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| 5/24 |
| 2006/11/6-7 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:45184 Activity:low |
11/7 The Press at War: What ever happened to patriotic reporters?
http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203
\_ The country at war: What ever happened to just conflicts?
\_ OP, do you actually believe any of this crap? Do you think
the sectarian thugs who are making our life miserable in
Iraq read the NY Times? Also the writer of this article seems
to think that Iraq would soon be edging out Irvine, CA
in Time's annual Best Places To Live Poll if only newspaper
owners took a firmer hand in reigning in the evil liberal
press. I love the WSJ's news operations but they must really
store their editorial people on a ship far, far away from
other sources of information. - danh
\_ You're confused and miss the point if you think this is about
thugs in Iraq reading American papers. Wars are won by
breaking the will of the enemy to keep fighting. If your own
press breaks the will of your own people then you've lost no
matter what is going on in the actual war zone. Your Irvine
comment is rhetorical noise and ignored.
\_ 'justice' is not an absolute. There is no such thing as a
'just conflict'.
\_ 'Intelligence' is not an absolute, there are just people who
are far from it.
\_ Did you even read the link?
\_ I'm reading it. Who is this guy? He's comparing
the Iraq invasion to WW2, and while he's at it,
blaming the Vietnam loss on leftist protestors.\
Even more powerful than the all powerful leftist
blaming the Vietnam loss on leftist protestors.
Even more powerful than the all powerful leftist
protestors was the several million residents of
Vietnam willing to die to the very last man to
kick the invading force out.
\_ Specifically he said the Tet Offensive was a win for
the US but mischaracterised as a loss and the media
allowed that wrong to stay uncorrected in the
public's view of the war. The TO was a devastating
loss for the north but you never knew it if you only
listened to American media at the time. How is he
wrong on that?
What is your issue with his WW2/Iraq comparison which
is specifically about how reporters reported in each
war?
\_ You don't get it, do you. We can win all
the giant military victories we want, witness
our quick victory over the regular Iraqi
forces in this war. We can win 100 Tet
offensives. You can loudly point out the fact
we won every battle in Vietnam. This is not
how you fight a guerilla insurgency. Those
"hearts and minds" guys really did have the right
idea. By letting Iraq spiral into sectarian
violence with roving guerrilla death squads
on all 3 sides run Iraq, we are doomed to failure,
no matter how many biased Fox or NYTimes
articles are written.
\_ As usual the War Nerd is right on on this one:
http://www.exile.ru/2006-November-03/the_doctrine_of_asymmetrical_war.html
http://preview.tinyurl.com/u6zec (exile.ru)
\_ http://www.exile.ru/2002-April-21/war_nerd.html
He's a data-entry tech in Fresno. He has
some points about the changing nature of
war but he sure as hell doesn't say that
winning hearts and minds is the way to go.
\_ Vietnam was lost in the media right here at
home, not in Vietnam. And 100 Tet Offensives
would have wiped out N.Vietnam about 8 times
over to the last man, woman, and child, but
I'm sure you didn't mean that literally. The
hearts and minds guys have it wrong. No one
tried to win the hearts and minds of anyone
in Germany, Japan, Italy, or any other place
the US or any other war has ever been won.
Wars are won by killing people until they
stop hitting back. Obviously roaming death
squads in Iraq is Bad(tm), but you're not
going to win the hearts and minds of death
squads. They must be killed and that is one
of the many failures on our part: we are
actually trying to win over those people
instead of just killing them.
\_ This isn't WWII anymore. That's not how
war works anymore, especially not in an
occupied country.
\_ Of course it isn't however no one is
going to win the hearts and minds of
the "roving guerilla death squads".
Especially for the largest ones such
as Al Muq Tadr (however its spelled)
which has a sizable force and known
leadership. The reason these guys are
still around is they are part of the
tribal power structure holding up the
current PM. All that tribal garbage
needs to be stepped on and buried or
they will fight a real civil war, not
this pansy thing they're doing now.
