1919 vs 2020?

Well worth reading discussion of the similarities and differences between the current pandemic and the previous one here.

"It’s really remarkable to me that the flu of a century killed 675,000 Americans out of a population of 110 million, meaning that roughly works out to the 2.2 million upper range guess of projections for COVID-19 by proportion of the population. And yet, the cultural response to it was primarily to shrug our collective shoulders and get on with our lives. It wasn’t total ignorance that created that situation. Some communities did engage in effective quarantining, for instance, and there were real death rate differentials between them. But to my knowledge anyway, sports weren’t cancelled. The World Series went on as normal (and quite famously in 1919!). There was no effective government response at the federal level."

One point I will take issue with, however, is this:

"Basically, what has changed is us. We see ourselves as something closer to immortal today." (emphasis mine) "The only two health crises even close to the flu between then and now were polio and HIV and those are very different types of events. Polio’s transformation into something much more powerful than in the past definitely scared lots and lots and lots of people, but what could you really do? AIDS certainly frightened many, but it was also classified as gay cancer early on and Reagan was happy to let them all die until his buddy Rock Hudson fell to the disease.

We have a culture of immortality. That’s not a bad thing. Science has advanced so far. We think we can protect ourselves from the outside world through eating and exercise and medicine. To an extent, we can. Even though COVID-19 has hit very old people in nursing homes and those with co-morbidities much harder than most people, it’s seen as an unimaginable tragedy to lose these people in a way that the deaths of thousands upon thousands of young parents and workers was not a century ago. To an extent, this is a reminder that human beings are incredibly fragile animals who have bodies where germs and bacteria pass in and out of all the time. We just don’t think about it. Our seeming indifference to climate change is related to this as well. We simply think we will figure it out, just like we figured out polio or the ozone layer or how to make a good television comedy."

I think this confuses correlation with causation.

Yes, we do think we'll "figure it out". But that's because we are accustomed to the - when you think about it - astounding advances in medical practice over the past century.

I mean...the docs in 1919 understood the germ theory of disease and the nature of influenza. They weren't stupid. They did what they could.

But.

At the time inoculation and vaccination was just beginning to become widespread. The notion that "oh, sure, we'll get a vaccine for that" was not just remote, it was nearly unthinkable in many cases. People died all the time from diseases we've more-or-less removed from our experience; typhus, cholera, diphtheria, measles, smallpox. That simply doesn't happen anymore.

So it's not that we "see ourselves as...immortal" or have a "culture of immortality". It's that we have internalized that what is going to kill us is a heart attack, or cancer, or an auto accident, or a random nutter with a firearm. The notion that a simple contagious disease - a sort of superflu - can kill or maim us?

THAT's insane. That's fucking creepy. That's...something that shouldn't be happening.

So we ARE not really treating this plague the way we did a century ago, but not because WE'VE changed.

It's because our fundamental baseline for medical competence and medical success has changed.

We don't expect we're going to die of cholera anymore.

So we're really pissed off and really frustrated and really afraid that this thing has become, despite all our knowledge and skills and learning, the pestilence that stalks in the darkness

That's how sieges work, Phil.

How the hell did they deal with these people in the past?

Phil: "That's it. I can't take it any more. We gotta get out. Open the gates."

Dave: "We've been through this, Phil. The Mongols are still outside. We can't open the gates yet."

Phil: "But...freedom! I gotta get out. I can't take it. I gotta...I gotta weed the turnips! I left the lights on in the cow byre! I gotta buy another dozen swords!"

Dave:...

Dave: "Mongols, Phil."

Phil: "Uuuugh. I can't staaand it. We've been in here for...weeks!"

Dave: "That's how sieges work, Phil."

Phil: "But...the Mongols have barely killed anyone for days!"

Dave: "That's because of the walls."

Phil: "Are you sure? Maybe the Mongols aren't as dangerous as you said they were!"

Dave:

Phil: "I'm just saying, how bad could it be? They can't kill all of us!"

Dave: "That is literally the thing they do, Phil."

Phil: "Aaarrrggh! My turnips!"

"Will you govern it any better?"

This post got me thinking.

I know it's difficult to look past the grandiose follies of the TrumpenEra.

But Klare has a point; there seems to be a widespread consensus in the United States' geopolitical thinking, not just within the GOP but throughout the mainstream U.S. geopolitical thought, that "China is the enemy". As Klare points out:

"In eastern Ukraine, the Balkans, Syria, cyberspace, and in the area of nuclear weaponry, Russia does indeed pose a variety of threats to Washington’s goals and desires. Still, as an economically hobbled petro-state, it lacks the kind of might that would allow it to truly challenge this country’s status as the world’s dominant power. China is another story altogether. With its vast economy, growing technological prowess, intercontinental “Belt and Road” infrastructure project, and rapidly modernizing military, an emboldened China could someday match or even exceed U.S. power on a global scale..."

The recent tsuris over the INF treaty and both the US and Russia seeming more concerned about China that each other seems a part of that. There seems to be a LOT of U.S. conturbation over the perceived threat of a powerful China.

Is it just me, or does this seem unpleasantly reminiscent of the setting of the Irano-Byzantine Wars of the 3rd through the 7th Centuries, wherein the two empires were obsessed with defeating the other, to the point where both succeeded only in thrashing themselves into debilitation that was ideal for the rising power of Arabic Islam to dismember and devour?

Is the ascent of the PRC inevitable? It would seem that to be so the flaws in the economic and political systems that brought down the USSR would have to be avoided. But, if they could be, does a conflict between the PRC and the USA have to occur? And, if so, what form(s) would it take? And would it be possible for one polity or the other to succeed, or is a mutual exhaustion of the Sassanid-East Roman sort seem more likely?

Discuss.

