0230 GMT December 21, 2005
An Editorial Decision on the Wiretap Story Your editor has decided we are not going to going to cover this story. We have a bad feeling about where this is going, and do not see how our covering it can help anyone.
Because your editor resides in Washington, inevitably he has comments on domestic issues, particularly if they are particularly absurd - like New Orleans and Katrina - or if there is something funny to talk about. This is not a story that is absurd or funny.
Our concern was, and is, simply that once again Mr. Bush is going to be facing unnecessary distractions of his administration's own making, and the Terror War will suffer as a consequence.
Considering that the Terror War is already being fought with essentially no direction from Washington, it is possible to argue the leadership issue cannot get any worse than it already is. After all, while its important that the President leads, America has thousands of very capable leaders of less-than-presidential rank who are out there in the trenches doing their best.
President Bush's Approval Rating Climbs to 52%, a major jump from the 36-38% range into which it had dropped. The newspapers are saying that his recent round of speeches has had no effect on his ratings. Rather, its the good news from Iraq - the election and the announcement US troops are to start withdrawing.
Sunnis Reject Preliminary Results which give the Shias a big majority in Shia provinces, the Kurds big majorities in their provinces, and a majority for the Sunnis only in Anbar (73%).
The Sunnis are saying the elections were rigged and demand a new election.
Well, you know, your editor spends much of his day demanding things, and for some peculiar reason he does not get 99% of what he demands. The 1% he does get is so pathetically insignificant he wonders why he even bothered wasting breath on the demand. He suspects the Sunnis are going to find the same is true of them. Demand away, folks. Iraq is now a free country. Don't expect us to hold our breath waiting to see if those demands are going to be fulfilled.
Mr. Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who is president of Iraq, has called for the unity of Iraq. We'd suggest our readers not see anything in this call. Of course Mr. Talabani wants a united Iraq: he has a much bigger stage to play on than if he went back to Kurdestan and its 4 provinces. How many other agree with his call is another matter.
Chad Fights With Rebels Operating from Sudan and claims 300 killed, up from 100 killed estimated earlier. Chad accuses Sudan of using rebels against it. This fight is something we are ignorant of and need to research.
Good News from the Congo The first election in DRC's independent history of 45 years has gone reasonably well. The US has been only one of many countries that have committed themselves to improving DRC's situation, but it deserves praise for its efforts, along with Belgium, the EU, and the UN.
Semi-nationalization of Venezuela's Oil Industry Proceeds BBC says only Exxon is refusing to renegotiate its contracts with Venezuela; all other oil majors have signed at Mr. Chavez's insistence. Venezuela now owns majority stakes in all the other majors, and the companies will have to pay much higher taxes than in the past.
Mr. Chavez has given Exxon till year's end to comply.
Nigerian Pipeline Explosion shuts down 7% of oil production; the pipeline was dynamited in the troubled Delta region where locals are demanding a greater share of oil revenues.
From the little your editor knows of the situation, its clear that the Delta militias have no interest in the welfare of the Delta peoples, they simply want money for themselves. So what else is new, readers will ask.
Analogies with Iraq and Venezuela We were wondering the other day how soon will it be before Venezuela's pipelines come under attack. Its not as if before Iraq people didn't attack pipelines. But we suspect Iraq has seen a new record for determination and severity of attacks. We don't hear much about such attacks in Iraq now; a combination of security and paying off local tribes - the Saddam Formula - has improved the situation. Nonetheless, Iran's oil infrastructure was so badly debilitated even before the looting that followed Gulf 2, that coming 3 years on oil production is still way below a potential of 6 million bbl/day and way, way below a potential of 10 million/bbl that the country hopes to reach within 10 years.
In the Interest of Accuracy Regarding Bolivia we reproduce the following from an Associated Press article in Evo Morales' victory and his promise to end controls on coca cultivation:
0230 GMT December 20, 2005
US Frees Dr. Germ and Mrs. Anthrax along with 6 other high value detainees in Iraq.
So they are not going to face trial, and for now its simplest to go by a London Times story, which has a US spokesperson as saying they are not guilty of anything, nor do they have information of interest. Times says this appears to be a conciliatory gesture aimed at the Sunnis.
Presidential Surveillance Powers [Thanks to Mike Thompson]. Here is an article by a commentator who believes that President Bush is within his authority to order warrantless wiretaps: Hugh Hewitt.
Not being lawyers, we cannot comment, but we do have one question. If the President has the authority, why is there a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court to begin with? And we note that with dismal regularity all Mr. Bush's claims of presidential privilege related to the Terror War so far have been rejected by the courts.
Further, why are Mr. Bush's advisors putting him on the path to needless confrontation with other branches of the government? It costs nothing to go to the FISAC. Why try and grab the maximum power all around you and then go "So Sue Me?" This not the way American government is supposed to work.
Rummy Rides Again No surprise: Mr. Rumsfeld has not only escaped any consequences for his Iraq mistakes, he has announced to his staff he is staying for another 3 years and they should plan accordingly.
We suppose Rummy could turn around to us and say: "No one else is being punished. Why should I?". Good question. The only good thing is that the new Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff is not going to kowtow to Rummy, and if Rummy tries to force him out as he did to the JCS head who dared say 2-500,000 troops were needed for Gulf II, this chief is not go quietly in the good night.
Bolivia Evo Morales is the first native to rule Bolivia after five centuries of white rule. Coca cultivation will be legalized, and hydrocarbon assets are to be nationalized. The native peoples form a large majority of the Bolivian population.
Balochistan An opposition leader charges that the Pakistan Army and security forces have begun an operation in Balochistan province, aimed presumably at separatists.
Oil at $57 as supplies grow, demand slows, and a warmer than normal winter January-March is forecast for the United States.
Our Ozzie friends are now looking to pay $3.70 a gallon and are feeling mighty chuffed, as a short while ago they were paying $4+/gallon. Australians, like Americans, also rely a great deal on cars.
1997 statistics, miles per capita: US first, 5700; Oz third, 4300; Finland (say who again?) silver medal world champions with 4600 miles per capita. Maybe that's how they beat the winter blahs in Finland: drive furiously all over the place. [OECD figures.]
More useless stats: US overtook Japan in annual hours worked in 1993, and its been steadily up for the US since, and down for Japan.
In this connection there have been rumors that the Iranian president was the target of an assassination attempt a while he as in Iranian Baluchistan, which also is seeing some trouble. No reliable details.
Belmont Club on Bolivia [Thanks Mike Thompson]. "There was nothing fraudulent about it, and voter turnout was an amazing 80%. Bolivians who are celebrating this are happy because Morales is the first-ever indigenous Aymara president the nation has ever had. For people who have been shut out from the existing system, for whatever reason, it's a great step forward to see one of their own in the highest office in the land."
"Politics in the Third World has long been principally a synonym for plunder. The sole variation from this boring theme lay in finding new and innovative alibis under which to commit the intended looting. Throughout the 1990s traditional elites operated under the banner of the free trade, economic liberalization and privatization -- while doing nothing like that. Each time, the local elites were at pains to emphasize their theft was at the behest; indeed the compulsion of international lending institutions. Though economics in the Third World very often consisted of banditry planned locally; it was always attributed internationally, preferably to Washington; and for decades no one was overly concerned at this sickening charade because these dens of corruption were distant from the centers of world power. Until September 11.
While radical Islam is the best known form of chaos from the Third World it was merely the worst -- but not the only -- form of dysfunction. There were many other countries where things simply didn't work, and where their overlords made a career of covering their crimes by claiming subservience to an 'international' program, as simple misdirection. The post-colonial world fell to pieces in a million ways; united only in a single, agreed-upon scapegoat: the USA. Chavez can be depended on to destroy his own country; as did Castro and as probably, will Evo Morales. Yet in the end, they too, will attribute their failings to America. What's needed is some way to make each nation consciously responsible for its own destiny. Whether in Iraq or elsewhere, that's the only way to go."
Said much better than we could.
0230 GMT December 19, 2005
BOLIVIA Radical native leader Evo Morales seems set to become next president of Bolivia. He has said he will discontinue the anti-drug war. If the US wants good relations, "welcome". If not, then its the US's problem.
We aren't going to give unasked for advice to the US government on how to handle Bolivia, because we are told the US approach will be - as we'd prefer - low-key. The US will squeeze Mr. Morales from behind the scenes while appearing, in the open, to take a great deal of abuse.
Mr. Morales's accession to president will work against him unless he gives up his confrontationist policies, which have set the indigenous peoples against the central and eastern regions. These latter are more "European" and have threatened to secede. Mr. Morales wants Bolivia's hydrocarbon money to go first to the poor Indians. This is a worthy cause, but normally when leaders say they want to help the poor, the result is simply the transfer of wealth from one rapacious elite to another rapacious group which becomes the new elite.
As for the drug war, this is a very complex issue and we can hardly claim to be experts. We do know that if Mr. Morales ends the drug war, leftists and paramilitaries will take over with a vengeance. There will be no peace for Bolivia, in fact, the internal wars will expand.
For the US, best to keep out and let Mr. Morales muck things up.
That said, we do have considerable sympathy for his constituency, which has been badly treated, no argument. We hope he really will do something for them, but as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
LETTER ON MR. BUSH AND THE INTERNAL WIRETAP MESS Reader John A. Cramer writes:
The term
"wiretap" is not correct here. The media have widely used the term,
which I always understood to be a bugging of a specific phone line. The
NSA is tasked with collecting intelligence from basically all electronic
communication forms, including wired and wireless methods. It involves
casting a much wider net than traditional wiretaps. Some idea of the
"rules of engagement" can be found here:http://cryptome.org/nsa
While this isn't the most up-to-date edition of this directive, you can get an idea of what changes might be authorized by the Executive branch. Specifically, this directive, from 1993, allows the Attorney General to authorize collection in the case of international terrorists. I suspect most of the howling you are hearing from Democrats is political - this will further inflame the left leaning folks that already hate Bush. In strict political terms, even if the Attorney General didn't authorize this, he will say he did. The current Attorney General has a long history of strong ties to the President.
COMMENT These days wiretap is used by some simply as shorthand for all kinds of signal intercept. The problem for Mr. Bush is there is a clearly defined procedure for internal wiretapping. He has only to apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court for warrants. These are given without demur. In case of emergency, he can act without the court's prior permission, but he has to come before the court within 72 hours for retroactive permission.
Mr. Bush has clearly said he approved warrant-less wiretaps in the national interest and that he informed members of Congress of what he was doing. He assures us that the program is very carefully controlled and that he has to reauthorize the program every 45 days.
The further problem is that Mr. Bush does not have the authority to act as he wishes even in matters of the national interest. The American system is one of checks and balances. The FISAC is one such check. It is not an adversarial court, it works with the government. There is no reason to bypass it, aside from a general predicate the Administration has pushed, that because of the Terror War, it is entitled to operate outside the checks and balances.
Frankly, we don't see how the American public is going to buy this because Mr. Bush has not adduced any proof - and he cannot - that he has to operate a secret program. Saying "Trust Me" to the American public and the other branches of government is a losing proposition before it leaves the start gate.
Now, it appears true he told some Congressmen of the program. The difficulty he will face is that he did not tell everyone he should have, such as a former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It is also not clear what he has told the Congressmen he has spoken to.
And even if he has, he cannot use that as an excuse to evade responsibility for an illegal act.
We Repeat Our Position We need to make our own position clear, yet again. Your editor has not the slightest interest in if the whole world knows what he is doing. He has nothing to hide. He has no sympathy with people who have something to hide, or with people who say "I don't like the idea the government or a private company or anyone should know more about me than I feel comfortable."
We also made clear we don't particularly care that Mr. Bush breaks or does not break the law of the land in these matters. The results of the detainee program, also originally argued by Mr. Bush to lie above the law, and on which he has had to back down, show the government is absolutely pathetic about catching real terrorists. The hard work is being done outside the US, by the CIA, the FBI, the military and others.
People have a much higher opinion of the government's efficiency in these matters than they should. Homeland security is one big, sick, very expensive joke. The incompetence of the government on this issue is deeper than the incompetence of a third-rate banana republic. Your editor is not going to lose a minute's sleep over the wiretapping, however illegal.
The issue here is not what your editor thinks. The issue is the law of the land. Further, and this is what worries your editor, already because of the Iraq foul-up the government is barely functioning on a whole host of critical domestic and foreign policy - and terror - issues. The last thing we need is further distractions from the issues, and further distractions are going to happen in major force because of this latest piece of idiocy by a bunch of advisors who keep giving the president wrong advice.
We mentioned to a Washington friend that Mr. Bush was already a lame duck president with two years to go. Our friend demurred. No lame duck is Mr. Bush. He is a a ruptured duck.
The Feud Between the President's Office and the CIA is another thing that is getting worse by the day. The CIA is in a serious payback mode for the wrongs the administration has done to the CIA. Now look, people, these are the keepers of the secrets. They have more dirt in one filing cabinet that the state of Texas has over its entire territory. We don't know if the wiretap leak came from the CIA: as far as we can tell, it came from the NSA itself. But if the CIA is gunning for the president's men, please believe us, its not going to be a fair fight. Mr. Karl Rove, manipulator elite class One has found this out the hard way. He has not been squashed like a bug yet. But he will if need be.This was the most powerful man in the United States. Where is he know? Consulting with lawyers. And you know, when you get that stage, even if the courts acquit you, you've lost your money, your name, everything.
What Needs to be Done is not to rein in a rouge CIA. There is no rouge CIA. This is the nature of the power game: you shove someone, they push back. The President's men sought to shove the CIA. Now they have to pay.
The solution is that everyone on Mr. Bush's team, even the good people like Ms. Hughes and Ms. Rice, have to go. The President has to seize control and start afresh. He has to tell everyone: "I appointed these people, its my responsibility. They have served the country - and me - badly. I ask the nation's forgiveness. By firing them I show there are consequences. I am appointing a new team, and I ask the nation to give me another chance."
The nation will cheer. But is this going to happen? No more likely than the Sun turning off in the next five seconds.
We are told - and apparently Time Magazine also says so, though we haven't read the story, that Mr. Bush has become so isolated he talks only to 3 people any more: Ms. Rice, Ms. Hughes, and his mother. Apparently his own father has turned against him.
Jane Fonda and American Troops as Killing Machines Alex Larsen writes:
As somebody who has gone through the training that Ms. Fonda insinuates makes soldiers into war criminals, I couldn't help but laugh. Yes, there is a certain amount of blood-thirstyness and cold detachment where the value of life is concerned, but we had [drilled into us] the importance of following the various international treaties governing what is and isn't considered a war crime, almost none of which the United States has signed, from the get-go.
For example, during bayonet training the officer or NCO in charge will ask through a blow horn, "What makes the green grass grow?" and the entire company will sound off with, "Blood, blood, bright red blood."
On the
opposite side of the token, we were told that if an enemy built a bunker
on top of a hospital, we could not use heavy weapons on that bunker
because of the very great possibility of killing hospital patients, so
we would be required to take the bunker floor by floor and room by room;
which as you can imagine could turn out to be a very bloody endeavor.
0230 GMT December 18, 2005
President Bush Says He Authorized Domestic Message Intercepts by US National Security Agency. He said doing so was within his power, and he attacked the New York Times for leaking the news because the story would hurt national security. He had reauthorized the program 30 times, and would continue to reauthorize it. Congress members were kept informed.
Okay, first congratulations to Mr. Bush for having learned something from the ruckus about torture, because he has almost immediately taken responsibility and not tried to hide behind spinning words. This is a start.
What is not so good is that apparently there is no law that authorizes him to okay domestic wiretaps without a warrant. He has legal authority to ask a court for wiretaps; in emergency he can okay wiretaps as long as he retroactively asks the court for permission within 72 hours. It is near inconceivable that if the government asked, even retroactively, the court would refuse.
Further, a number of Congress people are saying they were not told of any such operation. One senator promises to start an investigation, and if Mr. Bush has indeed broken the law, lets just say there is going to be heck to pay.
New York Times says that some NSA personnel were so concerned about the legality of their orders they refused to participate in the program.
This is going to be a dirty, dirty business that will distract further from the Terror War. The jihadis are too stupid and too ignorant of America to know anything about what's happening, else they'd be dancing in the streets.
Meanwhile, the Messenger Stinks Too Reader Mike Thompson sends us a Drudge Report update, where Matt Drudge says that when the New York Times broke the story, it omitted to say that it had a personal interest in the timing. Apparently the Times reporter involved has written a book "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration". The NSA wiretap story is in the book, which is about to be released. Connect the dots.
And The Stinkiest of All Are the civil servants who are leaking these stories to the press. The President of the United States is entitled to expect a bureaucracy that plays by the rules. No government can expect to function if every time a bureaucrat doesn't like XYZ policy, s/he jumps into bed with the nearest reporter.
Are we saying that bureaucrats should just shut their mouths when they see unlawful behavior?
We are saying nothing of the sort. But if we expect the President to follow the rules, his bureaucrats also need to follow the rules. A bureaucrat must first resign her/his job before talking to anyone. There are no ifs and buts here. The FBI officer who stayed in service even as he was leaking information on Watergate acted every bit as immorally as President Nixon did.
Notice we are not talking about the need for the media to observe rules, such as coming right out and saying "we are releasing this story so that it will boost book sales by our reporter". The media has no morals so there's no sense asking them to play fair.
Fallujah Reconstruction Promises Not Fulfilled says the Sunday Times of UK. Very little money has actually been given to the locals and the city lies in ruins. The operations against Fallujah and the aftermath have increased support for the insurgency says the Times.
Okay, the part about the money not arriving is serious. The rest of the story, headlined "Terror Reborn in Fallujah" http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1937778_1,00.html is a joke and shows that even British media can act pathetically stupid. To support his thesis the reporter quotes a couple of people to say they support the insurgency. This used to be called the American style of reporting, and is now becoming universal. Instead of hard news and analysis, we get stories that talk about feelings and basically have been created to frame the reporter in a glowing light. The people in such stories are just props.
And by the way, Terror Cannot Be Reborn In Fallujah. Terror Never Died in Fallujah. That's Because There Was Never Any Terror In Fallujah. Fallujah was 100% anti-government and anti-American. It was a base for terrorists striking all over in Iraq. But there would have been no point to terrorizing anyone in Fallajuh because everyone was on the same side. Get it, Sunday Times, or is this too complex for you?
So the correspondent was shocked to see the extent of destruction in Fallujah? What did he think the Marines and the Army were doing? Playing tiddlywinks with the insurgents who had booby trapped the entire city? He must be the last person on earth to know that Fallujah was destroyed.
Is he so brain dead that he fails to realize no American was concerned to win any hearts or minds in Fallujah? The Americans had one single objective, which was kill anyone opposing them in Fallujah.
They succeeded.
End of the story. You can go home now, Mr. Sunday Times reporter.
If the people of Fallujah decide to continue the insurgency when the Americans leave, well, the Iraqis will kill them.
Perhaps our good reporter has forgotten how the United Kingdom became the United Kingdom? Nation building is not a pretty business. In this respect, we suspect the Irish and the Scots might have a few stories they want to tell.
If anyone wants to talk about Fallujah, it should be about how the insurgents stupidly thought that Grozny tactics would work against the Americans. We don't know where these cretins come from. Is there no one who studies the American way of war before taking on the Americans?
Reader Mike Thompson Refuses To Withdraw his request that we make Ms. Fonda go away. It seems, says Mr. Thompson, that the editor is kind of "Fonda Janey". No, sir, Ms. Fonda was not on the Xinhua list of 10 best-dressed women. She is no great dresser, but she wouldn't have made it because of her age - Xinhua has bought into the American cultural ethos - and just imagine, the Chinese still think they are an independent country. Ms. Fonda is a woman. Xinhua's 10 fall into the Pop-Tart Division. But then what does your editor know, he's from Iowa.
230 GMT December 17, 2005
Please Make Her Go Away pleads reader Mike Thompson, in reference to a forwarded story about Jane Fonda.
Ms. Fonda's latest theory is that American soldiers are trained to commit atrocities. As we understand it, though her logic is not all that easy to follow and we have had to interpolate our own interpretation of what she means to say:
[1] In World War II and Korea, the services discovered American soldiers had a reluctance to kill. So their training was changed during the Vietnam era, and this new training continues to this day. It is designed to turn American soldiers into killing machines.
[2] As such, whoever comes within their sights has to be killed. Since many such people will be civilians, you get atrocities.
[3] The soldiers are not to be blamed : its not their fault, its the fault of the trainers.
Our comment [1] Its very hard to attack Ms. Fonda, no matter how inane she gets. As she enters the senior citizen stage of her life, she remains one of the most beautiful women in the world. And lets face it, folks, beautiful people, men or women, get away with a lot more that those of us who are plain or ugly. So our comments are going to be about as hot as tepid dishwater.
[2] It seems to us American soldiers are doing a really bad job of committing atrocities in Iraq, given atrocities is what Ms. Fonda says they are trained for. Given the unbelievable amount of firepower Americans deploy, its really sad how few civilians - and adversaries - they are killing. No one seems to have good figures, but somewhere between 20-30,000 civilians may have been killed since the fall of Baghdad. Considering most of them have been done in by insurgents, the results are pathetic.
[3] We don't doubt Ms. Fonda has a partial - a very partial basis - for what she is saying. Studies from World War II - and if are not mistaken, extended to Korean - showed that a surprisingly high number of American troops just didn't even fire their weapons in combat. Was the figure 30%? If anyone remembers the DuPuy studies, please write in. We find nothing odd about this: anyone with half a brain is simply so frightened when caught in combat they can take no action, even if it is to save their own lives. This may be particularly true of draftees, who just want to be someplace else. So, if a soldier is not firing his weapon, he is not just not killing anyone, he's endangering his own side. It would seem reasonable training would have to be changed to change this state of affairs.
[4] As far as civilians go, we do know the US ground forces today are extraordinarily careful not to kill civilians.
We ask Mr. Thompson to reconsider his request. True, if Ms. Fonda is sent away, no one will have to tolerate her comments. But then, a lot of men are going to suffer if Ms. Fonda is sent away. Can we persuade Mr. Thompson to put up with Ms. Fonda's political side for the sake of - um - art?
This Man Needs To Be Put Away Charles Krauthammer, a rather conservative writer - especially on Israel - writes in the Washington Post that the new President of Iran is certifiable. Apparently the president was caught on tape telling someone that when he delivered his speech at the UN, a halo appeared over his head, and the audience was held silent and unable to move, for 27 or 28 minutes, while they received the message from this great man.
Mr. Krauthammer also notes something we have heard before: the Iranian president belongs to a section of Muslims who believe their job is to accelerate the end of this world so that the new world, into which the 12th Prophet will guide us. Now, we want to be clear there is nothing particularly Muslim about this strain of thought: many Russians also used to think - perhaps they still do - that the world has become irrevocably corrupted and needs to be destroyed. As for Americans, well your editor listens to a southern Baptist radio station because he likes religious music, and he gets treated to regular blasts for what's in store for sinners. And it seems to the editor that the Christians who don't make the grade are going to fare worse than us heathens, who, after all, are guilty only of ignorance. Fire, flood, earthquakes, you name it, and its coming.
But - as Mr. Krauthammer notes, Israelis who think like this are few, and they don't have their fingers on nuclear triggers. We can by extension say the same about other apocalyptics.
We need to add that, needless to say, that the Muslims who think this way have a very specific idea of where the corruption originates: from the stinking, immoral west, of course.
More Defeats For Mr. Bush as the US Senate rejects extensions to clauses of the Patriot Act that were set to expire. And then there is a very nasty story that the New York Times said it originally did not publish at the administration's request about how the US government has been snooping on Americans without warrants. NYT says it held the story for a year because administration sources assured it that the law was being observed.
We first want to make clear to readers we have no problems with the government or anyone knowing about every aspect of our lives. Your editor is an old-time Puritan with a simple credo: if you are doing something you don't want other people to know about, don't do it. That's not very complicated, is it? So if the US government wants to snoop on your editor's life, that's a matter between the US government and itself: your editor could give a hang one way or the other. He tends to be quite suspicious of people who claim privacy rights.
The issue, however, is not what the editor thinks. The issue is the law of the United States. When the Patriot Act was enacted, a lot of people were worried it was eroding time-honored American rights to privacy; more than that, they worried that without checks, these new powers would be misused.
Well, that's exactly what seems to have happened.
Our Main Concern Regarding Mr. Bush is simply his rapidly eroding credibility and its negative effect on the Terror War. Mr. Bush and Company have spent the better part of 4 years saying: "Trust us", and then acting in ways when we'd have to mad to trust the government.
But meanwhile, however much incompetence the administration may have shown so far in the Terror War, and however many lies may have been told, the reality remains that there is a war on. It needs to be fought - Iran above is just one of the more urgent cases needing immediate attention. If the president has no credibility, there is no way the country is going to trust him to continue the job, especially when hard choices have to be made.
To hold off Mr. Bush haters who are going to email us and say: "why are you pin the administration's problem on us? We're not the cause", we hasten to say we are at no point saying that if the government has been lying, its lies should not be exposed. we are simply noting there is a problem, created by the administration, and America and the whole world is going to suffer for it. We don't think every aspect of the war on terror can be left till America gets a new president in 2009. And even then who is to say that Americans are not left with such a bad taste in their mouth that they cripple the new president?
Unasked for advice to the American elite Just stop lying. The world is not going to end. Getting a consensus on difficult issues may actually become easier if the elite stops lying - we are talking about every aspect of American life, not just the Terror War. If I can trust you, I will be less inclined to be confrontationist and more inclined to compromise.
Speaking of lying A brilliant concept used by American Congressmen is to alter electoral districts to guarantee the victory of the incumbent. So that is why you see some incredibly weird districts in America, and ma be one of these days we'll print graphics of some of the more outstanding.
Well, this process is also a form of lying. And the disgraced Republican majority leader of the House, Tom DeLay is a past master of redistricting in his state, Texas.
So today Tom Toles has a wicked cartoon which shows 7 elephants in suits sitting in the Iraq assembly, the elephants being republicans. One says to another: "It is pretty remarkable. Tom Delay drew districts that allowed the GOP to pick up seven seats in the Iraqi Parliament."
[Disclaimer: we are not Tom Toles fans: he makes too many petty personal attacks on President Bush.]
China News Foreign exchange reserves are expected to hit $1 trillion next year. Beijing's prescription for this massive imbalance? Americans should save more.
A new 960-km pipeline from Kazakhstan to China became operational, 15 months after construction started - we guess there are no environmental impacts statements involved. Its initial capacity is just under 200,000 bbl/day which will double in a second phase.
Xinhua really needs to focus on the straight news: your editor is too old for articles such as the one in the December 17 issue on the 10 best dressed women in the world. Eight of them are in such a serious state of undress that your editor thought he was going to keel over. What an inglorious way to go. Kids, your dad intended to remake the world. Unfortunately, he died while perusing Xinhua for news for the daily update. Duty always came first with him. He passed out in a pool of drool and drowned. We're suing Xinhua for running material unsuitable for staid defense analysts. Its not about the money, its about returning some of the money stolen from American workers. [Better stop here - your editor is getting carried away.]
Incidentally, Kate Moss heads the list, and oddly she is one of the two that actually have clothes on.
0230 GMT December 16, 2005
Tall Tales From the Wild West - of Iraq, that is. CNN runs a story saying the Iraqis had Zarqawi in custody at one point earlier this year but let him go because he was not recognized.
We have our own theory on Zarqawi, and if anyone should challenge us to prove it, we will have to retort "you have to prove your theory first."
We think there as once a Zarqawi, a petty criminal from Jordan who went to Afghanistan to fight jihad, but proved to have come too late. This Zarqawi then just sort of slouched around, not doing much. When the US attacked Iraq in 2003, he flocked to western Iraq like many other misguided souls, where he was either quickly killed or captured.
I.e., there is no Zarqawi, master insurgent. Everything about him is made up, by the Americans.
Okay, granted we can produce no proof at all of our theory. Where's the proof he exists? How come he always manages to escape, just in time? How come scores of his associates have been captured or killed, and yet he boldly wanders around Baghdad and Western Iraq, immune from harm? We ask these questions for starters.
Iraq Voting Went Off Peacefully Results will not be known till end December, but speculation is because of the heavy Sunni turnout, the Shias will get only 40% of the seats in Parliament, with the Sunnis and Kurds getting 20% each, and other parties getting 20%.
So the Shias will have to rule by consensus, is the theory.
Reality check: the Shias don't want to rule Iraq. They want to rule their 9 provinces, and they want to be left alone. May be things will change, but we are doubtful. Look for three nations in Iraq, regardless of what people say about their commitment to a united Iraq. That would be the elite speaking.
Dickie Takes a Beating The US Vice President does not like to lose. He has just lost, big time. President Bush has come to an agreement with Senator John McCain that the US will not use torture against terror suspects. The House has voted overwhelmingly in favor of a torture ban - earlier the Senate had voted 90 to 9 for a ban. And Ms. Rice, US Secretary of State, says US will not pursue the theory that American law on torture does not apply to offshore prisoners.
We don't want to bore readers, and we've said this before. The US should just not take prisoners in the first place.
Western Observers Pull out of Eritrea leaving Orbat.com quite confused. Just the other day the UN Secretary General was saying he was not to going to remove western observers as ordered by Eritrea, and the Security Council was backing him. We were impressed by this new steadfastness on the UN part. So what happened?
Along with 180 western observers, 20 from other countries are also leaving.
Meanwhile, a success story: UN troops have left Sierra Leone after a 5-year stay.
Also meanwhile, a gripe. Your editor is always careful to avoid using the derogatory "Pak" to refer to Pakistan. Its like calling the Indians "Indies" (as in "We, the Indi People"). So your editor always spells out the "Pakistan Army". The BBC story on the withdrawal of the UN from Sierra Leone, mission accomplished, shows Pakistani soldiers with identifying cloth badges stitched to their battle dress saying - you guessed right - "PAK ARMY".
UN Lebanon Assassination Probe Extended by 6 months, as requested of the Security Council by the lead investigator.
Meanwhile, 5 pro-Syria cabinet ministers have resigned, saying that any outside probe into the Lebanon murders is an infringement of Lebanese sovereignty.
And presumably cabinet ministers taking their money and marching orders from Damascus are not an infringement of Lebanese authority?
These men need to be arrested as foreign agents. The reason they are still around is a that some Lebanese factions to this day welcome the Syrian presence as a counterweight to the Christians and other factions.
Top Baluchistan Commander Wounded The top paramilitary forces commander in Baluchistan, a two-star general, and his deputy, a brigadier, were wounded when unknown persons fired on their helicopter.
We've received reasonably reliable information that the US CIA and India's equivalent, the misnamed Research & Analysis Wing, have been cooperating in aiding Baluch insurgents. Its hardly a secret that the Indians have been in Baluchistan in force for some time now. We are a bit puzzled about the US angle. The CIA has its own teams with locals to hunt Taliban and insurgents. If the these teams are getting cooperation from Indian agents operating in Baluchistan, that makes sense. But - while we have advocated the US encourage the Baluch to declare independence as a way of increasing pressure on Iran, we'd be surprised if the CIA is encouraging the Baluch resistance.
But - in all fairness, we are usually the last ones to know anything.
0230 GMT December 15, 2005
Media Takes a Beating, oddly at the hands of Time Magazine which is also part of the media, albeit as a print weekly. We can stop speculating, here's the figures on what Iraqis think is with their lives.
Sunnis: 25% say their lives have improved since the war, 21% feel safe in their neighborhoods. Understandable, considering the Sunnis have no idea what tomorrow may bring them, now that they are out of power, and considering the insurgency is being fought out mainly in Sunni territory.
Kurds: 73% say they are better off now, and 80% feel safe in their neighborhoods.
Shias: 59% feel their lives have improved, an astonishing 82% feel safe in their neighborhoods.
But here's what boggled our minds: Baghdad residents: 59% say their life has improved, 70% say they feel safe in their neighborhoods.
Thus: clear majorities of people feel their lives have improved since the war, and feel safe where they live. We need say no more.
Pakistan's North West Frontier Province Takes Turn for the Worse The Christian Science Monitor is one of the more thoughtful of American newspapers. In the military and allied communities its taken a beating because of its rather silly analysis of the Cope India air exercises, but we don't hold that against the CSM. Military reporting requires one to be an expert in many fields, and you can still get things quite wrong.
