top.
If people like the UAW realized what that private was telling us and them, and what the scene was telling us, they might have been far more successful. First of all, we have radically different understandings of why we do things and what we're doing. Lots of reasons for that, and I've talked about some of them before. But, we don't understand each other -- the UAW can talk about industrial democracy and having a way to influence the company through the union; the Southerner doesn't understand Industrial Democracy (Of course, neither does the UAW) and since he knows his bosses, he trusts them. The VW plant management may not have been actively opposed to the union drive, but they've treated the workers well and haven't lied to them too much. The workers want to be left alone and allowed to work and be treated fairly. The Germans have done a good job of that. So...
Now, I've had a checkered career, and have talked to a lot of people over the years in a lot of professions, including those in State Workforce Development Programs. A few years ago at a Conference, I was chatting with fellow Vet who a honcho in the Alabama Workforce Development Department and a guy who was working in the South Carolina Workforce Development. They told both told me that BMW in South Carolina and Mercedes Benz in Alabama had far lower turnover, fewer problems, lower unemployment insurance rates and lower employee incidence of lawsuits than the Honda and Nissan plants in both states. The Alabama guy said the same thing about the Koreans and Hyundai. Far more success than Honda with their workers. The reasons were simple; the German and the Korean attitudes toward the workers and the resulting culture were really far more attractive. At Mercedes, the workers all basically dress the same on the floor -- the blue lab/worker coat that those of us who've spent time in Germany are familiar with. There is no reserved parking for the bosses, it's all first come/first serve except for handicapped parking. The example that they both shared vigorously was the subject of litter -- at the German and Korean plants, if one of the bosses passed some litter, he'd stop and pick it up, either put it in his pocket or toss it in the trash. No big deal. At the Japanese plants, it was the opposite; before a Japanese manager would pick up a piece of litter, he would go find an American to have him pick up the litter.
Consider that. As an occasional management consultant, I can tell you that outsiders offering opinions about all the crap " you all are doing wrong" doesn't work well -- "It's the stranger with a stopwatch, brief case asking to borrow your watch so they can break it"- syndrome built large.So, the UAW goes south. They pick a plant that generally has good relations with the workers and where the company sees a union on the German Works Council model as a way to have better relations and produce higher quality. However, the company wasn't doing the organizing drive; the UAW was. I trust Bob, but who the hell are you?
The key thing about the South is the importance of family. Since they've been so embattled over time and so battered by various outsiders who mean well, the importance of "kin" among working class Southerners is a key thing. I was trying to enforce some simple Army regulations and found myself accused while in exile with the Reserves in Texas of being " a goddamned outside Yankee agitator." I made a point of being culturally nonsensitive despite which I still managed to make some friends for whom I still care deeply. Last time I cried over someone's death who wasn't family was when I heard that the S3 Secretary in the Brigade I was assigned to died from cancer. But, I was there long enough to lead by example and develop some expert and referent power. Just show up and start preaching, especially about what "the union is going to do for you..." without that and the native Texan or Alabamian or Tennessean hears some Yankee saying, "We're gonna take your women, corn and horses, and there's nothing much you can do about it." If the meaning of the message is what the receiver hears, well, nothing much you can do about it by shouting it louder.
This isn't any different than the spirit that grows up in military units -- there's me, my team, my squad, my platoon and my company. Everybody else is the damn enemy until proven otherwise.
I knew this was going to happen, as did a lot of us. Theoretically, it was the stuff of public health discussions and philosophy of science and ethics for a long time. First clue that the end was coming was probably when MRSA became a big issue. But, a friend of mine with too much time on his hands Facebook-ed this earlier today with the note that it was time to start singing the doom song. Since he's a system administrator for start-ups by profession, he's used to everyone running around saying the world will end tomorrow...in this case, it might.
Another reality is there’s not much money to be made in making new antibiotics, so we saw a lot of drug companies who left the field of antibiotic development because of this combination of factors, that it was getting really hard to discover, to develop new antibiotics, and you don’t make a lot of money in selling these drugs, so the market really wasn’t there. …I can’t tell a patient who has a resistant infection, “If we can get you through this next six months or this next year, there’s going to be a great drug that’s coming.” Or I can’t tell oncologists, for example, “Well, six months from now we’re going to have therapies to offer you; we’re going to have something to combat these infections.”