We have 130k or so troops there the
last I knew. They patrol? For what?
To be sniper and IED targets? They
should either be out there mopping up
a la Faluja or they should come home
now and just let it fall to crap.
\_ I don't think this works with Shiites.
They LIKE being killed. It just
reaffirms in their minds their martyr
complex. How do you defeat an enemy
that only gets stronger when you kill
them? I really don't know.
\_ I agree that some small percentage of
them are a-ok with the getting killed
thing, but tell me this, if pure force
can't keep them down then how did Saddam
keep the majority population from taking
over 25+ years ago? Why was there no
endless civil war between the Sunni and
Shia?
\_ They really should put Saddam back
in charge. Seriously.
\_ Also the writer lectures at Pepperdine, home of
more and more batshit crazy person Ben Stein. What
happened to him? He didn't seem so crazy in the
movies.
\- did you see the infamous BSTEIN - PKRUGMAN
"i won the john bates clark medal; you are a
game show host" exchange?
\_ Anyone who says "authorization to use force == authorization to do
absolutely anything he 'needs' to" is not worth reading.
\_ Where'd he say that?
\- james q wilson is pretty famous. mayor guiliani probably
got his crime fighting ideas from JQW. it;s called the
"broken window" theory [focus on small crimes to deter a
lawlessness culture] athough i believe there is some
cintroversy about who really came up with the idea ...
as well as controvery about the effectiveness.
he's one of the intellectuals favored by a number of
conservatives but he's not a wacko loser like
victor david hansen.
\_ Uhm ok, I know broken window theory. Where did he say
the bit about auth-to-use-force = auth-to-do-abs-anything? |
| 5/24 |
|
| www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009203 We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90% of the public do not want us out right now. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed the successes. scarcely any reported the triumphs of American soldiers and Marines. The few positive stories about progress in Iraq were just a small fraction of all the broadcasts. When the Center for Media and Public Affairs made a nonpartisan evaluation of network news broadcasts, it found that during the active war against Saddam Hussein, 51% of the reports about the conflict were negative. Six months after the land battle ended, 77% were negative; This decline in media support was much faster than during Korea or Vietnam. Naturally, some of the hostile commentary reflects the nature of reporting. When every news outlet struggles to grab and hold an audience, no one should be surprised that this competition leads journalists to emphasize bloody events. To some degree, the press covers Iraq in much the same way that it covers America: it highlights conflict, shootings, bombings, hurricanes, tornadoes, and corruption. But the war coverage does not reflect merely an interest in conflict. People who oppose the entire war on terror run much of the national press, and they go to great lengths to make waging it difficult. Thus the New York Times ran a front-page story about President Bush's allowing, without court warrants, electronic monitoring of phone calls between overseas terrorists and people inside the US On the heels of this, the Times reported that the FBI had been conducting a top-secret program to monitor radiation levels around US Muslim sites, including mosques. And then both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times ran stories about America's effort to monitor foreign banking transactions in order to frustrate terrorist plans. The revelation of this secret effort followed five years after the New York Times urged, in an editorial, that precisely such a program be started. Virtually every government official consulted on these matters urged that the press not run the stories because they endangered secret and important tasks. The media suggested that the National Security Agency surveillance might be illegal, but since we do not know exactly what kind of surveillance is undertaken, we cannot be clear about its legal basis. No one should assume that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the president to obtain warrants from the special FISA court before he can monitor foreign intelligence contacts. Though the Supreme Court has never decided this issue, the lower federal courts, almost without exception, have held that "the Executive Branch need not always obtain a warrant for foreign intelligence surveillance." Nor is it obvious that FISA defines all of the president's authority. Two assistant attorneys general have argued that when the president believes that a statute unconstitutionally limits his powers, he has the right not to obey it unless the Supreme Court directs him otherwise. This action would be proper even if the president had signed into law the bill limiting his