CSM says that though the Pakistan government had 60,000 paramilitary and regular troops in the NWFP, clashes between security forces and militants have become more frequent. Islamic fundamentalists from other countries are taking up residence; together with local fundamentalists they have started Talibanizing the area.
No need to put a spin on this, we have to call a shovel a shovel. This is not a good development, the more so because Pakistan is a soft state in every aspect of internal security - except, some cynics will say, in the business of maintaining the generals in power. Of course, creating a base to replace what has been lost in Afghanistan is not possible, given the enthusiasm with which the US is hunting down and killing militants. Still, in the Terror War, this is, at least right now, a small win for the fundamentalists to provide solace for the long string of defeats.
Speaking of defeats, we trust readers are keeping on top of Bill Roggio's reports from Western Anbar - www.billroggio.com. The reports are an excellent recounting of how difficult the business of counter-insurgency is, but also how relentlessly the Americans have been pushing forward now that they have reinforcements withdrawn from other parts of the country.
Remember the Alamo seems to be Mr. Donald Rumsfeld's battle cry. After having been proved wrong on every aspect of Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, you'd think Mr. Rumsfeld would have learned something? Not a chance. He is still working hard on reducing American ground forces, in direct opposition to Congress's mandate to increase the size of the Army. Its that same old "We need lighter, more agile forces to fight the war on terror".
Now, we know that things went to heck and beyond for the occupation because there were insufficient forces. This is why its taken two years to largely pacify north central Iraq. We see what happened in Anbar because there was a very severe shortage of forces.
But the darling Mr. Rumsfeld is still heroically plodding on with his thoughts that the Americans don't need many ground troops. He wanted to send 60,000 troops to Iraq, by the way.
Davy Crockett sure could have used a man like Rummy. Stubborn as a mule, which is insulting mules, because they can be pretty flexible if you treat them right.
Robert McNamara at least had the grace to resign when he saw he was wrong. Not our Rummy. He just keeps marching on, like the Energizer Bunny. This is what happens when you have a Consequence Free Regime, such as Americans now have in Washington. No one gets punished for their mistakes. Now if we could just give him a slight push so that he continues marching across the Washington Beltway, instead of inside the Beltway, the world would be.
Four Years in Solitary is what some stupid, sorry terrorist suspect has spent in the US Navy's custody. During this time, his lawyers say he has been denied reading material, toilet paper, toothpaste.
The Navy says it is not mistreating the man.
The US Navy should be ashamed of itself for spinning. Four years in solitary is not mistreating someone? Four years of not bringing him to trial is mot mistreating someone?
Look, we are not making excuses for this man. We don't doubt he is guilty of raising money for The Cause and scouting out chemical availability for large-scale sabotage and other stuff he is accused of.
Bring him to trial, sentence him to death, and shoot him.
But don't ever dare say you are not mistreating the man, US Navy. You dishonor yourself and a very fine fighting service by spouting this garbage. And please don't give us the "orders" latrine contents.
"If I Support An Unelected President, The Terrorists Win" says a bumper sticker we saw the other day. Oh brother, what a lot of cold, frozen horse manure.
Question to the owner of the car: The unelected president is who? If you are referring to our friend W, you need to get on strong medicine. He won the 2004 election with a plurality of the popular vote, as well as, of course, the electoral college vote.
If you are referring to 2000, where Mr. Bush won via the electoral college, and if you think that is being unelected, you need to go back to 7th Grade and study the American system of government. Good grief.
China versus India An Indian reader emails apropos our story on the revision of China's GNP and where India stands in relation: "Based on World Bank figures, which admittedly are given by governments, and using purchasing power parity, China has a GNP twice India's. It is accepted that India's GNP is considerably understated and there is a serious case for revision, which would reduce the gap.
By focusing on GNP/Per capita, however, you are missing the real difference between India and China. With regard to quality of life indicators such as life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality, etc., China is way ahead of India."
No dispute there, people. We have long maintained that the manner in which the Indian government has ignored, and continues to ignore, its people is a crime against humanity. You don't need large sums of money to provide clean drinking water, basic health care, and basic education to your population.
Some years ago, there was a severe drought in an Indian state and people were dying of starvation. Meanwhile, there was so huge a food surplus in government hands that a significant percentage was rotting and providing a healthy diet to rats because there was no way of storing all those grains. A local official was asked why the starving were not being fed. It would bring down market prices, he responded thoughtfully, if the government were to start releasing food stocks, and that would reduce the incentive for farmers to grow and market a surplus.
If you don't know India, you will find this story unbelievable. But it is true, and we hope someone who recalls the incident will unearth a reference.
India has many things to be proud of, and its democracy is one of them. It has many things to be deeply ashamed of too.
0230 GMT December 14, 2005
Sydney, Australia Sporadic violence continues and incidents have been reported in two other towns. Nonetheless, the dominant trend right now, on both sides, is a revulsion against racism of all kinds. Australians really are very tolerant; a lot of grievances had built up because of previous incidents involving "Lebs" and because of the Bali bombings, but mainly people seem to have gotten the anger out of their system and are searching for reconciliation. That doesn't mean the extremists on both sides have suddenly changed their attitudes; it does mean that the vast majority of Australians, of any color, are saying "Enough".
It is being said that the trigger incident, the beating of two white lifeguards by Arab youngsters, had nothing to do with race.
France Submits Resolution Asking 6-months Extension for the UN probe into the death of Lebanon's ex-Prime Minister.
The French have repeatedly shown they are not going to let his matter go. We congratulate the government of France for its determination that justice will be done.
A Little Story on the Iraqi Elections You Will Never See in the American Media Read this story from the Times of London online edition, headlined "The third election this year - yet hunger for democracy grows" http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1927583,00.html
China's GNP To Be Revised Upward to $2-trillion+, putting it in 4th place after the US, Japan, and Germany. The 20% revision is supposed to adjust for previous under-reporting in the service and small-scale sectors.
If people want to live in fantasy land, certainly Orbat.com can't stop them. We read the business magazines, and we wonder when hundreds of millions of workers are willing to take dirty jobs at gross wages of $1-200/month for 80 hours work weeks, how per capita income can be approaching $2000.
As for underreporting of GNP, India has been underreporting for decades. India's GNP of $725-billion for a population of 1.1 billion is a fiction, and when you visit India and China, you will see the typical Chinese does not make three times as much money as the typical Indian.
This matter of GNP has always puzzled your editor. In the late 1980s, when he was in India, the theory said labor should be plentiful at Rs 10/day, given the current GNP/per capita figures. In fact, aside from the very poorest districts of chronically poor states such as Bihar, or during dry season in the poor districts of Rajasthan, you couldn't get anyone to work for Rs 10/day. Whenever your editor brought this up with economists, they would simply say: "its well known our GNP and per capita are seriously under-reported". Some people put the figure at 15% under-reporting.
In truth, India is already a trillion dollar economy and China is not yet a two trillion dollar economy. Moreover, there's something in India called the rule of law and the right of workers and people which hampers the economy, and thank goodness for that. What worth is economic development if people have no rights? If you try and take over people's houses and land in an Indian city the way the Chinese routinely appropriate property, you'd have an insurrection on your hands. Some papers like the UK Economist are forever praising China and putting down India. No doubt the Economist would have praised Hitler's economic growth. India doesn't have a floating labor force of 1-200 million looking for work at any wage. That's all one needs to know about how well the two countries are doing.
The Chinese did start a decade earlier and they have worked very hard indeed to develop their country. More power to them. There's a lot of Indians, your editor included, who prefer the slow and steady Indian approach of 6-7% annual growth versus China's 9% - if China is really growing at 9%.
Editorial
Take Down the Iranian Mullahs
The news that a truck-load of fake ballot papers was intercepted on the Iran-Iraq border should come as no surprise. From the day in 2003 Saddam vanished from his Baghdad command post ahead of arriving American troops, Iran has done its best to spread chaos, murder, and mayhem throughout Iraq. But for the ghastly mess the US administration made of the occupation, Iraq's actions would have been recognized for what they are: war against another state.
Right now the American press is full of stories concerning the demoralization of Mr. Bush, and unfortunately the stories are mostly true. But Mr. Bush is not a private individual, entitled to withdraw to his retreat when people start throwing rotten eggs at him. He is the president of America, and he needs to come out, and start making the case for regime change in Iran. To fail in this is to fail in his duty to America, and indeed, to the whole world.
Instead of doing everything to suppress news about the true extent of the Iranian war against Iraq, the US needs to publicize it. In doing this, the US needs to follow a straight and narrow path: no spin, no lies. Just tell the truth and let the truth speak for itself. This alone will help enormously in getting the US public to understand why the mullahs must go.
Iran: Whistling in the Dark One might never guess it from the way the Iranian mullahs talk - and we count its new president as a mullah because though he is not a cleric, he is as intolerant as the worst of the intolerant clerics - that they are running scared. Every little success in Iraq brings their doom closer. When the hated Shah fell, the Iranians erupted in a frenzy of revenge and blood lust. The same thing is going to happen when the mullahs start to fall. They are not going to be able to retire into obscurity as happened to the communist rulers of the USSR and its constituent states. The mullahs will be torn to pieces in exactly the same way anyone associated with the Shah's regime was torn to pieces. They have every reason to be afraid.
But wait, you will say. Iraq and Iran and are both Shia; the Shia have the ascendancy in Iraq; isn't the real danger that Iran and Iraq will combine in a giant fascist theocracy and threaten every value of democracy?
The Iraqis may be Shia, but they are nationalists. Just as Saddam did everything he could to keep the Iranians down, so will the Iraqis. This is something many Americans did not understand when they went into the occupation. But they understand very well now that Shia Iraq is no friend of Shia Iran.
That aside, the danger for the Iranian mullahs is that the Iraqis are showing a people's democracy can work in an Arab land. It is a simple matter of time before the Iranians start asking: if the Iraqis can have democracy, why can't we? The answer to that question inevitably leads to mullahs that have been executed by the mob, or serving jail terms of such severity they will never leave jail alive.
That is why the Iranian mullahs are frantic, and that is why they will do anything to see Iraq's democracy fail.
Iran and Israel: Yet Another Misfire When you are in danger of your life and under increasing pressure, it is understandable you will make mistakes. And in the case of Israel, Iran is making such an obvious mistake that we can surmise only the Iran's are so desperate they cannot think rationally.
Iran is trying to play the Israel card, and it will fail. First, odd as this may sound, Iran has traditionally not seen itself as a champion of the people of Palestine. These unfortunates have had so many champions that the Iranians, who consider the Arabs to be an inferior race, have till now had no wish to be associated with the problem.
Second, this is the year of our lord 2005, not 1955, or 1965, or 1975, or even 1985 or 1995. The Palestine issue has steadily receded as the US has knocked off one enemy of Israel after another. The Egyptians were the biggest enemy; they are friends of Israel now. Jordan came next, followed by Iraq. Syria's days as an enemy of Iraq are numbered, and when Syria goes down, so will the pathetic creatures of the Iranian mullahs, the Hezbollah. The Middle East has seen peace, and it has gotten used to the money and comfort that comes with peace. The Jordan River would have to freeze over before the Arabs are willing to lose peace to fight for the Palestinians.
In short, no one is interested. If it hadn't been for that maestro of corruption and depravity, Arafat, who was fighting to remain relevant when it was only too obvious the US had cut him off at the knees by bringing peace to the Mideast, people would have been able to see clearly that frankly, my dear, no one give a darn anymore about Palestine.
This is why Iran's latest, most blatant, most crude ploy on Israel will fail - in truth, it already has.
Means and Methods The people of Iran are, by an overwhelming majority, victims of the mullahs. Raining nuclear fire, or conventional death and destruction, on them to bring about regime change is immoral. America must announce, without equivocation, that even if it takes five times as long, regime change will not be brought about at the expense of innocent Iranians.
America must do something it has not traditionally done well, and that is subversion. A declared independent Kurdistan and a declared independent Baluchistan are two critical steps that need to be taken in 2006 and will go a long way toward gripping the mullahs in an every tightening noose.
But What About Turkey and Pakistan? Well, what about them? Of all the oppressed people in the world today, the Kurds have the best case for an independent state. The cold war is gone and over. Turkey does not need to be appeased to keep it as an ally. But what about the concern that we must not aggravate fundamentalism in Turkey?
Our reply: where's the connection?
Then there is Baluchistan. An independent Baluch state could spell the end of Pakistan. Here we have to speak frankly, even if our Pakistani friends, and we have many, take offense. Pakistan was not created by any justification that would pass muster today. It came into existence by fraud and collusion between a certain segment of British imperialism - please note we say a certain segment, the British as a whole were not to blame - and corrupt Muslim leaders claiming to speak for the subcontinent's Muslims. Pakistan is not just a failed state, it is one who's continued existence poses grave dangers for the west. Pakistan is destined to fail anyway, and once Kashmir is separated de facto from Pakistan, the country's disintegration - which began in 1971 - will come to its logical end. Better the US manage the process of change than to fall victim to it.
Easy Enough For You To Say is the retort our Pakistani friends and critics will give. You are an Indian, and the breakup of Pakistan will be solely to the benefit of your country.
This may sound odd to Pakistanis, but the last thing the Indians want is another 150 million Muslims within their borders. Even if Delhi has to send the Indian Army to guarantee an independent Pakistan, albeit one composed of West Punjab and Sindh, India will make sure Pakistan survives. Kashmir is going - and India is equally a loser - and this time around you cannot stop Baluchistan from seceding as you did at least once before, in 1972-76.
This may give our Pakistani friends and critics no comfort, but we, at least, read the tea leaves of the subcontinent to foretell a very different India is coming just as a very different Pakistan is coming.. we can discuss this at another time.
The point here is that your editor is speaking from his Washington viewpoint, not his Delhi viewpoint. We are talking about what is in America's best interests. And just as an independent Kurdistan is vital to America in its war against the mullahs, so is an independent Baluchistan. Iraq is going to be reordered whether anyone likes it or not. The process of reordering this part of the world will continue.
0230 GMT December 13, 2005
Adding Insult to Injury The impending drawdown of US and British troops in Iraq is gaining momentum. The Times of London has given quite specific details that will bring down UK forces from 8000 to 5000 in the spring of 2006, as starters. UK will hand two of its 4 provinces back to the Iraqis. Meanwhile, US has already handed two south central provinces to the Iraqis, Najaf and Karbala, and is preparing a reduction of forces in the North and North Center. The 30,000 reinforcements sent for the election are, of course, not going to be replaced, but as of now it seems certain another 30,000 troops are to pull out by the end of spring, leaving 100,000 - and counting down - troops in Iraq.
So the Iraqis are rejoicing, right?
Wrong. All of a sudden, 90% of Iraqis don't want a troop withdrawal at this time.
Our reaction? Really Tough Cow Pies, citizens of Iraq. So first you yell and scream holy murder about being occupied; and now that you are being deoccupied, you decide that you love the Americans so much you are going top hug them and squeeze them and kiss them and make them yours for ever?
Goodness Gracious Us, you all are actually going to have to make your country work now, instead of sitting around going complain, whine, moan, and weep.
And guess what? From the performance of your security forces, our guess is you'll do just fine. Call it tough love.
To Our Friends Concerned About A Precipitate Withdrawal Please do not be concerned. US is not cutting and running. There are close on 200,000 Iraqi security forces doing a job ranging from not good enough to terrific. By end of 2006 there will be over 350,000. The US can afford to, and should, cut down its forces to below 60,000 in 2007. The residual force of 30-40,000 will stay for years. This is not cutting and running.
Sydney Riots Seem To Have Died Down after a second day of violence. Rampaging white and Arab youths seem to be equally responsible for the violence, which included smash-and-run attacks on cars, stores, and individuals.
The state government has recalled parliament to ask for tougher laws to deal with the violence.
The Australian, a leading national newspaper, at least seems to be trying to keep down the temperature with minimal reporting using non-sensational language. Read today's editorial http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17545285%255E601,00.html to get a handle on the manner in which the australian is handling the crisis.
Pity Poor Syria plagued as it is by the misrule of morons. Another anti-Syrian politicians has been murdered, just after he returned home from Paris, where he had been living in fear of his life.
This kind of continued idiocy at a time the UN is getting closer and closer to pinning complicity in the murder of the former PM on Damascus indicates only one thing: the murderers are getting desperate to the point they have lost rationality. They may be figuring "may as well hang for 10 murders as for one, and there's still a chance we can intimidate the Lebanese government", but all they are doing is making sure they will hang for at least one of the 10 murders when they might have escaped when there was only one murder.
The Business of Strategic Spying as opposed to what we call tactical spying is the subject of our attention today.
For this readers should thank reader James Daley, who wrote to ask why we were sure Iran did not yet have a bomb. When we replied CIA estimates, he asked a legitimate question, which was basically along the lines of a polite "is this the CIA which confirmed Iraq's WMD?"
Tactical spying is a very simple and straight forward business. Has the adversary shifted an anti-tank missile battalion into Sector XYZ? What is the name of the division commander of Division ABC? How many days of 120mm tank gun shells does the adversary have? And so on. Your editor's experience lies in an even simpler and more straightforward business, which is orders of battle confined to units and formations. For example, is there a third Pakistani armored division, and if there is, where is it, and what is its formation number and the brigade designations? This type of information changes very little, and you are not being asked to give your subjective assessment of how good the division is, what strength is it manned at, and so on.
Strategic spying, the entire field of which your editor heartily dislikes, is a very complicated business. But we're going to try and explain it.
Point the First: There are Two CIAs we all talk about THE CIA, but there are actually two quite separate agencies that happen to bureaucratically function under the same roof.
The first is the Directorate of Operations and the second is the Directorate of Intelligence. To be hugely simplistic, think in these terms: DO goes out and gets the information, DI assesses it.
Before we proceed, our readers need to know that for some reason everyone is focused on the 30 year rule when it comes to declassifying documents. Less well known is the 50 year rule, and even less well known is the "We're going to keep this classified for as long as we think neccessary" rule.
Point the Second: The DO Works in a Shadow World That sounds kind of obvious, but we are talking of something else. Think back to the type of dream that we all frequently have: the world is in shadow, you can't see anything clearly, and you are wandering around trying to figure out what the heck is going on based on a few clues that can become very insubstantial very quickly.
So, for example, suddenly you learn your family is in great danger, and you're racing around trying to find a telephone, and you're dialing the number and no one is picking up, then you realize you're dialing home whereas the family must be at the vacation lodge, except you cant remember the area code, and then you find the telephone handset is not connected to anything, but if you don't get in touch with your family they're going to die and so on.
So here you've been tasked to find out where Iran is in its nuclear program. But there are 10 absolutely critical parameters you must have detailed information on before you can say anything with any certainty, and there are 100 important factors, and on top of that 1000 other factors. If you are going to give an unequivocal answer, you need to get everything right.
Instead, what do you have? Bits and pieces of information which may appear so unrelated that you really don't have a good chance to figure out what's going on.
Worse: by the time a critical piece of information gets to you - such as "Iran's 123 centrifuge design has a critical flaw that is causing U240 to build up to unacceptable levels during the enrichment process" - Iran could have solved that problem. Or the test cascade built around the 123 design could have suffered a major setback because rotors in half the cascade were not machined properly. Or someone backed a fork-lift into the wrong corner and wham, your cascade is shut down. Or miracle of miracles, some ingenious young engineers managed to get it back up within weeks. Or you lost so much enriched material that you had to start all over again.
Even worse: people lie to you.
As bad: your agent gets caught and decides having all his nails and teeth pulled without anesthetic is not worth the hassle of the pathetic sums you are paying him.
As bad: your agent doesn't know he's lying to you. He thinks he's telling you the truth, but what he doesn't know if that Iran has decided to proceed with the 125 design; he works on the 123 design cascade, and for a variety of reasons the Iranians have decided to keep the test going.
Its been known to happen: Dr. AQ Khan of Pakistan is the most egregious example of this. The head of the program is himself lying to the government, so you've got the private secretary to the deputy Prime Minister in your pocket, but the stuff the private secretary is getting is near worthless.
We think you get the point: there are tens, hundreds, thousands of things you need to know, you will know very few of them, most of the time you wont even know how you know them.
Point the Third: DO Hands Off to DI So periodically, DO hands off information to DI, whose job is to analyze it. Now the fun really starts.
We'd all like to believe analysis is an objective affair. It actually is a highly subjective affair. You have people with their own biases, pet theories, positions to defend, egos to protect and so on. People will consciously or unconsciously add, subtract, divide, and multiply "facts" - we do Austin Powers here because those "facts" can be pretty shaky to begin with.
Point the Fourth: DI Hands Off to the DCI You can have the most scrupulously neutral operatives and analysts, and things can still get very messed up. The Director Central Intelligence is not interested in reading a 100 page report with 500 footnotes and 50 major qualifications simply on the question of if Iran has a test cascade operational or not. You have to summarize it in a couple of paragraphs, and remember, information/analysis is being summarized at every step, so for complexity you are going to every greater simplicity.
Its a bit like starting with a tip of one of Jesus's fingers from the Pieta, and then handing over to the DCI a chunk of marble the size of a truck and telling him: "You wanted the truth of the Peita, Sir here you go. Somewhere in this you'll see the Peita."
Point the Fifth: The Horror Does Not End There The DCI hies off to the National Security Council with his truck-sized lump of marble, and what does he find? Half a dozen other intelligence agencies or groups having significant input sitting there, ready to rip him to pieces because (a) they cant stand his face, (b) they want to make his agency look like idiots, so that (c) the president will promote them and demote the DCI. The DCI equally would love to stick stilettos into the other people, and not between their ribs either.
Point the Sixth: Now the Fun Really Starts All the ladies and gentlemen present are facing a presidential team that has its own agenda to push. So if the agenda is Sa-Dam Has WMD, all the heads of the agencies are under terrific pressure. Start bringing up adverse evidence? Start stuttering that the situation is a bit complex? Insist you are on the team and can be trusted to stay on the team? Big surprise: you choose the last option.
We could continue, but you get the point.
The Process Depends Entirely on the Integrity of its Parts By the way, did we mention that even in the DO and DI you will have groups of people each believing different things and pushing different agendas?
The process can, however, still work, sort of, if everyone, from top to bottom, is straight arrow.
In the Washington of today, the chances of this happening are zero.
In Other Words, most of the information you are getting is worthless, in practical terms.
So Back to the CIA In your editor's admittedly limited experience, the lower down an operative or an analyst is in the pecking order, the more likely he is to be objective. And even today you find senior executives of enormous personal integrity that will not twist information, or lie to their seniors, or put their signatures on information/analysis they believe to be fraudulent. Alas, such men and women are becoming fewer by the year - they don't even make it to senior positions.
The CIA and WMD Your editor's information is that the CIA, even at the highest levels, did not believe the case was proved. But not only was the CIA told to say it was proved, when things went wrong, the President's people told the CIA chief he'd have to take the hit - the President was not about to tell the country the responsibility was his - and so the CIA chief loyally fell on his sword.
The Odd Thing Is that if you were looking at the top level files yourself, you would probably have accepted the case for WMD! But more on this another day.
0230 GMT December 12, 2005
Iraq Prepares For Its Vote All those who said America cannot export democracy to Iraq, kindly proceed to woodshed and whack yourselves 100 times on the behind. Even the Sunnis who boycotted the constitutional elections are working to get out the vote.
It didn't take the Iraqis and the Afghans long to take to democracy, did it? And why should it have? Democracy is natural to the human condition.
When you put a man who has never seen a TV in front of one and hand him the remote, how long does it take for him to get to the Superbowl game, and to be yelling to his wife: "Woman, get me the beer and pretzels"? According to studies we have seen, the average is 23 minutes, all the more remarkable given that men who have never heard about TVs and remotes are unlikely to have heard of beer and pretzels either.
Racial Riots in Australia after Lebanese kids beat up two lifeguards. We're not sure why they did this, but there has been trouble before with Mideast immigrants men being rude to women on the beaches, and we don't have to go into the details as to what that means.
Australian youths, almost all white, reacted by rioting, attacking with bottles and other objects two women who looked Middle Eastern - they were saved by the police - and then attacking two men on a train who looked Middle Eastern.
Middle Eastern immigrants retaliated in their own ways, including burning an Australian flag.
Okay, my Ozzie friends, a message from your editor. Can you leave the women out of this? Middle Eastern women are the real victims of their men and its not right to be attacking women for any reason.
Now a message also for my Lebanese friends. Australia is not America. I'd suggest you not burn the Australian flag, and if you are too stupid to understand what I'm saying, then - sorry about that - you deserve what's coming to you.
Meanwhile, Back To The Great Robert Murdoch Reader marcopetroni tells us that there is a hullabaloo brewing because a Saudi billionaire who is an investors in Mr. Murdoch's company and a friend of the media mogul, has given a interview in which he boasted of getting Mr. Murdoch to change Fox News's reporting on the French riots. The perspective favored by this billionaire was that the riots were against poverty and inequality, and were not Muslim riots.
A Saudi billionaire, Mr. Robert Murdoch - the media baron with the lowest morals of any in a business that has no morals to begin with - and Fox News. What do you expect, folks? The scent of rare and beautiful roses? And we say that as conservatives way to the right of just about anyone else.
Pravda, 4-D, the Indigo People, and 2012 Confused by our headline? Don't be. Pravda says a special breed of children is being born with such powerful immune systems they cannot be affected by disease. 95% of children born after 1994 are indigo children. That is step one.
Step two is that in 2012 the sun and the earth will be in a straight line with the center of the galaxy.
Step three is that alignment will open a sort of window, open only to indigo people, in which they will be able to transition from our 3-D world to a 4-D world.
Questions we have of Pravda. The sun and the earth line up each year at all points of the earth's passage around the sun. The earth is 8 light minutes from the sun, so for practical purpose, its one and and the same body. You can draw a line from the sun to the center of the galaxy, 30,000 light years away, at any time you choose. We are in alignment with the center of the galaxy at all times. So what's special about 2012?
Next, sorry to tell you, Pravda old buddies, but we exist in a 4-D world right now, the fourth dimension being time.
Last, please do not be selfish: tell us where you're getting the good stuff from so we too can discover indigo children, cosmic alignments, and other interesting worlds.
What We Have Been Up To - Some Selective News
There is very little news on the internet today, so this may be a good time to tell you about some of the things we've been doing at Orbat.com.
The main project underway is the long deferred Content Manage System, which has been contracted for and is being customized in - where else - India. Your editor is a loyal American at heart and lost a year and a half trying to get the job done in the States. The cheapest quote he got was $7000 without support; a highly recommended Indian shop is doing the work for - yes, this is the real figure - $432.
We are also getting a pay-per-view system done for contemporary orbats, so people can pay for just what they want instead of buying a whole book, and do so simply by logging on and using their credit card. They don't have to wait on us to do anything.
A third module being worked on will allow readers to order individual history articles: they will browse, pay, and receive the articles over the internet.
A fourth module has to do with Tiger Lily, our publishing division. This will permit collaborative work between people working together on books, regardless of where they are in the world, and permit the editor - Robert McArthur in case we have not introduced him to you to stay on top of manuscripts from the time we give the author/s the go ahead to write them. A tiny shop in India will do the layout and conversions necessary for the printers and E-books.
Orbat.com is now in its 6th year, and while some may feel a sense of satisfaction that we have survived for so long, the truth is we are very, very far from where we wanted to be. Some of the reasons for this are inherent in the structure of the company: it is a zero overhead, completely virtual, flat management structure organization, which is years ahead of its time. The only person we are aware of who has come anywhere near our operational philosophy - which I should explain to you some time - is Linus Torvald of Linux fame, and of course, his organization is about as old fashioned as its possible to get in the internet age.
The very innovativeness of the organization and the way we do things has created enormous problems, particularly as we have had to work with zero money. And when I say zero, I mean it. anyone who works with us can verify that.
The inevitable mistakes have proved to be a burden. We lost $700 on one project where we did not take the money in advance for the work done. We lost $1000 on purchase of information - your editor's instincts were screaming not to go with the deal but he went ahead anyway. The information was definitely worth it for someone - just not us, we could have gotten it just as well for $50. We lost $1000 on the first CMS where the developer did not come through. Recently we paid $1700 for two months advertising on a well-known internet source, for our ad to appear on every single page in the first position. The ad generated $300 in sales. Okay, so we learned valuable lessons - in the ad case, that our product does not sell via ads, something your editor had suspected all along. But given your editor's very long experience of the world, none of these mistakes was an unavoidable one. When you work with as little money as we do, losing $1700 on something unproductive is a huge loss.
We have also lost a number of very good people due to burnout. They simply worked too long and too hard without the promised payoff - which was not much, but sufficient to make these people feel okay, so they were killing themselves with overwork, but at least they got something in return. Our History and Soviet projects are both stalled because of burnout; we lost a valuable contemporary correspondent who has made clear he never wants to hear the word "orbat" again. Our Africa south of the Sahara correspondent who had helped make our sections on those countries better than anyone else's dropped out. Luckily, your editor was able to cover - but at the cost of getting further into debt because your editor wasn't doing his paid work!
Against that, we have proved to ourselves our organizational model does work, the contemporary orbats database is in great shape and is growing better day by day, and we are starting to get noticed by People Who Matter. There is a lot more, but we must plead company secrets and not talk about that. We have no hesitation in sharing our mistakes. But for other things, we have to be careful. Jane's World Armies pays more for office supplies than our total revenues for 2005. So one day people will be saying "Jane's World What?" but that day hasn't come yet.
One of the nice things is that our organization is set up in such a way it cannot be penetrated by a competitor. Today, none of our competitors have the slightest interest in penetrating us because they don't even acknowledge we are competitors. This is not through blindness on their part, but because we are akin to the period at the end of their financial statements. Nonetheless, the organization was set up in a way that from the first it had its complete form, sort of like an embryo cell contains the form of the entire organism. One day people will want to try and penetrate, and they wont be able to do.
You cannot steal any secrets from us because we have no secrets to steal: everything we do is completely open. Of course, there are little tricks. The CIA can go in to get an orbat from country X, and while they may pay little for that orbat itself - people are ready to sell out their countries for very little money- the organization the CIA needs to send someone to buy that orbat is huge and costly. When we buy an orbat, firstly we pay a tiny fraction of what the CIA does, and secondly we have no organization to support. The tricks cannot be stolen from us because they reside solely in the editor's head.
In fact, we have offered to the CIA that we'll get them 90% of the orbat information they get for a 1% to 10% of their present cost. Do you think the CIA bothered replying? Of course not.
But they will, or your editor's name is not John Smith.
0230 GMT December 12, 2005
Iraq Prepares For Its Vote All those who said America cannot export democracy to Iraq, kindly proceed to woodshed and whack yourselves 100 times on the behind. Even the Sunnis who boycotted the constitutional elections are working to get out the vote.
It didn't take the Iraqis and the Afghans long to take to democracy, did it? And why should it have? Democracy is natural to the human condition.
When you put a man who has never seen a TV in front of one and hand him the remote, how long does it take for him to get to the Superbowl game, and to be yelling to his wife: "Woman, get me the beer and pretzels"? According to studies we have seen, the average is 23 minutes, all the more remarkable given that men who have never heard about TVs and remotes are unlikely to have heard of beer and pretzels either.
Racial Riots in Australia after Lebanese kids beat up two lifeguards. We're not sure why they did this, but there has been trouble before with Mideast immigrants men being rude to women on the beaches, and we don't have to go into the details as to what that means.
Australian youths, almost all white, reacted by rioting, attacking with bottles and other objects two women who looked Middle Eastern - they were saved by the police - and then attacking two men on a train who looked Middle Eastern.
Middle Eastern immigrants retaliated in their own ways, including burning an Australian flag.
Okay, my Ozzie friends, a message from your editor. Can you leave the women out of this? Middle Eastern women are the real victims of their men and its not right to be attacking women for any reason.
Now a message also for my Lebanese friends. Australia is not America. I'd suggest you not burn the Australian flag, and if you are too stupid to understand what I'm saying, then - sorry about that - you deserve what's coming to you.
