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Tuesday, August 31, 2004

In Defense of Augusto Pinochet

There was much rejoicing in the halls of the left at a recent decision by the Chilean Supreme Court stripping former President Augusto Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution. This is, of course, a great irony: without the efforts of the same Pinochet who they now seek to prosecute, it is doubtful if there would even be a Chilean Supreme Court today.

One thing that constantly amazes me about the modern left is its ability to blithely justify the crimes of Communist dictators, many of whom murdered millions of people, while, at the same time, it screams until it is blue in the face about the alleged “crimes” of General Pinochet who, at the most, is responsible for the deaths of three thousand people many of whom would, had they gotten their way, happily murdered tens of thousands (and perhaps millions) had Salvador Allende achieved his dream of creating a Communist state in Chile.

Pinochet did what was required by the situation, and exactly nothing more. To say otherwise is to fail to understand the dangers inherent in the situation that existed in Chile on September 11th, 1973.

Let us imagine the same events unfolding in our own country. Suppose that the Republican Party split into two while a still-united Democratic Party veered off to the radical left. In the next Presidential election, the ultra-leftist Democrat candidate wins 36% of the vote, while the two Republican candidates win 35% and 28% of the vote respectively. No majority in the Electoral College is achieved so the House of Representatives must elect the President.

The Congress (where the Republicans retain a majority) reluctantly agrees to make the ultra-leftist Democrat the President on the condition that he agrees to maintain constitutional rule. The Democrat accepts and then, upon the assumption of the Presidency, he immediately begins to subvert constitutional rule. His economic policies cause the nation to suffer inflation at an annualized rate of 140% during his second year in office. He “nationalizes” companies by using extra-legal means to seize them. New Democratic Party militias are formed and armed with illegal weapons imported from China. His Administration refuses to enforce judicial decisions against its own supporters. The President then begins reorganizing the armed forces in an effort to ensure its personal political loyalty to him.

What would the American people need to do in such a situation? One can hardly say, “Wait until the next election,” because it seems to be fairly clear that, when Party militias are running around with Chinese-made Assault Rifles and the President refuses to enforce the laws, that there isn’t going to be a “next election” or, at the very least, not a free and fair one. Impeachment is impossible because the President controls enough of the Congress to prevent it.

It seems clear to me that, under such conditions, only one course of action would remain open: the course that Pinochet and the Chilean Armed Forces chose in 1973. If the President has destroyed the economy and is creating conditions where he will either become a dictator or start a Civil War, there’s only one option left: the resort to the coup.

What else would you have had them do? Sit by and watch as Allende destroyed the country and turned it into a new Cuba? Stand around quietly and waited for the knock on the door from the secret police? They, quite simply, had no other choice.

Under Pinochet’s largely benevolent rule, the Chilean economy was reformed and allowed to grow. The Communist influence, which threatened to destroy the nation’s freedoms, was rooted out. A strong US ally was preserved in the war against communism. And, when all was said and done, Pinochet simply turned over power and allowed the full restoration of the democracy.

Now, of course, it is regrettable that the actions taken by Pinochet became necessary. But we must not misplace the blame: the fault for Chile’s time of troubles rests squarely with Salvador Allende, whose ruinous attempt to transform his nation into a communist state (after having received barely a third of the vote) demanded the active (and ultimately armed) resistance of all decent people. It was Allende who, by his abuse of democracy, necessitated its temporary end. Remember that.

Naturally, all of the people executed by the regime were not equally guilty. In all probability some did no more than privately hold leftist beliefs. However, in a public emergency, where the possibility of a civil war (which would probably kill hundreds of thousands) is imminent, extreme measures are certainly justified. How much better would it have been if James Buchannan had three thousand supporters of secession justly hanged in 1860?

None of this is to say that Pinochet’s actions were wonderful. Certainly, some of the things that were done must be considered to be deeply regrettable. However, it is to say that they were necessary and, ultimately, for the good of (almost) everyone.