(Oh, and the title? Its from the supposed exchange between the newly crowned emperor Heraclius and his deposed predecessor Phocas:

"Is it thus", asked Heraclius, "that you have governed the Empire?"
"Will you," replied Phocas, with unexpected spirit, "govern it any better?"

Ruling the waves..?

Rob Farley has a post up at the National Interest discussing the current expansion of the PRC's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), comparing that to the Great Power navies of the past century.

He asks whether the PLAN can succeed in advancing the PRC's geopolitical ends compared to the Imperial German, Russian (and Soviet), Imperial Japanese, and United States navies.

It's not a bad little article, but I think it asks the wrong question.

I'd start, rather, with the question "Does (fill in the blank nation) need a blue-water navy?"

Two of the four examples Farley picks - Germany and Russia/the Soviet Union - were primarily continental powers and as such the answer seems obviously "No".

As such their fleets were superfluous at best and, for Germany, disastrous at worst; dragging Wilhelmine Germany into a naval arms race with Great Britain that diverted resources that the Reich could have put to better use.

The "good cases" would seem to be the maritime empires, Japan and the U.S.; both depend on overseas trade, both are isolated by oceans, at least partially in the case of the U.S., both had, or have, imperial ambitions.

Oddly, Farley chooses to ignore two other great maritime empires.

The "success" is, obviously, the British. Britain obviously needed a blue-water navy, and, in general, did pretty well with it. Unsurprisingly that naval power disappeared with the Empire, but it had a hell of a good 400-odd-year run.

Spain, on the other hand, needed a fleet but always seemed to find its ambitions were greater than its capabilities.

Someday I should really find a good Spanish naval history to understand why the Dons never managed to figure out what the British seemed to manage so effortlessly. Whatever the reason, lacking a fleet capable of long-range power projection surely helped doom the Spanish colonial empire, whether from foreign enemies like the U.S. or from colonial revolt.

So.

Looking at the historical examples, and the current geopolitical needs of China, I can't really see how putting time, money, and effort into a big fleet helps them.

Anyone willing to take the counterpoint?

Let's discuss.

Oh, tempora! Oh, mores!

The lunatic stylings of Roy Moore and his fanbois reminded me again what a strange world we live in.

For one thing, it's the bizarre upwelling of tribalism in a world where "tribe" functionally means less than ever. Humans are interconnected in ways inconceivable even a generation ago, and yet “Evangelical Christian” has stopped being a religious faith and become a “tribe”. It’s really as simple as that.

So just like the Mongol who could stop on the way out of his yurt to play with his sister’s little kid before mounting up to go slaughter the Polish peasants in the village over the ridge, these folks have convinced themselves that they are a tribe, and the "others" out there are not just another tribe, but not really "people". It's like how tribal societies usually have names for themselves that mean "People"; the implication being that if you're not in the tribe you're not "people".

To top that off, these gomers have convinced themselves that they're not just a tribe, but a threatened tribe in a dangerous, frightful world against which only deadly violence can protect them.

A lot of this is an ugly combination of human nature – we’ve been tribes for a lot longer than we’ve been nations, or religions, or scientists, or whatever (along with human foibles in general – remember that “average” intelligence means that half the human race is BELOW “average”) – and way too much exposure to electronic media, which thrives on fire and murder.

But, still...the degree ti which that combination drives us to stupid behavior sometimes seems beyond any sort of rational sense.

I can’t remember what the actual incident was but I do know that it was one of the usual acts of distant violence, maybe an Islamic State attack somewhere, that caused a friend of mine to exclaim about how horrible and violent the world is today. She’s a smart person – “above average” – and so I bothered to talk to her about this.

“So…had one of those pesky barbarian invasions again last Tuesday, then?”

“No. What?”

“Didn’t get the massive pandemic this week? No Black Death, no whole-family-wiped-out-by-smallpox, eh?”

“Wha…what the hell do you mean?”

“So I take it that your city didn’t fall to the besiegers and you’re not currently being raped before being faced with a sort of “bad or worse” outcome of death or slavery? The famine caused by the summer’s crop failure not facing you with a hideously slow death to starvation? The rapacious king hasn’t taken up half your neighborhood in the corvee again?”

“What the hell does this have to do with (violent act in distant place)?”

“What it means is that we, we in the First World, really live in an insanely, historically unprecedentedly peaceful world. We are almost impervious to common disease. Medicine and public health have made pandemics hugely rare. Massive volkerwanderungs that caused continent-wide death, such as the mfecane in southern Africa or the Gothic invasions of western Europe or the Mongol incursions into western Eurasia haven’t occurred for centuries. We live, in general, under a rule of settled law; we don’t run the risk of a robber baron in Salem looting and murdering us on I-5 between Portland and Eugene. There ARE still horrible things that happen…but to those of us not able to afford our own mercenary bodyguards they happen less than almost any time in human history.”

“But…terrorism! School shootings! Urban gangs!”

“Happen. Yes. But…you’ll note that they happen in little bits and pieces in places all over the world. Remember that until probably two generations ago you would never have heard of those places at all, much less of some awful thing happening in them. Think about it; which of these horrible things happened to someone YOU know, personally. Someplace within, say, three days walk from you?”

“Ummm…”

“Thought so. So the world’s NOT “the most dangerous ever”. You just hear MORE of these dangerous things ever, because that’s what the “news” thinks will keep you watching their broadcasts so they can sell more airtime to the marketers of payday lenders and erectile-dysfunction pills. So your very best option is to chillax and have a nice dark ale with a whisky in abeyance and read something thoughtful.”

Mind you, I don’t think she bought it.

That's a huge part of the problem.

I have no idea what the hell you can do about that.

What's the English for "freikorps"?

Out old Intel Dump pal Phillip Carter has a piece up at Slate discussing the presser put on by the White House Chief-of-Staff, former GEN Kelly.

