Lovers in a Dangerous Time

The latest media take on the "legendary" Trump-Kim border stroll is that in so doing Trump has "normalized" the NORK nukes.

Far be it from me to hand El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago any diplomatic props whatsoever, but...what the hell else could he do?

The DPRK has nuclear weapons. Crude, perhaps, but certainly no cruder than the weapons used in 1945. Donnie Trump hasn't "made" North Korea a nuclear power; North Korea IS a nuclear power. Short of risking nuclear detonation on the Korean peninsula, what the hell is the U.S. going to do to change that? Kim, as big a sonofabitch as he is, is not a fool. He knows his survival and that of the Kim Dynasty depends on making his little fiefdom too nasty for a larger enemy to take down without paying an unacceptable price. He's seen what happens to the Saddams and the Gadaffis of the world. He's no more going to "denuclearize" than he's going to appear on The Apprentice in a cheap suit.

Only a monstrous simulacrum of a human being with the intellectual capacity of a brain-damaged marmoset would think or expect otherwise.

Oh, wait...

Christ, what a maroon. What an im-bessal. Can anyone explain why the Mustache of Stupidity still has any geopolitical credibility whatsoever?

Christ, what an asshole.

So while I'm perfectly willing to dopeslap the Tangerine Tinpot for his behavior at the G20, where he did his best to imitate his boss from Moscow and follow the boss' direction for continuing his efforts towards the demolition of the Western hegemony (his comments on the 1951-1960 US-Japan agreement were particularly moronic), I can't really get too arsed about this little jaunt around the bricks at Panmunjom.

The notion that the U.S. can do what it can and the NORKs must suffer what they must died the moment the first fission test succeeded north of the DMZ.

North Korea is and will be a nuclear power; regardless of what gas Trump and the Trumpkins may expel, the U.S. is going to have to accept that unless and until the people running the show in the U.S. are willing to risk a nuclear, biological, and chemical attack on their Korean and Japanese allies. Bolton may be willing to do that, and Trump may be ignorant enough to let him, but almost no one else in the U.S. government is.

For the U.S. "news" media to bloviate otherwise simply makes that acceptance more difficult and fraught.

Sick man?

Something appears to be going on in Istanbul.

While the original protests do not appear to have had much, if any, political motivation at this moment there appears to be a relatively small but highly vocal series of protests going on against the government of Prime Minister Erdogan and his AK Party.

Why could this be significant?

Because - as our frequent commenter Sven Ortmann pointed out back in 2008

"Turkey is in a peculiarly important position geopolitically; It controls the Bosporus (exit/entry for Black Sea) and is NATO's access point to the Persian Gulf region (other than from the sea). Sea lanes through Suez Canal/Eastern Mediterranean can be threatened or blocked from Turkey's soil. It's the only almost-Western but Muslim country and could bridge the gap culturally between Europeans and Arabs, being in between both. I should add that the Pan-Turkic ideology (a nationalist party got about 1/8 of the votes in the 2011 elections) could put Turkey into a rival position to Russia in regard to influence in Central Asia (Turkic languages there). The West's encroachment has been stopped in Belarus (as long as the dictatorship doesn't crumble) and Ukraine (where any national election can change the trajectory entirely). Russia would not exactly be happy to face a Turkish challenge on its southern flank."

And, I would add that the intriguing aspect of these protests is the possibility of their bringing the Turkish Army out of its barracks, and I think that a lot will depend on the protesters themselves, the government, and how the Army perceives them both.

Here, for example, is a post from something called the "Social Action Network" that, I think, may overlook the possibility that the Army may step in if the Erdogan government appears to be in danger.

The author concludes with "This is not yet a revolution, but it is not only tear gas that marks the air in Istanbul. It is also a scent of revolutionary aspirations." without anywhere in the body of the article speculating or even acknowledging what might happen if the Turkish Army decided that the "revolution" threatened the Turkish state with either a leftist rebellion or an government-led Islamic reaction. The Army has a long history - beginning with the Ottoman years and continuing as recently as 1997 - of intervening in Turkish politics when things look sketchy.

The AKP was elected largely due to popular dissatisfaction with the military and the Army has so far respected that. At the same time I cannot believe that the Turkish Army is at all pleased with the openly sectarian policies, the pan-Turkish rhetoric, and the Syrian adventurism of PM Erdogan.

But...in the comments section one of our regulars (thanks, BB!) links to a pretty good summary over at TPM that concludes that at this time the AKP has pretty much destroyed the Army's ability and willingness to intervene in politics. That adds even more uncertainty to what's going on.