Can you imagine what the rest of the Cold War might have looked like had South America’s oldest democracy become a Soviet satellite in the mid-1970’s? The United States might well have faced a tide of Communist subversion much worse than that which actually transpired in the 1980’s of our time. Imagine a dozen small wars, with an aggressive Chile seeking to impose its communist system through support to like-minded movements. But for Pinochet’s brave and necessary actions, all that came thereafter might have been changed.

So let us praise Augusto Pinochet and mourn that his contribution to the modern world is not presently (and probably never will be) universally recognized and appreciated.

posted by Yoshi at 11:03 PM

Sunday, August 29, 2004

Kerry’s Dolchstoss

Regardless of the veracity of individual charges made by the Swift Boat Veterans from Truth, there is one single and utterly verifiable fact which convincingly proves their overall case that John Kerry is unfit for command. To put it simply: John Kerry’s actions in supporting our enemies during the Vietnam War constitute a betrayal of the nation and its warriors that is simply unforgivable, either in this life or the next. As much as any other single individual, John Forbes Kerry contributed to the ultimate defeat in the Vietnam War. In this, the American Dolchstoss, John Kerry wielded a knife. Like Brutus, John Kerry may not have been the first to thrust the knife (and whatever actions he took may have come too late to decisively influence events) but he did participate: and for that he is condemned.

Yes, it is true that many different individuals, for many different reasons, contributed to the ultimate defeat in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, who managed to devise a war plan which dumped half a million American boys into Southeast Asia and then prevented them from taking the action necessary to secure victory, would rank high on any such list. However, it seems indisputable to me that, by the time the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January of 1973, the United States had secured a victory that it could live with: the preservation of a free South Vietnam. This victory, like that in Korea, was less than could have been hoped for and it came at much too high a cost. Yet it was still a result which achieved American war aims.

So why, then, were the free people of that region abandoned to Communist depredations? Why did the Congress cut off aid to South Vietnam? Why did President Ford not send American forces to the aid of the free Vietnamese? Why were the deaths of 58,000 Americans in a noble cause stripped of so much of their meaning? There is only one answer to this question: domestic opponents of this war had made continued American involvement in the conflict impossible. They had, through their propaganda efforts, destroyed American morale and undermined the legitimacy of the war. More simply: the brave boys who fought in Southeast Asia were betrayed, stabbed in the back, by traitors at home who sympathized with the enemy and sought to bring about its victory. John Kerry was among those traitors.

This truth may (as is so often the case) be exceedingly unpleasant for some people to hear. But it holds the incontestable advantage of being true. But for the efforts of traitors at home that war would have been won and the sacrifices of all of those Americans would have preserved a free South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese Communists themselves understood this. They knew that they could never defeat American armies upon the field of battle. Like the terrorists we face in Iraq today, whenever their forces sought to fight a straight-up battle against US forces they were slaughtered. The only way they could win was to force the United States to abandon the war. They could only do that with the cooperation of those in the United States who hated their country so much that they were willing to help ensure that it was defeated in a war. John Kerry was among those people.

“Why does all of this matter now?” some ask. “Wasn’t Vietnam a long time ago?” Yes, it was. There’s a line floating about that the attacks by the Swift Vets are relevant because Kerry made his Vietnam service an issue in the campaign. That might well be true. However, I assert that his actions during the Vietnam era deserve to be the focus of any campaign against him regardless of what issues he tries to campaign on. A man who betrays the United States as John Kerry did in the Vietnam era is not only unfit to be President, but he’s also unfit to serve in the Senate, unfit to use public bathrooms and, in general, unfit to be in the company of decent people anywhere. An individual such as Mr. Kerry shouldn’t be the candidate of any party for any office: he should be scavenging garbage in the streets or, better yet, buried in an unmarked mass grave along with other traitors justly hanged after a trial by a military commission.

