A Kitten Will Die . . .

My wife found this story and I thought it deserved its own whole post.

Timothy Kuklis attempts to give kitty a kiss

Time Warp

You're there in the time slip
And nothing can ever be the same
You're spaced out on sensation,
like you're under sedation
--Time Warp,
Rocky Horror Picture Show

Those who can make you believe absurdities
can make you commit atrocities
--Voltaire
________________

There is an unwritten rule among competent soldiers that says, never criticize your contemporaries. This is both self-serving and prudent, as have all done something that can be seen as deficient.

So what did McChrystal's unidentified aide mean when he criticized General George Jones as being "a clown" who was "stuck in 1985" (The Runaway General)?

Presumably the criticism meant that Jones was still a proponent of Cold War methods and ideology [1985 was the year Jones entered the War College, while McChrystal took command of the 75th Ranger Regiment.] The implication is that Counterinsurgency (COIN) and Counter Terrorism have superseded the Cold War mindset.

However, the Cold War mentality is still alive and well in U.S. foreign and military policy. From Colin Powell to Condi Rice to Hillary Clinton, we are still playing the containment game with Russia. Even after the collapse of the Soviet empire, the U.S. still aims to isolate Russia, thereby curtailing her efforts at military expansion.

The problem with this approach is that Russia shows little desire to engage in military adventurism. That is instead a role the U.S. occupies in today's world arena.

Our military forces are addressing a Warsaw Pact that no longer exists. So while the comment of McChrystal's henchman was true, there is an odd and disingenuous ideological grafting which is prevalent in the COIN crowd: They justify the continuation of the war in Afghanistan using Cold War logic, and the same language which justified the U.S. occupation of Korea for 60 years.

They speak of The Long War with glee, but to use Korea as justification is an absurd position. The North Koreans are a tad more of a threat than are the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, which total probably less than 200.

The bold Coindinistas are, like the General they dismiss, caught in a Cold War time warp; they just don't know it. It made more sense back when Communism was they bogeyman; at least then it was nation-states against each other. Now, it is a nation-state opposing less than 1,000 people.

The COIN proponents are too stoked to see what an ideologically odd gryphon to which they pay homage.

Comic Relief

The best physical comic this country has produced ever. Plus some good music.

Stunned

Still trying to believe it.And now Spain gets to try and prove that they ARE the best side in the world, and the Dutch get to try and erase 36 years of rue and loss.

Cruel, beautiful game.

March order

Just a housekeeping note for those who check in at my crossover blog. I have meant for some time to clean up the address for Graphic Firing Table and remove my bride's identification from the blogspot address (she still uses it in her e-mail). The new location is at the link.

Hope to see you in a couple of weeks for the decisive battle for July.

Charles Gittings

An update on Charles Gittings.

1. 6/29:

Hi Jeff,
>
> I'm entering a nursing home July 7th, and I've decided to discontinue any chemo or radiation after learning that the cancer has spread to my left leg bone near the hip. I'm ready to go. You can share all of that with the other folks on the blog.
>
> And I'll have a look at the blog...
>
> Best,
> Charly


2. 6/29:

Dear Charly:

No matter how and when the story plays out, just know this: you've made a friend in me, a friend who respects you deeply. It is an honor to know you.

My very best,

Jeff


3. 6/30:

The feeling is mutual Publius.

If anyone would like to contact Charly (cbgittings@yahoo.com), I'd suggest that it be sooner rather than later.

Have a great 4th, everyone.

The Good Old Days?

Seydlitz likes to remind us that we here in the U.S. seem to have trouble with strategic military and geopolitical thinking. That is, we don't do it well when we do it at all.

Jason over at Armchair Generalist has been on something of a roll lately, talking about the problems at the National Security Council and what he calls, reminiscent of our man seydlitz, the "declining competence of crafting strategy".

jim at Ranger is just convinced that the whole current Beltway gang has their collective head up their ass.

But at the risk of swimming against the flow, may I suggest that we're not getting worse at this.

We were NEVER good at it.

Or, at least, our geopolitical decisions since 1945 show a fairly poor level of thinking about the places, peoples and problems involved, as opposed to simply applying whatever the reflexive, moron-grade thinking of the time was to the issue.

Let's look at the record.

Well, the immediate post-war world didn't give us a lot to work with. We couldn't really do anything about Stalin even if we'd wanted to, which we didn't. Give us some credit for resolving the occupation of Iran in a way that didn't end up with a divided Iran.

But we were about as wrong as we could be about China, letting a combination of Red hysteria and magical thinking about the wonderfulness of the Kuomintang and silly wartime propaganda about Chiang Kai-shek lead us into a cascade of muttonheaded decisions that left us with a new enemy in Asia and tied to a belligerant, strategically useless "ally" whose penchant for getting us into "let's you and him fight" situations is only forgotten today because we adopted another irritatingly pugnacious little bastard of a nation at the same time.

Globally we almost completely missed the opportunity to take advantage of the former European colonies' wars of liberation. Instead of looking inside and rediscovering our primal American Revolutionary we usually backed the old powers, needlessly alienating the new nations.

In some places we actively did worse, notably in our own hemisphere, where our penchant for "our SOBs" gave us the Duvaliers in Haiti (helping us to generations of poverty and instability), the Batistas in Cuba (helping us to Fidel) and the Somozas in Nicaragua (helping us to Danny Ortega and the FMLN). Add our other SOBs like the Shah of Iran and Ferdy Marcos in the PI. Lovely people to invite to a party, assuming it was your own robbery, rape and murder...

We completely fucked up on the Middle East, first by actively supporting the 20th Century crusader state, and then by bankrolling those rulers who supported us and them, perforce dictators because their own populace didn't like their decision. Think about it - in a place where all we really needed was passage of the Suez and petroleum, a place where we had no real need to "take sides", we looked at the places with canals and petroleum and chose...the little piece-of-shit desert theogenetic foreign body. Why? Because we felt bad we'd let Hitler saute' all his Jews?

Aaaaaanway...

So after doing the smart thing at Suez in '56 we proceeded to screw the pooch thereafter. And lets not go into the foolishness of what we did in the Gulf culminating in Ambassador Glaspie's offhand meeting with our then-ally Saddam who thought he'd been given to green light to settle his differences with Kuwait his way. But add that to the let's-burn-down-the-grocery-store-to-cook-our-canned-spaghetti logic of funding a bunch of whack Islamic nutjobs to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Vietnam.

Y'all know about that.

Throw in stuff like developing a dictator in Panama and then invading to oust the same dictator. Ignoring the growing threat of instability below our southern border.

Funding a massive carrier navy designed to refight Midway in an age of submarine-launched antiship missiles.

Issuing every soldier a floppy black felt headgear...

OK, now I know it's time to stop. But, seriously, can we agree that this "loss of strategic competence" isn't exactly news?

We did one Big Thing right - we held out, and hung on - long enough for the Soviet state to collapse.

But we've fucked up SO many little things. When you look at it that way, hanging around occupying the ass-end of central Asia and invading the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates doesn't look all that much different, or stupider, does it? Stupid? Yes.

But not new or different, eh?