Meanwhile, Back To The Great Robert Murdoch Reader marcopetroni tells us that there is a hullabaloo brewing because a Saudi billionaire who is an investors in Mr. Murdoch's company and a friend of the media mogul, has given a interview in which he boasted of getting Mr. Murdoch to change Fox News's reporting on the French riots. The perspective favored by this billionaire was that the riots were against poverty and inequality, and were not Muslim riots.
A Saudi billionaire, Mr. Robert Murdoch - the media baron with the lowest morals of any in a business that has no morals to begin with - and Fox News. What do you expect, folks? The scent of rare and beautiful roses? And we say that as conservatives way to the right of just about anyone else.
Pravda, 4-D, the Indigo People, and 2012 Confused by our headline? Don't be. Pravda says a special breed of children is being born with such powerful immune systems they cannot be affected by disease. 95% of children born after 1994 are indigo children. That is step one.
Step two is that in 2012 the sun and the earth will be in a straight line with the center of the galaxy.
Step three is that alignment will open a sort of window, open only to indigo people, in which they will be able to transition from our 3-D world to a 4-D world.
Questions we have of Pravda. The sun and the earth line up each year at all points of the earth's passage around the sun. The earth is 8 light minutes from the sun, so for practical purpose, its one and and the same body. You can draw a line from the sun to the center of the galaxy, 30,000 light years away, at any time you choose. We are in alignment with the center of the galaxy at all times. So what's special about 2012?
Next, sorry to tell you, Pravda old buddies, but we exist in a 4-D world right now, the fourth dimension being time.
Last, please do not be selfish: tell us where you're getting the good stuff from so we too can discover indigo children, cosmic alignments, and other interesting worlds.
What We Have Been Up To - Some Selective News
There is very little news on the internet today, so this may be a good time to tell you about some of the things we've been doing at Orbat.com.
The main project underway is the long deferred Content Manage System, which has been contracted for and is being customized in - where else - India. Your editor is a loyal American at heart and lost a year and a half trying to get the job done in the States. The cheapest quote he got was $7000 without support; a highly recommended Indian shop is doing the work for - yes, this is the real figure - $432.
We are also getting a pay-per-view system done for contemporary orbats, so people can pay for just what they want instead of buying a whole book, and do so simply by logging on and using their credit card. They don't have to wait on us to do anything.
A third module being worked on will allow readers to order individual history articles: they will browse, pay, and receive the articles over the internet.
A fourth module has to do with Tiger Lily, our publishing division. This will permit collaborative work between people working together on books, regardless of where they are in the world, and permit the editor - Robert McArthur in case we have not introduced him to you to stay on top of manuscripts from the time we give the author/s the go ahead to write them. A tiny shop in India will do the layout and conversions necessary for the printers and E-books.
Orbat.com is now in its 6th year, and while some may feel a sense of satisfaction that we have survived for so long, the truth is we are very, very far from where we wanted to be. Some of the reasons for this are inherent in the structure of the company: it is a zero overhead, completely virtual, flat management structure organization, which is years ahead of its time. The only person we are aware of who has come anywhere near our operational philosophy - which I should explain to you some time - is Linus Torvald of Linux fame, and of course, his organization is about as old fashioned as its possible to get in the internet age.
The very innovativeness of the organization and the way we do things has created enormous problems, particularly as we have had to work with zero money. And when I say zero, I mean it. anyone who works with us can verify that.
The inevitable mistakes have proved to be a burden. We lost $700 on one project where we did not take the money in advance for the work done. We lost $1000 on purchase of information - your editor's instincts were screaming not to go with the deal but he went ahead anyway. The information was definitely worth it for someone - just not us, we could have gotten it just as well for $50. We lost $1000 on the first CMS where the developer did not come through. Recently we paid $1700 for two months advertising on a well-known internet source, for our ad to appear on every single page in the first position. The ad generated $300 in sales. Okay, so we learned valuable lessons - in the ad case, that our product does not sell via ads, something your editor had suspected all along. But given your editor's very long experience of the world, none of these mistakes was an unavoidable one. When you work with as little money as we do, losing $1700 on something unproductive is a huge loss.
We have also lost a number of very good people due to burnout. They simply worked too long and too hard without the promised payoff - which was not much, but sufficient to make these people feel okay, so they were killing themselves with overwork, but at least they got something in return. Our History and Soviet projects are both stalled because of burnout; we lost a valuable contemporary correspondent who has made clear he never wants to hear the word "orbat" again. Our Africa south of the Sahara correspondent who had helped make our sections on those countries better than anyone else's dropped out. Luckily, your editor was able to cover - but at the cost of getting further into debt because your editor wasn't doing his paid work!
Against that, we have proved to ourselves our organizational model does work, the contemporary orbats database is in great shape and is growing better day by day, and we are starting to get noticed by People Who Matter. There is a lot more, but we must plead company secrets and not talk about that. We have no hesitation in sharing our mistakes. But for other things, we have to be careful. Jane's World Armies pays more for office supplies than our total revenues for 2005. So one day people will be saying "Jane's World What?" but that day hasn't come yet.
One of the nice things is that our organization is set up in such a way it cannot be penetrated by a competitor. Today, none of our competitors have the slightest interest in penetrating us because they don't even acknowledge we are competitors. This is not through blindness on their part, but because we are akin to the period at the end of their financial statements. Nonetheless, the organization was set up in a way that from the first it had its complete form, sort of like an embryo cell contains the form of the entire organism. One day people will want to try and penetrate, and they wont be able to do.
You cannot steal any secrets from us because we have no secrets to steal: everything we do is completely open. Of course, there are little tricks. The CIA can go in to get an orbat from country X, and while they may pay little for that orbat itself - people are ready to sell out their countries for very little money- the organization the CIA needs to send someone to buy that orbat is huge and costly. When we buy an orbat, firstly we pay a tiny fraction of what the CIA does, and secondly we have no organization to support. The tricks cannot be stolen from us because they reside solely in the editor's head.
In fact, we have offered to the CIA that we'll get them 90% of the orbat information they get for a 1% to 10% of their present cost. Do you think the CIA bothered replying? Of course not.
But they will, or your editor's name is not John Smith.
0230 GMT December 11, 2005
Israel Further Ratchets Up Pressure on Iran as "military sources" reveal that Prime Minister Sharon has given his military the go ahead to move forward with a preemptive strike against Iran's N-installations in March 2006. That is the date Iran will supposedly have enough enriched uranium for one bomb 2-4 years down the line.
We respectfully disagree, Iran will have no such thing in March 2006, but then it isn't Washington that first on Iran's "Nuke 'Em" list. We've said previously Iran ahs every right to develop N-weapons; by the same token, Israel has every right to preempt.
Right now all this talk of preemption is just a game with multiple objectives. One is to force the US to do the preemption at a time just about no one in Washington is prepared to take Israel's word for anything, after the WMD fiasco. In 1991, the US did warn Israel to sit out the war and let the US do the work, on the theory Israel's "help" would only inflame the Arab world and make the US job in Iraq harder. So Israel immediately and happily stood down, and had the cheek to keep exclaiming through the war: "America, you're doing a lousy job of protecting us, someone hold us back, we're going in".
After the war the Israelis had the further cheek to say: "See, Patriot is lousy, world, buy our Arrow" - which happens to be almost as much an American missile as an Israeli one and is in a completely different class - and has never been tested under battle conditions."
We Don't Think The US Will Fall For The Israeli Trap Again Now, personally we admire the Israelis for the way they try and get away with the maximum. But they have to understand there are very few people left in America who are going to fall for this "hold us back or we're going to punch the ayatollahs" approach a second time.
Moreover, there is a growing anger in the US with the EU failure to bring Iran to heel, There is a faction - not in the majority right now but we believe it is growing - that is saying: "Let the Israelis and Euros handle this. They'll be the first to lose if Iran goes nuclear, and its time the Euros started looking after themselves. We've got our ABM defense in place and its getting stronger day by day."
The Issue of the ABM Interceptor's Warhead We've said this before, and readers have disagreed with us, but we'll say it again. Arrow is designed to take a nuclear warhead if necessary and so are US ABMs. That changes the dynamics of intercepting ICBMs quite considerably. Wait till Iran stages a test, you will not see anyone in America objecting to a US breakout of the test-ban treaties for fine-tuning testing of an ABM interceptor warhead.
If there's an N-warhead for the ABM interceptor and quite like for Standard 3 as well, why is the US going through all the agony of trying to whack an incoming warhead via direct hit, which surely has to be about the most complex engineering task today?
Well, the closer you can get your kinetic kill vehicle, the smaller the N-warhead has to be. There's a lot of advantages to not lighting up the upper atmospheres with 1 MT explosions.
Please don't think we are giving you a complete explanation of the whys: the subject is very complex, very political, with huge sums of money already spent and at stake, and all we're touching is one small part of the issue.
In 1999, incidentally, when the US was telling the Russians it was going to break out of the ABM treaty, it gave the Russians some figures for anticipated kills with non-nuclear warheads. You can read one document at http://www.fas.org/nuke/control/abmt/text/000119-abmt1.htm, it suggests 4 to 10 interceptors per incoming missile with target decoys. That is without the second tier Standard 3 and the THAADS, which is being called by some a point defense system, but has a maximum range of 250 km. Confusing.
Only in America So there's this murderer, set to be executed for his crime. He has an IQ of 70. No problem as far as the editor is concerned, but big problem as far as the anti-death penalty advocates are concerned. AT IQ 70, obviously the man cant tell right from wrong and shouldn't be executed. More the reason to get on with it, we'd day, but let's leave that alone.
So yesterday we read a letter in the newspaper, saying the reason the man has an IQ of 70 is that he shot himself in the head after he shot a policeman. The policeman died, our friend lived, albeit with diminished IQ.
Anywhere in the world the people who argued for the man would be considered outrageously out of line. Not in America, where it is now accepted to twist facts, make up facts, suppress facts, and outright lie to make your case.
And this makes one more reason Americans are in such a bad mood, constantly, about authority, and one more reason they are less and less inclined to listen to each other. Once someone starts lying, trust goes; once trust goes, discourse is not possible.
0230 GMT December 10, 2005
NATO Approves Afghan Troop Boost to permit US to reduce its contingent and to focus on East Afghanistan. NATO will take over from the US in South Afghanistan. A UK brigade will form the core of the new force.
Our comment: About time. NATO has been getting a free pass on Afghanistan with its nominal contributions. Afghanistan is important to the world, not just to the US.
As for why the world is not in Afghanistan, because of local considerations, three countries that would be most interested in sending peacekeeping forces, India, Pakistan, and Russia, are not eligible; ditto PRC and central Asian republics. The last in any case are very short of troops that would meet the standards needed for Afghan duty. So the burden must fall on NATO.
And while 6,000 additional troops is an excellent start, lets not forget that Africa too needs NATO forces. African troops, almost entirely trained by the US, have been performing in sterling fashion, but they are light infantry without proper logistical backing. One day the 5 regional African Union brigades will be ready for duty; yet, again, that will just be a start. NATO must fill the gap for now. There are - what? - about a million NATO troops aside from US forces? Is it too much to ask 10,000 be committed for Africa duty?
Come on NATO: some of you have old blood debts to pay from the colonial era. This is a good time to start.
Robert Mugabe Bores the World Again At Orbat.com, we have a simple rule. Being an idiot is allowed, as long as one is an amusing idiot. Boring idiots are not allowed, and Mr. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is being terrifically boring.
After a UN envoy issued a statement expressing concern about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe, Mr. Mugabe said the envoy was Norwegian, so he didn't speak English well. Further, he was an agent of the UK. Still further, if anyone needed to be tried for humanitarian crimes, first must be Australia for wiping out its indigenous population.
We confess we were a bit taken aback at this venomous attack against the poor Ozzies, who try and offend no one and prefer to mind their own business. But apparently whereas much of the world has chosen to ignore what's happening in Zimbabwe, the Australians have been among Mr. Mugabe's severest critics. Good for them.
Now, we at Orbat.com do not believe in being mature than the person we're discussing. Its pretty immature of Mr. Mugabe to attack the UN representative's English skills - which actually happen to be excellent, but obviously were a bit too sophisticated for Mr. Mugabe. So we'll counter by saying, the UN rep speaks better English than Mr. Mugabe speaks Norwegian.
As for who is to be be first at the tribunal. The Australians are guilty of crimes of the 19th Century, for which they are trying to make restitution. Mr. Mugabe, however, is wiping out his people right now, so clearly he needs to face the tribunal before the Australians.
Mr. Mugabe says the humanitarian crisis in his country is no worse than in many other countries in Africa. From this he draws the conclusion "you can leave me alone".
Problem: few other African leaders have deliberately pushed their countries into bankruptcy and starvation to stay in power. In fact, few leaders anywhere have. The darling Child of Swans in DPRK comes to mind. Readers more knowledgeable than orbat.com can perhaps name others? Mr. Mugabe, we suspect, will still be a standout.
Second problem: a lot of African leaders need to go. Why focus on Mr. Mugabe? Because he insists on making a blithering ass of himself each time he opens his mouth. He's asking for it. And anyway, one has to start somewhere.
Now, instead of arrest warrants for Mr. Mugabe, some bright spark at the UN actually invited him to Rome for a world conference on hunger. When they start issuing arrest warrants, may we suggest one for the FAO people who invited Mr. Mugabe? If leaders are to be held accountable for their crimes, so should civil servants who abet the leaders.
Another Example of How The World Has Changed 50% of Latin and Central Americans have cell phones. But: each to their own. 80% of Latin and 90% Central American cellphones use prepaid cards for economy; incoming calls are free. Data from http://www.lapress.org/Article.asp?lanCode=1&artCode=4485.
The US now has more cellphone lines than land lines.
In India, telephones are still a rarity, with about 10 lines per hundred people But cellphones have already overtaken land lines as of 2004, and cell-line growth is very rapid: in one year, 2004-05, cell lines grew by 56%.
The world is expected to have 2 billion cell phones by 2006, one for every 3 people.
Your editor actually has a cell phone. He keeps it in the car for emergencies.
Okay, our readers will say, very interesting, but what does this have to do with strategic matters? Well, the more phones, and the more camera phones, the faster news travels, and the harder it becomes for repression to work effectively.
0230 GMT December 9, 2005
Venezuela Oil Comes to the Bronx and if we go by the Washington Post report, no one getting the benefit of 45% under-market price is doing other than saying "Chaavy, we love you." Major propaganda score here by Mr. Chavez, who visited the Bronx and saw the soul of the people. Knowing the Bronx personality, your editor thinks its more likely the people of the Bronx will say: "You wanna see our soles? Here, take a look at the bottom of our shoes." Still, they appreciate Mr. Chavez's gift, and are not the least dismayed its a big fat stick in eye of the US Government. In fact, the US Government also doesn't care its been insulted. You cannot demand of someone else that they respect themselves.
Saddam Co-Defendant Complains of Jail Conditions This trial is generating quite a few laughs. A co-defendant charges his jail conditions are worse than they were in Saddam's time.
Our question to this gent: "So you have first hand experience of the jails you sent people to when you ruled? Do share the details with us." Its clear to us this lot is so terrified of being hung they have lost their minds and cannot put two rational sentences together. Not that we personally blame them: we too would be terrified if what awaits these gents awaited us.
Iran President Wants Israel Moved to Europe Sometimes when a manifest fool speaks, we may miss valid parts of his message because we are so focused on his idiocies. So it is with the President of Iran, who has - not for the first time - shown he is an uneducated person. He denies the Holocaust took place; unfortunately for him, the Germans kept meticulous records of their genocide and these are available to anyone who wants to look.
Nonetheless, the Iranian president did ask a question which westerners must understand is asked all the time among the Muslim peoples.
Given the Holocaust took place, it was done by the Germans and Austrians. The millions killed were European Jews. So why was a state not formed from the territory of the guilty nations, and the Jewish people given their secure homeland under international protection? If you are a westerner, ask yourself: do I have a reasonable answer beyond saying "might is right?"
Cope India 2005 Someone has finally gotten fed up with the egregious claims of superiority of Indian Air Force aircraft/pilots made not by the Indian Air Force, but by its uninformed boosters.
Trent Telenko, writing in windsofchange.net of December 5 has a number of points, in case you are interested in the exercise.
He notes the US AWACS was playing neutral party and voice cuing fighters from both sides in the air-to-air part of the exercise; so in a real conflict, is the US AWACS going to be playing neutral party? Next, the Americans took a decision not to display their Link 16 capabilities - that's why the voice cuing, which American pilots are not trained for since its not used anymore. Equally important, the Americans decided on In Visual Range fights whereas US doctrine specifically says that given the US will be outnumbered, this is a No Gain affair. In real engagement, US aircraft will be firing several fire-and-forget missiles and leaving the area before anyone gets a lock on them.
There's more if you want details, but your editor would like to add a couple of points. If the US pilots said they were "impressed" by the capabilities of Indian MIG-21s, MiG-27s, and MiG-29s, lets not take this as more than politeness. There is very little the US doesn't know about dogfighting against these aircraft. The US made clear what was valuable to them was learning how the Indians operated - the aircraft are irrelevant.
Next, the US wanted to get a close look at the Su-30 under near combat conditions, this is at least the second time the US has had the opportunity.
Next, readers should remind themselves the dog fight part of the exercise was irrelevant to the main objectives, which concern rapid fly-into India to fight alongside the Indians, not against the Indians. Bit of a difference here.
So supposing India had the money. Is anyone saying it would rather keep its MiG family than buy the latest fighters? And did anyone in India hear about something called the F-22 and F-35? Mr. Telenko points out that the Su-30 was designed after complete performance parameters of F-16s and F-15s were obtained by the Russians. The Su-30 is a response to these 1970s design aircraft.
Last, we hope the Indian bloggers are getting money out of the US aircraft manufacturers. They have been arguing for years now that the poor old USAF, flying around in its antique F-15s and F-16s, is just cannon fodder for aircraft like the Su-30, and we need not just F-22/F-35, but even better planes. This is happening at a time when skeptics are saying: "There is no credible threat even against the F-15/16 so we need just a few F-22/F-35, if that."
Meanwhile, folks, not to worry about PLAAF's 400 Su-30s or 800 or how many they deploy in the coming years. US air doctrine calls for a massive takedown of airfields, radars, communication systems etc using stealth aircraft and missiles before committing the fighter force to battle. It doesn't matter how good or bad the Su-30 is. The question is, how many will be flying after the counter-air phase - which the US can stretch to weeks if need be.
Nonetheless, we do think its plain foolish for the US to rely on two 8 aircraft squadrons of B-2s. US needs 100 B-2s.
0230 GMT December 8, 2005
UN Refuses Eritrea Order to Withdraw In a move that could signal a new chapter in UN peacekeeping operations, Mr. Kofi Anan has refused to accede to Eritrea's demand that UN observers be withdrawn from its side of the border with Ethiopia.
Eritrea has been frustrated because of the slow pace at which the border issue is being resolved.
Nonetheless, Mr. Anan's position, a first, shows the UN is determined to assert itself in keeping the peace between warring nations. His words have been quickly backed by the Security Council. The implication is that Eritrea will find itself under international sanctions if it fails to cancel the withdrawal order.
We are delighted at Mr. Anan's stand. This is one of the most positive developments to have taken place on the international scene this decade.
The last we checked, which was in late November, Ethiopia had one corps of 2 divisions on the border and had moved up, in early 2005, at least one additional corps HQ and 7 divisions in depth positions between 20-45 km of the border. This situation had not changed as of end November. This left Ethiopia with 5 divisions in other parts of the country including two in strategic reserve. These are our estimates
Eritrea had most of its 22-23 brigades on the border or in immediate reserve, with one commando and mechanized brigades in strategic reserve. Of course, Eritrea has little depth along 60% of the border, between Senafe and Assab, an average of about 100 km. As such brigades could be retained in peacetime cantonments even at this time, so readers have to be careful with our figure of on the border and immediate reserve.
So far there is no news of a general call-up of reserves.
We believe the figures being given for deployments at the front - Ethiopia 150,000 and Eritrea 80,000 - are exaggerations and are more likely to be <50,000 for Ethiopia and about the same for Eritrea.
Saddam Is Excused From Court on application from his lawyers; reasons not revealed by the presiding judge. The trial, however, continued. A two week recess was announced because of the forthcoming elections.
US Republican Party Lucky in Its Enemies President Bush is trying to explain to America that progress is being made in Iraq. In the meantime, he has been aided in a major way by the out-of-control Chairman of the Democratic party, Mr. Howard Dean, who seems to have not just a personal death wish, but a deep longing to destroy his party. His latest is that the notion the US can win in Iraq is just plain wrong. Some members of his party are already saying comments like this are not helpful to the party, but no one seems to be able to shut up Mr. Dean.
How Does One Define Victory? Did the US/Allies win World War I? One could argue they did not, because Act 2 followed within 19 years. Did the US win World War 2? One could say no. US troops are still in Japan and German, 60 years later, and the German threat was simply replaced by the Soviet threat. Did the US win anything in Korea? One could say no, because the US/UN managed only to restore the status quo ante, and American troops are still in Korea, 55 years later.
At the same time, its not particularly useful to say "no". The world is a much better place today than it was 15, 50, and 60 years ago.
We should keep the above in mind when we try and define victory in Iraq. To our mind, victory does not mean an end to the insurgency. The insurgency could well carry on for years more. Victory means a democratically elected government and democratic institutions growing stronger in a steady progression.
Iraq may well require 10, 20, 50 years to be fully stable. But so what? If the US could commit itself to Germany and Japan and Korea for long decades, why cannot it do the same for Iraq? Iraq is just as important. Look at the Balkans. After 10 years some basic problems are just starting to get sorted out. No one is crying about defeat in the Balkans.
Again, we need to be clear for our readers' sakes: we are not talking about the US fighting for 50 years in Iraq. We are saying US troops may need to retain some presence for 2-5 more years more - we can't see the xenophobic Iraqis agreeing to let US soldiers stay in Iraq for anything longer than 5 years.
Is 1000 US dead a year sustainable indefinitely in Iraq? No, and nor should the US accept that figure, given how small its ground forces are, and how many others wars need to be fought. What figure is sustainable? We can't say where the Goldilocks Point lies. But this we can say: the vast majority of Americans understand the US has to stay the course.
Now that the military has laid down a withdrawal plan, and once the first troops start coming home, the domestic situation on the war will change dramatically.
Of course, for many people, separating the war as an issue and Mr. Bush and company is issue is very difficult. They condemn the war because they cant stand Mr. Bush and Co. But, after all, Mr. Bush has to leave office in a little over two years. We hope a good consensus among the American people can be reached before then. If not, we'll all have to wait till after Mr.. Bush.
The Gulf of Tonkin Revisited The official National Security Agency historian says that while the August 2 attack was real, there was no attack on August 4. American destroyers thought they were under attack, but the North Vietnamese were merely trying to recover their damaged boats.
Six intercepted messages said August 4 was a second attack. But almost 10 times as many said it was not, or were ambiguous. Intelligence analysts played down the ambiguous/no reports and pushed the yes reports.
The clear implication is that President Johnson declared "war" on the basis of an attack that didn't happen.
Now please excuse us while we go "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" very loudly and very forcefully.
We want the historians and their disciples to grow up. To make our point, lets back up.
For whatever reason, the US decided it wasn't going to let the north conquer the south. So US involvement since 1961 had been steadily climbing.
For whatever reason, the north was not going to accept the 1954 border. So it had to step up its involvement to counter the US. And the US had to further step up its involvement to counter the north's counter, Etc.
Does anyone believe that a direct US-North clash would be long in coming?
If not the Gulf of Tonkin, there would have been another incident that would have convinced the US it had to play hardball. There is no way an escalation could have been avoided. If the US aid effort had started working, the north would have had to escalate anyway - just as it did. Then the US would have had to escalate anyway - just as it did.
The Gulf of Tonkin, August 2 or August 4, was completely irrelevant to what was happening.
That is why we advise historians to say: "Hmmm, that's interesting, there was no attack on August 4," and file that away as just one fact about the Vietnam War, among tens of thousands, that history has straightened out.
This was a case of an irresistible force colliding with an immovable object.
And look what happened in the end A nice big market for US exports, another developing country to invest in. For Vietnam capital inflows and an export market. Peace and friendship. Never, never, never underestimate the power of money.
Which is why your editor was an advocate of using cash to win the war. Why spend money to buy bullets to kill the other guy thus getting him off the battlefield? Inefficient. Allow the market to operate, give him the money directly. Your editor cannot claim credit for the mode of thinking that led him to this conclusion. He learned the method from Edward De Bono's Po Think. And no, Po Think has nothing to do with toilets. Its just shorthand for Beyond Yes and No.
For example, De Bono's solution to factories fouling rivers and streams was elegantly simply. Just pass legislation forcing factories to reverse intake and outflow pipes. They would discharge waste upstream, and pick up their water downstream. To survive the factories would have to clean up their waste water discharges. End of the problem.
0230 GMT December 7, 2005
Oh Well, It Was Sort Of Interesting While It Lasted...We can end the discussion about CIA secret jails in Eastern Europe. They exist no more. Read http://www.powerlineblog.com. There's 11-12 prisoners who were first in 1 East European country and then shifted to another, and now they're all in the "North African" desert. There's 14 CIA officers authorized to use the "enhanced" techniques. A few days ago Washington Post reported that the longest a CIA officer had lasted with the waterboard technique was 11 seconds, and of course, the officers know their colleagues will not let them drown, so presumable for the terrorists its less time. Of 12 prisoners only one talked without waterboarding. One prisoner lasted 0.31 seconds.
Hmmmm. So that's why the CIA uses this technique.
The Clown of Baghdad complained at his trial Tuesday that he hadn't had a fresh shirt for 3 days, and that he wasn't inclined to attend court today. So this is news to us, that he comes of his own free will. The other day he was complaining of being dragged to court in handcuffs. Wish he's make up his mind.
He also wanted to why why he had not been asked by the judge if he, the Clown, had been tortured, given all these witnesses were complaining of torture by his security agencies.
Lets see if we can explain things to this genius. (1) The prosecution lays out its charges first. Then the Clown and his Brigade get to refute or to make their own case. (2) The judge is not supposed to ask "have you been tortured?', at random, apropos nothing. If the Clown says he has been tortured, his Brigade can file affidavits with the court at any point. We have no heard of any such being filed. (3) The question of if an accused has been tortured comes up when testimony he has given to the prosecutors is brought forward. He can then deny his statements, saying they were made under torture. Since no one is adducing any statements made by Saddam in evidence against him, the matter is irrelevant to the trial. He can, of course, complain of mistreatment, at any time, he has done so on every occasion, but what he considers is mistreatment is, unfortunately nothing of the sort by anyone's prison standards.
Mostly, we can't figure out: the Clown has expressed, and continues to express, his opinions on everything, including the legitimacy of court officials' parents marriages, the right of Iraq to try him, the presence of the US in the country and so on. So why this sudden coyness, this need to be asked by the judge if he, the Clown, has been tortured?
The Deputy Clown of Baghdad is rapidly becoming more famous than he was earlier. Ramsey Clark says that a fair trial is very important to the healing process of the Iraqi people. We can imagine what the Iraqi people will have to say to Mr. Clark and his healing process, and we have no doubt we will not be able to reproduce most of the comments.
Next, the Deputy Clown makes this statement on the same day as Saddam the Clown threatens the judges that they had better watch out, he isn't dead yet. So we assume Saddam's threats are part of the healing process that Mr. Clark has chosen to impose on the Iraqi people?
Slammer Time for Saddam Nephew 15 years for entering Iraq from Syria without proper documents, 6 for aiding in the manufacture of bombs. Glad to see one weasel has gone down, albeit a very, very minor one.
US Needs To Learn From India What Law & Order Is About Two rival guerilla groups have been busy having at each other in India's northeast state of Assam. 125 dead so far. The civil authorities have issued a shoot-on-sight order to the army. Anyone seen wearing military style uniforms or carrying guns will be - well, not to put too fine a point on it - shot on sight. When the army gets these orders, they will not be aiming at the legs and so on of people breaking the rules, because in India shoot-on-sight means shoot-to-kill.
We are willing to bet our powder-blue booties that the rebel clashes will stop - very suddenly and very totally. That's because its well known the army makes no exceptions when it gets these orders. The army may end up killing a few people who are too stupid to follow the civil authorities' orders. But in the end, the death toll will be a microfraction of what it might otherwise be.
Iraq Military.com says 30+ Iraqi battalions are controlling their own areas of operation and more than 12 bases have been turned over to the Iraqis. The figure of 12 may contradict much larger figures for base handovers, but the latter includes forward operating bases and the like.
Even Military.com - no hot bed of liberals and cut-and-run types - says that if things keep improving as they have been a troop level of 50-75,000 is feasible by next summer.
In a sense, the debate about staying or getting out has been blurred by rhetoric on both sides. With the possible exception of a few loonies of the left, no responsible person is calling for abandoning Iraq. Almost without exception people are saying: Give us a plan to show that we are not in an open-ended commitment, and no, we aren't going to just take your word for it that you'll let us know when the time is right, Mr. Bush, because nothing you've said before has proven accurate.
Similarly, barring the odd loony of the right, no one is saying that the US should be hanging around in Iraq for an indefinite number of years. These people simply don't want a precipitate withdrawal that occurs before Iraq can stand on its own feet.
Both sides are, in reality, much closer to each other's position than might appear if we look only at the hot and fast slinging of words at each other.
0330 GMT December 6, 2005
Ms. Rice Turns The Tables In a master move, Mrs. Rice said that the EU governments had the choice of making as much information public as they wanted regarding Terror War operations. She made no comment on charges concerning US run prisons, thus - to use the Marine slogan from the Chosin Reservoir - "attacking in another direction". She has not just tossed the ball into the EU's court, she has thrown the rackets, the net, the ball boys, and the referee into the EU's court and gone home to watch football.
What a lady! Finally, an American who doesn't feel guilty for breathing, excuse us.
Ms. Rice's comments make abundantly clear the pathetic, wimpy nature of the German spokesperson statement that his government has a list of 400 landings made by CIA aircraft in German, and that he hoped "all the facts would be discussed". Hope away, bub. Germany is a free country. Hope is free. Just keep hoping while the cows come home, die of old age, and are sent to the glue factory. You have the right to hope, Ms. Rice has made clear the US government has the right not to answer questions. Snicker.
Saddam The Bipolar Clown CNN talks about Saddam's mood swings in the court - the session was 8 hours long today. Amusing, but not very. We are waiting for Saddam to do something really spectacular like streaking naked through the halls of justice.
Re. the word Bipolar: we just learned it today and so had to use it. In your editor's day the term was manic-depressive.
Iran buys 29 TOR AA Systems for $700-million. We hope "system" includes more than 1 firing unit and logistics vehicles otherwise this is a whoppingly expensive deal.
US and Israel protest, says BBC.
May we ask why? Last we hear Iran and Russia are sovereign nations. Iran faces a clear threat. It wants to defend itself. The correct reaction would be to look at one's fingernails, puff cigar smoke into the journalist's face, and say "Yeah, we heard about that. We could get turned out if it meant anything. We love to have our adversaries fight back before we take them down. But TOR? Naaaah." More smoke in journalist's face.
Luke L. Graysmith writes to the editor [slightly edited to leave out one or two words]
I agree with your point that Torture is effective, when performed by experienced interrogator(s).
But you summarily dismiss a legitimate argument when you hoot at the cliché called the golden rule.
True, Mr. Zarqawi will not be persuaded to stop chopping off heads just because we ‘play fair’ with the sickos. However, the golden rule proscribes a behavior for you to follow with all your enemies, even if it only saves you from some of them. The scandal at Abu Gharib and the specter of torture at other secret facilities are perfect recruiting devices for people like Zarqawi.
Why is this difficult for you to understand and/or care about? I have a possible explanation… I suspect that you like having more enemies for us to fight. I think a lot of military types do, because it supposedly legitimizes their POV. My own POV is that the military is essential and I am proud of our soldiers. But I am wary of the type that likes to spray gasoline on fires, rather than water.