Now I know that some damnable fool will respond to this with some prattle about the “right” of dissent. And, this may shock you, but I agree: you certainly have a right to disagree with any decision of the government and even to privately believe that the victory of an enemy in wartime is desirable. Every individual, under any circumstance, has a right to private “dissent.” What these devious and pernicious individuals wish to do, however, is to blur the line between private “dissent” and public sedition and treason. You have every right to believe whatever inane and moronic nonsense you wish to believe: but you have no right, absolutely no right, to take any action with the purpose of undermining the United States or assisting its enemies in war. That, ladies and gentlemen, is treason: the one crime defined by the Constitution. Those who give “aid and comfort” to the enemies of the United States are traitors, pure and simple, and traitors deserve no more mercy than that inherent in a quick death.

The Vietnam experience has lasting relevance because it legitimized treason. Individuals, people like Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and John Kerry were allowed to push the bounds of acceptable political discourse. I venture no prediction as to the exact fate of someone running around New York City waving a Nazi Flag during the Second World War, but I feel on safe ground in suggesting that it would be decidedly unpleasant (for them, at least). Today, on the other hand, people are free to advocate the victory of our enemies with impunity. Michael Moore calls terrorists who kill Americans the “new Minutemen” and he releases a $100 million movie. Protestors in New York City wave the flags of our enemies without repercussion. Because Fonda and Kerry got away with their treason, it has made it seemingly impossible to punish the treason of others today.

Ghosts of Vietnam haunt as still. They inhibit our actions. In fact, the traitors like John Kerry and Jane Fonda may we be indirectly responsible for starting the present war that we are engaged. Sound far-fetched? I’m not so sure. Had Vietnam been won, we never would have witnessed the feckless and weak American responses to Moslem crimes such as the seizure of the US Embassy in Iran, the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon, and the “Blackhawk Down” fiasco in Somalia. Had these things happened at all, a US which won in Vietnam would have had the resolve to respond with force and would have showed the Islamists that messing around with the United States is a deadly game.

posted by Yoshi at 8:45 PM

Initial Observations of NYC

Lesson One: When you're organizing a protest, underestimate, not overestimate the crowd beforehard. The organizers were running about yesterday predicting 250,000 people. Others more than that. There's no way there's 250,000 people out there. Perhaps 200,000. Probably not even that. The AP says "tens of thousands."

Lesson Two: Screaming "Fuck Fox News" doesn't really get much of a message out, now does it?
I love it. Anyone who watches this utter freakshow will come to the entirely logical conclusion that leftists can't be trusted to run the country or, for that matter, successfully operate a gas pump.

posted by Yoshi at 12:40 PM

Rumour #1 From NYC

Those are the rumors flying about, apparently hit with a sheet of plate glass.

Scratch that- "assaulted with a sheet of plate glass"

Nothing on the wires yet. But posted to Indymedia and DU.

These are going to be a few tense days, to sat the least.

posted by Yoshi at 1:03 AM

Friday, August 27, 2004

The Jewish Plot to Conquer America!

CBS News didn’t quite title their segment on a supposed Israeli “spy” in the Office of the Secretary of Defense “The Jewish Plot of Conquer America”, but they might as well have. It seems fair to surmise that, when Federal Officials leak the name of a supposed “spy” to the media and the New York Times provides more or less enough information to identify who that individual it seems to be virtually assured that the individual in question in not a spy. After all, the FBI may be incompetent at times, but they’re not quite that bad at what they do. Telling a spy “hey, we might come and arrest you next week, so burn anything we might find useful!” is roughly analogous to calling a suspected serial killer on the phone and telling him that you’re going to send a car to get him in forty-eight hours.

Between the leaks given to the Washington Post and the New York Times we already have enough information to have a good idea as to exactly who they’re talking about. Certainly, the individual in question will be fully aware that they are the person being spoken of. Let’s see what we know about the person.