The drugs aren’t there. And we know it takes a long time to get drugs from the development stage through testing and into the market. Right now, I can’t tell you when you’re going to have a new antibiotic to treat these highly resistant Gram negatives. The best I can say is it’s probably going to be several years, but I can’t point to one that’s in development and say, “We’re going to have that one in three years.”
There is a temptation to be snarky here. "We don't have effective antibiotics? No problem--get some turtle dung, eye of newt and blood of frog and go to town. Maybe some fire...yeah, lots of fire." Unfortunately, this is actually kind of real and is another reason why we should be spending a lot of taxpayer money on developing new therapies. Instead, the Rs are worrying about a bad software site. Bengazi. The fucking national debt that they exploded, TARP that they demanded. Here's the thing -- if we have a succession of plagues caused by diseases we could have treated but now can't, everyone is vulnerable. EVERYONE. The weaker and less healthy will get sick first, but everybody will be at serious risk. This demands a systemic response to which the Ryan-Boehner-Barton-McKeon response will be something along the lines of denial, blaming Obama, scheduling days of prayer and perhaps having Teddy Cruz's dad, the faith-healing Cuban minister (Santeria, anyone?) do some TV faith-healing. After all, it's OK in their minds to swear in to the Congress by TV?
Of course, the Randian-Markets are Magic crowd can indicate the cited interview. After all, this was on PBS, on Frontline. Commie bastards! And the guy in question is a government scientist. Pointy-headed, drone! A damn take wants us to worry...ok, how about the head of R&D from Pfizer, Dr. Charles Knirsch? The drugs aren't there. They're not even working on them...
Q. But did that mean that you had to close down the antibiotic thing to focus on vaccines? Why couldn’t you do both?
A. Oh, good question. And it’s not a matter of closing down antibiotics. We were having limited success. We had had antibiotics that we would get pretty far along, and a toxicity would emerge either before we even went into human testing or actually in human testing that would lead to discontinuation of those programs. Again, the science was difficult, and we have these other platforms, these vaccine platforms that are state of the art that we think that the prudent allocation of capital addressing very, very important medical need, we would devote the resources to those programs.
Q. So you decided essentially to shift the capital away from antibiotics and toward vaccine platforms.
A. Yes.
Q. And there were, according to people we’ve talked to, promising compounds at that time. You certainly had what some people described to us as the best and the brightest in the world working on some of these things at Pfizer. But you just said to me that there were problems with them and that there were difficulties, so I just wonder, was this program not the best and the brightest and one of the best in the world?
A. I don’t know which programs you’re referring to. Could you be more specific? Some of these programs right now haven’t even been moved into animal testing.
Now, I want any reader to understand this -- Pfizer is doing this not because they're greedy bastards, or at least, not solely because they are greedy bastards. They're doing because they see antibiotics as a dead end and they need to do something else which is going to require some hard and expensive research, development and clinical trials taking years. They didn't see the "return on innovation," and saw too much risk due to the difficulties of the science involved and the "uncertain regulatory pathways." In other words, things cost too much to do, too much risk of failure and then it just takes time to get a drug through testing, even if it's fast tracked. Should the new antibiotic cause serious side effects that outweigh the benefits, the legal liabilities are incredible. "So, get the divining rod out, Myrtle, we need to find a new well and different magic beans."
I'm honestly not knocking big Pharma so much as capitalism -- the unchecked Capitalism and greed advocated by the Republican Party of the "de-regulate, we're sorry BP, Enron didn't do anything wrong" era. Dr. Krnirsch speaks about public-private partnerships involving government research, universities and what really amounts to cross-fertilization between the various big and small pharmaceutical firms as scientists move between academe, government and business. Frankly, this is one place where the revolving door is not only not a problem for the nation, but where it works to our advantage. But, the fact is that scientific research is part of that "discretionary" funding thing shut down as non-essential during the latest Tea Party led unpleasantness. We're spending a lot less on pure science than we used to, and people like Palin, Cruz, Lee, Bachmann, Demint, Anne Coulter, Hannity and O'Reilly and so on delight in laughing at research studies and the boundary-less nature of what government has funded in the past.