One of the big reasons I am peculiarly fascinated by this is the implications it has for the wider Middle East. Turkey and the political career of the AKP was until recently perhaps the only test-case for an "Islamic state lite"; the possibility that a polity with a largely Muslim population could, in the absence of an Islamic Enlightenment and a thoroughgoing rejection of sectarian politics, have an "islamic" party in power without that party using that power to attempt to implement islamic social policies. Much of the recent governing that the protesters are calling despotic centers around attempts by the ruling party to enact conservative islamic shibboleths into public law; restricting things like alcohol sales and advertising and public displays of affection.

If the Turkish islamic party cannot rule without imposing or trying to impose sectarian law on its secular fellow-citizens I think it bodes poorly for everywhere else in the Muslim world where the traditions and practices of nonsectarian government are less entrenched than Turkey. I consider this a big part of this story and I think that this aspect is being poorly covered. I suspect that to a degree this is "urban hipsters who want to go West" versus "rural hicks who like them some religious limits" but I can't get a feel for to WHAT degree.

I also suspect that the U.S. press, assuming that it bothers to cover this much at all, is likely to frame it in the context of the "us versus them" way that it has taken to reporting events from the Middle East, with the islamist AKP taking the "them" part. But that the larger import of potential instability, or military coup, or the potential failure of the "nonsectarian islamist project" in the pivotal nation of Turkey and its role in a fractious part of the world is likely to go unexamined...

Hard to tell at this point if all this will blow over or blow up, but I'd suggest that events in Turkey are well worth keeping an eye on.

Domestic Terrorism

We spent the past week - both on the air and here at MilPub - talking about a couple of mooks who attacked the Boston Marathon and got all of us in a swivet.

But we said nothing about these guys:

"The fertilizer plant that exploded on Wednesday, obliterating part of a small Texas town and killing at least 14 people, had last year been storing 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger safety oversight by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Yet a person familiar with DHS operations said the company that owns the plant, West Fertilizer, did not tell the agency about the potentially explosive fertilizer as it is required to do, leaving one of the principal regulators of ammonium nitrate - which can also be used in bomb making - unaware of any danger there."

Had the Tsarnaev Bros had 270 tons of ammonium nitrate we wouldn't be talking about Copley Square, we'd be talking about Copley Crater.



The federal government is now claiming the right to prosecute the Boston bombers, and all over the Internet we're hearing calls for greater "security" and the threat of Muslim Extremists.

And yet the guy whose outfit managed to rack up the highest body count last week is "...proud to be associated with West Church of Christ"

We want to talk about terrorism and security and religious fervor and foreign policy. That's sexy.

Regulatory capture, lax zoning, piss-poor industrial safety, sloppy manufacturers and careless owners and look-the-other-way inspectors?

Not so much.

Y'gotta wonder at the hairless monkey sometimes. We seem to revel in straining at gnats while gulping camels without so much as a hiccup.

Maybe if some relentless reporter proves that Mister Adair is a secret jihadi, though..?

Update 4/24: And it should go without saying that the sort of slippery incompetence (or malicious carelessness, or out-and-out devious malfeasance) is unsustainable without a slippery, incompetent, careless (or malicious) media.

When almost none of the news stories about this mess emphasizes that probably 95% of the blame for the high casualty count is because nobody on the scene knew that this plant was storing tons of ammonium nitrate because the plant owners and managers did not comply even with the relatively benign level of regulation that requires reporting this highly explosive material to emergency response and disaster management agencies the effect is to remove public scrutiny from those owners and managers.

Even with that previous level of fail had the plant manager managed to grab the sleeve of the first firefighter through the gate and shouted "There's tons of goddamn AN in here - forget fighting it! Start evacuating everybody within a mile of this place!" the people of West, Texas might have been saved a lot of grief. But because of panic, or incompetence, or cowardice, nobody did that.

And the reportage has largely skipped over that, too, leaving uninformed observers (meaning 99.5% of the U.S. public) to assume that this sort of stuff "just happens", that it was some sort of natural disaster like a hurricane or an earthquake and not the acts of a handful of men whose motivations remain unexamined and whose culpability will likely remain undivulged.

Update 4/25: It gets worse: "He said firefighters prepared to set up a stream of water on the tanks to keep them from overheating and rupturing, but they discovered there was no water left in the hydrants to spray." It's difficult to determine whether these hydrants - which were probably within the plant itself - were on public or private water lines, but regardless of who was supposed to maintain them it appears that they were in an unserviceable condition at the time of the explosion or were constructed so as to be vulnerable to damage FROM the explosion (not something you'd normally want in a facility planned to...um...store explosive materials.

The cause of this explosion is still being investigated; apparently four tanks filled with ammonia did not rupture, and a separate tank car loaded with AN was knocked over but also didn't explode.

Where are we going? And why are we in this handbasket?

Remember Sammy the Whiny Seal we talked about back in February?