1) “The official under investigation was not named by those familiar with the situation, but was described by them as a desk officer in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Bureau, one of six regional policy sections. The official under scrutiny was described as a veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency who moved to the Pentagon's policy branch three years ago and had been nearing retirement.” (The Washington Post)
2) “The Pentagon analyst who officials said is under suspicion was one of two department officials who traveled to Paris for a secret meeting with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer who had been a central figure in the Iran-contra affair.” (The New York Times)
3) “The senior Administration official identified two of the defence officials who met Mr Ghorbanifar as Harold Rhode, Mr Feith's top Middle East specialist, and Larry Franklin, a Defence Intelligence Agency analyst on loan to the undersecretary's office.” (The Sydney Morning Herald)
4) “The investigation involves a single individual at DOD at the desk officer level, who was not in a position to have significant influence over U.S. policy.” (The Department of Defense, via the Washington Post)

Now, I don’t wish to accuse anyone of anything here, but if you look into the backgrounds of both of these men, it is clear that one of the two men named fits the profile described by the Post and one does not. Needless to say, leaking enough information to exactly identify a supposed “spy” is not exactly good counterintelligence tradecraft.

Let’s step past all of the leftist/Buchananite claptrap about the evils of the neocon/Likudnik (read: Jewish) plot to conquer America and review what we actually know about this case and use that to assess the seriousness of the charges and of the situation.

1) The Federal Investigation has been underway for more than a year and, as of yet, no one has been arrested (Source: The New York Times).
2) The Government doesn’t even wish to arrest the Pentagon Official in question, but rather to seek their cooperation (Source: The New York Times).
3) Even if the individual were to be arrested, “it is not yet clear whether the case will rise to the level of espionage or end up involving lesser charges such as improper disclosure or mishandling of classified information.” (Source: The Washington Post)
4) The information in question was supposedly “passed to Israeli intelligence” via the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. (Source: CBS News)
5) “The bureau has evidence that the Pentagon official has given the Israelis a sensitive report about American policy toward Iran, along with other materials, the officials said.” (The New York Times)

So, let’s put this altogether and try to understand just what’s going on here. From the look of it the “spy” charge is nothing more than a smear. It sounds like the official in question passed on a draft version of a Presidential Directive on Iran which was in turn passed along. This hardly rises of the level of say, selling advanced aerospace technology to China in exchange for campaign contributions. Whatever violations may have occurred appear to be technical, rather than substantive in nature. Certainly, if US laws were violated the individual will need to be punished, but it ought to stop there. A desk-level Pentagon official indirectly passing some information to one of America’s closest allies is hardly anything to get too worked up about.

What’s really causing the fuss in some circles of course is the insinuation that such information (or simply the analyst in question) was used to “influence policy on the War in Iraq” (to use CBS’s words). This, to put it simply, is absolute nonsense. Leaving aside the fact that Israel would hardly have to push the pro-war faction to influence them on the war (since the Israeli position on the Iraq War is the same as theirs), I don’t think anyone with their wits about them can seriously claim either that a desk analyst could influence US policy on Iraq or that Israeli possession of drafts of documents discussing US options on Iran could possibly harm the United States in any way, shape, or form.

Truthfully I, to borrow a phrase from a few weeks ago, question the timing of this leak. The broad similarities between this story and the Sandy Berger story are too obvious to be reasonably ignored. Both stories involve the mishandling of classified information and both were leaked to the press right on the eve of the other party’s convention. Both involved investigations that had been ongoing for some time. Frankly, I suspect that some Reno hold-over in either the FBI or the Justice Department decided to get a little revenge for the Berger fiasco.

The obvious difference between the two (which the media, of course, will ignore) is that Berger’s misconduct was far more serious in terms of how it reflected upon John Kerry because Berger was Kerry’s senior foreign policy advisor and he was accused (potentially) of attempting to keep information from a vitally important Commission. This fellow, whoever he is, is some low-level official who is accused, at the most, of passing some documents on to one of our nation’s closest allies.

Thankfully, the American people have more good sense than their media does. This is the sort of story which will excite the media and political fanatics but, like the Sandy Berger story, will have a hard time spreading any further than that (and since it seemingly lacks a “hook”, like Sandy Berger stuffing documents into his socks, it probably won’t even spread that far) because people instinctively know that we can’t be blamed for the random foolishness of others.

posted by Yoshi at 8:53 PM

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

John Kerry Turns Into the Fire

One of John F. Kerry’s supporters recently predicted that John Kerry would respond to the attacks by, as he supposedly did in Vietnam, “turning his boat into the fire.” Well, seemingly, he did just that. Unfortunately, in the world of politics, he appears to have turned his Swift Boat into the guns of an Iowa-class Battleship. Brave, perhaps, but also stupid.