Basic research costs more and more because it's less and less basic, and science is pretty much boundary-less by it's nature. If you are a PhD in biology specializing in primates, you have a deep understanding of math, statistics, chemistry, and some familiarity with physics, earth science and other more esoteric things besides how monkeys work.
Basic science and hard science is not something best left to the private sector because the private sector, even the hugely financially successful Pharmaceutical industry, is not designed to take on high risk, low return efforts.
The ideal drug for Pfizer is Viagra,which was initially developed as a tool for hypertension. The physiological effect of lowering blood pressure in the male reproductive organs those allowing better circulation was a side effect that became the reason for the drug's existence. As it came closer and closer to going off patent, Pfizer began to look at it as a mechanism for combating teenage hypertension. In fact, lower doses of the drug are marketed for some types of hypertension but are off patent; the primary money-making purpose for the drug is ED and those patents do not expire until 2019. However, there's nothing to prevent a physician from subscribing the lower dose and less expensive and possibly generic version for ED. They'd just have to prescribe multiple pills...When Canada allowed manufacture of generic Viagra, Pfizer countered by lowering the prices for the real stuff and then appealed saying that the Canadian legal system had erred. As a result, Canada invalidated all the patents on Viagra in Canada.
Scientific and medical research is not about making money; pharmaceutical firms are about making money. As we shift funding for research more to the private sector and less to the public sector, there will be less of the hard science and more of what might be considered technology, which can be described reasonably as the effort to take some scientifically known elements and apply them to resolve engineering problems of one type or another. Writing computer code is an example of a technological use of known scientific processes (coding, math logic, binary math, etc. etc. etc.) some of which is invisible to the writer and can be. But, re-designing the structure of micro-processors to depend on some as yet unknown principle of quantum mechanics or organic as opposed to inorganic chemical compound is science; the basic science lies in discovering that as yet unknown principle or compound.
Business excels at technology because the risk is an engineering solution; not so much at the other aspects of the continuum. The firm answers to the shareholders who may not be willing to absorb the losses of failed experiments trying to turn peanut butter into jet fuel. (That image is homage to Jerry Harvey and the Abilene Paradox, a great explanation for what's going on in Congress and the Republican party. Thank you Dr Harvey for again helping us all understand.)
S
o, how do we get the hard science done? Lots of it is done in the great research universities around the world, funded by foundations, Pharma and government. In this country, the only organization that can absorb the cost and the risk of this sort of research -- consider it to be a form of scientific infrastructure -- is the Federal Government. Not funding that risks not having the next great innovation; more to the point, in this incredibly complex organism that is the human community, it risks not being able to respond to the next crisis because no one has even thought of the problem.
The return on investment for a firm in basic science is really limited; the return for the nation on all infrastructure -- intellectual, technological, industrial, transportation, communication -- is incredible largely because the nation is the only one who can afford to do it. To those who worry about burdening future generations with debt, I suggest they consider if the future generations would like to have a future based on eye of newt and fire in hovels and caves connected by goat carts where strep throat and pneumonia kill 50% of the population before age 12, or something marvelous. If it all falls apart, the debt is going to be not an issue; survival will be questionable. We are a community, all in this together; failing to act that way as our right wing compatriots recommend is infuriating, and amusing, and really just an awful idea. The good news is when the universal pandemic comes, like the black death, plutocrats and senators and their families and supporters will suffer as much if not more than the poor, hungry, weak and those who serve them. However, it's cold comfort -- doing something now seems a far better approach than this when it's too late.
Failure of Leadership
with Lots of Unexpected Consequences
I have been relatively quiet on Bradley Manning and Edward
Snowden because I am very conflicted about what to think. Like a lot of folks
who are reading this, I’ve had the clearance and the access and I remember the
oaths I swore and the penalties. A lot of stuff then was pretty silly, but the primary
reason for the BURN BEFORE READING stamps was fairly simple – releasing the
information would reveal the source. Since I had a kind of obscure
specialty for a while, I can recall being dragged out of the Fort Clayton Golf
Course Bar by a CW4 who had been one of my students to read traffic that came
in as HOTHOTHOT and reading, shaking my head and pointing out the problem. It
was pretty funny, the chief went back and bought me another beer and we howled.
But, I still can’t talk about more than 20 years later.
