Operation Free the Petroleum!

I think it’s worth recalling the last time wingnuts were strutting around D.C. declaring "victory", boasting about making their own reality, and how they were going to show the rest of us how “war works”.

Didn’t end up so fucking well, did it? 

And that was with Dick Cheney & Co., an administration stuffed with people like Paul “The Stupidest Guy on the Face of the Earth” Wolfowitz, but who looks like fucking Metternich compared to this bunch of idiot grifters. 

At least the Cheneyites knew they were booting the post-war occupation. These dumb clucks? I'm not even sure they understand the whole "Phase IV" concept. Yes. They're that stupid.

Couple of quick notes here:

First (as a geologist); the whole "OMFG Venezuela has SO MUCH PETROLEUM!" thing misses one really important point. That much of - as in "a very large to overwhelming percentage of" - the Orinoco Belt is nasty, dirty, tar-sand type deposits, full of sulfur and organics and other shit. 

While they're supposedly less filthy than the Canadian tar sands, they're deeper and more difficult to recover, and only slightly less costly to process. Compared to the light sweet crude pumped out of the Gulf region, or even out of our own domestic fields, they're a fucking pain in the ass to access, expensive to process, and unlikely to be worth the oil majors' time and investment unless global crude prices rise, and rise a lot.

Felony Fats is too goddamn stupid to know that, or even understand it if it was explained to him. But the point is that while the selling point of this whole dick-waving exercise was "take the oil" that's been stuck in his brain cell since Iraq, the actual oil that's there? Ain't that big a seller.

Second, I'm not sure that anyone in this crew really understands, or is even close to understanding, the volatility of the region, but let's just put it this way; if you thought that the Middle East was an unpromising locale for freedom to reign after whichever despotic sonofabitch got the chop?

You'll love the northwest parts of South America. 

Colonialism - and Spanish colonialism, so the worst of the European lot - social friction, extreme wealth amid extreme poverty, deeply corrupt (hello? Spanish colonialism?) "institutions", such as they are, dysfunctional governance...there's a houseful of dynamite inside the former Gran Colombia, and dozens of potential sparks that could set it off, one way or another.

So…we’ll see. My bet is that these nimrods haven’t got a plan for the same things that screwed the Bushies in Iraq. I hope for the sake of the people in Venezuela that the sparks that set Iraq on fire aren't struck in the shantytowns of Caracas.

But I sure as hell wouldn't be surprised if they were.

The Third Gulf War and the Poison Gift that Keeps on Giving

As His Fraudulency thumps himself on the back for not completely goatscrewing relief efforts to Puerto Rico and farkles about tweeting about football players the poison tree that his GOP buddies and his fellow-idiot Dubya planted in Iraq back in 2003 continues to bear bitter, poison fruit.

The latest in sectarian strife there is ripening this week after the Kurdish minority voted overwhelmingly to secede and now the Shiite majority legislature in Baghdad is striking back with a measure to shut off air traffic to the landlocked Kurdish provinces.

The problem for Orange Foolius is that, due to the rank idiocy of Dubya's crew in knocking the secular Baath stopper off the Iraqi bottle, the sectarian genie is out, uncontrollable, and uncontainable. One of the favorite Republican "kwitcherbitchin'!" talking points back in the Oughts was to insist that Saddam is Evil and if you're against war in Iraq you are For Saddam and therefore For Evil.

The argument was transparently moronic then and looks even stupider now that the deposition of Saddam and the destruction of secular government has empowered every religious nut with an AK-47 to tear up what little bridgework allowed construction of the 20th Century over this already-bottomless post-Ottoman sinkhole. Evil?

Sheesh.

An administration headed by FDR and a military overseen by George Marshall would have a nearly impossible task trying to put this Iraqi Humpty Dumpty together again. The current passel of mouthbreathers, grifters, morons, reality-show carnies, egomaniac adolescents, and Trump (but I repeat myself) couldn't manage to do anything constructive with this mess if they had ten centuries, a magic 8-Ball, and a license to print money.

Oh, wait. They have the latter. They'd just sooner use it to fund Amway scamsters and give away cash to plutocrats.

I don't know if there's a point here, other than "Don't elect morons" and "WASF".