Carter says all the usual things that are being said elsewhere about the Kelly presser - that it pretty much told anyone who doesn't have a DD214 that their only role in military affairs is to "support the troops" and STFU - but one line from the Carter piece really struck me.

It was this:

"The burden of our post-9/11 wars has been heavy but not widely shouldered nor shared. The result, echoed in opinion surveys of veterans and military personnel, has been a mixture of pride, nostalgia, and resentment."

Yeah, well, there was another group of veterans and military personnel who held strong feelings of pride and nostalgia about their recent wartime service and deep resentment towards the civilians and political leaders of their nation they held responsible for their failure.

They were the guys from the Kaiserlich Deutsches Heer, the Imperial German Army, after 1918.

And by the 1920s they had given up pretending even notional submission to the civilian government of Weimar and went out into the streets to fight, helping to contribute to the chaos and social unrest that eventually enabled totalitarian rule come to power in Germany.

In the bitterest of ironies, the supposed true German nationalists they helped to power considered them a danger to the fascist state. Many of the ex-freikorps were murdered or disappeared in 1934 when the true believers consolidated power.

Are the situations of interwar Germany and post-modern America very different?

Yes.

Is it good to have a small, self-selecting group within a popular democracy with a monopoly on the use and understanding of armed force and the attitude that that monopoly makes them politically superior to those without it?

No.

You can argue about the iniquities of a draft and I won't argue back. But the Founders of this nation had some strong opinions about the danger to a republic from praetorian treason.

I will suggest that former GEN Kelly's remarks should make you nervous about listening for the sound of the dagger leaving its sheath.

There is more than one way to get stabbed in the back.

Now, the hard part

So today is the first day of post-Gaddafi Libya.Good on them.

Now for the really hard part.

As the columnist for Al Jazeera reminds us:

"...the NTC has been unable to secure a country awash with armed men. Libya is also a country shot through with rivalries, jealousies and blood debts, among individuals and groups. Some of these divisions are of historic vintage, many arise from Gaddafi's rule, and the war will have added a new crop. Like Iraq, Libya was assembled through histories of empire and its aftermath. It has been torn apart by war. Now it has lost the one thing that united much of the country: hatred of Colonel Gaddafi and his regime. Libyans are left to face the legacy of his mastery of the art of divide and rule. The involvement of Western air forces meant that the rebels never had to form a unified force. Only to a limited extent did they learn the habits of cooperation under fire.

That is why they now lack an army with which to bring the country under control."

The thing that drove and still drives me crazy is the calm assumption that has dominated much of U.S. foreign policy "debate" that the bomb-y, kill-y part is the "hard part". I have no idea where this springs from - watching war films, I suspect - but it's in complete opposition to the actual conduct of damn near every war the U.S. has ever fought, where the worst fuckups always seem to spring from political gaffes made either in hope of winning the war or in post-war inattention to detail.

Thus with Libya. I honestly have very little hope for anything good. The "country" has never been well-ruled, its people have little or no experience in or proven skill at self-government, and its economy and polity are not far above the tribal level. Post-colonial experience suggests that whatever emerges will not be pretty.

But...and this is my point; I cannot see how U.S. fiddling will be helpful. It is up to the Libyans to do what they can for themselves. A "solution" imposed from outside is no real solution at all, and for all that there appear to be significant portions of the U.S. "leadership" congratulating themselves on how much we had to do with the current outcome I hope that we all recall that.

Backside to the Future

(Being A Mere Diversion, And a Personal Rumination on The State of the Nation and the Upcoming Election Year)

With the ludicrous Ames Iowa "straw poll" it appears that the 2012 campaign season has officially begin...15 months before the actual election.I can't begin to express how this irritates me.

Glenn Greenwald explains better than I can how the combination of endless "election" coverage combined with the rapacious cable news 24/7/365 cycle hammered down into the simpleminded "tell the masses what they want not what they need" paradigm of the corporate news (and, of course, sprinkled with some commercial gottasellsomeads! pixie dust) goes in one end and emerges a Möbius band of idiocy that ties misinformation into disinformation with plain, good old fatuousness for a sort of fractal stupidity; refracted infinitely to where any hope of extracting simple, sane understanding of the people and their ideas has vanished.

But at least on one hand the tale told by one of the idiots - while set about with sound and fury signifying nothing (that is, the usual folderol involving gays, guns, and God - fodder for the gossip columns and the prayer breakfasts but nothing more than a magnetic sticker on the bumper of the People Who Matter in our electoral "process") - is simple enough.

No new taxes. In fact, no taxes at all, or as close as possible.

Small government. Teeny, tiny, eensy-weensy leetle government (except the part that blows up Scary Brown People, but that's the cool part, anyway).

Freedom for the Job Creators! Deregulate everything regulatable!

Free Markets! (meaning; deregulate even MORE stuff!)

Plus some other truly crazy shit; abolishing the Fed, returning to the gold standard, protection for precious rapist-babies...but you know the drill - that's just to give the loonies a shiny pretty to play with.

Here's the thing; this is nothing new. Nothing. We've already been there, done that, and got the crinoline and the Arrow t-shirt.

Low taxes? Freedom for the magnates? Utter deregulation and a complete lack of federal anything?The Gilded Age.

Seriously.

And, if I have to be scrupulously honest, if I was in Forbes 400, if I was one of the rich and the powerful...why not?Hell, the pre-Depression United States was a paradise for a rich man (woman? enh...not quite so much). Mansions? Servants? Senators appointed at your whim? Entire federal administrations in your pocket? Ask the Doles how that Hawaii thing worked out for them, the Rockefellers how the Standard Oil gig payed off before those meddlesome Progressive trustbusters elbowed in.

And let me be honest about this, too; the United States works perfectly well as an open oligarchy. It did from about 1870 to 1930, and don't kid yourself; some pigs are still more equal than others and always have been. Tell me that you get the same meal ticket emerging from the Oregon Episcopal School versus Jefferson High School here in Portland.