authority. I know, you are thinking, That is just what the current Justice Department would say. In fact, these opinions were written in the Clinton administration by assistant attorneys general Walter Dellinger and Randolph Moss. The president may have such power either because it inheres in his position as commander in chief or because Congress passed a law authorizing him to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against nations or people that directed or aided the attack of 9/11. Surveillance without warrants may be just such an "appropriate force." In any event, presidents before George W Bush have issued executive orders authorizing searches without warrants, and Jamie Gorelick, once Bill Clinton's deputy attorney general and later a member of the 9/11 Commission, said that physical searches may be done without a court order in foreign intelligence cases. Such searches might well have prevented new terrorist attacks; if they are blocked in the future, no doubt we will see a demand for a new commission charged with criticizing the president for failing to prevent an attack. In August 2006, when the British arrested the conspirators in the plot to blow up commercial aircraft in flight, evidence suggested that two leads to them were money transactions that began in Pakistan and American intercepts of their electronic chatter. Unfortunately, the New York Times and the ACLU were not able to prevent the British from learning these things. But they would have tried to prevent them if they had been based in London. Suppose the current media posture about American military and security activities had been in effect during World War II. In the 1930s, after all, the well-connected America First Committee had been arguing for years about the need for America to stay out of "Europe's wars." Aware of these popular views, the House extended the draft by only a one-vote margin in 1941. Women dressed in black crowded the entrance to the Senate, arguing against extending the draft. Several hundred students at Harvard and Yale, including future Yale leader Kingman Brewster and future American president Gerald Ford, signed statements saying that they would never go to war. Everything was in place for a media attack on the Second World War. Here is how it might have sounded if today's customs were in effect: December 1941. Though the press supports America's going to war against Japan after Pearl Harbor, several editorials want to know why we didn't prevent the attack by selling Japan more oil. Others criticize us for going to war with two nations that had never attacked us, Germany and Italy. The New York Times runs an exclusive story about the British effort to decipher German messages at a hidden site at Bletchley Park in England. One op-ed writer criticizes this move, quoting Henry Stimson's statement that gentlemen do not read one another's mail. Because the Bletchley Park code-cracking helped us find German submarines before they attacked, successful U-boat attacks increased once the Germans, knowing of the program, changed their code. After President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill call for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, several newspapers criticize them for having closed the door to a negotiated settlement. The press quotes several senators complaining that the unconditional surrender policy would harm the peace process. A big-city newspaper reveals the existence of the Manhattan Project and its effort to build atomic weapons. In these stories, several distinguished scientists lament the creation of such a terrible weapon. Leslie Groves testifies before a congressional committee, the press lambastes him for wasting money, ignoring scientific opinion, and imperiling the environment by building plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge. The German counterattack against the Allies in the Ardennes yields heavy American losses in the Battle of the Bulge. The press gives splashy coverage to the Democratic National Committee chairman's assertion that the war cannot be won. A member of the House, a former Marine, urges that our troops be sent to Okinawa. After President Truman authorizes dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, many newspapers urge his impeachment. Thankfully, though, the press did not cover World War II the way it covered Vietnam and has covered Iraq. Like many liberals and conservatives, I believe that our Vietnam experience created new media attitudes that have continued down to the present. During that war, some reporters began their coverage supportive of the struggle, but that view did not last long. Many people will recall the CBS television program, narrated by Morley Safer, about US Marines using cigarette lighters to torch huts in Cam Ne in 1965. Many will remember the picture of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a captured Viet Cong through the head. Hardly a... |