I am not sure what to think of secret torture facilities in East European countries. But even if I were to support the concept in limited circumstances, I see the torture at Abu Gharib as a dangerous and stupid fiasco. The argument is dragged into a humiliating territory, in which you are frantically defending the torture of some cab driver for information about which of his brothers like to kill Shia. If we are going to compromise on basic principles, let’s save it for the important stuff, instead of dragging America’s name through the mud by water-boarding morons with IED’s. Let the Iraqi’s handle that stuff, if it is their lives on the line (our soldiers’ lives are on the line by definition, and that should not justify torture). Let’s save our moral hand-wringing for circumstances that really matter to Americans, like plots to kill US civilians.
Geeze. And don’t tell me I’m right. Tell your blog readers that *some* torture is just plain stupid, and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for providing ammunition to those who would prevent torture in the *rare* circumstances that may actually be justifiable.
This is just one more area where the neocon’s "To Heck with You" attitude is causing massive problems for the American ‘empire’ they claim to support. And you sound like a cheerleader for their squad, rather than a voice of sanity. Your readers aren’t dumb, they can understand the subtleties… and you write well, so you could explain it. Instead you provide only half of what needs to be said, in such a way that the excessively ‘brave’ will think, “Here is a smart guy, and he says torture is ok, so I’m not gonna listen to any pansy that says we shouldn’t put Iraqi prisoners on leashes for parade.”
Please to provide a public service, sir.
Editor's Reply A well reasoned letter, on target. Using Mr. Graysmith's viewpoint, which is that of a traditionally decent American, he is right. And of course there is no such thing as "some" torture. Torture is torture.
But Mr. Graysmith wounds the editor when he calls him a neocon. Neocons are pink-panty wearing girlie whatevers. Okay, so here your editor has insulting the pink-panty brigade, and he knows from experience some of them can snap a neocon like a stick of asparagus and chomp him down without needing even a sip of white wine. If by neocons Mr. Graysmith means the Washington types that got us into Iraq, your editor has been very clear on this many time: hang them publicly with their panties stuffed in their mouth. A more deceitful, lying, anti-American and unpatriotic bunch of people has never been any country's misfortune to endure. They disgrace America simply by being alive. Neocons are in this for themselves, not for America. And your editor gets particularly angry when the neocons seem to find any excuse to save white folks overseas but have nary a word for the oppressed Africans except "well, we cant be intervening everywhere now, can we?"
You editor is not being facetious. There was a time when you had American patriots and no one ever thought of asking their political affiliation.
On torture Your editor sincerely believes no soldier should be required to torture. The soldier's response to torture should be exactly what the current Chairman JCS, Marine General Peter Pace said publicly to Secretary Rumsfeld the other day. Rummy said that a soldier needed to report torture if it was taking place. General Pace corrected him. No sir, he said. The soldier has to stop the torture from taking place. There speaks a warrior.
Next, your editor believes - but has not written about - that the US government has no right to order the CIA to torture anyone. The CIA is not the government's scum squad. To be a spy for your country is a noble profession, and very much harder than being a warrior for your country, which in these times is hard enough. Spies need to have their own code of honor. The man who resorts to wrongdoing taints his warrior's purity. He dishonors the word "fighter". By doing that, he weakens himself.
If the GUS wants to torture anyone, first, lets stop spinning. Its the spinning that gets ordinary American very upset, and we said that in our opinion piece yesterday. The use of euphemisms permits a person to avoid responsibility for what he is doing. Your editor has yet to meet a torturer who will blandly say that is what he is. Its always referred to as "hard interrogation" or some sort of pretty-fied word. The US government needs to stop dancing around the reality. It has to stand up and say: we do torture - your editor made it clear yesterday that the practices given out out by American Sweetheart (not) the CIA chief are clearly torture. US has signed treaties against that. Say what it is, pull out of the treaties, and to heck with everyone else.
Oh dear - can't do that? Have to keep resorting to euphemisms? That's because you believe what you're doing is wrong! Torture if you have to - but stop lying.
Personally we don't see why anyone should need to torture people with today's drugs and other stuff which we wont go into. By the way, if someone is going to define as torture showing prisoners pornographic movies or forcing them to wear women's underwear or forcing them to listening to country-western music - at normal-concert decibels, then we part company. But first someone has to show that this is effective, and is not being done merely to give the captors cheap jollies.
Your editor is on record as saying the US government should not be segregating enemy combatants in special jails. Toss them in some nice American federal jails. They'll talk fast enough.
Re. prisoners on leashes. Goodness gracious, people, where did Ms. Lyndie England's MP company learn such things? Well, in peacetime the company is made up of many "corrections" staff - gosh, what a euphemism. That's where they learned it from back home, in Maryland and Virginia They didn't think they were torturing anyone.
0200 GMT December 5, 2005
Mr. Ramsey Clark Needs To Watch What He Says The former US attorney general, now advisor to Saddam at the dictator's trial, appears most concerned about the two Saddam lawyers killed. Is he now going to have any comment on the widespread intimidation of witnesses from the village where Saddam perpetuated the tortures and massacres that he is currently charged with? Fair is fair, Mr. Clark. Its wrong for people to intimidate Saddam's lawyers. Its just as wrong for Saddam's supporters to threaten witnesses to the point where at least two have changed their minds about testifying. Expect some witness murders.
By the way, does Mr. Clark have anything to say about the daily threats against the judges?
Ms. Rice On the Offensive On CIA Prisons Timesonline UK says that after weeks of defensiveness on the Washington Post's CIA prisons report, the US has gone on the offensive. Ms. Rice has told EU to back off, and to trust the US when it says it is not mistreating prisoners/ We are all in this together says Ms. Rice, cryptically adding that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Our first reaction is admiration for the Secretary of State. Enough of this rear-end smooching the administration is getting so well known for, and which never works, because you can never satisfy the critics. US should have said, the minute the story came out, we're at war and in war all rules are suspended. These people are not enemy soldiers, no Geneva. If we need to resort to 16th Century torture techniques to get our information, we're going to do it and you keep out of our business. In a way, Ms. Rice is saying this, and good for her.
Our second reaction is to laugh so hard our Diet Pepsi started coming out of our nose. EU has to trust the US when it says its not torturing detainees? EU may, by our reckoning on this issue, a bunch of wussies. But no one has accused the EU of being blithering idiots. Of course US is torturing detainees! As - according to us - it should be! The techniques laid out by the charming gent who heads the CIA are ALL considered torture. What is there for the EU to trust? Even a relatively "mild" technique like shaking has been ruled by the Israeli Supreme Court as torture, and we hope no one is going to accuse the Israeli supreme court of being pink-tights wearing liberals.
One reason Americans are so distrustful of their government is that the government lies and lies and lies. Calling it "spin" doesn't change the nature of the lie.
It is time for the US government to stop lying on this torture issue.
Why Torture Works We honestly, really, do not want to attack the people saying torture does not work - including some military interrogators. They are honest and sincere people, idealistic people, who speak from their conviction - and religious belief in many case.
At the same time, we'd like to point out is a huge qualification on the "does not work" matter. If you arrest a person, and he knows within 24 hours or 72 hours or even 15 days he is going to be produced before a court and either bailed out, or jailed, in either case out reach of the torturers, of course he's going to try and get away by telling you what you want to hear.
But when you can hold than man indefinitely: please try and understand, folks, you talk. If you make the mistake of not telling the truth, the agency investigating will find out what you told them does not tally. It comes right back at you, and makes your life twice as bad as the first time. If you lie to them again, they come back and things are 4 times as bad. So you tell the truth, very quickly if you are normal, a little later if you are tough.
The human is not made who can resist torture for long: we're talking hours for normal and days for the extra strong. The first rule taught to secret agents for if they are caught: try and get away with a plausible story, thought aforehand. If you don't get away it, tell the truth. No one expects you to die a superhero, because good torturers will make sure they don't kill you.
Sickening? You bet. Horrible? You're right. Immoral? Well lets talk about that a second.
On Lying
The Bible says very clearly we should not lie. Your best friend's wife comes running to your house begging you to hide her: her husband has caught her with another man, he's got his gun, and he's looking to kill her. You hide her. Your best friend comes rushing up. "Is my wife here? I'm gonna kill her." Do you stand there and say "The Bible tells me not to lie. So I will tell you the truth. Yes, she's hiding in the guest bedroom. I realize you will now put nine 9mm bullets into her head. But I will remain a virtuous man because I told the truth". Obviously you lie.
Are you going to the downstairs place because you lied? Obviously not, because you weighed the balance and decided to save a life you had to lie.
Torture is, in a civilized society, an abomination. The question of how do we fight a war against an immoral enemy without compromising our principles is an old one. And the answer is, when you're in an all out war, you do what you have to do because you have to survive. There is no point to being dead, with your last words being: "I lived by my principles". If nothing else, Darwin tells us people who think like that will soon be eliminated from the chain of evolution.
On Treating The Enemy As You Want To Be Treated So this is another tired old saw that is periodically dragged out of the Cliché Stable, stumbling and complaining because it is just fed up of being put on display. We shouldn't torture enemy combatants because when our men fall into their hands, we don't want them tortured.
Our reaction: snort snarf snosh smgaff ha ha ha HA! What a great sense of humor people who use this cliché have.
You enemy captive is a soldier, uniformed, and fought a clean fight. He deserves every respect. Did the US not give respect to the 100,000 whatever POWs from Gulf I? Your enemy captive is a person who despises your values, aims primarily to kill civilians, and no matter how treat him, should you have the misfortune to fall in his hands, you're in trouble.
This man will not play by your rules - by targeting civilians he has already proved that.
Sri Lanka Truce Seems To Be Breaking Down from what we read in the BBC news. The truce was declared in 2002, and has been pretty much maintained, uneasily, but still...Now a hardliner has become head of the government, and the rebels seem to have killed nine soldiers with a mine. Further, a breakaway faction of the rebel LTTE seems to have joined forces with the government and the rebel leadership is trying to settle scores. That's going to mean run ins with the government, as Colombo cannot just sit back and let its new allies be killed.
Venezuela Parliamentary Elections are won by Mr. Chavez's party which looks set to have a bigger majority. Opposition boycotted the poll. This is not good, but lets not confuse ourselves with talk about lack of legitimacy and so on; Mr. Chavez would have won hands down anyway. The math is simple: there are many more poor people in Venezuela than middle-class and well-off people. Poor people love Mr. Chavez. Mr. Chavez will win. Nothing complicated, its called democracy.
Meanwhile, the government says saboteurs attacked an oil pipeline. Well, if that's what your dissidents are going to start doing, Mr. Chavez, good luck.
US wants to get rid of Mr. Chavez? Very simple. Drive down the price of oil to below $40/bbl. Venezuela surplus wiped out. Poor people get unhappy. So on. Of course there are bigger issues than Mr. Chavez, so you may not want to do that.
Another approach: announce Mr. Chavez is your best, your truest friend; invite him to Washington, and hug him and squeeze him and make him ours forever. All the man wants is respect. So give it to him.
Law of Unintended Consequences We all know the US is struggling with a flood of illegal immigrants. Now someone has come up with a new theory which to us, at least, makes a lot of sense. Prior to the 1990s era crackdown on illegal immigration, Hispanics - and Mexicans in particular - came across the border, earned their money, and went back. Border was easy to cross. Comes the crackdown. Border is tough to cross. Illegals decide to stay in US and set up shop rather than risk the journey. Bingo, your illegal immigrants climb in number.
0200 GMT December 4, 2005
Washington Post Writes A Sanctimonious Editorial on the revelation the US has been paying Iraqi papers to carry positive news. The insurgents and terrorists don't have the problem of paying anyone to focus on negative news about the US, because people like WashPo do the job for free.
As an Example of Free Propaganda For the Insurgents read about the non-existent Iraqi "Tet" offensive in Ramadi http://inbrief.threatswatch.org/ This "offensive" exists in the minds of AP and Reuters, and it is a very serious lie by the media. Are they going to get punished? Doubtful, because people like you and me don't have the resources to take out ads showing how AP/Reuters lied.
ACLU Gets No Rest These fighters for Truth and Justice are now to file cases against the US Government on mistreatment of enemy combatants as violation of US and international laws. How they are going to get evidence, we are not quite sure. For example, the German government says aircraft known to do work for the CIA made 400+ flights into/out of Germany in 2002-2003. That's nice, but the chances of the German government finding out who/what/when was on the flights are zero.
Personally, we'd have no problem with ACLU fighting for enemy combatants to be treated better if we saw ACLU filing cases against the US government and the states for better treatment for US prisoners. Wouldn't get them the same publicity.
OK, So Another Senior al Qaeda Leader has been offed by the US inside Pakistan and the Pakistani cooperated. Thank you Pakistan for lining up this kill, and hundreds of other kills and arrests.
Which still doesn't answer the question why more of these animals seem to have found a good home in Pakistan than in any other country in the world. We haven't done the math, but we wouldn't be surprised if half or more of the terrorists arrested/killed worldwide have met their end in Pakistan.
0200 GMT December 3, 2005
WMD, Lies, and Gulf 2 Reader Scarlet Paz sends a letter to US Stars & Stripes in which the author, a captain serving in Iraq blasts the war as based on a lie. It wasn't about WMD he says, but about the security of Israel and the control of Iraq's oil. Ms. Paz says the letter has received widespread condemnation and asks our opinion.
First, we completely understand why this young officer is angry and bitter. We've been saying for a long time now that, in our opinion, President Bush should have trusted the American public and told them the truth about why he was going to war.
Second, the captain is entirely correct. WMD was the excuse for a war to protect Israel and oil was definitely a very major consideration.
This said we can get down to basics.
When a country goes to war, the cause is usually straightforward. For example, Hitler wanted to dominate the world.
Gulf 2, however, was not started for one reason. As is the case in Washington for almost any major policy decision, a coalition of disparate interests came together, 9/11 being the galvanizing backdrop, to put into action ideas long discussed and deferred because earlier the time wasn't right.
The security of Israel was the primary reason for a group that saw its chance to act. It enlisted powerful allies, each with their own agenda. For example, key US oil allies like Saudi, Kuwait, the UAE, Oman etc were equally concerned about Saddam and wanted him put down for good. An attack dog on a chain is still dangerous.
Another big player was the lot who believed that true peace in the Middle East could come about only with democracy, and that the repression of 1-billion people by their rulers was inimical to the world, and thus to the US.
Yet another group was the crusader lot, who had been talking for some time about the unprovoked war fanatical Islam had launched on the Christian West after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. But till 9/11 the war, and counter-war, ran mostly in the shadows. It's very difficult for any country to galvanize itself to action in the absence of a straightforward, direct threat, and the Islamic threat was long-term and extremely diffuse. Till Bin Laden did everyone the favor of killing close to 3000 people on American soil.
Another group was the one which believed the US has the duty of creating a world empire. In 2003 America dominated the world or had convinced the parts it did not control - like Russia and China - to work within the US frame of reference. Except for one last remaining block, the Mid East Arabs.
Surely oil interests played a part. The oil interests in America are not monolithic, because America is simultaneously the largest consumer of oil - think low prices - and, till recently, at least, the largest producer - think high prices. But the oil issue we'll have to save for another day as it is much more complex than just saying "America wanted Iraqi oil". If control of oil was the issue, the US should have attacked Saudi Arabia, not Iraq.
When you consider these groups don't think in terms of hard-edged squares each painted in one own solid color. Think of circles that move together and move apart in a constantly changing color kaleidoscope. Before 9/11 the display was not sufficiently constant in time to permit clear decisions. 9/11 fixed the display long enough for the decision to go to war to be made. Many key decision makers spanned two or more groups. There were compromises made. Fore example, there is no way you could have sold Mr. Rumsfeld a war for Israel's benefit. But you could have sold him a war for democracy and the American world empire.
Back to the WMD: Mr. Bush Did Not Lie People, we hate to say this, but the US administration believed quite strongly they existed. However much anyone may hate Mr. Bush, he did not know he was lying, not least because just about every other country with input into US intelligence resources also believed Iraq had WMD. If it didn't, why fight so hard to keep the UN out? The record of Iraqi deceit on inspections is long and extremely detailed, and the record was made by the UN - not by the US.
To say, as some have said, that Saddam was simply tired of being pushed around becomes a dubious proposition once US 3rd Army started massing on his border. The man knew the game was going to be over if he didn't allow inspections, so where was the question of his ego and telling the UN they couldn't order him about in his own country?
Saddam has always acted rationally, why should he get irrational now? Some have also said that Saddam believed the WMD flap was an excuse to get him, and if he proved he had no WMD, the US would merely find another excuse. We don't accept this as serious proposition. Had he permitted free inspections even at the last minute, and had UN/US inspectors looking in every place, how could the US have invaded?
But we do have to say that WMD alone would not have persuaded the administration to war, even if the war was sold to the American public on that basis. We can discuss this another day.
You can ask, "so where are the WMD that you say everyone believed existed?" No clue, folks.
And frankly we personally don't care.
Because we would have supported this war 100% even if the UN had said: "we've gone over every square meter of Iraq and there are no WMDs." To us WMDs are completely beside the point.
We support the war on the basis of the clash of civilizations alone, and because we believe the American world empire gives the world its best chance for a stable, long-term peace.
That does not mean we condone the appalling casualness and indifference which the Administration showed to the aftermath of Saddam's overthrow.
What happened is that the security of Israel group sold a bill of goods. No one was thinking about the aftermath because the security of Israel group said there would be no aftermath. Had aftermaths been discussed, there is no way the other groups would have agreed to go to war. And in all the excitement about the coming war, no one wanted to listen to the CIA and State, who kept saying there would be an aftermath, and a very bad one at that.
The security of Israel lot wanted Saddam and the Baath destroyed, the army reduced to dust, and Iraqi turned against Iraqi so that for a whole generation Iraq could not be a threat.
This will explain why the Iraqi Army was disbanded, and every last piece of major equipment destroyed. We had, for a long period, derided these decisions as supreme stupidity. What we have begun to see only lately is that they were deliberate decisions which the security of Israel lot managed to get accepted as government policy.
The issue here is not charges of perfidy, deceit, dissimulation and so on to be laid at the door of the security of Israel people. They did nothing that every interest group in Washington does not do every day.
To the question of "why should pro-Israeli groups be running American foreign policy in the Mideast?" we ask our own questions. Why should anti-Castro groups be allowed to determine the course of the wholly irrational American policy toward Cuba? Why should trial lawyer groups be allowed to destroy America? Why should businesses with a firm determination to privatize American education at taxpayer's expense be allowed to ram No Child Left behind down America's throats? Why should investment bankers be allowed to destroy social security? Why should the so-called civil liberties lot be allowed to erase all mention of God from public life? Why should vicious commercial media interests chasing a buck be allowed to use the 1st Amendment to push obscene material to our children?
This is the way Washington works. The security for Israel lot played their game flawlessly. If we are to be angry, we should not direct our anger toward any specific interest group for doing a good job. We should be asking ourselves, why did we let America come to this, where secret cabals of the right, the left, the center, the whatever determine the course of our lives? And what do we need to do to bring about change in our own country, even as we fight for change in other countries?
Big Time Cop Out Don't look to your editor for answers. He's a guest here. He pays his taxes, keeps his nose clean, gets up when the Pledge of Allegiance is recited, teaches his students to appreciate this great country, and eats only genuine American-made chocolate, Hershey's to be specific. This is your country folks, you figure things out.
0230 GMT December 2, 2005
Israelis Training Kurd SF Units specifically in CT operations. This news comes from a Turkey e-newspaper and is forwarded to us by reader marcopetroni. The contracts are small, less than a million dollars.
The Turks are understandably unhappy, as they have a huge Kurdish separatist problem. We suspect, however, that the arrival of the Israelis is not aimed at the Turks, who are close allies of Israel. Rather, its the lot across the Kurds' eastern border that should be getting worried. The Iranians too have a Kurd problem, in their northwest. An interesting development.
Israel's Sharon Is Looking 10 Years Younger these days and is usually photographed beaming from ear to ear. As well he might. He shafted his own party because of hardliner opposition to his peace plans: in grand style, he simply announced ahead of the elections he has formed a new party. Haartez of Israel says if the election is held today, the new part will have the biggest block, with 37 votes.
Meantime, Likud, Mr. Sharon's old party, is melting away like the polar ice caps: it would get 9 seats today and that is going down.
Also meantime, after a revolt in the Labor party which saw a much younger man taking over, Shimon Peres left the party he has headed for many years and has joined Mr. Sharon. Labor gets second place in the hypothetical if held today. Since Labor is generally for the peace thing, looks like the crafty old bird, Mr. Sharon, will be back leaving the religious parties and Likud to eat their hearts out.
WashPost At It Again - The Clowns Just Keep Marching On So the Washington Post has this story about woe and so on in Baghdad with people complaining there is no security, and in Saddam's time at least there was security. Smack in the middle of the story is a large photo of Iraqis troops celebrating as they take charge from the Americans of a section of the Syrian border. Great job, WashPost editors.
Anbar has been the most rebellious province and has been the hardest to subdue. That the Iraqis are now starting to take over the ultra-sensitive Syria border from the Americans is a remarkable success. Not that the story makes any mention of this.
Wait for WashPost to write a story on how insurgents are freely going back and forth across the border now that the Iraqis have taken it over, to show what a sad failure the Americans are.
Bill Roggio, our favorite Iraq blogger, is in western Iraq and was present at the handover ceremony. www.fourthrail.com.
How Come WashPost Never Told Us The Rest of the Story? After the non-stop series of operations along the Euphrates corridor, suicide bombings have fallen to their lowest level in 7 months. Doesn't WashPost owe it to readers to report this? We got it from an AP story in www.military.com. WashPost also uses AP as a feed.
The US has continued taking relatively heavy casualties through November, in great part because - we had to state the obvious - there's a war on in West Iraq and the US is vigorously prosecuting it. For example, a new operation has begun, this time to clear the town of Hit. A US Army artillery battalion is participating: without knowing the breakdown of the other troops, we can't say if this is an example of the much talked of new model for operations, where Iraqis form the bulk of the troops and the US provides fire and logistic support.
Israelis Arrest Al-Jazz Reporter Alas, this seems to have less to do with Al Jazzera as a media vehicle than with the man lives on the Palestine side and seems to have been up to no good. Israelis are not saying anything. In any case, much as we may dislike Al Jazzera, they are entitled to put their view of reality to the world as much as anyone else.
Russia Will "Never" Withdraw Troops From Kalingrad Region says the Russian Army Chief of Staff, according to Tass of Russia.
Sorry, have we missed something? Was anyone expecting the Russians to demilitarize the area? We didn't know it was an issue.
It Just A'int Fair Okay, folks, pop quiz time. Why is the Gulf Stream getting colder, threatening a new ice age for Northwestern Europe? Because global warming has caused an influx of fresh water from melting polar ice caps into the Atlantic, diluting salinity, reducing the ability of the ocean waters to retain heat. Go figure.
0230 GMT December 1, 2005
The Editor Misses The Real Cope India Story and to add insult to injury, it is an American reader who gently guided him to the story behind the story.
Says the senior commander on the American side: "in the future -- for any possible contingency that pops up -- we’ll be able to hit the ground running and work together...What that ultimately does is improve peace and stability in the region.” Says the senior commander on the Indian side: "Such exercises not only help in promoting mutual understanding and learning from each others’ experience, but also enhance interoperability and help refine joint operational procedures".
Now, being away for so long from India your editor took the Cope Thunder exercises at face value, aided by Indian newspapers and bloggers that seem to have missed the real story as much as your editor. The Big Deal isn't about the US doing Dissimilar Air Combat Training, which is what your editor had assumed. Its about an alliance between the US and India against a 3rd party.
The 3rd party being the other Su-30 operator in the region, the PLAAF.
This also explains the presence of the E-3 AWACS. Your editor had assumed it would operate passively, sucking up all the information it could. Your editor was baffled as to why the Indian Government would allow the E-3 to operate.
Now we know the reason: as part of the exercises, Indian Su-30s flew escort for the AWACS. So, connect the dots. If it isn't happening already, its going to happen: The E-3 was controlling Indian fighters, and we presume the Indians were/will control American fighters.
At this point readers will have to excuse your editor while he goes outside to barf. The thought of Uncle Sam and Mother India kissy-facing away in full view of the public is enough to make this old nationalist sick.
The Indian and US Navy's already have considerable joint operating experience which they continue to build on.
So, ladies and gentlemen, US strategy in securing the Indian Ocean flank against China Rising is no thought exercise, as many of us academics have believed. There's an alliance that's getting more and more intimate by the minute. Cut! Cut! Cut! Where are those darn Indian movie censors when you need them?
Correction on US Air Aces Reader Theo Levin writes to note we missed the USAF's other two Vietnam aces: Charles DeBellevue, who was the Weapons Systems Officer for six kills, and Jeff Fienstein. Your editor is definitely in the first stage of Alzheimer's or something: he tried to recite from memory the five American attack carriers that were in the China Seas and adjacent at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and he couldn't. A happy coincidence that the US Navy, which in those days normally deployed three carriers forward to the West Pacific just happened to have five - war surge deployment - in the area when the incident took place. Not.
What fascinates your editor is the way people have edited their memories to now "prove" the incident didn't take place. It did. What the editing does is to divert attention from the real question people should have asked then and later. Since the North Vietnamese leaders never gave any evidence of being addicted to hallucinogenic drugs, why on earth would they decide to pick a fight with the US Navy they were going to lose hands down?
We'll leave it to people better versed in Second Indochina history to answer that question. But one reason the weaker - in this case much weaker - side preempts despite potential suicide is that it believes an attack is imminent anyway, so there's nothing to lose and something to gain by preempting. That would be the Big View Conspiracy Theory. The Small View Not-So-Conspiracy theory is that if you have destroyers lurking around to cover insertion/recovery of raiding teams, one way of increasing your chances of getting your paws on the raiders is to attack the covering force.
Your Editor Said It First Few may recall British astronomer Fred Hoyle. He was a great popularizer of science and wrote science fiction in his spare time. Decades ago your editor read an article by him where he argued that the real danger facing the world was not global warming, but global cooling. There weren't many takers for his theory: though concern about global warming was nowhere near as acute as it is today, it was something boffins discussed.
So for decades your editor has wended his lonely way, like the Raven of Doom, croaking warnings about global cooling. No one listened, which is as it should be, as your editor has not the slightest clue about these matters.
But now we learn from the London Times that the British fear the Gulf Stream is breaking down. You'll remember from school geography (even if you are American) that the Gulf Stream is what gives Britain its relatively mild winters even though it lies well into the northern latitudes. If the Gulf Stream stops, UK temperatures would fall around 6 C. Voila, a new ice age, at least for northern Europe.
0300 GMT November 30, 2005
India-US Air Exercises We're not going to comment specifically on the recent exercise at an Eastern Indian air base. The Indian and US Air Forces are falling over each other in extending courtesies and in praising the other side. Clearly they had fun. But as usual we witness the spectacle of uninformed bloggers mouthing off about India's great victory and so on and so forth.
The Americans are in India - as they were in an earlier exercise - to learn everything they can about the Indian Air Force, its equipment and tactics while revealing as little of their own important stuff as possible. From all accounts they are succeeding.
We'd like to ask our Indian friends a question. Yesterday we wrote about Congressman Randy Cunningham. He and the USAF's Captain Ritchie were the only two American aces of the Vietnam war. The North Vietnamese had - please correct us if we have the figures wrong - more than one dozen aces, including one who shot down 9 US aircraft. Does this mean the Vietnamese were better fighter pilots? If our Indian friends can answer this, they'll see what we mean about the India-US air exercises.
India committed its best pilots, and they have done well. Lets leave it at that.
Hello, Hello? There's Still A War On - Anyone Remember Iraq? The US military's announcement that it has an approximate timetable for starting withdrawals from Iraq has had exactly the effect the Administration wanted. A heavy sedative has been administered to the American media.
Does the Use Of a Key Iraqi Witness's Deathbed Confession Create Troubling Questions? Washington Post seems to think so. You see, the defense wasn't present. So the Post, in all its glory, jumps to the conclusion there are troubling questions about the fairness of using the videotaped confession at Saddam's trial.
But if the Post had bothered to inform us that the defense refused to go to the hospital, even after being assured security would be provided, then maybe we'd be less troubled. This one witness alone. though now dead, has provided very damaging evidence against Saddam and one of his brothers. Defense lawyers knew that. So the lawyers decided not to go, and then claim that since they weren't present the evidence cannot be admitted. Or if admitted, it cannot be used. Well, its for the defense to use methods they see best for their client. But it is not the Post's job to do Saddam's propaganda for him
0300 GMT November 29, 2005
Saddam Trial Adjourned 7 Days to permit new lawyers to replace the two who were murdered.
We protest: with 1100 lawyers, how can any two be that important that a trial has to be postponed?
The court did enter into the record the videotaped hospital confession of the dying security official sent to wreck retribution on the village where two men tried to kill Saddam as he passed through. 148 locals were killed. There is so much evidence in just this one case that it is the only case the tribunal has brought so far.
No coincidence here: Saddam was brought to court by American guards, and made to walk up 4 floors because the elevator was busted. Saddam complained about the Americans and the walk. Poor baby.
And dumb fool too, for insisting the Americans shouldn't be guarding him. Doesn't this pathetic excuse for a human being understand only the Americans are keeping him alive?
Saddam, says the media, dominated the proceedings with his demands, threats, and complaints. Overall his refrain is he is the legal head of Iraq. Not going to do him much good on the gallows, his spinal cord is going to break the same as any man's when they spring the trap. If he lives to go to the gallows, that is.
Venezuela Accuses USA of Withholding Spare Parts rendering the 24 F-16 fighters in its air force incapable of combat. The US says it is bound by contract to supply parts as requested and has been so doing.
Meanwhile, the US continues to object to Spain's $2-billion sale of 12 transports and 8 patrol vessels to Venezuela, and says it has not granted approval for the sale - the aircraft and ships contain US made/licensed equipment.
Spain says it will replace US equipment if approval is refused, but Venezuelanalysis.com says that would adversely affect the price negotiated.
Another 10,000 Colombia Paramilitaries To Demobilize The Daily Journal On Line of Colombia says another 10,000 paramilitaries have agreed to demobilize, following a similar number having given up war since last November. The government has resettlement programs underway.
These are right-wing militia that fight the leftist rebels. Both groups are heavily involved in the drug trade.
Randy Cunningham was America's first fighter ace of Vietnam War, and the only one who managed all kills with missiles. With his RIO, William Driscoll, flying an F-4J of VF 96 off the USS Constellation, he shot down five PAFVN Migs, including three on a single sortie - at the end of which he and Driscoll were themselves downed by a SAM, barely making it to the South China Sea and rescue. He received a Navy Cross for his victory that day in 1972.
Cut to 33 years later. Yesterday Congressman Cunningham, serving his 15th year in the House, was convicted of accepting bribes from defense contractors. He admitted his guilt, was stripped of almost everything he owes, and is heading for jail - sentence yet to be decided.
We feel nothing but sorrow for this American hero and his family. Corruption is so widespread in Congress that the US was forced to legalize it: in America with a little ingenuity you can raise any amount of money for your campaigns; the compromise is everything has to be on the books and tax paid if owed. So Representative Cunningham was as clever as some of his colleagues and he got caught. He has taken responsibility; he is paying the price of his mistakes. Unlike the prosecutor, we will not judge him.
0001 GMT November 28, 2005
Saddam's Lawyers Want 3 Month Delay because they haven't received all the documents they asked for and haven't had time to work on the case because of fears for their security.
Look, fellas, we aren't lawyers. But the US is going to be handing Saddam wholly over to the Iraqis pretty soon. So the delays you are seeking to impose are not going to help anyone. Once US security is off the case, there's going to be a "Sorry About That" moment when someone "gets through" the security cordon and does the old boy in.
Ramsey Clark on Saddam's Defense Team We want to be clear we are not attacking Mr. Clark's right to represent who he wants. America is a free country, and CNN quotes court officials as saying if he makes the proper application, he can represent Saddam, or at least act as a legal advisor to the team.
What we are concerned about is Mr. Clark's statement that "A fair trial in this case is absolutely imperative for historical truth to justice obviously". What Mr. Clark, a well-known extreme-left, but peaceful, anti-war proponent who served as President John's attorney general, means by the statement is that he intends to put the US on trial and bring out all the long associations the US had with Saddam before the Big Fat Idiot (now the Big Thin Idiot) invaded Kuwait without getting a clear view on his proposed invasion from someone other than Ms. April Glaspie.