Well, turns out that that Dark Nexus of infomercials, CNN, has brewed a tempest in...I don't know, something smaller and less significant than a teacup. A shotglass? (Probably appropriate, since the whole damn nonsense makes me want to drink heavily).

I won't bother you with the sissy-fight, something about which sailor put two rounds in Osama's ten-ring. Go read the article at the link, if you care.

But here's what bugs me. Back in the day we fought dangerous people. Seriously dangerous guys, people who controlled entire armies, fleets, scads of big ol' bombers loaded with torpedoes and five-hundred pound blobs of high explosive. Guys who could command the actions of millions of hard-core, well-trained, dangerous sons-of-bitches.

Well, it took millions of us, but we fought them, and won. And then went back to work, making cars, building houses, watching television, electing rubes and gomers, stealthily gettin' busy after the kids went to bed. Y'know, being regular civilians in a nation at peace.

We got over ourselves, is what I'm saying. We seem to have gotten over getting over ourselves, if this ridiculous nonsense over who actually put bullets in the World's Tallest Saudi is any indication. Faced with the saddest lot of raggedy-ass fundamentalist wannabees we have let ourselves become some sort of quasi-Star Wars Empire, farkling about all over the world, torturing and disappearing people, and letting folks who shouldn't be allowed to run a raffle directing our politics and military operations that most of us don't know - or, much care - about. We're at perpetual war, and yet, who gives a shit?

The guy who shot down the aircraft carrying ADM Isoroku Yamamoto, who could have wreaked more havoc in his sleep than Osama could have on his Best Day Ever,

"...joined the 449th Fighter Squadron in China, still flying P-38s. He claimed three further Japanese planes probably destroyed and damaged, but he was shot down on his 139th mission, bailing out near Kiukiang on April 29. He was rescued by Chinese civilians, who treated his injuries and escorted him to safety five weeks later. At the end of the war, Barber attained the rank of major and commanded one of America's first jet squadrons. He retired as a colonel in 1961."

Guy didn't get out with four years to run until retirement. He didn't get into a public pissing contest with CPT Lanphier, the other guy involved in the shootdown.

It was just another day at war. And when the war was over - which We the People WANTED it to be - we got on with the business of getting back to business.

Now, this. It's perfect; the entire business of this ridiculous "War on Terror" in a shotglass. Neverending. Inconclusive. Utterly meaningless. But chock-full of noisy, furious bullshit.

Who gives a shit who "killed bin Laden"? We soldiers were once taught that we were a team; that every one of us was important to completing the mission, from the chancre-mechanic that gave us our plague shot to the guy who drove the truck that took our Class V down to the port of embarkation, to the cooks who mermited our hot chow up to the firebase to the guy who pulled security while we slept.

And, yet, here we are; sitting at home listening to a couple of knuckleheads pissing down each others' legs about who shot some scruffy wog in a dirty house in butt-rump Pakistan. And CNN, which should have a pantsload of better things to talk about (How did Osama manage to sit around Abbotabad - described as location of "...the regimental headquarters for the Frontier Force Regiment, the Baloch Regiment and Pakistan Army Medical Corps and Kakul Military Academy..." - for years without our old pal Pakistan giving us the heads-up..?), that managed to pass the tenth anniversary of the Iraq Debacle without so much as a whimper of discontent that the montebanks, grifters, thugs, and stooges that lied us into that Mess-o-potamia (and comprehensively screwed what was going on in Afghanistan in the process) are still with us, nattering on Morning Joe and Meet the Press as if they weren't as complicit as Bob MacNamara in getting a bunch of Americans killed in somebody else's goddamn civil war.

If that doesn't say something about us, and something not very complimentary, I don't know what the hell it does.

Quis Custodiet?

I kinda hate to keep hammering on this nonsense.



It probably bores the hell out of you like any other family feud and I admit that it really is a sort of military "inside baseball"; of interest only to the sort of people who keep stats and obsessively squirrel away bizarre trivia about obscure minor leagues.

But, like jock itch, this story gets to me in particularly tender places.

And, kidding aside, I think it says some things that concern me about my country and my armed forces. So I apologize, but I'm gonna vent a little here.

One is the irritating nature of the "Global War on Terror" as presented to, and accepted by, the U.S. public.

Ever since 2002 I've thought that the most ominous part of the various wars and quasi-wars and secret wars we've been fighting (largely in the unpaved portions of Asia and Africa) is the way they have been almost completely removed from and independent of public opinion and public purview. The U.S. public as a whole neither pays a price nor has an interest in what their soldiers are doing in the less paved parts of the world under the auspices of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force.

I could go over why this isn't a good idea, the multiple reasons that cabinet wars and imperial expeditions are not in the best interests of a democracy. The inevitable erosion of liberal governance and the expansion of executive power that occur in wartime. The moral and intellectual hazard of accustoming a people to continual, low-grade expeditionary wars (without immediate costs or consequences to the people bankrolling the wars). The bad habits that governments, troops, and citizens pick up whilst committing mayhem in places to other peoples without either seeing or feeling the effects of the mayhem themselves.