| www.exile.ru/2006-November-03/the_doctrine_of_asymmetrical_war.html Previous (103) FRESNO -- For the eXile's 250th issue celebration, I've decided to step back a bit and take a look at modern warfare, a sort of mid-term summary of everything I've been trying to teach you folks over the past hundred or so issues I've been writing for this paper. I'll give you the bad news first: no 21st century war is "purely military." The days when countries duked it out on the battlefield are over for the foreseeable future. It goes by a lot of names, from "terrorism" to "asymmetrical warfare" to "fourth-generation warfare," depending on whether you're for it, against it, or just trying to sound cool. But whatever you call it, the key factor is that it never involves WW-II style conventional war between nation-states. Oh, there'll be a few good old-school conventional wars from time to time. And you could include the Iran-Iraq War from that same decade. This way doesn't require any of the building blocks of conventional war: you don't need industry, aircraft, armor or massive armies. In fact, this kind of war can be played by any group of wackos that can round up a dozen or so bushwhackers. All you need is small arms and a grudge -- and those are the only two commodities most of the world has a surplus of. It's a heartbreaker for you hardware freaks, this idea that it just doesn't matter whether our tanks are better than their tanks (or planes or artillery or whatever). But it's time you grew up, guys: haven't you kind of noticed that in most wars, the other side doesn't even use tanks, or planes, or artillery (except mortars, which are so portable they can be considered small arms)? You guys are stuck in the dream about a classic NATO/Warsaw Pact Sumo match in Central Europe, and you just don't want to think about all these brush wars. The Warsaw Pact doesn't exist any more, so that war is never going to happen. If the Soviets had sent the tanks into the Fulda Gap, it would have been a nukefest, not a tank battle like Kursk. Not exactly a wargamer's dream: before you can even get your corps deployed, the whole playing field would melt down. If you want tank duels, go replay the Kursk Salient or project yourself fifty years into the future, where maybe, just maybe, the Asian powers will have a good all-out war. If you want to know about war now, then you have to jump into the weird world of "asymmetrical war." And I'll tell you: once you make that jump, you find this kind of war is just as interesting, just as satisfying as setpiece battles. I made the jump ten years ago, when I realized my hardware research wasn't helping me understand the wars that were actually happening in Africa and Asia. And I'm glad I did, because I understand the world way better than most people. I knew Iraq would go bad because I've studied this kind of war. To get your head around this kind of war, you have to delete most of your ideas about warfare. That's right: get your Black & Decker out of the garage, charge that puppy up, and do some brain surgery on the part of your cortex that stores your favorite ideas about war. Here's a list of War Myths, so you'll know where to drill: 1 War involves battles. Most of the "armies" in the world right now avoid battle and focus on killing civilians. This is the hardest thing for Americans to understand: armies that don't aim at victory and actually avoid battle. So many war buffs who ought to know better just won't see this. If you read military blogs, you know the type: guys who say "we won every battle in Nam!" The NVA/Viet Cong strategy was classic irregular warfare stuff, based on outlasting the enemy, not defeating him in battle. When they did go for military victory, like in the Tet Offensive, it was a near-disaster, saved by the other key fact about this sort of war: 2 You win by killing the enemy. In this kind of war the enemy wants you to kill a lot of people. A lot of irregular warfare groups start their campaigns with a suicide raid, where they expect to be slaughtered. Here again it's a matter of you hardware freaks facing hard facts. If we take Iraq 2003 as a familiar and painful example, you saw a classic outcome: our hi-tech beat their wanna-be hi-tech in the conventional battles. Then we started getting picked off by low-tech ambushes where the insurgents used homemade IEDs in combination with old, rugged Soviet weapons like the RPG-7 and Kalashnikov. After two years, those simple weapons are still effective -- and they're actually getting lower- and lower-tech! Take IEDs: when the Iraqi insurgents started using them, they'd hook the detonator up to a garage-door opener or cell phone so they could be set off by remote control signals. Our convoys started using jammers to stop those signals from getting through to the detonators. So now the insurgents are using wires or even string to set off the IED. And that's why it works, because you