Gyroscope

I yield to no one in my contempt for G. Bush or regarding the war as counterproductive. Therefore, for that reason, and that I am from Kansas, it is particularly important, I think, that I need to get on the record on this.

The New York Times today has an article about Fred Phelps’ latest twist in his protest. The Topeka, Kansas “preacher” rose to infamy by protesting at funerals of homosexuals, most notably Matthew Shepard, the student beaten to death because he was gay. Phelps and his crew go to funerals and hold up signs and chant that the deceased was now burning in hell for his sin. You want to see more, go to his cheerfully named “God Hates Fags” website.

Now his crew is going to the funerals of SOLDIERS KILLED IN IRAQ and protesting on the theory that their death is caused by God punishing America for not being opposed enough to homosexuality.

You may have to read that twice to get it - I know I had to read the story twice before my brain could register this. As opposed to the war as I am, I’d never do anything at a military funeral other than solemnly pay my respects. Protesting the war by protesting a funeral would be offensive, counterproductive, a sin and rude but would at least follow logic consistent with other human stupidities.

But Fred’s miserable excuse for a “church” stand within sight of the funeral party, at their time of profound grief and vulnerability and hold up signs that say “Thank God for IED’s”, “God Blew Up the Soldier”, or “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”. As he writes on his website: “No one talked about the fact that God was spreading these dead bodies all across the war zone. Let alone did anyone speak of the sinful lifestyle of the deceased. Instead, people puffed out their chests, thumped them long and loud, waved that dishonorable ignoble filthy fag American flag, and screamingly demanded that God bless them.”

This is nonsense on top of offensiveness on top of stupidity. I won’t even spend time pointing out the many ways this is ridiculous because I don’t want to detract from the emphasis on the obscenity, the arrogance, the twisted perversion of religion, the exploitation of free speech and the general stench of this useless idiot.

Fortunately laws are rapidly being prepared to give the same protection to funerals that was rightly given to abortion clinics: people do have some rights to not listen to some particularly offensive words and that can be done with no meaningful restriction on freedom of speech. And a gang of motorcycle riding Vietnam Vets is prepared to show up at funerals and drown out Fred’s chants with that two-stroke snarl. At any other place than a funeral, I tell them to go for it and ask if I and my bike could join the fray.

As a Christian, as an American, as a Kansan, I am offended. I’m offended I can’t come with more extreme words to describe how pissed off I am. Fred has a right to express his opinion. And I have a right to tell him how twisted it is.

Posted by John Nordin at 08:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anthony Cordesman
Center for Strategic and International Studies
“The Iraq War and Lessons for Counterinsurgency”, March 16, 2006

Cordesman has been publishing papers on the Iraq war as it has progressed. He sometimes appears on the PBS News hour as a guest speaking on military affairs.

He observes that insurgent attacks are concentrated in four Iraq’s 18 provinces. These four, however, contain 43% of the population. The most rural provinces are comparatively quiet. So insurgency is concentrated in certain areas, but these are the key areas (including Baghdad). The Republican claim that “most of the country is calm” is true geographically, but not really the point.

Cordesman observes that economic reconstruction is not going well. Oil production is still below pre-war levels - and prewar Iraq was under sanctions. There has been about $20 billion spent on reconstruction and we have almost nothing to show for it. It’s true that lots of new schools have been built, but he points out that counts of new schools, etc. are irrelevant if they aren’t equipped and aren’t used, which is often the case. So much for another talking point about how the “good news is never reported.”

As for the insurgency, Cordesman argues again, as he has before, and has anyone who has ever studied guerilla war, that our technology is not the cure-all we think it is. “The insurgency has effectively found a form of low technology ‘swarm’ tactics that is superior to what the high technology coalition and Iraqi forces have been a le to find as counter.” (p.9). The US is making the traditional mistake - thinking we are superior because we have superior technology. Cordesman contends that the entire cost of all the IEDs exploded against us could well be less than the cost of one AH-1S (Cobra attack helicopter) (p.23) This illustrates so well why our wealth, technology, firepower has proven to be so ineffective.

