Kilcullen vs Sullivan
Barack Obama says he won’t be rushed into making a decision about Afghanistan. The New York Times reports that Obama wants to show that whatever he decides, whenever he decides it, that he has considered all of the options carefully. “President Obama has not made a decision about his new military strategy for Afghanistan. And the White House is happy to say so.”
The White House has been eager to show that Mr. Obama is engaged in extensive deliberations before making what is likely to be one of the most debated decisions of his presidency. Drawing on studies of how decisions were made to escalate the war in Vietnam, Mr. Obama and his aides seem intent on showing the nation and the world that he is not being rushed by the military, nor making a judgment without considering the long-term implications.
However, one of the men who played a key intellectual role in formulating the counterinsurgency plan in Iraq says that President Obama’s indecision is risking a disaster on the scale of the Suez debacle not only for the US, but for NATO. The Guardian reports:
David Kilcullen, one of the world’s leading authorities on counter-insurgency and an adviser to the British government as well as the US state department, said Obama’s delay in reaching a decision over extra troops had been “messy”. He said it not only worried US allies but created uncertainty the Taliban could exploit.
Speaking in an interview with the Guardian, he compared the president to someone “pontificating” over whether to send enough firefighters into a burning building to put a fire out. …
Kilcullen expressed concern that Obama might deny McChrystal the 40,000 extra troops and split the difference between the four options, the kind of fudge common in domestic politics.
“Time is running out for us to make a decision. We can either put in enough troops to control the environment or we can credibly communicate our intention to leave. Either could work. Splitting the difference is not the way to go,” Kilcullen said.
“It feels to me that all these options are dangerously close to the middle ground and we have to consider whether the middle ground is a good place to be. The middle ground is a good place on domestic issues, but not on strategy. You either commit to D-Day and invade the continent or you get Suez. Half-measures end up with Suez. Do it or not do it.”
But Andrew Sullivan calls the inentional delays proof “that we have a President”. In his view the President is imposing a “relentless empiricism” on the decision-making process.
The news that Obama has refused to sign off on any of the four major options presented to him in Afghanistan reminds me of why he was elected president. This critical decision – arguably the most critical of his young presidency – is one that will not be rushed the way such decisions often are. His insistence that the civilian branch truly control policy there and that empire not be passively accepted as a fait accompli are real signs of strength in the struggle to recalibrate American foreign policy. Can you imagine Bush ever holding out like this on the military?
One of the real reasons why Kilcullen’s Habemus Pablum may be more correct than Andrew Sullivan’s Habemus Papa is that Barack Obama is reviewing his own policy. In March 2009 the long time critic of the White House during the Bush administration drew on his insights and an extensive policy review which he commissioned to announce his own Afghan Policy, which can viewed verbatim here. It begins with these dramatic words:
Good morning. Today, I am announcing a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This marks the conclusion of a careful policy review that I ordered as soon as I took office. My Administration has heard from our military commanders and diplomats. We have consulted with the Afghan and Pakistani governments; with our partners and NATO allies; and with other donors and international organizations. And we have also worked closely with members of Congress here at home. Now, I’d like to speak clearly and candidly to the American people. … So let me be clear …
… has now subtly altered itself to ‘let me be clear that I am going to think carefully about revising my own plan’. Gerard Vanderleun observes that President Obama is being hailed in the left-wing blogosphere as a cool and supremely rational President who will not be rushed into doing anything but asks, how can we distinguish from mere dithering or worse, the infliction of a death by a thousand cuts on the US expeditionary enterprise?
Veterans of dysfunctional corporations will recognize the Obama style as the one in which upper management is fond of giving middle management “All the responsibility, none of the authority, and zero resources.” It’s a time-tested recipe for failure and demoralization while maintaining an aloof, “concerned,” and above the fray posture on the part of the CEO. It is what is being done to the US military, day in and day out, in Afghanistan and, as such, works to Obama’s favor as long as it can be done slowly and without alarm.
The spectacle of the Obama taking months to understand what is wrong with his own painstakingly crafted handiwork himself might appear “Presidential” to Andrew Sullivan, but it does raise the question of why after taking months to get it wrong we should have any confidence that Barack Obama should do any better now. One possibiity that must surely be considered, and yet which has been ruled out of bounds, is that the decision maker himself is incompetent. But that’s for him to judge, it seems. Sullivan conclusion that Obama’s application of “relentless empiricism” has broadened his mind and led even him to think that “the troop question is rather like the public option question” makes you wonder whether there isn’t some fundamental problem of context that is being missed.
Just kidding.
embedded by Embedded VideoYouTube Direkt
..We elected a man who doesn’t take decision making lightly….he doesn’t make them at all. He outwaits decisions until events overtake him and the decision ” makes itself “. This rot will spread downward to the lowest levels who will learn to sit on their hands and wait. Those who use initiative will be crushed.
..Obungle is Uncle Joe in July of 1941. When a Soviet frontline unit reported the German attack, the reply they got was ” Why isn’t this in code ? ” Why indeed.
“the troop question is rather like the public option question.”
In the sense that you kick the can down the road, create the illusion of activity, get your base to sign on, and create dissention and confusion in the daily reality of providing care to patients as well as the objectives we have in Af/Pak, I have to agree with Sully. It’s relentless something or another, to be sure – if he wants to call this empiricism, I would question what the objectives are. I suspect this leads directly to an empirical objective that no man knows outside the head of Barack Obama.
Those words can, of course, be code for something entirely different. I must, once more, defer to the wisdom of Inigo Montoya.
“You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.” (paraphrased)
I can appreciate one’s desire to make sure the project is adequately thought through — but now I am getting the feeling they want every last speck of flying dust in Afghanistan to be charted out in an MS Project file.
One of the things I am hearing is that W took time to plan the Iraqi Surge and therefore we need to give O the time he needs. I am not all that aware of how long the Iraqi surge was debated in public — but I am having a hard time imagining it was this long or this back and forth. Nor am I aware that W announced the surge and then decided to put it on hold and think it over for some longer amount of time.
I agree with Kilcullen that hemming and hawing over this sends a bad signal. Maybe Andrew Sullivan will be happy over this dithering and so too the Taliban.
When I get indecisive over a decision I find myself going with the safe decision rather than the one presenting higher risk. My guess is Obama is going to go with the safe decision and that for a politician is a muddled one that attempts to appease all sides. So, he sends more troops but sets up the mission that focuses on the construction & humanitarian aid aspects of COIN but neglects the stick part.
Andrew has turned himself into a sniveling toady. He is no longer thoughtful, he has lost all objectivity. He went from the extremist “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t” for George Bush…to “exalted if you do, and exalted if you don’t…and Nobel Prize if you might”.
The administration has been dithering, frittering away time and dawdling, because they know as much about appropriate military responsiveness as a tree sloth knows about drag racing.
Tough talk from a leftist is best suited when they are trying to strip away freedom of speech rights from non-leftists. You can’t guilt trip the Taliban and al Qaeda with threats of being shunned from after parties during the Oscars.
And there are no lies and distortions that the state-controlled media can cast upon jihadists that is worse than what the truth would cast upon them. In fact, it would run completely counter to the narrative that they have “root causes” for their “torment”…that WE have inspired.
The campaign “red meat rhetoric” of invading Pakistan and “getting fully into the RIGHT war”…has now turned the corner. Reality has the administration in full mincing and prancing mode, shadow boxing with showy feints of fancy, and deliberations on whether to wear the green satin short short trunks with the white trim or the hot pink culottes with the mauve trim and the matching espadrilles.
Meanwhile, back in Waziristan…
Please don’t call Andrew Sullivan an Irishman. I don’t know what the heck he is, but the Irish don’t deserve him.
The ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry is undermining the Afghan government by questioning its legitimacy, a very old leftist tactic to assist the establishment of a hostile tyranny. A Third World government is compared to a Western European social democracy, and found wanting- so it has to be abandoned. Is Karzai better than the Taliban? I would think so but that is not the point, the point is the left wants the Taliban to win. Eikenberry is an Army man, you protest, but the Army is a rather liberal organization and he is taking the post-Vietnam Army position of “let’s not do this one.”
This piece of wisdom I learned from an old war movie, seen on tv: “Not making a decision is also a decision and it’s the worst decision you can make.” Sometimes, when not in a war zone, not making a decision may be the right decision
“Obama has refused to sign off on any of the four major options…”
Oh, Lord, I saw so much of this when I was at the Pentagon. Present the options and they don’t like any of them. And that’s your fault for not coming up with better options. I call this SFOS – “Search for the Optimum Solution” – and it is both endless and paralyzing. They want something that is perfect, satisfies all the special interests, can’t fail in a manner that is traceable to them, and does not cost any money. Notice how well our space launch development efforts have gone for the past 40 years? SFOS at work!
“…split the difference between the four options….” Yes indeed, another winning DC approach! If you don’t know whether to bomb the enemy or drop them MREs you do a little of both, preferably using the same aircraft on the same missions.
What is astonishing is that in this Administration that promised “change” and was touted as being an “outsider” to DC, all of the old tried and true failure-assured methods are being trotted out. I really don’t know whether this is because the Obama Admin is just a bunch of old DC hands “doin’ what comes nacherly” or if these guys are stupid enough to think they invented this tired old crap.
I think the bigger problem is that Afghanistan is not being debated at all. It has been cut loose from its strategic context. There are variables — like Pakistan — whose inner workings are either unknown or hidden from the public eye. There are diplomatic discussions with Iran, Russia and NATO which the public is not privity to. And McChrystal has been largely kept from testifying before others. In other words, there is a lot of information out there with regard to the framework of the decision and the variables of interest which is not even being aired.
To say that that Obama is imposing a lengthy process and therefore applying an unremitting empiricism is more a statement of belief than one which can be invested with any meaning. It’s like saying the sausage is in the sausage-grinder. About all we can conclude. We know nothing about the ingredients or even the kind of sausage that is being made until it is finally served up on a plate.
But here’s the thing. It is already recycled sausage. The ingredients going in were outputs of Obama’s earlier sausage-grinding. You know, the one which emphasized wars of necessity, Afghan elections, Richard Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton? Read his speech, it’s all there. Now we have the same sausage maker cranking ever more slowly.
Sullivan may be content to declare “c’est magnifique” and smack his lips in anticipation. All I can say is it is being made by the same cook who produced what you have now tipped into the trash, so best wait and see.
The dithering reaches back into his (few) days in the Senate where he was, if I recall correctly, he was on the AfPak Committee. If you consider Obama’s life story you will see that he has never made a hard decision, never taken the rocky road of righteousness. He puts off decisions, gets his political opponents disqualified on a technicality, or discredits his opponent with by throwing slimeballs.
His crisis in this case is that whatever he decides will be scrutinized publicly, and at least half of the public are going to cry “Foul!”. He has spent most of his life voting “Present” and now, like it or not, he is at the desk where the buck stops. He lacks the moral compass and mental discipline to see the right path and will now spend time (and lives) pushing this decision through what amounts to a “commitee of experts” so that any blame goes to the commitee and any credit (however unlikely) is his to own.
The worst of it all is the millions of Afghans will be dropped back into the bloody hands of Medieval barbarians and the lives lost by the soldiers there will have gone for naught.
You’re right. The Irish should be left out of this.
Outstanding post, plus your comment #8, wretchard.
Now, I rant on related topics.
Andrew Sullivan calls it, “relentless empiricism”? Of course this is a complete misuse of the term ‘empiricism’, but it’s some kind of attempt to value what the left has as its ideal, a completely free and unanchored intellectualism – as if such a thing were not an oxymoron. Free and unanchored from decisions made just yesterday, apparently, as you so trenchantly point out. Offhand, I can think of no historical precedent for thinking this ever works, but then Obama’s entire career is academia and various theaters of Chicago politics, grievance-mongering and thuggish behaviors, what works has never, ever been his concern, and does not seem to be so now.
(and I suppose if I were to have a quibble about your post – paying any attention at all to Andrew Sullivan might have been a mistake)
Along these lines, the decision this morning to bring KSM to New York City for a civilian trial, is being ranted about by Rush this morning, and he makes a good point. Since KSM has confessed – and could have been executed in military custody on that basis – what is the point of this trial – but to put US procedures on trial, and even further than Rush has suggested – maybe even give the Troofers a forum. Does this decision “work”? No. More street theater. And perhaps, since we know that KSM was waterboarded, perhaps as a fruit of the poisonous tree, we must need to free KSM, apologize to him, and pay him blood money for what we have done to him?
I don’t think Obama is going to put any troops into Afghanistan, because I don’t think Obama believes in or wishes to wage a war against terrorism, and that is because I believe he doesn’t want to defend this country against terrorist attack.
I could go on doing this sort of regressive argument, but what’s the point? The only thing good about the present administration is that what you see is what you get: there is no attempt to hide anything. E.g., Obama wants to redistribute income to keep the “relative deprivation” people happy, and that shows up in his health plan and the cap-and-trade business. Obama simply wants to attack his political enemies–i.e., he operates on the leftist model that says that America is a collection of “good” political interest groups, and “bad” political interest groups and the only good use of the powers of government is to destroy the latter in order to advance the former.
I believe that all the effort spent on second-guessing Obama’s thinking is a waste of time, because Obama’s already done his thinking and now he’s doing his doing: the only question for me is how long is it going to take a majority the people of this country to recognize that they’ve elected a president who says in effect “either I get a marxist/socialist American state, or I will destroy it.”
As I’ve had occasion to note elsewhere, this is most treasonous and seditious presidential administration since James Buchanan (1856-1860), under whom some of his own cabinet members sat in Washington planning in advance for secession and insurrection.
The democratic party was the party of treason in the 1860s and it’s the party of treason today.
I wouldn’t take Sullivan seriously, right down to his ‘and’s and ‘the’s.
Afghanistan has no good solutions. So, Obama’s first mistake is to look for one.
Who has the track record though?
Petraeus.
You’re president, you listen to everyone, and then you do what Petraeus recommends. If it’s the same thing as what McChrystal is recommending, so much the better.
There are, however, about a dozen reasons why Obama will not do that, and coming in at about Number 6 is that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing, and that is not going to change.
Somehow, as I read the reportage (“President Obama is considering…weighing…evaluating…reviewing…studying…”), I can’t help but think of comrade Trotsky’s bon mot, “you may not be looking for war, but war is looking for you.” Does Obama truly believe that he can both run AND hide?
Buchanan, hmm?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Buchanan
Interesting. But somehow I don’t see the modern democratic party splitting as a result of the Obamanation.
What is this ‘WE have a president’ phrase from Sullivan? Sullivan is not a US citizen. And as such I agree with Josh #11. As he is a foreigner, why consider his opinion?
Also, I worry that we have a President and media who are more concerned with process than results. What should matter is whether we win the war. Instead, people are going on about how the President is making up his mind.
Watch this clip from the “Band of Brothers” episode “The Breaking Point,” which covers the short and sorry career of Lieutenant Norman Dike. Dike was the kind of guy who looked and sounded impressive, but who was ultimately weighed in the balance and found wanting. “It wasn’t that Dike made good or bad decisions, it’s that he didn’t make any decisions at all.”
Reminds you of someone we know, huh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4yZqdCMqBU
I recall clearly watching and hearing George Stephanopolous (sp?) stating, years ago on some Sunday news show or other, in response to a question about Clinton showing a prediliction for talk rather than action that “talk IS action”.
Dithering appears to be a default position for “thoughtful” leftists. They seem to never get enough of “debate” and “dialogue” when confronted with situations not to their liking. Witness the incessant complaint that Bush “rushed” us to war in Iraq despite the fact that the issue was hashed over for months in congress and before the UN before the invasion was undertaken.
There are also those who consider indecision and half-measures as the epitome of statesmanship. This is very common – history is filled with “dithering” heads of state and diplomats. What these people never seem to understand is that, sooner or later, SOMEONE will make a firm decision and the resulting action(s) will very often be much at odds with what they would have preferred.
Then there are those who “debate” and “ponder” long enough to get what they wanted all along but without the onus of having to take responsibility. More than one person on these threads has proposed that Hussein wants American defeat in Asia. I think this may well be the case and that his “dithering” is simply his way of appearing to be do his job while in actuality allowing events to move the situation beyond repair or at least far enough in the dumper to allow him to make a “wise” decision and pull out in order to avoid an even worse calamity.
What’s the reference to Suez? Was it that the US pulled the rug out from under the Euros?
My take is that people are making something simple complex. Obama wants out.
When he was campaigning the big war was in Iraq and AfPak was a sideshow. Obama only talked about AfPak as a distraction to make himself sound serious about a topic he knows nothing about. His knowledge base on the area comes from one Summer trip during college and old National Geographics he saw at the dentist’s office. Bush and Petreaus won Iraq for him. That earns no gratitude but did spare him from withdrawing under fire.
The Russians, Iranians and Chinese may have preferred that the US had retreated in humiliating failure. Some may speculate that Obama is an agent of their interests but I could not possibly say so. Most Americans probably think that the Shanghai Cooperative Organization is a plot element from a Jackie Chan movie. Some like Obama get their news from The Nation, Huffpo and MSNBC.
