Gaza Redux, or

Didn't some guy in the USA get elected? First off, a short quote from the guy who won a 2nd term as president of the USA

“There is no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on from outside its borders,” Obama said Sunday in his first public comments on the fighting. “We are fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend its borders.”

Well, in his defense, it is difficult to see missiles clearly when one's own eye is packed full of them. Nearly 4 years ago to the day, Dec. 27, 2008, before the Brand New President of the USA could be sworn into Office, the Israeli gov't launched Cast Lead against the people of Gaza, for a 3 week period, with attacks by air, sea and land. Now, 4 years later, Hamas has missiles that can reach both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Is this progress?

But if Netanyahu and Barak are responsible for creating the immediate pretext for an attack on Gaza, they are also criminally negligent for failing to pursue an opportunity to secure a much longer truce with Hamas. We now know, thanks to Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, that in the period leading up to Jabari’s execution Egypt had been working to secure a long-term truce between Israel and Hamas. Jabari was apparently eager to agree to it. Baskin, who was intimately involved in the talks, was a credible conduit between Israel and Hamas because he had played a key role last year in getting Jabari to sign off on a prisoner exchange that led to the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Baskin noted in the Haaretz newspaper that Jabari’s assassination “killed the possibility of achieving a truce and also the Egyptian mediators’ ability to function.” The peace activist had already met Barak to alert him to the truce, but it seems the defence minister and Netanyahu had more pressing concerns than ending the tensions between Israel and Hamas. What could have been more important than finding a mechanism for saving lives, on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides. Baskin offers a clue: “Those who made the decision must be judged by the voters, but to my regret they will get more votes because of this.” It seems Israel’s general election, due in January, was uppermost in the minds of Netanyahu and Barak.

More Progress,

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan described Israel on Monday as a "terrorist state" in carrying out its bombardment of Gaza, underlining hostility for Ankara's former ally since relations between them collapsed in 2010. . . . "Those who associate Islam with terrorism close their eyes in the face of mass killing of Muslims, turn their heads from the massacre of children in Gaza," Erdogan told a conference of the Eurasian Islamic Council in Istanbul. "For this reason, I say that Israel is a terrorist state, and its acts are terrorist acts," he said. Ties between Israel and Turkey, once Israel's only Muslim ally, crumbled after Israeli marines stormed an aid ship in 2010 to enforce a naval blockade of the Palestinian-run Gaza Strip. Nine Turks were killed in clashes with activists on board. . . .

towards the Stone Age, where some in Israel have threatened to send Gaza

There is no justification for the State of Gaza being able to shoot at our towns with impunity. We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire.

This is progress?

Loss of allies among Muslims and more death for the Fish Barrel that is Gaza for poll points in an election? Assassination of a member of Hamas willing to talk about peace and getting along with their neighbors? And the US gov't bound hip and thigh to a regime like this?

Israel is set on a path to Self Destruction, and no, I don't want to see that.

What the whole world does see, however, is that for the 2nd time in 4 years, Gaza has suffered for political points. This is atrocity, it is genocide, death and terror launched against a helpless and oppressed population for frivolity.

bb

(FDChief: N.B. Here's what I think you wanted for paragraphs, bb; let me know if you had different ideas...)

Ironbottom Sound

This month's battle over at GFT: Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (Fourth Savo Island) 14-15 NOV 1942.

Death revisits Sealark Channel, the great gray ghost-ship, a Japanese admiral turns away with decision in his grasp - again - and the thunder of cannon in the night.

Arabian Knights

  
If you're down and confused 
And you don't remember who you're talking to 
Concentration slips away 
Because your baby is so far away 
--Love the One You're With, 
Crosby, Stills and Nash

Well, what am I supposed to do? 
You won't answer my calls,
 you change your number.
 I mean, I'm not gonna be ignored, Dan!   
--Fatal Attraction (1987)
_______________________ 

Military leadership is not always about success:

• The March of the 10,000
• Thermopylae
• Little Big Horn
• The Confederates at Petersburg
• The Lost Battalion of World War I
• Wainwright at Corregidor
• The U.S. Marines at the Chosin (with U.S. Army support ☺)
• The U.S Special Forces at Lang Vei
• Lt. Murphy in Afghanistan

We are taught that physical courage is the factor that makes us soldiers (err, New Age Warriors), but this only part of the equation. A recent discussion about Shackleton's fraught Antarctic expedition motivated this thinking.

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton led his crew with fierce loyalty after the loss of their ship (The Endurance).  He set up Camp Optimism in the most unhospiaible climate, and tirelessly motivated his crew to labor and to keep hope alive. Shackleton believed that character and temperament were as important as technical ability, and lived by the motto, "Optimism is true moral courage." 

While physical courage is the hallmark of soldiering, it is not the gold standard for leadership.  Moral courage is supreme, and it the U.S. Army seems weak in this area.  We accepted General MacArthur's vacating his command, leaving General Wainwright and his Army in the lurch.  Contrast this with the loyalty of Luftwaffe Group Commander Erich Hartmann who refused a direct order to avoid Soviet capture by flying to safety in the British sector, as it would have meant the abandonment of his men.