Henh. Right.

But I'm not here to argue equality of outcomes.

I'm here to talk about next year.

It's becoming painfully clear that the GOP is going to nominate someone whose positions on things like federal regulations and spending are closer to those of John D. Rockefeller than his grandson. And if they win - and the continuing Great Recession makes such a win highly plausible - they will do their very best to return this country to the Gilded Age they by their words and deeds so seem to yearn for.

I consider this a very Bad Thing, largely because me and mine are unlikely to be among those included in the Four Hundred. We will not be robber barons; more likely we will be among the robbed. Mojo and I had a lovely saunter about our graceful Pittock Mansion this sunny Sunday, and I observed that had we been alive then our only glimpse of the beautiful appointments and spectacular vistas would have been as we carried the dirty linen down the stairs or brought master his cigars.But I have to accept that it would not necessarily be a Bad Thing for the nation. More nations have thrived and grown in wealth and power as oligarchies than as democracies, simply because of the late arrival of popular democracy on the historical scene. The nation as a nation might do quite well.

And it is unlikely that even the most teabaggiest Republican government would be able to go full public-be-damned on us. The welfare state is deeply ingrained in U.S. society, and there would come a point where even the most Galtian overlord would draw back from reintroducing a world of match girls and breaker boys even if it helped bring back the Gibson Girl and the Arrow Shirt guy.Make no mistake; "reforming" the entitlement systems now in place mean simply throwing people out of them. Some of those people will find ways to live without their dole money; the American people had all sorts of ways of coping with poor, sick, old parents and injured relatives before 1933 and they can reinvent those ways again. Families will return to the multigenerational homes of the past, where retired grandma cares for the grandkids while mom and dad work, in return for food and a bed. There are ways, there are ways.But.

And this is a big "but"...

Two things have changed enormously since the last time we tried to live this way, assuming that the GOP experiment goes forward. And I'm not sure whether they've really thought this out.

First, in 1911 the U.S. was a burgeoning industrial power; work was there - not always good work, often dirty, hard, low-paying, dangerous work - but it was there. And it was work that needed people; vastly manual, even when skilled. The factories of the Gilded Age needed lots of poor people to work them.Second, there was still a hell of a lot of "open" land, and "open" places, for people to go to try and start again. The frontier only officially closed in 1890, and even in the Fifties there were lots of places that were still booming and enjoyed a boomtown's need for people.And both of of those "safety valves" are gone.

If the Great Recession and the thirty years of deregulation, outsourcing, offshoring, downsizing, and deunionization have proved anything to the people Who Matter in business and politics, it's that Henry Ford's old paradigm - pay the workers better so they will buy more stuff - has been broken. The "old economy" here in the U.S. - the economy that depended on American working people working to make stuff that other American working people bought - is tanking, HAS tanked, and I don't think anyone knows how to put all those people back to work in any sort of work that pays a living wage.And there's nowhere to "go". The frontier really IS closed, and there's no hope for people to take up forty acres and try and make a go of it. Oh, sure, you can try an start-up a little company, make cute glass cups or design webpages or invent a new application for a cell phone...but working for yourself is a backbreaking task, and especially in the corporatist U.S. of 2011 there are so many ways that a bigger, more powerful competitor can dry-gulch you. My wife is a "contractor" and I've seen the sausage-making up close. They're right - it's not pretty. And it's not going to get you into the parlor at Pittock Mansion, either.

So assuming that the Gilded Age Project largely succeeds, we can assume that it will result in a fairly large group - larger than we have dealt with in living history - of relatively permanently unemployed or under-employed people, people who not only don't have work but for whom the IS no work, no work that can't and won't be done by someone in Bangladesh or Uruguay for a fraction of what that American would need to make to live even at poverty levels in this country. That among this group will be many old, sick, and old sick people. And that if there IS a way out of that throwback to the future it is something that not only is unapparent to us now, but even potential precursors are not apparent.

The old economy is failing. The new economy - whatever that may be - has not yet emerged, if it ever will emerge in any form that will help those knocked down by the fall of the old economy to their feet again.

And one major political group in U.S. politics believes that the best response to this is to return as closely to the conditions of 1889 as possible.

So.

I'm not sure what is in store for me, for my family, for you and yours. But I suspect that even if we don't end up turning back down the road towards the past we're in for some hard years ahead.

And if we do...well...

If the U.S. Army taught me one thing, I learned how to mop a fucking floor.Hopefully when I get laid off I won't be too old to get a job cleaning up at the Big House.

The Captives of Our Bow and Spear

You can take an Afghan to Hell with kindness,
but never to heaven by force
--Afghan proverb

Tribe wars with tribe. Every man's hand
is against the other and all are against the stranger
... the state of continual tumult has produced
a habit of mind which holds life cheap
and embarks on war with careless levity
--Winston Churchill
______________________

Chief advocates viewing the Battle of Little Bighorn as another fight in the progression of events which began in 1492. This perspective helps in understanding the totality of the situation.

Using that viewpoint, let us extend lessons from LBH into current scenarios in Afghanistan dealing with Counterinsurgency, unconventional/guerrilla war (UW/GW) and terrorism. This may seem a stretch, but saddle up . . .

The hostiles in both scenarios did not have a problem in the world until the outer world forcibly imposed progress upon them. The Afghans have much experience repulsing the outsiders, be they Greek, Persian, British, Russian, Paki, Indian, Chinese, American or even present-day Iranians.Minus external forces, the Native Americans and the Afghanis would do fine, thanks, without the education or whatever the interlopers wish to impose. Both nations (or more precisely, confederation of nations) would be happy to continue killing each other before it became necessary to reach out and kill The Other. The only thing better than killing each other would be to kill invaders.