We've effectively turned these damn wars into a third-person shooter game, complete with it's own fucking music video and all, for God's sake. And - although largely unwilling to join the fight ourselves and uncaring about the real people who do - we've turned our pixellated images of them into cartoonish heroes, ridiculously inflated and lionized "warriors" for what should be a warrior-free zone: an industrial democratic republic.

So this "Shooter" has become, for me, a living version of the crayon-drawing of a modern American "warrior" that We the People seem to want; imputed with unlikely and improbable virtues, excused all critical assessment, feted and fetishized and blown up beyond the reality of what soldiers have always been. Your neighbor's idle brother, the smart kid behind the counter at the convenience store, the nice guy your sister dumped because "he was boring", the knucklehead who cut you off at the freeway on-ramp.

What especially got to me on this subject was the fawning reaction this Shooter got when he and his cronies stopped off on Capitol Hill (see the first link above), where the people who should have been his fellow citiens and notional governmental superiors treated him like a bunch of gushing fangirls and fell all over him to praise his work which is, at bottom, no more than any other infantryman has been asked to do in this endless farkling about in central Asia only with fancier kit and more secrecy.

This basically irks the shit out of me, this whole business about fellating the "warriors" and bumper-sticker patriotism and endless painless videogame wars. I don't think it's healthy for a republic and I don't think it's a smart thing for us as the notional sovereigns of the United States to be doing to ourselves.

And this "Shooter" has become the poster child for all of my irritation with my fellow citizens.

The other problem I have with this story is what I think it says about a troubling development within my Army and the U.S. ground troops in general, by the way one of the guys from one of the Navy's Special Operations outfits feels about the rest of the Navy and (by inference) the other military outfits he is forced to share the battlefield with.

The magilla with this Shooter has been his loud complaints about how tough it is to be him, how tough the Special Operations outfits have it, and how - because of that - he and they deserve special consideration; early retirement pension vestment and special benefits if they ETS before they earn their retirement.

By publicly agitating for special privileges for the Special Operations forces - and only the SOF - this Shooter is taking a fire axe to this weak join between the SOF and the line units. By publicly demonstrating his contempt for the guys in the Navy Choir, for the line squids on the carrier decks and in the Stores warehouse at Norfolk this Shooter is fueling the fire of resentment and irritation that these guys, many of them, probably feel for him and his high-speed brethern.

One of the reasons that the U.S. Army and the other U.S. services have been so competent and successful tactically is that they have always been good at working together as a team. Every element in the team; the combat, combat support, and combat service support units, and individuals, recognize their mutual dependence. The guy who kicks down the door depends on the helo driver overhead who depends on the avionics tech back at the FOB who depends on the guy loading the supply truck back at the Corps rear who depends on the PAC clerk working the computer back at Ft. Ben Harrison back in the States. Who, for God's sake, depends on the guy in the 82nd Chorus singing at some fucking high school in Cornhole, Iowa to get the kids all excited about volunteering for the Army.

And one reason all those people work together is the understanding that they're all in the same Army; they all - although some get a little more money and some get to wear some cooler uniforms - get the same basic deal.

They HAVE to work together to win, and the way the service treats their service recognizes that fact. The door-kicker doesn't succeed if the PAC clerk fucks up his pay, his allotment doesn't get to his family, their e-mails get him all fucked up and so that night he's thinking about his sick daughter's not getting TRICARE instead of the people who might be behind the door with a nasty surprise for him and his team.

But the Shooter doesn't care, or probably doesn't even know, about this. And because of that he's busy kicking in a door that I don't think, either as a soldier or a U.S. citizen, we want to open. It does and will do us no good to make our special operations units a sort of Special Republican Guard, and the example of the originals should tell us so.

There's always an entropy in military organizations that works around eliteness. The elites can easily start looking down on everyone else with contempt and everyone else starts envying and resenting the elites.

In Third World armies this can cripple the organization; the Iraqi Republican Guard was a classic of the genre.

The Guard was vastly expanded in the Eighties to ensure the loyalty of an Army fractured by the war with Iran. After the defeat in the Second Gulf War of '91 the Special Republican Guard was created to provide even more "eliteness" loyal to the regime. Each time it was the best guys, the most loyal, the smartest and most technically proficient who were pulled into the "elite".

By 2003 the bulk of the Iraqi Army was just fucking incapable of modern military operations and the U.S. Army went through it like a dose of salts. All that "eliteness"? As useless as a tampon in a typhoon.

The U.S. military is nowhere near as big a jugfuck as the Iraqis were and U.S. society is nothing like the trainwreck that Iraqi society was and is.

