War links
As UN day is celebrated, looking back at the 1930s and the era of the League of Nations.
About Paul Nitze and George Kennan: friends whose disagreements shaped American Cold War policy.
Reports that President Obama is pushing for radical revision of US nuclear weapons strategy.
Report that Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan’s nuclear technology spreading may have had much more official Pakistani support than realised.
Tracing the ebb and flow of counter-insurgency theory in the US Army:
Given this feverish period of creativity in the early 1960s, and the fairly widespread awareness of counterinsurgency theory that suffused American political, military and even popular culture, why did these wise men not apply its tenets in the war that was soon to engulf them? At the simplest level, the explanation is fairly straightforward: they chose not to. The Army, for its part, chose to fight the conventional war it wanted to fight-with big-unit operations, massive applications of firepower, and an emphasis on reducing American casualties and multiplying enemy ones. As for the Army’s civilian masters, the narrowly quantitative and mechanistic orientation of Robert McNamara and his Whiz Kids ran exactly counter to the appreciation of the human element of warfare that counterinsurgency requires. These were, finally, not men with particularly vivid imaginations.
… Even the much-maligned William Westmoreland, … “had started one of the first small-unit counterguerrilla training courses in the Army.” He was also aware of Mao’s “three phases” of insurgency, and in 1965 Westmoreland diagnosed Vietnam as being in the third of these, when the guerrilla has the capacity for large-scale maneuvers against government forces. Thus, he reasoned, the U.S. could now rely on conventional tactics against the Viet Cong. The problem, … was that neither Westmoreland nor the Joint Chiefs understood that “denying the insurgents victory in phase 3 was not the same as victory; rather, it would signal a return to phase 2.” And in phase 2, conventional tactics are useless.
… Much of it-certainly as much as belongs to the army-can be pinned squarely on the backs of Kennedy’s contemporaries: McNamara, William Bundy, and the highly educated practitioners of systems analysis who worked for them. These were men of reason. Capturing hearts and minds was, in their confident telling, far less important than capturing Viet Cong. “McNamara and his principal assistants were oblivious to the human and psychological dimensions of war,” U.S. Army Colonel H. R. McMaster wrote recently in these pages. “Their faith in American technological superiority, combined with their assumption that the enemy would conduct himself like any rational actor, blinded them to the characters of their North Vietnamese and Vietnamese Communist foes.” It also blinded them to the importance of the population caught in the middle.
One of the functions of saying American defeat was inevitable is to absolve opponents of the war for any responsibility for the American defeat or for its various consequences. That the people of Indochina are now living through the post-Soviet bloc joke (“what is socialism?, It is the longest and most painful path from capitalism to capitalism”) just adds to the ironies.
The Obama Administration is shelving plans for missile defences in Eastern Europe, which is likely to please Russia. It is based on a re-assessment of likely Iranian missile capacity. The Eastern Europeans are likely to be less impressed. Russian reactions have been verbally positive. NATO is raising the possibility of integrated missile defence with Russia. Asian Powers are trying to “read the tea-leaves” about what this means for US missile defence in their region.
Qaddafi “celebrates” UN day in his own inimitable way. It was too much for his translator:
After struggling to turn Khadafy’s insane ramblings at the UN into English for 75 minutes, the Libyan dictator’s personal interpreter got lost in translation.
"I just can’t take it any more," Khadafy’s interpreter shouted into the live microphone - in Arabic.
At that point, the U.N.’s Arabic section chief, Rasha Ajalyaqeen, took over and translated the final 20 minutes of the speech.
"His interpreter just collapsed - this is the first time I have seen this in 25 years," another U.N. Arabic interpreter told The Post.
The 1986 American air assault on Libya. Libya’s 40 years of destructive kleptocracy.
The Chechen insurgency seems to have evolved into a full jihadi revolt in the Caucasus.
About the Arab preference for war:
President Barack Obama, like his predecessors, hopes to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all. There’s no viable solution, though, when people on one side can’t even make peace with the idea of peace. A distressingly large percentage of the Palestinian population is still in the throes of what Rebecca West glimpsed in the Balkans some time ago. The bitter hatred and rejectionism that drives this conflict still hasn’t ebbed even in Egypt 30 years after a peace treaty was signed. It’s hard for most of us in the West to believe that some people prefer war to peace when they could have either, but they do. Ali Salem, bless his heart, has been contending with them for years.