After capture and spending 10 1/2 years in a Soviet gulag, Hartmann said in a later interview, "I could not leave my men.  That would have been bad leadership."  He and many others like him show a moral strength which reaches beyond the physical.  Think of John McCain refusing an offer of early release by the North Vietnamese command -- that is moral courage.

Transition now to the lavish lifestyles of men like Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus -- the plush lodgings and planes in which they traveled were more befitting of the Arabian 1001 Nights.  Their sumptuous offices at CENTCOM and all the other HQs, the limousines, the private command airship companies and all the other bling that kits out the 0-8 through 0-10 caste are far-removed from the lifestyles of their predecessors.

Instead of leadership we now have commanders steeped in West Point Honor Codes, Infantry Creeds, Ranger Creeds and a plethora of feel-good buzz words that are as meaningless as a mouthful of grits.  Witness Petraeus's vaunted "12 Rules for Living": "The only thing better than a little com­petition is a lot of competition. Set chal­lenges for your subordinates to encourage them to excel." The rules are generally insipid pop platitudes not likely to give Tony Robbins a run for his money on the motivational talk circuit any time soon.

Contrast present leadership with that of Chesty Puller at the Chosin Reservoir retrograde.  He gave his Jeep to the weak and wounded and marched out as a simple Infantryman (despite heart problems). On Guadalcanal his Regimental Command Post was in the forward reaches of the battlefield within rifle shot of the enemy.  Compare this with the fights at Waygul and Wanat, when the senior commanders were physically absent.

Leadership has both physical and moral aspects.  None of the U.S. senior officers refused to preemptively invade Iraq; First Lieutenant Ehren Watada is the only junior officer to officially protest the Iraq War by attempting to resign his commission (he was Court-martialed and ultimately discharged from service.)  Did any of our leaders even murmer the word, "Aggressive War"?

It is possible that ethics professor Colonel Ted Westhusing gave protest via suicide during his Iraq posting six years ago.  The Los Angeles Times reported, "In emails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the US had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military" (General Petraeus's Link to a Troubling Suicide in Iraq: The Ted Westhusing Story). In his suicide note, he wrote, "I didn't volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves." 

If elective invasions, bombing, Predators and Reapers, secret prisons, torture, open-ended detention and more do not raise any hackles amongst the General Officer class, then a penile thrombosis is very little thing in comparison, which is not to say it is nothing.  It is just a logical outgrowth of a corrupt and entitled mindset.

Amidst moral cowardice on such a scale, how do we even discuss Petraeus's moral lapse?  We have divorced morality from the equation when we adopted elective warfare and assumed the mantle of warriorhood.  Petraeus did what warrior-kings do: he took an Amazon concubine.

--Jim and Lisa

[cross-posted @ RangerAgainstWar] 

Remembrance Day

On this day we should think more of those veterans who served as private, pfc, or nco rather than four star David.  Is there a similar day in Greece, Al?   Seydlitz, what about Portugal?  Sven, Germany? 

I still remember my great-uncle Dinty, a ww1 vet who got a taste of the mustard gas, and who lived with us in the forties and early fifties because he could not afford a place of his own.  Until my sister was born anyway, and the room was needed so he moved on to my Aunt Alice's house, and later to another Aunt before he finally passed away peacefully.  At least he was with family.  For many today that is not an option, although it should be.

I spent a few hours yesterday passing out paper poppies and shaking a can to raise funds for impoverished vets.  There are many 80 and 90-year old veterans or their widows on a small fixed income.  Many cannot afford to get back and forth to the VA hospital or even to a local Doc.  Some need help navigating the VA bureaucracy.  Some are living in houses with leaky roof that they cannot afford to get fixed.  I have seen them in the market staring at the prices in the meat display fridge and finally settle for spam or items past their expiration date.  My bride has been known to drop a $20-bill on the floor behind them, then tap them on the shoulder and press it into their hands saying they dropped it.  Beats me how the economic pundits can say there is no inflation.  They, those vets and their wives and widows have been called the greatest generation but they are fading fast and should not pass on while cold and hungry.

As for Petraeus he is in good company: Ike, Kennedy, and a few others like FDChief pointed out.  All of us may (or may not) even have strayed from the straight-arrow path ourselves in the bad old days of long peacetime deployments.   Perhaps we were not so full of hubris to think we could get away with it.  We need to stop policing the morals and sexual behavior of others.  We (or at least I) should be more concerned with our own.  King David will do fine.  

A number of those vets or widows are preyed upon by scam artists and phone hustlers.  Good for Holly Petraeus for standing up for military families, for consumer protection, and against illegal foreclosures with Senator-Elect Warren.  A lot of vets were affected by those foreclosures.  The discussion should be about her accomplishments for vets and not her husbands human weakness.

Here is one link Holly Petraeus    

Wars and Lechery

It appears that former GEN and current Director of the CIA David Petraeus' government career has been terminated with extreme prejudice by his dick.