In short: I’ve never seen the defending side in a political scandal so incompetently led. There was a way to defuse all of this early and, for some reason, John Kerry declined to take it.

If I were Senator Kerry I would, upon the unveiling of the first ad, have gotten myself a whole hour on either 60 Minutes or Dateline NBC and I would have answered completely (and as truthfully as possible) every question put to me. And I would have said something like this.

“I hold no animus towards these men. We were in a war together and, as those of us who have been in war understand, equally honourable men can have altogether different recollections of the same events. What really motivates these men, I think, was my opposition to the war after I came home and I understand and accept that as well.

“Having seen the war first-hand, I came to the conclusion that it was wrong and had to end and I worked passionately towards achieving those goals. Sometimes, in doing this, I said intemperate and inaccurate things. In my eagerness to see the war end, I was often willing to accept as the truth some things which later turned out to be false. For example, one of my closest allies in the anti-war movement, a man named Al Hubbard, claimed to have been an Air Force Captain in Vietnam when, in fact, he’d never even been there at all. We were in a hurry. We didn’t fact-check as much or as deeply as we should have. And we got some things wrong and for that, I am deeply sorry.”

Frankly, I think that something like that would have killed the story then and there. People would have instinctively understood that, amid the fog of war, some facts are occasionally lost. By implicitly accepting that some of the things that the Swift Boat Veterans say might be true, Kerry would defang many of their later attacks because he’d have set the tone for the subsequent conversation and there’s just enough on the record to make any assertion by the Swift Boat Vets seem like simply a matter of confusion.

More importantly, by apologizing for some of his anti-war conduct (but not his anti-war stance), Kerry would have managed to blunt the second attack: that he smeared his fellow veterans and betrayed his country. Once again he’d have set the tone for the conversation ahead: all of the truly radical things that Kerry said were the words of an idealistic young man who, in his fervour and desperation to end a hopeless war, occasionally went a little too far.

If Kerry had done that, pretty much anything that the Swiftees were able to throw at him afterwards (unless, as rumoured, they’ve got something real big in reserve) would really look like low blows: the desperate attacks of petty men assaulting a man who already conceded that he’d made mistakes.

This course of action, I’m convinced, would have blunted the effectiveness of these attacks. While I’m quite certain that the Swift Vets would have attacked anyways, the chances of their efforts backfiring would be much greater.

So, why didn’t Kerry try this or something like it? I can see only one answer: he was too proud and too convinced of his own absolute superiority to do any such thing. The John Kerry of thirty-five years ago may have been a cynical opportunist who sought medals for the sake of a political future career and then, when that didn’t work, threw those medals over a fence and betrayed his “Band of Brothers” but the John Kerry of today is an idealistic opportunist: someone who, after three and a half decades, has bought into his own lies.

From what I’ve seen, the John Kerry of today is someone absolutely convinced of his personal and moral superiority. His preposterous claims that his four months in Vietnam qualify him for the Presidency are heartfelt. He’s seemingly someone who has never quite been able to break the bonds of his Vietnam experience and has, therefore, constructed his entire life around it.

As a result, anything that threatens Kerry’s version of what he did in Vietnam is a threat to Kerry himself: to his emotional and psychological well-being. Just like Mark Hacking apparently constructed a life narrative for himself which starred him as an aspiring Doctor, John Kerry has created a narrative that features him as both the greatest war hero and the greatest anti-war leader in American history (nay, the history of the world). When you threaten the internal world of a fabulist, well, lock your bedroom door before you go to sleep.