If the military wanted to make Obama happy they would produce a report on “New Strategic Realities for the Asia-Pacific Region.” If my worst instincts are right Obama, with his mentors Maurice Strong and Soros are paving the way for a shift to an American withdrawal in favor of China. What I expect to see from the Left is a series of attacks on India as unstable, provocative, racist, imperialist, and hostile to Gaia. China is already mobilizing along the Indian border and has bases in Sri Lanka and Pakistan. A China allied politician is seeking to subvert Thailand. This makes Japan an Asian Germany and puts The Philippines in the role of an Asian Poland. Australia may get to be the Eastern Israel. As for India and Vietnam, what choices do they have?
So let me be clear:
Flashback 14 months:
“His plan comes up short. There’s not enough troops, not enough resources and not enough urgency. What President Bush and Senator McCain don’t understand is that the central front in the War on Terror is not in Iraq and never was. The central front is in Afghanistan and Pakistan where the terrorists who hit us on 9-11 are still plotting attacks seven years later.”
Barack Obama
Campaign Speech
September 9, 2008
h/t gateway pundit
Meanwhile, at lower pay grades, there is some progress:
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_13776093?source=bb
President Obama’s public anguish about a *new* Afghan strategy is itself a message. In the hands of a more capable statesman such a strategy about the strategy could be an effective tool to corral allies and squabbling domestic factions into the strategy desired all along. But, this president seems callow and feckless. It really does look as though the explicit message of indecisiveness communicates the implicit reality.
Under the baleful penumbra of America’s rancid domestic politics in the age of Obama, our only hope for Afghanistan, ultimately, is that a critical mass of Afghans desires a *normal* life enough to resist classical salafist “Taliban.” These veterinarians represent that hope.
Word Press seems to have eaten my post, so sorry if this duplicates later.
The President is the Commander in Chief and can overrule the military. In fact, very often defeat is the result of the President failing to do this. LBJ left Westmoreland in charge for too long, and W let Iraq go to the wolves for three years.
The issue isn’t whether the President is in charge or not. He is. What matters is whether we win the war.
If Obama comes up with a better way to win, great. But just rejecting the military’s proposals proves nothing, does nothing, and accomplishes nothing. The actual results in Afghanistan of what decisions are taken in Washington is what people should be looking at. So far, by that measure, it has not improved much in Afghanistan.
And, as far as overruling military leaders, Creighton Abrams was overruled, too. The President can be right, but so can the military. It’s best to keep an open mind.
7. RWE:
“Obama has refused to sign off on any of the four major options…”
Oh, Lord, I saw so much of this when I was at the Pentagon. Present the options and they don’t like any of them. And that’s your fault for not coming up with better options. I call this SFOS – “Search for the Optimum Solution” – and it is both endless and paralyzing. They want something that is perfect, satisfies all the special interests, can’t fail in a manner that is traceable to them, and does not cost any money. Notice how well our space launch development efforts have gone for the past 40 years? SFOS at work!
Ah, yes, space launch development. I too have observed this firsthand and can attest as to how it is a micrcosm of how Fort Fumble and almost all federal agencies make (or don’t make) “decisions.”
I asked a friend today to show me how Chauncey Gardener, if he were in charge, would have handled Afghanistan in any appreciably different manner than Obama has handled it so far. He was stumped.
On my wall of honor and diplomas I can see several from Bill Colby. One is a letter of appreciation for particpating in the Phoenix Program. There are rules and then there are ways to apply the rules. Believe me we had them on the run…..using the rules. It was very effective in it’s outcome for the commie cadre leadership was severed….
Now our guys in Afghan can’t do a thing but wait for our muzzie Prez to dither their lives away …… he wants islam to win…any real doubts?
By the way, why quote Andrew Sullivan anymore? Might as well quote Wanda Sykes at that rate.
LOTM, China has bigger fish to fry than India. Mainly, colonizing Africa and buying Australia. I *wish* they could join the US in an imperialist, er, “stabilization” of the oil kingdoms.
China barely cares about their western regions, why would they want to engage in utterly pointless Himalayan border skirmishes with India?
–
Hey, Chauncey Gardner versus Wanda Sykes, I’m glad we can consider all the schools of thought here on BC!
Please don’t equate the amount of time it took President Bush with the amount of time President Obama should be allowed. 9/11 was a surprise. Back then, we had experience bombing Afghan tents. Now, we have experience flying materials into Afghanistan, trucking materials into Afghanistan, and shipping materials to Pakistan. We have recent experience working with Afghan tribes. We have recent experience living and working in rugged Afghan terrain.
Beyond that, Vice President Cheney stated that we conducted a thorough review of the Afghan situation in 2008, and that the current administration was given the results of that investigation before President Obama assumed the oath of office.
The Taliban is not taking a break because we had an election last year. We shouldn’t either.
@26 You have to kill the weeds if you want the delicate flowers to blossom. And you have to have just enough fertilizer, when the time is right. (?)
/\ 28 Don R. good point, and to further it why quote someone on the campaign trail. I guess we are good to go on the “seas receding and earth healing” proclamations as promised during the Denver acceptance speech though.
Is it just me or does anyone else get the feeling that Holder may request a change of venue for the KSM trial from NYC to Dearborn, Michigan?
During the US Civil war union commanders spent a lot of time looking for the optimum plan to deal with the Confederacy and the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee was generally too smart to open himself up to the optimum plan and in the few times he did the Union commander was too busy searching for the plan to realize it was in front of him.
It wasn’t until Lincoln found a commander who was okay with pursuing a less than optimal plan with determination that headway was finally made.
Obama seems like he’s really interested in compromise. He’s the kind of politician that, given the choice between building a bridge and not building a bridge, he would find a third way.
He would build half a bridge, and call it a fine compromise.
Sometimes, compromise is more dangerous than either alternative. In Obama’s case, delay preceding compromise is actually worse. This public hand-wringing is atrocious. As long as he’s “trying to decide”, it just gives our enemies more time to make splashy attacks and mass murder to influence his decision. Whether those actions influence him or not, the dead are just as dead.
If you’ve ever used a programming “framework” that does certain tasks by “magic” you are often faced with the question of puzzling out how to know whether what you are about to attempt is right or wrong. So it seems to me the most important problem is making all the variables of interest visible so that we can know or at least know to the extent possible WTF we are doing.
It’s kind of like following a proof on blackboard. The President has his back turned to the class and his body is covering the writing, so we don’t know for beans what he’s writing. The fact that he’s taking an awful long time to write something we can’t see doesn’t mean anything ipso facto. And if he’s going simply write QED and then a result, then we are in a temple of worship not a policy process.
So here’s what I think. Make the policy process more transparent and allow a side-by-side examination of the different options to the extent secrecy allows. Make open source reference to all the secret discussions now in play. In other words, level with the public and go through the problem step by step.
I asked a friend today to show me how Chauncey Gardener, if he were in charge, would have handled Afghanistan in any appreciably different manner than Obama has handled it so far. He was stumped.
He likes to watch.
Come on benevolent host re. suggestion 35 /\. He promised to discuss proposed legislation on C-span…..but we just have not had the time for that due to the urgency of everything liberal. Word has it that Team 44 is scouting golf courses to play in Asia.
“relentless empiricism” is another term for “endless debate”, isn’t it?
Voltimand @ 12 said “I don’t think Obama is going to put any troops into Afghanistan, because I don’t think Obama believes in or wishes to wage a war against terrorism” should read “…a war against his muslim bretheren.”
Obama simply wants defeat in Afghanistan (and Pakistan). The guy HATES HATES HATES America, American tradition, and the White majority population.
What, you think he decided to “try” KSM in NYC on a Whim? Heck he’ll be dancing in the White House when that city gets hit again, and KSM is “released” on technicalities meanwhile he can use trial discovery by hard left lawyers to “create torture warrants” for the Bush administration per Andrew McCarthy.
Obama LOATHES the US, and wants a massive defeat so he can be Marshall Petain or America’s Vizier. In this he has not insignificant allies — the SWPL Yuppie elite leadership (Holder, Geithner, Reich, etc.) plus Blacks, Hispanics, and a sizeable section of women (Anita Dunn, Buffy Wilkes, etc.).
What is likely to spoil Obama’s bet is over-reaching by his “partners” in AQ, the Taliban, Iran’s IRGC, Ahmadinejad, and Bin Laden. He’s likely to get the US good and nuked, with millions dead, and fear and the knowledge that only if most Muslims are dead can America be safe as the result.
Terrible and stupid ambitions tend to create even bigger disasters.
With apologies to De Morgan
Great committees have little committees
Upon their conference tables, ruminating every item
And these larger committees have even larger committees
Needed by the bitter clingers, sort of guardian ad litem
They need committees of committees to trim the endless sail
We…too stupid to be nuanced, too feral to embrace the stay
They, martinets taking great pleasure wallowing in perverse detail
Hoarding all the colors on the easel, while every painting comes out…gray.
“It’s kind of like following a proof on blackboard.”
It’s like that old cartoon. A blackboard shows a long series of calculations, ending with “and then a miracle happens” followed by the desired answer.
It’s not that Obama does not have a desired answer, it’s just that all those idiots doing the calculations have not produced a suitable miracle.
But so much for the incompetence, let’s talk about the insanity. The idea that we have to delay coming up with a decision on Afghanistan because of concern over the corruption in the government…. Well, if you really were concerned about that you would tell the Pentagon that their troop estimates were all too low because you had to factor in the requirement to root out corruption in the safe areas of Afghanistan and install a suitable government. What they are doing now equates to “The beatings and layoffs will continue until morale improves.”
Hope this isn’t too OT, but here goes:
Diehard Hillary supporters (apparently gay ones at that) praise the Bushes and Cheney:
http://hillbuzz.org/2009/11/10/thank-you-former-president-george-w-bush-and-former-first-lady-laura-bush/
No really. Remarkable piece.
G/20; roughly, Ike sided with Nassar, who had started the fight by closing the canal, against the Anglo/French force which went in and took back the canal. But the A/F kept it limited –did not try to force Egyptian regime change, and so the political end of the crisis just kept bubbling until a frustrated Ike, with larger strategies re Cold War in mind, made some sort of nasty threat to the A/F gov’ts, which caused the expeditionary force to sack it up and go home, turning the canal back over to Nassar, who thereafter kept it open for biz.
IIRC my readings.
RWE, that first ”big deal” the admin’s ”privately owned media” front made re ”corruption in the Karzai government” (well DUH!) was the canary in the wind that foretold the camel in the coal mine that will soon be said to have broken the straw’s back. The election was gonna ‘have a problem’ no matter what. Rahm Emanuel was going to see to that, there was just too much exploitable cover there to wastefully play it straight.
Micheal Yon advised much the same, either surge or come home.
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/01/yon-the-greatest-afghan-war/
I believe that if we quit, our options will be reduced to 1) nuke AfPak into a valley of glass or 2) wait for a WMD attack on one of our own cities and then nuke AfPak.
One thing IS certain: we cannot allow Taliban/AQ to operate unmolested and within reach of Paki nukes.
buddy larsen,
Suez happened the same weekend the Soviets went into Hungary. The anti-American Little Englanders have been using it to beat on the US for over 50 years. That is why, with the exception of Thatcher, under Labour or Tory governments the gulf between the US and UK has kept spreading. Equally important was the nail it drove into the coffin of the 4th Republic in France. There too both the Left and the Right have no love for America. As we in the BC know to well.
17. John Lynch: “…more concerned with the process..”
I think you have hit the nail on the head with that one, it gives the dignified air of scholarly contemplation to what the average person would refer to as, “deer in the headlights”. And look at the wonderful results of twenty years of “peace process” in the Arab-Israeli comflict.
I fear this will end badly.
Scory@19: Dithering appears to be a default position for “thoughtful” leftists.
Yes. One exhibits exemplary morality by so doing. On foreign policy matters only. On nationalizing large portions of the economy, there is no dithering.
LOTM, Buddy: I’ve been thinking of Suez at bit lately. I wonder what this President, one with no love for Europe and indeed perhaps a certain animus toward it, may do to bring about another Suez – an event that signals to the Euros that the US can’t ever again be trusted. Perhaps there will be several mini-Suezes, of which the missile shield affair was the first.
A riposte for Mr. Sullivan.
He says “His insistence that the civilian branch truly control policy there and that empire not be passively accepted as a fait accompli are real signs of strength in the struggle to recalibrate American foreign policy. Can you imagine Bush ever holding out like this on the military?”
Memory, not imagination, is all that is required. The surge was opposed by almost the entire military establishment with the exception of Petraeus, and by the enitrety of the political establishment of both parties. The Baker-Hamilton Commission had just come out saying Run Away! The war was very unpopular with the public, and Republicans had just gotten hammered in the 2006 elections.
Bush was Horatio at the Bridge. In the darkest hour he said “I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me.”
“disaster” for who?
In the darkest hour he said “I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me.”
I doubt he’d have left out India and Ernie. Ernie is one mean ginger tom.
To repeat, it’s fine that the civilian leadership is in charge of the war. But that is not the issue. No one believed that President Bush was not ultimately responsible for the war in Iraq (although he did have his period of dithering with the bizarre Iraq Study Group, which he then ignored). No one serious will believe that somehow the military is going to go off on its own initiative, like the French Army did over Algeria.
Bureaucratic infighting does happen, but the important fighting is in Helmand and Paktia and is being carried on by dusty men on dusty roads. What matters is who is winning in Afghanistan, not in Washington. Ultimately, the President is responsible, period, the end, the buck stops here.
It seems to me that there is an attempt to relieve President Obama from the consequences of his decisions. He’s being painted as bravely taking on a military that reports to him. That isn’t real courage unless there’s something to be lost and some price to be paid. It’s hard to see what is at risk, except his reelection chances. All the military options that have been rejected seem to have something to do with winning the war. Since August, I’ve seen nothing from the administration that shows they have the same aim. It’s clearly, as LOTM says, an attempt to leave our Afghan allies to their own devices before they have any chance of winning on their own.
What I suspect will happen, sometime down the road, is that we’ll be hearing accusations of betrayal when the military can’t win the war. A failure of the military to improve conditions in Afghanistan will be portrayed as some kind of passive-aggressive sabotage of President Obama. After failing to provide enough troops and support, the administration will blame the military for failing to deliver what it promised (after all, they could win for Bush in Iraq). All this as if the President’s political fortunes are more important than defeating our enemies.
Just wait…
I was somewhat optimistic for our prospects in Afghanistan when the administration rolled out a fairly reasonable plan back in March. We kept Gates, and we got McChrystal. But now, I’m afraid, something has changed. I’m not seeing a President who is acting like he wants to win. It seems the government is more concerned with appearances than reality. So, we have constant deliberations by very important people, taking things very seriously, while dusty men on dusty roads get shelled and blown up.
We are heading for one hell of a crisis in civilian-military relations. At the very least, morale at the front is going to collapse if it becomes clear we are going to lose the war. At worst, the military may become a political player beyond its constitutional limits.
I’d be very, very happy to be wrong, and maybe this is just a dark feeling that will pass. But it’s hard to avoid thinking like this while decisions that I thought were made are now unmade, as if nothing had happened.
Pick your philosopher. I use to use Hericlitus but as quoted by Plato in Cratylus and Diogenes Laetius (Diogenes of Sinope, a Cynic, which was a virtue) in “The Lives of Philosophers” these verities hold true :
Everything flows and nothing stays.
Everything flows and nothing abides.
Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.
Everything flows; nothing remains.
All is flux, nothing is stationary.
All is flux, nothing stays still.
Our current man child in the WH believes by waiting the stars will align in his favor. This reasoning is, of course, going against all his military high command save those ass kissers who want another star.
The corollary to the above is an old military maxim that states;
No matter how carefully made, the battle plan rarely survives the first engagement. “Taoists recognize one cannot step into the same creek twice.
Obama is bordering on treasonous behavior.
But would you expect less from an islamist?
Buddy #44:
My thoughts exactly. You know, recently in one of the former Soviet Republics the winner was found to have been falsifying votes for the OPPOSITION. The reason was that he thought that getting 90% of the vote looked too fishy from the international viewpoint and he was trying to make the guy who ran against him look like he got more votes because a 70% win was more believable.
If Karzi had waltzed to a 65% win then they would have declared it too big a win and therefore invalid. Or else they would have declared that too many civilians were being killed in the war and so a new strategy was required. Or an endangered snail would have been found on the hillsides of Tora Bora.
Besides, this crowd, this ACORN crowd, this TARP crowd, this Bailout Our Friends Crowd saying an election was rigged and the government too corrupt is the pot calling the kettle a disadvantaged minority, anyway.
B. Hussein Obama, because of his innate inability to make a decision, and his lack of any serious management, business, or leadership expertise, is now responsible for far more US military casualties than is Hasan at Fort Hood. That could be quantified and exposed through a little honest digging by our ineffective MSM. Maybe Obama finds this acceptable: he said in his first remarks wrt Ft Hood that American soldiers should not be at risk in their own country…that implied that leaving them at risk overseas is perfectly ok???
What seems to be absent in all these discussions is the cost. Did it ever occur to anyone that we can’t afford to continue in Afghanistan, let alone ramp it up? Perhaps the financing will never materialize.
To say that Obama wants us to lose is presupposing we have the capacity or the will to win. I am unaware of any insurgency since WWII that has lost to a foreign power. I don’t see what makes us any different.
LOTM – i just recently read in Foxbats Over Dimona that during Suez the Soviets actually threatened – obliquely, but intelligibly – to nuke Britain and France and that that is why Dwight stepped in and UK/France relented. Authors also said this was publicly suppressed in the West but privately attested to by officials w/ knowledge according to now unclassified US documents. Sounds plausible, but I have no idea if it’s true. Evidently generations of Soviet diplomats bragged about their “first and only” open threatening of nuclear warfare and Red soldiers claimed that that is what they were taught at Frunze, or wherever. Know anything about that?