can't jam a string either. Americans are pretty well anti-death, but lots of other tribes are in love with the idea of the martyrdom thing. Like the Shi'ites, whom I've written about already, some might say with admiration. People who woof about "hittin' 'em hard" haven't thought cold and hard enough about what they mean. All you need for an effective insurgency is a few hundred urban guerrillas (with a much bigger base of civilian supporters). And no overwhelming force short of neutron bombs will solve the problem. Which brings us to another very interesting question, the future of genocide and nuclear weapons. But as long as we're wimping around with this "no nukes" rule, there just ain't no kind of overwhelming force that can convince every testosterone-poisoned Sunni kid to join the Pepsi Generation. Consult your own experience, remember what young males are like! How hard would it have been to get those guys, Beavis and Butthead times 80, to plant a bomb or shoot a sentry if they thought they could get away with it, or better yet, be seen as heroes by their fellow countrymen? Teenage boys are the cannon fodder of any guerrilla war, and teenage boys are nothing but weasels who stand on their hind feet sometimes. Keep that in mind when media types try to hand you our next piece of total crap: 5 People want democracy and peace and all that kind of stuff. Let me repeat your first lesson: consult your own experience instead of believing the talking heads. Do you care about those things -- I mean, compared to money and sex and taking revenge on the MR2 that cut you off a couple of blocks back? It takes up all their brain power trying to read the Bible and mind everybody else's business. They wouldn't care if Charles Manson took power as long as he said God and Jesus every few seconds. Out of all the people I've met, I can only think of one who cared about democracy: my Social Studies teacher. But he was one of these decent old Minnesota Swedes, goodhearted, too soft for Bakersfield, committed to ignoring reality. His wife, another big Secular Humanist, left him for a dyke, his students called him "Gums" and he admitted once to our class that he'd lost his Faith. That made him Public Enemy #1 with the Christians and he had to transfer to another school district. If this is a democracy, it's weird how the only people who go in for it are conmen and closet cases like Rove. We all know local politics belongs to real estate developers at civic level and to the corporations at Federal level. Which is fine with me, and with most Americans, but why call it democracy? Look around the world and you'll see that people are divided into ethnic gangs, like the planet's one big San Quentin. If they have any ideology beyond that, it's more of the God stuff, and you need Thorazine to cure that. Godfearing gangbangers, that's exactly what we ran into in Somalia, 1993. Half the population of Mogadishu turned on our guys who were trying to provide aid for the starving. They wanted their clan to win and the other clans to lose. And if stopping the aid convoys from getting food to those enemy clans was the only way to win, they were ready to make it happen, ready to die fighting our best troops backed by attack helicopters and APCs. We killed maybe a thousand of these "c... |
| preview.tinyurl.com/u6zec -> www.exile.ru/2006-November-03/the_doctrine_of_asymmetrical_war.html Previous (103) FRESNO -- For the eXile's 250th issue celebration, I've decided to step back a bit and take a look at modern warfare, a sort of mid-term summary of everything I've been trying to teach you folks over the past hundred or so issues I've been writing for this paper. I'll give you the bad news first: no 21st century war is "purely military." The days when countries duked it out on the battlefield are over for the foreseeable future. It goes by a lot of names, from "terrorism" to "asymmetrical warfare" to "fourth-generation warfare," depending on whether you're for it, against it, or just trying to sound cool. But whatever you call it, the key factor is that it never involves WW-II style conventional war between nation-states. Oh, there'll be a few good old-school conventional wars from time to time. And you could include the Iran-Iraq War from that same decade. This way doesn't require any of the building blocks of conventional war: you don't need industry, aircraft, armor or massive armies. In fact, this kind of war can be played by any group of wackos that can round up a dozen or so bushwhackers. All you need is small arms and a grudge -- and those are the only two commodities most of the world has a surplus of. It's a heartbreaker for you hardware freaks, this idea that it just doesn't matter whether our tanks are better than their tanks (or planes or artillery or whatever). But it's time you grew up, guys: haven't you kind of noticed that in most wars, the other side doesn't even use tanks, or planes, or