The Shampoo and Conditioner World
Just as on your computer the most important keys to note are the “undo” buttons so in modern life it essential to know how to reverse the effects of our actions. Things go in a cycle. There is no escape from it. We strip the oils from our hair by washing with shampoo and we reintroduce them later by using conditioner. We take the escalator to the fourth floor gym so that we may have more time to burn off the fat caused by inactivity. And we pay for the privilege every step of the way.
Things are no different in international politics. The Washington Post reports that the Pentagon and the State Department are preparing to invade Mali next year using a proxy African force. “U.S. military planners have begun to help organize a multinational proxy force to intervene next year in Mali, the famine-stricken, coup-wracked African country that has become a magnet for Islamist extremists, U.S. officials said Wednesday.”
The international force would be led on the ground by several thousand Malian and West African troops but would receive extensive support from the Pentagon and the State Department, which would help train, equip and transport the troops, Obama administration officials said. …
Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa, called northern Mali “the largest territory controlled by Islamic extremists in the world.” …
Other U.S. officials said al-Qaeda’s North African affiliate, which for years attracted limited global attention, poses an increasing threat. The group has become well-stocked with weapons smuggled out of Libya after the NATO-led war there last year.
“The largest territory controlled by Islamic extremists in the world.” Al-Qaeda is not doing too badly for a group that has supposedly been destroyed. It may even be doing better than General Motors, a corporation that has supposedly been revived.
But to criticize it would be to misunderstand. To understand the way the world works under the Obama administration, think in cycles. Consider Libya the shampoo to Mali’s conditioner. After you arm up the Jihadis in Libya naturally you’ve got to police up the weapons in Mali. For the weapons have to go somewhere, and the Jihadis have to go somewhere. It’s not as if they’re going to settle down and turn their AK-47s into ploughshares. To do this while maintaining the administration’s pacific image, you use African troops. After all their life is cheap.
The watchword is never to do anything directly. Why send people to Guantanamo when you can ship them off for rendition or maybe ask them a few questions in a Benghazi safe house? Just keep the obvious fingerprints off the operation and no one smart enough to vote for Hope and Change will be any the wiser.
Still something might go wrong. According to RFI (via Google translation) “General Carter Ham and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton believe it is essential that Algeria is involved in the military intervention.” Otherwise it may look like the Obama administration is leading from the front.
However, the same article has quotes a source that has grave doubts about the combat capability of ECOWAS, the African force that is supposed to do the heavy lifting. Nor is the Malian army much of a force. One analyst from the Jamestown foundation said, “the idea of asking the Malian army, a very heterogeneous group of ethnic point of view, to be first in line to the north of Mali is going straight into the wall.”
What happens if ECOWAS and the Malians get into trouble? Or Mali spins out of control? How could that possibly happen given the administration’s sterling track record in Syria? And by the way, where are the guns going into Syria to arm the rebels going to wind up after Assad is toppled?
But never mind. The Jihadis will be booted from Mali. And after the administration has given Mali the treatment there will of course be the need to undo the effects of deed. Doubtless the place will have to be rebuilt, the refugees gathered up, the weapons introduced policed up and the whole cycle begun again. In politics as in personal hygiene, after the Headless Shoulders Shampoo comes the Headless Shoulders Conditioner.
At least that’s a more optimistic way to look at the problem than the alternative: the possibility that the administration’s policies in the Middle East have metastized political Islam and now the military is scrambling to find ways to contain its spread under the resource constraints imposed by the president.
What is truly frightening is the possibility that the president has put the US into an unrecoverable spin, one in which you will need ever larger quantities of conditioner to undo the effects of the shampoo. William Baldwin of Forbes captures the idea in his cheerfully titled article: Do You Live in a Death Spiral State?
Thinking about buying a house? Or a municipal bond? Be careful where you put your capital. Don’t put it in a state at high risk of a fiscal tailspin.
Eleven states make our list of danger spots for investors. They can look forward to a rising tax burden, deteriorating state finances and an exodus of employers. The list includes California, New York, Illinois and Ohio, along with some smaller states like New Mexico and Hawaii.