As for the overall battle plan, Cordesman writes, “Much has been made of the intelligence failures in assessing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. These failures pale to insignificance, however, in comparison with the failure of US policy and military planners to accurately assess the overall situation in Iraq before engaging in war, and for the risk of insurgency if the US did not carry out an effective mix of nation building and stability operations. This failure cannot be made the responsibility of the intelligence community. It was the responsibility of the President, the Vice President, the national Security Advisor, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs … The nation’s leading policymakers chose to act on a limited and highly ideological view of Iraq that planed for one extremely optimistic definition of success, but not for risk or failure.” P. 12

While Iraq is not Vietnam, the US is making many of the same mistakes it made in Vietnam. One of those key mistakes is to stake your reputation on some marginal strategic assist - because then you cannot allow yourself to loose or withdraw before completion. Vietnam was not a vital assist of the United States, and neither was a contained, de-fanged Saddam. But once the Bush gang turned him into a monster, they had to get him.

Posted by John Nordin at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Department of Homeland Security has sent a bulletin (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/dhs-extremists/?resultpage=1) warning of possible attacks by eco-terrorist groups. One of the threatened modes of attack is "sending continuous faxes in order to drain the ink supply from company fax machines"

Posted by John Nordin at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Could it be that they are actually thinking of invading or attacking Iran? Using tactical nukes? Or will they have the Israelis do it for us? Could the saber rattling be just to try to scare Iran (which it won’t) and then the Busites will be backed into a corner by their own extreme rhetoric? Or maybe the extreme language is a trick: they will do a “little” raid or some sanctions and – because we’ve been conditioned by the extreme rhetoric we’ll think we convinced Bush to be reasonable.

Whatever, it’s a bad idea all around. Some facts:

Iran
1.6 million sq km – About the size of Alaska
68.8 million people
4.3 million cell phones
GDP: $552 billion (purchasing power parity)
GDP/capita: $8,100

Iraq
437 thousand sq km – twice the size of Idaho
26.7 million people
547 thousand cell phones
GDP: $94 billion (purchasing power parity)
GDP/capita: $3,400

France
547 thousand sq km – twice the size of Colorado
60.8 million people
44.5 million cell phones.
GDP: $1.8 trillion
GDP/capita: $30,000

All data from the CIA fact book. The cell phone number is a proxy for the level of development. France I listed just because we might be invading them after Iran.

So: Iran. Four times the size, three times the people, six times the economy. Oh yea, Iraq went so well, Iran should be just easy.

I think Bush might well do something other than a full invasion – a bombing, sanctions, getting the Iraq army to start incidents on the border. And in a later post, I’ll explain why that won’t work either.

Posted by John Nordin at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have a law that prevents people from immigrating to the United States if they supplied “material support” for a terrorist or terrorist organization (section 212(a)(3)(b)), material support being defined in part as “to commit an act that the actor knows, or reasonably should know, affords material support, including a safe house, transportation, communications, funds, transfer of funds or other material financial benefit, false documentation or identification, weapons”

So far, not so bad. We certainly don’t want terrorists coming here. No sir. Here is an example of how it has been applied. This woman in Sierra Leone had a group of terrorists in her house for four days. Her daughter was there also. According to the New York Times (April 3, p. A20) her application for refuge in the US is being denied. Sounds a little harsh, but we don’t like terrorists.

One tiny problem: she, and her daughter, were being raped and further injured by the guerrillas. And there are more cases.

The Refuge Council USA reports that many refugees and asylum seekers from Burma have been denied for simular reasons. They contributed money to sub-groups of other groups that may be associated with a desire to violently overthrow the Burmeese government. Wait a minute: isn’t the US opposed to the dictatorial junta running Burma now? As the NYT points out by the same logic you could keep out of the US the Iraqis who helped rescure Jessica Lynch. For more on the Burma situation see Burma Underground.

And this restriction is keeping out refugees from Columbia as well.