"It had long been rumored that something was going on between Petraeus and Broadwell."

I don't really have a dog in this "fight". In general I am not particularly impressed by Petraeus' military vita - he seems very, well, "German" to me in that his myopic obsession with tactical minutia seems to have precluded his either garnering or providing the geopolitical/strategic advice his civilian superiors should have received to make sound strategic decisions. As CIA chief, well, we don't really know what the hell the CIA is doing, so there's that.

My only thought is that it does seem frankly shortsighted to base an individual's public employment on where and with whom he or she trades bodily fluids.

Hopefully GEN Petraeus was not using his organs of generation in his positions in the military and intelligence agencies he directed. And one would hope that he was no less discreet in his pillow talk with his lover than with his wife; neither was cleared to know what he knew, so I don't see how the one relationship compromises his effectiveness more than the other in that sense.

Obviously the way that this sort of screwing around is viewed by the media and the public (or is it - how many the public tut-tutters and finger-waggers about this have slipped out for a bit on the side, I wonder?) such a bit of extracurricular rumpy-bumpy put the man in the position to be blackmailed. But is that an issue of the act, or the way we TREAT the act?

I'm not advocating adultery, or the old rules where people like Jack Kennedy screwed the pants of anyone female that would slow down from a slow jog and the press connived to keep it secret. I guess what I'm saying is that I frankly don't give a rat's ass and I'm suggesting the rest of us shouldn't either. I'm suggesting that we treat what happened between David Petraeus and Paula Broadbent as something that should be of concern to Petraues, Broadbent, their spouses, and those who know them personally. I'm suggesting that we should reconsider the notion that when happens in the bedroom is important to what happens in the War Room. And that we might be fools to toss away otherwise intelligent and capable public officials because of their private weaknesses.

But maybe I'm just an indifferent oaf. Maybe private fooling around IS a critical indicator of public failure. Maybe we did the right thing with Petraeus and his wandering weenie.

What do you think?

Update 11/10 p.m.: Glenn Greenwald has a good observation on the broader implications of all this lovey-dovey-ness:

"...there is something deeply symbolic and revealing about this whole episode. Broadwell ended up spending substantial time with Petraeus when she, in essence, embedded with him and followed him around Afghanistan in order to write her biography. What ended up being produced was not only the type of propagandistic hagiography such arrangements typically produce, but also deeply personal affection as well.

This is access journalism and the embedding dynamic in its classic form, just a bit more vividly expressed. The very close and inter-dependent relationship between media figures and the political and military officials they cover often produces exactly these same sentiments even if they do not find the full-scale expression as they did in this case. In that regard, the relationship between the now-former CIA Director and his fawning hagiographer should be studied in journalism schools to see the results reliably produced by access journalism and the embedding process. Whatever Broadwell did for Petraeus is what US media figures are routinely doing for political and especially military officials with their "journalism".

Hmmm...

Happy Birthday, Marines

Warmest Birthday wishes to all fellow Marines.

Semper FI!

Explaining Yesterday's Election Results to a Greek

I had coffee with a young Greek university student this morning, and he said, “I see Obama”s Party won.”  I said, “Well, Obama won, but his party didn’t.”  We then went through the following:

Q:  How could Obama’s Party lose and he still be the leader of the government?
A:  Well, the President is elected separately from our Congress.  He won the Presidential vote, but his party did not lose as such, it just didn't  gain a majority of both Houses of Congress.

Q:  But isn’t the President the leader of the ruling party?
A:  Our Constitution doesn’t provide for a leader of any party.  If anything, it’s an honorary position and need not even be a serving elected official.

Q:  So parties are lead by whoever the party wants?
A:  Yes


Q:  If Obama's party didn't win the Congress, then the opposition party won?
A:  No.

Q:  Then if neither party won the majority of Congress, is it a coalition Congress?
A:  Obama’s party won a majority in one House, and the opposition won a majority in the other?  The two Houses are separate in this manner.

Q:  Then is there a coalition leader of all Congress?
A:  No.  Each House has a leader elected by the house members of the party with the majority in that house.

Q:  How do you have coalitions if there are two leaders in Congress?
A:  Our system of government does not provide for coalitions.

Q:  So, you now have a President from one party, who isn’t the party leader, party leaders who are not necessarily part of the official government, one House ruled by one party and the other House ruled by the other?
A:  Yes.

Q;  If the Houses are from different parties than the president, how are Cabinet Ministers apportioned?
A:  Cabinet Ministers are not members of Congress and do not work for Congress.    They are appointed by the President, with the approval of the Senate and work for the President.

Q:  What if the President’s choice for ministers are not approved by the Senate?  Does the Senate then pick the minister.
A:  No.  All ministers must be picked by the President.  If the Senate won’t approve one, then the President must make another pick or wait until the Congress is in recess and make a limited term appointment.

The discussion went on to cover House and Senate rules, filibusters (not covered by the Constitution), vetoes and overriding vetoes and the like.  I was able to provide answers to all his questions, until his final one:

Q:  Based on what you have told me, how does your government manage to get anything done?