Nothing other than pure irrationality could explain what has been, frankly, a bizarre response to the Swift Vets on the part of the Kerry campaign. The campaign’s own obsession with them (along with that of the pro-Kerry media) has only served to turn what would have been an important story into the story of the month. Not only has it erased whatever traces of a bounce Kerry received from his convention, but it’s giving the President a running start heading into his. The new Los Angeles Times poll of registered voters shows Bush pulling ahead by three points (where it hadn’t shown him ahead all year). If you did the same poll of likely voters, well, the results would almost certainly give the President a five to seven point lead.

These charges work because they feed into the pre-existing impression created by tens of millions of dollars worth of paid Bush advertising: John Kerry can’t be trusted because he’ll say whatever he has to in order to win your support today and he’ll also say whatever he must to win the support of your neighbour as well.

At first I was dubious when I heard that Karl Rove had decided to make Kerry’s “flip-flops” the primary target of the negative side of the Bush campaign. Well, I’m a believer now. Though other types of spring advertisements might have had a more immediate effect on the polls, the ad barrage turned Kerry’s shifting positions on the issues into a sort of meta-issue which colours how people see everything else that John Kerry says. On a daily basis now I have people (non-political, non-Republican people) make comments about how Kerry can’t be trusted because, “he’s always changing his positions to please everyone.” Kerry, my friends, has been successfully branded by the Boy Genius.

The response of the Democrats now (as directed by Kerry) resembles nothing so much as a blind panic. Yesterday, for example, the Democrats tested out their new tactic of releasing personal information on their opponents and trying to imply that they’re murderers.

As reported by Crushkerry.com and verified by the New York Daily News, the Kerry campaign is passing around copies of a “Brown Book” with negative personal information on all of the Swift Vets. The first blow was launched against James Zumwalt, the son of the late Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, with claims that he attempted suicide after his ex-wife’s fiancé, who he’d once tried to run off the road with his car, was murdered. Hint-hint. You know one side is getting desperate when it tried to imply that one of its opponents once murdered a man a charge which, presumably, can be easily demonstrated to be false (I presume this because, had he been charged with the murder or convicted of it, presumably the Kerry team would have said as much).

While some Democrats are crowing about the optics of sending triple amputee Max Cleland and former Green Beret Jim Rassman to the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas I think, quite frankly, that it was one of the silliest and most desperate political stunts I’ve ever seen in my life. It was, to put it mildly, a stunt worthy of a Michael Moore film and one which I think will be transparently seen as such.

It is, of course, much too early in the campaign to write off the Kerry candidacy altogether: an awful lot can happen in the next two months, especially these days. However, it now seems to be undeniable that the Swift Vets have drawn blood and will continue doing so unless an effective counter-attack can be mounted by the Kerry campaign. Already the feckless response to the initial charges had made this task more difficult and perhaps altogether impossible.

John Kerry’s turned his boat into the fire alright: and he’s had about as much success as that other JFK had when he turned his PT Boat in front of a Japanese Destroyer.

posted by Yoshi at 11:02 PM

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Why Vietnam Still Matters

This is the fundamental and still unanswered question of the Vietnam War: is it acceptable, in a democratic society at war, for a group of people to advocate the defeat of their own nation and the victory of its enemies? Should a group that holds such opinions be treated like any other group in any other debate? Is being for or against victory in a war being fought by one’s own nation the same as being for or against Tort reform?

Here’s the problem with having a normal, democratic, debate once a war is underway: In any such debate some faction will take a position on one side of an issue, the other will take the opposite and most of the time the majority will opt for something in the middle. If it is acceptable for one group in a democratic debate to wish defeat (or something indistinguishable from it) upon their own side while the individuals on the other side call for total victory, it is exceedingly likely that a majority of the people will be persuaded to accept some middle course. Not victory and not defeat. Call it half-victory. Or, more aptly, half-defeat.

To translate it into personal terms, in a one-on-one fight, the results of a debate in which one side advocated killing an opponent and the other advocated the freeing of said individual would be the wounding of that opponent. Of course, a wounded opponent can still kill you either right then and there or later, after you’ve gone to sleep.