But this "Shooter" represents something I haven't seen before in the U.S. military; an elite-unit guy willing to just come out and flat-out say; I'm better than you, I work harder than you, this war (the way it's being fought and my role in it compared to yours) means that I deserve more and better stuff than you.

And those are exactly the sorts of things that led to the Special Republican Guard. We just don't have a Saddam here willing to use them to MAKE a Special Republican Guard.

But there's nothing in human nature or U.S. society that says we can't find one.

And between that and what this "Shooter" nonsense says about our country and our soldiers I can't help but worry at least a little.

If I had a rocket launcher...

Filed under the heading of "can we have a better effing media" is this article from the LA Times; L.A. gun buyback yields rocket launcher, assault weapons.

"A $2,000 pair of pocket pistols and a military rocket launcher -- sans rocket -- were among the 1,673 firearms that Los Angeles residents traded in for gift cards in the city’s gun buyback this weekend."

reads the first paragraph of this little item.

Charlie Pierce goes wild with this, asking;

"Who in the holy hell goes out and buys a freaking rocket launcher? What are you hunting? Traffic helicopters? And then, who in the holy hell turns it in to the cops? Shouldn't this engage the interest of the FBI's crack Set-Up-The-Loonies unit that has been so successful elsewhere?"

and on the face of it, given the newspaper article, his concern seems like a legitimate one.

But - speaking as someone who has had his rocket launchers in the day - wellll...let's just say that there are "rocket launchers" and "rocket launchers".

If this thing was, say, the "launcher" section from an RPG-7, well, that's bad. That really is a "rocket launcher"; you get your hands on the grenade round and you're in business.

But if this thing was - as I suspect it was - the dunnage from an old LAW or an AT-4, well, frankly, that's just a piece of fiberglass pipe. It's expendable, and is somewhere between difficult and impossible to reload. It's issued as a unit, launcher and projectile, and once it's fired the "launcher's" only real use as a weapon is as a bludgeon and not a very effective one, at that.

I will not disagree that the U.S. is pretty freaking ridiculous on who can tote around what weapon and why, but not sure that the whole "rocket launcher" thing here is really the cherry on the top of the self-licking ice cream sundae.

But you'd never know that from this article, and I suspect that there's one of two reasons for that;

First, it's possible that the LAPD did not produce the "rocket launcher" for the reporter, or describe it other than as such. In which case, one would think that the stupid fucking reporter would have asked an actual question, you know, like reporters in movies do, about the exact nature of this weapon.

Or, second, it's possible that the police DID produce the thing, and the reporter stared at it like a cow at the minutes of the Council of Trent, and ambled away as fucking clueless as he was before seeing it.

It's hard to tell which is worse.

But what is telling is that Charlie had a neat little quote from James Madison in his blog the following day:

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

-- James Madison to W.T Barry, August 4, 1822

which sums up the utter fuckupitude that this little newspaper article represents.

In our current civilization We the People are asked to make many decisions on issues we have no personal knowledge of, in places we have never visited, and with information perforce supplied by others.

And the only way we can arm ourselves with the power of knowledge on these issues, from wars to traffic law, is through the reportage of others.

But if this article does anything, it shows how a simple question of physical fact - one that could have been clarified with a single, simple question - can be rendered not just completely, utterly useless but actively misleading - "OMFG, there are rocket launchers out there on the streets of LA!!!!" - through the total incompetence and ignorance of one local reporter.

And this is to completely elide the pernicious influence of maliciously deliberate liars of the Glenn Beckian sort.

It remains in me, therefore, no real sense of wonder that we are so thoroughly fucked.

Update 5/24 p.m.: In the Comments section, Andy (one of our most reliable regulars here - the next round's on me, Andy...) does his usual thorough job of fact-finding and tracks this nonsense down further. He finds a photo of this fearsome weapon of mass destruction at the Bakersfield TV station site and notes that it is, as suspected, an inerted training aid - in this case, of a U.S. AT-4.

So, no, the streets of LA are not in danger of becoming Beirut or Ramadi, LA Times, as a few simple questions would have established.

Grrrrr.

Why, oh why, can we not have a better fricking media?!?

Im Westen nichts Neues

Did you know about the firefight today?

Sounds like some of the guys in Kunar Province, way out in the eastern edge of Afghanistan, had a rather trying day today. Some of the local badmashes - probably Afghan Talibanis, possibly Pakistani Talibs, possibly just locals with a case of the ass - shot up their "outpost" (whatever that represents in military terms; a patrol base, a checkpoint, an LP/OP...) with rifle and grenade fire.According to the press release the boys reacted pretty well; they returned fire and shot up their attackers, who presumably grabbed a hat; at least there's no mention of the position being endangered.

So presumably it was just another day at the office for the guys out in Bar Kunar.