Following are some ways LBH can be compared to the Phony War on Terror (PWOT):

[1] "Fighting Season" -- both the Indians and the Afghans could only fight when they could support themselves operationally. Where the Afghans gather support external to the group, the Indians had to follow the cycle of nature. Both groups were sidelined by deadly winter weather, but of course, they continued to train, plan, maintain equipment, etc.[2] Militarily, both the Afghan and Indian War campaigns had the same goals. The hostiles were given a Hobson's choice: Submit to government control or pick up the lance. There is no discernible middle ground.

[3] The Afghan fighters have a force structure similar to that of the Indians, one based upon tribal loyalties and realities. The groups are usually as strong as their leaders. Both groups possess limited ability and opportunity to isolate the battlefield, but both have the luxury and will to prepare the field before they willingly engage government forces. Both are fighting for their survival as discrete entities; neither care to subsumed into their own loosely confederated nation nor into a construction fashioned by the invaders.[4] Both must apply the concept of Mass and Economy of Force. The LBH demonstrated Mass as the prevailing principle, where most fights in Afghanistan demonstrate the principle of Economy of Force. The U.S. Army must gain and maintain contact with these adversaries, while it is the opposition's job to break contact until it is advantageous for them to turn and face the enemy. This was shown at LBH, Waygul and Wanat.

[5] Government forces used indigenous members to neutralize the indig. The government elevated the indig that they chose either to leadership positions or as judas goats.At LBH they were called Scouts and in Afghanistan they are called the Afghan National Army.[6] Intelligence is mitigated: In 1876 intel was negligible to nonexistent regarding the Indians' intentions. In Afghanistan there is so much intel that analysis is hampered. The reliability and validity in both cases is always in doubt.

[7] Concealment: In the Indian Wars, there was no place for the Indians; in Afghanistan, the hostiles hide in plain sight and there is no place for U.S. forces to hide.

In conclusion, the best hope of prevailing in the Afghan leg of the PWOT would be to use a tactic that worked with the Indians: Give them tax-free cigarettes, legal gambling casinos and tell them they are free and autonomous. Facts be damned.

---------

All I can add to what jim has written is that when tribal cultures war with outsiders there are only two outcomes; the outsider is pushed back out (or destroyed) or the tribesman is assimilated and destroyed (with this conquest there is no "or"; in order to make the tribesman into the image of his conqueror his culture and entire way of life must be destroyed, and that almost always involves massive butchery among the natives.).

Anything else lends itself to the continual low-grade warfare endemic to tribal and especially nomadic tribal societies. The skills of a pastoralist or a horse-nomad lent themselves entirely too well to warfare; the tribes will nearly always want to retain their freedom to raid when they want, to battle for mastery when they choose.

The British took 100 years to acquire India, from Clive's victory at Plassey to the crushing of the Bengal Revolt of 1857. They then spent the next 100 years trying to remake the Indian peoples into a Western-style nation. By and large they succeeded. But it took a century, billions of pounds, and hundreds of thousands of lives; both in lives taken and lives spent in the service of that immense colonial enterprise.If the United States is willing to pay that price, no one has yet informed the U.S. public.

AAR

Not to distract from seydlitz's discussion of Jellybean Dutch and his legacy, I'd like to ask the patrons for some help with a question of military history.Specifically, I'm wondering; can you think of a time and place in history that can be taken as a successful parallel for what we say we're trying to do in central Asia?

And in this I am willing to accept at face value the U.S. government's assertion that we have formed troop units in other people's countries purely and only to "help" those people in those countries fight Islamic hegemonists.

So what I'm looking for is

1) a foreign power sending troop units (and, technically, political and economic aid) to a government attempting to suppress a domestic insurgentcy that
2) succeeds - that is, it has to have happened long ago enough that we can say that a) it worked, i.e., the rebellion was suppressed and the government the foreign power assisted assumed a monopoly on the use of force pretty much thereafter, and b) that the nation so assisted has become at least moderately "successful" since the insurgentcy, that is, relatively democratic, respectably prosperous or at least making efforts to get there, and making a respectable showing on the "freedom indices".

To give you an example, I thought about parallels with the civil war in El Salvador. Here was a clear-cut U.S. FID mission, and the war was successful in that it brought El Salvador a relatively decent peace.The major difference is that there was no large-scale committment of U.S. maneuver units into ElSal; the government there pretty much won without the need for a foreign expeditionary force to do the fighting, regardless of how much "advisory" support they received.

So; any thoughts on this, you military history buffs?

Panem et Circenses

"In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

What does it say for the state of the United States as quondam empire that unlike Smith's 18th Century Britons we refuse even to pay
"...the taxes...on account of the war..."?WASF.

America and the Middle East: Part 1 Bunker Hill to Pearl Harbor

Pluto commented a little while ago about how quiet it's been around here.

Pluto: It's quiet. It's...TOO quiet.

Y'all've seen the movie enough to know what happens then - all hell breaks loose.

So here's my installment of hell.

I wrote these way back in August of 2006 over at Graphic Firing Table. If you overlook the breezy style (and I LIKE the breezy style - if you want solemn history, there's tons of textbooks you can read) the crux of the biscuit is that three years ago I wrote what I still believe: that all the thrashing about in the Middle East and southwest Asia isn't going to get us out of the fundamental trap we've put ourselves in with the act of recognition in 1948. It just ain't gonna happen. And why I feel all "talked out" about a lot of the Middle East politics and strategy and tactics we've been talking about since the old Intel Dump days.

Plus I just liked these and felt they deserved another airing other than burial in the deep recesses of the old GFT.

So - without further ado, here's "America and the Middle East", a four-part series.