If your career takes you to Los Angeles or Chicago, don’t buy a house. Rent. …
To lend money to California, Illinois or the other nine states perched on the precipice requires a leap of faith. So does buying a house in those locales. Don’t count on a property tax limit to protect your home’s value. If other taxes are high enough, there won’t be any buyers.
In other words a bad public policy can put you on a trajectory where the undo button doesn’t work any more. If this happens in the Middle East, there may be no alternative but to ride it down to the bottom and to see if anyone walks away.
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
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If military action does succeed in dispersing the naughty boys, with their weapons, where will they go?
Perhaps Hilary and Co should send troups into the neighbouring countries to be ready? But then that would not be leading from behind.
Ya know everything once in a while it seems Buraq Hussein will feint at doing the right thing, then betray it, to leave our people twisting in the wind and ultimately unprotected before an onslaught from out enemies. Wheels within Wheels of deception and betrayal are lurking all over our Dear Leader’s mideast misadventures.
All the better to bring forth Islamic revolutionary chaos.
All I know is I would’nt want to be on this Mali mission.
Hey Richard:
This system of using local proxies supported by American airpower and SF has acutually worked pretty well, in Afghanistan in 2001, Northern Iraq in 2003, and Somalia in 2006/2007.
Welcome to the Obama Doctrine, proxy wars without end. Isn’t this what Lefties once accused Reagan of? Those wars of course actually came to an end with the Soviet Union (except for Afghanistan).
I can understand folks like Bruce Bartlett expressing their disgust with the Republican Right. But why do they have to insist they lose because they’re too right wing as opposed to too Corporatist, top down, centralizing and arrogant, of which the Boehner purge provides the latest exhibit A?
http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=6824
“And by the way, where are the guns going into Syria to arm the rebels going to wind up after Assad is toppled?” Wretchard the obvious answer is Obama should not have ‘led from behind’ but directly involved the U.S. in Syria sooner — so says University of Houston Professor Craig Pirrong (yes I’m gonna keep naming this guy because he’s the personification of stupid, Pentagon and Homeland Security worshipping Republican Establishmentarianism, the kind that will reduce America to a police state even more so than Obamanista Peronismo). That would’ve kept the weapons from falling into the hands of Syrian groups now designated as terrorist organizations post hoc – as if the Obama Administration wanted to prove that Assad’s claims that he’s been fighting jihadi terrorists were true all along. That my friends is called doublethink. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. Just remember that no matter what NATO and U.S. backed Syrian jihadis do it’s all Russia’s fault.
Mark my words: in the end it will be the dupes, fools, wise in their own eyes blowhards on the fake Right who think other nations bowing to a crumbling U.S. empire are bowing to them, and the like who will push this nation over the precipice. Not just those doing the pushing from the so-called Left.
Wouldn’t it be great if Israel Australia and Texas/Louisiana turn out to be the best places to invest money or yourself?
Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the only group of people whose options seem to be narrowing down are the poor dumb suckers paying taxes in the good ole USA?
Hitting the jihad is like slapping your foot in a puddle; it just splashes out in all directions.
I keep thinking of the focal point of an ambush, the killing zone. It seems that we, the USA, are in a series of overlapping killing zones,as though a dozen ambushes are being sprung, En Echelon I think its called.
The Obama doctrine: kinda sorta hint that you’re gonna do something about some bad guy in Egypt, Libya or Syria then hope the locals can bring it off without much in the way of US support — especially boots on the ground. Then if things go tango uniform, (or WHEN things go tango uniform) blame someone else (Bush) after getting Hillary or Rice to deny we had anything to do with it. Two descriptions stand out for their absence: decisive and bold.
wa @ 6: Hitting the jihad is like slapping your foot in a puddle; it just splashes out in all directions.
Sure, Bruce Sterling has a Lawrence of Arabia-type character say about as much in his novel, “Islands In The Net” – “bombing the desert doesn’t matter to us, it just makes more of it.” And that’s the thinking (sic) behind our nation building in Afghanistan, “No more failed states”, we say. But building them up from failure may be beyond our reach, which leaves the other interpretation of “No more failed states”, mainly vitrifying them from border to border.