I am unaware of any insurgency since WWII that has lost to a foreign power.
The Malayan Communist insurgency in the early 50′s. The Sunni/Al Qaeda alliance in Anbar province, and the Mahdi militia in Baghdad and southern Iraq. By any reasonable historically accepted ‘metrics’ of what constitutes victory or defeat, all of these insurgencies have lost.
Late at night, in the Hall of the Presidents, Obama paces fitfully, begging the portraits to understand.
I will not be rushed
Though my name be crushed
‘Neath the right wing idiot mass
For I know I’m right
Least in Allah’s sight
So on Afghan plans I’ll pass
As deciders go
I may seem quite slow
But I get there in the end
I will delegate
So that I can skate
Up the hill and round the bend
It’s a lonely job
And it does play hob
With my presidential mien
For my health care plan
Meant for every man
Is departing from the scene
There is much to do
And the days are few
And the nights are long and cold
And I must decide
If I run or hide
To do neither would be bold
So I take me hence
To the passive tense
While our soldiers fight and die
Waiting for my writ
While I think and sit
Is it me or is it I
As to cost, that is a choice. If Afghanistan is now unaffordable because society has decided to spend money on the stimulus, or Obamacare or whatever, then the honest thing to do is say, “folks we can’t afford Afghanistan”. I’ve decided the risk of a resurgence in al-Qaeda to be acceptable, we need the stimulus, Obamacare or whatever as a higher priority, so we’re going home.
That’s a judgment call. The President might bet wrong, but that’s his prerogative. And if he New York gets nuked, well, he bet and he lost.
But he himself cast Afghanistan as the “war of necessity” and kept beating GWB over the head with it. He was going to “get” OBL. He was going to sort out Pakistan. He was going to do a lot of things, like some guys I know who are someday going to buy a yacht and a big house and now the anticipated paycheck hasn’t come through. So he’s got to choose.
But I think if the President has done the numbers, then he already knows the answer. Maybe he’s waiting for the “miracle” to happen. It may happen, but it would be wrong to bet on it.
Folks,
President Obama is just another conflicted LibTard…
He cannot make decisions.
Once the rare decision is made it is under immediate review.
Once the decision is under review there are many, many positions one can take.
Thus, a decision simply becomes no decision.
This is standard operating procedure for the left!!!
It is why they hated Reagan and Bush.
CR @57…
Hit the books…
Try Malaya — then keep on reading…
Greece, et. al.
Our allies lied to Ike. He specifically asked them BEFORE their operation if anything was up. They laid on smoke and went for the bold.
He reminded Britain who supplied their oil and gold — hence the climb down.
The obviousness of the Canal Campaign permitted the Soviet Union to correctly time their Hungarian Operation.
Ike was furious — and rightly so.
The spanking has never been forgotten: offensive or counter-offensive operations need American approval — or else.
It is notable that the NATO allies who have actually put soldiers into Afghanistan are those ‘allies’ that Obama has dissed over the past year. I include Canada in that list. Add to that, Poland, Britain and France.
Unless those ‘allies’ are willing to take over leadership of the “War on Terror” (I know, it is to laugh) then I expect you are going to see a silent and speedy withdrawal of all those soldiers. And, of course, an equally silent and speedy incursion onto that battle space by Russia, Iran and China (the latter, being America’s new friends… maybe Chavez will send over some fellas, too…and I am not joking here, by the way).
Obama is a Left wing university guy, and he knows, as do all of his friends, that America has been the chief Evil of the World, the leader of White Bad Guys, the inheritor of the totally Evil British Empire, and it deserves anything it gets now. Ignoring the huge Tea Party crowds is part of this: these are, according to our current lordlings, disgustingly white and middle class, and can be ignored, especially with ACORN and its allies making sure that the next elections are fixed in the time honoured Chicago Way.
A very non political friend of mine told me that Canada should withdraw our troops from Afghanistan and look to our own borders for our own interests. I think that is wise. Obama’s Way warns all of us that allying ourselves with the USA is extremely unwise. I wonder how Karzai is doing these days??? His fate will be like that of the Shah of Iran, I expect.
John Lynch @ 53 said “He’s being painted as bravely taking on a military that reports to him. That isn’t real courage unless there’s something to be lost and some price to be paid.”
That’s just the left playing to the leftist base.
Witness the protestors on the corner with signs like “No Blood For Oil”, “Bush=Hitler”, etc.
No-risk slander of our Nation, our Military, and our Leader in a time of war.
But to those idiots, it was ‘courageous’ and ‘patriotic’.
And as we all said, well, then go try the same protest against Saddam, or in Iran, or North Korea…
Of course not. Risk their lives??!!
Yes, we’re seeing that same ‘courage’ with obammy…
Yes, Blert, thanks. The Greek Communist insurgency, a casualty of the Truman Doctrine. I forgot it in my reply to Captain Ramen above.
Ramen: Mine wasn’t a sweeping critique of your points in #57 — just trying to set the record straight on post-WWII military history re: insurgencies. To be accurate, the Greek one was subdued primarily by the Greeks themselves, rather than a foreign power.
To level with the public implies Obama needs to be able to swallow any criticism come what may. Somehow I seriously doubt it.
And in order for himself and his admin to look good/thoughtful, there will be six months negotiations of setting-up rules for the ‘open debate’ on Afghan/Pakistan policy. Then there is the actual open debate itself.
Once a decision is made, for example, a level of troops to be sent to theater, how long does it take to implement all the logistics, congress to release the funding, and decide which units to send in?
Seriously, even if Obama makes a decision now, what would be the shortest amount of time Gen McChrystal would see the additional resources?
But a comparable amount of time is fairly close between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway. If the present schedule of meetings and arguments, to arrive at a perfect tactical and strategic plan, had been followed after 1941 we would still be trying to dislodge the Japanese from Hawaii and Midway.
The Algerian insurgency lost, too, and it was a BIG war and a BIG loss for the reputation of the terror method. Itwas well after they quit that France, in a mood of magnanimity (and a press excoriating the army’s brutal suppression, as it was endlessly characterized), turned over her colony to a national party that was not the same party as the insurgents –tho soon enough they infiltrated to some extent.
The Viet Cong lost, too. Later, of course, in the new war that broke out after the Paris Treaty was signed, and after the departure of American combat forces, Russia, China, the Democratic Party of the USA, and North Vietnam (a separate nation, not an insurgent) in concert and alliance, were able to undo the work of the ARVN and the US military, and to finally, with the critically important help of the US Congress, defeat the ARVN and take control of the Republic of South Vietnam.
***
H/50 and PAC/52; Old Abe at his darkest hour of the war was being urged by friends to parley for settlement with the south in order to be less hated and more likely to win re-election in the 1864 election. to this lot he was quoted, or he wrote (i;m not sure which) this:
I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end… I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.
I am unaware of any insurgency since WWII that has lost to a foreign power.
Add to Don Rodrigo‘s excellent list; the NPA in the Philippines, and Latin American groups such as Sendoro Luminoso, Tupamoros, the Arbenz faction in Guatemala in 1954, and the Bolivian ELN of 1965-66. The last two involving Che Guevera. In all cases the revolutionaries themselves would claim that their defeats are attributable to the support given to government forces by the US. The IRA has arguably lost its effort to impose a Marxist dictatorship over either the Republic or the 9 counties controlled by the UK. Insurgencies in The Congo during the 1960s (another appearance by the sadistic medico Che Guevera) collapsed under foreign pressure. The Tibetan insurgency against invading chinese is looking a bit thin after 50 to 60 years. The last is anomalous being the one case of successful communist conquest as an invader, in the world’s most isolated backwater. There however the marxist invaders have to resort to genocide.
The belief in successful native workers and peasants insurgencies against corrupt decadent Capitalist Imperialists and their stuffed shirt stooges is one of those hoary old chestnuts that is allowed to persist as a romantic trope because it has been made socially inconvenient to slap it down. The basic premise is a lie. The real Imperialists peddling alien philosophies and using co-opted elites to rule through disciplined hierarchical structures are the Communists and the Islamists.
British and Americans helped the Greeks. I heard Prof William McNeill mention having visited the Acropolis during the battle.
dan,
I don’t know and if I did I would neither confirm nor deny but it sounds plausible to me.
So, wretchard and other opiners, what will our world look like as the USA withdraws into itself, in order to pay the Baby Boomer pension plans and construct an overarching health care system and force its industries to ‘go green.’?
Canada is completely dependent upon the American umbrella. It’s time to rethink that, for sure. And what about Australia??? At least Australia is on the same side of the globe as India. Oh well.
w: But I think if the President has done the numbers, then he already knows the answer.
This president doesn’t do numbers.
And he already knows such answers as he will ever have.
–
heathermc: if all that was changing was that the USA would withdraw into itself, pay the Boomer pensions, and construct universal healthcare, we’d be lucky. but OTOH give it time, let’s see what the 2010 and 2012 elections hold.
heathermc,
what will our world look like …?
We will be governed by the America Spectator’s law firm, “Nasty, Brutish & Short”, and that will be what life will be like.
John Lynch wrote: “At worst, the military may become a political player beyond its constitutional limits.”
Interesting. I see that as the “At best” scenario — the US military intervenes to defend the US Constitution from a Political Class which has abandoned it and bankrupted the country.
Yes, there is a risk that a militarily-imposed correction could turn into a military junta.
But there is a much higher probability that the military could supervise a new Constitutional Convention — focused on preventing the re-emergence of the kind of disgusting Permanent Political Class we suffer from today.
Polls say that 80% of us trust the US military, only 20% of us trust Congress.
“All the responsibility, none of the authority, and zero resources.”
Sounds a little like Rommel’s predicament in the wake of Overlord. (Did I just inadvertently invoke Godwin’s Law?)
Kinuachdrach,
Not even in jest. That is the road to disaster. Do you really want to leave a door open to a Weasley Clark?
We do need some limited constitutional reforms, from the bottom up. We need to work on getting control over the process at the state level. That is where the heavy lifting is. If we can keep enough of a presence at the national level, even if we are not in the majority, to prevent the corruption of the Judiciary then that will suffice for a while. The real rot is down below at the state and local levels and in your community school board.
@wretch,
The fact is we can’t afford any of those things. Just like any family on a budget, we need to figure out our priorities and allocate funds relative to the threat. Mexico is collapsing and the border isn’t secure. Chavez could plunge Central and South America into war. To say nothing of our domestic problems.
@LTM, Don, blert, buddy,
The key word here is ‘foreign,’ as in most of the counter-insurgency fighting is done by foreign troops in support of a colonial administration or local government.
In the examples you cite where America and her allies were victorious, not a single one involves massive numbers of American troops. Did we defeat AQ in Iraq solely through military might, or did subcontracting the job (i.e. bribing) out to the Sunni tribes have something to do with it? Did we really defeat the Mahdi army? AFAIK that broken toothed bum Al Sadr is still alive. And I am still not convinced that Iran didn’t end up the winner.
In Malaysia the communists were defeated, but only after a 12 year protracted struggle and only three years after the British left! Since the goal of the British was to stay I am unsure how anyone could say they ‘won.’ Ditto for Algeria (in fact the French government collapsed over this). After the colonial power left, the insurgencies lost their raison d’être, had become unpopular and were subsequently defeated by the local government.
Similarly, the republican forces only ‘lost’ in N. Ireland after the British made significant political concessions, granting them home rule and allowing a terrorist organization (Sinn Fein) into the government.
As for Tibet, the analogy simply doesn’t hold. China gets land and natural resources from Tibet; we get nothing. Tibet borders China; Afghanistan is on the other side of the planet from us. Like you said, the Chinese are willing to invest decades – perhaps centuries – to get what they want. They are also willing to replace the local population with their own (i.e., ethnic cleansing) and erase their culture. Are we willing to do all these things? Relocate to Afghanistan! Plenty of sand, sun and sand!
I am not saying cut and run from Afghanistan; far from it. Supplying local allies with advisers, funding, intel and matériel is both effective and inexpensive, as in the cases of the Philippines, Guatemala and Greece. This is the path I believe we should take in Afghanistan. We can still ‘maintain contact with the enemy’ and disrupt their plans for a fraction of the cost.
Kinuachdrach: I agree that it is not crazy to see a Julius Caesar response to Obama’s actions. The Republic made by George Washington, Ben Franklin and etc has lasted for 200 years. No one has decreed that it SHOULD last any longer, and it won’t, unless the American voter becomes truly interested in local elections. Which is a very faint hope, I think. ACORN, now. ACORN is VERY interested and active in local elections.
My mother, born in 1912, told me once that during most of her life, the British Empire and the pound sterling was The Power. And then, it just vanished. And so it could be for the Pax Americana. Obama and the people who vote for his way, think that will be a good thing, because they have never lived without running water. But, I guess we may all learn about that, again.
As to the Suez crisis, that didn’t go well for anyone in the western world, except it put the final blow to the British Empire which was not unwelcome in Washington DC at the time.
How the US Funds the Taliban
Pay to Play
cap’n ramen, very good, but you forgot the Scots highlanders, the Amerindians, and the Boxers, Huk, Moros, and Singh. hey that sounds like a law furm
LOTM
I don’t know if it counts as an insurgenccy but the CIA did a fine job overthrowing the elected government of Gough Whitlam in Australia in 1975. It was a beautifully orchestrated operation. Gough wasn’t real happy though.
The most remarkable thing about Obama and his people is their astoundingly naive presentation to the world at large of exactly what they intend to do and not do. They have not a clue in the whole wide world as to the numbers and kinds of people living in the U.S. that they daily alienate.
Nor do they seem to understand how the “tea parties” are in effect rehearsals for a major revolt against the democratic party. At best they and their media flacks can respond only with teeny-bopper snide remarks.
We have gotten beyond the Greeks: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make silly, stupid, and narcissistic.” The very fact that the Obama people have made spectacles of themselves not so much by not caring about the Ft. Hood attack as by not understanding what it’s all about in the first place, is symptomatic here. This is a kind of solipsism that is so absolute that people in this country still aren’t willing to credit it: “You can’t, you simply can’t be that stupid. Can you?” Yup, you can. If you don’t believe, believe. When you live entirely in your fantasy world, you cease to understand that there is any other out there.
If this country survives we may be witnessing the self-immolation of liberalism as we know it.
#43 Don Roderigo–I read that Bush piece and was flabbergasted not only by it but by the pro-Bush comments trailing after it. People are already starting to lament how far Obama falls short of what Dubya said, did, and accomplished. I expect we will see more of this in the coming weeks and months.
W,
BTW, nice work on the site with the Zamboni. Litter all gone. The place looks nice again.
My take: O has already decided to withdraw. The “deliberation” is a sham to hide the prejudgment.
The Ambassador is helping his boss by sending that message.
(Withdrawal may be over several months and drones and special ops increased but the troop war is to be ended … in failure.)
We will now be facing two kinds of inflated bubbles. A second financial crisis consisting of all the debt the President has unleashed to paper over the cracks in the short term and a security bubble which has basically created a huge liability down the road in exchange for short-term relief. Now maybe I’m wrong about those two bubbles and time will tell. If I’m right then it will be a full-scale catastrophe.
Any statement prefaced with “Let me be clear” is simply a declaration of mendacity following.
It’s like the nifty little warning labels the Consumer Protection Agencies force manufacturers to affix to their products. I wonder if our President can understand the irony?
O/T with permission requested.
Having passed into the Weimar Republic redux of economics we are set in 2011 for alt-A and subprimes to reset at higher levels. Take a look at the magnitude this time around and someone tell me how we will survive. Please.
Take a gander at the chart !
http://tinyurl.com/yzzkvo4
Now maybe I’m wrong about those two bubbles and time will tell. If I’m right then it will be a full-scale catastrophe
wretchard, I fear you are right…more than you know. The commercial real estate crisis will make the residential mortgage meltdown look like a Girl Scout pillow fight.
We are in for a Tsunami…and everyone is standing on the shore wondering where the water went.
It seems that Barack has fallen-back into the campaugn mode he so loves and is most comfortable with as a decision process. The trouble is that while campaign oppo-reseach turned up good opportunities to exploit, intel on Karzi, Taliban, AQ, and the Pakis is not nearly good enough for him.
He operates best through Campaign-Mode, in that response to his attack usually fits within an antcipated parameter. Such is definitely not the case with Afgan/Pakis gordian knot. Therefore, he will most likly trust to depend on a committee decision that presents the least blow-back to him.
Reagan had the Laffer curve working. More jobs in the private sector in small and medium companies and thus higher government revenues.
Now we have (officially) over 10% unemployment and many economists officially saying it’s over 17%. We have debt in the trillions, mega trillions, which we will never see the end of, nor will our great great grandchildren. The FED , along with the US Treasury refuse to tell the US Taxpayer who got the money. That my friends is theft and obama ,Goldman Sachs, and George Bush coordinated the raid . We’ve been had.
When these mortgages reset few will have the resources to pay the increase. It will be a worldwide depression and then worldwide war for the scraps. Except this time too many have the bomb. Should be very interesting to see how many of us live through it all.
Really the trillion dollar stimulus is a drop in the bucket compared to our future $50T+ liability. The second financial crisis will happen because the jobs are not going to be here – in quantity and pay-grade – to support the still ridiculously overpriced homes in California, Nevada and Florida.