Nor would I. Someone got some information they probably
should not have had and passed that along to someone else who somehow got it to
someone else. The fact that in that chain of someone’s was probably a source
just like Bradley Manning or Mr. Snowden is irrelevant. I don’t need to get
cheap laughs. However, if you have a SCIF handy, read me back on and I’ll tell
you the story.
So, you don’t talk about what you know. I taught at the
INTEL School and that’s where I learned my SKIF etiquette but that training
started a lot earlier. A boss of mine was reading one of Kissinger’s books
where it referenced the clearance that he had, and the boss went ballistic –
some things are incredibly sensitive even if you don’t care why. Henry the K
didn’t care about a couple of 10000 grunts and a couple of 100000 Vietnamese
and Cambodians or so; why would he care about something silly like the name of
an access? The boss’ boss came in to talk to us about it, and said that “We are
held to a higher standard.” You put on the uniform and you are held to a higher
standard.
On the other hand, the stuff that Manning leaked through
International Man of Mystery Julian Assange was primarily battle journals. In
other words, the old DA 1594s or whatever they are calling them now, some
SITREPs, some raw SPOT Reports and so on. He was a computer geek and a very
junior Intel Analyst. He plotted stuff on maps. If he had access to a lot of
highly classified stuff, that was really stupid.
But, the material is pretty damning. We were in a war that
we should not have started, fighting a professionals’ war against the people –
with the exception of the Kurds, at one time or another we were fighting
everybody while they consistently were and are fighting and killing each other.
We don’t get the culture, the religion, the climate the history. We still don’t, but that last time worked
out so well that there’s really no reason not to do it again.I just don’t see a statue of Tommy
Franks in the future of West Point.
Manning was getting a view of how silly that was, how
insane, how brutal and how fruitless. I don’t know what motivated the guy. But,
I do know that most of what he revealed was probably vastly over classified.
And then we get to another problem, one that I realized last night at dinner
with my wife who in her Army incarnation was a Documents Custodian in a Brigade
S2 in Europe. The coin dropped; she
worked as a civilian for DOD and DOT and I had been a contractor. Guess what –
no way if any current security procedures were being adhered to could Manning
have gotten the stuff he had to Wikileaks. We’re not discussing a highly
trained intelligence operative here, we’re talking about a pretty flakey
private in a combat zone., who appears to have been violating every principle
of handling sensitive and classified material in the book; according to
Wikipedia he told one of his biographers that he smuggled the stuff out on his
data card.
When the coin dropped, I dropped my sandwich. My wife at
best tolerates my jousting with windmills, but this one bugged her as much as
it bothers me. This should not have happened. And it did – and it was not
Manning who was the weak spot, but the supervision and leadership that let him
do whatever misguided and deranged crap he did.
Manning was on a
secure DOD/ Army system, in a sensitive compartmentalized intelligence facility
(SCIF) of some sort and he was able to download highly classified materials to
either thumb drives, data cards or CDs. The military
banned all that stuff on its computers prior to the kid's enlistment. While it
might be possible to cheat if you were on night shift in a CP someplace with
just a normal Army computer and nobody checking on you, in a SCIF there are a
lot of people checking on you usually. When you enter the SCIF, you are subject
to search; brief cases, backpacks and similar things are checked as a matter of
course. HOW THE HELL DID HE BREACH THE BASIC IT SECURITY AND THE PHYSICAL
SECURITY PROTECTING THIS STUFF? This is a serious concern. Certainly, the
officers and NCOs running the place should be investigated for either
complicity or negligence or both. If they say him with a CD, they needed to act
immediately; if they saw him with a data stick, ditto. Slipping a micro into a
slot would be really disturbing. Either
they didn’t care, they allowed it to happen or they just didn’t bother to watch
this obvious candidate for Soldier of
the Millenniums. Somewhere, SGT Morales is crying. The fact that somehow
this kid had access to TS and higher should bother a lot of us.Did DOD not investigate the guy prior to the
granting of the clearance? Was there no interview? How did he keep the
clearance after reprimands? WHO GETS REPRIMANDED FOR ASSAULTING AN OFFICER?
Maybe some hard corps grunt dealing with the problems of cooling down after a
fraught mission and being asked some silly crap; but, this guy was a REMF.