Where Mr. Clark is getting confused is that the US hasn't put Saddam on trial. Even if the US had put him on trial, prior US association with Saddam does not absolve him of his crimes. The US and Japan were allies in World War I, for example, ditto US-Italy. So when the WW 2 trials began, no one brought up prior alliances as justification for present crimes.
This defense becomes even more irrelevant when one considers Saddam is being tried by his own people for crimes he has committed against his own people. The US does not figure in any way. As such, all Mr. Clark is attempting to do is get publicity for himself by maligning America and adding nothing to Saddam's defense.
It is entirely true that America saw Saddam as an ally through the 1980s because Saddam, very secular, was beating up on the Iranians, very Islamofascist. But you cannot put a country on trial when that country has decided as a matter of foreign policy that allying with someone is beneficial for its interests.
You may as well out the US on trial for having allied with the Soviet Union in World War 2. After all, US aid and alliance saved the Soviet Union and permitted it to continue oppressing its people - and the people of Eastern Europe - for 50 more years. We don't see Mr. Clark going down that route. Isn't it important for history and justice to also talk about the millions, perhaps tens of millions who died under the Soviet boot 1942-1992 as a direct consequence of US aid and alliance?
From Walter Wallis "One of my biggest disappointments in this war has been the failure of Brass to stand between the troops and the Feather Merchants. Go find a cat dead 3 days in the sun, put it on your desk, then go about your daily business. Play whack-a-mole where the mole whacks back and try to give the mole the benefit of the doubt. Stand in the middle of the road waving at a car to stop, and just stand there when it does not even slow. This is akin to what some demand of our troops. When the first reaction to any accusation of troop misdeed is to make a conditional condemnation of the soldier, command influence to the soldier's detriment has already been exercised. Bad Brass.
We could not agree more. The way the brass has been letting troops take the latrine contents rather than face up to the media, Congress, whoever, has been nothing short of shameful and dishonorable. We'd like to add to Mr. Wallis's letter by asking: why are the soldiers who burned the bodies of Afghan insurgents, for reason of public health, being reprimanded? Oh, we see, they didn't know about Muslim customs. Our reaction: put every officer involved in the chain of reprimand in the latrines, upside down. Let them wallow in the stuff themselves rather than throw it on men under their command.
Equally shameful is how no Congressman has come forward to reprimand the Pentagon for letting the brass betray their own men and women.
From Mike Thompson Could a reason or reasons for reluctance to draw down in Iraq be Iran and Syria? Bashar Assad isn't "cooperating" because all of a sudden he's a fine and upstanding human being. Hes got 100,000 veteran battle tested veterans on his doorstep, hours away from Damascus. Likewise with Iran, a massive ground force that could cross the Iranian frontiers a genuine threat as well as a bluff. If you're playing poker do you throw away your best cards and keep the stinkers ?? Iraq was supposed to have been the prelim with Iran the main event, and with Sharon trying to unify the govt and country behind him ( a necessary step before attacking Irans nukes ??) why withdraw the force when they will be sent right back with another extended buildup time allowing Iran more time, much like the buildup to Gulf 2 ?? Rummy might have botched up the tactical situation, but strategically he's still the author of "draining the swamp", and the deep ends of the swamp are Iran and Syria.
0300 GMT November 27, 2005
Saddam's Lawyers Too Busy on Designated Court Date or so they tell CNN. They have to travel all over the country on other work. So they want a postponement. More time is also required because some of the lawyers are not familiar with the law.
Good thing Saddy is not being tried in America. If his lawyers gave that as an excuse for not appearing in what has to be the most important case they have, they'd be in trouble. With 1100 lawyers one would assume at least 1 was not busy and that at least 1 was familiar with the law.
US Soldiers Who Burned Afghani Insurgents Bodies did so for hygiene reasons and committed no crime - the bodies were decomposing in 33C temperatures. Nonetheless, two soldiers have been reprimanded for showing unfamiliarity with Muslims traditions. Two more who taunted insurgents using the dead bodies are also reprimanded. We wonder how US soldiers find time to actually fight given this politically correct nonsense they have to go through.
Somalia Piracy: Action at Last A private company will undertake anti-piracy operations off Somalia and set up 5 coast guard stations, under a deal with the transitional government.
Al-Jazeera A Legitimate Military Target says Frank Gaffney, a former US defense official, because it calls for suicide bombings and attacks on US forces.
We don't follow Al-Jazz, and if it has been calling for such attacks, that makes them enemy symps, and its off with their heads as far as we are concerned.
Isn't it just wonderfully coincidental how the American establishment uses propaganda? On the one hand Administration is saying "don't be absurd" when Al-Jazz says the US may be targeting it. And of course the notion the US would bomb an ally - Bahrain - to get back at Al-Jazz is absurd. But just as Al-Jazz is getting a bit less paranoid, along comes a former top Pentagon official saying Al-Jazz needs to be attacked. The Administration, if challenged, will say Mr. Gaffney is now a private individual. This will be done with a wink wink nod nod because everyone knows people go in and out of the government all the time. The wink wink nod nod will be done in a way that Al Jazz notices, and it will be back to big-time paranoia.
0400 GMT November 26, 2005
·
Withdrawing from Iraq Is A Victory for America We are honestly not
clear why so many patriotic Americans feel their country is cutting and
running in Iraq. America wants – we all want – the Iraqis to rule
themselves. America has been giving the Iraqis the means to do just that,
including training their forces. There are now ten Iraqi divisions. So why
shouldn’t America withdraw the equivalent of two divisions? Not to do so
would be a vote of non-confidence in the Iraqis. Given the excellent progress
they are making, such a vote would not be fair or right.
·
To start withdrawing would be confound America’s enemies, who
insisted that America came to appropriate Iraqi oil and to colonize the
country.
·
It would also seem to be necessary now that all three Iraqi
ethnic groups have asked the US to set a date for withdrawal. How can
America say to the Iraqis “this is your country, your are the boss, but we
aren’t leaving till we say so”? All ethnic groups understand America is a
stabilizing force; they may not like the idea of American troops in Iraq
but they uniformly see no alternative. Till now. Now they feel confident
enough to ask for timetables.
·
We have to trust their judgment. That’s what democracy means:
the people decide. Sometimes they decide wrong. But it has to be their
decision. If things go wrong they will ask the Americans to slow down or
even to reverse withdrawal. After all, which other country will come in to
help them without taking undue advantage of them?
·
Remember Lawrence of Arabia’s Words. To those who worry
the Iraqi forces are not ready: lets be frank, folks. Are they ever going
to be ready by American standards? This is the Middle East. People do
things differently.
·
Lawrence, who had some slight experience of raising and
training Arab armies, used to say that it is much better the locals do the
job, however badly, than the British do it for them, however well. This as
true now as it was 90 years ago
·
Former Canadian Defense Minister Says ET Are Here This is kind of embarrassing,
so we are not going to name names, but Mike Thompson sends a piece which
has a former Canadian Defense Minister saying not just that extra terrestrials
are amongst us, but that the US is using these nice people to get super
weapons technology which the US will use for intergalactic wars. The US return
to the moon program is simply intended as an outpost to keep watch for ET
people, though the minister does not explain why. Is it to grab them and
get weapons tech out of them before anyone else does? Is to it kill them
dead before they take over the earth? It’s very strange. Your editor, an ET
from Mars, came to earth for work and stayed on because the chocolate is
better than what we get on Mars. Hershey’s Milk Chocolate to be specific.
He has no weapons technology to give anyway, unless you consider an
unfailing ability to drive wives away. No, he cannot share this with you if
you want to drive your wife or husband away: he didn’t mean to drive any
wife away.
·
Another Expert on America Speaks Reader Henry Cobb
sends this from a discussion board: “Mr.
Ishihara said U.S. ground forces, with the
exception
of the Marines, are "extremely incompetent" and would be
unable
to stem a Chinese conventional attack. Indeed, he asserted that
China
would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against Asian and
American
cities-even at the risk of a massive U.S. retaliation. The governor said
the U.S. military could not counter a wave of millions of Chinese
soldiers prepared to die in any onslaught against U.S. forces. After
2,000 casualties, he said, the
U.S.
military would be forced to withdraw.”
·
We have no clue who Mr. Ishiwara is, apparently he’s a
governor, of what? Okinawa, perhaps? Now, we don’t hold it against him that’s
he’s an ass, and perhaps he hasn’t gotten over the events of 60 years ago
when he lost his island to the extremely incompetent Americans. Its no
crime being an ass, lots of people think your editor is one, and they may
well be right.
·
No. What we have against Mr. Ishiwara is he is an incompetent
ass. In case you are waiting for us to blast him on what he has said about
US ground forces – surprise, we’re not. That would be wasting everyone’s
time.
·
We assume he is talking about the coming PRC attack on Taiwan.
What we don’t understand is why people like Mr. Ishiwara don’t understand
they are absolutely right when they say the US wont fight for Taiwan, but
fail to see the US doesn’t have to fight for Taiwan. The reason Taiwan
doesn’t have a few hundred nuclear warheads sitting around today is because
of the US and the US only. When the US is convinced PRC really means to invade
Taiwan, the US will step aside and you will suddenly find Taiwan with a few
warheads within a year, tens within two years.
·
If PRC decides its going to take Taiwan at the risk of losing
all its major coastal cities to nuclear attack, then all we have to say is,
the PRC is run by lunatics and they need to be nuked now, before they can
cause more trouble down the road. You’ll recall the Soviets thought so but
the US would neither join them nor promise to stand aside in the event the
Soviets decided to act. And these things are not so easily done: right up
to the late 1950s the US could have destroyed the Soviet Union and shot
down every Soviet bomber that happened to make its way past Iceland – look at
the staggering array of assets the US put into air defense in the 1950s and
you’ll see what we mean. But America didn’t do it, even though the Soviets
were America’s mortal enemy, because it’s not so easy to condemn 100
million people to die even when you don’t fear retaliation, it’s a gazillion
times harder when you know the other guy is going to get in a few solid
blows.
·
So clearly we don’t believe lunatics run the PRC; indeed, a
more cautious bunch of people its difficult to find. PRC’s military buildup
against Taiwan is intended simply to dishearten those who might think of
declaring independence. PRC’s plan is to have Taiwan rejoin under
negotiated conditions, with a majority of Taiwanese voting to rejoin. US
cant stop that, and frankly, if a majority of Taiwanese voted to rejoin,
the US would be the best man at the wedding.
·
We don’t want to raise the temperature for no reason by
attacking PRC for remarks it hasn’t made, but reader Hale Cullom does have
a point when he talks about millions of Chinese willing to die to fight the
Americans and says, “didn’t we go through this 55 years ago?” This is 2005,
there are no millions of Chinese willing to die for any cause: they’re just
like everyone else, just trying to get by to make a million dollars.
0030 GMT November 25, 2005
Very little news today, presumably news
reporters are off eating the Thanksgiving Turkey, though why non-American
reporters should be doing this is unclear. Your editor celebrated by eating
the Thanksgiving Donut, an original American tradition that has somehow
gotten lost in the last few hundred years.
Heavenly Leader Visits the Troops for the sixth time this month, says Tass of Russia, indicating that something is afoot in DPRK.
2. Saddam Lawyers to Attend Court next week. Some arrangement for security seems to to have been worked out, presumably only for the top lawyers.
0230 GMT November 24, 2005
Ohmygosh, Hugo Has Done It Massachusetts has signed a
deal with Venezuela for the latter to supply 45 million liters of
heating oil at 40% below market price. Congratulations to Mr. Chavez:
very wily, and he's succeeded. This is going to look terrible for Mr.
Bush, on the lines of: "Our own President cant do anything for
his own citizens too poor to afford heating oil this winter, but a foreign
president whom Mr. Bush hates has been generous."
Okay, well and good. Now
your editor is going to berate Massachusetts: he has a right to, as he
grew up in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and in his American persona
considers himself a New England Yankee. The day Yankees start
accepting charity, and foreign charity at that, is the day they start
diminishing themselves.
Before anyone from New
England starts pelting the editor with rotten potatoes (technically
pah-tate-ohs) let him declare to all and sundry he too is facing a big
heating problem this years due to changes income. He's turned down the
thermostat to 50F for the night, and 55F for the day. Nothing like a
bit of cold to remind oneself that one is alive and be grateful for
what one does have.
The Yankee ethic was:
"You dont have it, do without. You have it, don't waste it."
For some citizens of Massachusetts the ethic seems to have become:
"Stick out your hand and see what money you can collect."
Oh yes, please: no letters
about how the elderly and the sick cant take the cold etc. The state
of Massachusetts doesn't have money to subsidize heating oil this
winter for those who really need help?
You Heard It Here First We've been saying for
months now that the US is going to start withdrawing troops from Iraq,
and yesterday the newspapers carried details of the first withdrawals,
which will take place assuming the Iraq situation does not take a turn
for the worse. Seeing as how seriously the insurgents and their
leaders are being whacked left and right, and seeing as the insurgents
failed to disrupt the constitutional election, we may reasonably
assume things are unlikely to take a turn for the worse.
In that case, three
brigades planned to rotate to Iraq in early spring 2006 will not go.
One of the three might be posted to Kuwait, to provide a
quick-reinforcement if needed. The US has 18 brigades in Iraq,
including one that has been extended for the elections, so presumably
the first benchmark will leave 14 brigades in Iraq, with another 4
leaving at intervals through the year.
The Chocolate Snatch
Affair: More Sordid Details Emerge. We now learn that President Bush talked
about snatching the Orbat.com editor's chocolate bar with Mr. Tony
Blair. Two people present said that the President was only joking, as
is his wont; the other says the President was dead serious. Only a
full revelation of confidential documents from the meeting between the
two leaders will resolve the issue, we say.
And we are asking no more
than Al Jazzera is asking. So if you think the editor is being absurd,
where does that leave Al Jazzera?
Clue for the Clueless at Al
Jazzera: Mr. Bush is a preppie. Preppies of his and previous
generations often display what's called the British sense of humor.
This sense of humor requires one to deliver the most absurd statements
in a dead-pan serious manner. Thus, if Mr. Bush said: "Darn, Al
Jazz is getting on my last nerve, we'd better bomb their HQ in
Bahrain," this is a joke. if Mr. Bush had been laughing uproariously
when he said that, Al Jazz could start counting down the minutes of
mortal life its staffer had. This is so incredibly subtle we think Al
Jazzera might not get it.
Hebron Arabs Ask Jews For
Help
Reader marcopetroni sends a news item from Israelnationnews.com which
says that members of the International Solidarity Movement, an
anarchist organization, have been arriving in the area ostensibly to help the local Arabs
in their struggles with the Jews, but actually to create
confrontations between the Jews and the Arabs. The foreigners know at
worst they will be deported and so risk nothing. Accordingly, the
local Arabs have asked their Jewish neighbors to help control these
uninvited guests. Discussions are going on to see what can be done.
US Navy To Relocate
Sardinia-based SSNs If we relocate right, there is an SSN division (3
boats) forward based at Sardinia and the US Navy has decided its time
to relocate its boats. This has been greeted with much enthusiasm in
Sardinia, with the locals saying they appreciated what the Americans
had done for them, but they are happy to see the SSNs gone. A more
radical lot of radicals is saying they'll see it when they believe it
(slip intentional, Orbat.com's interpretation of radicals' statements)
because they don't trust the Americans or the Italian government.
Next, they say, they want Italian installations off the island, and
restitution for damage done to the island by US military installations.
That's fair enough; maybe
these locals can also make restitution to the US for all the jobs the
US created, and also for protecting them against the Soviets. These
radicals may have been all for the Soviet Union, but if the Soviets
had actually attacked and occupied Sardinia, they first lot to the
guillotines would have been the local radicals. Understandably, the
Soviets had no time for idealist leftists.
14.
Yet More on Representative Murtha We know no one has
any interest in the Murtha affair, but we erred and need to set the record
straight. It wasn't Mr. Cheney who called Mr. Murtha a coward, it was a
freshman Congressperson, and this was a double insult as Mr. Murtha also
happens to be one of the longest-serving representatives. Mr. Cheney added
fuel to the fire before proclaiming Mr. Murtha's fine patriotic
Americanism. Mr. Murtha served also in the Korean War, not just in Vietnam
as we had implied.
0230 GMT November 23, 2005
1. Urgent: the US President Must Prove to Orbat.com’s Editor that the disappearance of the editor’s chocolate bar is not an American plot. The editor has heard that the President specifically targeted the said chocolate bar, which disappeared from the editor’s ‘fridge last Friday. The editor guards his chocolate bars with fiendish cunning: only the CIA has the resources to steal the bar from the editor’s ‘fridge given the editor never left the house that day. Mere denials will not cut it, Mr. President. The editor wants proof, with all documentation, hearings, and impeachment if you are lying, that you did not order the bar snatched, did not talk about having the bar snatched, and did not, for even a moment, think silently to yourself, gee, it would be nice the Orbat editor’s chocolate bar.
2. Whoa, whoa, you say, we know the editor is crazy, but if he is this crazy he needs to be put away. Insisting the President prove he did NOT take the chocolate bar? Come-on, folks, this is past la la land, this is 911 the White Coats with the horse tranquilizer filled syringes, and now.
3. Your editor completely agrees. And is happy to step aside and say Al Jazzera needs the treatment before they harm themselves, as they have lost their already frail grip on reality.
4. Al Jazz, which had of late been going respectable, now suddenly wants the US to prove the US was not planning on bombing Al Jazz’s HQ in Qatar, after the US got angry about the news channel’s coverage of Fallujah April 2004.
5. How ridiculous can these people make themselves? It’s at times like these we need an Ozzie friend of ours, who seemed to know only two words when he was angry. One concerned the urinary function; the other was a suggestion so gross it cannot even be alluded to in metaphorical fashion.
6. UK Telegraph Says US was Careful to Ensure no civilians were present before it used white phosphorus in Fallujah. The correspondent was with US troops.
7. We’ve said earlier that when the US has said it is going to attack Place XYZ, and its giving all civilians a chance to get out, and spends a month encouraging people to leave, then please excuse us, those that remained behind deserved what they got.
8. Moreover, white phosphorous has been used fore 100 years, and its employment in warfare is not banned.
9. Soldiers have every right to protect their lives by any means necessary. There may be a political calculation that some weapons cost too much for the lives they save. That is another matter. During the Vietnam War, your editor was a firm believer in the idea that the Red River dykes needed to be blown. It would have caused a terrible loss of civilian life, and potential starvation. But it would have hurt the Hochis where it counted. It didn’t seem to bother the so-called brilliant general Giap and the Hanoi politburo that they sent two million of their own soldiers to their death. It was not the US’s business to care more for the lives of North Vietnamese than the North Vietnamese leaders cared.
10. Its not a coincidence Hanoi finally sat down to talk when the B-52s went for Hanoi and Haiphong, and the harbors were mined – measures that should have been taken at the start of the war, not the end. Though what good the talks did is not clear: the NVA in any case could not mount another offensive after the failure of the 1972 Easter offensive until it built a new army. It did so by 1975 and attacked again.
11. If the US was looking to save face before cutting and running, it could have declared the war won and pulled out. But the war continued, and American soldiers and airmen kept dying to save the face of a bunch of fetid, repulsive, gas bags in Washington.
12. It WP is what takes to kill insurgents, our reaction is, “knock yourself out, fellahs. But why did you stop with WP? Trundle out a few score Mother of All Bombs out the rear doors of C-130, and end it right there.
13. The US’s reaction to the WP charges has been pathetic. Needed is a robust statement: “The lives of our men are more important to us than the lives of a bunch of baby-killers. We regret not that we used WP, but we stopped there. Next time no Mr. Nice Guy. Get ready for Paradise.” Now, of course, that is the stance the military is taking. But we need the Administration and the Pentagon to say the same thing.
14. Oh, yes, of course the world will hate us more if we take such a tough stand. Like we can all really, really feel the love right now, can’t we, folks?
15. In World War II, the US had one motto, one aim: to say to America’s enemies, “Bye Bye, You Die Now”. Ditto Gulf I and II, the military part. Anyone notice something odd? The US won those wars. It did not win Korea and Vietnam.
16. Okay, that’s no way to fight an insurgency. But Fallujah was not an insurgent action. It was a straight conventional battle, that the enemy was sure it would win because the same tactics had cost the Russians very heavily in Grozny. No need to pull punches next time there is a Fallujah
17. More on Representative John Murtha After attacking Representative Murtha for calling for an Iraq withdrawal, Vice President Cheney is now making nice. Mr. Murtha has, after all, served 37 years in the Marines on active duty and as a reservist, and went to Vietnam, whereas Mr. Cheney’s patriotic credentials are somewhat mysterious. One senses, nonetheless, that Mr. Cheney is being made to make nice, sort of like when your attack dog has lunged at your boss and now you are choking your dog till he wags his tail. The intriguing part is, who has forced Mr. Cheney to backtrack on Mr. Murtha?
18. Mr. Cheney is famously known for not taking instructions from anyone, and for his absolute refusal to apologize to anyone or admit he is wrong. He has nothing to lose: he’s not running for President in 2008, his heart may give out at any time, he has socked away a few tens of millions, and after 2008 elections will go back to the corporate sector and sock away a few hundreds of millions if he lives long enough. He doesn’t particularly care for the Republican Party, and – one suspects – not even for the President.
19. So whoever has made him eat his words on Mr. Murtha mst have real power over him, and we just cannot imagine who.
20. Meantime, Mike Thompson reminds us that the US withdrawal from Somalia was the work of Mr. Murtha: he convinced President Clinton to withdraw. As we all known, it was the withdrawal that convinced Mr. Basket Case Laden that the US was a paper tiger.
21. Can we hold Bin Laden against Mr. Murtha? We think not. The US did not go to Somalia to fight Mr. Bin Laden, it went to feed Somalis. Thanks to mission creep, the US decided to get involved in local politics, messed up on Adid, and decided to withdraw – rebuilding Somalia was not what the US had come for.
22. Can we blame the US for withdrawing? Suppose the US had stayed to build a new Somalia. We know from the Balkans this is a 20 year process, perhaps even a 30-50 year process. Would the American people have accepted the mission? We, at least, are positive it would not have done so.
23. Mr. Reagan withdrew from Lebanon after the Marine Barracks bombing. No one has called him a coward for doing so. He decided Lebanon was not America’s fight, and got out.
24. 0530 GMT November 22, 2005
1. Bill Roggio Reports on Iraq From Kuwait City During the raid on the al-Qaeda safe house in Mosul, 8 terrorists shot each other or blew themselves up to escape capture. Orbat.com comments that we can reasonably infer the terrorists did not think much of their chances of getting Tender Loving Care from the Iraqis had they surrendered.
2. No word yet on if Zarqawi was at the safe house, says Mr. Roggio. He is, however, quick to note the words of an American commander he had reported earlier: Zarqawi’s death with change nothing, it will simply be another step in a long insurgency.
3. Ramadi Area Attacks Down by 60% Mr. Roggio tells us, as US/Iraq forces continue to to squeeze insurgents in the Euphrates Valley. Another operation is under way, involving just 500 US/Iraq troops, to root out insurgents in northern Ramadi. The pressure is to be kept on, with Iraq forces occupying each area after it has been cleared.
4. US, EU Wimp Out On Iran – Again and are to postpone referring Iran to the Security Council to give more time for a compromise. Iran, of course, is refusing any compromise. Now, while the US is talking instead of fighting because it has no fighting options at this time, there is one good outcome of the US joining the Wimp Brigade – we hope temporarily. At the rate things are going, a couple of years from now no one will be able to accuse the US of not giving negotiations a chance or of acting without consulting allies.
5. Be Careful What You Wish For We’d been moaning and whining about the lack of serious news on Russia/CIS in Pravda, and then we discovered the old Tass, now ITAR-Tass, and wish we hadn’t. The site is so boring it will make strong women weep. We’ve been reading the site for a week now and there is not one item worth reporting. Give us Pravda with its stories about Martians and the White Slave Trade any day.
0230 GMT November 21, 2005
Deadly for whom? Reporting, CNN Style "Gunmen launch deadly ambush against Marine convoy" says the CNN headline. One Marine and 8 insurgents killed, says the story. So the ambush was deadly for whom? This is world-renown CNN. This is American media reporting today.
US Doubts Zarqawi killed in Friday attack US is identifying bodies from an attack against an insurgent house in Mosul last Friday, but says it doubts Zarqawi was killed. The attack order was given before US knew Zarqawi was/had visiting/visited the house.
Iran Replies to EU/Russia Make Nice Efforts Over N-Concerns 183 of 197 Iranian lawmakers present approved a parliamentary bill requiring Iran to block all IAEA inspection of nuclear facilities.The vote comes 4 days before IAEA is to take up question of referring Tehran to UN Security Council for violation of the NPT. So much for EU/Russia continuing to make nice to avoid confrontation with Iran.
Orbat.com Position on Iran N-Program Under no conditions will Iran voluntarily give up its N-program. Without the program, Iran may as well tell the US: "Please come and walk all over us, at your pleasure". Iran will not have a workable bomb till 2010. That leaves 5 years to find a solution. The solution will have to be destruction of Iran's N-program and regime change. Contrary to what is being said, US does not have to attack 300 facilities to kill the program. It has to attack less than 10. But destruction is only a stop-gap solution till the real problem is addressed, which is the Iran mullahs have to go in order for the US to advance its interests. No ifs and buts, no candy and nuts, and it isn't going to be Christmas all year long. The present administration's credibility for major foreign interventions is down in the septic tank, it can't get any lower. The intervention will have to be left to the new administration, which gives it a 1-2 year window in which to act. The present administration can help by starting the tedious process of consensus building needed for another major intervention after the Iraq fiasco.
Another official fingers the Vice President for Torture An aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the torture instructions came directly from the Vice President, and were implemented. He has no knowledge of what is happening now, but sees no reason to believe that torture is still continuing. The official charges Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld ran a cabal that excluded senior bureaucrats. They genuinely did not know about the official sanction of torture. Official rhetorically asks if the President knew. Official says he voted for President and would like to believe that Mr. Bush was also kept out of the loop.
The Fantasies of Mr. Robert Mugabe Mr. Mugabe says uranium has been discovered in Zimbabwe will build nuclear power reactors to meet its energy shortage. Its plain the old dictator is losing his mind. You dont need uranium deposits to build nuclear reactors. Uranium for power reactors is available in plenty from many sources. Announce you will pay for a reactor, and all the industrialized nations will be at your door, kissing your left big toe, to bid for the job. All you need is about 2 billion bucks a gigawatt, and a minimum of 10 years, preferably 15, for project completion. The question is, where's the money? Zimbabwe cant spare the minimum $50 million required to get the planning done. Hopefully the doctors will change Mr. Mugabe's medication and he will get back to some version of reality.
0130 GMT November 20, 2005
HACKED BY A MICHAEL MOORE SUPPORTER! Reader Stephen Commer emailed us to ask if we knew the site had been hacked: there was peculiar code all over the place and links that led to Mr. Moore's sites. Your editor was, as usual, clueless, but pretty chuffed about the whole thing. He felt Orbat.com was finally being taken seriously. After the initial euphoria, however, your editor is forced to concede that being hacked by a Moore supporter is pretty pathetic, given Mr. Moore is pretty pathetic. Moreover, there's nothing we can do: one of our black programmers offered to implement our choice of several degrees of retaliation all the way to the nuclear option; alas, attacking people's websites is illegal - as well as violative of the right of free speech, so we regretfully had to turn down the offer.
US ARMY PRESENTS IRAQ PULL-OUT PLAN Our problem here is that people are going to say the recent escalating pressure back home forced the US government to prepare and present a withdrawal plan from Iraq, and we don't see that the debate at home has much to do with the proposed pull-out. The military has been pushing for a start to withdrawal for several months on purely military grounds: the Iraqis will not learn to stand on their own feet as long as the US is holding their hands; US troops are becoming the problem rather than the solution because they are attracting needless fire and avoidable hatred from Iraqis; and, most important, how long can the force continue operations at this pace?
Case in point: a captain from our area who has been killed in Iraq was on his fourth tour in four years. This is not right, and it is not fair that a small part of America has to bear all the burden of the Terror War. The Army understands perfectly if this pace of deployment keeps up, come another three years, there will be no army left because people will not join, or if they join, they will not reenlist.
The Army was told to shut up about the withdrawal for the present because, it was said, specific pull-out dates would encourage the insurgents.
Au contraire, Pierre. This is yet another example of "obvious" but incorrect assumptions that have bedeviled the Iraq venture from the start. The insurgents will not be encouraged by concrete withdraw plans, they will be afraid. For the simple reason everywhere the Iraqis take over, there isn't going to be a Mr. Nice Guy to see that the locals and insurgents get their rights. Sure, the Iraqis are a lot less efficient at the military end of CI. But they are very efficient of making people talk, and talkative people are the key to beating an insurgency, not firepower, technology, and massed manpower.
In fact, the only thing standing between Saddam and the lynch mob right now is the Americans. Ditto other regime members in custody.
Well, now the Army is free to talk about the withdrawal again because President Bush needs something to save his party in 2006. If he can show a marked decrease in troops, Americans will be mollified, and the nice thing is - as we said above - for purely military reasons the US needs to reduce its footprint.
One reason: the troops have to come back to they can resume conventional war training for the next target.
So the plan is to bring 2000 troops at a time home, with no formal deadline except that 40,000 have to be back by end 2006. We dont count the extra 30,000 in Iraq right now for the elections, because after December 15 they are due back anyway. If things are going well, increments of 2000 will come home rapidly. If they are not going well, the increments will come back more slowly. But, whatever happens, on the first Tuesday of November 2006, there will be less than 100,000 US troops in Iraq.
The press is talking of "the magic number" of 100,000. Well, we don't know where they go for their magic, because less than 100,000 is tolerable politically only if that too is being drawn to 60,000. Below 60,000 you have a bit of leeway timewise till you go down below 40,000 and less than 300 a year killed. In our humble opinion, that represents a ceiling the American people will accept for some years.
In case we at Orbat.com haven't been clear enough: by refusing to set deadlines, the US will feed the insurgency. The insurgents have been saying the Americans plan never to leave, and President Bush has been thoughtfully playing right into their hands.
In Vietnam the greatest single problem was that the Americans simply spent no time at all looking at things from the enemy's viewpoint; the few that did were marked as mavericks and discredited. There are two parties to every war. Your job is to impose your will on your adversary. But if you dont even bother asking where he's coming from, all you're doing is the elephant dance: Dance Crush Dance Crush, and hope that you re big enough and bad enough you will simply squash the adversary dead.
This worked beautifully in World War II. It did not work in Korea or in Vietnam. It worked beautifully in Gulf I and II. It would have failed in post Baghdad 2003 but did not because a remarkably well-educated Army managed enough leeway in the field that it could be innovative, despite the "Nuke 'em" approach initially used.
READER WALTER WALLIS DISAGREES with our saying Senator John Murta is a patriot and has a right to be oppose the war without being called a traitor. Mr. Wallis, who served in Korea during that forgotten war, says Mr. Murta has disgraced his uniform and country by going public with cheap shots against the President's Iraq policy.
We understand perfectly Mr. Wallis's viewpoint, which is why we emphasized that as far as we are concerned, everyone has the right to question the tactics/strategy being employed in Iraq on its own merits. In fact, when the government is using wrong approaches, it is our patriotic duty to disagree.
Mr. Wallis has a point about going public. The problem here is that Senator Murtha, who to start was a firm supporter of the war, has been trying to get Mr. Bush and other prominent Republicans to listen to concerns raised by conservative Democrats like himself - and by many Republicans. He has, however, been brushed off with the "My President, Right or Wrong" line. He is angry, understandably so. One thing the Republicans have not learned - and have caused unnecessary pain for themselves - is that you do not assume the Divine has anointed you because you won the election with 22-23% of voters voting for you. You have to work with the opposition, and with differing factions in your own party. If you don't, and if you squash even your own loyalists, they will take it out on you somewhere else where you cannot accuse them of being anti-national. Perhaps it might have occurred to Mr. Bush's inner circle that this is one reason in his second term he just cannot seem to get anything passed?