In the late Twenties a former German soldier published a book about his life in World War One. The main point of the story was to show the many civilians who had no idea of the lives their soldiers had lived in the war. His title was a piece of vicious irony; the phrase "Im Westen nichts Neues" was used by the Imperial German Army to describe a "normal" day of fighting on the Western Front lines. In such a day anywhere from a handful to hundred of men would have died and more ripped up by bullets, shells, bombs, and mines while others slowly weasted away from disease and exposure. For those men, "nothing new" meant everything; the end of life, or health, or youth. In the "news" the civilians received - it meant just nothing. All this death and injury were just another day at the office.

But the guys who lived through it came back home with a head's worth of nightmare composed of boredom, hardship - ranging from discomfort to misery, stress, fear, hate, and all the other assorted crap that war stuffs into your brain housing group.

And their wives, kiddies, parents, friends, and bosses - whose heads had been stuffed with "nothing new" and marching-song bullshit for four years, had no fucking idea why the guys seemed a little tense now and then.

So I don't know why the fact that our cabinet wars have disappeared off the public news irks the hell out of me. It's nothing new, and certainly nothing shocking. Armies, countries, governments have tried stuffing the dirty work their soldiers do down the memory hole probably since Ramses' day.But it still irritates the shit out of me all the same.

92,000 Military logs?

A commentor going by the name of "Podunk Paul" asks: "Where are you guys? Just what the Guardian calls the biggest intelligence leak in history and you're talking about Netroots, or whatever. Your experience is needed to explain what these 92,000 military logs mean."What Paul is referring to is described here as "more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports" published by Wikileaks. Including in the specialite' du maison are stuff like:

- the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight.

- a US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and

- Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman (supposedly in response to attacks set by or assisted by the villagers).

- four British shootings in Kabul in the space of barely a month, in October/November 2007, culminating in the death of the son of an Afghan general.

- second cluster of similar shootings, all involving Royal Marine commandos in Helmand province, took place in a six-month period at the end of 2008.

And throw in the usual drone attacks on the random wedding or funeral, black ops units topping people, sometimes including the people they were sent out to kill, and, from the other side of the hill, the Taliban SAM threat and the bloody work being done by their demo guys.

I guess my question would be...is there anyone who should be surprised by this?

Heavily armed foreigners shoot you when you approach them?

Or bomb you based on poor or nonexistent intel?

Or just fuck up?

The history of war is full to overfull, bursting with stupidity, meaningless death, mistaken killing of friends or harmless passersby. The notion that the Western nations could send fighting men into a chaotic failed state with a 30-year history of internal war and external invasion and somehow fight a delightfully sanitary, perfectly choreographed campaign was neither sensible nor likely. The idea of "fighting for their freedom" was utter nonsense that sprang, like some moronic Minerva, from Paul Wolfowitz's forehead. Afghanistan has been chaotic but never "free" in any Western sense.

How sending 30,000 grunts was going to change that is something only Dick Cheney's turgid mutterings can explain.

No, there is no "news" here, no revelation. I can't "explain" it any better than to repeat what Bill Sherman said; war is all hell, and you cannot refine it.

And, really, we should be congratulating ourselves on our restraint! Marcus Licinius Crassus Dives crucified 5,000 men and women at the end of the Third Servile Rebellion; the Appian Way from Rome to Capua was shaded with the trees bearing this wretched fruit.Poor Crassus, "for all his self-approval, did not venture to ask for the major triumph, and it was thought ignoble and mean in him to celebrate even the minor triumph on foot, called the ovation, for a servile war." (Plutarch, Parallel Lives)

H&I

I have an odd sort of love-hate for Michael Yon.

He is one of the few journalists really willing to spend a LOT of time in some of the filthiest ass-end parts of the world finding out what's happening there. He also knows soldiers and soldiering in a sort of latter-day Ernie Pyle way, and I like that.

On the downside, he's a sort of dirty-boot Bob Kaplan, Tom Clancy with a notepad, a guy who's never met gee-whiz cool Aaaaaarmy training he didn't love. He's sort of a man-size eleven-year-old that way, and he commonly mistakes technical and tactical proficiency for strategic and geopolitical competence, and he always assumes that the GI's are the epitome of studly cool and the fuzzy-wuzzies are dirty rats.I love the fact that he has some great pictures and a nice little article about the gunners at FOB Frontenac (although, Mike? That'd be "Cobra Battery, 1st Battalion, 17th Artillery - the 17th Infantry are those guys walking around with the teeny little bullet launchers, remember?).

