En español se llama: "Irak "

After the ridiculous tragicomedy of the failed "coup" (if that is, indeed, what it was) in Venezuela the usual wild rumors are flying about whether Caesar Orangius will use U.S. armed force to do what the Venezuelan "opposition" couldn't, and before you could say "Achmed Chalabi" the usual suspects were blabbering on about regime change:

"Your time is up. This is your last chance. Accept Interim President Guaido’s amnesty, protect the Constitution, and remove Maduro, and we will take you off our sanctions list. Stay with Maduro, and go down with the ship." (Bolton on Twitter)

I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry, frankly.

I think the fears of a Venezuelan intifada are overblown. I don't see this as another Iraq Occupation with GIs getting blown up on roads and mortars hitting the Green Zone in Caracas.

What I do see is that regardless of who rules in Venezuela the nation is completely fucked, and only a great fool (or John Bolton and Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump, but I repeat myself...) would want to have anything to do with it.

How quickly we forget that the very reason there is a Maduro - and before him, a Chavez - is because the rule of the people like Guaidó and López was worse for Jose and Maria Desayuno than Chavez and Maduro were, at least initially. The rabiblancos or whatever they're called in Venezuela ruled for the 1% in Caracas, and the notion that the mass of Venezuelans want them back in 2019 is as idiotic as believing that installing the Iraqi National Congress would make them the Federalist Party of Iraq back in 2003.

Add to that the simple fact the Venezuela was and is a massively corrupt petrostate at a time when petroleum prices have cratered. Yes, the Trumpkins are doing their best to bollix the petroleum market by screwing with Iran, but it's unlikely that they can jack prices up enough to save Venezuela from itself. The place is simply screwed in the short- and, probably, the medium-term, no matter who runs it.

But it's hard to underestimate the Great Wall of Stupid that runs through the Fraudulency Administration:

"The president has occasionally mused to others that Bolton wants to get him into wars. Two advisers who have discussed Venezuela with him said Trump often brings up Florida politics, and his golf club in Doral, when talking about the subject. Both said Trump was unlikely to authorize any sort of long-term military action there. At the same time, however, aides said he has given Bolton wide purview over Venezuela."

I like the golf club thing; that's particularly Trumpy.

(I wonder if he knows there's a par-3 one-hole "golf club" along the Korean DMZ?)

With any luck my Army brothers will be spared a dip in this shitpool, because right now only the locals get to enjoy the dysfunctional mess that is Venezuela...but remember the "Pottery Barn Rule"?

Jesus wept. The stupid, it burns.

Moon Over Tripoli

Eight years ago we had quite a conversation around this joint (as well as some amusement, if such a thing can be had about people killing and dying...) about the goin's on in the North African desert.

What surprised me at the time was that a handful of the barstaff here - principally our long-gone and lamented seydlitz - were in favor of the military intervention (he makes the case in the comments here, and laid out his case in more expansive terms here) and had hopes that giving Gadaffi his conge' would mean better times for Libya and, by inference, for the southern Mediterranean rim.

Well...that didn't work out very well. Libya has, since 2011, devolved into a semi- (or completely, depending on your definition) failed state. So far as I can tell there is a "government" in the old capital of Tripoli, but this "government" is, in most parts of the country, purely notional and those parts are in the best post-colonial, post-dictatorial tradition swarming with outlaws, rebels, armed insurgents, rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists.

Among these goofs is one of those ridiculously-comic-self-parodying-but-still-murderous caudillos of the Moon Over Parador variety who calls himself Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar (or Hifter). This joker was tapped by the "government" to run the shambolic Libyan Army back in 2014 and has, as you'd expect from someone who dresses up like this -

- declared himself Grand High Mufti Emperor For Life (or something) and has been prosecuting the civil war against the "government".

Having been involved in this rotating clusterfuck eight years ago and seen the worthlessness of the expense of cash and high explosive you'd think that the United States would have the good sense to stay out of this goat rodeo and, almost surprisingly, that was the case until last Friday. The official position was the Libya's problems are Libya's, which seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable position for the US to take.