And in any case you do not wage war on a partisan basis, you wage it by consensus.
This said, we understand it galls a man of Mr. Wallis's principles and beliefs that Senator Murta is saying things the hated left Democrats and even more hated press is saying. But look at this way: why have we on the right let the left hijack this debate? Why are we on the defensive and not them? Because we have let the left frame the terms of debate - that means you are dead in the water from the word go, without having fired a shot.
And we've let the left frame the debate because we didn't want to appear unpatriotic by attacking the President. Yet, we've all got the remember: the President is not America. He is a partisan politician the same as the war's opponents. Personally, your editor likes Mr. Bush a lot. But we have to face up to the reality that the day of American giants is gone. Surely, Lincoln and Roosevelt were politicians too. But they thought first about America, and only secondarily of their own advantage.
This is the age of Aquarius, of the Boomers, of the Me First, Last, and Only generation, the believers in anything is justified because, you see, I'm special - by definition if I want it, it has to be right for everyone, and if they don't see it, they are stupid.
Incidentally, your editor STILL runs into people - Americans and foreigners - who say: "How can those people who voted for Bush be so stupid?" Fellows, here's a big secret that will make you better people: people voted for Mr. Bush because they got tired of your Clintons, Gores, and Kerrys putting down us plain folks who know we aint got genius brains, and don't know much, but we do know you geniuses seem to get America into ever more trouble in every way. Bush is one of us: he's - dare we say it? - an average Joe - just like we are.
ENCOURAGING NEWS FROM FRANCE We thank reader Mike Thompson's for his constant efforts to cheer up the editor. November's been rough: we're near to losing 3 weeks on the darn CWA 2006, and while we exceeded our October sales targets, November's look like a total mess because your editor has been fire-fighting on account of systems going down. To say nothing of the usual shenanigans with Mrs. Rikhye, failing Calculus because we're not putting enough work into it - yes, AGAIN - and the usual threats by graduate school to expel one - again for not doing enough work - and how are we expected to do any work when for 18 days we've been spending 14-16 hours a day trying to keep Orbat.com together.
The first bit of cheery news Mr. Thompson sends is that the French police have announced with a straight face that yes, they CAN say the situation in France is now normal because only 100 cars a day are being burned, because that IS normal for France. Let's see: the US’s population is 5 times that of France, and the number of cars per capita is - lets guess - 1.5 times as much. So that's equal to 750 cars a day being burned in America.
Hey, this is one of those times Americans can be grateful we're freaks and not normal: because 750 cars burned a day would definitely NOT be considered normal in America! Sheesh!
The second bit of good news is that performance personality Johnny Depp is leaving his mansion and estate in France. He no longer feels safe. Mr. Thompson suggests Mr. Depp's modest manse would make a good retirement spot for your editor.
Thank you, Mr. Thompson. We were thrilled for a minute till it hit us. Till this French thing, we dont think many people in America knew 100 cars a day burned is normal in France. Now what else are the French hiding from us in the name of normality? Like maybe burning 100 houses a day in France is normal?So on second thoughts your editor has decided to stay on in America. True his metro area has one of the highest murder rates in the world, civilized or otherwise. The thing is, unless you are dealing drugs, or part of a gang, or inclined to shoot your wife because she's sleeping with your best friend, Washington Metro is one of the safest places in the world to live in. Our county recently went over 20 murders a year for near on 1.5 million people - and most of those were for love, honor or gangs - and people are freaking out. Since your editor has no love, lost his honor years ago, and no gang wants him, he's safer right where he is.
0100 GMT November 19, 2005
1. AMERICA WANTS OUT OF THE EMPIRE BUSINESS The Pew Charitable Trusts, one of the most impartial of American polling organizations, say Americans want to reduce involvement overseas by margins that equal post Vietnam and the end of the Cold War.
OPINION
2. UNSOLICITED ADVICE FOR MR.BUSH Lately, Sir, you have been getting into a whole lot of trouble because you are not controlling your advisors, including your Vice President. May we suggest you exercise your prerogative as president and start running the country?
3. We’re going to comment on just one issue: the manner in which your advisors have attacked Senator John Murtah, a staunch patriot, veteran, and previous supporter of the Iraq War, is going to boomerang on you. Mr. Murtah is not saying anything his voters are not telling him, and unless you start listening to what the country is trying to say, you are going to bring disaster on your party next November. Similarly, if you don’t stop Mr. Cheney from attacking the patriotism of people like Admiral Stansfield Turner – who has an infinitely better record as a patriot than Mr. Cheney – you are going to expose yourself to growing ridicule.
4. A RESTATEMENT OF ORBAT.COM’s POSITION ON IRAQ We support the effort to build democracy in Iraq, and to us it is immaterial the government seized on this as an objective after making as a big a mess of things by invading Iraq as it did and in the aftermath. Good things can come out of bad decisions, this is an example.
5. At the same time, speaking as an expert who spent two decades explaining American global strategy to foreigners, and who has some slight expertise in the matter, and who also has some slight expertise in military matters, your editor says without equivocation US grand strategy in Iraq is deeply flawed, and the government is forcing the military to pay the price for the flawed strategy.
6. This has had consequences that are directly undercutting American interests. Iraq has drained US resources for no purpose, diverted attention from the crusade against Islamic fundamentalism in a dozen major areas, and hobbled the US in its drive against tyranny.
A SIMPLE STRATEGY FOR CRUSADE AND WORLD EMPIRE
The government is wasting American blood and gold in its King Canute approach to Iraq. Iraq is going to break up no matter what the US does, and in any case a tripartite Iraq is to America’s interest. The : for example, it interestwhile a unified Iraq is not. America should be managing the transition of Iraq to 3 independent states, not trying to maintain the last vestiges of the Ottoman Empire. An orderly transition should begin now and it will permit the reduction of US forces in Iraq to below 60,000 by next November.
Next, expand the ground forces by at least 50%. The government’s policy on force levels is stupid belong belief, and unfortunately, some very powerful generals are throwing their weight behind the Administration’s idiocy.
Third, the government is ready to keep saying we're engaged in a hundred years war, but it is expending resources as if we're in a two year war. America needs to either up defense spending to 6% of GNP - not an unrealistic level in pour opinion, but politically impossible - or it needs to adjust to spending smaller sums of money more efficiently. Example: America has essentially taken over Africa - bet most of our readers didn't even realize this had happened - on an expenditure equal to tens of millions of dollars a year for about 15 years. The job is by no means done. But the American lives lost have been nil, except in accidents, and the money spent is pocket change. Obviously not all problems can be solved by such lower expenditures. But spending $100 billion a year on terror operations in two countries is also not the way to go about things.
Four, start building up the consensus at home. You will never have 100% agreement, but anything about 65% is more than sufficient. The government can no longer run around waving the flag and expect Americans to automatically rally to the flag. Americans' loyalty is to the flag as a symbol, not to whatever morons happen to be running the government at any given time. The post-9/11 consensus is gone, wasted by a bunch of profiteers who made their money, attained their purposes, and have gone on to better things, or are simply sitting quiet - or perhaps not so quiet as shown by Mr. Cheney, aided and abetted by incompetent bureaucrats and political generals.
Five, keep in mind that to much of the world, America's moral superiority in the crusade is not an automatic given. What's striking about the crusade is how little other countries want to have to do with it - even countries that are under attack, like France, the Netherlands, India, the Philippines and Indonesia, who should be America's natural allies in this battle, not allies by brute force. Why this situation is so is something we can discuss another time, but we warn our conservative readers will not be happy with the answer.
The issue is no longer is the military war in Iraq winnable. It is being won right now. The issue is if the current approach is worth the cost - and clearly it is not, and if, while winning the war in Iraq on the back of the military, the government is not losing the war at home.
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0330 GMT November 17, 2005
1. FRANCE, DAY WHATEVER Following from Reuters via CNN says it all: “Violence has fallen sharply in the past week, and police said Monday only 215 vehicles had been destroyed overnight, an "almost normal" level.”
2. Your editor has cancelled plans to retire to France. He bought a sub-compact 7 years ago, managed to pay it off after 5, has kept it in immaculate condition so he won’t have to buy another car for as long as he can drive. He simply can’t afford to lose the car – its replacement value is $1200, which will not buy even a Vespa. Nothing personal, we know our French friends will understand, with 215 burned cars being almost normal and all that.
3. WHITE PHOSPHOROUS Reader Conor Savoy writes to say artillery illumination rounds do not necessarily have to be parachute retarded; we apologize, the only ones we’ve seen are mortar-fired illumination rounds. He adds the US does use illumination rounds against personnel. We will leave it to others better qualified – we were assuming if the DOD says it doesn’t, that ends the matter because DOD would not want to be caught out.
4. Mr. John Pike at www.globalsecurity.com makes the point that if white phosphorus has been used, bodies will not have unburned clothes. Obvious; we didn’t know the bodies the Italian TV channel cited were in unburned clothing. That in itself should end any discussion on the TV channel’s credibility, whatever else may be out there.
5. US PRESENTS IRAN N-PLAN EVIDENCE The US has presented to IAEA and others 1000 pages of documents on Iran’s N-plans; the documents are said to have come from a laptop that was smuggled out of Iran.
6. An unnamed European official says the documents are impressive, but the material is such the papers could have been forged. The problem is after the Iraq WMD fiasco the standard of proof others will require before believing the US has become very high indeed.
7. IRAQ: OPERATION STEEL CURTAIN Over the weekend US reported 40 insurgents had been killed in the ongoing offensive up the Euphrates Valley on the Syrian border. Monday US reports another 30 killed in Obedi, another border town US/Iraq forces have advanced on.
8. In the earlier phases of Steel Curtain, which is now into its 13th day, the insurgents did not stand and fight – a reasonable strategy for the weaker side. If they are now standing and fighting, it is because they have been surrounded and have nowhere to go.
9. That in turn indicates the US/Iraq strategy of pacifying the Euphrates Valley is working.
10. Some insurgents were caught as they sought to escape hidden among a flock of sheep.
11. Now a man has to do what he needs to do to stay alive, but the insurgents should have known this worked for Ulysses and his men when they were trapped in the Cyclops’ cave only because the Cyclops, a giant, had giant sheep. So giant, in fact, that the Greeks got away by grasping the wool on the belly of the sheep even though the Cyclops carefully felt each sheep before letting them out for the day. Having been blinded by Ulysses, the Cyclops had to use touch to try and catch the Greeks.
12. These sheep must have been as big as tanks and we would for sure not like to meet them on a dark street at midnight.
0230 GMT November 16, 2005
1. HUGO OVEREACHES Our favorite villain, President Hug Chavez of Venezuela, made a rare error by calling the respected Mexican president Senor Vincente Fox a puppy dog for US imperialism. Both sides have recalled ambassadors.
2. Mr. Chavez gains nothing by insulting one of the two most leaders in Latin America. Does he think he will earn points with the Mexican people or other Latin leaders?
3. ITALIAN TV CHANNEL STANDS BY ALLEGATIONS US USED CHEMICAL WARFARE IN FALLUJAH [Thanks to reader marcopetroni for keeping track of this story.] We didn’t bother reporting the allegations when they first surfaced, because the story was both silly and pointless. The TV channel said the US had used napalm in Fallujah, as well as white phosphorus bombs.
4. US replied it had long since destroyed its napalm stocks, and white phosphorous is used only for illumination, a functioned permitted under chemical warfare treaties.
5. So, we can’t really blame the TV channel for doing what seems to be instinctive with media of any political persuasion, which is to grandly assert it stands by its claims and has evidence.
6. If the channel has evidence the US has used napalm, then it should be sharing the evidence with HR groups and European courts.
7. Now let’s talk about white phosphorous. We have no reason to doubt that the TV channel can produce some people burned by this item. That still doesn’t mean the US used the item as an anti-personnel incendiary, and we are resentful this TV channel is making us waste our valuable time in explaining stuff any schoolboy enthusiasts knows.
8. Illumination rounds descend by parachute. The idea is to keep the round up in the air as long as possible, so that it provides illumination for as long as possible.
9. Okay. So parachutes can fail, and rounds can arrive on the ground without having fully burned. Someone with the misfortune of being in the wrong place is going to get very badly burned.
10. The TV channel says it has witnesses who saw bodies with strange burns. Well, we’re not experts at this sort of thing, but have the TV’s experts considered you can get strange burns if oil is involved in an explosion or fire. The oil sticks to your skin and makes the fire much, much worse. You see this kind of burn all the time in armored warfare and sea battles. The results are not pretty.
11. We feel for the TV channel, but as far as we know, death in battle is not a particularly pretty affair. We doubt someone at the wrong end of a JDAM thinks to himself, in the last milli-seconds of his life, “Gee, I am soooo lucky I’m not being killed by white phosphorous or napalm”.
12. JORDAN WOMAN BOMBER’S MOTIVES All four of the Jordan hotel bombers are/were Iraqis. The woman whose explosive belt failed and who was captured alive has lost a brother-in-law and two brothers to the Americans. One was a bomb-maker; one was Zarqawi’s right hand man. So she wanted revenge.
13. We have a question to ask of her. Wouldn’t it have been simpler if in the first place your family not gone to war for the basest of motives, that of restoring Saddam to power?
14. 1100 SADDAM LAWYERS RESIGN because of concern for their own safety. The Iraqi tribunal is not impressed. The trial will go on, it says.
15. Even in his last days Saddam remains a megalomaniac. Eleven hundred lawyers? The man is lucky they’ve resigned, think what a mess so many could have created.
0130 GMT November 14, 2005
1. MEDIA CENSORSHIP IN FORCE IN FRANCE, BELGIUM Seems irrefutable that media censorship is in force in France, where we are still seeing hundreds of cars a day torched, and in Belgium, which has also been hit, though the number of daily incidents is in the single digits,
2. Orbat.com has no problem with media censorship effected with the intention of defusing the situation, and of cutting off Islamofacist and Islamophobic groups from rallying followers.
3. If, however, it is true that in France the censorship is intended to avoid switching voters to the right, then all we can say is, the French media is asking for trouble from its public.
4. SOME SAY IZZAT AL DOURI NOT DEAD but its best to keep in mind this time the news of his death came from the Baath Party, not from US/Iraqi sources.
5. How’s this for logic? One Iraqi tells the media reporter that if al Douri were dead, there would be massive demonstration in the streets. The streets are peaceful, thus al Douri is alive. Why did the reporter bother reporting this tripe?
6. HOWZAAAAAAAT?! (Cricket exclamation when the wicketkeeper thinks he’s got the batsman out, said to umpire). Women constitute 27% of the new Afghan parliament.
7. Next time anyone tells your editor that Muslims cannot handle democracy – and its usually liberal westerners who say so, he shall have great pleasure in stuffing this statistic down their throat. Lets see now, where do women constitute 27% of parliament? Not in the United States (Congress).
8. Afghanistan leaped 500 years at one go. Women didn’t even have the vote before the US invaded.
9. US Administration, Pentagon, Intelligence, Congress, Military, yes even the media which has left Afghanistan alone: you did it right. The glory and the victory are yours.
10. Now regarding Iraq, kindly all of you Assume The Position, because you are going to get 12 of the Very Best on your useless backsides – and that’s for starters. Everyone but the military, that is.
11. If people in Washington who make egregious mistakes were treated to a Singapore 12, as opposed to a boarding school 12 or the old American paddle 12, we can assure readers our leaders would think things through better.
12. LAFF OR GROAN? Suddenly everyone in Washington has advice for the US military: you must clear and hold. First we laughed. Then we groaned, and continue groaning.
13. Where do these blithering idiots in Washington get off? Do you think the military didn’t know it? Do you think they didn’t ask for the proper number of troops? You all denied them the troops – Rummy Baba actually thought 60,000 troops would do the job. What do you think the military has been trying to, but build up Iraqi forces, in support of this strategy?
14. Don’t you Washingtoons have something sordid to do like misuse your power or steal the taxpayers’ money? Go do it, and stop bothering the grownups.
0100 GMT November 13, 2005
1. PARIS DAY 17 “Only” 82 cars burned in the Paris region, which is under curfew, and “only” 420 cars burned elsewhere in the country. The big riots expected in Paris on Saturday did not materialize; perhaps the websites calling for the riots were breathing hot air, perhaps the curfew and police reinforcements deterred.
2. In Lyon, however, for the first time in any city since riots began, arsonists/demonstrators clashed with police. Hitherto the bad guys had been burning and running, this time they stood their ground and presumably got beaten up for their pains.
3. ONE GOOD THING ABOUT THE FRENCH JUDICIAL SYSTEM Of approximately 2300 arrested, 300+ have already been convicted and are presumably starting their terms or are waiting deportation. Another 400 have been referred for juvenile action, which means they too have been convicted.
4. WHY FRENCH RIOTS COULDN’T OCCUR IN US aside from the usual blah blah about America integrating immigrants better than anyone else and so on.
5. Reason 1: You don’t work, you don’t eat. There is no safety net worth the mention. You don’t get wonderful doles and places to live in and sit on your fat behind for years at taxpayers expense, on end drinking coffee and talking insurrection.
6. Reason 2: You create problems: if you’re not a citizen, you are deported fast track. If you’re sentenced for a crime with a punishment of more than a year, even if the judge does not sentence you to a day in jail, the authorities can take you away from the court, and deport you as soon as they get the paperwork done. No appeals.
7. Reason 3: Since most Americans of every color, ethnicity, religion, and country of origin have to bust their rear ends to make just make a living, if a bunch of immigrants went around burning cars and screaming that America owed them because they came voluntarily to settle in America or were born here, you would have Americans of every color, ethnicity etc etc beating the stuffing out of such people.
8. Reason 4: to elaborate on Reason 3. If in America you went around rioting and demanding jobs, which you define as not being the jobs that your parents did – i.e., clean latrines – but “real” jobs, i.e., sit on your tushy and pass papers around, you are likely to get unpleasant things done to you by other Americans. There are simply too many Americans cleaning latrines to have any sympathy for those who say they deserve better.
9. GEORGE THE BORE George, give it up, man, give it up. Now you claim innocence because – you say – Tariq Aziz, the man who said you took money – says he said nothing of the sort. You want your name cleared on the basis of what you want us to believe Tariq Aziz, former regime foreign minister, says.
10. George, George, George, what are we to do with you? Your name came up not because Tariq Aziz named you, but because your name was there, black and white, in documents, which are in the possession of the US Senate, including details of who paid what into your charity and you ex-wife’s account. There is also sworn testimony against you by people involved with you and your grubby dealings. Tariq Aziz is irrelevant, he will in any case never be called to testify at your trial – America is out, because UK says it has never extradited a sitting MP – but you have apparently violated UK law too.
11. Er, George – may we ask you to look into whether your immunity as a sitting MP applies to an ex-MP? Just a suggestion, old boy.
12. Another suggestion: can you zip your lip? Cardinal rule when you’re up the creek without the paddle: say nothing.
13. DO YOU HAVE TO BE A MORON TO BE A JIHADI? We wouldn’t think so, but its rapidly becoming an inescapable conclusion.
14. A videotape has surfaced saying that Queen Elizabeth II is ultimately responsible for UK’s “crusader laws” against Muslims. The British monarch is responsible for nothing except possibly whether she should put on her pink bunny slippers or her blue bunny slippers after getting out of bed. If the jihadis can’t even understand how the British system works, despite all the hundreds and thousands of actual and wannabe British Muslim jihadis, Jeez, even to call these guys morons is to insult morons, who appear to have a higher IQ than the jihadis.
15. By the way, Jihadis, not a bright move, threatening the Queen.
16. But then what to say? You just bombed three Jordanian hotels, 90% of the people you killed were Arab, including 27 Palestinians. Before the bombings, 70% of Jordanians, acting in the usual knee-jerk Arab way, said Al-Qaeda’s violence was justified. But that’s before Zarqawi claimed credit for the Jordan bombings.
17. Dumb and dumber, that’s all we can say.
18. HERAT, AFGHANISTAN A prominent 25-year woman poet has been beaten to death by her husband because she published a book about love and longing.
19. Let’s hear it again from the peace and love division about how we must respect all viewpoints equally.
20. No, no, and no. You cannot respect a point of view when its advocates say their view is superior to all others and you must live by their rules or die. You cannot give such people any quarter. You must hunt them down and kill them before they kill you. Does it get any simpler than that?
21. By the way, will the peace and love division tell us how they advocated respect and understanding for communism, which was a religion as much as Christianity or Islam? And the communists were not a patch on the Islamic fundamentalists. The communists merely wanted you to keep your mouth shut on political matters. They didn’t care how long your beard was, how much you drank, how many people you slept with or didn’t sleep with, and if you wrote poetry. Sure, in artistic expression you couldn’t make political statements, actual or seen to be political. Yet for all its horror, communism was a peace-loving religion compared to the bunch we face today
OPIONION: JOBS & ECONOMICS 101
1. It’s misleading to say France has a 10% unemployment rate versus US’s 5% because there are no jobs in France. There are ALWAYS jobs available. The question is, at what wage. Half of the US’s 5% unemployed could get jobs within a day. The jobs would be lousy, miserable, dirty, backbreaking jobs with no benefits, no health insurance, and no days off – if you don’t work, even if you are sick and dying, you don’t get paid. Places you can always get a job: Wal Mart, McDonalds and the like, agriculture are starters.
2. If you’re going to say “but those jobs are beneath me”, my response is the same as any Americans “get out of my sight, I can’t abide whiners”.
3. Your editor returned to America as a middle-aged person, and America is not kind to people looking for work in that age group. So your editor worked as a manual laborer in a warehouse. After the first week, he handed in a paper with 30 productivity suggestions. The assistant manager carefully took credit for the whole thing and your editor continued to haul loads. Then one day a supervisor said: “My calculator is dead, how am I gonna get the production figures entered in the daily report?” You editor gently told the supervisor he’d be happy to do the computation, sans calculator. When the supervisor found your editor could multiply 8 times 9 in his head, unlike the assistant manager, the supervisor saw your editor was promoted to a clerical position.
4. One day your editor worked out he was making an effective $2 an hour after transportation, transport time, insurance, taxes, and day care for his youngster was taken out. He quit, and luckily got a job a secretary to the school secretary at his son’s school. Your editor rose in importance every year, till his responsibilities extended to two 8 by 11 sheets of paper – single space, in 6 point type. His take home also rose, to a magnificent $18,000 a year. More on this saga another time, for now just remember that Washington is at least 40% more expensive than America outside of New York and Los Angeles. Reduce that $18,000 by 40% to see his REAL take home.
5. So, your editor’s response to the rioting French immigrants: go back from where you came. No one owes you a darn thing: not the French people, not the French government. You think the Irish who came to America didn’t suffer horrible discrimination? The Italians, the Greeks, the Jews, everyone had to pay their dues before they were accepted. And if they hadn’t learned to talk American, dress American, act American, and be real American, they wouldn’t have had a chance.
0300 GMT November 12, 2005
1. IZZAT AL DOURI SAID TO BE DEAD CNN reports, based on a Baath party announcement, that Saddam’s deputy, General Izzat Al Douri, most wanted man in Iraq after Saddam’s capture, and the main Baathist organizer of the insurgency, is dead.
2. General al Douri was a dapper man who looked every centimeter the soldier, unlike many of Saddam’s senior generals. Loyal he may have been to Saddam, but his heart was as dark as that of the other Saddam senior deputies like Chemical Ali. If he really has died, he has cheated the hangman, and we, for one, cannot say we are happy.
3. SOME PARIS DISTRICTS UNDER CURFEW for the weekend as a precautionary measure, as a slight uptick in violence is reported in the capital area. “Only” 460 cars were burned yesterday. We think its pathetic that a major western government sees comfort in figures that are, for any other country, a day of major rioting.
4. REGARDING LETTERS FROM READERS ON FRENCH RIOTS Almost without exception, our American readers are terrifically pleased to see the French get their just desserts. We haven’t been publishing these letters because none are publishable, to put it mildly.
5. Like our readers, we too were highly chuffed for the first two days before serious bloggers began warning that this was no time for settling scores with the French. Western Europe is America’s first line of defense since the start of the 19th Century, and in their own interest, Americans must overcome their anger and stand by France.
6. The odd thing is that any American who visits France or lives in France for any length of time says exactly the same thing: the French love Americans. Gulf II hasn’t changed a thing as far as the person on the street is concerned. It is Mr. Bush they can’t stand. None of us should get het about that, because after all, a whole bunch of Americans can’t stand Mr. Bush either, to say nothing of the rest of the globe.
7. INDIANS AND MR. BUSH Indians, for example, are great friends of America – friends, heck, they have becomes allies. Right now there is a 12 day air exercise going on between F-16s from Misawa AB and Indian Air Force fighter squadrons. India has held more joint exercises with America than can be easily counted. In the good old Soviet days, whatever the politicians may have said about the USSR, the Indian military, diplomatic, administrative, and intelligence services kept the Soviets away with a 10-meter pole. There is no way the Indians would ever have agreed to a joint exercise with the Soviets.
8. India has never been ally to anyone except the US in its near-60 years of freedom.
9. But mention Mr. Bush at a party, and the reactions from the Indians is so severe and so negative that the ceiling blows off and the walls collapse. Your editor has seen Indians within instants of apoplectic heart attacks when Mr. Bush’s name is mentioned, they get so wroth.
10. MOTHERSHIP BELIEVED BEHIND SOMALIA COAST HIJACKINGS Authorities say a mothership is responsible for launching the motorboats that have been hijacking ships off Somalia.
11. Our readers will have heard about the Carnival Cruise lines subsidiary’s ship that fought off pirates and got away. The story given at the time is that the captain refused to capitulate even after being fired on with AK-47s and a rocket launcher; instead he tried to run down the boats and then used his 16-knot top speed to pull away to safety.
12. Apparently all that did happen and all credit to the feisty captain. But apparently he had a secret weapon that is supposed to be widely deployed on merchant ships starting about two years ago. This is one of those sound generators that can be used with great precision to produce noise up to 160 decibels – if we remember our acoustics, 130 db is what you get standing right behind one of the old Boeing 747s on takeoff. Since the decibel scale is logarithmic, 160 db has to be close to the threshold of knocking out a human, and certainly the pain has to be considerable.
13. Which reminded your editor of a weapon the Ozzies came up with in the early 1960s. It was sound based, and called the Wombat. It was supposedly discarded as being too inhumane. Please correct us if we have things mixed up.
14. A REAL AMERICAN It’s so easy to get carried away by the negative when one lives in the Washington metro area. You editor has to remind himself 20 times a day that Washington is not American with an upper case N-O-T. Now comes a story that serves to remind who Americans really are.
15. In Thailand last year, an 11-year old American girl was vacationing with her family on a beach. When the tide started acting peculiar, she knew exactly what was doing even if the locals had no clue: she had been studying tsunamis in school.
16. She became so agitated her father took her word for it and ran to the hotel to warn people, while she shouted for the people on the beach to run for their lives.
17. So, no one knows how many lives she saved, but it must have been in the scores. A whole bunch of people owe their lives to this plucky youngster – and the American educational system.
18. DANG, THEY’RE GETTING CLOSER TO UNMASKING YOUR EDITOR Pravda of Russia says Egyptians are descended from Martians. Any day now Pravda will reveal the truth about your editor. He is from Mars and arrived on earth for a mission so secret even he couldn’t be told what it was. He has been patiently waiting for the mother-ship to come get him back. The other day Mrs. Rikhye said: “obviously the mission thing was a ruse to get you off Mars, and obviously the mother ship is never coming back”. Harsh, even for a wife disgusted with one.
0200 GMT November 11, 2005
Today is another of those No-News days.
1. FRENCH MEDIA SELF-CENSORED RIOT NEWS The head of a major French TV company said he had censored his organization’s reporting on the riots because he didn’t want right-wing politicians getting a boost. Apparently several other media companies took similar decisions.
2. WE’RE NOT GOING TO COMMENT on this because no comment is needed, but it half explains a great mystery: Orbat.com, among many other bloggers, complained it could get no good reportage, it was almost as nothing was going on, instead of the most wide-spread civil unrest France has seen in its modern history – riots in 300 cities is not a trivial matter.
3. But half the mystery remains. What stopped non-French media from wading in there? BBC we know for a fact was downplaying the news because we visit BBC every day. What was the American media doing? Does anyone report anymore?
4. Someone Who Should Know told your editor that in the US the media has essentially stopped reporting on government issues: the media relies on handouts, which can of course be given face-to-face, from various “sources”, and avoid doing its own investigation or asking tough questions.
5. The Someone Who Should Know, by the way, is a raving liberal, almost a left-winger, and he was savaging mainstream American media, which is definitely well to the left of the country.
6. It seems to us the media in America, at least, has become corrupt in more ways than we have space to discuss. Insofar as major media worldwide is owned by giant conglomerates, we don’t really see other media in other countries as being that different.
7. PAKISTANI ANTI-AMERICAN GROUPS DEMAND ONLY AMERICAN RELIEF GOODS says Jang of Pakistan. Various groups who have no other agenda than anti-Americanism are turned up at relief points and telling officials if they have American goods, and in some cases South Korean goods such as blankets, they’ll take the stuff, otherwise the relief agencies can keep the supplies.
8. So supplies sent by Pakistanis – and presumably India and other 3rd world countries – are simply being dumped by the recipients.
9. Your editor did not contribute a thin dime for quake relief. If you did, we aren’t going to say we told you so, but now you know. Fool me once etc etc. This whole emergency relief business is a big scam, no matter where you’re sending your money. If you feel you must contribute, give your money to a known group that will provide medical care and help restore schools.
10. Of course, if you contribute regularly to known charities or your organization has adopted a school in Honduras or wherever, that’s fine. We’re talking about these disaster scenes.
11. LIBERIA HAS A NEW PRESIDENT – Madame President is the correct address form for her. She becomes the first woman to head an African country, and your editor has to confess to some bafflement. In South Asia we have women leaders all the time –Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have them right now – and no one thinks it’s a deal of any kind, big or little. If Sonia Gandhi had been Indian born, India would – again – have a woman as leader, making it 3 of the 4 major South Asian states. Sonia is an Indian citizen, but stood down for Prime Minister – a job she was entitled to as head of the party winning the last election – because opposition parties were making too much of a fuss and she did not want to create an unnecessary distraction.
12. WHY BILL GATES SHOULD BE HANDED OVER TO TERRORIST ZARQAWI So for a whole year our Word 2000 was crashing about 30 times a day, and your editor’s computer has a 1.4 GHz Celeron chip and had 256 MB of memory, with Windows XP as the OS. So when the hard drive also crashed, hard, your editor took it as an omen that more memory was needed. He purchased 256 MB extra, for $49, more money than he thinks he should have to spend because Idiot Face cant make an OS that works. Incidentally, your editor uses his computer for nothing else other than word possessing and the net. There are no games and no fancy shmancy programs for digital stuff and the like,
13. So now the computer started crashing only 20 times a day, and it wasn’t just Word that was crashing it, but Frontpage and the internet browser as well.
14. Okay. When the hard drive went down again – and the tech said very definitely the problem was not the hard drive – your editor got an MS Office upgrade, to Office 2003, thinking maybe this would resolve the problem. So – as anyone who deals with Bill Gates can tell you, every version of office deliberately leaves out some combination of programs, to force you to buy them separately. Small Business Edition 2000 had neither PowerPoint – which your editor needs for college, or FrontPage, and he had to pay $100 extra for each program on top of the Small Business Edition.
15. Well, the Office 2003 he has doesn’t have Frontpage, so your editor whipped out his Frontpage 2003 that he had bought the year previous.
16. Well what do you know? Frontpage 2003, crashed the system right after installation, the minute your editor attempted to open the news page in Frontpage. And crashed it so badly that he had return to an original, pre-install configuration.
17. Now, of course, our Mac fans will be sitting there with superior smiles. Folks, if you have money to Mac, your editor envies you. Anything over $700 for a laptop, paid every 3 years, is well beyond your editor’s budget.
