Syria

Open Thread

Mark Noonan21 Comments

This will be a bit for Amazona to chew on!

Team Trump is asserting that they will be working to end “birthright citizenship”. This is the concept that if you are born in American territory, you are American. The argument in favor of this is the wording of the 14th Amendment which goes: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”. This is held to mean that in 1868, an Amendment to ensure that black Americans who had been cruelly denied their rights as citizens applies to Juanita in Chiapas who boards a bus for Juarez, crosses illegally into El Paso and has a kid.

Yeah, no. Don’t think so. The Constitution isn’t a suicide pact. I’m a strict constructionist…original intent and all that. There was no intent to make “anchor babies” a thing. It wasn’t even in mind as the Amendment was proposed, passed and ratified. There was no court case on it – we don’t have, for instance, a court case from 1880 where a person illegally in the USA is arguing their American-born child is American. It wasn’t even a concept until about 40 years ago. This is mostly because travel used to be far more difficult and pregnant women wouldn’t often travel as their condition wasn’t conducive to arduous travel. But when you can now fly cheaply many thousands of miles in a few hours…here we go.

To hold that the 14th means we must allow “anchor babies” is as stupid as saying that a law legalizing interracial marriage means two boys can get married. Sure, this is basically what Obergefell held…but that was one of the most monumentally stupid decisions the Court has ever rendered. This has nothing to do with the merits of same sex marriage – maybe it is something we should do? But to apply laws written without the subject in mind is just asinine. Anchor babies and SSM were new subjects that no law, prior to them being brought up, covered. In the case of SSM, the Court should have ruled: sort it out via the political process. Because no law of the USA prior to the concept of SSM covered SSM – and this includes, of course, the Constitution of the USA which, being silent on the matter, leaves its resolution to the States, or the people. So, too, “anchor babies” – no law of the USA covers it, so any laws about it will have to be made on the fly and if you really want “anchor babies” to be American citizens because of the plot of dirt they were born on, amend the Constitution…don’t try to bootstrap it on to something never intended for it.

Assad’s regime in Syria has collapsed and the usual collection of Neo-Con warmongers and Liberal idiots is cheering. We pray for the people there and hope that we get a miracle…but what we’re likely to get is a massacre.

Good to keep in mind that Syria isn’t a country. It is a geographic expression. The people who reside in the borders of Syria are very different groups, some of whom hate each other with a passion. Assad is Alawite and his faction has dominated Syria since the early 1970s…as a sort of 3 million person Alawite Empire lording it over the other 22 million people there…though the Christians and Druze of Syria have tended to favor Alawite rule as it is far less oppressive than other Muslim rule (Alawites are a bit of a bizarre Muslim sect held by many Muslims to be heretical…some even consider them idolators). The Alawites were long heavily suppressed by other Muslims (especially the Turks during the Ottoman Empire) but when the French took over Syria in 1918, they tended to favor the Alawites and so, post-French rule, the Alawites were best positioned to take over.

As you can see just in that short paragraph, this isn’t going to be a cut and dried thing. The rebels are not fighting for a free Syria where are all afforded equal rights – they just want to be in charge. The only possible saving grace here is that the rebels are a coalition and maybe none of them are strong enough to totally dominate…that might provide some wiggle room to avoid disaster. But there is a massive danger that this is going to degenerate into tribal score-settling and that means Alawites, Christians and Druze are in for a very bad time.

I talked about this a few days ago – about how we live in the land of make-believe. And a price will now be extracted for the world pretending that Syria was a country…rather than several countries that want nothing to do with each other and so, upon independence, what should have done was to break it up into its ethnic components, including population transfers to avoid having oppressed minorities. Had the real world been lived in then what we call Syria today would be at least 5 nations including 1 Christian and 1 Druze and nobody would have been dying all this time. Side note: there is an even money chance that American intel people fostered this Assad collapse just to toss a problem for Trump to deal with.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan20 Comments

One of the sure signs of an impending political disaster for a political party is a series of articles explaining why in spite of everything going to heck in a hand basket, this time everything will be different. Getting a lot of these articles about the Democrats. The best so far was one which asserted that even in an R+1 environment, the Democrats can hold the House. Its like they’re ignoring that the GOP only needs a net gain of 6 to take the House. If it was D+4 this GOP takeover is likely to happen…but with Pudding Brain sitting at around 42% in the polling aggregates, the best outcome for the Democrats right now is a net loss of about 30.