But I had not reckoned with the Very Stable Genius in the Oval Office, who Friday blarted out his love and support for this Haftar jamoke: "The President recognized Field Marshal Hifter’s significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources, and the two discussed a shared vision for Libya’s transition to a stable, democratic political system.”

The "democratic system" nonsense is utter crap, of course. This goon wants to be Field-Marshal-President-for-Life, and that's the most Trumpy thing about him; Orange Foolius luuuurves him some dictators, and this dude is just the latest in the long string of jackbooted lovers the tangerine-hued shitgibbon has taken.

The only good news? It doesn't appear that the US will waste any actual blood and treasure on backing the Alfonse Simms of Tobruk.

But, still...how the hell do you run a country with a doofus like this at the wheel?

What's Kurdish for "under the bus"?

The Turkish Army appears to be preparing to throw some additional complexity into the already-eleventh-dimension-chess-game that is post-IS Syria by threatening portions of northwest Syria currently controlled by the Kurdish PYD Party "People's Protection Units" (YPG) armed forces.

The Erdogan government, much like the governments preceding it, sees the YPG as functionally indistinguishable from the Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK, and clearly now that the Islamic State is off the table and the endgame for Syria appears to be closing has decided to take action against the perennial bogeymen of the states of the Anatolian and the Fertile Crescent, the Kurds. Or, at least, one faction of that beleaguered people.

The YPG was central to the US drive to reduce the physical "state" of the Islamic State, providing the only really effective infantry for that campaign. On Tuesday a spokesperson for the "US-led anti-ISIS coalition" tossed the YPG in the Afrin region under the Turkish bus, noting that the YPG in northwest Syria were not within the coalition AO.

I'm not sure how this will work, given that the same article linked above claims that the Trump Administration's cunning Syria plan includes supporting some 30,000 "Syrian Democratic Forces" along the Iraq-Syria border, ostensibly to continue to hunt IS fugitives but strategically to interdict Iraqi and Iranian support for proxies inside Syria such as Hizbullah.

The SDF, however, is pretty much the YPG with ash-and-trash. The YPG fielded something like 50,000 troops, while the Arab portions of the SDF consist of two main groups, the Jaysh al-Thuwar that includes some Turkmen and Kurds but seldom put together more than 2-3,000 fighters, and the Jaysh al-Sanadid militia of the Shammar tribe centered in northeastern Syria and Anbar province in western Iraq. The Shammar could assemble 8-10,000 troops. If the YPG decide to grab their A-bags and beat cheeks there won't be enough "SDF" to provide an interior guard on a porta-potty.

And this is beside the whole "The Kurds get screwed again" meme which seems to be a Middle Eastern thing and one in which the U.S. plays it's own shameful part.

Leaving the YPG units in the northwest to be smashed by Turkish tanks after coopting them to help fight for U.S. political objectives would be in the great tradition of American expeditionary war; maybe the Kurds can find some surviving Vietnamese mountain tribe Mike Force guys who can teach them the Nung term for "buddyfucker".

Once again we're reminded, not so much of Trump Administration incompetence (although that certainly plays a role here), but of the fact that describing the United States' Middle Eastern policy as an actual "policy" - that is, as something developed with a thoughtful consideration of regional realities and American national interests - remains somewhere between risible and tragic.

What's Pashto for "conditto"?

Here's a great fucking idea; since there are no real American "interests" left in Afghanistan, let's not send American forces there.

Let's send mercenaries!

"Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump's chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, according to people briefed on the conversations."

Gee, I can't see how that could possibly go wrong...

What is truly sad is that this suggestion comes from a guy who you would think would be all in favor of the fictitious-Trump "who kept us out of war" that seemed to dominate the "Trump-is-better-than-Killary-Klintoon" cartoons that kept appearing before the election:

"Mr. Bannon has told colleagues that sending more troops to Afghanistan is a slippery slope to the nation building that Mr. Trump ran against during the campaign. Mr. Bannon has also questioned what the United States has gotten for the $850 billion in nonmilitary spending it has poured into the country, noting that Afghanistan confounded the neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration and the progressives in the Obama administration."