Like the chart shows we’re in the eye of the storm here with the housing problem. FHA is headed towards insolvency.
Rather than taking sensible measures to bring jobs of the exporting variety back here – weakening the dollar in a controlled fashion, incentivizing plant construction with less regulation and tax cuts, and negotiating with our creditors to finance it – these idiots that run everything are trying to juice the housing market with a tax credit.
The only way we can survive the coming storm is to have regime change here at home. I don’t mean getting rid of Maobama; he’s just the front man. I mean replacing the current set of elites – the union bosses, the m-i complex, the media – with new ones.
P.S. I just had a frightening thought… these next few months are the perfect time for a terrorist attack. The economy is swirling around the toilet bowl. Black Friday to Christmas is make or break for many businesses. A Mumbai style attack at shopping malls and Wall Street will pretty much do it in.
61. wretchard:
“As to cost, that is a choice. If Afghanistan is now unaffordable because society has decided to spend money on the stimulus, or Obamacare or whatever, then the honest thing to do is say, “folks we can’t afford Afghanistan”. I’ve decided the risk of a resurgence in al-Qaeda to be acceptable….. this is where he needs to say > that is why I am issuing every American a can of mace ….
Any statement prefaced with “Let me be clear” is simply a declaration of mendacity following.
It’s uncomfortably close to, “I want to make one thing perfectly clear,” isn’t it?
Habu, #91: That my friends is theft and obama ,Goldman Sachs, and George Bush coordinated the raid.
Indeed, the previous administration’s complicity in this mess is one reason why I don’t believe John McCain or any other GOP President would have been able to do anything more than slow down the runaway train to catastrophe. (Which, in turn, tempers my disdain for Obama somewhat.) We might have been screwed a bit later, and probably in different ways, but in the end we’d still have been screwed.
At least with Obama and the Dems in Congress in charge, what passes for liberalism today will get the blame for the crash when it happens, as Voltimand alluded to at #83. Of course, whether that results in contemporary liberalism actually being discredited and abandoned is another matter entirely. If post-Cold War socialism has anything to teach us, it’s to never, ever underestimate the survivability of even proven bad ideas that happen to have strong visceral appeal.
If whiskey has an idée fixe about women then I plead guilty to having one about the strategic threat posed by China. That does not negate the fact that I like China, in fact I really like the women, but the government is a real and growing threat.
What can India do to break the iron circle being forged around it? What can Australia and Vietnam do? Should Israel accommodate the rising power and trust the SCO to hold a leash on their Iranian dog or should she forge an alliance with those threatened by the new hegemon and strike the first blow?
China is itself very unstable and vulnerable. Deeply corrupt with its growth based on the same financial shell games that exploded the American economy a year ago it shows that sometimes both sides can be in on a fraud. The social compact is unraveling. Corruption has destroyed the last vestiges of legitimacy for a regime that is now sustained solely by inertia. The divisions between regions, classes, and rural versus urban sectors is larger than ever seen before and cannot be sustained. In this situation a threatened elite either focuses on an explosive grab outwards or faces an implosion.
China is now facing the same choices that Japan faced almost 70 years ago. Unless the moves into the Indian Ocean are an enormous head fake they have made the same decision that Tojo did. They will forgo the easier Strike North against an underpopulated but resource rich Siberia in favor of a Strike South at the resources of Australasia the Middle East and Africa. The riches of Siberia will wait. They can be picked up later when there will be even fewer Russians to worry about. This has been a very long time in coming. Thirty five years ago when my brother visited Kenya the locals told him that Tanzania had been occupied by China during the building of the TanZam Railway.
To be blogged under the title “The Circling Dragon.”
There are two issues here. First, the war is not in Washington. What Mr. Sullivan, and for that matter, Obama think or say is meaningless. The war is in Afghanistan, among real people with real guns, and more importantly, real intent.
Second, if Obama doesn’t make a decision, someone else will. I suspect that has already happened, and we will see Obama forced to do something by circumstances.
There are, as Wretchard said, any number of things that could blow. I would bet on a serious stock market/financial system collapse in the next bit. Possibly prompted by some religion-who-dare-not-speak-its-name military or terrorist action.
Derek
W @ 61 As to cost, that is a choice. If Afghanistan is now unaffordable.
I read today that Obama’s new spending programs in his first nine months have exceed all of Clinton’s new spending in his entire 8 years. Cost can’t be the argument. Ummm, can it?
Something that occurred to me while trying to cross Fifth Ave in Manhattan during the Veteran’s Day Parade:
The towers fell in New York on 9/11/01, Kabul fell to American led forces on 11/14/01. That’s 65 days.
President Obama’s hand-picked replacement commander in Afghanistan, GEN McChrystal, delivered his Afghanistan war plans to President Obama on 8/30/09, and President Obama hasn’t acted on his General’s recommendations as of 11/11/09. That’s 73 days, and waiting.
Btw, all this talk about turning the war over to the Afghans… Remember when that was called “outsourcing the war” at Tora Bora?
Great Tweets in History.
LATimestot
Fallon: Finally, Obama unveils his new Afghanistan strategy. Its called Dont Ask-Dont Tell latimes.com/ticket
MajoratWH
Obama: “The US does not seek to contain China, nor does a deeper relationship with China mean a weakening of our bilateral alliances.”
MajoratWH
In Asia, “controlled economies have given way to open markets. Dictatorships have become democracies,” Obama says
—-
So why is he moving America in the other direction? Does he expect anyone to believe in his unicorns anymore? Does this just mean “Boys you’re on your own?”
dkite, #97: There are, as Wretchard said, any number of things that could blow. I would bet on a serious stock market/financial system collapse in the next bit. Possibly prompted by some religion-who-dare-not-speak-its-name military or terrorist action.
The religion has no problem speaking its name. It’s the Western elites and MSM who are squeamish about it. Perhaps you meant the Religion-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (a la Lord Voldemort)?
In any case though, you’ve pointed out why I find nuclear terrorism to be more red herring than real threat at this point in the war. With the U.S. economy as fragile as it still is, using a nuke to bring it down would be like using a steamroller to kill a spider. Smaller but more targeted attacks would be much cheaper and easier for aQ and their ilk to pull off here, have the same catastrophic effect on our economy, and not entail the likelihood of massive retaliation that a nuclear attack would.
Damn, I get back from a whiskey drinking fishing outing and read that DHS is rolling out immigration reform ie 10-30 million new US citizens in 2010.
Why is DHS involved with “immigration reform”?
Maybe we can create a bunch of construction jobs building jails to put all these new citizens into when they cant afford to buy Pelosi care!
I got into a running battle on generational demographics a while back on this site…
72. heathermc:
So, wretchard and other opiners, what will our world look like as the USA withdraws into itself, in order to pay the Baby Boomer pension plans and construct an overarching health care system and force its industries to ‘go green.’?
Folks, any boomers counting on their GenX offspring supporting massive social spending better get their head examined…
The best you can hope for is a GenXer dealing with his/her own parents.
Anyone been watching the tea party thangs?
GenXers figure that Boomers have had 45+ years to prepare for their golden years. Big deal if they spend them gobblin’ cheap grub under the golden arches!!!
Joshua: Agree totally. If say, Iran even threatened to do something in the Strait of Hormuz, or anything like that, all the spun up leveraged asset bubble would experience a collapse. And probably bring down the remaining banks.
There is something truly unsettling about what is happening. The asset bubble. Didn’t people lose enough last year? An almost rational desire to follow the madness of the market up. The Hasan thing. If we cover our eyes, ears and put our head under a pillow, this had nothing to do with radical islam. The political madness, let’s match Bush’s deficits in the first month.
There seems to be an intense desire to be totally disconnected from reality. Not ignorance, but a hunger for pure fantasy.
Very odd, and very dangerous.
Derek
joe buzz,
The ultimate Gerrymander.
If you do not like the voters you have, get new voters.
They are counting on Outrage Fatigue. They deliberately throw as many things as possible up at the same time.
These are true revolutionaries. They do not want to improve the system. They want to change it.
Most politiicians are very cautious, always thinking of future alliances and advancing one item at a time.
These people burn bridges and attack as widely as possible. They are in their own minds modern warriors eager and able to fight, anything that is but a war.
Beer and fishing sound better and better each day.
The President lives in the hypothetical. That way no serious decision ever has to be made and no responsibility can be pinned on him. That is what voting “present” means and that is what we should have recognized from the beginning.
When the war in Afghanistan was a mere hypothetical during the campaign, Obama declared it the “necessary” war as opposed to the “unnecessary Bush war” in Iraq. As soon as he had to move from the hypothetical to the actual he was unable to make a real decision.
When Hasan, with known indirect links (and possible direct ones too) to Al Qaeda, shouts Allahu Akbar before murdering 13 soldiers and wounding scores of others, the President cannot say anything definitive. Everything remains hypothetical — “we must not jump to premature conclusions.”
Even his own health care proposals were outsourced to Pelosi and Reid while the White House lingered in generalities and hypotheticals.
What can we make of this? Is this the result of a character flaw in the President, or is it inexperience and incompetence, or is it part of an intentional plan?
What should we make of an Attorney General who wants to investigate attorneys who wrote briefs on anti-terrorism policy during the Bush administration, and also is going to have trials in New York City of those who masterminded the 9-11 attacks? These trials will be showcases for the terrorists and for political opponents of Bush era policies and will ultimately have procedures like those that got OJ Simpson off.
Sometimes I find myself almost rooting for such an outcome — an embarrassing show trial with an acquittal on some sort of technicality or jury nullification — to show the consequences of this administration’s decisions. But I don’t linger there for long. Instead I wait with dread as the dangers mount.
And I wonder whether a culture that finds dodge ball too aggressive can produce enough people with the toughness to stand up to what is coming.
Please forward to Mr. Obama:
General Colin Powell
Chairman (Ret), Joint Chiefs of Staff
A Leadership Primer
LESSON 1
“Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.”
Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions and decisions. It’s inevitable, if you’re honorable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign
of mediocrity: you’ll avoid the tough decisions, you’ll avoid confronting the
people who need to be confronted, and you’ll avoid offering differential
rewards based on differential performance because some people might
get upset. Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying
not to get anyone mad, and by treating everyone equally “nicely” regardless
of their contributions, you’ll simply ensure that the only people you’ll wind
up angering are the most creative and productive people in the organization.
LESSON 2
“The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the
day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost
confidence that you can help them or concluded that you
do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”
If this were a litmus test, the majority of CEOs would fail. One, they build so
many barriers to upward communication that the very idea of someone lower
in the hierarchy looking up to the leader for help is ludicrous. Two, the
corporate culture they foster often defines asking for help as weakness or
failure, so people cover up their gaps, and the organization suffers accordingly.
Real leaders make themselves accessible and available. They show concern
for the efforts and challenges faced by underlings, even as they demand high
standards. Accordingly, they are more likely to create an environment where
problem analysis replaces blame.
LESSON 3
“Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often
possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so
inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death
as soon as they are nicked by the real world.”
Small companies and start-ups don’t have the time for analytically detached
experts. They don’t have the money to subsidize lofty elites, either. The
president answers the phone and drives the truck when necessary; everyone
on the payroll visibly produces and contributes to bottom-line results or they’re
history. But as companies get bigger, they often forget who “brought them to
the dance”: things like all-hands involvement, egalitarianism, informality,
market intimacy, daring, risk, speed, agility. Policies that emanate from
ivory towers often have an adverse impact on the people out in the field
who are fighting the wars or bringing in the revenues. Real leaders are
vigilant, and combative, in the face of these trends.
LESSON 4
“Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros,
even in their own backyard.”
Learn from the pros, observe them, seek them out as mentors and partners.
But remember that even the pros may have leveled out in terms of their
learning and skills. Sometimes even the pros can become complacent and
lazy. Leadership does not emerge from blind obedience to anyone. Xerox’s
Barry Rand was right on target when he warned his people that if you have
a yes-man working for you, one of you is redundant. Good leadership
encourages everyone’s evolution.
LESSON 5
“Never neglect details. When everyone’s mind is dulled
or distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant.”
Strategy equals execution. All the great ideas and visions in the world are
worthless if they can’t be implemented rapidly and efficiently. Good leaders
delegate and empower others liberally, but they pay attention to details, every
day. (Think about supreme athletic coaches like Jimmy Johnson, Pat Riley
and Tony La Russa). Bad ones, even those who fancy themselves as
progressive “visionaries,” think they’re somehow “above” operational details.
Paradoxically, good leaders understand something else: an obsessive routine
in carrying out the details begets conformity and complacency, which in turn
dulls everyone’s mind. That is why even as they pay attention to details, they
continually encourage people to challenge the process. They implicitly
understand the sentiment of CEO leaders like Quad Graphic’s Harry
Quadracchi, Oticon’s Lars Kolind and the late Bill McGowan of MCI, who all
independently asserted that the Job of a leader is not to be the chief organizer,
but the chief dis-organizer.
LESSON 6
“You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.”
You know the expression, “it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.” Well,
it’s true. Good leaders don’t wait for official blessing to try things out. They’re
prudent, not reckless. But they also realize a fact of life in most organizations:
if you ask enough people for permission, you’ll inevitably come up against
someone who believes his job is to say “no.” So the moral is, don’t ask. Less
effective middle managers endorsed the sentiment, “If I haven’t explicitly been
told ‘yes,’ I can’t do it,” whereas the good ones believed, “If I haven’t explicitly
been told ‘no,’ I can.” There’s a world of difference between these two points
of view.
LESSON 7
“Keep looking below surface appearances.
Don’t shrink from doing so (just) because you
might not like what you find.”
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the slogan of the complacent, the arrogant or the
scared. It’s an excuse for inaction, a call to non-arms. It’s a mind-set that
assumes (or hopes) that today’s realities will continue tomorrow in a tidy, linear
and predictable fashion. Pure fantasy. In this sort of culture, you won’t find
people who pro-actively take steps to solve problems as they emerge. Here’s
a little tip: don’t invest in these companies.
LESSON 8
“Organization doesn’t really accomplish anything. Plans
don’t accomplish anything, either. Theories of management
don’t much matter. Endeavors succeed or fail because of
the people involved. Only by attracting the best people will
you accomplish great deeds.”
Ina brain-based economy, your best assets are people. We’ve heard this
expression so often that it’s become trite. But how many leaders really “walk
the talk” with this stuff? Too often, people are assumed to be empty chess
pieces to be moved around by grand viziers, which may explain why so many
top managers immerse their calendar time in deal making, restructuring and
the latest management fad. How many immerse themselves in the goal of
creating an environment where the best, the brightest, the most creative are
attracted, retained and, most importantly, unleashed?
LESSON 9
“Organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing.”
Organization charts are frozen, anachronistic photos in a work place that ought
to be as dynamic as the external environment around you. If people really
followed organization charts, companies would collapse. In well-run
organizations, titles are also pretty meaningless. At best, they advertise
some authority, an official status conferring the ability to give orders and
induce obedience. But titles mean little in terms of real power, which is the
capacity to influence and inspire. Have you ever noticed that people will
personally commit to certain individuals who on paper (or on the organization
chart) possess little authority, but instead possess pizzazz, drive, expertise,
and genuine caring for teammates and products? On the flip side, non-leaders
in management may be formally anointed with all the perks and frills
associated with high positions, but they have little influence on others, apart
from their ability to extract minimal compliance to minimal standards.
LESSON 10
“Never let your ego get so close to your position that
when your position goes, your ego goes with it.”
Too often, change is stifled by people who cling to familiar turfs and job
descriptions. One reason that even large organizations wither is that
managers won’t challenge old, comfortable ways of doing things. But
real leaders understand that, nowadays, every one of our jobs is becoming
obsolete. The proper response is to obsolete our activities before someone
else does. Effective leaders create a climate where people’s worth is
determined by their willingness to learn new skills and grab new
responsibilities, thus perpetually reinventing their jobs. The most
important question in performance evaluation becomes not, “How well
did you perform your job since the last time we met?” but, “How much
did you change it?”
LESSON 11
“Fit no stereotypes. Don’t chase the latest management
fads. The situation dictates which approach best
accomplishes the team’s mission.”
Flitting from fad to fad creates team confusion, reduces the leader’s credibility,
and drains organizational coffers. Blindly following a particular fad generates
rigidity in thought and action. Sometimes speed to market is more important
than total quality. Sometimes an unapologetic directive is more appropriate
than participatory discussion. Some situations require the leader to hover
closely; others require long, loose leashes. Leaders honor their core values,
but they are flexible in how they execute them. They understand that
management techniques are not magic mantras but simply tools to be
reached for at the right times.
LESSON 12
“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.”
The ripple effect of a leader’s enthusiasm and optimism is awesome. So is the
impact of cynicism and pessimism. Leaders who whine and blame engender
those same behaviors among their colleagues. I am not talking about stoically
accepting organizational stupidity and performance incompetence with a “what,
me worry?” smile. I am talking about a gung-ho attitude that says “we can
change things here, we can achieve awesome goals, we can be the best.”
Spare me the grim litany of the “realist,” give me the unrealistic aspirations
of the optimist any day.
LESSON 13
“Powell’s Rules for Picking People:”
Look for intelligence and judgment, and most critically,
a capacity to anticipate, to see around corners. Also
look for loyalty, integrity, a high energy drive, a balanced
ego, and the drive to get things done.
How often do our recruitment and hiring processes tap into these attributes?