Iran loses its only AWACS aircraft after an aerial parade:
Eye witnesses reported that the flaming planes landed on the mausoleum burial site of the Islamic revolution's founder Ruhollah Khomeini, a national shrine.
Wondering if the Obama Administration is about to drop trying to making deals with Syria.
About Walid Jumblatt’s obligation to his 300,000 Druze. About Walid Jumblatt’s equivocations and Syrian strategy:
The essence of Syria’s strategy is the destabilization of its surroundings to increase its own regional leverage. Yet this cuts in many contradictory ways. Iran cannot be happy with the prospect of a sectarian war in Iraq; Syria’s efforts in Iraq are also alienating the United States at a time when the Obama administration has engaged Bashar Assad to bring about a change in his regime’s behavior; Egypt is fed up with Syria’s and Iran’s encouragement of Hamas’ intransigence, which has neutralized Egypt’s role in inter-Palestinian reconciliation talks; Saudi Arabia and Egypt are unhappy with Syria’s obstructionism in Lebanon; and both Syria and Iran are eying each other with quiet suspicion to see which of them might open a full-scale dialogue with the United States before the other does.
Meeting Walid Jumblatt and on his Iranian problem:
but the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon has yet to defeat the Iranian Revolution in Lebanon.
British commandos rescue kidnapped journalist, his Afghan translator is killed. Ambush and clearing in an Afghan village. The anniversary of 9/11 in Afghanistan. About the incoherence of NATO policy in Afghanistan and the similarity to British debates in the later C19th. President Obama is apparently reconsidering the Afghan strategy, although the military is somewhat disconcerted about the process which appears to be more public, thanks to the leaking of the US/NATO commander’s assessment, than substantive. Leading to a very unflattering comparison with how the previous Administration had preceded in Iraq in 2006-08. Meanwhile, the NATO/US commander warns Afghanistan will be lost without more troops as the Taliban extend their areas of control. Again and again, the Muslim Middle East seems to be a choice between the corrupt and the fanatic. (In part because government has not been built on existing social structures.)
The Taliban are targeting a surviving Pakistani pagan group.
About Paul Nitze and George Kennan: friends whose disagreements shaped American Cold War policy.
Reports that President Obama is pushing for radical revision of US nuclear weapons strategy.
Report that Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan’s nuclear technology spreading may have had much more official Pakistani support than realised.
Tracing the ebb and flow of counter-insurgency theory in the US Army:
Given this feverish period of creativity in the early 1960s, and the fairly widespread awareness of counterinsurgency theory that suffused American political, military and even popular culture, why did these wise men not apply its tenets in the war that was soon to engulf them? At the simplest level, the explanation is fairly straightforward: they chose not to. The Army, for its part, chose to fight the conventional war it wanted to fight-with big-unit operations, massive applications of firepower, and an emphasis on reducing American casualties and multiplying enemy ones. As for the Army’s civilian masters, the narrowly quantitative and mechanistic orientation of Robert McNamara and his Whiz Kids ran exactly counter to the appreciation of the human element of warfare that counterinsurgency requires. These were, finally, not men with particularly vivid imaginations.
… Even the much-maligned William Westmoreland, … “had started one of the first small-unit counterguerrilla training courses in the Army.” He was also aware of Mao’s “three phases” of insurgency, and in 1965 Westmoreland diagnosed Vietnam as being in the third of these, when the guerrilla has the capacity for large-scale maneuvers against government forces. Thus, he reasoned, the U.S. could now rely on conventional tactics against the Viet Cong. The problem, … was that neither Westmoreland nor the Joint Chiefs understood that “denying the insurgents victory in phase 3 was not the same as victory; rather, it would signal a return to phase 2.” And in phase 2, conventional tactics are useless.
… Much of it-certainly as much as belongs to the army-can be pinned squarely on the backs of Kennedy’s contemporaries: McNamara, William Bundy, and the highly educated practitioners of systems analysis who worked for them. These were men of reason. Capturing hearts and minds was, in their confident telling, far less important than capturing Viet Cong. “McNamara and his principal assistants were oblivious to the human and psychological dimensions of war,” U.S. Army Colonel H. R. McMaster wrote recently in these pages. “Their faith in American technological superiority, combined with their assumption that the enemy would conduct himself like any rational actor, blinded them to the characters of their North Vietnamese and Vietnamese Communist foes.” It also blinded them to the importance of the population caught in the middle.