"Fat, Dumb, and Homophobic is no way to go through life, son"

I got a big laugh from this, the latest on the proposed re-institution of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (aka "Youse Homos Can Serve Until We SAY Youse Can't Serve") from Former Senator "Man-on-Dog" Rick Santorum:

"What we are doing is playing social experimentation with our military right now. That's tragic. I would just say that going forward we would reinstitute that policy if rick santorum was president. That policy would be reinstituted as far as people in I would not throw them out that would be unfair to them because of the policy of this administration. But we would move forward in conformity with what was happening in the past. Which was sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone. Keep it to yourself whether you are heterosexual or homosexual."

because if you needed to know anything about what the man doesn't know about military service circa 2011, this pretty much tells you.And that's...pretty much everything.

I never served in anything but an all-male unit until after I got off active duty. But since then I've been assigned to everything between a headquarters company and a laundry-and-bath platoon with stops along the way with every sort of military critter.

And one thing I can tell you with stone-cold certainty.

Sex is ALWAYS an issue.

Doesn't matter if it's the boys on the girls, the girls on the boys, the boys on the boys or the girls on the girls. We're human, so until we're about 68 years old roughly a third of our brain is occupied in thinking about sex. I'm not sure what the other 66 percent does; sudoku, maybe.

Obviously the most complicated this gets for military discipline is in mixed-gender units. I've worked in several, and I can tell you that you can walk and talk military discipline and the UCMJ all you want to, but you get a young man and a young woman together and you automatically have the potential for something not covered in the rest positions at the halt section of FM 22-5.

Mind you, the Army has a long history of being stupid about Sex. I saw it first all the way back in 1981, when in its infinite wisdom the Army had set up a mixed-gender BT company. 1st Platoon of A/4/3, Fort Dix N.J. was female. "First Fox" fireguards shared a stairwell with my Second Platoon, and I was later told (though I was unaware at the time, being first a squad leader and then platoon guide and thus exempt from fireguard) that the young women on guard ranged from adorable to fugly and the young men from studly to dorky. But they were there, they were horny, they were bored, so almost none of them left Fort Dix unscrewed.

It's lucky we never did have a fire; the horndogs were too busy having it off in the empty cadre rooms to have sounded an alarm.And in my experience it almost always has nothing to do with homosexuality, which makes Santorum's connection between the Big Gay Scary even less sensible. The disciplinary problems and/or personnel complications were 99.9% heterosexual and 85% consensual (the other 15% were a supervisor/supervised deal, which IMO pretty much can't really be counted as such any more than any other "sexual harassment" type scenerio can).

And gay?

Ask anyone who served in Panama back in '86 and '87; the women's barracks over at 210 Aviation was like a big OG-107-covered episode of "The L-Word". Damn near every one of those gals liked her girls like she liked her corn-on-the-cob; hot and covered in butter.

But y'know what? They worked their asses off and kept those aircraft where they belonged, in the air, and as a result nobody really brought up the whole "hot-girl-on-girl-GI-action" thing.So excuse me if I continue to laugh at young Mister Santorum, who seems to think that U.S. troops have to put their genitalia in the company safe before leaving Reception Station. Sex not an issue?

Maybe on your planet, spaceman...

Hey, Omar? What the fuck is Arabic for "tiger, tiger, tiger"?

Quote of the day on the Three Days In June (a.k.a the McChrystal Affair) from "DoD Buzz":

"A former Republican Pentagon official who knows McChrystal well and helped select him for the Joint Special Operations Command, said that the president’s decision was, “understandable because civilian control of the military must be maintained and not be denigrated. But,” said Marshall Billingslea, who headed the Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office, “the nation nevertheless owes Stan McChrystal a tremendous debt of gratitude. The nation is safer today because of Stan.”

Safer.

Oh, yeah, right, safer. Sorry.

I almost forgot that it was only Stan's hard, indomitable missiony-ness or something that foiled the Taliban High Seas Fleet and the Al Qaeda Luftwaffe strike on the naval base at Pearl Harbor.I know he's a Republican and required to say shit like this, but, really! WTF are these people smoking?

(h/t to Jason at Armchair Generalist, and cross-posted to MilPub)