More often than not, we ignore them in favor of length of resume, degrees and
prior titles. A string of job descriptions a recruit held yesterday seem to be
more important than who one is today, what they can contribute tomorrow, or
how well their values mesh with those of the organization. You can train a
bright, willing novice in the fundamentals of your business fairly readily, but
it’s a lot harder to train someone to have integrity, judgment, energy, balance,
and the drive to get things done. Good leaders stack the deck in their favor
right in the recruitment phase.
LESSON 14
“Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers,
who can cut through argument, debate and doubt,
to offer a solution everybody can understand.”
Effective leaders understand the KISS principle, Keep It Simple, Stupid. They
articulate vivid, over-arching goals and values, which they use to drive daily
behaviors and choices among competing alternatives. Their visions and
priorities are lean and compelling, not cluttered and buzzword-laden. Their
decisions are crisp and clear, not tentative and ambiguous. They convey an
unwavering firmness and consistency in their actions, aligned with the picture
of the future they paint. The result: clarity of purpose, credibility of leadership,
and integrity in organization.
LESSON 15
Part I: “Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands
for the probability of success and the numbers indicate
the percentage of information acquired.”
Part II: “Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range,
go with your gut.”
Don’t take action if you have only enough information to give you less than a
40 percent chance of being right, but don’t wait until you have enough facts to
be 100 percent sure, because by then it is almost always too late. Today,
excessive delays in the name of information-gathering breeds “analysis
paralysis.” Procrastination in the name of reducing risk actually increases risk.
LESSON 16
“The commander in the field is always right and the
rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.”
Too often, the reverse defines corporate culture. This is one of the main
reasons why leaders like Ken Iverson of Nucor Steel, Percy Barnevik of Asea
Brown Boveri, and Richard Branson of Virgin have kept their corporate staffs
to a bare-bones minimum -how about fewer than 100 central corporate
staffers for global $30 billion-plus ABB? Or around 25 and 3 for multi-billion
Nucor and Virgin, respectively? Shift the power and the financial accountability
to the folks who are bringing in the beans, not the ones who are counting
or analyzing them.
LESSON 17
“Have fun in your command. Don’t always run at
a breakneck pace. Take leave when you’ve earned it:
Spend time with your families.
Corollary: surround yourself with people who take their
work seriously, but not themselves, those who work
hard and play hard.”
Herb Kelleher of Southwest Air and Anita Roddick of The Body Shop would
agree: seek people who have some balance in their lives, who are fun to hang
out with, who like to laugh (at themselves, too) and who have some non-job
priorities which they approach with the same passion that they do their work.
Spare me the grim workaholic or the pompous pretentious “professional;”
I’ll help them find jobs with my competitor.
LESSON 18
“Command is lonely.”
Harry Truman was right. Whether you’re a CEO or the temporary head of a
project team, the buck stops here. You can encourage participative
management and bottom-up employee involvement, but ultimately the
essence of leadership is the willingness to make the tough, unambiguous
choices that will have an impact on the fate of the organization. I’ve seen
too many non-leaders flinch from this responsibility. Even as you create
an informal, open, collaborative corporate culture, prepare to be lonely.
“Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.”
Obama and Dems simply lied about Afghanistan. They lied then, and the lie now. Recall, Joe Biden called the bombing of Afghanistan a “War Crime” in October 2001, less than a month after 9/11.
Joe Biden.
Obama is no different, heck he probably wants a defeat in Afghanistan and an Islamist coup in Pakistan even more than Biden. This is all Kabuki to cover a withdrawal and defeat in Afghanistan as “morally good for America” so he can have a “summit” with Osama bin Laden in the White House. The New Yorker cover was accurate, not parody.
As far as women go, Women’s Voices Website reports single women voted Obama 70-29 and were his margin of victory. McCain took White Men, and (barely) Married White Women. But Women are left, far more than men, and that has been a feature of the Gender Gap for a long time.
As a practical matter, if Obama decided to fight to victory in Afghanistan, feminists, female employment in social work, teaching, health care, and federal, state, and local bureaucracy would decline, as would their cultural, economic, and political influence.
Rising would be the military (almost entirely White men) and defense workers (same). Who would exercise more cultural, political, and economic influence.
This is reality. This is why reliably feminists, women’s organizations, and female liberal pols reliably defend Islamists, Jihadists, and oppose the Afghan War period. To quote Paul Anka, “That’s just the way it is.”
Obama faces a political/cultural/economic civil war inside America over these issues: the economy, Afghanistan, terrorism, and the like. Obviously KSM will be acquitted or hung jury like OJ or Robert Blake. Just one Muslim or Single Female or Leftist juror will be enough to at least create a hung jury. That’s a two-fer for Obama — it will be the “legal system” taking the heat, and “Bush’s fault” while he uses the opportunity to disclose sources/methods of intel (making future attacks easier) and allowing foreign prosecution of Bush.
Which guarantees a cultural/political/economic civil war. All those unemployed White men, instantly unattractive to women and ineligible for any kind of “female/non-White/Gay” only government work will have innate interests completely opposite the “Mama Voted for Obama” (yes there is such a kids book) crowd.
Feminists and Liberals love the unemployment figures because it made women the majority of workers for the first time. It also however leaves many men totally uninvested in the system and ready for any man on a White Horse who promises to restore them to what they were.
I think on a simply numerical and power level, Obama vastly overestimated his appeal and power. Hence his narcissistic need to go to foreign places and bask in adulation.
I guess it’s time to get on my own hobby horse for a short ride.
What I’m seeing is not dithering. What is being done here is to use existing situations to whittle away at the most respected institution in America, the US military. It is a process of demoralizing the military itself and also of undermining its credibility with the American people and the international community.
Big Bama’s diplomatic initiatives have essentially the same function, erode, demoralize and undermine relations with American allies and strengthen, bolster and uphold America’s enemies.
His initiatives with the Intelligence communities are intended to have the same effect.
His economic policies will do the same to the economy.
His political essays are intended to do the same to our fundamental political and cultural institutions.
None of this is accidental, it is part of the well practiced modus operandi that is the stock in trade of any competent community organizer. I believe all of this is designed to create a crisis, a very useful crisis, that will enable the establishment of a permanent one party system of government. It is a carefully cloaked coup.
Re Napolitano rferred to above got an email a day or two ago, saying:
“Janet Napolitano appoints Arif Alikhan, a devout Muslim, as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development in the Dept of Homeland Security.” Source announcement: Homeland Security Press Room.
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/06/obama-appointment-arif-ali-khan-asst-secretary-dhs.html
“The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) is proud to announce that the DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano swore-in Kareem Shora, a devout Muslim, who was born in Damascus, Syria as ADC National Executive Director as a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC).”
http://www.adc.org/
***
has anyone ever heard a new government official being identified as “Joe Blow, a devout Catholic (or Jew or Protestant),” –being appointed to critical Homeland Security positions? This announcement was made on Aug 20, 2009 but i just heard about it post Ft Hood.
(anther email worth sending around)
545 PEOPLE
By Charlie Reese, Orlando Sentinel, retired
Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.
Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?
Have you ever wondered; if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?
You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The president does.
You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.
You and I don’t write the tax code, Congress does.
You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does.
You and I don’t control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.
One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.
I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.
I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.
Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.
What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.
The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? Nancy Pelosi. She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.
It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million can not replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts — of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.
If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.
If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red.
If the Army & Marines are bogged down, it’s because they want them bogged down.
If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it’s because they want it that way.
There are no insoluble government problems.
Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like “the economy,” “inflation,” or “politics” that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.
Those 545people and they alone, are responsible.
They and they alone, have the power.
They and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.
Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees.
We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!
Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the OrlandoSentinel Newspaper.
What you do with this article now that you have read it………. Is up to you.
Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
CDL license Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Dog License Tax
Excise Taxes
Federal Income Tax
Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline Tax (currently 44.75 cents per gallon)
Gross Receipts Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax
Inventory Tax
IRS Interest Charges IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
Liquor Tax
Luxury Taxes
Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Personal Property Tax
Property Tax
Real Estate Tax
Service Charge T ax
Social Security Tax
Road Usage Tax
Sales Tax
Recreational Vehicle Tax
School Tax
State Income Tax
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
Telephone Federal Excise Tax
Telephone Federal Universal Service FeeTax
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge=2 0Tax
Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax
Telephone State and Local Tax
Telephone Usage Charge Tax
Utility Taxes
Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft Registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax
THINK THIS IS FUNNY? Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, and our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.
We have a president for the ages.
He has
Nixon’s paranoia
Clinton’s elastic concept of the truth
Roosevelt’s high-handed drive to control everything
Grant’s blind eye to crony corruption
Lincoln’s carelessness about the Constitution
Wilson’s sanctimony
and more, much more:
Unparalleled lack of experience
Unparalleled ability to anger our allies
Unparalleled eagerness to pass the buck
Has there ever been such a president before? And he reads the teleprompter so well!
(Of course Lincoln had the excuse of a civil war, and the various excesses were disposed of after the war. The comparison is grossly unfair to Lincoln, but he was the only example I could come up with. Better historians are welcome to add/modify the list.)
Storm the Bastille.
Off with their heads.
And bring the reset button…
Here’s a song for next year in the Neo-Hobo Jungles of the post-apocalyptic USA.
Roger Miller, King Of The Road
Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms to let…fifty cents.
No phone, no pool, no pets
I ain’t got no cigarettes
Ah, but..two hours of pushin’ broom
Buys an eight by twelve four-bit room
I’m a man of means by no means
King of the road.
Third boxcar, midnight train
Destination…Bangor, Maine.
Old worn out suits and shoes,
I don’t pay no union dues,
I smoke old stogies I have found
Short, but not too big around
I’m a man of means by no means
King of the road.
I know every engineer on every train
All of their children, and all of their names
And every handout in every town
And every lock that ain’t locked
When no one’s around.
I sing,
Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms to let, fifty cents
No phone, no pool, no pets
I ain’t got no cigarettes
Ah, but, two hours of pushin’ broom
Buys an eight by twelve four-bit room
I’m a man of means by no means
King of the road.
Wretchard @ 8 –
Damn, that’s good stuff! Posts like that deliver a stroke so sharp, swift, and lethal that the victim and onlookers are momentarily unsure whether the blade has even hit its mark. Upon a second or two of reflection, the result is clear.
Is Wretchard as devastating in a live debate as he is with the printed word? Inquiring minds want to know.
Captain Ramen @ 92
You seem in 92 to be making the argument against your own point:”P.S. I just had a frightening thought… these next few months are the perfect time for a terrorist attack.”
A major defeat in the War on Terror, particularly AFPak, would cost us a hell of lot more than the cost of the operations there. As Wretchard has pointed out probably in a much better way than I ever could, there are way too many bloated bureaucracies and subsidies in our suffocating NannyState that could and should be trimmed first, before we discuss the cutting the cost of the AFPak campaign.
Now I have long believed that Buraq is setting up the military and Petraeus for a fall in AFPak. The cost of sending our brave young men and women to their deaths needlessly and pointlessly as cannon fodder for another one of Buraq’s schemes to humiliate America is almost too much to bear.
a bit off topic, but I cannot remember so many people (not just here, but everywhere) trying to figure out a President’s psychology, since Nixon. Obama is so unknown or so difficult to come to grips with, people keep trying to find a psychological key to understanding him.
Maybe worth a post, wretchard?
cfbleachers @ 4:
Nice mental visual! And precisely what I had been thinking. Excellent turn of phrase!
wretchard @ 10 said:
Having some experience with the modern Irish Republic in having lived there twice for a total of over a year, I can say that you may not be that far off. The Republic is a modern PC construct. The pugnacious folk who used to paint themselves in woad before battle are now Switzerland squared = a modern “neutral” country. They would no more stand for something these days than pResident Pantywaist. The Republic is fully socialized and has lost the ability to remember that they were even free men once.
BTW, LOTM, Northern Ireland is composed of six of the nine counties of Ulster, not all of them – Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone. Cavan, Donegal, and Monaghan are part of the Republic of Ireland.
Josh @ 11:
Probably more like kabuki. But I do get ya!
wretchard @ 35:
I gotta tell you a story:
I was in Advanced Fields and Waves (senior physics level). Prof used to march into class flipping the textbook and catching, all the time. Prof was trying to prove the Laplacian. He writes along 1..2..3..4..5.. all of the boards in the room. The 1 1/2 hour is up and he says, “Finish this yourselves and I’ll write it up also, give the rest to you and we can review next meeting.” Sharpest student raises hand and says, “Uh, Prof, back over there, (points to bottom of 1st board) shouldn’t this be ……?” Prof backs up, chin in hand, ponders for about 5 minutes, picks up text and starts flipping it and says, “Well, I made an a$$ of myself, didn’t I? Go ahead and finish from there. (Points to bottom of 1st board.) I’ll make sure to correct it. It WILL be on the test.” And stalks out of the room.
Now there was no harm, no foul here. Once you work the Laplacian out you get a shortcut and can use that forever more. BUT each and every physics student in that particular U MUST go the route, once.
If 0bama, at the end of his pondering, does the same, well, that surely does tell us something. Doesn’t it? (Another vote present) I doubt he will be as honest as my physics prof.
Just for fun. Is The Won, Baraq 0bama, Nicolae Carpathia?
78. Captain Ramen:
Today, A Mexican trade group asked for UN peacekeepers to intervene in Juarez.
Mexico Group Wants UN Peacekeepers in Juarez, Universal Says
Can you say failed state?
LOTM @ 96 said:
You know what is interesting? China killed off a generation or more of girls. They have a demographics crisis coming their way of epic proportions. I bet they are going to try and do some conquering just to get women for breeding stock. Just an ‘off’ thought.
Johnny @ 106: Now, hit the tip jar. You owe wretchard for wasting his bandwidth. Not that the lessons are a waste but …. post them on your own blog. It’s easy – go here: Blogger, make your FREE blog then post a link. That is just good web etiquette.
Tamquam @ 108: You betcha!
Some say that the big 0 is dithering, dawdling, hemming and hawing, wavering, wasting time, vacillating, hesitating, dallying, waffling, or procrastinating. Others would call it premeditated postponement for partisan gain. Still others would call it Analysis Paralysis.
Wiki definition:
“Analysis paralysis is a phrase that describes a situation where the opportunity cost of decision analysis exceeds the benefits that could be gained by enacting some decision, or an informal or non-deterministic situation where the sheer quantity of analysis overwhelms the decision making process itself, thus preventing a decision.”
http://tinyurl.com/5c6tgc
For those whose lives are on the line may describe the big 0 as having his finger up his butt. One thing is certain, the big 0 is not decisive.
Even the left of center Politico that the big 0 is a ball of confusion when it comes military decisions.
[Politico describes eight dithering meetings]
Gibbs said. “It’s important to fully examine not just how we’re going to get folks in but how we’re going to get folks out.”
Asked if he believes the strategy-formulation process is winding down, Gibbs said: “I do. I think we’re making progress, and I think the president gets closer and closer every day.” Asked if there will be another formal strategy meeting, he replied: “I think it’s probably likely, yes.” On Wednesday, Obama held his Eighth formal strategy session on Afghanistan. It lasted about two hours and 20 minutes.
“I think everybody thought, coming out of yesterday’s meeting, that the meeting was very productive and that we made progress,” Gibbs said. “What the president wants to ensure is that we take into account and understand — so that the American people can understand — our time commitment… The meetings were very productive. This has been a very rigorous and deliberative process.”
http://tinyurl.com/yab8n4j
It has been pointed out, that Obama didn’t know what he was getting into when he shot his mouth off on Afghanistan. He seemed to have believed that GWB stalled on Afghanistan because it suited his purpose to maintain an atmosphere of crisis for domestic reasons. He was wily enough not to accuse GWB of this directly though, relying instead on hints and insuniations. Obama has no good choices on Afghanistan, hence his inability to formulate a response. Had he not opened his mouth during the elections, I am sure that the Americans would have been on their way home now.
I find it interesting that Suez has been mentioned several times in this context. Essentially, what happened was that the combined forces of the UK and France were sent into Egypt to reverse the typically Marxist theft of the Canal – which was built either entirely or almost entirely with British and French money. For reasons of its own (probably connected with the strong anti-British sentiment of America at that time, still going strong in some quarters) the USA decided to side with socialist thieves and the British and French had to leave.
And it is easily arguable that this action by the USA, carried out in its usual clumsy, bullying and ignorant manner (we Brits and the French had been dealing with Arab irrationality for well over a century, and the USA didn’t have a clue) is one of the major reasons for the resurgence of Arab nationalism and global jihad. In other words, Obama is reaping the crop that Eisenhower sowed, and Eisenhower’s actions at least partially led to 9/11.
It might also be mentioned that American profligacy with oil has also been part of the reason why the jihadis have money to buy their equipment with.
On the subject of Afghanistan; of course it is a good idea to stop that hellhole being a pit of terrorism. But the USA has chosen to do that by essentially conquering Afghanistan. Yet another example of American hubris. Alexander couldn’t manage it. The greatest empire the world has ever seen (the British one) couldn’t manage it. The Russians couldn’t manage it. But the USA can. RRRiigghhtt. /sarc
RagnarD,
Re: Ireland.
Right you are. That was sloppy of me. Thank you.