Can we get any more stupid?

Posted by John Nordin at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It ought to be easy to be a Democratic politician now. An unpopular president leads an unpopular war that is going nowhere. The president regularly violates Constitutional protections, covers up scientific data, has no domestic accomplishments worth mentioning, has messed up drug coverage for seniors, has created a huge deficit. And every week brings a new example of corruption. Yet, the Democrats seem timid, quiet, and there is nothing like the full-throated roar that there was against Clinton, or even against Nixon.

Where are the Democrats?

And when the Democrats do get going, they pick goofy targets and go after them ineffectively. For example, there is the Dubai ports deal. Now, to be sure, they, technically ‘won’ that confrontation. However, they wound up looking bad. First, because they picked the wrong reason to go after the deal. They tried to make it about security, when it should have been about hypocrisy. The problem isn’t that Dubai is a terror state, the problem was that after Bush has spent five years trying to whip up fear of an Arab tide of terror it was more than hypocritical for him now to claim that he was shocked that people didn’t like an Arab company running some of our ports. The hypocrisy was that once again money trumped everything, as it always does for Bush.

And then there was Hillary. She isn’t a liberal and so she took out a strong position opposed to the ports deal. Oops, one problem, her husband, reported the Financial Times (March 5th) had made over $500k from speeches in Dubai, had received a half million dollar donation for his presidential library, and was advising the company on how to handle the opposition to the deal.

And why shouldn’t he? We want closer relationships with responsible Arab governments and to deepen business dealings with them. The real Democratic position should have been to mock Bush for his expediency, not to try to pander to security fears.

But that does represent a constant Democratic problem: they so want to be considered tough and manly like the Republicans.

Posted by John Nordin at 08:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times paged through the transcripts of detainee hearings in Guantanamo. There were a few proud to be enemy combatants. And there was the man named Muhibullah who denied he was the man with the same name who was a governor of Shibarghan province in Afghanistan. The prisoner suggested the court should contact the governor and ask him. Well, the court said, that is really your job. They said that to the detainee who can’t have an attorney, can’t collect evidence, can’t use the phone.

Then there is the Casio watches, model F-91W, to be exact. This is part of the evidence against more than one detainee because these have “been used in bombings linked to Al Qaeda.” Well, one detainee asked, why don’t you arrest the people who sell them? Like Amazon, for example, that has them for $12. I think I used to own one. According to Forbes, some guards at Guantanamo have them. Apparently some Moslems wear them because they have a compass that they can use to find the direction to Mecca.

Doubtless the detainees include some very bad people. But if they’re not wearing a Casio watch, I don’t know if our military will be able to find them.

Posted by John Nordin at 05:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Most debates about the issue of civil liberties and the war on terror assume that there is something to “balance.” There is an assumed trade off that if you keep to all the picky little rules of protecting people’s rights that this will allow terrorists to get away free.

I have my doubts about this.

Most of the Bush administration semi-legal actions (detaining large numbers of immigrants on weak charges, sweeping up people from the battlefield, widespread spying on Americans, etc.) have, if you notice carefully, produced almost no terrorists to convict or kill. Aside from the sad comedy playing out around Moussaoui, can you recall a single major terrorist trial since 9/11? I can’t. Lots of minor cases about “sympathizing” or “supporting” terror – by talking to people we don’t like or making ill-advised trips to suspicious training camps, but no one who actually planned a significant terrorist action or led a terror group. Many people who overstayed a visa, but not very many who built bombs.

The Bush administration also claims to have stopped terror plots before they could come to fruition, but none of these have produced any arrests, and I’m sure the Bush gang would have trumpeted them if they had them.

So what have we gotten for this wholesale assault on liberty? What have we gotten in exchange for a president who says he has unilateral power to suspend the enforcement of the law, the power to make people disappear, the power to serve secret warrants, the power to tell the courts what they can and cannot do?

What are we “balancing”? Pretty much nothing, I think.

Posted by John Nordin at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)