18. Your editor’s youngest, the math/computer tech who wont spend a penny extra on clothes and stuff if he can help it, bought an I-Pod not even two years ago. He wanted to go to the Apple store, so I drive him. He picked up another I-Pod. What ho, your editor asked his famously miserly son – takes after his dad, except his dad is a miser because he doesn’t have any money, his kid is a miser because he invests his money. You just paid $250 for an I-Pod not just two years ago and you’re buying another one? Kid shrugged. Life expectancy is 2 years, Dad, he says, my I-Pod hard drive is ready to lay down its earthly burdens.
19. Okay, as it is your editor never bought Mac products because his kid has been explaining since the kid was age 6 that it simply isn’t cost-effective to buy Mac, but the I-Pod episode convinces him further – stay away from Mac.
20. Besides, whatever his failings, Gates looks like a dim-witted clown just begging you to like him. Your editor has never seen a more self-centered, arrogant, and vicious face than Steve Jobs’. You as the customer exist solely to feed Jobs ego.
21. Oh yes, lets not mention the way that Word reformats things as random when it feels like it. Your editor can carefully do the headings for 100 pages of text, save, only to find after Acrobatizing that Word think it knows better what headings your editor wants. And lets not talk about Adobe’s whims and fancies.
22. Okay, so we did say this was a no news day!
For a couple of days we had to put the updates on the front page as we were having trouble with the system. Updates for November 9 and 10 are, unfortunately, lost.
1. FRANCE DAY 12
2. ITS HARD NOT TO GET RUDE
3. POLICE HAVE TO SAY THEY ARE NOT CHASING RIOTERS
4. FRENCH GOVERNMENT RESPONSE? CALL UP 1500 POLICE RESERVES
5. FRENCH GOVERNMENT STRATEGY NO MYSTERY
6. MEANTIME BACK ON THE IRAQ RANCH
7. OZZIES TAKE DOWN MAJOR TERROR CELL
0245 GMT November 8, 2005
1. FRANCE DAY 12 As if to tell the French President and Prime Minister what the rioters think of them, 1400 cars were burned yesterday, the first death reported – of a man beaten when he tried to stop rioters from set his car on fire – at least two policemen were shot, and 2 churches burned down.
2. So we are told, a tear gas shell that hit a mosque aggravated the riot situation. Now Muslim rioters have burned down two churches. So by the same token, should not the Catholics of France start bombing mosques?
3. What is the matter with the western media? Its okay to burn churches? Stand up and defend your civilization, you pathetic wimps. We don’t want people burning mosques. But we do want the press to express outrage.
4. Particularly baffling to us is the nonchalance the online media is treating the riots. CNN at 0200 GMT did not even have the riots as a main story. And to hear BBC tell it, you might think this was some disturbance of no concern to the west, taking place in some 3rd world country.
5. It is not taking place in some third world country. It is taking place in France, the country where the concept of human rights for all individuals began. France and Italy are the cradles of modern civilization. This is no longer about some immigrants feeling rejected. Americans have as great a stake in what is happening in France as the French themselves.
6. ITS HARD NOT TO GET RUDE about France’s leaders. The President and Prime Minister say rioting will not be tolerated. Well, fellas, read your own national police blotter. Your authority seems to have sunk lower than the deepest Paris sewers. The only person who has any guts is a Hungarian immigrant, your Interior Minister. Maybe its because what its like to live in a real tyranny? His approval ratings are now at 57%. Given France’s many parties, that kind of rating is high. And its climbing.
7. So the leaders of France say a curfew will be imposed – by mayors at their discretion, but not until Wednesday. So what so special about what happen on Wednesday? Your mistresses take the day off so you have time to worry about the Republic?
8. As for calling out the Army, now is not the time, says the Prime Minister. So, when is the time? A map from the UK Telegraph shows all of France is under attack. So perhaps the PM is saving the Army to protect the rioters from the police?
9. POLICE HAVE TO SAY THEY ARE NOT CHASING RIOTERS Now, American readers of Orbat.com: the French police are getting so little support from the government, they are having to deny they are chasing rioters. How did this come about? The rioters are screaming: “Mommy, the police are chasing me, just because I set cars on fire, threw rocks at children, burned shops! Mommy, I am so outraged, can I go burn some more in protest?” This situation is going beyond the absurd to the surreal, a play in a lunatic asylum, where the rioting criminal inmates are the victims, and the warders trying to subdue them are the oppressors.
10. FRENCH GOVERNMENT RESPONSE? CALL UP 1500 POLICE RESERVES We learn that 8000 extra police have been deployed across France to deal with the crisis. We are SO not impressed. What are 8000 extra police supposed to do when there is national rioting? Not to worry, says the government, we’ve called up 1500 reserves. Listen, guys, if you can get your elbows out of your ears, 10,000 police for an emergency like this would barely suffice for the Paris metro area, leave alone the whole of France.
11. FRENCH GOVERNMENT STRATEGY NO MYSTERY Though the government is not saying so, its strategy is to let the rioters exhaust themselves. Lets not aggravate them, they’ll get tired.
12. Well, there is a problem with this strategy. It is racism of the first order. Who do you think the cars belong to? They belong to immigrants who played by the rules. Who’s paying the price for the rioting? The immigrants.
13. The majority, from what we read, are simply trying to get along. By allowing their areas to become no-go zones, the French government let down its citizens and residents. And now it is compounding the crime.
14. We don’t want to be seen as racist, says the French government, so let the immigrants sort this out themselves. We’ll focus on stopping the riots from spilling out of area. This is so obnoxious one wonders how the leaders of France sleep at night. Pretty well, apparently, otherwise they’d have cracked down by now.
15. MEANTIME BACK ON THE IRAQ RANCH The brave Islamic resistance is fighting to the death at Hasbaniyah – its own death. The Iraq Army and US Marines are in no hurry, they are searching every single building before they move to the next street. The US has announced this is not search and destroy. This is clear and hold.
16. Of course, blogger Bill Roggio has been telling us that this is precisely what the US and Iraqis have now being doing for months. The press has just figured it out; even then it buried the news by giving just a sentence.
17. OZZIES TAKE DOWN MAJOR TERROR CELL In their first major such operation, Australian authorities have arrested 17 men, all part of a plot long under surveillance, to attack a major target. The Sydney Harbor Bridge is being mentioned, but the government is saying nothing. Guns, explosives, documents have been recovered. Only one suspect was shot.
18. The few photographs we’ve seen show the Australian police as looking alert, but calm. There is no brandishing of the arsenals US law enforcement agencies produce at the drop of a hat, no dramatic scenes of police dressed out of a sci-fi movie moving along with their weapons positioned as if they are out to arrest the Alien. Just a feeling of competence and confidence: don’t worry folks, we’re here, you’re safe.
19. Yes, yes, we know the Ozzies are not everything made out to be. Most of them apparently hate the outdoors, shriek like little kids when they see a snake, and would rather make love than war, and if love is not available, then the TV and a 55-gallon barrel of high-fat potato chips is even better.
20. Nonetheless, the Ozzie police do have style. We need more style in the States.
21. MARINE SNIPER SLOGANS (Thanks to reader Max Underwood): (1) “You can run but then you just die tired!” (2) “Marine Sniper – Pro Choice”.
22. Thank goodness the slogans have changed. The previous favorite, “Reach Out and Touch Someone” was just a bit macabre for your editor’s taste.
23. TALKING ABOUT SNIPERS: KOHIMA 1944 This is a story for which your editor has always wanted to know the end. Maybe our readers can help?
24. Kohima was where the British-Indian Army stopped the Japanese tide of conquest on its western front. It was one of those close quarter fights that so horrible you wonder how human beings survived it. Its common to say of battles like Kohima that men were reduced to the state of animals and fought and died liked animals.
25. Your editor has no idea where these wholly misleading and inapt metaphors come from. There are no animals in the world that could take a battle like Kohima – and a hundred others like it in World War II. Its more like humans become superhuman, oblivious to pain, hunger, disease; some reasoning part of their brain shuts down, and they decide they are simply not going to retreat. A real last man last round situation – and at Kohima this was true of the Japanese as well. They had come too far to return, dysentery was wiping them out, they were short on everything; bad as the conditions were for the British-Indians, they were an order of magnitude worse for the Japanese. They knew they were dead men anyway, and had just one aim, to take as many of their enemy with them.
26. Much of the battle, incidentally, was fought with the opposing sides separated by the distance of two tennis courts.
27. Now, during the course of the battle, there as a Japanese sniper who was slaying men left and right. In the jungle, and in a close-quarter battle, it can become near impossible to determine from where the fire is coming.
28. A young Gurkha soldier solved the matter in the manner of a true warrior. Sick of having his comrades shot, he suddenly stood straight up, exposing himself fully. The sniper fired, and since the defenders were now watching and had a target – their own man – to go by, they got the sniper.
29. What your editor has never been able to find out: what happened to the Gurkha?
30. Also incidentally, Kohima originated a famous saying, when a young British officer asked his superior: “When we die, Sir, is it over, or do we just go on?”
0001 GMT November 7, 2005
· FRANCE We learn that both president Chirac and the French Prime Minister have said control must be reestablished and “no-go” zones were unacceptable. So they have decided to finally break their silence, and reverse their defense of rioters. Presumably this is not because they believed they wrong wrong the first time around, because it has penetrated even their rarified atmosphere that the people of France want action.
· The rioters were frightened, very frightened. In their fright they expanded rioting to new areas. That’s what they think of the French president and Prime Minister.
· The French police are adapting, but still so far behind the curve of the rioters’ hit and run tactics that one wonders what exactly have the police been studying these last few years?
· French politicians nonetheless continue to fall over themselves demanding appeasement, the western press continues to sink to new lows in spinning the riots to make it look like economic deprivation and police brutality are the cause.
· What’s becoming apparent is that the rioting has just one simple cause: the Muslim immigrant communities have gotten used to governing themselves these last 15 years or so the French government has advocated “sensitivity” to their concerns. In essence, the sensitive immigrant demand has been just this: stay out of our face, stay out of life, stay out of place, stay out of life. We will run our areas as we want. We’ll force our women to veil, we’ll administer our own justice, we’ll run those who sell alcohol out of our areas, we’ll sell drugs, you, the government, just keep those welfare checks coming and stay out. The entire conflagration has been touch offed by the Interior Minister telling his men: no more no-go zones. Go.”
· The new Interior Minister, poor fool, didn’t understand this concept of self-governing zones at the heart of France. He said “we don’t care who you are, the law is going to be enforced” So for this highly illogical stand, he is being reviled by the leaders of France, and media everywhere else.
· “What?” exclaims the rioter, having burned his fourth car of the night, torched his second shop, and is starting to burn his first school, “you are calling me scum?!! I am offended, offended, and I will burn some more. Yes, I knew when I start burning, you would call me scum, and I was so outraged, I started burning.” Normal people might go” Huh? You’re not making sense, fella.” But to the western press, it makes perfect sense.
· As for the Interior Minister, poor fool like the French Fox. The people of France are solidly behind him, and rallying more to him as every day passes. He was already favored over the French prime minister for the 2007 Presidential race.
· People of France, citizens of the world: meet your new president. He believes laws are to be enforced, not “sensitized away”. There cannot be two laws, one for white native French, one for Muslim immigrants. Thank heaven there is someone in Europe who understands that.
· THE LITTLE NATION THAT COULD Take a country called Denmark. Shape it into the shape of Virginia. Toss your reshaped Denmark over the US state of Virginia. You get a pretty close fit: Virginia is a bit bigger.
· Virginia is also small enough to take 35th ranking in the US state size stakes.
· You get the point: for a country, Denmark is tiny.
· But yesterday, Denmark showed it had the heart of a lion.
· A Danish newspaper ran caricatures of the Muslim Prophet. 10 Arab ambassadors asked for a meeting with the Danish foreign minister to protest.
· The foreign minister said he would not meet with them. He had no power over the press, but in any event, even meet the Arab ambassadors would negate the very idea of Denmark.
· For the record, we condemn the caricaturing. Muslims are particularly sensitive to any human-made depiction of the Prophet. It is not political correctness that everyone respect everyone else’s religion. What we object to is when people get offended when Christianity is the religion in question, but that’s not relevant here.
· May we request that Muslims everywhere show the same respect to other peoples’ religions, including Indian religions, as they expect for Islam? Then maybe we can all just get along.
· YOU GOT THAT RIGHT In the middle of a story about the deprivations of the Muslim immigrants to French cities that was so sad we ran out of toilet paper wiping our eyes and nose, and will have to use the Washington Post to wipe our behind, the BBC says: “Although some complain that their voices are never heard, as we tried to speak to local residents, we were told at one point to leave the area or risk being attacked.”
· How did that piece of reality escape the copy editor? Imagine the cheek of the reporter. He should be fired for telling the truth.
· THE DAY OF THE SNIPER: RAMADI, IRAQ Please do not misunderstand your editor: his motto is the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist. But there is nonetheless something stomach-churning about the way terrorists are choosing to die in Ramadi. Read the account below, and you’ll find yourself asking: are these men on powerful drugs? Are they cretins with IQ 60? What’s going on here?
· Multi National Forces West press release, forwarded by Mike Thompson: “In the first incident, a sniper team observed an insurgent digging a hole along a street that historically contained a high number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The sniper team engaged the insurgent with one round and was able to confirm one enemy killed in action.
0230 GMT November 6, 2005
· FRANCE UNDER THREAT There is so much going on in France – and apparently also in Denmark – that, truthfully, your editor has been caught flat-footed. He pays almost no attention to Western Europe on the non-unreasonable assumption that the US media must be covering it adequately. Turns out US media has not been covering anything, and if it weren’t for the blog reports that reader Mike Thompson sends your editor would remain clueless.
· Essentially: in France as in many other European nations such as Denmark and Sweden, for many years immigrant Muslim areas have become increasingly no-go for police. In France the situation is so bad that this year alone something like 6000 police cars have been attacked – in a country with a population 1/5th of the US. Apparently 60,000 cars have been burned this year in France, this being the preferred tactic of immigrant hoodlums.
· In these areas, things have gotten so bad that white French people living alongside the Muslim communities are known to have converted to Islam to escape constant harassment. There is no police protection for the law abiding, immigrant or native, because the police have been under orders for years to show “sensitivity”. That means stay out.
· In France, one police union writes to the interior minister and says their members cannot handle the situation now spiraling out of control, and that the army has to be called in.
· APPEASEMENT AND THE COMING FALL OF EUROPE? Blogger Cicero says it better than your editor can [edited for brevity] “Throughout the 1930s during Hitler’s rise, the West maintained the hope that appeasement would contain the Nazis in Germany. Chamberlain claimed victory for appeasement in 1938 when he and Hitler signed the Munich Agreement.
0230 GMT November 6, 2005
· FRANCE UNDER THREAT There is so much going on in France – and apparently also in Denmark – that, truthfully, your editor has been caught flat-footed. He pays almost no attention to Western Europe on the non-unreasonable assumption that the US media must be covering it adequately. Turns out US media has not been covering anything, and if it weren’t for the blog reports that reader Mike Thompson sends your editor would remain clueless.
· Essentially: in France as in many other European nations such as Denmark and Sweden, for many years immigrant Muslim areas have become increasingly no-go for police. In France the situation is so bad that this year alone something like 6000 police cars have been attacked – in a country with a population 1/5th of the US. Apparently 60,000 cars have been burned this year in France, this being the preferred tactic of immigrant hoodlums.
· In these areas, things have gotten so bad that white French people living alongside the Muslim communities are known to have converted to Islam to escape constant harassment. There is no police protection for the law abiding, immigrant or native, because the police have been under orders for years to show “sensitivity”. That means stay out.
· In France, one police union writes to the interior minister and says their members cannot handle the situation now spiraling out of control, and that the army has to be called in.
· APPEASEMENT AND THE COMING FALL OF EUROPE? Blogger Cicero says it better than your editor can [edited for brevity] “Throughout the 1930s during Hitler’s rise, the West maintained the hope that appeasement would contain the Nazis in Germany. Chamberlain claimed victory for appeasement in 1938 when he and Hitler signed the Munich Agreement.
0430 GMT November 5, 2005
· PARIS DAY 9 OF THE RIOTS Washington Post reports yesterday that one group of rioters were “angry” that the police had sought to break-up their street drug-dealing.
· Please excuse your editor for a moment. He needs to go bang his head against the neighbors’ brick wall.
· Your editor is back, feeling much better.
· Two issues here. WashPost, which has no difficulty working in 3 lines of adverse commentary for every line of pseudo-fact when dealing with the terror war, delivers the above line with a straight face: no commenting, please, we have to be fair, is the implication.
· Second, your editor is greatly heartened by the Paris fiasco. The French have always been very tough on internal disorder. If they cannot get even so basic a situation in hand, then America, bad as it may sometimes seem, is a paragon of efficiency and virtue.
· Some of the serious blogs we were able to skim are saying that the French riots will prove to be a more important turning point in the war between Islam and Christianity (phrase ours, many hard-headed people are still hesitant about saying it loud) than the NY Trade Center attack. If 9-11 was the end of American innocence about this war, the Paris riots will end European innocence. About time.
· VALERIE PLAME: A READER REPROACHES US Reader Deke Ray (not his real name) blasted us in a letter today. The more printable part of the letter said – edited heavily: “I read you because I thought you are not of the establishment. By going on and on about Ms. Plame, you are only making a (bleep) of yourself. Maybe there are a couple of ordinary people who care about Ms. Plame, Mr. Cheney, the CIA etc. Please get it into your (bleep) head that no one else in America cares. These are stupid mindgames that the Washington crowd plays endless, to the ruin of this country’s governance.”
· After we finally emerged from the trench where we had taken shelter during Mr. Ray’s bombardment we had to agree with Mr. Ray that no one outside this twisted city really cares.
· Admission: we have been talking about Ms. Plame to show off to readers that we know something about the spy business. Its hard being a nobody after years of being a somebody. We hope Mr. Ray can forgive us.
0330 GMT November 4, 2005
· PARIS: DAY 7 of RIOTS Approximately a dozen immigrant-dominated towns/cities around Paris have experienced some rioting.
· Bleeding Heart Brigade “we must be understanding…” and yes, the French Premier brought up the double rate of unemployment just as we said the BHB would…”they’ve been here for 30 years and we haven’t done enough to make them welcome”.
· From what we read, however, increasingly the French “ordinary folks”, who were already very concerned about immigration, are not buying the BHB line.
· The French Interior Minister is the leading contender with the French premier to be President of France, so we can see there is a bit of tension here. The Interior Minister is himself an immigrant, from Hungary. So maybe if he doesn’t become President of France, he too can go around smashing things and screaming racism and you French did nothing to make me feel welcome.
· The only people in the western world who have a legitimate grudge on the not-made-to-feel welcome part are American blacks. They were brought in chains, and they were owed. No other immigrant group is owed anything. We came voluntarily, no one forced us. It’s for us to assimilate, not for the west to change its identity to make us feel welcome.
· A QUICK UPDATE ON OUTED SPY VALERIE PLAME Its becoming increasingly clear that the CIA set out to get the US Vice President, and Karl Rove, and so far it is victory all the way. Already the US White House is preparing for the post-Karl Rove era on the quite sensible assumption that when Mr. Lewis Libby, just a few days ago aide to Mr. Cheney, next meets the feds, he will be doing everything to avoid the 30 year sentence he faces. If that means turning in Mr. Rove or even the Vice President, then a man has to do what a man has to do.
· Okay, so why is the CIA acting vicious? With very good reason it turns out. CIA was not convinced about the WMD. So imagine its horror when President Bush tell CIA its going to have to take the blame for the WMD fiasco. CIA Director nonetheless fell on his sword for Bush.
· The problem is that when the CIA refused to write the playbook the way Mr. Cheney wanted it to justify an invasion of Iraq, Mr. Cheney set out to fix the CIA. Instead the CIA fixed him and is about to fix him some more.
· This has been kind of obvious even to your editor, who is so “out” in this town that he stands to the outside of the Jiffy John man who comes to pick up the portable potties from the Mall, set up for the tourists.
· Now, however, no less an eminence than Senator Kennedy’s wife, known in her own right as a powerful lawyer, has written in the Wall Street Journal that either the CIA is colossally incompetent, or it wanted to get back at the Vice President.
· For example, the CIA never got Valerie Plame’s husband to sign a confidentiality agreement when he was sent on his mission to Niger. He is junior to his wife, he has no WMD expert – she is. When Mr. Novak, the prominent American journalist, called the CIA to ask if Valerie worked at the CIA, the CIA confirmed this and made only a half-hearted effort to say “you cant use this information”. A journalist as experienced as Mr. Novak knows he shouldn’t be publishing anything from the CIA without consent given in six different ways in front of witnesses including the Pope. Mr. Novak broke the story – because he knew the CIA wanted it broken (this we are saying, not Senator Kennedy’s wife).
· Now, if as much as breathe inside a CIA office you have to sign confidentiality agreements. CIA is sending a man to Niger on official duty and no confidentiality agreement? No written report required either, he was asked to give an oral briefing.
· Its obvious from this the CIA sent Plame’s husband to Niger on a “mission” knowing he would find nothing, and would speak out as required.
· A set up from the first. Good job, Big C. We’ve always been partial to the agency since Vietnam, when it repeatedly kept telling the government things were not the way in Vietnam that the military and politicals were saying. When the papers on the 1971 Bangladesh crisis were recently declassified, the few CIA memos show very clearly the CIA was right on top of the crisis from the start: it had uncannily accurate analyses. It was wrong of the US Government to blame the CIA for what was its own mistake.
· AN ASIDE ON DEEP COVER SPIES The CIA knows full well that naming Plame as a covert agent risked no one’s life – its looking increasingly likely the people who outed her, using the media, were the CIA themselves. How do we know outing her put no one in danger?
· First, we’ve said before that Aldritch Ames blew her cover and she was recalled to Washington. So her cover could not have been blown by Mr. Lewis Libby who finds himself used as a catspaw. Mr. Lewis thought he was blowing her cover, and if the CIA carries her as a covert agent (anyone want to bet that’s just what they’re doing?) has broken the law. But no one has been endangered.
· Second, deep cover agents as Plame is said to be undergo a double change of life. It is more than likely that Plame is NOT her real name, but her identity within the CIA, held so closely that except for a few no one would know that Val Plame does not exist in real life. Even her neighbors would not know her real identity. Next, in the field, she would use another identity that can be thrown away as needed.
· So the only way anyone could put two and two together when the US press “outed” her is if someone who knew her as Katrina Seminova sees the pictures in Vanity Fair – which she posed for willingly – and says “Oh Ho, Comrades, our little kitten Katrina is actually Valerie Plame”. They still don’t know her real identity.
· She outed herself to give her husband publicity, and she did so with her agency’s permission.
· There are two reasons why (this is your wise old editor talking). One, she’d already been blown. Two, she has had no interest in continuing her covert work once her adorable twins, now 5, were born.
· Last, your editor leaves you with this thought, and its up to you to believe him or not believe him: he doesn’t care much either way. Ms. Plame was not that important an agent to begin with. Go back to para 3.
ANOTHER MEMOIR THAT CAN BE SKIPPED IF YOU HAVE A LIFE
· AN HOUR AMONGST THE SPOOKS IN WASHINGTON Your editor is glad to be back in the States, so he’s not complaining, but once in a while he finds himself missing all the silly spook games that were part of everyday life in Delhi. In the last 15 years he has had just one occasion to be near the game, and that too only for an hour.
· It was October 2003. Your editor was on his way to a party – the first party he had been to that year and the last for another year – with a mission. A young gentleman and Mrs. R (the late Mrs. R ) had taken a fancy to each other. The people holding the party were friends of your editor’s, so he had invited himself – after all, Mrs. R couldn’t say: “You cant come because you’re not invited” which is usually the case – meaning, its usually true even his friends don’t invite him, and if they do, Mrs. R would tell them “he cant come, but I’ll be there”.
· The mission was to check out this youngster, do a bit of a “dekho” as they used to say in the British-Indian Army, with the Brits pronouncing the word as “dekko” because the hard “kh” is hard for them. Not wishing to embarrass Mrs. R, who was definitely Not Amused when your editor announced he was actually going out after sunset – she knew instantly something was wrong because your editor NEVER leaves the house after sunset, your editor said he’d go in his own car, stay for a while, and then come back.
· So off he went. Now, there is a game your editor plays that every kid is familiar with: Lets Get Lost and Find Our Way Home. He tries not to play this when he’s got people riding with him, especially his kids, who groan loudly and say: “Please, Dad, no, not another adventure”. Anyway, your editor was in a part of Washington downtown new to him, and at night everything looks different anyway. So he roamed the streets in his car, taking in the sights such as they were, then, when he realized he was two hours late, parked where he was, hauled out the brown bag with the mandatory bottle of wine, and set off find the place where the party was being held.
· He met many interesting people enroute, and had nice chats with them all: there was a pair of lovers, a doorman who had come from the Sudan, a Polish cleaning lady who still could not speak reasonable English 50 years after coming to America, a runner, a very pretty young lady with a large rat on a leash who insisted the rat was a dog – cant fool the old editor, that was no dog but a hairless rat and not a large one at that, but one does not disagree with pretty young ladies who have stopped to chat, and a white-haired couple, elegantly dressed, on the way to the Chinese Embassy and who were lost – fortunately your editor was able to guide them to the gate even though he himself was lost – and so on.
· But most interesting were streets where no one was about on foot, and where roamed the moving vans and the Office Depot vans and the Cable Company vans, slowly moving up and down streets lined with embassies and diplomatic residences at speed of about 5 kph – you could keep up with, except your editor walks very slowly.
· Now, here we are at 2230 Hrs at night on a Saturday, so your editor does not have to explain why its unlikely the Office Depot van is taking office supplies for delivery – and not when you see the same van three times in 3 blocks. Not to say every now and then a van stops and there is a friendly chat between the two men in the van (Office depot uses one driver for delivery unless the driver is training a new hire, also not done at 2230 on Saturday) and – at least twice – two groups of young men, at different locations. These groups were among many young men all over the place who uniformly wore jackets and ties, were between 5 feet 8 and 6 feet 2, had crew cuts, and were glued to cell phones, and who looked as if they could break you with one hand. One had dark glasses on, by the way. The area your editor was in is very quiet, shady, with minimal power streetlights – in other words its reasonably dark to begin with.
· So each time your editor passed one of these groups of young men, he’d smile in comradely fashion at the men, meaning to say “hey, that’s cool, you’re on the job, and I’m cool with that.” Should explain: with security people you should always make eye contact right away, hold it, and smile politely, nod your head and give a “hello, beautiful evening” as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
· Some smiled back, others looked indifferently, others had the “shove off, we’re hetro”.
· So it was a nice long walk, but your editor was very disappointed not one detail stopped him to ask what he was doing. Later it occurred to your editor that since he dresses like an illegal Latin immigrant, has the same complexion, and was carrying a brown bag with what was obviously a bottle of liquor, he actually was blending in perfectly: a laborer out late after finishing a job, with his hard-earned bottle, looking to find a park in which to drink, despite the cold (Hispanic women in joint families are quite strict about the men drinking inside the house – it is generally not allowed). So then your editor cheered up: hadn’t lost the old tradecraft: he still had it, even if it was accidental.
· It was very pleasant indeed just to be roaming around in the middle of all the overt covert activity, people keeping tabs of who was visiting what houses, and the vans snooping in on everyone’s calls, and the security people there to keep their man safe. A lot of fun, a lot of work and effort for no useful purpose because, for heaven’s sake, in the real world who really cares. Very nostalgic, and a beautiful part of the city to walk at night, especially for someone who is very, very seldom out at night.
· Oh, doubtless you’re wondering about the young man. Your editor invited him to the hallway, followed by an anxious Mrs. R. There are occasions I could be tough with her, contrary to popular belief, and this was one. I told her curtly to get back inside. Then I told him what a wonderful guy he was, he was so good for Mrs. Rikhye, she had been so happy, a changed person, since he’s come into her life a few months previous (all true), and there was really no need for him and her to meet covertly, he could just come to the house, your editor would love to see him, and everyone knew your editor goes to sleep at 9 so they’d have their privacy.
· Six weeks later he resigned his job with an international law firm and went back to Europe, leaving your old editor pleased with himself – though he was careful to commiserate with Mrs. R when the youngster announced he was leaving for home – that he hadn’t entirely lost it in this field either. The poor kid’s palms were dripping sweat while we talked outside, and for a moment your editor was pleased. At least one person in the world was scared of your editor.
· But you know what? He was only a kid. Besting him was not satisfying at all. We are here to protect the young, not to use cheap tricks to scare the heck out of them just because your wife has taken a fancy to them. Not sporting. Besides, Mrs. R’s mood, seldom of the best when your editor is around, rapidly deteriorated.
0330 GMT November 3, 2005
· US MEDIA REVEALS DETAILS OF VITAL CIA OPERATIONS, ENDANGERS NAIONAL SECURITY An aide of the US Vice President is facing 30-years in prison for revealing the name of a supposedly covert US agent. In fact, her cover had been blown by the super-spy Ames, and she had been recalled to the CIA HQ for desk duties. But: the CIA says she was still covert, and – rightly – in our view – it is not for us, as part of the public, to second guess the CIA. The aide has broken the law, let him pay for it.
· At the same time, endangering US national security should also be a crime when revelations of vital ongoing operations are revealed to the public by the US media.
· Mike Thompson brings to our attention that several US newspapers have yesterday carried detailed stories about the secret network of US prisons for Terror War detainees. In the Washington Post’s case, it has even provided an aerial photograph of one such facility.
· If the aide can get 30 years for giving the name of one blown covert agent, we think 50-100 years for the owners, publishers, editors, and reporters of the offending newspapers is fair.
· The newspapers will tell us they are “exposing” CIA mistreatment of prisoners”. Unfortunately, the newspapers have no right to do anything of the sort when they are endangering on-going operations. If their conscience bothers them, they have a simple recourse open to them: file a complaint through the chain-of-command, without discussing either their action or any details in their media outlets, and if not satisfied, file a court case. We are informed requesting a writ of habeas corpus would be one way to go. Its not our problem that some other media outlet will then have the screaming headlines: “Washington Post seeks to free top terrorists.”
· LOOKING FOR A SCAPEGOAT FOR GULF II? BLAME THE ARAB LEAGUE several media sources carry the story, confirmed from two different sides, that the UAE put forth a proposal in front of the Arab League for exile for Saddam before the US invasion. His safety would be assured, a transitional body would rule Iraq for 6 months till elections could be held.
· The Arab League shot down the proposal without even taking it up for discussion. Why?
· Because the UAE, a member in good standing, was (1) not sufficiently important to table such a proposal with the permission of the AL – UAE says there was no time to build a consensus on if there should be a discussion, (2) the AL did not interfere with the internal affairs of member states, (3) the AL could not ask a fellow tyrant to go into exile.
· Well, gentlemen of the Arab League. Your reasons are not difficult to see through: the real one is that once one tyrant can be disposed of this way, your turn is next.
· Now, we doubt you feel one tiny bit of guilt for the tens of thousands of Iraqis that died in Gulf II and the aftermath. But remember, your God will judge you – and its pleasant to think your people will judge you before that. You are going down any way, but you have done something useful: enabled the world to see the naked misuse of power by which you, at the expense of your people, turned Arab governments into the personal club of a few.
· There is nothing, absolutely nothing, by way of good you have done after decolonization. You do nothing useful now. You need to go, before you are made to go – Baby Assad is only the most obvious case.
· US TURNS OVER 30th FORWARD OPERATING BASE TO IRAQIS In this case it is the division base at Tikrit which is now under Iraqi control. Bill Roggio has a detailed analysis which we will post tomorrow of how the growing ability of the Iraqis to look after themselves is freeing combat troops to reinforce the areas were the insurgency is the strongest, so that for the first time these areas have sufficient numbers of troops to make a solid difference.
· Meantime, Mr. Donald Rip Van Winkle Rumsfeld, suddenly wakes up and says: “Ah, yes, we may need more troops in Iraq.”
· Go away, Rummy, before you hurt yourself with one of those dumbbells you carry around with you in the office. No one needs you anymore and you have nothing to say.
· The US does NOT need more troops now that Iraqization is catching hold in a major way. The US can safely start withdrawing troops in the spring of 2006.