No shit, Sherlock; that's why the sucker is called the "grave of empires". NObody can figure out how to hustle this particular part of the East; not the Brits, who tried for over a century, not the Soviets, not us. The only way to win this particular Game of Thrones is not to play.

But in the sort of "logic" that has already made the Fraudulency Administration a standing joke this gomer is thinking that the "best" way to skin this cat is to import the kind of guys whose signature move is to panic and have a fucking mad minute in the middle of a busy public street in a country that their employer is trying to keep friendly and pacified.

Jesus wept. Does anybody here know how to play this game..?

Possibly the Trumpiest thing yet.

His Fraudulency wants to throw money at the Pentagon by hoovering out the bank accounts at State, the EPA, and other non-kinetic federal agencies.

And when I say "throw" I mean THROW; this projected budget is almost 10% higher than the final Obama Defense budget. We had an increase that big in the early Reagan years, and I might remind you that there was this thing called the "Cold War" back then and we needed to protect ourselves from the bear in the woods, as the kidz say nowadays. The most recent big DoD hikes were back in the early Bush era, when Dubya and Dick wanted new guns to overawe the heathen Afghans and Iraqis and, again, in their last year when they needed to spend some of that money they saved by not rescuing black people in New Orleans or something.

But setting aside OTHER numbnuts Republicans...that's a big sweet slug for the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.

Setting aside the ridiculous notion that what the U.S. really needs now is a bigger armed force the really Trumpy piece of this that that the proposed increase - about 50 billion - has no ground in actual delineated military need. There's no "plan" here outside "let's throw cash at the DoD" and we all know how well that works...

Let me throw something near to my heart out as an example.

The field artillery branch of the U.S. Army currently employs two primary 155mm gun systems; the M109 "Paladin" series self-propelled howitzer and the M777 towed howitzer. The M777 is a relatively recent design, but the M109 is on the last of a series of upgrades of a system that was designed in the 1960's. While neither is an exceptional design (and by that I mean neither exceptionally good nor bad; they're both fairly middle-of-the-road FA systems) it's worth noting this statistic:

M109A7 maximum range - conventional projo 18km, RAP (rocket-assisted) projo 30km
M777 maximum range - conventional projo 24km, base-bleed projo 30km, "Excalibur" (guided/enhanced range) projo 40km
G5 (South Africa towed cannon system) maximum range - conventional projo 30km, base-bleed projo 39km, V-LAP projo 50km
G6 (SA - SP cannon) maximum range - conventional projo 30km, Base bleed 39km, V-LAP: 52.5km, M9703A1: 67km

The G5 and G6 gun systems were designed in the Seventies...but they still outrange the most recent U.S. FA systems in all categories of projectiles.

This is not to say that the Army FA is some sort of Third World shitshow. But...the mech and armored divisions have been waiting for a new SP system since the Crusader (XM2001) was cancelled in the early Oughts. So if you wanted to throw some money at the Army the notion that the U.S. might spend some money on upgrading the SP FA system to at least the ability to shoot out as far as an almost-fifty-year-old South African system seems like a not-unreasonable idea.

But...will that happen?

Who the fuck knows?

After all...this is Trump. The guy seems to make decisions based on who licks him the most like a triple-scoop of butter-brickle. IMO it's entirely likely that some conman shrewder than he is will slip in and sell him on some Ronco potato-gun contraption that works about as well as the infamous "Sergeant York" antiaircraft system...

So it's not just a question of "do we really need to throw more money at guns?" although that's really a good question. The problem with THIS throw-money-at-guns gimmick is that it's no more well-thought-out than the goofy Muslim ban. It seems designed after the way the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq usta threw money at stuff; just fly in pallets of dollars and start spreading 'em around.

After all; what could go wrong?