FC
For myself I was well aware that the Suez example empowered attitudes like yours and would probably stimulate an injection of your bile. Your main points are accurate to a point, your proportions are what is off. The focus was not driven by old fashioned anti-British politics of the Colonel McCormick Chicago Tribune school. That was part of the pre-war Isolationism of the Right that morphed into the anti-Colonialism of the Left. The problem was the Soviets and their invasion of Hungary.
ledger (118): precisely my point (one of) in posting Colin Powell’s LESSON 15. Obama opts for 0% solution in lieu of 100% solution. I see this in defense acquisition every day. I cite Powell as one of his supporters who Obama should be listening to. Maybe the general was just a ‘useful idiot’ for Mr. Obama, too.
—
Part I: “Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired.”
Part II: “Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut.”
Don’t take action if you have only enough information to give you less than a 40 percent chance of being right, but don’t wait until you have enough facts to be 100 percent sure, because by then it is almost always too late. Today, excessive delays in the name of information-gathering breeds “analysis paralysis.” Procrastination in the name of reducing risk actually increases risk.
—
I think Obama is deferring to the establishment, which is dysfunctional. This is what he has done with ‘health reform’ and congress (defers on issue more important to him than AfPak). The dysfunction is why we need a ‘decider’. Bureaucracy is tied in knots with competing orgs/missions.
Obama won the pageant. Doesn’t seem too interested in the J-O-B, though.
122/Johnny I mostly agree. The problem is the Big 0 doesn’t have any guts. He off-loads responsibility to others – who can then be blamed for failure.
He has no business being CinC. He is OK at being a dithering lawmaker/lawbreaker from Chicago but, he is a failure in the Oval Office.
Johnny #122 and and #106.
Powell’s rules include the P in [40,70] rule.
Obama is obviously violating this. However, the General was also violating hiw own rule by advising as late as this week to “take your time”.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/11/gen-powell-to-president-obama-on-afpak-strategy-take-your-time.html
I don’t need fancy theories of calculated subterfuge to explain Obama’s dithering.
I’ve seen it lots in the business world:
procrastination = fear of making a mistake = lack of confidence in one’s own judgement
President Dithers isn’t smart enough to have figured out (after 11 months) that there is no strategy for Afghanistan that won’t cost him something politically. So he keeps stalling, looking for the “optimal” solution that does not exist. He was able to campaign against “false choices” but now in office he is finding out that the choices are not false after all.
Obama the Unready is showing the true danger of electing someonw with no track record or leadership experience.
Here is something relevant to this discussion.
Blogging Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: Prologue
This is a fascinating dissertation that highlights and explains Obama’s and friends march to destroy America.
Have a good weekend.
Papa Ray
Central Texas
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
2009 Judge Alex Kozinski
Obama has already bristled at the term, “victory”. And he’s also already declared that the “War on Terrorism” is over. If these kinds of things that have been happening are truly indicative of his mentality (and why aren’t they? These were “unforced” statements he simply thought he’d announce), then he’s gotten himself in a bewildering position. He’s skeptical of winning the war, but of course he doesn’t want to be seen as losing it, so he’s kind of dithering along without even a clear objective much less a strategy. And if this were true, the results would resemble pretty much what we have today, wouldn’t it?
Sun Tsu says “never run into battle. You will be out of breath when you get there and unable to fight”.
Cato says “He who hesitates is lost”.
LBJ says “Go home with the boy what brung you”.
Colin Powell says: “You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.”
This Thanksgiving Day Hussein Obama will announce “Our boys will be home by Christmas” and he will bring home our troops in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, West Germany, and Korea.
Well, it *did* take him five months to pick out a dog. Expect a decision on Afghanistan in, say, 2042.
/snark
I think Tamquam @ 108 may well be onto something:
What I’m seeing is not dithering. What is being done here is to use existing situations to whittle away at the most respected institution in America, the US military. It is a process of demoralizing the military itself and also of undermining its credibility with the American people and the international community.
I think there’s a palpable difference between, say, Clinton’s view of the military and what we are witnessing with Obama. Clinton’s attitude was cookie-cutter Vietnam protestor: part pity, part disdain, with an overall view that the American military was the red-headed stepchild of foreign policy, ie to be ashamedly kept in the back room & not acknowledged unless absolutely necessary. And he did not like military culture, hence DADT and Sarah “the Marines are extremists” Lister. But … (1) Clinton had lived enough among red America to know what the military means to these Americans, and (2) he was a cagy enough politician to know that the military could be of some use to his ambitions in the office of POTUS, so it would be shooting himself in the foot to embark on an all-out war with the very troops he commanded.
Obama’s view is not different by degrees; it is wholly different in kind. He knows *nothing* of red America, having had virtually no contact with it for his entire life, and he does not appear to appreciate, as Clinton did, that even if the POTUS doesn’t like military culture and disagrees with the hawkish approach to foreign policy, that the military can still be useful to carving out a successful presidency.
Clinton, the penultimate user, still had a use for even the military.
Obama appears to have no use at all. Zip. Zilch. No affection, no identification, no appreciation, no concept of the military’s raison d’etre, not even a savvy politician’s concept of quid pro quo co-existence. He really comes across as someone who wants the American military to just … go away. Preferably, tail between legs.
So I have to say that his modus operandi comes across to me as landing somewhere between passive-aggressive neglect, which is bad enough, or something more sinister still — an attempt to grind the military underfoot via defeat and humiliation.
I keep going back to his statement about having a “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the military.
“WTF” was almost every conservative’s visceral (and accurate) reaction to that statement. But “how would he ever get there?” was also a legitimate question. Because replacing or even eclipsing the role of the military in American policy and in Americans’ affections (at 80%, most trusted institution in the country) would seem an impossible goal.
Consider, though, that undercutting the military, first operationally, then reputationally, and fiscally the whole way, WOULD be one of the first steps a CinC would take if his/her long-term plan was to lay the groundwork for that “civilian national security force.” If he can gut the constitutionally mandated and defined official military, who are sworn to uphold not him but the Constitution, and whose individual fealties are deeply rooted in red America, then it is that much easier to create by executive order (or by a 3:00 AM Saturday rush-rush legislation from a lapdog Congress) a new institution with no such constitutional restraints or definitions as the old one.
How bad and low-down can this get?
We have not yet begun to dig.
Anyone else hear Obama’s weekly speech this morning? On and on about Ft Hood “tragedy”, not a word about KSM – or China.
OK, I suppose he could have recorded it four days ago before leaving, but it was a whole bunch more tin-ear sanctimonious stuff in any case.
(vids are online at whitehouse.gov, but I can’t find a transcript to link to)
And this morning we learn that Obamamandias wants to delay the investigation of the Fort Hood shooting. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/14/obama-urges-congress-delay-fort-hood-investigation/
Let’s just wait till it can be successfully swept under the rug. If we let the serfs learn any information, they might jump to conclusions and demand We make a public decision. Just like the rest of his policy making.
I think there’s a palpable difference between, say, Clinton’s view of the military and what we are witnessing with Obama.
The most relevant contrast, BW…is not with Clinton, but with Carter.
The same deep bow to the enemies of Israel and the same antipathy toward Israel, with the same bald face denials. The same willingness to be part of a sheikhdown…the illusion of peace …at any price.
The same dismantling of the military, with the same back of the hand attitude toward its generals.
The same ponderous, effete, Chamberlainesque, limp-wristed, appeasement, blameshifting, and self-loathing (America, not himself…narcissists apologize for others, they are blameless) …masquerading as “diplomacy”.
Wretchard, this administration has indeed “counted the numbers”, but it isn’t the currency of the dollar which gives rise to the hesitancy and halting lurch forward inch by ponderous inch…it’s the currency that would have to be paid from the furthest left reaches, which will start screeching “quagmire” 85 seconds into a troop infusion into Afghanistan. The fawning entrenched media in his pocket protects like a suit of armor from every bit of the spectrum to the right…from Lieberman’s left of center, to smack dab in the middle, to the far reaches of the right.
But it will abandon him with all the epaulets falling off like a bird molting…the minute he gets attacked from the “there are no enemies, except Middle Americans” left.
The political currency loss would be steep…and that is the only counting that is being done. Like Carter, this administration would tear apart the military in a heartbeat and throw more trillions at “wealth redistribution”. There’s a bullseye being assembled to do just that…and The Robin Hood of Nothingham, has his eyes set on the Marx.
merdum, comment ce faisse que 2 de mes posts consecutifs aient été absorbés ?
well, i just linked the new nyquist on the adjacent thjread –but since it’s about the Clinton presidency (in large part) it belongs here underneath the bogie wheel and cfbleachers comments:
http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2009/1113.html
absolutely savage on the progenitors of the current shape-shift of corruption.
***
merdum, commentaire que faisse CE 2 de mes posts consecutifs absorbés aient été?
MC, il ne pas que toi. La meme chose se passe pour moi. Oui, il est tres frustrant!
umm, I give up for the moment, even a tinyurl isn’t goin thru !
I’m goin for a walk & come back later, see if it works out after!
how is it that some BClubers responses appear on my Gmail account (from the former article) ?
48. anton & 17. John Lynch
I think he is only concerned with “the process” as a tactical tool. This is a deeply teleological and ideological administration. But striking this pose of “thoughtful and process-oriented” is the best way to camouflage his deliberate stalling. Anyone who has ever been a bureaucrat knows how this is done.
We all know this will end very badly. … but that is a big part of what Obamandias intends.
59. Don Rodrigo,
To your list of failed insurgencies add the Ukrainian National Army, whose last commander surrendered in 1962, the Estonian Forest Brethren of the 1950s, The Hungarians of 1956. Tibet?
There is nothing indecisive about The One.
He has decided to lose the war in Afghanistan and Iraq too, if he can pull it off. But that would undermine his domestic plan to socialize our medical industry. He has quite a few supporters who don’t share his hatred for this country and he needs their backing to finish his domestic agenda.
No, he is simply putting off the decision to lose the war until his health care program is safely won. I think there are quite few things that he has put off for the same reason and when he gets his health care bill through (which fairly certain at this point), you’re going to see all of the ugly come out.
BTW, it’s interesting that people attribute his hatred of America to his being a “secret Islamist”.
He is simply a leftist who happens to hate America even more than the Muslims do.
olright, my response and link about Algeria war is posted there, that couldn’t get through here !
http://bokedou-an-hanv.blogspot.com/2009/11/ca-fait-au-moins-3-ou-4-fois-que-je.html
there’s still BC posts on my gmail !
137. RayJ
If he can lose both wars, pass national health care then that will be the trifecta that sends the definitive message dat we gonna have a civil wowa, or is it whow-wa.
Anyone who can read can easily understand the Constitution fo rit was written so dat da farmer “out west” (close to the eastern foothills of the Allegany mountains could understand it could be undustand’n in what it be say’in, ya know?
o HUSSEIN is a bitter piece of work and is determined to destroy this country.
From BL’s link @133:
According to Klayman, “Monica Lewinsky was the lightning rod that drew the public’s attention and investigators and law enforcement people away from the real scandal which was treason by Bill and Hillary Clinton, and even some Republicans, that were taking money from Communist China in exchange for returning favors. In the case of the Clintons, we shipped technology over there through their Commerce Department, under Ron Brown, in exchange for … campaign contributions…
Ron Brown who died in a plane crash in 1996 attributed to pilot error during landing in Croatia.
Which is not to … you know … but at some point the calculus has to derive some meaning.
Wherever one is on the conspiracy scale, the line that caught my attention:
…the tendency of the public is to shrug off corruption as normal. But never before has there been corruption like this.
Apparently this country has further to go before a critical mass of public opinion agrees.
140. Geeze Louise
“that drew the public’s attention and investigators and law enforcement people away from the real scandal which was treason by Bill and Hillary Clinton, etc.
It goes deeper than that. Bill went to Oxford in the 60′s and found his way to Moscow. No body from the US went to Moscow without Intourist, the KGB “escort-tour guide service” being with them constantly.
We don’t know who Bill met with or his purpose in going. We never will since sociopaths are incapable of understanding and telling the truth.
We do know this. Immediately upon his return to London he began to organize anti war demonstrations against the US.
In the intelligence tradecraft there exist an anagram which used separately or in any combination can help identify, forthe KGB a possible recruit. That acronym is M.I.C.E. Money, Ideology, Compromise or Coercion (depending on source), and Ego”. Did Billl fit..dah.
That Bill Clinton’s dysfunctional upbringing and continuing dysfunctional adulthood made him a prime target to become a mole is too apparent to go unnoticed.
I believe he was a mole, sold out the US to Moscow where he could and is still in their good graces. Hillary and o Hussein fit the same MICE.
The truly sad part is that given the world wide capabilities if Eschelon , http://tinyurl.com/6sxg which includes the NSA someone, somewhere knows this and is running cover for them.
And it doesn’t confine itself to just politicians. In the past three years half of the US wealth has vanished. Look to Goldman Sachs and all the chieftains that are not simply there but are all over the Mother of the FED, the New York FED. Ben Bernanke refuses to tell Congress where the 800+ billion dollars for the “bailout” went. Simply refuses and the Democrats are allowing that to stand.
As I’ve stated before, we’ve been had.
130. Rurik:
And this morning we learn that Obamamandias wants to delay the investigation of the Fort Hood shooting. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/11/14/obama-urges-congress-delay-fort-hood-investigation/
Could the near-coincidng of the NY terror trials and the Ft. Hood trial become a political “black swan” for Obama and the Democrats? A veritable smorgasbord of multi-culti PC-ness will be on display in these two media circuses. People will get an eyefull of what their elites are really like and really up to.
#130. Rurik
Take note of Obama’s reason for delaying the congressional investigation: so congress (read: Republicans) can’t turn this in a political show. Now, who do you suppose would have an interest in doing so, hmmm? Once again, Ft. Hood is about politics and that’s all it is about. First it was the rabid right-wingers who were going to go all islamophobic on us, and now there’s the possibility that the Republicans in congress just might (maybe) turn this into an opportunity for airing Obama’s willingness to do his soft shoe around “Islamists in the military are committing personal acts of terrorism,” or some such nonsense. Will the Republicans heed this quite reasonable request. I certainly hope not.
#139. Possumtater:
This is what you get when you name U. S. military installations after failed confederate generals. Bad joke: Ft. Bragg is next.
refusal to make a decision is a decision.
in military matters, it’s typically also a recipe for disaster.
For a chilling explanation of the how and why of PC accommodation of Islamist aggression, take a look at this:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=115542
from World Net Daily
The thing about terrorism is that it . . . terrorizes.
F@ck the delay, if given half a chance, the U.S. Army, Marines,Air Force, Coast Guard and Navy will clean up Obama’s shit.
And not worry if he says, thank you or kiss my ass.
If you missed the United States Marines Birthday Message watch this!
I was a grunt, but served next to Marines and let me tell you they will not only help do the job but save your ass….EVERY TIME!!
I know, I was there.
Papa Ray
Habu@141: And it doesn’t confine itself to just politicians. In the past three years half of the US wealth has vanished…As I’ve stated before, we’ve been had.
The reason I noted the death of Ron Brown is that I remember thinking at the time “Oh Yeaaah???” (my Frances McDormand impersonation from the movie Fargo.) I’ve been having more than a few McDormand moments since 2008.
But Bill Clinton. I am in no position to have any kind of informed opinion about his being “turned” other than to note the facts, but I will say his post-presidential activities may leave more of an historical mark than anything he did or didn’t do as President. His Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) is just f…ing huge. And much of it Middle Eastern money. I’ll let the informed people fill in those blanks, but CGI is a major player with some breath-taking revenue streams.
And we hear next to nothing about it.
At least his fellow traveler William Jefferson got 13 years.
V/143; re forts Hood & Bragg; that braxton bragg would have the honor –that IS a wonder, as he was pretty much reviled by his own command, and as such occupied a space thus denied to any better leader. the lit concludes that Bragg’s commands were connected with a Jefferson Davis alliance –a political general i guess one would say. And a martinet –see online memoir of Army of Tennessee Pvt. Sam Watkins’ “Company Aitch” for some talk from Johnny Reb in the line. John Bell Hood OTOH was a great general who could not be called a ‘failed’ general as he sqwoze the max out of what he had to work with –including his own self, so many large pieces of which got shot off at various times while leading from the front that the remainder only retained unchallenged rights to the name due to its fortuitously including his head.
I just watched the movie In the Electric Mist (2008) with Tommy Lee Jones playing the role of Detective Dave Robicheaux who encounters General John Bell Hood, played by Levon Helm, during the course of an investigation into a series of murders in Louisiana. Flawed movie – script and direction notably missing – but Tommy Lee and Levon Helm – picture perfect. It’s a challenge to defile raw acting talent – although Al Pacino has given it a shot during the last decade.
John Bell Hood OTOH was a great general who could not be called a ‘failed’ general as he sqwoze the max out of what he had to work with –including his own self, so many large pieces of which got shot off at various times while leading from the front that the remainder only retained unchallenged rights to the name due to its fortuitously including his head.
buddy – it reads fun but I dare you to diagram it.
Is “fortuitously” missing what it’s supposed to be modifying?
Commented on Ace of Spades and my blog on The Bow. Short summary, pompous parvenue fraud seeks to one up genuine article predecessor and embarrasses hosts.
Habu,
M.I.C.E. Money, Ideology, Compromise or Coercion (depending on source), and Ego”. Did Billl fit..dah
Regarding Clinton, how do you blackmail someone who is shameless? He might be rented but could he be bought? Is there evidence he really has ideological fire inside? Does he believe in anything or is the biggest difference between him and Obama the fact that Bubba is smarter, more flexible, and better able to work with others? Maybe that is why he exploded with anger during the campaign. Maybe he is in fact less ideological than Obama. Agreed he sold out to China and has been collecting from everyone ever since but I suspect that while he knows the Socialist tropes and can recite theme to applause he sees through them better than most. Reports are that he has contempt for believers and frauds like Gore.