And the really curious thing is that the Democrats don’t seem to fully realize what’s coming for them – I mean the stalwarts and the pundits. The Democrat leadership does, its why we’re up to something like 28 or 29 House Democrats calling it quits: who wants to fight a hard battle only to wind up in a very powerless House minority in 2023? And that minority gets more powerless all the time – both parties guilty (though Democrats far more guilty) of reducing the minority’s ability to affect legislation. And now in 2023 will come the tit for tat removal of Democrats from committees. I really can’t explain the Democrats on this – with a razor thin majority, the time was to try to co-opt at least some GOPers…nothing doing: it has been all hard left. Could be, of course, that with the narrow majority the far Left Democrats are insisting and Nancy really can’t do anything else.

We’ll see how it comes out – but I don’t think Democrats can talk their way out of bare shelves and high gas prices.

We did some sort of raid into Syria. Supposedly to kill some terrorist mastermind – they say we got him, and also got some kids. I think the bad guys are making sure they’re always around kids and other non-combatants. Seems to me that we should pay a hitman to take these guys out – less expensive and less chance of killing kids when we do it. It is probably illegal for us to do that – but Congress has the power to grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal (though some treaties we’ve engaged in limit that), and I think we should go that route – even if it means denouncing some treaties. Let our intel agencies name the guys we want dead, put a price on it and then grant a Letter of Marque to anyone who wants to give it a shot – bring us proof the target is dead, collect the money. You’re on your own – get caught or killed, nothing will be done for you. Plenty of people would take us up on the offer.

Facebook is losing users. It is the most irritating social media platform I’m on. I only retain my account because it allows me to keep track of family and friends. But I have been suspended for the most mild political jokes posted. And my account is small, which means some narc who knows me – or knows someone who knows me – is monitoring my posts and reporting me. Others are even more irritated than I am. Facebook has a choice: be a platform which allows people to talk, or die. Personally, I think they’re going to die: like the MSM, their cultural imperatives are such that they can’t change.

Think of Joe Rogan: he gets 11 million views for his podcast (I’ve never listened to it, myself). This is more than the top three cable news programs combined (all of which are on Fox). Listening to people who talk about him, he seems a left-of-center guy who just invites people on who he thinks have something interesting to say – you know, keep the show topical and interesting to draw and retain an audience. The rather “no duh” media model. All the MSM has to do to restore its viewership is do the same thing – stop being DNC lapdogs and just talk openly about things people might want to hear. Presto: eyeballs on screens. But they can’t seem to do it – they’ve gone with their usual method: trying to get Rogan banned. They managed to snooker (very easily, because they’re stupid) some aged, has-been recording artists to pull their music from Spotify (which carries Rogan) with a demand that Rogan goes, or they go. The funniest bit about this is David Crosby who made a fuss after Neil Young did…but it seems that neither Crosby nor Young own their music rights, having sold them in the past (presumptively after blowing all their money). But even if they could get their stuff off, Spotify is telling them to take a leap – Rogan is getting 11 million hits a show…Crosby is probably getting a few thousand hits a month.

Canadians have had it with Trudeau’s Covid restrictions and massive protests by Truckers are causing all sorts of trouble for the Canadian Ruling Class. With the workers uniting to resist oppression, the Socialists know what to do: take down the Truckers Go Fun Me account.

Meanwhile, Team Pudding Brain put out its latest Covid plan and it says…to pretty much keep on doing what we’re doing: useless mask and vaccine mandates. These mandates will only be followed by the Democrat governors already following them…GOP governors will continue to ignore them. The math here is very strange: to be sure, a segment of the population is still terrified of Covid. This is the Democrat base – especially white, upper class college educated females. You’ll still find them talking about being triple vaxxed and never stirring from home except at great need. But, seriously, how big a political constituency is this? It can’t be more than 15% of the population, tops. Everyone else is really getting rather done with it: as has been pointed out, if masks worked, then they would have worked a long time ago. After two years of wearing a face diaper everywhere if we still have Covid, then we ain’t getting rid of it. All the mandates do is please the cowardly and piss everyone else off.

And that is before you add in the hypocrisy – mask mandated California is about to host a maskless Super Bowl. You know, we can all see this – and see the politicians not wearing a mask (the LA Mayor was caught without one and seriously tried to sell us “I held my breath as I took the picture”). We know its all BS. We can’t imagine why some people are still living in a world where we have to “fight Covid”…and my bet is that when vote-counting time comes around, the number of people who will punish mandates will vastly exceed those thankful for them.