Democracy and warfare are fundamentally incompatible. This does not mean that a democracy must cease to be a democracy in a war, but it does mean that it must show restraint. While war can be conducted in the framework of such a government, it cannot be conducted in a democratic manner.

Someone should ask John Kerry the following question: does he consider an individual who, at this very moment, is advocating the victory of the Iraqi “resistance” over the forces of the coalition to hold a legitimate political opinion? Would it be illegitimate to question the patriotism of an individual who held such views?

Let’s make something clear: I’m not talking about those with different ideas about tactics and strategy: we need debates of that sort to win the War on Terrorism. We need plenty of them. However, we cannot conduct such debates so long as the ill-disguised intention of one side in those debates is simply to discredit the whole enterprise in the guise of offering helpful advice.

For the record, I tend to agree with General Douglas MacArthur when it comes to the conflict in Vietnam: it was utterly stupid to commit half a million American soldiers to a land war in Asia over a scrap of dirt without any particular strategic value. If I were in LBJ’s position I would have held the American troop commitment to the minimum level possible and used the saved resources to follow the same strategy that Ronald Reagan eventually did in the 1980’s: expanding American military strength at home and subverting Communist regimes abroad. And, of course, without the Vietnam experience in the back of everyone’s mind, it would have been much easier to support various anti-Communist groups without anyone kicking up a fuss back at home.

However, once the war was entered into it had to be won: once the first shot is fired American credibility and honor is on the line. Once war has begun, the time for debate about whether or not the war should have been fought is over and that war must be carried on to a victorious conclusion.

Now, I’m quite sure that some person is going to say that “no one ever advocated victory by the enemy blah, blah, blah.” To which I say: nonsense. I’ll tell you exactly who advocated victory by the enemy: that great paragon of the left, the man who was invited to sit next to a former President at the Democratic National Convention, the man whose movie just made more than $100 million, the man whose ugly face I’m forced to endure every time I enter a bookstore, the man who has been hailed a hero and a patriot by literally thousands of prominent liberals: Michael Moore.

Let me be very clear here: I’m not simply saying that because Michael Moore opposed George W. Bush he favours the victory of our enemies in this war. I’m saying that he supports the victory of our enemies because he has said exactly that. This April, on his web site, he declared, “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win.” His words, friends. His exact words.

There’s only one word for a statement like that: treason. Any reasonable group of Americans at any point prior to the Vietnam War would have agreed as much. Someone writing something like that in the middle of the Second World War would probably have ended up in jail and, I think, rightly so. Not because we can’t debate the likes of Michael Moore, but because we can’t debate him and win the war at the same time. If everyone in support of the war, from the President on down, has to divert their time to deal with idiocy of Michael Moore and his slavish, drooling, and semi-coherent band of followers along with a hundred thousand or so other people just like them, then we’re not going to have time to do very much else.

And I’ll tell you who else supported the victory of our enemies in war: John Kerry. Not this war (I, frankly, have no idea what he really thinks about Iraq), but in the case of Vietnam. That isn’t hyperbole either. When he was the leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Mr. Kerry advocated the wholesale adoption by the United States of a “peace plan” put forward by the Vietnamese Communists. Certainly, I’d say, that must qualify as support for the victory of our enemies.

We need to make it so that favouring something other than total American victory in an American war is a political position viewed by the average person with warmth akin to that with which a tribute to the SS would be received in a Synagogue. Those opposed to the victory of the United States in any war should be shunned like a bitter and loud transsexual rights’ activist at a Southern Baptist Convention. They should be refused entry into places where decent people eat and work and they should be harassed and heckled on the streets. In short they should be treated as un-persons and generally and genuinely denounced as the worthless sub-human garbage that they are.

posted by Yoshi at 9:50 PM

Likely Act of Terror in Russia

It looks like there's been a major terrorist attack in Russia:

(CNN) -- Two passenger planes have crashed in Russia Tuesday night, Russian officials and a news organization said.

A passenger jet carrying 34 passengers and eight crew members in the Tula region crashed about 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of Moscow, the ministry reported.
A second plane went down about 160 kilometers (100 miles) from Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia, government-run news agency Ria Novosti reported.
A ministry spokeswoman said she could only confirm that the second plane had been lost to radar.