Re Hillary it is the other extreme. The factors fit to well to work. She is like Angela Lansbury in the Manchurian Candidate. Her ego is to big to control.
Blogged under the title “Of M.I.C.E. and Moles.”
BW/150; sir, i make it a point to avoid reading the writing my self is by keyboard fortuitously enabled. Thus to parry any thrusts related to the Hon. Gen’l John Bell Hood, may i inform you sir that he was Al Capp’s model for Gen’l Jubilation T. Cornpone. Shirley a town as forlorn as Dogpatch do need its heroes, and thus it should come as no surprise that its most famous son, memorialized by a statue made of the recovered useable metal parts of dozens of Dogpatch’s most prominent abandoned trailers, is Civil War General Jubilation T. Cornpone, best known for the “Battle of Cornpone’s Retreat”, the “Campaign of Cornpone’s Disaster”, and the defense of Dogpatch itself which, before it was realized the attacking force was not the yankee General Grant and the Army of the Potomac but was in fact forty or so of Ma & Pa Hatfield’s chillun up to tomfoolery with their slingshots, peashooters, some tin pots, and their pappy’s old Bugle, resulted in the skillful delaying action known as “Cornpone’s Rout.” I thank you sir for your kindly attention to this footnote.
KSM trial in NYC… Does NYC have a death penalty?
buddy – woo hoo! Hitting the cornpone hard tonight, are we? Bravo Zulu on sentence #3. That is surely worth at least a dogeared (dogpatched?) edition of Strunk & White. Suh. (I grew up in South, if central Florida counts.)
LOL –thanks bogie –but i cain’t take credit, those names and battles are Al Capp’s –the factual imaginaries from the actual imaginary tooniverse.
151. Lifeofthemind & Habu:
re: Bill Clinton’s putative ideological bona fides versus his innate bent for flimflammery
Wes Pruden, Managing Editor of the Washington Times during the Clinton Administration, and also a fellow Arkansan, regularly referred to him as Flem Snopes. I believe that’s a pretty accurate and succinct description. His whole life is just one long con… /g
148 buddy
Well, there’s more important things than pulling J. B. Hood’s reputation out of the fire.
But if you want to talk about something, you might take note of the incredibly stupid and stupidly handled 1864 invasion of Tennessee that resulted in two of the CSA’s more disastrous defeats, climaxing with the only time in that war that a whole army suffered such casualties as to disappear as a military unit. He presided over the destruction of one of the only two major CSA armies left by that year.
I’m sure you know all this stuff. The “squeezing out” defense, OTOH, could apply to all sorts of ne’er-do-wells: Nathaniel Banks eg., not to mention my favorite, Ben Butler.
Ask the people in heaven who died at Franklin whether they liked J. B. Hood? My thoughts on Ft. “Hood” stand.
Questions.
1. Is the NYC KSM trial a sign of a sheer incompetence of the 9/10 kind?
2. Deliberate set up that would involve the some or all of the following points?
- a) Discovery and thus “let’s fry Bush/Cheney by a proxy”
- b) Legal technicalities -> KSM walks free
- c) Circus maximus giving an opportunity to KSM to spew jihadi bile, possibly for a year.
- d) Providing a convenient settings for another jihadi NYC attack or 5 Beslans for a blackmail and consequent KSM release
Some auxillary details:
Who is the prosecutor in this case?
Preet Bharara
Preet Bharara, was appointed U.S. Attorney for NY’s Southern District by Obama.
Preet Bharara is a political appointee.
Preet Bharara, WAS Sen. Chuck Schumer’s chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary.
What is Preet Bharara “claim to fame”?
Preet Bharara, who is presently a political appointee, discovered that political appointees are appointed to political position by politicians and politics plays a role in who politicians appoint to political positions. YCMTSU.
That there is a bad mojo written all over this is no doubt. But this does not seem to me as an isolated event. Contextually, with what happened already since the start of 0 rule, I can’t shake off the feeling that this is a calculated affair.
What seems to be the major pattern in all manifestations of 0 rule?
133. buddy larsen:
The answer to the question I posed on the last thread….why did we learn of the NSA’s taps of Hasans messages to Yemen in real time rather than 50 years later….is this. The NSA is concerned about sources. They don’t like to reveal what they know publicly because it might lead the bad guys to figure out how they learned the info.
In the case of AQ however, its commen knowledge that the NSA would be monitoring traffic in and out of places like Yemen–and especially to bad guys like the AQ imman there. No big deal. Further there is no peer rival to the NSA in that part of the world.
The penetration of the west that the KGB made for many decades has been getting a review lately as old KGB agent write their memoirs and pull out their old notes. The most recent to do so is Anatoly Chernyaev. British Newspaper reports of his recent postings show that British Labor was darn near owned by the KGB for decades.
So Habu’s assertion isn’t far off. It would explain what I thought was Clinton’s treason during the 90′s. I thought Clinton sold out the US to the Chinese. It was totally disgraceful. He should have been impeached and imprisoned for the sell out. That said, you have to know that the elites–even in the media– understood that too. That’s why Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid died early in 2008 when a reporter turned up that she was getting many multiple $10,000 campaign contributions from Chinatown kitchen workers in NY and San Francisco. Everyone “knew” that money was coming from red china. The MSM all shifted to favoring Obama. (Of course his campaign likely received even more foreign money. But for now it appears to be untraceable.)
The red chinese penetration of the USA is probably the closest equivalent to the KGB penetration western europe from the 30′s-70′s.
I have heard plenty suggestions that Wen Ho Lee was a red chinese spy but got away with it because it was the NSA that uncovered his espionage but they were unwilling to let on how they knew about his efforts. (So he skated and won some suits.) Same as they did during the late 40′s with the Venona cables.
deleted as I can’t find the reference I need.
With Clinton my technical question always was; Bought or rented? With Obama the question is; Owned by who?
twobyfour,
“He has never lost an election, and has never held a job outside of politics,” the wiki on Chuck Schumer.
When he first ran for the Senate I heard that he walked into Wall Street board rooms and said, “Cough it up.” Another gift to America from the Harvard Law School, along with Obama and Eliot Spitzer, his single minded ambition and ruthlessness either triggered or enabled the subprime crisis.
Rudy Giuliani is clear minded, plain spoken and correct, about why the civilian trial in New York is a bad idea.
LotM,
Rudy Giuliani can’t go beyond the incompetence and irresponsibility paradigm and he can hint that the decision is political and based on ideology.
But 0 and all actors involved in this decision are not stupid. They know what the possible consequences are. It is not a recklessness what I see, it is a deliberate setup to bring about these consequences to bear their fruit.
The main contention of Holder that since KSM was behind an attack on civilian targets and thus a civilian court is appropriate somehow skips the inconvenient fact that Pentagon is not a civilian target. As if everybody suffers from some sort of amnesia.
Kill the economy — half through
Kill the military — steps being taken via Afghanistan dither
Enslave future generations — half through
Humiliate and demoralize American public — by any means
Bring terrorists from overseas to roost in USA — just about to get a mighty impetus
And on, and on. Every second day, one s***t or another is flung at the fan. So what that he may not last but one term, or even less. The damage will be done–the mission accomplished.
Geoffb, saw it before you kilt it –and was gonna add that when bill Clinton signed “Motor Voter” (the ‘Acorn enabling act’) among the dozen or so of his invitees onstage behind him stood professors Cloward and Piven. Don’t believe me, look it up. Equivalent shoe on other foot example, a pubby signing would’ve needed to invite Franco, Juan Peron, David Duke, a KKK Grand Dragon, and an adolf hitler lookalike juggling act. and –the press would’ve lit up like mad. As is, crickets –i learnt this bon mot by accident, looking up Moto Voter and seeing the signing pic, with the names of the folks depicted.
C/159; as i understand it, Win Ho Lee came under suspicion by peers, who reported this to FBI field agents, who reported up the chain. Reno said to leave him alone, just to keep him under surveillance for now. Months later –six? –they moved in. The widespread feeling is, he was given time to finish his mission, to get all of what he was after and get it sent off to the next level. Probably went thru the Riady Family and then to the PLA.
V/157; can’t argue that –Franklin is in the book as a JBH victory but it was terribly bought, with those frontal charges uphill against entrenched infantry. And then Nashville –painful wastage, loss, dissolution. So i guess you’re right –in the cold hard light of truth, losing an army overrides that the rank and file always loved his brio and audacity and fought hard –maybe too hard –for him.
Sign of those times: one of the reb Generals killed at Franklin had the given name “States Rights”. General States Rights Gist, KIA, Franklin, November 1864. If you look at his wiki, you’ll note that wiki has reassigned him to the Army ofthe Potomac. Hope the Gen’l got no internet connection wherever he is.
I thought I had a reference at hand and could add it in editing but couldn’t find it. We moved to a new place in 2005 and so much is now still boxed in the basement.
Didn’t know about the Cloward-Piven moment but it is typical. Thanks for that one.
2×4 @ 158:
That is rhetorical, right? More likely, who is the tail on that dog?
The exact nature of the wagging is yet TBD.
O/t but comments just closed on prev thread–
Dave, re Ia Drang battle and Hal Moore conversation –i guess going back to the movies thread –i had emailed that Hal Moore youtube to a friend over in tea sipperville, a shrink (no i don’t repeat do not know him professionally, that is, as a patient –at least i don’t think so) who was an M60 commander in VN, name of Schmidt. he’d mentioned, when “We Were Soldiers” first came out, that he knew Joe Galloway, from associations after the war (s’why i sent him that Hal Moore vid). i just heard back from him something i hadn’t known, he emails
“Dont know if I ever told you but I first was in combat about 5 miles from where Hal Moore and his troops performed the 1st ever combat air assault & survived the NVA onslaught of 4500 – Idrang valley – LZ Xray. Joe Galloway is the only civilian to have ever won a medal for valor and he did so during that battle.”
anyhoo –you guys were in the same place more or less at the same time more or less –be funny as hell if y’all knew each other. from san antone tho in teasip area now. local judge a few years ago told him he was now a batchelor again so he went and bought a new red corvette like he had in the 60s-70s when he was single before. says it still works fine chasing women but now when he catches one he cain’t recollect what it is he’s spose to do with her. ah age is a shipwreck. no, a trainwreck. no, well maybe a bus/helicopter wreck
anyhoo, in the movie Joe Galloway was played by the same guy that played the sniper in “Saving Private Ryan” –the guy who got blown up fighting from the church steeple in the final battle scene. in the Ia Drang fight it got so hot Galloway, a civilian reporter along for a ride, grabbed a weapon and joined the fight. i guess he wouldn’t fit in too well with the AP today. well maybe if he’d grabbed a weapon and started shooting at the Americans.
(O/t completed, apologies, over & out)
RagnarD/165
Yea, a rhetorical question.
It’s just… frustrating. If the Hopeychange was more overt, it would be in some ways easier to fight it. It looks like they (them) decided that it is desirable to have a complete train wreck, first.
“Now I’m marching southward,
My heart is full of woe.
I’m going back to Georgia
To find my Uncle Joe.
You can talk about your Beauregard,
And sing of General Lee.
But the Gallant Hood from Texas,
Played hell in Tennessee.”
Franklin and other assaults were desperation
attempts by the Confederate Army of Tennessee
to pull the Union Army of Tennessee back from
Atlanta into the Cumberland region. Might have worked against lesser Union Generals, against Uncle Billy, ’twere futile.
Sherman was delighted when the feud between Jefferson Davis and Joe Johnston resulted in relieving Johnston and instituting Hood. Sherman knew Hood would attack, so he finished taking Atlanta, sent the bulk of his forces back to Franklin, etc and went to Savannah with but 62,000 men. Neutralized Savannah and then cut another swath through the Carolinas. A reinstated Joe Johnston could do nothing about it, especially since his source of logistical support, the plantations, had been Shermanized.
It was not that Hood was stupid or excessively rash (or that Johnston was timid).
It was that Sherman was decisively brillant.
I just wish the damnyankeesonofabitch had been on the right side.
In his chapter on heroes, the cavalryman James Farber (Texas, CSA) deals with both Hood
and the lesser-known (until recent times) Dick Dowling. John Bell Hood comes across quite well in that narrative.
Also related is why Glorietta Canyon New Mexico was the most critical battle of the war. Also related is how Major General David Twig comitted treason in 1861 while his subordinate John MacGruder did not. It is easy enough to ascertain that the treason gained the confederates nothing but some supplies (promptly stolen by the Knights of the Golden Circle), but the honorable course of MacGruder played a major role in why Texas was never successfully invaded.
Now then, a polling question: Who was the best General the South ever had? Was it
(a) Robert E. Lee
(b) Stonewall Jackson
(c) George McClellan?
McClelland takes on Lee:
The war is a year old in the summer of 1862, and George McClellan’s 105,000-strong main body of the Army of the Potomac is marching on the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia.
The vanguard is but 15 miles distant when the Army of Northern Virginia engages at Oak Grove (June 25), then next day at Mechanicsville (June 26), and Gaines Mill (June27), Garnett’s and Golding’s Farm (June 27 & 28), and the Union rear at Savage Station (June 29).
McClelland quits his “Peninsular Campaign” at this point and turns in retreat toward his base of supply at Harrison’s Landing on the James River. On June 30 at Glendale and July 01 at Malvern Hill Lee makes two attempts to break up the retreating union army, but cannot, and the “Seven Days Battle” ends with Richmond safe and McClelland’s army bottled up on the James and shipping out for home as rapidly as possible.
Lee has lost 20,000 men he cannot replace. Lee’s endlessly matériel-poor army his lost vast amounts of matériel. His command is scattered and disorganized, with major elements separated by as much as a week’s march.
McClelland has lost 20% fewer men from a 20% larger army. McClelland has won most of the battles, McClelland has an impregnable lodgment deep in confederate heartland on the James near Richmond, McClelland has riverine communications with Yankee industrial railheads via a gunboat-protected supply fleet.
Yet McClelland cannot escape fast enough. He abandons his beachhead and sends his army back across the Potomac, to where it had jumped off four months earlier. Not waiting around to supervise the departure, he hands provisional command to staff and heads to DC, along the way drafting a letter to his boss, President Lincoln, the explanatory section of which says:
“If we have lost the day we have yet preserved our honor & no one need blush for the Army of the Potomac. I have lost this battle because my force was too small. I again repeat that I am not responsible for this & I say it with the earnestness of a General who feels in his heart the loss of every brave man who has been needlessly sacrificed today. I still hope to retrieve our fortunes, but to do this the Govt. must view the matter in the same earnest light that I do you must send me very large reinforcements, & send them at once.
I shall draw back to this side of the Chickahominy & think I can withdraw all our material. Please understand that in this battle we have lost nothing but men & those the best we have.
In addition to what I have already said I only wish to say to the President that I think he is wrong, in regarding me as ungenerous when I said that my force was too weak. I merely reiterated a truth which today has been too plainly proved. I should have gained this battle with (10,000) ten thousand fresh men. If at this instant I could dispose of (10,000) ten thousand fresh men I could gain the victory tomorrow.
I know that a few thousand men more would have changed this battle from a defeat to a victory as it is the Govt must not & cannot hold me responsible for the result.”
Of McClellan’s 105,000 men, over 60,000 were in units that never engaged the enemy during this battle.
This battle is where the legend of “Bobbie Lee” really began. European attaché observers in both armies and the southern –and yankee copperhead –American people waxed rhapsodic over the skill and mastery of such a fabian fallback into the area best suited for a coordinated sequence of “steering” hammer blows –though Lee himself and his generals were furious with themselves & each other over a thousand botched communications, misunderstandings, and failures to execute in concert among detachments with both poor communications AND a need to coordinate a complex battle plan.
but that’s all secondary to a magnificent defense in depth, using mobile strikes and feints to turn the enemy this way and that while (except for Malvern Hill) he hit economically on narrow fronts that would then start or maintain a desired movement of large bodies of enemy.
What had happened in the Army of the Potomac? My own take –well better said i agree with those whose take it is –is that somewhere early on, Lee had begun so precisely anticipating every day what McClelland would do on the morrow (probably at times before McClelland himself knew what he was going to do tomorrow) that McClelland, catching up to this with what must’ve been a massive shock, from then on fought the battle just as you would expect someone to fight if he was convinced the enemy general was inside his head reading his thoughts and making him think thoughts he couldn’t be certain of which were his own or which were Robert Lee’s.
Of course, his letter to Lincoln had to then point in every way AWAY from that sickening revelation, and point instead toward something at the far other extreme of total battle readiness. Something that was beyond the ken of generalship. Something that was the fault of the politicians and their money-grubbing ways. Something the citizenry would bite on. Something like “Not enough troops”.
IOW, screw all the head case mumbo jumbo, all he had needed to have WON the battle (and thus take Richmond and end the rebellion) was a lousy ten thousand more troops. 115,000 troops instead of 105,000. Even tho Bobbie Lee had allowed him to use only 43% of the army he already DID have.
Yup, George McClelland, the enemy’s most valuable general –and a damn close parallel and stark reminder of the habits of the mind that in a war leader can destroy a nation and cause it to lose its sovereignty.