The Case for Diplomatic Can-Kicking

Mark Noonan14 Comments

In light of the cease-fire that Trump has negotiated in Syria, Ace has some interesting comments. Do read the whole thing, but this is what I’m thinking about:

Is everything fixed, then?

Let me answer that with a question: Is anything ever fixed?

When I was younger and less experienced — and had seen less war — I was a big believer in the Rumsfeld Doctrine, “if the problem seems unsolvable, enlarge it,” that is, don’t chew about the edges if chewing about the edges doesn’t solve things, but go for the whole sandwich if need be.

I also believed the empty Neocon slogans about appeasement and Hitler and Clinton “just kicking the can down the road” in Iraq.

The empty sloganeering went like this: If we don’t permanently solve our diplomatic/military crises once and for ever, then we’re just “kicking the can down the road” and deferring problems until later.

It is very difficult to permanently solve problem – by war or diplomacy. But if you can get the shooting to stop for a significant period of time and allow people to get on with their lives, you’ve done well. We don’t know what will come out of the Syria deal – the problem is most emphatically not solved because most Kurds live in Turkey and Iran and while this is so, at least a portion of the Kurd population will pine for unity with their brothers. But, maybe this deal with allow the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds to start building a life and, just perhaps, rising stability and wealth will make the Kurds outside Turkey less willing to tangle with the Turks? Who knows; and maybe in 5 or 10 years there will be another crisis…and if there is, our job will be to assess our interests and only if we feel there is something crucial concerning us should we offer more than our good offices.

Kicking the can down the road is also not entirely a bad thing. In 1878, the Great Powers of Europe were at loggerheads over what to do with Turkish territory conquered by the Russians in a recent war. Russia, the victor in the war, naturally wanted to have everything her own way. But Austria and Britain weren’t keen on Russian domination in the Balkans. The Germans were at cross purposes because they were trying to keep on good terms with both Russia and Austria. Turkey, naturally, wanted to recover the lost territories. In the end, the British Prime Minister Disreali brokered a settlement which gave Russia some of what she wanted but not total domination of the Balkans.

What is interesting at the time was that the Austrian government was a bit divided on what to do – some arguing for peace even if Russia got advantage, others wanting war to the knife to push the Russians back. The “war to the knife” side saw that whatever deal was made, if it didn’t totally push Russia out, it would just be kicking the can down the road. That the basic problem would remain and would eventually flare up again. And, they were right. The 1914 war was started in roughly the same area and over roughly the same issue: who was to dominate the Balkans? An argument could have been made that the issue should have been fought to a finish in 1878 rather than 1914 – but, had it happened in 1878 then it doesn’t mean that peace and reason would then become triumphant. The aftermath of the actual war to the knife is now known and it isn’t pretty. But by making peace in 1878, the peoples of Europe were spared a major war for 36 years. That is quite a long time, actually. It was a pity that when 1914 came there were no Statesmen of the stature of Disreali (nor any generals who could win the war quickly), but who could foresee that? But even if someone had negotiated an 11th hour agreement in 1914 (as they did the year before in 1913 after the Balkan nations had fought Turkey), it still wouldn’t have solved the problem. Until Russia surrendered her desire for domination of the Balkans, war was always a prospect in the area.

As Ace also points out, World War Two is a bit unique. We were clearly attacked out of the blue and without just cause. Our enemy in Hitler was a purely evil man who had to be destroyed. And we unleashed unlimited power against the enemy – the destruction we wrought was only limited by our capacity to deliver it to the enemy. Had the war in Europe gone on past August of 1945, then Berlin would have been nuked rather than Hiroshima. The level of violence was really astonishing – especially after the allied armies broke into Germany. It is fairly well known how the Russians behaved – and orgy of rape, murder and pillage – but less well known is what the Anglo-American and French forces did. There wasn’t the mass rape and murder that accompanied the Russian invasion (though the French – via their Algerian troops – did permit a great deal of rape as revenge for German rapes in France) but the slightest resistance was met with overwhelming firepower; a great deal of looting went on; Germans were kicked out of their houses to provide billets for allied soldiers. It was a crushing, overwhelming defeat – a defeat so complete that the militarist Germans simply gave up on the concept. But, such a thing is unlikely to repeat itself: both in having such a purely evil enemy and having a political situation where ruthless application of power is possible.