And, worse...to pull this cash from State? Hell, Trump's own SecDef explained the arithmetic of that little transaction to the Congresscritters thusly:

"When Mattis was a four-star Marine general in charge of U.S. Central Command, he told a congressional committee, “If you cut the State Department’s budget, then you need to buy me more bullets.”

Sigh.

More and more it seems like every time these gomers do something it seems like - assuming that they've put any thought into it at all - they've studied the issue and cudgeled their brains as hard as possible to find the answer to the question "How would I do this if I were a fucking moron?"

WASF.

Yakla. Arabic for Dieppe, or Normandy, or neither, or what..?

It will surprise no one here that my general opinion of the not-even-a-month-old reign of His Fraudulency is a mixture of disgust and contempt; disgust for the greedy, mulcting brutality of the Grifter-in-Chief and contempt for an "adiminstration" that is barely capable of incompetence, let alone anything approaching a grasp of the actual complexity and difficulty of running an immense industrial nation.

But...since this is supposed to be a blog about military affairs and geopolitics...let me concentrate on one specific issue involving one single episode in this farcical miniseries and what is says, not just about the Barely Sentient Administration but about the whole business we've been doing in the Middle East since 2001; the raid on the village of Yakla in Yemen.

And the issue is this: "winning"

Specifically, the new President seems to be furiously irked that anyone questions that this particular operation was a "win" for the Forces of Goodness and Peace (i.e., the United States, by definition the Good Guys, amirite..?)

"...a winning mission..." is the exact phrase that the Tangerine Toddler Twitterblurted out (attributing it to his SecDef, mind you).

Now.

As I noted in the preceding post, first, I have no idea what the actual objective(s) of this raid was or were, and, second, I have no idea whether that objective or objectives was or were achieved. And, indeed, if it was in intel-gathering operation we will probably NEVER know, and rightly so. Whatever intelligence was obtained will be hidden and used to guide future operations, as it should be.

If the intelligence desired was obtained, then, in the strictest sense even a raid that seems to have fallen apart tactically, cost over 100 million dollars as well as dozens of lives - innocent, friendly and enemy - and has provided cause for at least one of the "governments" of Yemen to first revoke and then to request a "review" of U.S. ground operations in their portion of that wretched land can be called a "success".

But..."winning"?

The entire farrago about this mission "winning" or "failing" just point out to me two problems.

First, and specific to this administration, that Five-Deferment Donnie has no more idea of how actual military operations, campaigns, and wars work than a fucking Jersey cow knows about the proceedings of the Council of Trent. The "winning" nonsense is that's just how a simpleminded derp thinks war works, and the orange Amway salesman has never been closer to combat than the concession line where American Sniper was playing, so that's just how he thinks.

But people like Mattis should know better, and tell him so. I suspect that he did, and that the joker didn't listen, or understand.

Second, and worse, generic to our nation and our foreign policy, that we're even debating about whether some piddly-ass little airmobile raid was a "win" or a "failure" points out the degree that ALL of us; the press, the public, the military and civil authorities in the United States have no real fucking clue what the fuck we are doing in the Middle East.

Because, quite simply, this Yakla raid is part of a much larger, much more complex...something. A "(Sort of) War on (Certain Kinds of People Who Use Certain Kinds of) Terror". A "clash of civilizations". A Great Power cabinet war gone out of control. A...well, I have no fucking idea, actually, and what pisses me off is that I'll bet you and Joe and Molly and Steve Fucking Bannon have no fucking idea, either.

The Yemen raid was something of a tactical mess. But, more importantly, we don't know what our actual goals are in Yemen and whether (or how much) this raid got us closer to them, or not.

In August of 1942 the Brits attacked the French Channel port of Dieppe. The raid was a fiasco, thousands of Allied troops were killed or captured, and the Nazi hierarchy exulted in their success. But the Allies learned a ton from Dieppe, so the next time they came ashore in France it opened the road all the way to the Elbe.

Is this raid Dieppe, or Normandy, or what?

We have no context. We can't possibly know.