(from Graphic Firing Table, August 16, 2006)

Since this is such a huge subject, I’ve broken it into installments. This one, the first, is my rumination on U.S.-Middle East policy from 1776 to 1940. The second will cover the history of Americans in the Middle East from 1941 to 2006. I’ve already discussed the difficult propinquity of Israel and the Arab M.E., but I wanted to dissect U.S./Israeli/Arab policies in a single posting. And, finally, I wanted to take a look at what I feel are rational goals for the U.S. to seek in the Middle East, where we stand towards attaining them, what the likelihood of their attainment might be given our present policies, and what alternatives might be there for consideration.

Okay.

So from 1776 - Bunker Hill - to 1941 - Pearl Harbor - was the pure-D, stomp-down riding-the-short-bus-simplest part of the whole nut roll to write.

Word up: our country just didn’t HAVE a Middle East policy until the beginning of the Second World War. None. Squat. Nada. As far as the sandy Arab parts of the world, we knew like a Dominican nun knows about Wesson Oil parties. Didn’t know, didn’t care to know. Besides, we had other stuff to worry about for about eighty years. Revolution, angry Canadians, hostile former owners, floods, famine, free silver, angry Mexicans, Fifty-four-Fourty or Fight, freesoilers, slavestaters, the Missouri Compromise, John C. Fremont and then, by God, the Civil War broke out.

Well, okay then.

So we DID have a teeny little run in with some Arabs during Jefferson’s administration:

President Jefferson: “Well, Robert, what have we here?”

Secretary of the Navy Smith: “Dispatches, Mister President. Our expeditionary force to the Dey of Tripoli. General Eaton and Captain Hull appear to have fought a smart action at Derna, you see, sir.

Pres. Jefferson: “I see. Hmm. Very good. Your Marine fellow O’Bannon writes well, there, regarding his actions in raising our flag over the harbor.”

Sect’y. Smith: “Ahem. The Marines appear to think highly of him, yes.”

Pres. Jefferson: “Indeed. One question, Robert.”

Sect’y. Smith: “Sir?”

Pres. Jefferson: “What the deuce is a “haji”?

Sect’y. Smith: “That would be a “dune coon”, sir."

Pres. Jefferson: “A what?”

Sect’y. Smith: “How our troops refer to the natives, sir. Oh, or a “sand nigger”.

Pres. Jefferson: “Oh. Quite.”

Obviously, a young nation with an enormous frontier, a tiny military force and a relatively miniscule overseas trade had no real need to pay attention to the peregrinations of whatever tribe or tribes wandered the then-worthless wastes of the Arabian Peninsula. Any American attention on the Middle East in the period between the Revolution and the First World War would have been on the “Holy Land”, then a wholly-owned subsidiary of the creaky Ottoman Empire and of no real significance other than a romantic tourist destination.

The other consideration was the European colonial powers. Mostly the British, whose control of much of North Africa and India made American interest in anything remotely Arabian, well…problematic.

Lord Palmerston: “Just not yours to play with, Yank. Good luck with those redskins, though…”

That was that. The crux of the biscuit. The heart of the matter. America did nothing in the Middle East because we neither wanted to nor could. And that was the whole story, too, through the 19th and right through the first four decades of the 20th Century.

Until, as it changed so much else, the Second World War came along and nothing would ever be the same again.

America and the Middle East: Part 2 - 50 First Dates

Three things happened in the 1940's to change our country's Middle East attitude from "Medina? Dude! Like, where's that at!?" to "Mine! Mine! It's mine. All mine! Putitdowndon'tplaywithitgetcherfuckinghandsoffitit'sMINE!":

1. The intense industrialization (read: automobilization) that had been underway since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution went into hyperdrive during our Arsenal of Democracy thing, and multiplied our need for all petroleum products, especially gasoline.

2. The European colonial powers took such a pounding that they emerged from WW2 either unable or unwilling to maintain their former colonies (or both). The United States stepped into this "power vacuum", because...

3. The Soviet Union emerged from WW2 a "great power" - the other nuclear superpower - and provided America with an intellectual coffee table on which to set our Middle East philosophy: the Cold War...

Which was, pretty much fully and completely stated, "stability".

Billmon over at Whiskey Bar is a much better writer than I am, so I'll let him explain this whole stability thing:

"The United States has tried to enforce stability in the Middle East because until Commander Codpiece came along foreign policy elites and American presidents alike viewed it as inherently in our interests to do so -- to protect the flow of oil, keep the Soviets out of the region, open markets to Western capital, and keep the Arab-Israeli conflict from getting out of hand.

However, this most emphatically was not done for the benefit of the people of the Middle East. It was for our benefit, and, secondarily, for the benefit of the colonized elites who transferred their loyalties -- or at least their services -- to America after the old colonial powers exited the region.

You can argue (imperialists almost always do) that the masses benefited from this stability because it created security, promoted economic growth and improved living standards. The British crown tried that same argument on the American colonists in the 1770s with a notable lack of success -- and they were all Englishmen. But there is some validity to it.

However, our stability fetish (and our commercial interests) also required us to do business with brutal dictators and/or prop up corrupt feudal elites -- many of them little more than rent-seeking parasites perched on oil fields disguised as countries. Where authentic or semi-authentic nationalist movements appeared -- in Egypt, for example -- we either tried to crush them or buy them off, and usually managed to do one or the other.

We also encouraged our "friends" in the region to Westernize themselves, to abandon or at least dilute their Islamic identities and become part of the globalized culture of capitalism (not that they needed much encouraging). As the energy importance of the region increased and the penetration of Western capital and culture deepened, so did the level of U.S. intervention -- always in the interests of that precious stability.

It may sound like I'm just reciting the plot from Syriana. But these were real policies, deliberately pursued over many years. And they were, by and large, extremely successful -- both for us and for our clients in the region. They were, however, abhorrent to the fundamentalist, anti-colonial Islamic movements (like the Muslim Brotherhood) that had existed in the region since the days of the British and the French."