There's a lot to be concerned about here, but Manning's actual leaks are the
least of it. He was a computer GEEK and gee, the Army
needs those for places like Fort Meade and various Field Stations. Was he in a
Field Station? No, he was in the SCIF in a Forward Operating Base in Iraq. The
Army knew he needed help; they were going to discharge him during Basic for
unsuitability. Instead of washing him out, they sent him on to AIT and he got a
TS/SCI clearance. The unit wanted to leave him behind instead of taking him to
Iraq but they were short analysts so... Where the hell were the Counter-Intelligence
people who were supposed to be there? He was acting out all over the place in
all sorts of ways…and nobody noticed until a hacker reported him?
Seriously. In a combat zone, prior to
the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the guy was openly gay, disrespectful and
out of line.
Now, many years ago there was an Army Security Agency analyst
we’ll call Randy. Randy was at Field Station Augsburg and was very, very gay.
Openly gay. Blatantly gay. He cross-dressed and hung around the Bahnhof
according one guy who knew him. Nobody cared, he was really good at his job. The
MI community was always very tolerant of a lot of deviance, up to a point. One
story had the Politzei catching him
at the Bahnhof along with the MP liaisons and there he went. How do I know the
story is true? One of my officer students at the INTEL school told me about him;
then others told me about him; and then, when I was facilitating course with
the Warrants and the subject of stress and reactions to it was on the table,
one of the Warrants started saying that none of that was problem in the old
ASA, none of their soldiers had issues and this was a waste of everyone’s time
to consider. “Chief,” I asked, “Were you ever in Augsburg?” “Yeah, Sarge, I
spent most of my enlisted in Augsburg.” “Chief, did you ever know a guy named
Randy?” Silence…followed by laughter. “Oh hell, Sarge, Randy was my squad
leader…” “Were the stories true?” “Oh Shit! You had to be there…”
So, yeah, Manning is guilty of a lot of stuff.
However, given the obvious questions and the way the guy was treated while
awaiting trial -- Marine Stockade as opposed to Army Stockade? Solitary
confinement because he was suicidal? Naked? -- make me think that justice could
be best served in his case by sentencing him to reduction to E-1, a Less than
Honorable Discharge, and a couple of years in Leavenworth. I'd actually prefer
the reduction, a General Discharge under Honorable Conditions and time served.
And then, the Army needs to start asking some hard
questions about what the hell happened to common sense and adherence to basic
procedures safeguarding materials. Manning's Chain of Command needs desperately
to have a bunch of their careers ended so they can move on to their true
calling of asking if you want paper or plastic. If they'd been doing their
jobs, this wouldn't have happened. Everything about Iraq that went bad, down to
the way we found out a lot about it was due to a failure of leadership at a
really existential level.
Soldiers in combat cause collateral damage. Soldiers in combat do a lot
of things to block the horror. We know that. But, the American people need to
know that. They need to have their noses rubbed in it so every time some yahoo
decides to start demanding we go off to some war some goddamned place, there
are no surprises. Bradley Manning broke the law, broke his oath as a soldier
and did it irresponsibly and almost blithely. No Luther-Ellsberg existential
“Here I am, I can do no other…”anguish there. But, he needed help, guidance and
the attention that soldiers, especially weak soldiers need and deserve all the
time, not just in combat.
I had soldiers like Manning. Any NCO or Officer who led troops had to
deal with people like Manning. Too smart for their MOS, too smart for their
duties, not fitting in, not a lean mean fighting machine – just a kid who
needed his ass kicked and his shoulder patted. Instead, he was ignored, not
mentored, not helped and this is what happened. I had 200 soldiers in my last
company, and I knew all the flakes and made a point of watching them. I didn’t
bully them, I didn’t berate them, and I sought ways to help them grow and
adapt. I know my last company was at Fort Lewis and this was in Combat. I don’t
care; the way you operate in garrison is the same way you need to operate in
the field. If you take care of you soldiers, they’ll amaze you when the chips
are down. If you don’t, well, this is what happens.