So, can kicking isn’t a completely wrong thing to do. In fact, it is probably the best we can accomplish in most circumstances. With the hope that if its kicked far enough, it will be replaced by some other problem down the road. Because until the End, there will always be problems. There will always be people who feel they have been cheated and/or who think they have a right to someone else’s belongings. Because of this, war will always be in prospect and will, at times, break out. Our job is to permanently have a military ready to fight and then first try our hardest to broker a settlement and, failing that, give the enemy such a lesson about American power that they’ll shy away from trying it a second time. Other than that, we can only wait and see what happens and then deal with it as it arises.

In light of this, permanent alliances and international bodies are a blind ally: they commit us to certain actions even though future events might make a mockery of our commitment. Think about Turkey: suppose we had decided to fight them? Well, as they are NATO allies, that would technically require Spain to go to war against us in defense of their NATO ally Turkey. We hope for friendship – or at least tolerable relations – with all nations; but we can never tell what the future will bring. And, so, we can’t tie our hands in advance – we have to be free to decide as situations arise how we will deal with them.

They say we had to get into NATO and the UN because the world was changing and this is what we needed – but precisely because the world is changing (and always has and always will) it was wrong to get into them. It is time for us to disentangle ourselves and just move forward on the path which seems best to us at the time. It is time, that is, to start kicking the can down the road rather than rushing to war.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan61 Comments

Trump pulls our tiny number of troops out of part of northern Syria and all of a sudden, all of Trump’s opponents are pro-war. Ain’t fallin’ for it, guys.

As I said back when Obama was President, I’ve become quite the peace-nik – mostly because of complete lack of trust. I do trust President Trump’s basic instincts here, but overall I don’t trust our government, our military brass or the Democrats when it comes to war. The lives of our troops are too important for them to be thrown away on unclear, endless missions where we surrender all our military advantages and then haul up our troops on charges of war crimes when they make what some REMF thinks is a mistake. I’ll agree to send our troops to war on the following conditions:

1. It is declared.
2. It is fought with brutal and unlimited use of our military force.
3. This is very important to me – we inform all and sundry that when dealing with captured irregulars and hostile “civilian” populations, we’re going to use Rule .303.

The Trump impeachment circus goes on – from what I can tell, Schiff all but wrote the “whistleblower” complaint and as that is falling apart, the Democrats are cooking up a second “whistleblower” to shore up their collapsing case. Meanwhile, various DOJ investigators seem to be closing in on the whole start of the scandal – you know, back in 2016 when the O Admin authorized spying on Trump – and this is getting more and more people into a panic. None of can say where this goes, but I’m feeling confident that Trump (and McConnell) have a very firm grip on this and they are planning on using impeachment – if the Democrats do go for it – as a hammer in 2020.

Dick’s got woke and went broke – but don’t think that will deter them. The only thing an American corporation fears these days is offending the Chinese government. Dick’s made its anti-gun SJW move because it was, socially, cost-free for them. We have to make it economically expensive for corporations to indulge in this sort of thing – only then will they cool it.

Ellen DeGeneres was in the box at a football game with W and the left went ballistic. Ellen made a statement about how its ok for people to disagree and still be kind to each other. That isn’t sitting at all well with the left:

“Avengers” star Mark Ruffalo certainly agreed, saying kindness was out of the question until Bush was brought to justice.

Got that? Brought to justice…for the crime of being a moderately conservative Republican. And this is what Ellen – conventional American liberal – and W – conventional American conservative – don’t get: the left hates. It is what it does, first and foremost and above all else. For every Ellen there are a dozen liberals who’s fondest hope is to see people like us suffer. We could get along with – and often split the difference – with liberals who don’t hate, but such are not remotely in control of the left. We have to defeat these people – drive them from power and take away their subsidies. And we won’t be able to do that if we’re all pretending – as conventional conservatism has – that the left is run by sane people.

The brownouts in California afford us, I think, an opportunity to start rebuilding Republican strength in California. California is horribly misgoverned and this power outage thing just highlights how bad it is there. Trump has commented on it – to the fury of California Democrats – but I’m hoping that someone on Team Trump is really looking at the State to for any election prospects. Certainly it is worth it simply to run up the GOP vote total and thus help Trump win the popular vote (not that it matters, but that it’ll be a fitting and final insult to the Democrats) – but, long term, we can’t rely on Texas forever…and Californians are our fellow Americans (well, most of them, anyway) and we should be working to free them from liberal tyranny and malfeasance.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan34 Comments

Robert Stacy McCain offers some sage advice for any young men out there seeking female companionship.

I’ll add a small note: I definitely fall into the bottom 15% (read it, you’ll understand), but if there are any youngsters out there reading this, I’ll double down on McCain’s advice about having a self-deprecating sense of humor. It is very useful! When you really do it right, a lady will think you’re charming. That goes a long way.