· PARIS: 6th NIGHT OF RIOTS Here is how the whole thing started. Because of the growing number of immigrants, large areas of several French cities became no go areas for the French police. The immigrants don’t let the police in, and the government, in its inane – but no more inane than any western country – attempt to “address the issues” which the immigrants face, such as unemployment, supports the immigrants.
· The French Interior Minister, a tough cookie, told the cops they were to reclaim 25 no-go areas. That’s how the rioting started.
· What the Government of France needs to address is the rights of French citizens and the future of France. Immigrants, with few exceptions, get such lavish benefits that even if they have no jobs, they are far better off in France than at home. Their issues have been addressed by giving them the privilege to enter France. It is for them to adapt to France and to obey French law, not the other way around. And guess what? Your average white, Catholic Frenchman whose family has been in France for 2000 years is also hurting for jobs. Oh sure, trot out the figures about how the immigrants have twice the unemployment rate of native Frenchmen. Maybe it has to do something with lack of skills? And so now France is supposed to admit immigrants, AND guarantee them jobs when there are fewer and fewer jobs for people without the right skills?
· Hey, we just had an idea. All those who think the immigrants are being mistreated? Give up your job for an immigrant, and move to Africa. That would be really fair – even we couldn’t complain. Perhaps more realistic: agree to pay a volunteer immigrant tax, say another 25% of your income, so that immigrants can be given true equality with French people. What a great deal: step off the Air France flight from Chad, nice new car waiting for you, drive straight to your nice 3-bedroom flat, and in the morning, go straight to your nice job. That would be truly caring for immigrants.
· Then you can go around with a sign saying “I put my money where my mouth is for immigrants”, and feel morally superior while the rest of France jeers at what a nincompoop you are.
· And with the French government taking 50% of your income already, with the additional 25% gone – hmmm – guess what! You’ll have just enough to go live in an immigrant ghetto. Then you can riot and demand equality with the immigrants. Then we’ll walk around with signs that read “ Endless Possibilities.”
· What do we mean by that? We’re not sure. In fact, we don’t know. But at least we’re making more sense then the people soft on immigrants and their no-go zones.
· Even two years ago we might have cried woe and gloom at the way Western Europe was letting itself be walked over by Islamic immigrants. We don’t need to do that any longer. Every West European country has woken up.
0330 GMT November 1, 2005
· 4th DAY OF RIOTING IN PARIS IN PARIS DISTRICT We are getting a massive headache. Now the French police are scrambling to find out who lobbed 1-2 tear gas grenades into a mosque, as riots continue. We are getting a bit dubious about the word “riot”, what’s been happening seems a bit minor to be called that, but that’s not our point. The French police have joined the Western Division of Wussies. Rioting going on for the fourth day? Bad. French police explaining themselves? Bad. People talking about the need for the police to treat the community better instead of police saying people need to stop when ordered? Bad.
· This multicultural sensitivity has to stop. Why have these French immigrants come to France? To build a mini-country-of-origin or to become French? If its the former, throw them out. These immigrants have their own country/countries. Did they come to make money? Fair enough, if France needs the labor, and they should be sent home after a reasonable sum of money has been earned – reasonable to be defined by the French.
· Wait a minute, our readers will say to the editor. Aren’t you an immigrant to the States and a brown-skinned one at that?
· Correct. And I absolutely believe immigrants should adopt American ways or go home. So am I some kind of ersatz American? Absolutely not. For example, I have never made any effort o speak standard American. But I demand no sensitivity or special exception because I am an immigrant. For example, America is a Christian country. I take absolutely no offense that townships should use public land for Christmas displays. I am not a citizen, but I make darn sure my kids in class stand for the Pledge, and if they don’t say it, they have to stand quiet. Etc.
· LYNDIE ENGLAND PROMOTED TO SERGEANT AND IS BUSY HUMILIATING/TORTURING PRISONERS Yes folks, its true, and its all over the Pakistani newspapers. A senior woman investigative police officer in Multan province has been nicknamed Sergeant Lyndie England for her habit – picked up from the real Lyndie England, no doubt – of stripping accused persons under investigation and having them tortured in front of station staff and detained persons.
· The police have registered a case against her. What does Sergeant Lyndie think of that?
· Very little apparently. She continues in her office, continues her routine of humiliation/torture, and says that no one can say anything to her, she has shown the world how an investigation is conducted.
· Now here’s the thing – and this is very common in the sub-continent. Sgt. Lyndie freely admits there is no evidence against the man she has been mistreating and torturing – it is thanks to this man that the media has come to know what is going on. But does the lack of evidence bother her? Not a bit, and we’ll explain why.
· Years ago, a friend of your editor’s reported a blank check stolen, forged, and money withdrawn from the bank, at the company he worked. The friend was a person of many connections, he talked to his dad, who talked to the highest police officer in that particular region of Delhi.
· Next thing one knows, the police have the company’s accounts clerk in the lockup and are beating heck out of him.
· Now, the friend and yours truly had done their own careful investigation, and had concluded the one person who could NOT have committed the theft/forgery/withdrawal was the clerk.
· So when the clerk’s family appeared at my friend’s door begging for help, friend and I charged off on a rescue mission to the local cop shop.
· The head of the station received us politely, but did interrupt us as we tried to explain why he had the wrong man. “I know I have the wrong man. He is 100% innocent. But if some people…” here he stared pointedly at my friend “had not approached the Deputy Commissioner for Delhi South, we could have recorded the man’s statement and let him go. Now I am under pressure from my DCP. If you have anything to say to anyone, tell your clerk to admit his guilt and I give my word he will be bailed out immediately and he can go home. The court will acquit him because he was in the office – 40 people can testify to that – when the check was cashed at the bank, 10 kilometers away, and he had no opportunity to touch the checkbook and withdraw a check from it” – which is what we trying to tell the officer – “besides,” here he waved his hand, “I know when a man is innocent and when he is guilty. This man is innocent, I say.”
· Nice speech from a defense lawyer, but a bit disconcerting coming from the very officer who had ordered the clerk beaten till he confessed. The station police had thoughtfully stopped beating the clerk while we visited, so that we should not be disturbed by screams and so on.
· I wish I could say this is the only such story I have from 20 years in India. But it is only one of many that I have first-hand knowledge of, and there are many more cases whereI have talked to people who have been mistreated in custody. In fact, torture of suspects in India is so routine, the Indian Criminal Procedure Code specifically says statements given to the police cannot be used as evidence. The statement has to be given in front of a magistrate to be eens.
· UN SAYS NO THANKS TO GUANTANAMO VISIT The US invited the UN to come visit, but refused to give the UN observers free access to prisoners. The UN says even on its China visits it is allowed to talk directly with prisoners.
· Guantanamo may be run by the military, but the decision to send terror war prisoners there and the frame of reference for their treatment is a political decision. Nonetheless, the military can help put pressure on the politicals to shut down this public-relations disgrace. We’ve said this before: shoot the guilty ones and set the other free. If you don’t have the stomach to shoot them, send them to federal prisons in the US – and let them be with the general population. People stomping on Korans is going to be the least of the prisoners’ problems.
· HMS CUMBERLAND CAPTURE 2-TON COKE SHIPMENT while on Caribbean patrol. The smugglers’ fast boat was outrunning the frigate when a helicopter was sent aloft and a sniper disabled the smuggler boat’s engine. Nice work, which is why we mention it.
· UK MOD, however, has definitely been overcome by the alleged street value of the 2-tons of cocaine, claimed at $355-million: MOD says the capture has given a “hammer-blow” to the illegal trade.
· Sorry to rain on your parade, MOD, if its hammers we are talking about the correct comparison would be a blow with an ordinary household hammer to the stomach of a 500-lb. man. It hurts, but the drug lords will shrug off the loss: it’s small spuds for them.
0001 GMT October 31, 2005
· IRAN LEADERSHIP DIVIDED Let us frankly saw we hoped the new Iranian president’s fire and brimstone speech against Israel meant that Iran was getting ready to do something so incredibly dumb that the west would have to invade and force regime change.
· But now reader macropetroni sends an article which says the Supreme Ayatollah, who actually is the final authority on anything in Iran, is not amused. Supreme has been apparently been warning the new president to cool it; more important than the warnings – which may not influence the new president as much as they might, because he is a revolutionary and ready to fight anyone, including his Supreme – is that Supreme has created a new system at the top, transferring some of his most important powers previously reserved solely to himself, to moderate Rafsanjani. This is the clearest indication of a deep divide in Iran – no news to Iran watchers, who have been discussing the divide for years; but – to our disappointment – it is clear that Supreme and company are ready to smack the impudent young pup, the President, till he learns to behave.
· UGANDA GRADUATES OUT OF IMF CLASS Good show: BBC says Uganda has economically progressed to the extent it no longer qualifies for IMF assistance.
· Proof – as if anyone needed it – that Africans are perfectly capable of good governance.
· PARIS RIOTING There are been more rioting after the funerals of two immigrant Muslim youngsters. The rioters say the police were chasing them and the boys ran into an electricity substation and were electrocuted. The police say they weren’t chasing the boys.
· Now wait a minute a minute, folks. Lets accept the immigrant community’s story. So the police are to blame? The youths have no responsibility to stop if the police are chasing them? So next time a suspect is running from the law and hurts himself, the police should pay him restitution?
· Are the French also losing their minds, to the extent the police have to deny they were chasing the boys?
· And what’s happen to the French police? Everyone knows you don’t riot in France unless you are prepared to get hurt badly. Of course, that’s the CRS you should be really scared of, the regular French police are no worse than any European police, but still, are the French police becoming wimps?
LETTERS
· FROM COLIN ROBINSON [Via telephone] It was not right for you to personally attack the IISS for saying the US would have to keep 140,000 troops in Iraq beyond 2008. The statement was made in a press conference and is not part of the publication being released, and the speaker made clear he regretted that this was the reality.
· Hmmm. We did tell Mr. Robinson that by our standards we were pretty polite to IISS, and compared to US talk radio, we are wilting violets when it comes to attacks. Mr. Robinson has worked at a US think tank, and told us – rather firmly, we thought – that he did not have the time to listen to US talk radio as he had work to do. A wise stance – we too don’t bother to listen to US talk radio.
· FROM HALE CULLOM III Don’t be so sure that international agreements on torture that the US is signatory to are worth very much. In Europe and in most other countries, treaties in effect supersede domestic law.
&n The USA has a different view as to the relationship of treaties to national legislation. Under US law, treaties and other international agreements become U.S. federal law, on the same basis as any other federal statute. (Article VI, US Constitution). Treaties, like US law, are superior to State statutes – but that’s as far as it goes.
In practice the equality of treaties with Federal law means that Congress can modify or repeal treaties by subsequent legislative action, even if this amounts to a violation of the treaty or international agreement as far as international law is concerned. The last enactment in time ALWAYS controls for US law purposes regardless of what the rest of the world thinks. Moreover, the treaty may be struck down or modified by the Courts, if it is found to run afoul in any way of the US Constitution.
Further, mere “executive agreements” – agreements with other countries that are not treaties, that is, not ratified by the Senate, are inferior even to State statutes. Finally, in Goldwater v. Carter, 444 U.S. 996 (1979), the Supreme Court refused to interfere with the actions of President Carter in unilaterally abrogating the Defense Treaty with the Republic of China (Taiwan).
· FROM JAMES FREEMON Until they include ‘None of the Above’ as a choice on our ballots, abstaining from voting is the only way we have of indicating our distaste for the bozo’s chosen to ‘represent’ us. When presented with the choice between a big government tax and spend Democrat, and a big government spend it regardless Republican, I chose not to participate in my own fleecing.
· I’ve paid my dues by proudly serving in the US military for 21 years. I have done my duty and repeatedly put my ass on the line for my country. It’s my right to ‘flip the bird’ to those I feel do not represent me, and are taking America in a direction I do not want it to go.
· Editor’s comment A mandatory voting system would have to include something akin to instant runoff: The voter would list his 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. choices; first past 50% would win. But what if I don’t want to vote for 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so on down to 100th? Your editor does not know enough about voting systems and invites opinions. Would a “None of them?” box work? You have done your duty, shown up, don’t like any of the rats, said so?
· FROM R.L. GOODSON, referring to our post about the extraordinarily high USAF jet training losses in 1950 as you US remobilized for Korea: “Cause of most of the training accidents was the unreliability of the aircraft. F-80, F-84 had notoriously underpowered, unreliable engines, on occasion prone to explode in mid-air. Jet aircraft are easier to fly than high performance, prop-driven aircraft. Jet aircraft do not have the torque effect from the propeller of of a powerful reciprocating engine. Granted, when the first swept wing aircraft were developed, i.e., the F-86, there were problems until the pilots learned about the different handling characteristics. Signed, An Old Navy Pilot (Vietnam Era).”
0330 GMT October 30, 2005
· INDIA, PAKISTAN TO OPEN 5 CROSSINGS ON KASHMIR LINE OF CONTROL For the first time since trouble over Kashmir began in 1947, India and Pakistan are to allow Kashmir residents on both sides of the Line of Control to cross over to seek help because of the earthquake. While residents of Kashmir will simply have to show up on the border with proper ID, relief groups will have to notify each side in advance.
· There has been no date put on how long the crossing will remain open.
· MORE ON THE GALLOWAY The senor aide to Vice President Cheney has been indicted in the Valerie Plame affair – not for giving her name to the press, because as early as 2004 the special prosecutor has decided the aide had no broken any law concerning naming a CIA agent. Instead, he has been indicted for perjury – in other words, not for the crime the investigation was investigating, but because he lied about his role, after it was determined he broke no law.
· Opinion We have zero interest in Mr. Cheney and his aide, though the Washington Post had a huge headline about the matter. We just wanted to emphasize to Mr. Galloway, that he’s for the high jump. It doesn’t matter whether he’s innocent or guilty of taking money in the oil for food scandal. If he has lied about anything in front of the Senate, any small little itsy bitsy teensy eensy thing, he’s committed perjury, and the Senate wants his head, they’ve got him by the short and curlies. If the Americans are indicting so senior a person to the Vice President of the nation simply because he did not tell “the whole truth”. GG has no chance.
· Not to worry, old chap. We’ll send you regular clippings concerning the mean things we say about you, to your prison, to keep you amused. And then people say we at Orbat.com are not nice people.
· UK TERRITORIAL ARMY AT LOWEST STRENGTH SINCE 1907, a big drop in enlistments because of Iraq is blamed.
· Analysis We’d better clarify the situation is quite different from the US drop in Guard and Army Reserve enlistments. A very substantial fraction of US troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, worldwide, are reservists having a very hard time of things. The US has not decreed general mobilization, even in Vietnam reserve troops were not sent. The troops are being kept on at time for two years, many suffer great financial hardship. And reservists are being killed in large number.
· The UK has no doubt called up TA reservists, but nothing like on the US scale – please correct us, but we don’t think any TA battalions have been called up – and certainly the British losses are in any case insignificant.
· Opinion Our interpretation is that with the end of Empire, the modern Brit has jettisoned the crusader zeal so evident in America today zeal. The British feel they have been lied and misled by their Prime Minister, and that bad as Saddam was, things have been done in a slimy fashion. We know this is also a big factor in the drop in US reserve enlistments. Young people are the ones who enlist, and they have to feel they are enlisting for a cause. The Brits don’t see a cause worth enlisting for.
GOODBYE KASHMIR, IT WAS REAL
· From the Editor of Orbat.com to the people of India: good people, the battle is over, the fight is done. The United States has once again prevailed over India and Pakistan, and we are well on our way to Kashmir as – at the minimum – an autonomous state within India and Pakistan. From there to independence is a short way.
· What tipped me off to the coming events? The words that there is no time limit on how long the border crossings will remain open. Into next summer for sure, as the winter has set in, the snows will not melt in the high mountains till May, and people in Pakistan Kashmir are going to continue needed help – at least – till June. Major disasters like the earthquake take years to recover from. Once Kashmiris, Indians and Pakistanis get used to the idea of a semi-open border, there will be great pressure to keep it open – and lots of goodies from our Man Sam as a big incentive. The Big Man has been pushing this idea for decades and is about to get his wish.
· I have fought the fight to get back Kashmir and all of Pakistan, to recreate a unified sub-continent, for 35 years, and have failed. To give up a principled fight because one is tired and has failed is immoral, and I committing not only an immoral act by giving up, but also treason against the land of my birth. To the few people who still care: I ask your forgiveness, but I have no other way. It is not even a matter of age. It is a matter of simple survival. I have bills to pay so I can simply survive. As long as I was in a 2-wage earner family, it was possible to survive, with many sacrifices. Well, Mrs. Rikhye decided after 28 years of sacrificing that my battles are not her battles, and she has opted – which is her right – to let me meet material needs on my own.
· I must, then, devote all my time to the business of earning money. Were I to come back to India, I could get by on what I would earn from 10 hours of work a week: even at today’s price, a one room flat, and a Vespa, are not difficult to come by for a person with my qualifications and skills. But my family is in the States: I cannot abandon my children, the youngest of whom is only 19, or my parents, who are 85 and 77. But living in the US, even at the minimal level I do, require a clear focus on earning. I have been thinking, were I to sell my house, I could clear my debts. A one room apartment and a Vespa can be earned in 10-20 hours a week in Washington, too. But if I sell my house, what do I leave for my children, except empty words about patriotism and duty and country, and where will my mother come when she can no longer manage on her own. I cannot go live with my children, and impose on them – my battles are not theirs, any more than they are those of the former Mrs. R.
· So I am not going to complain: win some, lose some. The odds of winning on this were very slim indeed when I returned to India in 1970 for the first time as a grown person. The people of India have no time or urge for the struggle, they want to get on with their lives, make up for the time they lost under five decades of “socialist” rule. I cannot blame them in the slightest, that the odds have decreased like the calculus limit that approaches zero but never reaches zero.
· It is possible that one day India will rise again a unified power. But then it is also possible that all the oxygen molecules in my room will gather in one corner, depriving me of the air I need to breathe. I would be foolish to plan my life around that contingency. So also I would be foolish to plan my life on the assumption that the people of India will decide once again that the struggle for One India is worth the sacrifice.
· To the US, I say: “Good job, Samster. Hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of your devoted servants and citizens worked for this development for many, many long years. It is a job well done, you have earned your victory. I have no condemnation of you: you have done what is in your national interest, had you not, if I were American, I would have to charge you for failing your country.
· You could not have done it without the Indians who made themselves available to see your point of view on a sane solution to Kashmir, for a consideration of course. Were it by some magic in an alternate universe I could decide for India, my first act would be a list of Indians to execute for selling out their country. If I could, I still would, and Kashmir would only be the latest in a frightening long list of crimes you have committed against your people.
· But that does not mean I blame you in any way. You had to do what you had to do. I wish it had been otherwise, that the men and women who have laid down their lives for 3000 years so that India could be a great nation were the ones earning rewards, rather than you, the traitors, who have sold out your motherland. But is not to be so, and I pass no moral judgment on you, nonetheless.
· Perhaps I too would have sold out India for the material reasons you did, and for the chance for my children to make better lives in America. I remain acutely aware that due to the hard work of my father, I had to make no moral compromise to come to America, in a day when America was closed to all but 100 Indians a year – that was the Indian immigration quota before 1963. Even then, as immigration liberalized, it was impossible for a civil servant, a military man, an intelligence person, to afford to send their children to America for an education. The US government made it possible, you have kept your side of the bargain, America has kept its side. At least there has been honesty there.
· Because but for the grace of the divine I escaped making any compromises, I have no right to judge you, and I will not. But I remind you – and indeed this is surely the emptiest threat to have been hurled at you, as I have absolutely no power whatsoever to enforce, please remember, I do not not judge you, but I would still hang you if I could: treason is treason. I understand why you betrayed India, you would have my understanding – and my compassion – as you went to the gallows.
· Meanwhile, I must concern myself with more mundane, but more practical matters, one of which is urgent, one not as much so.
· The not so urgent matter is, what should the state flag of Kashmir look like, when it finally because part of the great United States of America? You may laugh, but Kashmir is more valuable to America than India, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan, or any other place in the heart of Asia. Three words that any savvy retailer will tell you: “Location, location, location”. If I were American, and were told I could any place I wanted in Central Asia, but just one place, I would choose Kashmir without a second’s thought. To my younger readers: look at at an atlas and you will see why I would make that choice.
· The more urgent matter is that of a passport. Contrary to what Indians believe, I have kept my Indian passport even though under the new laws I will be deported should I make a single mistake that involves any offense against the law – I do not say crime for a reason – involving a theoretical punishment over 1 year/ It does not matter the judge fine me not a dollar, not sentence me to an hour in jail. If the offense is such that a sentence of a year, or greater than a year, can be imposed, it is not necessary the American authorities to as much as give me a chance to return home to say my goodbyes to my family, or to allow me to call a lawyer. I can be taken straight to jail from the courthouse, with no right of appeal, kept in jail while my papers are processed, and then be put on a plane to India.
· Yes, my dear American friends, this is your country today – and these laws predate 9-11.
· But I do not complain, and will not complain should that happen to me. America has been very generous to me from the day of my first arrival. I love this country and its people. Once India announced dual nationality, I applied for US citizenship precisely to avoid the above fate should I make a mistake – or even should anyone accuse me of a mistake and I not have the resources to clear my name.
· Yet, there are many reasons why I think America would be justified not to give me citizenship, for all its generosity to me, and I would understand. There is a more troubling problem: what sense does it make for me to give up that piece of paper with the Great Seal of India’s stamp on it, because my government has sold out, only to accept a piece of paper with the Great Seal of the United States, and swear allegiance to the government that purchased my government?
· But a passport is nice to have, who knows, I may once again want to travel to another country, just to see what lies on the other side of the mountain. So, when winter break starts, and I am a little freer from pressures of work and study, I shall look on the internet for a country that will give me a passport requiring more than the few hundreds dollars I could borrow on a credit card.
· If there is no such country, then would it be such a big deal to turn in my passport at the Indian Consulate, sign a form renouncing my citizenship, without having a new country and a new passport? It is perfectly possible to live in the US with one’s “Green Card” alone; beside, even with another country’s passport, I am still vulnerable to the peril of the one-year offensive law.
· Make haste slowly. I was the man in a hurry who made life-changing decisions on what sign for a departing international flight first caught my eye as I walked into Palam or Kennedy Airport.* I would go Monday to hand in my passport, in a respectful manner, to the clerk on duty. If only I could resolve one troubling question:
· I know it is the infirmity that comes with advancing age that makes me ask the question, and I cannot forgive myself for my weakness. I know no one else cares that Kashmir will soon be gone. How much do I really care, now that I can look to the future, and know that Kashmir will soon be gone?
· * Laugh if you will, but the chain of events that let me to return to India to start a revolution began when one day, in 1967, I cleared immigration at JFK after a flight from Teheran, and saw a big sign: “Announcing Delta’s Inaugural Service to Atlanta: $100 round trip”. I cannot vouch, at this distance for the exact words or price, but I had not even finished reading that one line when I found myself heading for the Delta counter, instead of the Eastern counter to use the ticket I held for Boston, and for wife and home. How the revolution began, and how it ended, you’ll read all about in my memoirs, “My 20 years in India with the CIA”. But first I have to make money so I can take time off to write the memoirs, so its bye for now, until tomorrow…
0330 GMT October 28, 2005
· MORE FROM COLIN ROBINSON Orbat.com reader and contributor Colin Robinson and your editor have been exchanging emails over the past 24 hours. We explained to Colin that AGTW has changed from pure news with limited comments to a more blog-like approach because, unlike immediately after 9-11, there are a number of really excellent blogs giving facts – we use some of them, and also our readers prefer the present mix of news.
· We do, however, think he has a point on mixing news annotated with analytical comment with opinion. We try and avoid that, by labeling all-opinion pieces as such, but we think, on reflection, we are not going far enough in keeping the two separate. Our manner of analysis can lead people to think we are simply giving our opinion.
· Now, we’re not going to ask you to click through yet another page. As it is we had to go back one page because our orbat.com people wanted their front page back, not that we’re doing a good job of maintaining it – time, always short. Now saying you should go back another page for the opinion wouldn’t be fair.
· So what we’ll do is to give news items and opinion pieces on the same page, but refrain from any opinion mixed with a news item, unless it is of the analytical kind: “we think this development implies such and such,” and save our personal comments under separate headings.
· If you have thoughts on this, or suggestions how we can do it better, please let us know.
· Colin, if we go for two separate pages, as you suggested, we need a second editor. There is no way I can deal with two pages: already I am stealing time from studies and sleep to do this page. If you or others have any workable idea, I’m happy to adopt it. Orbat.com belongs as much to its readers and contributor as it does to me.
· US TO REALIGN OKINAWA TROOPS TO GUAM Henry J. Cobb and Joseph Stefula send us news that the US has acceded to a long standing demand of Japan’s. US will reduce its footprint on Okinawa, relocated some 3rd Marine Division troops to Guam.
· Though the Japanese are not saying anything about a quid-pro-quo pro, Japan is apparently to allow a US nuclear-power carried to be based in Japan, reversing long-standing prohibition against such warships docking at Japanese ports.
· TERROR BOMBERS KILL 22 IN TEL AVIV, in two attacks last Sunday. Has been said about the Palestine people: no need for Israel to destroy them. They will destroy themselves. We don’t agree with Israel’s seizure of the West Bank. That doesn’t give terrorists the right to kill Israeli civilians. Attack the army if you must attack. Then we can respect you as fighters. Right now, you are not fighters, you are simply murderers of innocents.
· MORE ON THE GALLOWAY and we’re being serious. Non-American readers might wonder what is the big fuss about GG having lied to the US Senate? Isn’t he being picked on?
· Not really. President Clinton was impeached not because of what he did with Monica, but because by saying he had no relationships with that woman, he committed perjury. So why should GG be spared? That’s the law in America, and perjury is accepted as a crime under English systems of law.
· The media is all agog about the possibility the US president’s advisor Karl Rove will be indicted in the naming of a CIA agent. Arrested for naming the agent? No, for having lied about some conversations he had. So what makes GG special?
· Last, get this: a teenager who worked on the property of a prominent Los Angeles professional couple apparently killed the woman and then pushed off. He happened to call his mother to say he was with his girlfriend. Mom said, in effect: “Don’t come back, there’s cops all over the place”. Would you as a parent have done any different? I wouldn’t: protecting my child, right or wrong, is number one on my agenda and to heck with the consequences. So guess what? The mom is in jail, for having helped her son to evade arrest – he was arrested very quickly, by the way. When he called her, the law says her duty was to inform the cops and give them all information.
· So what’s so special about GG that he shouldn’t be indicted?
· CINDY SHEEHAN REDUX TO THE 5th POWER Wrong again, but that’s hardly an unusual experience for your editor. We thought Cindy Sheehan, the Anti-war demonstrator had gone away once the press saw through her. Not a bit. Jang of Pakistan tells us that on Wednesday she was arrested in front of the White House for demonstrating without a permit.
· Why we had to get this news from Jang of Pakistan is a mystery to us.
EDITOR’S OPINION – TORTURE: BACK TO THE FUTURE
· We are feeling like complete idiots ever since we learned that the US is signatory to an international convention against torture. All this time the US Government has been saying “Geneva does not apply”, and we’ve been defending the government by citing chapter and verse that yes, Geneva does not apply.
· But none of that is relevant because of this other treaty. We’re not angry at the government, because this slimy way of dealing with issues you don’t want to talk about – misdirection – is a common tactic in today’s American public life. Moreover, we would assume that even informed persons are ignorant about this other treaty, because all that we have seen – and admittedly we do not read as much Americans news as we should – is attacks on the US because it is not following Geneva.
· But we do owe it to our readers to set the record right. In light of the other treaty, then yes, Abu Gharib was wrong and illegal. That Geneva did not apply to Iraqi civil prisoners is irrelevant.
· Next, may we respectfully ask Vice President Dick Cheney if he has lost his senses? 90 to 9, the US Senate voted to ban torture of prisoners in American custody. When Senator John McCain, who spent five years being severely tortured, brings up such a bill, and when General/Secretary of State Colin Powell supports the bill, along with some very tough conservatives in the Senate, the impetus behind the bill has to be taken seriously. And we can say with confidence, the American people have spoken, and said no to torture.
· So Mr. Cheney does something exceedingly smart. He wants to exempt the CIA from the bill. So the headlines – you may expect – all over the world will scream “American government wants right to torture”. The Mr. Cheney prevails on Mr. Bush to threaten a veto of the bill.
· Get this folks: Mr. Bush has never vetoed a single bill, ever. But he says he will veto this one? So that the Senate can pass it again with more than the 2/3rds majority required to override his veto, so he can look like an utter fool because he has weakened his credibility, smeared America, and still had to let the bill pass?
· Someone, please tell your editor he has accidentally slipped through a crack in the space-time continuum and is in an alternate universe….
· WAIT A MINUTE YOU SAY, DIDN’T YOU DEFEND TORTURE in several of your opinions during and after Abu Gharib?
· If you think that, it is definitely our fault because often we don’t explain things as much as we would, had your editor not been ADHD.
· Your editor did not support torture at Abu Gharib. All he kept saying is, why is the US media and HR groups focusing on this issue when what happened at is no worse than the daily routine in American prisons? How come degrading an Iraqi prisoner is worse than degrading an American prisoner? Is the American less of a human than the Iraqi.
· We say again, that people who oppose torture by saying things like “it doesn’t work because a man will say anything under torture” are completely clueless, and wonder why they get to write long columns in newspapers and pontificate on TV when they are so obviously clueless.
· The very sad truth is that torture works beautifully, assuming you are careful not to kill the victim before you’re done. Do people honestly think that interrogators don’t know the victim will say anything? That’s why you torture heck out of him, send him back to his cell to recover, and then bring him out again, and again, and again, till you have the complete story. You still don’t let him go, because you may need him again in case you didn’t ask all the questions that you should have, or in case he did slip one over you.
· But what if he’s innocent? There is always that 1% chance that the man really is innocent of everything: he really didn’t know his brother Abe was hanging around with Bob, who unknowingly was carrying messages for Chuck, who thought he was helping Doug run a gambling ring whereas…. etc etc, you get the point.
· Interrogators are pretty good at finding out if you really are not the least bit involved. Of course, it may take a few sessions. And that’s too darn bad. No one said war is some kind of a court trial. The innocent suffer with the guilty, that’s the nature of war. What’s the sense of undertaking missions like the bomber attack on Saddam’s favorite eatery, which must have sent a powerful lot of people prematurely to the Great Eatery in the Sky, and then squall about the tiny chance an innocent man might have been tortured. In the bomber attack, the end justified the means: there was a reasonable chance the US would get Saddam, and if a hundreds other had to die while you missed him, its still a good tradeoff and justifiable.
· THAT SEEMS LIKE A PRETTY FRANK ADMISSION YOU THINK TORTURE IS ACCEPTABLE, DOESN’T IT? Well yes. But what your editor thinks is immaterial. If the US has signed a treaty it isn’t going to do bad things, it has to stand by the treaty. Moreover, using other methods may take more time, but they do work. Incidentally, if people are going to say dressing an Arab prisoner in frilly lace panties and making him dance with another man is torture, or having a female MP rub up against him is torture, or being shown pornographic movies is torture, then sorry, the proponents of that view can never be satisfied that the prisoner is being treated right, and if he is savvy, you will never get anything out of him. So when people say they are other means that work just as well, they should be pretty darn sure they can specify what these other
· And that’s all we need to debate. Its against US law to torture. End of the matter. Change the law if you think you can – and on this point you cant because America is against torture – otherwise observe the law. Savvy, Kemo Sabey?
· JUST A BY THE WAY Its difficult to accept with a straight face an Arab prisoner’s complaint – such as we believe has been made at Gitmo – that scantily dressed female MPs constitute an assault on his religion. First, you’re religious? Then why are you hanging around with killers who kill old men, women, and children without a second thought? Sorry, old boy, you are not religious.
· Second, why is the sight of a scantily dressed female an assault on your religion? Oh, we see, its because women are considered unclean by some of your co-religionists.
· That’s fine, what we’d like the HR types to explain is: why should we be paying the slightest attention to people who think like that? That’s discrimination against women, which is absolutely something you cannot get away in the US. So why should we be sensitive to some jerk’s sick feelings? Because they’re his religion, he says?