And that's a huge problem. If you have no idea what your end-state is (or, worse, if your end-state is something utterly impossible, such as "the utter defeat of radical Islamic terrorism") then how the hell do you know when you've reached it. How do you know whether Operation Yemen Derp, or whatever, has gotten you closer, or further away, or sideways, or where the hell you are?

Update 2/28: Per the usually-unnamed "Pentagon officials" it appears that this raid did not manage to acquire any particularly valuable information.

If that is indeed the case, then - given the loss of life and material - it seems fairly reasonable to write this operation off. Whether or not that loss has significantly affected the U.S. interests in Yemen, or whether the U.S. should be considered to even have interests in Yemen, is still nearly impossible to tell given the overall level of secrecy surrounding this war in the shadows.

Strategic Stupidity and Unequal Treaties

Our man seydlitz has a post up asking questions about the U.S. geopolitical strategy in the Middle East and the impact of the continuing drone strikes on that strategy.

While an interesting question, I would opine that as a matter of strategic veterinary dentistry, it's looking at the wrong end of the horse to figure out what's the matter with the teeth.

Instead, I offer this, the supposed final note of the Looney Tune melody we've been playing on the Iraqi barrel organ:

"But what about the extensive negotiations the administration has been engaged in for months, regarding U.S. offers to leave thousands of uniformed soldiers in Iraq past the deadline? It has been well reported that those negotiations, led by U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and White House official Brett McGurk, had been stalled over the U.S. demand that the remaining troops receive immunity from Iraqi courts."

So. I'll be the first one to say - I wouldn't want to be tried in an Iraqi court. I suspect that things are a little less...predictable...shall we say? than ending up in the Multnomah County justice system.

But the bottom line for any Western power in the Third World is that you're always going to be working in the shadow of colonialism.You don't like that? Don't commit your maneuver units to fucking Third World countries.

Despite what 99.7% of the U.S. public - including its leadership, apparently - believes, most of the rest of the world remembers that for about 200 or 300 years being a white guy meant never having to say you were sorry...to a brown, black, or yellow guy. Most of the rest of the world has some ugly memories - still - of being booted around by people who were uniformed and armed like our GIs. The Iraqis were beat up pretty thoroughly in the Twenties by the Brits, who placed great faith in this sort of "unequal treaty", where you got to pimpslap the wogs...but they couldn't do the same to you.

And you don't quickly forget stuff like that.

One of the things that helped make the Bushie Mess-o-potamia such a mess was the reinvention of this sort of horseshit.

I've said for years that we would have saved hundreds of U.S.troops if the FIRST time some GI had shot an Iraqi by accident he'd have had a speedy trial and been handed ten years in the USDB. And the first time some GI shot an Iraqi for fun, or to hide a rape, or some other truly heinous thing, that he would have been handed over to whatever had replaced Saddam's secret police and hanged in Firdos Square. I don't think that would have been just or fair...but it would have been smart. Cunning. We would have gone a long way to distancing ourselves from the Bad Old Days of extraterritoriality, colonial immunity, and the sort of collective anger that a hell of a lot of the world still has for their former imperial masters.

But we didn't.

Instead we made it crystal clear that the Unequal Treaties were still in force and still unequal. Throw a grenade at a U.S. patrol? End up in Abu Ghraib. Shoot a pregnant Iraqi at a checkpoint? Get a downcheck on your "failure to follow proper checkpoint procedures" block in your NCOER.

That's strategic stupidity.

It doesn't take a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of drones, missiles, satellites, and computers.

All it takes is some high level negotiators who don't get that granting your troops "extraterritoriality" (regardless of whether you call it that, or "immunity"...) doesn't fly in the Third World and assumes that because we're just speshul snowflakes the wogs will be happy to give in on this massive collective grudge they carry about that because...well, because we WANT them to soooooo bad.

THAT's strategic stupidity.

Sheesh.

Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?

The Man Who Wasn't There; A Cautionary Tale

As I was walking up the stairI met a man who wasn't therehe wasn't there again todayI wish, I wish he'd stay away“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”
Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan
brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the
Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of
the late deceased,And the epitaph drear: "A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East."

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.