This whole stability-and-anticommunism thing started even before WW2 ended. Nazi Germany had won a lot of Arab sympathy with their fight against the colonial powers, and both Iraq and Iran were pro-Axis. The Brits reoccupied Iraq in 1941 and both Britain and the U.S. occupied southern Iran between 1941 and 1946.

In the postwar period, our quest for "stability" brought us back to the Middle East again and again. For the Arab residents of the joint we must have seemed insufferable, the strongarm suitor who never gets the hint:

Fairuza: Allah wept! I thought he would never leave! Did he try to put his hand up your dress again?

Maryam: AAAAgh!! Was that only his hand? I felt like he was trying to put me on like a fucking muppet. Wait...what was that?!

Sam: Hellooo? Girls? It's ME again! Let's PAR-TAY!!

The Girls: SHIT!!

For most of the 40's and 50's we treated the Middle East like a pimp treats his best girl. As long as momma keeps doing what daddy tells her, she gets her lovin' man's best attention. Get out of line, though, - and occasionally the Arab countries did - and there was some pimpslappin' goin' down in the 40's and 50's:

As mentioned, we occupied Iran in the 40's. This was actually a good thing for the Iranians, because when Stalin refused to get out of northern Iran we were able (with the help of the U.N.) kick him out - remember, the Soviets didn't have a working Bomb until the late 40s - and roll the Iron Curtain back to the Iranian border.

BUT - when Iranian PM Mossadegh tried to move Iran out of the shah's U.S. alliance, we sent in the CIA and kicked him over. The Pahlevi shah then went on to cut sweetheart deals with our oil majors, setting in train the events that would culminate in the 1979 revolution.

Other than that, there was the usual involvement in coups and such: Iraq in 1958 and 1963, Egypt in the 50's, where we were widely suspected of working against Nasser and the "United Arab Republic", Pakistan (where we tried to use the Pakis to counterweight Indian infatution with Soviet Russia)...

Oh, yeah. We also invaded Lebanon in '58 to knock down a Muslim Revolution...

(we do this every so often, kind of like we did in Mexico during the 19th Century)...

But probably the single biggest change we helped bring about in the Middle East happened in 1948.

But more about that tomorrow...

America and the Middle East: Part 3 - Birth of a Nation

So here were were in 1948.

Locked in one of those wrestling matches with the Soviets where you can't let go because you're afraid the other guy is gonna pound your head into Wheatina as you break.

Needing ever more petroleum, which we're finding is gushing like a TV tabloid/Jessica Simpson nonsense riff from the Arab countries of the Middle East.

And rushing into former European (read: British and French) colonies in order to keep those damn Commies out, trying to scrounge up locals and form "organizations" to help us like NATO and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).

At this point we need the support (or at least the complacence) of the new post-colonial Arab countries as much as we ever have. So what do we do?

We help plunk down nearly a million European Jews on the coast of the Levant in the middle of an Arab land (part of the former Ottoman Empire).

In the exact location of the former crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.


What the hell would make us do something like that..?

One huge reason was Harry Truman. I'm not sure if Truman felt exceptionally guilty about his former boss FDR's unwillingness to do anything to save Europe's Jews during WW2, whether he just thought that Jewish Israelis would be better allies than Muslim Arabs, or he just thought that Omar Sharif was a smarmy little schwarma-licker and had it in for camel-beaters. In the words of the Truman Library:

"When President Harry S. Truman took office, he made clear that his sympathies were with the Jews and accepted the Balfour Declaration, explaining that it was in keeping with former President Woodrow Wilson's principle of "self determination." Truman initiated several studies of the Palestine situation that supported his belief that, as a result of the Holocaust, Jews were oppressed and also in need of a homeland."

Why Truman felt that this homeland needed to be on the east side of the Mediterranean as opposed to, say, Bayonne, New Jersey is not recorded. Maybe he thought that he might lose Raritan County to the Republicans or something.

It's worth noting that both the U.S. War Department and State Department were somewhere between violently opposed and "Have you been smoking CRACK!??" about this. They felt - who'da thunk! - that backing a Jewish state in the Middle East would set this country against the Arab states until further notice. The U.S. Middle East "hands" also worried that our backing of Israel would drive the Arab states to look to our enemies - the Soviets - as their friends. They worried about the strategic and economic consequences of reestablishing a Western-supported European ministate in the Levant. They worried that they might not be able to get invitations to Damascus and score those cool Lawrence-of-Arabia headscarf things anymore.

May 14, 1948, the new state of Israel was founded. Truman issued an immediate statement recognizing the new government. The Arab states mobilized, and the First Arab-Israeli War was on...

It's interesting to note that not everything was sweetness and light between the U.S. and Israel early on. Eisenhower kicked the Israelis out of Egypt in 1956 for their part in "Operation Musketeer", the Anglo-French attempt to undo Nasser's takeover of the Suez Canal. But then the Arabs attacked in '67, and since then we've been pals forever...

Now I'll be the first to admit that the Israelis seem to be good people and that Israel, as a functioning democracy is a pleasant anomaly in the Middle East. But our position as Israel's Pimp Daddy has put us a difficult position in the Middle East.

In fact, I'm going to claim that it has put s in a paradox we cannot solve.

But that's for tomorrow.

America and the Middle East: Part 4 - What Can Be Done?

What do we need from the Middle East?

Well, when you get right down to the nitty, it’s pretty simple:

1. We need oil
2. We need passage through the Suez/Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz chokepoints
3. We need political stability and a degree of U.S.-tolerance to get #1 and #2.

Let’s take ‘em in order:

#1: Oil is fungible. Middle Eastern countries need to sell oil as much as we need to buy it. If we pay them what they ask – or bargain them to get what we want to pay – we’ll get oil.