One of the functions of saying American defeat was inevitable is to absolve opponents of the war for any responsibility for the American defeat or for its various consequences. That the people of Indochina are now living through the post-Soviet bloc joke (“what is socialism?, It is the longest and most painful path from capitalism to capitalism”) just adds to the ironies.
The Obama Administration is shelving plans for missile defences in Eastern Europe, which is likely to please Russia. It is based on a re-assessment of likely Iranian missile capacity. The Eastern Europeans are likely to be less impressed. Russian reactions have been verbally positive. NATO is raising the possibility of integrated missile defence with Russia. Asian Powers are trying to “read the tea-leaves” about what this means for US missile defence in their region.
Qaddafi “celebrates” UN day in his own inimitable way. It was too much for his translator:
After struggling to turn Khadafy’s insane ramblings at the UN into English for 75 minutes, the Libyan dictator’s personal interpreter got lost in translation.
"I just can’t take it any more," Khadafy’s interpreter shouted into the live microphone - in Arabic.
At that point, the U.N.’s Arabic section chief, Rasha Ajalyaqeen, took over and translated the final 20 minutes of the speech.
"His interpreter just collapsed - this is the first time I have seen this in 25 years," another U.N. Arabic interpreter told The Post.
The 1986 American air assault on Libya. Libya’s 40 years of destructive kleptocracy.
The Chechen insurgency seems to have evolved into a full jihadi revolt in the Caucasus.
About the Arab preference for war:
President Barack Obama, like his predecessors, hopes to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all. There’s no viable solution, though, when people on one side can’t even make peace with the idea of peace. A distressingly large percentage of the Palestinian population is still in the throes of what Rebecca West glimpsed in the Balkans some time ago. The bitter hatred and rejectionism that drives this conflict still hasn’t ebbed even in Egypt 30 years after a peace treaty was signed. It’s hard for most of us in the West to believe that some people prefer war to peace when they could have either, but they do. Ali Salem, bless his heart, has been contending with them for years.
Iran loses its only AWACS aircraft after an aerial parade:
Eye witnesses reported that the flaming planes landed on the mausoleum burial site of the Islamic revolution's founder Ruhollah Khomeini, a national shrine.
Wondering if the Obama Administration is about to drop trying to making deals with Syria.
About Walid Jumblatt’s obligation to his 300,000 Druze. About Walid Jumblatt’s equivocations and Syrian strategy:
The essence of Syria’s strategy is the destabilization of its surroundings to increase its own regional leverage. Yet this cuts in many contradictory ways. Iran cannot be happy with the prospect of a sectarian war in Iraq; Syria’s efforts in Iraq are also alienating the United States at a time when the Obama administration has engaged Bashar Assad to bring about a change in his regime’s behavior; Egypt is fed up with Syria’s and Iran’s encouragement of Hamas’ intransigence, which has neutralized Egypt’s role in inter-Palestinian reconciliation talks; Saudi Arabia and Egypt are unhappy with Syria’s obstructionism in Lebanon; and both Syria and Iran are eying each other with quiet suspicion to see which of them might open a full-scale dialogue with the United States before the other does.
Meeting Walid Jumblatt and on his Iranian problem:
but the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon has yet to defeat the Iranian Revolution in Lebanon.
British commandos rescue kidnapped journalist, his Afghan translator is killed. Ambush and clearing in an Afghan village. The anniversary of 9/11 in Afghanistan. About the incoherence of NATO policy in Afghanistan and the similarity to British debates in the later C19th. President Obama is apparently reconsidering the Afghan strategy, although the military is somewhat disconcerted about the process which appears to be more public, thanks to the leaking of the US/NATO commander’s assessment, than substantive. Leading to a very unflattering comparison with how the previous Administration had preceded in Iraq in 2006-08. Meanwhile, the NATO/US commander warns Afghanistan will be lost without more troops as the Taliban extend their areas of control. Again and again, the Muslim Middle East seems to be a choice between the corrupt and the fanatic. (In part because government has not been built on existing social structures.)
The Taliban are targeting a surviving Pakistani pagan group.