artillery (except mortars, which are so portable they can be considered small arms)? You guys are stuck in the dream about a classic NATO/Warsaw Pact Sumo match in Central Europe, and you just don't want to think about all these brush wars. The Warsaw Pact doesn't exist any more, so that war is never going to happen. If the Soviets had sent the tanks into the Fulda Gap, it would have been a nukefest, not a tank battle like Kursk. Not exactly a wargamer's dream: before you can even get your corps deployed, the whole playing field would melt down. If you want tank duels, go replay the Kursk Salient or project yourself fifty years into the future, where maybe, just maybe, the Asian powers will have a good all-out war. If you want to know about war now, then you have to jump into the weird world of "asymmetrical war." And I'll tell you: once you make that jump, you find this kind of war is just as interesting, just as satisfying as setpiece battles. I made the jump ten years ago, when I realized my hardware research wasn't helping me understand the wars that were actually happening in Africa and Asia. And I'm glad I did, because I understand the world way better than most people. I knew Iraq would go bad because I've studied this kind of war. To get your head around this kind of war, you have to delete most of your ideas about warfare. That's right: get your Black & Decker out of the garage, charge that puppy up, and do some brain surgery on the part of your cortex that stores your favorite ideas about war. Here's a list of War Myths, so you'll know where to drill: 1 War involves battles. Most of the "armies" in the world right now avoid battle and focus on killing civilians. This is the hardest thing for Americans to understand: armies that don't aim at victory and actually avoid battle. So many war buffs who ought to know better just won't see this. If you read military blogs, you know the type: guys who say "we won every battle in Nam!" The NVA/Viet Cong strategy was classic irregular warfare stuff, based on outlasting the enemy, not defeating him in battle. When they did go for military victory, like in the Tet Offensive, it was a near-disaster, saved by the other key fact about this sort of war: 2 You win by killing the enemy. In this kind of war the enemy wants you to kill a lot of people. A lot of irregular warfare groups start their campaigns with a suicide raid, where they expect to be slaughtered. Here again it's a matter of you hardware freaks facing hard facts. If we take Iraq 2003 as a familiar and painful example, you saw a classic outcome: our hi-tech beat their wanna-be hi-tech in the conventional battles. Then we started getting picked off by low-tech ambushes where the insurgents used homemade IEDs in combination with old, rugged Soviet weapons like the RPG-7 and Kalashnikov. After two years, those simple weapons are still effective -- and they're actually getting lower- and lower-tech! Take IEDs: when the Iraqi insurgents started using them, they'd hook the detonator up to a garage-door opener or cell phone so they could be set off by remote control signals. Our convoys started using jammers to stop those signals from getting through to the detonators. So now the insurgents are using wires or even string to set off the IED. And that's why it works, because you can't jam a string either. Americans are pretty well anti-death, but lots of other tribes are in love with the idea of the martyrdom thing. Like the Shi'ites, whom I've written about already, some might say with admiration. People who woof about "hittin' 'em hard" haven't thought cold and hard enough about what they mean. All you need for an effective insurgency is a few hundred urban guerrillas (with a much bigger base of civilian supporters). And no overwhelming force short of neutron bombs will solve the problem. Which brings us to another very interesting question, the future of genocide and nuclear weapons. But as long as we're wimping around with this "no nukes" rule, there just ain't no kind of overwhelming force that can convince every testosterone-poisoned Sunni kid to join the Pepsi Generation. Consult your own experience, remember what young males are like! How hard would it have been to get those guys, Beavis and Butthead times 80, to plant a bomb or shoot a sentry if they thought they could get away with it, or better yet, be seen as heroes by their fellow countrymen? Teenage boys are the cannon fodder of any guerrilla war, and teenage boys are nothing but weasels who stand on their hind feet sometimes. Keep that in mind when media types try to hand you our next piece of total crap: 5 People want democracy and peace and all that kind of stuff. Let me repeat your first lesson: consult your own experience instead of believing the talking heads. Do you care about those things -- I mean, compared to money and sex and taking revenge on the MR2 that cut you off a couple of blocks back? It takes up