Seal the deal by learning how to cook.

Democrats are already lining up to run against Trump. Illustrative of how this will go is Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI). She’s as liberal as the day is long but deep in her background was a time when she wasn’t full-blown liberal. Because of these past heresies, she’s being mercilessly savaged in the liberal world. Mark my words: for 2020, the left – which controls who gets the Democrat nomination – will not settle for anything less than an Absolute Not Trump. Their nominee will have to sign off on the very latest iteration of whatever it is the left is hating Trump about, no matter how obscure or silly it is. If someone on the left makes an accusation against Trump, everyone who wants to be the Democrat nominee will have to subscribe to it. It’ll get really interesting.

In re the Wall and Shutdown, Don Surber notes that Trump Hatred has trapped the Democrats – they hate him so much they are fighting over an amount of money that is so small, it works out to a rounding error. Earlier, I happened to overhear someone conversing with another about the mess – the person doing most of the talking was apparently married to a furloughed worker and went on and on and on about what a bad man Trump was, how stupid the wall was, blah, blah, blah. What was remarkable, to me, was that the other party – while clearly having no love for Trump – kept pushing back and insisting that the wall was necessary because the border does have to be controlled. I think we’re seeing that dynamic play out nationwide: the Democrats just keep repeating their talking points, but it is blowing right past non-Democrats because everyone can see the fight is about nearly nothing and, what the heck, why not build the wall? I think Trump will win this – only a craven surrender by the Senate GOP could derail us, and I don’t think Cocaine Mitch is in the mood to surrender.

It’s a poll from a Libertarian outfit (and, so, probably skewed anti-war), but it shows that the American people largely back Trump’s withdrawal from Syria. I’d have to look it up for how long ago I wanted us to withdraw from the Middle East, entirely: but it was a while back ago. Long before Trump. I did, of course, back the war in Iraq but I thought at the time – given Bush’s “axis of evil” bit – that it was a mere precursor to war with the actual source of the Middle East problem: Iran. I would have had it – Iraq, then Syria/Lebanon…and, then, if Iran hadn’t collapse, on to Tehran to finish the job. A swift moving series of military actions, with no fussing about nation building (I’d prefer we just find local strongmen and let them rule the locals, backed by our force), would have rocked the enemy on his heels and, also, prevented an anti-war left from really coalescing. Bush decided to do it differently, likely on the advice of people at State and Defense. I don’t think the American people are anti-war, as such, but they are anti-war-forever. They are anti-no-victory. They are anti-wasting-time-and-lives. If we go to war, we should go all the way. And if we can’t see our way to that, we should just stay home.

Withdrawing from Syria: Why is War Not the Answer?

Mark Noonan8 Comments

President Trump announced today that we will be pulling our ground forces (from what I understand, about 2,000 troops) out of Syria. His stated reason is that ISIS is wrecked and that was the only reason we were there.

This announcement set off a great deal of fury from both the left and the right. Some, in keeping with their Trump-Russia delusions, claimed this was Trump selling out Syria to the Russians as part of Trump’s stooge requirements. Others left off that notion, but still claimed our withdrawal would be a foreign policy disaster for the United States…Iran and Russia will prevail in Syria; Turkey will be strengthened against the Kurds; allies around the world will mistrust our commitment. So on and so on. As for me, I agree with the President’s decision.

First and foremost, President Trump did only go into Syria to get rid of ISIS. That’s what he said in 2016 and that’s what he’s done as President. To be sure, you can still find ISIS groups floating around the maelstrom of Syria, but the bottom line is that the fierce, ISIS regime of 2016 is no more. They are now just another set of rag-tag Islamist rabble running around Syria, killing for Lord only knows what real reason. Unless we wanted to start going village to village and simply killing everyone we think is ISIS-related, we were never going to get entirely rid of every last bit of ISIS. And Trump never said we were there to settle the Syrian civil war, nor to rebuild Syria. The job Trump set, as far as we can do it, is done. Time to come home.

But beyond that there is something we must understand and it should govern our choice on whether or not to engage in war: we, the United States of America, are not allowed to win a war. Not under the current global and national political reality. Both at home and abroad, the people who set the pace for military affairs have decreed, perhaps without really knowing it (but maybe they do?), that when the United States engages in military action, final victory may not be achieved. We are not allowed to compel an enemy surrender. We are not allowed to kill them without remorse to compel their surrender. We are not allowed to punish them, post-conflict, for putting us through the trouble. We are allowed to fight, and to die, and to have our bravest hauled up on war crimes charges…but we are not allowed to win.

