Happy Fourth!

This should be an easy post to write, but somehow it isn’t. Despite the fact that we’re living in times of prosperity unimaginable even twenty years ago, there’s still a kind of fin de siecle feeling in the air, a feeling filtering down somehow from our elites. Peggy Noonan wrote a dreary piece some months back about how families are taking their children to the mall to buy them one more pair of faded jeans - not that they need any more jeans, mind: It’s just that they’re doing what we can while they can. Getting it while the getting’s good. As though it might soon be over. We’re at war overseas. We seem to be at war with each other. What’s to celebrate?

Come on over to my place, and I'll tell you.

Stay in Formation

A slight bit of gaming workmanship caught my attention this week. While sipping myself to full consciousness with Mrs. Dadmanly one morning this weekend, I came to the following insight.

Little Manly owns a Playstation game, I believe it’s Call of Duty 2: Big Red One. I will remember that title I think, because the Lad polished off the entire game, all levels, within his first two days of summer vacation. Not.his.money’s.worth. But then, as he paid for it himself, who am I to complain?

One of the levels involves flying in a formation of Liberators I believe. (Would that be B-24s, my historically unchallenged friends?)

Among the many added environmental touches in these games are dialog and other atmospherics that add to the realism, or impact.

That morning I overheard a commander in the game sternly instruct my son at the controller, “Don’t take evasive action, don’t break formation.”

(To continue reading, go to Dadmanly's companion site, Gladmanly.)

Re: Re: Qaeda/Mastercard

In 1670, the Welsh privateer Henry Morgan recaptured Old Providence Isle. In the 1620s, Providence had been a haven for privateers raiding the Spanish Main, but the Spanish sent a fleet to capture it, after which it was renamed Santa Catalina. Henry Morgan had participated in its recapture once before -- it made an ideal base for raiding -- but in 1670 he left a garrison to hold it for him. He seems to have intended to establish a free state there, a land for freebooters that owed loyalty to no king. However, he got distracted by the plunder and reward of his sack of Panama, and never got around to reinforcing his claim. Spain recaptured it.

This is the model we face with al Qaeda. They have a notion of what they view as the ideal society -- an Islamic Caliphate. Because they believe it is universal to all mankind, it does not matter where the Caliphate exists. If it perishes for a time in one place, it can be erected in another. If they are driven out of Somalia, they may go to Afghanistan; if driven out of Afghanistan, they may return to Somalia, or go set up shop in southern Thailand, or Indonesia, or Mindanao isle.

There's a lot about that model that is admirable, and genuinely free -- fighting men choosing their own way, and holding it with the strength of their arms. If they would only quit killing innocent women and children, and asserting a right to rule over you and me as well as themselves, they would find me reasonably well disposed to their claims on places like Mindanao (which is a fine place to have a claim upon, if you've a mind). Until they do that, we will find that we have to fight them in every corner of the world. They genuinely do not care whether they hold their Caliphate in Kabul or Africa. Neither do I, in point of fact, so long as they won't try to hold it in Georgia or Tennessee. Until we kill enough of them to force an agreement on that one point that matters, we'll be chasing them around the world. So be it, if it must be so.

RE: AQ as Mastercard

As the subtitle of Bobbitt’s piece suggests, “We haven't absorbed the lessons.”

The lessons unlearned include continuing to view our extra-state enemies as aspiring Nation States.

I think Bobbitt describes the situation perfectly. This rehashes my earlier criticism of Michael Hirsh in Newsweek, whereby flawed and incomplete analytic frameworks lead to inaccurate analysis and misjudgments. I first posted on some of the reasons for this in the context of how our Intelligence Analysts displayed similar or at least analogous patterns of analysis.

Bobbitt alludes to the same illogic that bedevils Hirsh and his sources within the Intelligence community, whereby the absence of attacks are taken as proof that the threat was exaggerated. Is it not rather more likely that the demonstrable examples of broken plots and failed attempts reflect success against an enemy that was all too capable, were we to go back to ignoring the threat?

I use the term “extra-state” at the top of this post to try to isolate this phenomenon of state-support of non-state modern terrorism agents and entities.

Wide Awakes Radio (W.A.R.)

This online radio premiers tomorrow. Looking forward to tuning in ... though Kit & Heidi (from EuphoricReality) are on late... They are fine tuning the tuning today so you can listen to their casual conversations... HERE

A Passel of Alices

I can always count on Mark Steyn to strip away vast layers of pretense, and offer up the core of an issue, and likewise always with wit.

His Sunday Chicago Sun-Times piece more than met my expectations, this time dealing with the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ill-considered Hamdan decision:

There are several ways to fight a war. On the one hand, you can put on a uniform, climb into a tank, rumble across a field and fire on the other fellows' tank. On the other, you can find a 12-year-old girl, persuade her to try on your new suicide-bomber belt and send her waddling off into the nearest pizza parlor.

The Geneva Conventions were designed to encourage the former and discourage the latter. The thinking behind them was that, if one had to have wars, it's best if they're fought by soldiers and armies. In return for having a rank and serial number and dressing the part, you'll be treated as a lawful combatant should you fall into the hands of the other side. There'll always be a bit of skulking around in street garb among civilian populations, but the idea was to ensure that it would not be rewarded --that there would, in fact, be a downside for going that route.

The U.S. Supreme Court has now blown a hole in the animating principle behind the Geneva Conventions by choosing to elevate an enemy that disdains the laws of war in order to facilitate the bombing of civilian targets and the beheading of individuals. The argument made by Justice John Paul Stevens is an Alice-In-Jihadland ruling that stands the Conventions on their head in order to give words the precise opposite of their plain meaning and intent. The same kind of inspired jurisprudence conjuring trick that detected in the emanations of the penumbra how the Framers of the U.S. Constitution cannily anticipated a need for partial-birth abortion and gay marriage has now effectively found a right to jihad -- or, if you're a female suicide bomber about to board an Israeli bus, a woman's right to Jews.

I agree whole-heartedly with those who argue that the US must uphold a higher standard, that our military must fight a civilized fight, that there are vital national interests in preserving the highest ideals in how we fight, and how we operate in a post-9/11 world.

The difference between me and my fellow Milbloggers, and this passel of Alices, is that we Milbloggers know that the US and its military have always have upheld those higher standards, notwithstanding isolated violations by individuals, and only very rarely, those who represent official government policies.

For more commentary, check out the expanded post at Dadmanly.

Al Qaeda as MasterCard

Philip Bobbitt, author of The Shield of Achilles, has a piece in the London Spectator called "We haven't absorbed the lessons." He argues that no one is familiar with al Qaeda, and that European readings of it as being similar to the IRA, ETA, or other earlier terrorist groups are dangerously mistaken. The worst of these, he says, is the reading that says that there is no al Qaeda at all... that, as al Qaeda lacks the old cellular or battalion structure used by earlier nationalist terrorist groups, they must not really exist.

He also notes the degree to which the suicide note of the leader of the 7/7 bombers echo media and academic talking points on the war.

It's a good piece, worth reading today.

Condolences to Doc

Doc just lost a beloved pet.

Go pay your respects.

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