Mind you – this item reminds us that it is never in a nation’s best interest to be held economic hostage for a resource. Japan’s immolation in 1945 should remind us of that:

Emperor Hirohito: Take Indonesian oil, you said! Sleeping giant, you said! It’ll be like taking pocky sticks from a baby, you said!

Prime Minister Tojo: So sorry! Please excuse! Regrettable incident! Ow! Ouch!

Hirohito: Stupid fuckwit! The Yankees should have put those bombs up your ASS!

Tojo: Owww! Yes, so sorry! Aieeee! Excuse, please! Owowowow!!

So, instead of sending gas-guzzling Hummers and Abrams to drive around Ramadi, it seems to me that we’d be better served figuring out how to build a 65-mpg Hummer. Or, better still, a Hummer that runs on something else we have a lot of. Chipmunk droppings? Hydrogen fuel cells? This is still a work in progress. But anyone with a functioning brain has figured this out already. That leaves out the Republican and 89% of the Democratic political leadership of this country. So whether we’ll get there is a true tossup.

#2: A little trickier. We basically need political stability and some neutrality from 13 nations to do this: seven for the Suez/Red Sea (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Eritria, Somalia and Yemen…

Ismail Omar GUELLEH: Don’t forget ME! I got 100% of the vote last time I got reelected! The freedom-loving people of Djibouti love me! That’s why they vote for me! Twice! Even the dead vote for Guelleh, here in freedom-loving Djibouti!

…oh, yeah, and Djibouti. Sigh)

and six for Hormuz (Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Saudi, the UAE and Oman). This isn’t really a separate issue because it leads directly to point 3:

#3: Political stability. Back in the good old days we just bought the sons-of-bitches and they either stayed bought or they got what was coming to them.

PM Mossadegh: I’ll say!

Nowadays, though, the old colonial tradition of a paid-for-puppet-and-compliant-masses is wearing thin. The Arab “street” is being increasingly radicalized by groups demanding political power. Because of the forced marginalization of political Islam, these groups are often – mainly – radical and Islamic.

Sheik Nasrallah: My ears are burning. Hey – you talkin’ about ME? Hee hee, you silly American dogs, you…

For the radical Muslims, America has a whole bunch of strikes against it. They can be cooked down to two main categories: cultural and political. Let’s start with the easy one: our “way of life” versus theirs.

Our way of life, both social and political, demands that people with other points of view get a say. Demands that people whose ideas and behaviors you ma not like get ot do them so long as they don’t physically interfere with your life. Demands, basically, they you get on with doin’ your thang and let me get on doin’ mine.

Theocracy (the government-of-choice of Islamic and Christian fundamentalists everywhere) says that there’s only one point of view, and you know what that is:

Reverend Dobson: God says that Hillary Clinton is the Whore of Babylon. And progressive income taxes are Satan’s tool. Oh, yeah, and Playboy magazine is the instrument of your damnation. Praise the Lord!

Mullah Khameni: Yeah, what he said!

Our way of life allows a massive outpouring of all sorts of stuff, particularly stuff that offends the sort of people who feel that every time homos have sex Baby Jesus cries (or Muhammad weeps or something…) and that women’s bodies should be covered up, like, with massive walls, and kept locked away for Daddy to play with. This is an anathema to the fundies of all stripes and will keep us at odds with the Islamic conservatives for decades to come.

We’re not going to win that argument by out-shouting the mullahs, Sistani or Dobson or Khameni, whatever... Just remember that the Soviets officially banned Playboy and monster trucks and blue jeans, and look what happened to them. I’m pretty upbeat on this one. We’ll probably win the “culture war” with Islam because nobody wants to listen to Pakistani rap, see Saudi action movies, read Yemeni romance novels or wear Sudanese sneakers…

The political problem is something else. Right now we’ve got a lot of people in a lot of nations in the Middle East that have a pretty large lump stuck in their craw. And that’s our friend Israel. They see Israel – and with some justification – as an utterly non-Arab, non-Islamic invader forced into “their” part of the world by European colonial promises like the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement and now maintained by raw American military muscle. An eternal poke in the eye from the same people who are pissing them off by exporting that bimbo Brittany Spears and her talentless jerk of a husband to the oppressed masses of Islam;

KFed: Word! Mess with my Family (and you’re Through)! Yo!

Allah wept.

The thing is, I personally don’t see a way to finesse this one. Diplomacy is the art of giving a little here and taking a little there until both sides think they’re putting one over on the other. Deal is – both sides here want exactly the same thing. They both want a country, each in their own image, in exactly the same place. And, just as importantly, the Arab countries realize that they can keep trying until they win. And they only have to win one. Israel has to win every single fucking time.

So the U.S. doesn’t really have any good options: stand behind Israel and you will be at odds with the Muslim nations until…until…I don’t know until when. But a long, long time. Distance ourselves from Israel and anticipate the horrific spectacle of an Islamic ethnic cleansing if the IDF ever fails to hold against an Arab attack.

We’re screwed, in other words. And I haven’t the faintest idea how to un-screw ourselves. Go back in time and unsay the Balfour Declaration. Un-do Truman’s recognition. Make the whole problem go away before it began. Other than that, we’re stuck on the same old treadmill, grinding away endlessly, making more Islamic enemies every time we box up an F-18 or a cluster bomb or an artillery round to ship to Israel...



There’s an old joke that has Gorbachev, Reagan and Menachem Begin suddenly called before the Lord, who announces that He will tell them any one thing about their nations.

Gorbachev asks “When will the final triumph of the Communist Party bring peace and prosperity to the Soviet Union?” God whispers the answer and Gorbachev begins to weep.

Reagan asks: “When will Big Government and the Welfare State wither away in America?” God whispers the answer and Reagan begins to weep.

Begin asks: “When will your nation Israel enjoy final peace within its borders.

God begins to weep.