Manning appears to have had other problems. He lived an openly gay life
prior to enlisting in the Army. While If you can salvage a marginal soldier,
you might create a superstar. But if you can’t, and it appears his chain of
command had figured out he wasn’t going to hack it, you don’t take them Iraq,
you don’t cut them slack for acting crazy, you don’t look the other way. You
get them out of combat, away from the unit and let the psychiatrists and JAG
determine what needs to happen next. YOU DON”T SHOVE THEM IN A POORLY
SUPERVISED SKIF for fifteen hours a day. But, “ Farrell, we were short analysts
in the worst way”. To which I can only respond, “Yeah, and look what that kind of
short term thinking got you.”
___________________________________________________________________________________
I received this note this morning from the only general I’m on a First Name basis with – I call him General or Boss and he calls me Mike. Anyway, I’ve written about Larry Lust before, but I think this note from him was pretty apropos of what we’re facing as the soldiers come home from this debacle…
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Should you ever wondered what valor looks like, go to the website below and watch the video of MGS Roy Benavidez's remarkable story.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
If you’re not familiar with Master Sergeant Roy P. Benavidez, read the following citation…
The President of the United States of America, authorized by Act of Congress, March 3, 1863 has awarded in the name of the Congress the Medal of Honor to:
MASTER SERGEANT ROY P. BENAVIDEZ
UNITED STATES ARMY
for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty West of Loc Ninh on 2 May 1968:
Citation: Master Sergeant, then Staff Sergeant, United States Army. Who distinguished himself by a series of daring and extremely glorious actions on 2 May 1968 while assigned to Detachment B-56, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne). 1st Special Forces, Republic of Vietnam. On the morning of 2 May 1968, a 12-man Special Forces Reconnaissance Team was inserted by helicopters in a dense jungle area west of Loc Ninh, Vietnam to gather intelligence information about confirmed large-scale enemy activity. This area was controlled and routinely patrolled by the North Vietnamese Army. After a short period of time on the ground, the team met heavy enemy resistance and requested emergency extraction. 3 helicopters attempted extraction, but were unable to land due to intense enemy small arms and anti-aircraft fire. Sergeant Benavidez was at the Forward Operating Base in Loc Ninh monitoring the operation by radio when these helicopters returned to off-load wounded crew members and to assess aircraft damage. Sergeant Benavidez voluntarily boarded a returning aircraft to assist in another extraction attempt. Realizing that all the team members were either dead or wounded and unable to move to the pickup zone, he directed the aircraft to a nearby clearing where he jumped from the hovering helicopter, and ran approximately 75 meters under withering small arms fire to the crippled team. Prior to reaching the team's position he was wounded in his right leg, face and head. Despite these painful injuries he took charge, repositioning the team members and directing their fire to facilitate the landing of an extraction aircraft, and the loading of wounded and dead team members. He then threw smoke canisters to direct the aircraft to the team's position. Despite his severe wounds and under intense enemy fire, he carried and dragged half of the wounded team members to the awaiting aircraft. He then provided protective fire by running alongside the aircraft as it moved to pick up the remaining team members. As the enemy's fire intensified, he hurried to recover the body and classified documents on the dead team leader. When he reached the leader's body, Sergeant Benavidez was severely wounded by small arms fire in the abdomen and grenade fragments in his back. At nearly the same moment, the aircraft pilot was mortally wounded, and his helicopter crashed. Although in extremely critical condition due to his multiple wounds, Sergeant Benavidez secured the classified documents and made his way back to the wreckage, where he aided the wounded out of the overturned aircraft, and gathered the stunned survivors into a defensive perimeter. Under increasing enemy automatic weapons and grenade fire, he moved around the perimeter distributing water and ammunition to his weary men, reinstilling in them a will to live and fight. Facing a buildup of enemy opposition with a beleaguered team, Sergeant Benavidez mustered his strength, began calling in tactical air strikes and directed the fire from supporting gun ships to suppress the enemy's fire and so permit another extraction attempt. He was wounded again in his thigh by small arms fire while administering first aid to a wounded team member just before another extraction helicopter was able to land. His indomitable spirit kept him going as he began to ferry his comrades to the craft. On his second trip with the wounded, he was clubbed with additional wounds to his head and arms before killing his adversary. He then continued under devastating fire to carry the wounded to the helicopter. Upon reaching the aircraft, he spotted and killed 2 enemy soldiers who were rushing the craft from an angle that prevented the aircraft door gunner from firing upon them. With little strength remaining, he made one last trip to the perimeter to ensure that all classified material had been collected or destroyed, and to bring in the remaining wounded. Only then, in extremely serious condition from numerous wounds and loss of blood, did he allow himself to be pulled into the extraction aircraft. Sergeant Benavidez' gallant choice to voluntarily join his comrades who were in critical straits, to expose himself constantly to withering enemy fire, and his refusal to be stopped despite numerous severe wounds, saved the lives of at least 8 men. His fearless personal leadership, tenacious devotion to duty, and extremely valorous actions in the face of overwhelming odds were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service, and reflect the utmost credit on him and the United States Army.