(only to recite my standard disclaimer, it’s not likely to take all of that, just enough “firmness” to make your point, which is just what our nation building, is not.)
Watching a pair of grey squirrels gambol through the unleaved trees this morning, I was struck by how like our government those squirrels were. Racing out on the slimmest of limbs, then leaping into the air and grabbing onto an even slimmer limb, all apparently blissfully unaware of the thirty foot drop to the ground below. The only difference I could see between the squirrels and our government is that the squirrels were gamboling with their lives and our government is gambling with ours.
The White House thinks squirrels
Are why the Earth whirls
While Congress says fish are to blame
That leaping from limbs
And circular swims
Are cause of Earth’s rotating game
So what must we think
Of this vast missing link
Who live at taxpayer’s expense
I speak of the crowd
For crying out loud
Who govern though lacking in sense
The White House contains
The shredded remains
Of policies stupid and dumb
And Congress of course
Has less sense than a horse
If they had any pulse they’d be numb
The bureaucracies too
Just may have a few
Dim bulbs lesser minds see as pearls
Yes the folks we elect
Are so far from select
That we’re better off governed by squirrels
Unlike squirrels when they leap
They close eyes as in sleep
And that’s how our government works
White House leaps from the limbs
Congress goes for long swims
With the difference that squirrels get no perks
But think of all the wonderful new Malian and Syrian restaurants we’ll have when the refugees start opening restaurants here.
Mali. Good God. This is being seriously considered? Mali, today, is a weather event in the maelstrom of Islamist aims. This is like getting involved in El Salvador in order to fight the Soviet Union. What?
What?
What?
Have we got a Cold War containment policy going on with regard to Islam? Is this still a bi-polar world that would favor such a thing?
This system of using local proxies supported by American airpower and SF has acutually worked pretty well, in Afghanistan in 2001, Northern Iraq in 2003, and Somalia in 2006/2007.
The Cold War was largely fought by proxy. What is at issue is whether you can fight a proxy war with Qatar arming the same group of men that you have to get the Malians to fight later on. That seems crazy on the face of it.
Then there is the question of who is fighting who. During the Cold War America was the leader of the Free World. What is the leader of now? The behinds? What is our ideology and what is the ideology of the enemy? Is there in fact an enemy, when your friends are in Saudi Arabia? When the Obama administration has a Radio Free Islam then there’s an argument for the existence of a proxy war. But in a world where Major Hassan can’t be made to shave and America enlists people not to fight for it’s values but so far as can be determined, against its values, who is the principal? Who the agent?
The proxy must do you bidding. When the relationship is reversed it has to term it a proxy war.
Cowboy…
At least the Wan won’t strand us in Timbuktu….
…
Never mind.
The meme that the real leaders planted in Soetero’s none-too-capacious brain probably runs like this:
- over the “Fiscal Cliff”, which requires big cutbacks in the US military budget,
- blow off the existing stockpile of weapons & people we cannot afford to replace in irrelvant locations like Mali,
- eliminate nuclear weapons as a necessary cost-reduction,
- accept a second Nobel Peace Prize from a bunch of hypocritical Norwegian America-haters,
- bask in the praise of the entire world (or at least the only part of it that matters – the NYT-reading useful idiots).
Of course, nuclear-armed China, Russia, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Iran, Israel, Japan, Brazil, (and all-too-soon Hamas) may have a different ending in mind.
It is the 1930s all over again. Eat, drink, and be merry! Go to the beach or the ski-slopes while travel is still possible. We are all grasshoppers now, enjoying the last of the summer wine before that cold hard winter rain starts to fall.
There are 15 million Malians with a puopulation growth rate of 3.0% per annum, which means a doubling time of 23 years. They produce 6 mtpa of grain which is 400 kg/capita – not so bad. From the FAO website: “A Cadre Harmonisé analysis (IPC-type analysis) conducted in early June has classified several areas of the country in phase 3 (critical food insecurity) while part of Northern Mali was classified as phase 4 (extreme food insecurity). Emergency humanitarian interventions need to continue to prevent further deterioration of the food security situation.” You can’t do nation-building in a country that is going to starve to death. Feeding them is the wrong solution also. This is possibly the reason for the reference to Algeria. Forces can come from the north without having to feed the southern Christians on the way through.