all their brain power trying to read the Bible and mind everybody else's business. They wouldn't care if Charles Manson took power as long as he said God and Jesus every few seconds. Out of all the people I've met, I can only think of one who cared about democracy: my Social Studies teacher. But he was one of these decent old Minnesota Swedes, goodhearted, too soft for Bakersfield, committed to ignoring reality. His wife, another big Secular Humanist, left him for a dyke, his students called him "Gums" and he admitted once to our class that he'd lost his Faith. That made him Public Enemy #1 with the Christians and he had to transfer to another school district. If this is a democracy, it's weird how the only people who go in for it are conmen and closet cases like Rove. We all know local politics belongs to real estate developers at civic level and to the corporations at Federal level. Which is fine with me, and with most Americans, but why call it democracy? Look around the world and you'll see that people are divided into ethnic gangs, like the planet's one big San Quentin. If they have any ideology beyond that, it's more of the God stuff, and you need Thorazine to cure that. Godfearing gangbangers, that's exactly what we ran into in Somalia, 1993. Half the population of Mogadishu turned on our guys who were trying to provide aid for the starving. They wanted their clan to win and the other clans to lose. And if stopping the aid convoys from getting food to those enemy clans was the only way to win, they were ready to make it happen, ready to die fighting our best troops backed by attack helicopters and APCs. We killed maybe a thousand of these "c... |
| www.exile.ru/2002-April-21/war_nerd.html Next (103) One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelwe Thirteen Fourteen Ames asked me to write a column on how all the wars are going, kind of a war reviewer. And I said yes on one condition, that you people don't send me emails telling me liking war is a sign of unhealthiness or some psychoanalytical crap. All I have to do is look down at the keyboard and there's my hairy white gut slopping over it, and there's crumbs between the keys from the fake homemade soft'n'chewy big cookies in the vending machine downstairs. I mean they made me pay for the last keyboard because I spilled Diet Coke all over it. Every web pig in the world is swimming in it, farting off the side of the swivel chair, aroma-free carbonation farts, or at least you hope they are. I live in Fresno which is a death sentence already, and I do about fifteen hours a day at this desk. Technically that wasn't an act of war, and also it happened last year, but you have to mention it because it was just so beautiful. First there was the towers falling down in slo-mo, over and over. Don't tell me you didn't watch them fall about a million times in a row. That was the first time an office building ever got beautiful in the history of the world. And secondly it was like permission to work out on whoever did it. Total complete permission to do anything you want to them, like a movie that starts with the hero getting his farm burnt down or somebody killing his family. You just lean back and relax with a little grin and inhale those Milk Duds, because now comes the good part, 90 straight minutes of revenge. The best war is when you can hate both sides, and that's how it was with the WTC. I work in like a ten-story version of those towers, and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one who perks up every time a plane gets close to the building. Until those planes hit the WTC nobody dreamed you could knock down an American corporation building. It was like the noche triste, when Aztecs made the Conquistadors bleed for the first time and said, "Hey these aren't magic six-legged metal monsters, they're just a bunch of victims like us!" Then you saw the ragheads having tailgate parties to celebrate the big WTC bbq, and it's like, Whoa! I get to cheer when Americans die but that doesn't mean you can, you hairy-ass goats. Bad soldiers too, you could see that because they kept shooting AKs in crowded streets. That's a 776mm round, you idiots, if you fire it into the air it comes to earth you know not where, like on some little kid's soft-skulled head, and that's the end of the kid. So they had it coming, and there was lots of good footage of the USAF getting ready to give it to them. It should've been perfect, the lead-up to bombing the shit out of Afghanistan, but Bush almost ruined it. Seriously, how hard can it be when all you have to say is, like, "We're coming for you, towelhead fuckers!" If Coppola had been directing this he would've fired Dubya the first day of filming like he did Harvey Keitel the first day of Apocalypse Now. Bring Martin Sheen over, like from the West Wing, and let him do it, he'd have the Afghans converting to Presbyterianism in a couple of days. They said so themselves, how the