War links
About the complicated interactions of imperialism, xenophobia and aggression.
The real but limited and temporary effect of racism on the American conduct of the Pacific War.
Human Rights Watch suffers a rather embarrassing Nazi memorabilia scandal with its now (former) military expert.
A useful issue of (pdf) the Australian Army Journal.
The US and Russia have agreed to more substantial cuts in their nuclear arsenals.
A South Korean naval vessel sank near the North Korean border. More.
Arguing the Obama Administration is systematically downgrading democratic allies and pandering to autocratic rivals. Hints of European dissatisfaction.
About ideology and anti-Israel antipathy in the Arab world. Dissecting a particularly tendentious set of “Israeli/Palestinian” land maps. A useful summary of the history of Israel-Palestine peace plans. Riots in Jerusalem over re-opening of a synagogue originally destroyed in 1948. Tensions over Palestinian belief they are being squeezed out of East Jerusalem. More. Suggesting US-Israel connections are weakening. Hillary puts Israel on the spot. But Tim Minchin has a peace anthem to offer.
President Ahmadinejad is a 9/11 “truther”, of course. Israeli minister claims that he has been secretly contacted by a range of Arab states saying they are OK with an Israeli attack on Iran.
Arguing that US is losing leverage in the Middle East. Arguing that the resistance bloc of Hamas-Hezbollah-Syria-Iran cannot be appeased by the US. About US diplomats saying things about Syria that are not true. President Assad II is adept at pandering in words while acting quite differently”
President Barack Obama clearly wants to tilt U.S. foreign policy more toward the Arabs, but he doesn’t have to do it at the expense of our alliance with Israel. Just start with what Washington, Jerusalem, and most of the Arab states have in common and build outward from there. The present alignment may only come round once in a century, so we best not blow it.
A former general in the Chechen insurgency was shot in a Dubai hotel in March 2009. A targeted assassination nobody much cared about, apparently, so was not newsworthy. Both his brothers had previously been killed. He was shot with a gold-plated gun.
Report that al-Qaeda is growing in numbers and strength in North Africa.
About Qaddafi’s charm offensive:
In a fundamentalist version of the Battle of New Orleans, our hapless jihadis all explain that they came to fight the Soviets in 1990 or later. None was aware that by the time they arrived, the Soviet Union had collapsed and its troops had disengaged. As one former LIFG fighter explains, such developments were not discussed in the Libyan media. …
And although America might have provided support to Muslims in the past, this doesn’t matter because it was for our own self-interest, not because we realize that Islam is the one true faith.
Qaddafi releases a lot of al-Qaeda members.
About the problems of Afghanistan and the burden of military competence:
The ur-text for a philosophical discussion of the role of the U.S. military in the post-Cold War era is Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 Oxford lecture, “Historical Inevitability,” in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that vast impersonal forces such as geography, environment, and ethnic characteristics determine the direction of world politics. Berlin reproaches Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon for seeing “nations” and “civilizations” as “more concrete” than the individuals who embody them, and for seeing abstractions like “tradition” and “history” as “wiser than we.”
… only the most difficult human landscapes require intervention in the first place, and when one does intervene militarily, one should always do so without illusions. …
And thus we confront Afghanistan: a country whose citizens have a life expectancy of 44 years and a literacy rate of 28 percent (far lower among women), and only a fifth of whose population has access to clean drinking water. Out of 182 countries, Afghanistan ranks next to last on the United Nations’ Human Development Index (just ahead of Niger). Iraq, on the eve of the U.S. invasion, was ranked 126th; its literacy rate hovered around 70 percent. Afghanistan’s problems on a developmental level are not only more profound than Iraq’s, but vaster in scope, as Afghanistan encompasses 30 percent more land. Consider, also, that 77 percent of Iraqis live in urban areas (concentrated heavily in Baghdad), so reducing violence in Greater Baghdad had a calming effect on the entire country; in Afghanistan, urbanization stands at only 30 percent, and so counterinsurgency efforts in one village may have no effect on another. …
The Afghanistan-Pakistan border is in reality no border at all but, in the words of Sugata Bose, a Harvard historian, “the heart … of an expansive Indo-Persian and Indo-Islamic economic, cultural, and political domain that [has] straddled Afghanistan and Punjab for two millennia.” …
Karzai governs everywhere in the revenue belt, synonymous with Pashtunistan, in the south and east of the country: the Taliban succeed in these very places, not because of no governance but because of corrupt and abusive governance. …
… despite the awful toll of casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the near-breaking of the Army through the strain on soldiers and their families because of long and dangerous deployments, American ground troops are emerging nearly a decade after 9/11 as a force that is even more organizationally and intellectually formidable than it was after the Berlin Wall collapsed, when the United States was the lone superpower.
… even though it is a truism of counterinsurgency that there are few shortcuts to victory and you shouldn’t rush to failure. …
If you are willing to stay, you can turn any situation around for the good. But that is an imperial mind-set, with its assumption of a near-permanent presence, which today’s Washington cannot abide, even as its own strategy drives toward that outcome.
General Petraueus thinks the next year in Afghanistan will get worse before it gets better. Controversies about the use of private contractors in war zones. And also. Gen. McChrystal has brought special operations forces under his direct control, with controversies about civilian casualties. Fights between the Obama and Karzai Administrations over corruption. More.