Things are indeed hotting up.
Which means it’s time for some light relief:
http://nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=464371
The SF wannabees got a major loss yesterday
Their hero -John Giduck-a KGB-FSB and an alleged IDF agent- lost his case against the real SF soldiers who claimed that he-in fact- a spy and a fraud.
http://johngiduckterroratbeslan.blogspot.com/
Interesting
I was reading that a lot of what is considered high income people in the death spiral states are trapped in them. They are in professions that are service “practices” that they have built up over the years and are networked into the area. If they leave and go to another state they have to start building from scratch again. I have no sympathy because these are the same people who voted for Democrats for years. If they are going to survive they will have to go black market and underground and I’m not so sure they have the stones to do that.
We often try to over complicate things. Fact is, I choose not to live in a gay positive society that welcomes pot smoking. I don’t want to raise my kids in that environment, either. That puts me at odds with the United States, and given what I expected from that country, my own, who could believe what it has become now?
I’m sorry, I decline to participate in the grand progressive experiment that this country has become. I view the ambitions of my governemnt as inimical, and aimed at stealing my kids from me.
On paper, I know government to be more than bankrupt. It’s far worse than bankrupt.
In many ways, life in these United States has become a nightmare, fueled by strongarm progressive ambitions.
As a conservative I can’t really count on many victories. Even Reagan, a good man and a hero for the good, failed. He only sent the Long March on a brief detour.
Believe me when I say the US Constitution is a dead letter. What a laugh, the US Constitution!
The best option for those who value liberty is to flee the United States. So, where does one go?
According to the Financial Times:
“There is a move to re-Sovietise the region,” the US secretary of state told a news conference in Dublin hours before going into a meeting with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.
So that is what the reset button is about! But Mrs. Clinton is taking a stand. She will not be for it until it happens.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a5b15b14-3fcf-11e2-9f71-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2EMgEvit0
“…no alternative but to ride it down to the bottom and to see if anyone walks away.”
Or nuke the place from orbit.
The Obamites are just following the same successful approach used in domestic policy. Create regulations. When regulations kill an industry, subsidize it and add more regulations. When that hurts another group then start another new program and add more regulations. Any Day Now they will come up with the correct mix, the right equation, the perfect answer to everything, Unified Field Theory for perfect socialism and Ever Bigger Government. Or else be safely out of office with heavily armed guards and a big stash. Did you notice that they just reinstituted lifetime Secret Service protection for former Presidents? Think they did that just for the Bushes?
If you want to know what will happen in Mali, read Jake Tapper’s The Outpost. They will run into trouble with local troops who don’t want to fight; ethnic friction will produce casualties amongst our allies and inflicted on the local civilians; some of the ”civilians” will be ”insurgents”, producing more horror in the villages; knowing they Malians will respond avidly to a whiff of Democracy, we will start local councils, give them money, and begin building roads/schools/clinics/power plants/irrigation projects and try to convince nomads to settle down and grow cut flowers ….
I’m getting a headache.
Death spiral and tailspin are different.
A tailspin is a stable downward spin (not even a spiral) with one wing producing more lift than the other, and is easily stopped in even old aircraft, let alone modern ones. A horizontal version of a spin is a snap roll.
A death spiral is an information mistake gone unstable. A pilot unable to see the ground feels he’s turning left when in fact he’s not. He corrects, starting a right turn that he feels is straight. The nose falls and the airspeed increases, which he corrects by raising the nose, tightening the unnoticed right turn. The nose falls further, he correct further, until either he hits the ground or a wing is pulled off from g-forces.
You learn to fly by instruments chiefly by learning to ignore what it feels like.
Cowboy @ 19: “The best option for those who value liberty is to flee the United States. So, where does one go?”
I feel your pain & share your feelings, Cowboy. But Nil Illegitimis Carborundum. All of us in the human race now have our backs to the river with nowhere further to retreat.