Famously, when the Medics got to Benavidez at Loc Ninh, they took one look at the hunk of hamburger that remained of the guy, and started to put him in a body bag. Conscious but unable to move or speak, he let them know he was still alive by spitting blood at them. Interesting to think of Benavidez this week. A lieutenant I served with from South Texas when I was in exile from the active duty to the reserves back in the days of "Capstone" knew the guy when he'd been in JROTC. Quiet man, friendly, and serious PTSD. Well, duh...but, quiet, friendly and interested in talking to young people about their future. Like fajitas, Pearl Beer and Norteno music. Loved his country, family and home town.
There is something incredible about these men, and I suspect sooner than we might think, women. They didn't get up that morning to be heroes. They didn't wrap themselves in the flag and run around proclaiming themselves to be something great. They found themselves in a situation, they did their duty because that was what they figured they were supposed to do, and then are universally pretty humble about the whole thing.
This is an excellent time to watch the old Audie Murphy "To Hell and Back." (My first day as First Sergeant of the 9th Chemical Company, 9ID (Motorized) I spent on that airfield parade strip at the end of the film followed by a division run...Hooah...first one led by MG Taylor after MG Shallikashivilli gave up command. ) And, I was miserable all over the terrain shown in that film at Lewis). Guy wanted to take care of his family, protect his buddies, do his job, maybe get an education and serve his country. While his performance in The Red Badge of Courage was classic, TH&B presented the GI as GI. His life was tragic in a lot of ways, but Murphy remained humble about his service and loved nothing more than to be with soldiers. Not bragging or dominating, although those stars tend to do it when you’re around on of these guys, but just to BS and listen. Murphy was awarded the Medal as the result of an incident where he stopped a German Tank with Infantry attack, firing the M2 from the deck of a burning Tank Destroyer after calling in Artillery fire directly on his position. When the FSE asked him how close the enemy was to him, he said, “Hold on a second and I’ll let you talk to them…” It’s worth revisiting Murphy’s citation as well.
CITATION: On January 26th, 1945 2ND Lt. Murphy commanded Company B, which was attacked by 6 tanks and waves of infantry. 2ND Lt. Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to prepared positions in a woods, while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him, to his right, 1 of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. 2ND Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2ND Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50 caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from 3 sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back. For an hour the Germans tried every available weapon to eliminate 2ND Lt. Murphy, but he continued to hold his position and wiped out a squad which was trying to creep up unnoticed on his right flank. Germans reached as close as 10 yards, only to be mowed down by his fire. He received a leg wound, but ignored it and continued the single-handed fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack which forced the Germans to withdraw. His directing of artillery fire wiped out many of the enemy; he killed or wounded about 50. 2ND Lt. Murphy's indomitable courage and his refusal to give an inch of ground saved his company from possible encirclement and destruction, and enabled it to hold the woods which had been the enemy's objective.
I was out at Fort Irwin earlier this week. NTC is at its usual delightful summer weather, 110+ and dry as a bone, with a light 20 knot wind. Because of the Sequester, they'd cancelled a number of rotations at the National Training Center and cut back on civilian services, so when I got to the gate, MPs were manning it. Not a lot of traffic, so I struck up a conversation with the soldiers. Turns out that after all that time in the desert in Iraq and Afghanistan, the installation decided to not provide any way to cool the water for these guys. They see the commander of the relief about every four hours, and have him bring out ice that they buy themselves. For some reason, this got me mad...kids asked me not to mention their names and assured me that "Hey, First Sergeant, we can take care of ourselves..." Told them that I knew that we'd always had to do that because nobody else would but that didn't make it right.