The real but limited and temporary effect of racism on the American conduct of the Pacific War.
Human Rights Watch suffers a rather embarrassing Nazi memorabilia scandal with its now (former) military expert.
A useful issue of (pdf) the Australian Army Journal.
The US and Russia have agreed to more substantial cuts in their nuclear arsenals.
A South Korean naval vessel sank near the North Korean border. More.
Arguing the Obama Administration is systematically downgrading democratic allies and pandering to autocratic rivals. Hints of European dissatisfaction.
About ideology and anti-Israel antipathy in the Arab world. Dissecting a particularly tendentious set of “Israeli/Palestinian” land maps. A useful summary of the history of Israel-Palestine peace plans. Riots in Jerusalem over re-opening of a synagogue originally destroyed in 1948. Tensions over Palestinian belief they are being squeezed out of East Jerusalem. More. Suggesting US-Israel connections are weakening. Hillary puts Israel on the spot. But Tim Minchin has a peace anthem to offer.
President Ahmadinejad is a 9/11 “truther”, of course. Israeli minister claims that he has been secretly contacted by a range of Arab states saying they are OK with an Israeli attack on Iran.
Arguing that US is losing leverage in the Middle East. Arguing that the resistance bloc of Hamas-Hezbollah-Syria-Iran cannot be appeased by the US. About US diplomats saying things about Syria that are not true. President Assad II is adept at pandering in words while acting quite differently”
President Barack Obama clearly wants to tilt U.S. foreign policy more toward the Arabs, but he doesn’t have to do it at the expense of our alliance with Israel. Just start with what Washington, Jerusalem, and most of the Arab states have in common and build outward from there. The present alignment may only come round once in a century, so we best not blow it.
A former general in the Chechen insurgency was shot in a Dubai hotel in March 2009. A targeted assassination nobody much cared about, apparently, so was not newsworthy. Both his brothers had previously been killed. He was shot with a gold-plated gun.
Report that al-Qaeda is growing in numbers and strength in North Africa.
About Qaddafi’s charm offensive:
In a fundamentalist version of the Battle of New Orleans, our hapless jihadis all explain that they came to fight the Soviets in 1990 or later. None was aware that by the time they arrived, the Soviet Union had collapsed and its troops had disengaged. As one former LIFG fighter explains, such developments were not discussed in the Libyan media. …
And although America might have provided support to Muslims in the past, this doesn’t matter because it was for our own self-interest, not because we realize that Islam is the one true faith.
Qaddafi releases a lot of al-Qaeda members.
About the problems of Afghanistan and the burden of military competence:
The ur-text for a philosophical discussion of the role of the U.S. military in the post-Cold War era is Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 Oxford lecture, “Historical Inevitability,” in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that vast impersonal forces such as geography, environment, and ethnic characteristics determine the direction of world politics. Berlin reproaches Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon for seeing “nations” and “civilizations” as “more concrete” than the individuals who embody them, and for seeing abstractions like “tradition” and “history” as “wiser than we.”
… only the most difficult human landscapes require intervention in the first place, and when one does intervene militarily, one should always do so without illusions. …
And thus we confront Afghanistan: a country whose citizens have a life expectancy of 44 years and a literacy rate of 28 percent (far lower among women), and only a fifth of whose population has access to clean drinking water. Out of 182 countries, Afghanistan ranks next to last on the United Nations’ Human Development Index (just ahead of Niger). Iraq, on the eve of the U.S. invasion, was ranked 126th; its literacy rate hovered around 70 percent. Afghanistan’s problems on a developmental level are not only more profound than Iraq’s, but vaster in scope, as Afghanistan encompasses 30 percent more land. Consider, also, that 77 percent of Iraqis live in urban areas (concentrated heavily in Baghdad), so reducing violence in Greater Baghdad had a calming effect on the entire country; in Afghanistan, urbanization stands at only 30 percent, and so counterinsurgency efforts in one village may have no effect on another. …
The Afghanistan-Pakistan border is in reality no border at all but, in the words of Sugata Bose, a Harvard historian, “the heart … of an expansive Indo-Persian and Indo-Islamic economic, cultural, and political domain that [has] straddled Afghanistan and Punjab for two millennia.” …
Karzai governs everywhere in the revenue belt, synonymous with Pashtunistan, in the south and east of the country: the Taliban succeed in these very places, not because of no governance but because of corrupt and abusive governance. …
… despite the awful toll of casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the near-breaking of the Army through the strain on soldiers and their families because of long and dangerous deployments, American ground troops are emerging nearly a decade after 9/11 as a force that is even more organizationally and intellectually formidable than it was after the Berlin Wall collapsed, when the United States was the lone superpower.
… even though it is a truism of counterinsurgency that there are few shortcuts to victory and you shouldn’t rush to failure. …
If you are willing to stay, you can turn any situation around for the good. But that is an imperial mind-set, with its assumption of a near-permanent presence, which today’s Washington cannot abide, even as its own strategy drives toward that outcome.
General Petraueus thinks the next year in Afghanistan will get worse before it gets better. Controversies about the use of private contractors in war zones. And also. Gen. McChrystal has brought special operations forces under his direct control, with controversies about civilian casualties. Fights between the Obama and Karzai Administrations over corruption. More.