And if you can’t win a war, you best not fight it.

I’m probably starting to bore most of you with this movie, but I just keep coming back to this clip from Breaker Morant about the problem we find ourselves in:

That is our problem in a nutshell: for a long while, now, we’ve been operating our warfare under the theory that some rules, first cooked up in the 19th century, govern the conduct of war while everyone we have fought in the past century has routinely ignored those rules. The rules were an attempt to humanize war – which is akin to an attempt to humanize hell. To be sure, there are rules to war and anyone familiar with military history knows that the greatest captains (Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon) all found clemency to be a mighty engine of war. But the bottom line is that even the most wise, kindly and far-seeing military commander knows that what he’s trying to do is compel people to do what they don’t wish to do. They also knew that while no good commander seeks to win via blood, a commander must still be willing to pour out blood in whatever amount proves necessary for victory.

Part of our problem is that we’re colored with our experiences of the Nazis. But, to me, there is a bit of a mistake in our perception. What the Nazis did to make themselves purely evil had nothing to do with war – we call them war crimes, but they were really just crimes, as such. In fact, the crimes they committed during the war directly harmed their own war effort. The actual war crimes committed by the Nazis were when they did things like shoot American POWs. What they did to the Jews, though, was only incidentally connected to the war. The Nazis did that because they adhered to evil and wanted to do bad things – whether or no there was a war, the Nazis still would have been inhuman garbage. Another aspect of this is that we put the Nazis on trial rather than just shooting them like the mad dogs they were. And we compounded that error by allowing Communist Russians to join us in trying the Nazis, as if a Communist had the least understanding of what law and justice entail. Since then, we’ve had lots of people refer to the rules and seek ever for another Nuremburg Trial…and as they can’t well put on trial Jihadist who would die rather than surrender themselves to a court, they just keep putting on trial our troops…accusing them of war crimes for what any historian knows are just the routine actions of a battlefield.

And, so, our inability to win – we are prevented from it. We could easily win in Syria – and by that I mean kill or disarm everyone there and dictate a settlement as we think best. It would take some years to do it. It would require an army of at least 100,000. And it would require, in the beginning, lots and lots of killing. What you might even consider massacres because if we really applied the full force of American might, then you would have battles where several thousand of the enemy die and only a few, perhaps no, American casualties. Think of it like this: suppose there was identified a town of 10,000 in Syria as a place where enemy forces are hiding/recruiting/training/what have you. Under the way we do things, today, we’d send in groups of men to root out the enemy house by house, always taking care to do as little physical damage as possible and only shooting when we have high confidence that there is an enemy. The way war is actually fought, we’d just surround the place and, depending on how much a hurry we were in, starve them into surrender or blow the place to pieces until the shell-shocked survivors came out with their hands in the air.

There would be children there who would be killed: not a war crime.
There would be non-combatants who would be killed: not a war crime.
There would be objects of cultural significance destroyed: not a war crime.

As I said, a war crime is something you done wrong in the conduct of the war. You know: shooting unarmed prisoners. A crime against humanity would be something along the lines of massacring the population of a town after it surrendered. But starving people into surrendering or blowing them to pieces if they don’t surrender quickly enough: that is just how war is fought. And if you capture a guy you suspect to be an irregular combatant – well, if getting him to talk requires some rather brutal treatment, then he should feel grateful if that’s all he suffers: an irregular combatant’s life is forfeit upon capture. That is a rule of war.

Now, you take all that and then add into the mix the fact that we have those in the United States who will seek to use any distasteful action, any failure, against their own country in order to advance their political fortunes, and you’ve got, well, what we have now…troops being sent to fight; getting them stuck in shooting galleries…and then having them hauled up on murder charges if they survive. No, thanks. If that is how war is to be, then count me a peace activist. Unless and until we get to a place where we can fight a war how it is supposed to be fought and have at least some reliance that no one back home will try to make partisan hay out of the blood of the dead, then I want no part of war. I don’t want our young men and women shoved into that. It isn’t worth their blood.

So, hats off to President Trump for just doing what he said he’d do.

And, now, it is high time we got out of Afghanistan, as well.

The Middle East is Changing

Mark Noonan24 Comments

So, Iranian forces in Syria attacked Israeli targets and Israel, naturally, responded – a big thing and important in itself, but this struck me:

Bahrain has backed Israel’s right to “defend itself”, following dozens of Israeli airstrikes on Iranian military targets in Syria overnight.

Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid al-Khalifa said on Thursday that it backed Tel Aviv’s military response to attempted Iranian missile strikes on an Israeli army base, early Thursday morning, in the occupied Golan Heights.

“As long as Iran has breached the status quo in the region and invaded countries with its forces and missiles, so any state in the region, including Israel, is entitled to defend itself by destroying sources of danger,” the minister, whose country is a close ally of Saudi Arabia, said on his official Twitter account…

Bahrain is a tiny country and is allied with Saudi Arabia mostly for protection against Iran. So, no surprise that Bahrain would be pleased to see Iran harmed, but it is massively surprising that an official of the Bahrain government would publicly declare Israel – which, officially in most Muslim countries, doesn’t even exist – has a right to self-defense. This is a sea-change in Arab attitudes.

What I think has really broken the log-jam here is the fact that Trump pretty much dropped the Palestinian issue like a bad habit. As long as our actions in the Middle East were always tied to a theory that we had to remain somewhat neutral in the Arab-Israeli conflict – and thus had to pretend that the Palestinian leadership was a key element – we were tied to a false idea, and thus couldn’t really move. Trump moved; now, everyone is moving. Its been a couple decades since anyone in the Arab world really gave a darn about the Palestinians and while no one would object to a permanent peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, everyone with any sense at all knows the Palestinian leadership has staked out an impossible position (return to the 1967 border, return of “refugees” to Israel and, of course, still rhetoric about marching on Tel Aviv one day), and so there’s no chance of it right now. So, let’s move on until the Palestinian leadership changes.

And as people are able to move on – as people no longer have to pretend that a few fanatics in Gaza have to be appeased in order to do anything – the political realities which have existed at least since the Iranian revolution are rising to the surface…and are being dealt with. I’m not saying they are being dealt with properly – there’s a lot of confusion and an outsider like me really can’t judge all that well – but they are being dealt with. Saudi Arabia is determined to check Iran (wise move, Saudi Arabia) and in that effort, ignoring a powerful Israel which is also determined to check Iran would be foolish. I think we’re still a ways away from an Israeli Embassy in Riyadh…but I don’t think that far away. The times, they are a-changing…and it is Trump, the Agent of Change on Steroids, who is making it happen.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan47 Comments

President Trump is moving ahead on Welfare reform…which really works out, in the end, to undoing Obama’s un-reform of Welfare.

Everyone says the GOP is doomed in November. Poll results; levels of voter enthusiasm; all those special election victories for the Dems; numerous GOP retirements (especially of Speaker Ryan) all indicate that the historical norm of the party in power getting clobbered in its first mid-term will happen. Hard to argue with all that – but, I do. So does Da Tech Guy, who gives seven reasons 2018 may be different from 2010.

My view remains that Donald Trump has fundamentally altered the electoral dynamic of the United States. We’ll find out if I’m right in November – though 2020 will also play it’s role. My main contention is that people are abandoning the Democrats. This started right around 2014 as the reality of Obama fully sunk in, and Democrats – supremely confident that they would never lose the White House and could ignore Congress – went ever further left not just in their ideology, but in how they presented their ideology (meaning, there was less and less effort on the part of the Democrats to disguise what they wanted…they were more and more openly proclaiming the socialist future they envisioned). Do the American people want identity politics, amnesty for illegals, gun control, tax increases and the impeachment of Donald Trump? As I said, we’ll find out – but my guess is that the number of Democrats in the country is a lot smaller than it was before and that even though Democrats are at a fever pitch (they’re pouring money into the Texas Senate race, for crying out loud: that’s just stupid. They need that money in Missouri…but the far left hates Cruz), there simply won’t be enough of them in November in the State and districts that matter. Stay tuned.

Senator Warren set up the CFPB to be outside Constitutional controls – now she’s mad that its outside Constitutional controls. As I have said, Democrats thought they’d never lose the White House again.

Donald Surber gives his thoughts on Trump and Syria. My view: don’t go in unless we declare war. If we’re saying that a government using WMD’s against its own people is an act of war against us, then go ahead and declare war. Mobilize the reserves; appropriate the money; raise the taxes and send the boys over to compel an unconditional surrender. If we’re not willing to do that, I don’t want to do it.

Alan Dershowitz’ advice is not to fire Mueller, but to have Rosenstein recuse himself. It is an interesting idea. But, I still say Fire Mueller.