But as I'm enjoying the pretty night fire pictures I come across this:

"Sometimes the crews fire “H & I” or “terrain denial” missions. Harassment and Interdiction missions are fired at terrain known to be used only by the enemy at certain times, and so anytime the enemy feels like rolling the dice, they can move into that terrain. Such missions also provide influence for “shaping” the battlefield. If the commander is trying to flush the enemy into a blunder—maybe an ambush—or maybe to cut them off from an escape route, he can have the guns pound into a gorge, say, that is used as an enemy route. Or maybe he just tries to persuade the enemy to take a route where we have sniper teams waiting. The battery can be used in many ways that do not include direct attacks on enemy formations."

Yes, indeed.

When I was just a mere slip of a redleg, my FDC Chief taught me that H&I fires in a LIC were the worst way of substituting motion for direction, a bad excuse for shooting unobserved rounds at a grid coordinate, a waste of rounds and a good way of pissing off the locals at you.We did this shit a lot in Vietnam, where my Chief got sick of it. Typically you had no eyes on the "target", which could be a trail junction, the edge of a treeline, a river ford, anywhere. And since you were also typically in the middle of a farming district, these were also typically used by local Romeos slipping out to see their hootchie Juliets, woodcutters, farmers, enemy runners, monkeys, roebucks...just about damn near anything. But the point was that - despite what Yon thinks - you never really knew. It was a statistic, a way that the artillery battalion or brigade could say "We fired XYZ missions on Targets Able, Fox and Whiskey"

I have no idea if H&I fire is any better in A-stan than it was in Vietnam. But the fact that we're doing it at all...?

Hmmm.

Cold, Dead Fingers

In the previous post, Publius noted that "...we have events at Fort Hood today. A major with an Arabic name, maybe helped by two others—still unknown‚greases 12 GIs, wounds 31. Arabic name. Huh. Anybody think this won't profoundly affect the dialog?"

As Spencer Ackerman notes here, it already has.

The frustrating thing about this is what it reveals about:

1. How lazy and incompetent our "news media" are. I have gotten to the point where I ignore the first 24 hours of coverage because the news agencies rush to get everything into print or on the air regardless of its veracity. The sad part is that I suspect that many Americans get most of their "information" from just this period. By the time the actual facts emerge Joe and Mary Lunchpail have lost interest.

2. The degree to which we just don't frigging LEARN. Didn't we go through this one before? Weren't we wrong then? Why, then, all the bloviating about this incident as some sort of betrayal of an Islamic Fifth Column?I think we've all talked about this at some point, but, once again, this sad and sorry tale brings out the degree of dysfunction in our polity. We're often badly informed and then use that misinformation to stoke our fears and stupidity. In a system based on the premise that the People are Sovereign a People so easily fooled and so prone to emotional foolishness - the People as Fool - are a dead weight and a crippling liability.

Update, 11/6 p.m. The American People need help being fooled. And shout-radio has just the man Mike "Savage" Wiener.

According to Paul Campos "Yesterday Savage was obsessing on how nobody was going to be allowed to say that the army base shooter, Nidal Hasan, was an Islamic terrorist."

I'm gonna rant here for a bit.

rant

I call bullshit on the "terrorist".

More. I say that if Nidal had been one of ours, and had done what he did in a jihadist madrassa in Lahore, instead of the "Soldiers Readiness Processing Center" at FHTX we'd be writing him up for a DSC.

(Now also for the record I don't think Nidal was a hero, whatever his motive. I think he is a whacko, and I think we'll find his brain housing group is pretty effed up.)

But...

When I first read about this my thought was, oh, great, some sick fuckstick gone and shot up the Main PX, or a shoppette, or the Commissary. I expected to read about not just my soldier brothers dead but their wives, kids, girlfriends, and civilian buddies all randomly shot down by this SOB. But...

It seems like the SOB was a choosy SOB. 13 KIA: 12 GIs and one DoD civilian. I have no idea of the WIAs, but so far the guy seems to have killed soldiers and only soldiers. Unarmed soldiers, sure, but...

Look at it this way. For the better part of 10 years the Army paid me to train to kill enemy soldiers. I trained to kill them with my cannon battery from miles away. For all practical purposes they might as well have been unarmed. Pregnant women troopers? Yep. I'da killed 'em. Young peach-faced privates right off the rice paddy? Deader'n shit. My job was to kill the enemy, destroy his fighting power. Not to give him a fair fight. Shoot him in the back, blow him to bloody rags with high explosive...whatever it took. If I could have caught him unarmed in a "Deployment Center"? Battery six, mothafucka, and xin loi for your ass.

And guess what?

We're at war with Al Qaeda, the Talibs and a half-dozen other odds and sods Islamic organizations. All of us. The guys on the MSR out of Ramadi. The joes manning the LP/OPs in the Panshir Valley. And the casuals milling around the "Deployment Center" at Ft. Hood.

You and me, too. "Total war"? Ever hear of it Got lots of pregnant women, kids and everything else killed in places like Dresden, Coventry, Hiroshima, Hue. You do what you need to to defeat The Enemy.