Since my congressman is that troll who heads the house defense committee, Buck McKeon, I'll send him a note. Not that it will do anything, since the Specialists and PFCs of the garrison MPs don't contribute to his campaign, but in between sending me emails about how he's fighting for jobs by passing anti-abortion legislation and has our soldiers backs by supporting more money for contractors, I'll appeal to his conscience. That should be interesting.
As for me, I’ll drop a note to the garrison CSM which is more likely to accomplish something. And, make a point of checking to see if they need any ice or anything when I drive through the gate for a visit to drop off when I head back to Barstow. If we all did stuff like that, all of those of us who wake up every day and wish we could put on the uniforms again and go mess around with soldiers, I wonder what the impact would be?
When I got to wear a uniform every day, I was intimately invested in the lives and futures of the 200 or so soldiers in my company. My soldiers. Well, now they are all my soldiers. They are now all your soldiers. We need to take care of them, their families, their dreams, and aspirations. But, at the very least, we should be able to make certain that they have cool water to drink occupying a freaking guard post in the Mojave Desert in June.
I admit I’m assuming the best case – the McCaines and Grahames will fail and we won’t end up neck deep in a Shiite-Sunni war of mutual annihilation in the Middle East. Of course, we’re not masters of our fate on that…events have a way of steamrolling us. We'll get our soldiers home finally, and they'll be pretty quickly forgotten. And we'll have soldiers doing their duty, taking care of their brothers and sisters by pooling money to buy ice and space heaters and who knows what else, and the nation will forget. I've quoted Kipling more than once at the blogs I write for...probably time to do so again...
Speaking of the Sequester, I was walking from the grocery store this afternoon in the blazing Barstow sun in 113 degree temperatures. Guy in his 30s approached me with a bottle of Windex and asked me to let him wash my windshield for spare change. He told me he had just been laid off without any notice at Fort Irwin’s Nonappropriated Fund Program at the Shock Zone of something. The haircut still gives me away, but I have no idea what that might. If you find yourself at Irwin, be assured they have a shock zone. The guy had no understanding of why he was laid off, just that he needed to make some money to keep his family fed. I gave him some cash, and wished him luck. Wasn’t a lot of cash, but he was grateful and asked if I’d let him wash my car windows. Shit. I told him to skip it, and wished him luck again; he asked God to bless me.
Now, if you’ve been looking at my stuff, you know that doesn’t have much impact on me. I’m the guy who says sincerely that if there is a god, she and I have some issues to work out. But it got me thinking; I have no reason to be alive, semi-prosperous, pretty healthy and comfortable. I’ve done enough stupid stuff that I should be dead. In jail perhaps; in an insane asylum. Yet, here I am. I don’t believe in god, but life has been pretty good to me. Now, if life would get me out of Barstow that would be helpful. Regardless, however, the reason this guy is now begging for scraps right now is the Sequester. I really don’t feel badly that the executives at the defense contractors won’t get the same bonuses they would get if they got bigger new contracts. In fact, I think most of them probably should be in jail along with the bankers, bond traders, rating agencies and hedge fund managers. From whom much is given, much is owed and much is expected. Haven’t quite lived up to that in American business for a while. But, damn it, the Sequester is hurting people who aren’t concerned about how they’ll get by if Mercedes stops making Maybachs or if they can pay for another dancing horse. It’s hurting those soldiers trying to drink hot water to stay hydrated in 110 heat at Fort Irwin. It’s hurting this guy, Pedro F. Rodriguez, who is just trying not to be a bum in Barstow. It’s hurting our present, it’s hurting our future, and it’s betraying our past.
It’s our time. There’s nobody else here; just us. If it’s going to be right, it’s our time to make it right. I have little trust in the good intentions of most of the elected officials in this country. But, they do care about their jobs. Their money. Their pensions. Their perks. We can take that away from them. We need to serve them notice that until every American who wants a job can have one based on their skills, abilities and dreams; that until every American has adequate housing, food and medical care; that until every child in this country goes to bed full, healthy, with clothes and supplies for schools; when everyone has some reasonable level of safety, security and hope, that the elected classes and the 1% for and by whom they largely seem to be employed are at risk of a radically less lucrative future. Otherwise, we join the betrayal -- of present, past, future and any concept of the United States as the last best hope for mankind.
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