The first immigrants came to North America fleeing the problems of Asia. Then came the Europeans, fleeing the problems of Europe. Unfortunately, they brought those European problems with them, and after about 10 generations, those problems have finally caught up with North Americans. It is simply history in action. We were fortunate to see the good times, and now we are approaching the point where we are going to have to take a stand. Might as well be here as anywhere else.
Remember that the outcome has been preordained by the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Takers can’t win in the end; all their victories are Phyrric. They can certainly push Hillary!’s Reset button — but in the end only the Makers are sustainable.
Life can be hard and is getting harder, and political and cultural developments and trends are terribly problematic–emphasis on terribly–but in day-to-day terms, on the level of simply getting up in the morning and making it through the day, it is not a nightmare, not by any means. For me, personally, at any rate. Certainly my life is, objectively, better than life is for most people in most places in the world that I’ve visited or traveled through. It’s better in so many ways. And I’ve experienced some very tough going lately, financially and in terms of my health.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Just trying to provide what might be some useful perspective.
19. Cowboy: I have been pondering this question. Maybe the solution is to take a page out of the enemy’s playbook. If individual churches banded together to provide schooling from K-12 you could regain control of your children’s futures. The school would have final say in curriculum. The school would have final say in disciplinary standards. Any progressive attacks could be answered via freedom of religion. Success is the best teacher. Parents would soon be knocking down the doors to get their children into successful schools. See if the Vatican would subsidize these schools to increase the reach of the church, much like the Madrassas. Sauce for the gander. Best of luck.
26. SpeakEasy:
Like your suggestion. What your post brings to mind is Wretchard’s Belmont Club Manifesto, where we — with his prodding — started a conversation about how liberty-loving people can survive and thrive in today’s America.
I hope that Wretchard will revive that topic often and soon. I think a series of open-thread discussions on the subject of a new “liberty nation” within America’s borders would be a wonderful idea. We only scratched the surface in the first thread, and there is so much territory to be covered.
Walt@9: “The only difference I could see between the squirrels and our government is that the squirrels were gamboling with their lives and our government is gambling with ours.”
Well, that, plus the squirrels are nimble and quick and good at what they’re doing. And they seem to have more brains and less chutzpah.
“There is a move to re-Sovietise the region,” the US secretary of state told a news conference in Dublin hours before going into a meeting with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.”
I am gettin mighty cornfused. Seems the Hilary here is criticizing our Russian “Allies” who seems to be on the other side of the Syrian Matter from Hilary. But, but, but ain’t Putin’s boy in Washington Mr Flexible himself, Buraq Hussein? Are Buraq and Hilary on the same side? What’s going on?
As with the Mali misadventure to be, you kinda need a scorecard to tell who is wearing the white hats, if any one is.
So too in the Benghazi attack, where the lead attackers were supposedly Iranian sponsored Ansar Al Sharia but were backed by Al Qaeda operativies, both of whom thought and may have had agents imprisoned at the Bengazi station. But then again in Syria, Iran is supposedly on one side and Al Qaeda the other. So how are they on the same side in Benghazi and opposite sides in Syria? Or are they?
Are Iran and Al Qaeda playing both sides against the middle? Who’s playing who? Will Iran win either way?
Cowboy@19: “The best option for those who value liberty is to flee the United States. So, where does one go?”
I’ve thought long and hard on this. My marriage was unravelling (and may still, but seems better for the moment) and I had reason to expect a good chance of having to start over. What would I do?
I laughed all major cities off right way. No WAY am I going to start over in some socialist hellhole.
I considered the “American Redoubt”…the interior mountain west, where men are men and some of the women seem like they might be too. At least they let you have guns and people seem to keep to themselves out there. But why settle for “at least”? And it’s still the US, so Obama’s minions will still get you eventually.
Australia looked good until I really looked at it. They’re worse off than us in a lot of ways.
Canada? Mostly the same as Australia only colder. Europe? HA. Africa? If you want to get killed. South America? Economic basket case, but many areas not too bad in other respects.
In the end, if I end up alone, my plan is simple. Become a man without a country. Get citizenship in some small Caribbean country that has no political ambitions and is unlikely to become a center of military activity, renounce my US citizenship, buy a sailboat and set sail for parts unknown…pick up a software consulting gig when I can/have to and otherwise just go look at stuff and meet people and fish a lot and drink folgers in the morning.