If this guy HAD been an AQ covert ops dude?

These people were just as much his legitimate prey as any GI in full battle rattle in an M998 on the main road to Kandahar.

If he had been an active enemy when he kacked them (and not just a nutjob on a spree) he was no more a goddam "terrorist" than I would have been calling for a battery three with WP in effect on a helpless convoy of North Korean signal service troops.

So. If you ask me:

1. Once he recovers from his gunshot wounds "Abu" Nidal Hasan needs lots of electroshock therapy. Lots.

2. Mike "Savage" Wiener is a goddam crank with a sock for a brain, and

3. If any significant portion of the U.S. public other than goddam sock-brained crank Mike "Savage" Wiener thinks an enemy killing U.S. soldiers - anywhere, anytime, anyhow - is "terrorism" rather than "war" it's time to piss on the fire and call in the dogs because the U.S. public wouldn't know a fricking war if it bit them on the fricking ass. The People as Fool. Jesus wept! WASF!

/rant

We now return you to your regularly scheduled weekend

Shocked, shocked!

Fabius is in a swivet about the network news:

"Perfidy: The act of violating faith or allegiance; violation of a promise or vow, or of trust reposed.

ABC News proudly announces what seems likely to be a betrayal of their public trust as journalists, joining the Obama Administration to produce propaganda supporting their proposal for health care reform. If that proves to be true, at least they are open about this – so Americans seeking real news can look elsewhere.

1.ABC news refuses to air paid ads during its White House health care presentation, the Drudge Report has learned, including a paid-for alternative viewpoint. (Source: Drudge Report)
2.Letter to ABC News from the Ken McKay (Chief of Staff to the Republican National Committee) protests this “glorified infomercial to promote the Democrat agenda”, esp the refusal of ABC News to include any presentation by Republican Party leaders.
3.Response by Kerry Smith (SVP, ABC News) to the RNC letter — “no one watching, listening to, or reading ABC News will lack for an understanding of all sides of these important questions.”
4.An excellent analysis of this by Zenpundit: Well at Least We Know ABC is Immune to Intellectual Embarassment."

Leaving out the caveat that anyone intending to bash the Mainstream Media for bias would do best to leave out any references to Drudge, I will simply append my comment from Fabius' blog to give our commentors a chance to opine:

"I’m shocked. Shocked!

Republicans are now all swoony and gasping because the media conglomerates are falling all over themselves to parrot the Administration line? Refusing to paper up the GOP counter-propaganda during commercial breaks? Giving the “he said” without the “she said”?

Mind you, notice that nobody, from Drudge on down, is actually recommending that the network news do an impartial, analytical breakdown of the whole “health care” issue, scrutinize the various nostrums recommended by the big parties as well as more peripheral players, and then provide an assessment of the proposed solutions’ costs and benefits to the public.Nope. They just want the MSM to air THEIR propaganda alongside the Democrats.

The network news no longer does “journalism”. Dog bites man!

And this is different – how? – from when the Hearsts furnished the wars provided that they were furnished the pictures? When each party and even each grange, union, mill, and turnverein published their own little fishwrap, loaded with slanted articles, special pleading and outright lies? When you could predict the tone of the article based on whether it was a Whig journal, a Democratic journal or a Republican one, a Jacksonian or a Hamiltonian one?

We’ve allowed ourselves to continue dreaming on in the particularly unique and anomalous moment that existed from about 1945 to 1985, a period when the news outlets persuaded themselves – or were persuaded, did someone mention the Fairness Doctrine? – that they were “unbiased” sources of information. This time period is now as dead as the dodo, and I’m not sure how getting angry at the network news for doing what economic and political pressures and realities were bound to make them do is going to help.

How about, rather, we accept that FOX is news for right-wing-nut-Republicans, ABC/CBS/NBC is news for moderate Republicans and…well, there IS no “news for left-wing-nut-Democrats” unless you count the blogs. And even knowing THAT, if you want to be truly knowledgeable you will accept that all Drudge’s horses and all Kos’s men can force the net news or the big papers to do, y’know, actual JOURNALISM, that is, a reasoned analysis and dissection of the competing sides’ claims. Instead they will take a controversy, any controversy, and print some version of: “Scientists claim sun giant ball of flaming gas; others believe its Apollo’s Chariot”.

We’re returning to a period where the “news” arrives from a mix of competing ideological sources and fourth-grade level mass market pablum. If you’re used to getting your information served up to you already dressed and butchered, you’re going to have a hard time with that. If you can accept that you’re going to have to dig harder for the “truth”, then you can move on and still take part in the kabuki play that has become our national governing process."

Is there a third option? And is this really the Apocalypse, as Drudge and Fabius seem to think?