Russians used to vaporize a whole valley to make a point and now the Americans try to drop bombs one or two at a time without hurting anybody. For two weeks the network guys in their safari suits stood on mud huts talking, and the camera would follow an F-18 or F-16 down till it dropped its load in little bursts at the foot of the ridge. It was so damn slow and boring, like somebody trying to bomb Anaheim one house at a time. They'd show a bunch of flat-hats hunkered down on the mud roofs going, "Aalllaaalaaa, such puny weak harmless bombs you Americans are dropping! And every time something went wrong the cameras were on it like flies, there'd be like five crews around a big dusty hole with some kid-parts scattered around the edges. I don't know if we really blew up all those kids, because if I were running the Taliban Ministry of Make-Believe I'd set off a few shaped charges at an orphanage now and then to get the news crews excited, hire some old women to stand around crying and call it a USAF atrocity. But the USAF is pretty hopeless too sometimes, and they kind of have a thing about kids, like the old joke: "You don't have to lead 'em as much." And it got worse with that "raid" on Mullah Omar's house. Something you have to know about the US military is that it sucks at commando raids. Don't believe that Chuck Norris bullshit, that Delta Force crap: we absolutely suck at high-risk small-unit actions. Americans win wars with logistics and propaganda, not fancy stuff. It's too bad that stuff doesn't film very well, because it's a lot cheaper to make Chuck Norris Delta movies than ones which show the US doing what it actually does: grinding people down by bombing and blockades and daily wham, wham, wham hammering. The Delta boys turned into heroes when Ridley Scott made a movie out of the disaster in Mogadishu. They fucked up in the Dust Bowl just like they fucked up in Mog A hundred of them -- yeah, really stealthy! Parachute in and start taking fire before they hit the ground. Then they jimmy open Omar's pool door and scuff around inside the house looking for spare change or plutonium or the keys to his SUV or something. Then the local security guards show up and America's finest go sprint back to the choppers before they get arrested for loitering. Somebody in the Pentagon (hey, can they call it a pentagon now when it's only got four sides? and then wham, we take Mazar-i-Sharif and it's a toboggan ride to Kabul. I was watching the news about 10 hours a day at that time and nothing I saw seemed to mean a big victory. The Afghans, if you look at their history, they fight basically for two things: boys to rape, or money. So either the US sent over a few planeloads of cub scouts, which is something I wouldn't put past a guy like Cheney, and sent them to the Taliban in Mazar with a note around their necks saying, "Here, you can have us if you let the 'Coalition' win." Or they had a CIA bag man go in with a Samsonite full of gold bars. Either way something weird happened and Mazar collapsed and then it was all downhill. Now that is when the US can do a good job: when the enemy cracks and has to start retreating. That's when an all-weather air force comes in handy, and those laser designators really shine. You get a career sergeant on a hilltop lasering up a convoy of BMPs, with an F-15E vectored in by AWACS. You get each BMP jammed with dust monkeys worn out from fleeing. You get your Toyota pickups full of RPG rounds that make for some excellent secondary explosions. And you have this whole caravan bouncing along with the headlights off and everybody feeling safe'n'sassy, snoring away after a big day of machine-gunning Shiites and blowing up Buddhas. Maybe like one raghead at the most wakes up and sort of wonders, "Hey, what's that little red light bouncing along the side of the APC?" Then it all goes cubist, and like fifteen legs and arms are corkscrewing into the night sky. And instead of a caravan you've got an auto disposal site. Not enough DNA left in the whole caravan to identify anybody. Barely enough meat left for the local jackals to have a KFC "Extra Krispy, Extra Sunni!" If you saw the target-cam images from that part of the war, you had to say, "Life is good!" So officially the US kills lots of people but never makes a mess. Luckily, enough of the pilots started emailing gun photos that you could get a fair sample of Taliban arms and legs flying around in clouds of dust. Then the "mature" people went in and it was time to start pretending that Afghanistan, the asshole of the world, is suddenly going to turn into Minnesota, where everybody's nice and smiles all day, la dee da. Hairy Afghan girls delivering the six o'clock news in Kabul, that kind of utter crap. Like that girl who's delivering the news is going to survive more than a week! Her own dad is going to cut her throat for appearing unveiled and unshaven. But that's part of the un-fun-ness of Ameri... |