Of course, I’m not yet alone and have a daughter to think about for now. So I’m burrowing in and preparing for the worst case. Give me about a year and everything will be done except for stacking stuff higher.
30. Agoraphobic Plumber
Again, I repeat myself deliberately: I would love to see Wretchard revive his “Manifesto” thread. It is his blog, and in due time I imagine he will.
26: SpeakEasy — I have heard this from my more optimistic friends. But it will take 30 years before the graduates of those schools become teachers of the following generation and constitute a sufficient voting block to turn things around. And I don’t think we have 30 years of design margin left.
Entropy and all that. It takes decades, centuries, even millennia to build what can be destroyed in half a generation or less. We had enough design margin to survive our own Civil War, and the two big World Wars of the 20th Century. We had enough financial and moral capital to survive the bank panics and depressions of that same century. We had time and oceans as buffers. The oceans are no longer moats and time is measured now in the length of time it takes to press the “send” button on a computer.
I had thought that we were not that close to the edge but the election told me otherwise. Perhaps new schools are an answer but if so, they will be more like the isolated monasteries of the middle ages, as repositories of knowledge and values, rather than the schools you are thinking of, I fear.
31 Don, yeah, and that’s all well and good. I’d love some more of Wretchard’s take on this stuff as well as many of the commenters here. But I’ve had to make choices.
I’ve maybe thought about this stuff too much over the last 6-7 years, because I’ve passed through thinking about it and gotten on to doing something concrete about it (i.e. making physical preparations). I’ve dwelled on it in my sleep and during all my waking hours for YEARS now, and things have done nothing but get worse. Even when there are “green shoots” it’s easy to spot that they’re only green because of the mold growing on them. I’m in fight-or-flight mode. I’ll fight if I have to (I have an idea I might even be good at it, but no idea until I actually had to I guess), but flight is just more my style…so that’s what I’m planning if the option is available.
Most seem to be assuming that the United States will always remain the United States. Why?
A divorce between the liberty loving folks and the progressives is certainly possible. It doesn’t even have to be a shooting war.
For example, many of my family members are ardent progressives. Do I want them to die? No. Do they want me to die? No. They just want things their way politically, and they don’t want to pay for things I think are important-and vice versa. Many comments I’ve read in liberal newspapers and blogs makes it seem that they would be THRILLED to be rid of us non-progressive knuckle-draggers.
Why NOT an amicable divorce?
That sounds like the plan the US had for pacifying the Creeks, Cherokee, Sioux and Apaches.
Along with a whole host of others.
Inside every malian there is a democrat just waiting to be set free!
Another vote for a revisit to the Belmont Club Manifesto. I’d like to see some of those topics and videos Wretchard was teasing us with.
34 @Beth
As much as I would like that solution, they will never let it happen. Not for as long as they rule.
34 @Beth
No such thing as an amicable divorce – especially with kids involved.
The children that you want to raise in a Judeo/Christian ethical fashion.
Thr ‘kids’ that have never grown up to take responsibility, except leading with their behinds.
In this devorce, where would the military stand.
For the military that stays with the progs, will they leave the rest of us alone or will they dirty fight?
Who takes charge of the WMD’s?
Natural resources?
Banks?
I wouldn’t trust any progs with them.
Plenty more to ponder.
Cowboy, any thought of moving to Israel west bank?
Where Will It End?
Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa, called northern Mali “the largest territory controlled by Islamic extremists in the world.” …
REALLY?!?!?
Bigger than Iran? Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan?
ok maybe bigger than Pakistan.
off topic: why does Delaware elect morons to national office? and all with “C” names…
Castle
Carper
Coons
Carney
@38…
Use Google Earth or Google maps…
It IS the bigger sandbox.
People and otherwise, it’s vacuous.
Which is also an appropriate term for Coons.
Now that I have taken the trouble to look it up, rather than eyeball the map on the wall…
Mali is smaller than Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya and Sudan,
Mali is larger than Egypt, and Pakistan
(square miles within it’s borders, by population, Mali is smaller than all of the above)