Once Again, We Have to “Do Something” in Syria

Mark Noonan34 Comments

There was a gas attack in Syria – everyone is pointing fingers, but the most likely culprit is the Assad regime or elements aligned with it. Personally, I don’t care who did it – some set of bastards, who are fighting other bastards for control over the rubble of a nation. But, its a gas attack and we’re all supposed to wring our hands and demand something be done.

I’m not so interested in doing something.

The reason is because we’re not allowed to win. That has been the problem since the end of World War Two: the United States has been strictly prohibited from winning any wars. There are a lot of things which go into this prohibition, but the primary thing I can see is that the Ruling Class of the world – including that part of it which is allegedly American – doesn’t want us to win. It is too scary for them.

People don’t realize how powerful we are. To be sure, there is a vague memory of World War Two in there, but even in that, the full extent of our power is not understood. When the Japanese signed the official surrender document on September 3rd, 1945, we had been at war for not quite three years and 9 months. We had, in that time, increased our Army from about 200,000 men to 11,200,000. We had already built 162 Fletcher class destroyers, 58 Sumner class destroyers and had started work on 98 of what were to be 152 Gearing class destroyers. We had built 24 Essex class carriers and were starting on the Midway class (just FYI, that class of carriers, designed in WWII, were used by the United States until 1992). During WWII, the Air Force went from 800 planes to 80,000. And here’s the real thing: our power was still waxing when the Japanese surrendered. We hadn’t really begun to impose our full power. It would have been 1946 or 1947 before we were able to do so (like this: you might have seen the Band of Brothers series…but please note those men got into the military in 1942 and their first combat action was more than two years later: it takes a while. Most of those who went in from mid-1943 on didn’t see much action). So, even without maxing out our effort, we still managed to fight and win to major conflicts on different sides of the world against first class powers. We were the only nation in the world in 1945 that could do that.

We still are.

Militarily, we are a lot weaker than we were 25 years ago – but we still have 11 fleet carriers; 9 amphibious assault ships; 53 attack and 14 ballistic missile subs; 22 cruisers, 66 destroyers; 950 self propelled guns; nearly 1,200 mobile rocket launchers; more than 150,000 transport vehicles; 2,300 main battle tanks; 6,100 armored combat vehicles; 155 heavy bombers; 1,700 fighters…you know, quite a lot. And with Trump’s new defense budget, we’re about to get a whole bunch more. No other nation on Earth has quite so much, nor the capacity to build so much. A direct attack on the United States amounts to national suicide…and yet here we are, about to send kids to Afghanistan next year or the year after who weren’t even born when 9/11 happened. Why?

Because we’re not allowed to win. Think about it. Do you really think a few thousand Jihadist/drug dealers could really withstand us for 17 years if we were serious about winning? Its not like the Taliban has an armaments industry – someone is sending them weapons and ammunition. We’re not doing anything about that. We also know where they are, and yet we don’t really go out and get them (the US military which dug the Japanese out of Iwo Jima is quite capable of dragging the Taliban out of whatever caves they are hiding in). And now people are calling for us to go deeper into Syria…but you just know they will be the first to complain if we ever used the sort of force which victory requires.

As I was saying, people in charge are afraid of our power – afraid, that is, that if the American people found out how very powerful they are, they might go on a bender of conquest. At the very least, we wouldn’t give a damn what anyone says about us. We simply wouldn’t have to care what the world says…and an America like that is just what the Ruling Class doesn’t want. They don’t trust us. The wars have to be controlled; America has to be controlled; if America isn’t harnessed, then things like the UN won’t work. See where all this goes?

So, the heck with it. No war in Syria – not unless we are allowed to win. If Trump gets up there and says we’re going in for victory and we’re not going to give a damn what the world says about us, then I’ll say “ok, we go”. But absent that, I just want us to stay out of it. I don’t want to see the picture of a 19 year old kid who got blown to pieces in a fruitless battle because some REMF saw a picture which gave him the sadz. Enough is enough.

Syria Strike

Mark Noonan21 Comments

Just was watching Twitter for an extended period of time tonight – astonished at the wide variety of heart felt, differing opinions about it. Some Trumpsters upset, some Never Trumpers finding a strange, new respect for Trump. Honest questions. Sincere hopes. Support for the troops without cheap rah-rah patriotism. It was refreshing.

I don’t know what will come of this – I’m not sure I support the action (though I support the actions of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, of course). I hope there is a plan behind all this – there could be, and it might work out to a brilliant stroke of diplomacy backed by military force (the only sort of diplomacy which actually works, by the way). We’ll just have to see.