And yes i’m thinking of an analogy and no President Obama is not President Lincoln in it.
Dave,
One of life’s ironies is that as the Secession crisis came to a head Sherman was an employee of the State of Louisiana as head of the Military Academy. He could not offer his services to the Union until after he had resigned his position. In fact he knew the South well having been stationed there in earlier years.
The mirror of that situation was Robert E. Lee being at the same time the commanding officer of a Union post in Texas and determined to honorably carry out his duties and defend his command. In fact after the surrender of the Union establishment to the seceding State of Texas Lee travelled to Washington and accepted an appointment as a Colonel signed by Abraham Lincoln and served until Virginia left the Union, departing only when his resignation was accepted.
George McClellan did good work. He built the army that Grant fought with. Some are best at training, some at logistics, some at strategy, and some at tactics. Few are good at all. Sherman was a better strategist than tactician. McClellan was better at logistics and training and administration. That does not make him unworthy or traitorous, just human.
To be blogged under the title “Three Generals.”
Yup, George McClelland, the enemy’s most valuable general –and a damn close parallel and stark reminder of the habits of the mind that in a war leader can destroy a nation and cause it to lose its sovereignty.
And the Dems ran him for president against Lincoln. “Let’s take a gutless screw-up and put him in an even HIGHER office!”
Still not deviating from pattern even today, I see.
LotM/170; –a lot of people find his generalship difficult to understand in the light of his 1864 ‘peace’ campaign for president. they reason that if he was ideologically willing to run for president as the anti-Lincoln openly promising to make a settlement with the Rebellion and end the hostilities, then was he ideologically motivated –perhaps subconsciously even –to be forever ‘leaning back’ from fighting the army until it had reached some number or level of training that seemed never to be enough.
George McClellan did good work. He built the army that Grant fought with. Some are best at training, some at logistics, some at strategy, and some at tactics. Few are good at all. Sherman was a better strategist than tactician. McClellan was better at logistics and training and administration. That does not make him unworthy or traitorous, just human.
Alas, war is a terrible arena for the Peter Principle to come into play. Successful combat leaders need the unusual combination of daring and canny, with a dash (acc to Napoleon) of luck. The trick is to winnow the rear-ech personalities from the combat-suited types before too many bodies stack up. In this way I think Easy Company in “Band of Brothers” was fortunate in that Capt. Sobel was surfaced as a poor tactician & removed from command before D-Day. A lot of other units have not been so fortunate. McClellan was unsuited for command at the position he found himself advanced to, and tragically, a lot of men died as a result.
But it does intrigue me that the aggressive combat leaders don’t necessarily have an easy ride with the reputation afterwards, either. True, there is no substitute for victory, but it seems there will always be people calling someone a butcher. Grant’s Wilderness campaign … Sherman, hated in the South for generations … and “Blood & Guts” Patton, whom Andy Rooney (who never served under him) has for years been calling a butcher.
LotM/170; –a lot of people find his generalship difficult to understand in the light of his 1864 ‘peace’ campaign for president. they reason that if he was ideologically willing to run for president as the anti-Lincoln openly promising to make a settlement with the Rebellion and end the hostilities, then was he ideologically motivated –perhaps subconsciously even –to be forever ‘leaning back’ from fighting the army until it had reached some number or level of training that seemed never to be enough.
I think this is why the first requisite for a commander must *always* be someone who is “interested in victory.” If the commitment is not there, in the gut, so to speak, then there’s always the concern that some other reactionary reflex will overtake at the worst possible time.
Tactics can be learned; instinct cannot. That’s why I personally put a high value on instinct in a candidate for POTUS. There is no way a person can know everything they need to know for that office. But a person with the right instincts will find their way if they are smart enough to surround themselves with the right kind of advisors, ie the people who DO know acc to their individual areas of expertise. OTOH when you elect a person who lacks the right instincts or, worse still, someone with the wrong instincts, no amount of good advice is going to help in a time of crisis when decisions are often made on instinct alone because the desired info is simply not available.
That Obama is not committed to American victory (and pretty much said as much in the context of Iran) — ie, his instincts range from non-existent to badly warped — was clear to a lot of people before the election, and was likely what scared the cr@p out of them on a subliminal level.
Bogie wheel says:
But it does intrigue me that the aggressive combat leaders don’t necessarily have an easy ride with the reputation afterwards, either. True, there is no substitute for victory, but it seems there will always be people calling someone a butcher. Grant’s Wilderness campaign … Sherman, hated in the South for generations … and “Blood & Guts” Patton, whom Andy Rooney (who never served under him) has for years been calling a butcher.
Warning – strictly opinionated discussion dead ahead.
bogie, IMNSHO, winning generals and leaders are stone cold killers. Jackson, Sherman, Grant, Patton, Rommel all possessed the mind set necessary to view troops as pieces on a game board, to be played and lost as needed to accomplish perceived combat objectives. They ARE butchers. However, in most cases they are smart butchers. They conserve their resources where possible and butcher the opponent AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY. Troops, interestingly enough, recognize and generally respond positively to this characteristic. They are there for the win.
Programmer’s observation: War and Sex are not for the fastidious.
I am leaning over to be fair to McClellan, criticize that as you wish. He publicly disputed the Democratic platform and declared his intention to preserve the Union. Given who he was fronting for his election would probably have lead to disunion followed by an authoritarian crisis. It was a very near thing and I am glad that Lincoln won. Nevertheless I do think that “Little Mac,” who did care for his troops, was not a traitor. We all want to talk about the dashing cavalry hero but the fact is that the military is a bureaucracy and the great administrators in history may not get any movies of their lives or girls dreaming of them but they build the machine that achieves victory.
bogie wheel@128 said:
No affection, no identification, no appreciation, no concept of the military’s raison d’etre, not even a savvy politician’s concept of quid pro quo co-existence.
Or, Obama completely understands all these things, and simply wants to destroy US. Let’s not mis-identify as stupidity, incompetence or arrogance what is cetainly pure evil intent.
Having Holder bring those jihadi scum to NYC for trial has clear evil intentions. No other explanation is possible, except the destruction of our legal system, nullifying our intelligence capabilities and the empowerment of our enemies.
So, will we accept the typical “oh sorry bout that” from the Left when this precipitates another attack on New York?
I watched on FNS yesterday, two sleazy thieves (both D-NY) trying to justify Holder’s decision. And, they expect to retire on our dime with full benefits. Probably won’t happen!
OT: Stop the presses, but I just saw Hillary Clinton … being diplomatic! Oh, not about foreign countries or anything, but about trying KSM in NYC she danced around calling Obama an idiot, and regarding Sarah Palin said she might like to meet her!
OK, keep those presses stopped one more minte, I’m going to say something diplomatic about Obama his own self. Part of Hillary’s rant about Afghanistan was how Obama is asking questions, asking for proof, of what the military proposals address. Well, ………. I have to say, George Bush *not* pressing the uniforms, was probably his mistake. I believe Bush got a *lot* of bad guidance from his generals.
If Obama wasn’t showing himself a complete turd in his every comment about Fort Hood, I’d be a little more optimistic. And, not making decisions for any reason – or lack of data – is still no excuse in an executive. I guess I’m saying just maybe he has at least a speck of an excuse.
OK, restart those presses now.
Mr. Danneskold(sp?),
“The exact nature of the wagging is to-be-determined.”
Insert worst case prediction here. Then it doesn’t matter who’se doing the wagging. Or, even if he’s doing it for his ownself. CSI is always after the incident, when they bring body bags and squeegees. Many times when the crime is well-planned, there is NO TRAIL OF EVIDENCE.
Half US wealth disappears, and we can’t even investigate? But “don’t jump to conclusions.”
The problem with that approach is that the conclusions I arrive at, after slow, methoditical deliberation, is that Hasan is a Muslim terrorist, a murdering Islamic freak, who YOU all in WDC allowed to penetrate our defenses. You facilitated his being promoted to field-grade, after having US pay for his entire education and training. I thought I/you/US was covered against this type of “malicious activity” here in the Homeland, by those Espionage laws and stuff. Looks like we’ve lots of work to do in that sector of US society as well.
Short version: Let’s get it on! Re-instate waterboarding. And whatever other truth drugs we’ve discovered. Expand Gitmo. Add scafolds.
Apply swift justice.
Okay. Let’s wait til we have more money and more civil rights, and our tax dollars have completed making OFA 250,000 true believers strong. Who’se doing the dithering?
The whole issue surrounding the NYC trials is that of “access.” Terrorist sympathizers (or those bent on a rescue mission) cannot get access at Gitmo…the Castro duo won’t contenance that type of Muslim activity in Cuba (much as they might like to see the results), and an approach by sea is impossible, and monitored just in case. But in NYC, there will be nothing to prevent terrorists from getting trucks or any number of other explosive-laden devices in proximity to the site of the trials. Maybe that’s what O and Holder have in mind….
LotM: McClellan was darned good at building an Army. He was not so hot at using same.
I rate Grant as vice versa. Sherman good at both games.
In McClellan’s near-rout Allen Pinkerton played an inadvertent role. His boys made an uncharacteristic error in estimating Confederate strength. They seem to have cubed instead of simply multiplying by three. This played into Mac’s weakenesses and things went downhill from there.
I knew that bit about Sherman starting what is now LSU. Marse Robert was in Texas first as the LtCol and then as the Colonel of the
2nd Cavalry Regiment. Albert Sidney Johnson being the first Colonel.
This was the first cavalry regiment the US Army had ever maintained in peacetime. It was they who first mapped the area between San Angelo and El Paso and included the Big Bend country. No other force had ever ventured there since De Perala lost his cannon to the Commanche in 1759.
It is instructive to learn how Marse Robert calmed down the Tex-Mex border and how he honored private treaties between settlers and various indian tribes.
Also instructive is how Lincoln, Grant and Sherman (Stanton was excluded) put their heads together and crafted a post-war plan to avoid Reconstruction. It failed because Lincoln was assassinated. John Wilkes Booth was undoubtedly the worst enemy the South ever had!
As to the plan, I surmise that Sherman came up with it, Lincoln was sharp enough to recognize it as a way out of a jam and Grant?
Oh, he took another swallow and said “(Hic), shounds good to me.”
Later on, Sherman moreor less saw to the enlistment of “Trooper Smiths” (Johnny Rebs who wouldn’t take the damnasty oath), rendered
good and valuable assistance in the re-establishment of the Texas Rangers, twisted Grant’s arm to get the lifting of Reconstruction, rescued the Navajo from a slow die-off in Bosque Redondo, found competent commanders for the frontier garrisons and let each one of them go to work on solving their local problems and so forth and so on.
All of this on top of the fact that the way he settled things in 1864-65 probably helped avoid a multi-year famine in the south and a complete slaughter of Confederate Army remnants.
I think we all owe a lot to the man. Now do you hear that whirring sound? That comes from my ancestors spinning in their graves
and all this heretical blasphemy and blasphemous heresy I am spouting.
PS: Did you ever brush up on the Confederate Secret Service? Contained a disproportionate number of Jews. They knew their business, thereby eliciting some heartfelt anti-semitic comments from U. S. Grant. Sure gave him the “Hebe Jeebies”. (ahem)
Nidal Hasan should be sent to Gitmo.
159.
But its probably safer to say that red chinese penetration of the USA today is more than GRU/KGB penetration of the USA in the early 40′s and less than KGB penetration of western Europe from the 30′s – 70′s.
Hard to tell really. Seems every year some chinese is arrested in the USA for sending some top secret sensitive whatchamacallit to red china.
Linked @ Papa Ray’s Link:
America’s “First Pacific President?”
Related:
And speaking of the Pacific Theater of World War II, as John Hinderaker of Power Line tweets, “Was Truman right to end WWII?
Obama can’t say.”
Obama declares self ‘America’s first Pacific president.’
TOKYO — Trying to reassure allies and rivals, President Barack Obama billed himself Saturday as “America’s first Pacific president,” promising the nations of Asia “a new era of engagement with the world based on mutual interests and mutual respect.”
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Obama spoke extensively of his own roots in the region – his birth in Hawaii, living in Indonesia as a boy, his mother spending nearly a decade working in the villages of Southeast Asia. “The Pacific rim has helped shape my view of the world,” Obama said, speaking in front of 14 alternating U.S. and Japanese flags.
“America’s First Pacific President” was Herbert Hoover.
Can somebody explain to me how they are going to try KSM in a federal court in NYC given:
1. No Miranda warning
2. No counsel
3. Trial delayed for years
4. Coercive interrogation
5. Way too much hearsay evidence
6. Incredible pretrial publicity
HMMMMM?
“A good plan, applied now with vigor is better then a perfect plan applied tomorrow”
-Gen George Patton Jr.
There is no American military Commander today that is fit to polish Georgie’s boots.
I see Afghanistan as a trap. Logistics is the king of War. Stalin called artillery the god of battle, but without powder and shot, it’s a weak and puny god.
Standard for a serious insurrection, where every mans hand is turned against the invader is 1 troop per 20 citizens. If the resistance is hard core, but without outside support and some internal help for the invaders, 1 in 40 is considered minimal. If there is just a small minority fighting guerrilla then 1 to 90 is an acceptable ratio.
Figure 20 million ‘gani’s and a medium level of resistance. 20 million divided by 40 is 500,000. Divided by 20 is 1 million. Divided by 90 is about 225,000 or so. None of the established, time honored ratios gives the figure 40,000. So the Army is bullsh1ting POTUS.
Not an unusual thing. JFK didn’t support the Bay of pigs because the Commandant of the Marine Corps BS’d him out of it, thereby putting the screws to the CIA, which was his objective. He also F%^&#D over the Nation he was sworn to protect, but that is a different issue.
The reason the USA has military forces in Afghanistan is to keep the Taliban from providing AQ with a place to plan ops and train warriors to carry out those ops. That mission DOES NOT require nation building.
Not sure nation building is possible or even desirable in the ‘stan. The people don’t want it. So you have a bunch of liberals trying to force democracy on people at gunpoint. Isn’t that sublime? NOT.
So forget the nation building that the ‘gani’s don’t want. Contract with certain warlords for basing rights, build forts and hunt bugs (terrs). Treat the ‘stan as a post AIT course with live fire and targets that move around and shoot back. Then sublet to our allies that want to get their ‘elite’ units blooded. In a few generations the ‘gani’s that get tired of the game can come in and get civilized. Sort of like what we did with the American Indians.
I don’t mind turning down the temperature, as a tactical move, most effective when applied as a sly head fake on the part of a more experienced player, but, in the here and now, I fear that is not the case. I prefer the war feathers and war bonnet “crazy wacko don’t mess with me” approach as more effective, not only in the current geopolitical context, but for sooooome time to come. The Shakespearean foundations of human endeavors won’t be abandoned in this century.
What I fear, and despise the very concept of, is global government, of which international law is but a precursor, with the ICC in the vanguard. The alternative is independent sovereign nation-states that will experience ‘misalignment’ of self interests leading to war.
So there’s the choice.
I think where we stumble is believing in the idea of a third or middle way; hence Obama’s difficulty with Afghanistan; hence the regular f^ck you Habu outbursts. Be nice wouldn’t it, but I don’t think so.
The only third way I know know of is the balancing act mentioned by Wretchard earlier – maintaining viability until the day of reckoning at which point the only move left is to fight.
But I take comfort in Dave’s (surprisingly?) optimistic statement that we’re going to get out of this period in history. I’m thinking that maybe the insiders are getting control of these situations in ways that aren’t being broadcast to the larger audience.
My headscratcher since 2001 was how an aggressor so primitive encroached this far, physically and mentally, into the western consciousness. I know, I know, they’re “smarter than we think” (or they look I might add) but that no longer cuts it for me. The sad reality is that we were dumber – and less prepared – than anybody thought – military, intelligence, and government. I am thinking that those deficiencies have been mitigated, as per Wretchard’s previous posts about faster feedback loops informing more expeditious western response reactions. That part I think is true. What changes with less alacrity is the ideological overlays. And that is concerning.
And now we’re slouching into the future with a CINC that … isn’t Bush … or Cheney.
In fact, it wasn’t too long ago that this site had an “interloper” excoriating BC for “binary” thinking.
I submit that the elevation of compromise over binary choices has yet to be justified. In a human context, both are constrained by limits – situational and absolute.
One of the conceits of the post modern world is that there is another way. Sometimes. But most of the time, not. At least in my experience. Like a petulant child, the modern world dislikes that reality.
But I wish to h^ll Obama would stop bowing.
Some excellent key insights in this thread –just quickly want to add to bogie/174 that a leader with that instinct is not only grand good fortune for the people but also a fundamental deterrent to the bad guys –and as such at the head of a powerful nation is grand good fortune for everybody including the bad guy’s people. Also agree that Billy Sherman was very great as combat general but also as general of the larger conflict outside the combat operations, beginning with the standard military technicals including the technical known as ‘indefinable leadership quality’ and proceeding through his ability to foresee and accept general consequences including the adverse personal, his investment to the long benefit despite the short cost, his having been right about what constituted the common benefit, and lastly, that he won his battles, which otherwise would have mooted his other qualities, and depending on the magnitude of loss, would have mooted to greater or lesser extent those qualities themselves (think ‘drunken man of the house’ problem in postwar South, and Vietnam Syndrome).
If Sherman is ever the new modern action principle, Robert E. Lee, as great a general and person as he was, is ever the Lost Cause, in repose. Grant? Grant and Lincoln are the weather and the atmosphere.