The first plane disappeared from radar at 10:56 p.m. (2:56 p.m. ET), a ministry spokeswoman said.

The Tupolev-134 had taken off from Moscow's Domodedovo Airport and was en route to Volgograd, in southern Russia.

The second plane, a Tupolev-154, disappeared at 11 p.m. (3 p.m. ET) after having taken off from the same airport en route to Sochi in southern Russia, Ria Novosti reported.

And, so far as we know, these planes did not crash into eachother. Given the time differentials between the crashes and the different areas in which they hit the ground, I think it's safe to say that they didn't collide in mid-air. Beyond the very unlikely possibility of two mechanical failures in such proximity in such a short time, Jihad seems to be the likely cause of the crash.

posted by Yoshi at 3:19 PM

Sunday, August 22, 2004

When John Kerry Committed a Capital Offense

Here’s an interesting fact: when, in 1970, John Kerry travelled to Paris to meet privately with the North Vietnamese delegation and Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government on Vietnam (the communist “government-in-waiting” of South Vietnam) he committed an offence for which he could have (and ought to have) been sentenced to death. Now, I fully realize that the Kerry Campaign and others have already addressed this point, noting that Kerry didn’t violate (or just narrowly missed violating) US Law. However, I’m not talking about the law as it applies to civilians: I’m talking about the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Let’s step back for a second so that I can explain a few things. Contrary to published reports that Senator Kerry left the Navy in 1970 he, in fact, remained an officer in the Naval Reserve right through 1978 (he was simply released from active duty in 1970). This means that, potentially, he would have been liable to be prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is a set of laws passed by the Congress in 1950 which apply to members of the Armed Forces, some members of the reserves, and various other individuals employed by or serving with the military.

In meeting with and advocating the positions of the Communist Vietnamese, Kerry clearly violated Article 104 of the UCMJ, entitled “Aiding the Enemy” which states that, “Any person who… without proper authority, knowingly… communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly; shall suffer death or such other punishment as a court-martial or military commission may direct.”

Now, we know that Senator Kerry met with representatives of the enemy. This much is certain because he’s admitted to it. Now, the question must be: were his actions taken with the aim of giving aid and comfort to the enemy? The answer, unquestionably, must be yes. In his 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry not only mentioned his visit to Paris to meet with Communist negotiators, but also advocated the adoption of the “eight points” put forward by Madame Binh. The Communist’s position in the negotiations was that the United States would have to begin a withdrawal from South Vietnam and that then would discussions about the repatriation of US prisoners of war would begin. Kerry, presumably on the strength of his meeting with the Communist negotiators, endorsed this position, saying that, “if the United States were to set a date for withdrawal the prisoners of war would be returned.”

Frankly, at this point, I think that we’re nearing the threshold which divides simply loyalty from outright treason. In my mind there’s very little doubt that the John Kerry of 1971: the John Kerry who denounced his fellow soldiers, dishonoured his flag, and disgraced his country was, in his heart, a traitor. An opportunistic traitor, to be sure, but a traitor nonetheless.

I’m sure that some people will take offense at my earlier suggestion that John Kerry should, in 1971, have been put to death for his treasonous actions and words. But I ask you this: what else would you have us do with traitors? Let them run free to go about their lives and achieve their goals?

Vietnam was not a war lost upon the battlefield. Despite some poor strategic decisions, America’s fighting forces were never defeated by the enemy and, in fact, inflicted massive casualties upon them. The Viet Cong essentially ceased to exist as a force on the battlefield after the Tet Offensive in 1968. Improvement in South Vietnamese forces under Nixon eventually forced the North Vietnamese to cease irregular attacks and turn towards invading the South with a regular army. The first attempt to do so, however, was crushed by a combination of US and RVN forces. Victory would have been won and a free Vietnam saved but for one thing: those traitors and seditionists at home who undermined public support for the war and who eventually convinced the Congress to, in South Vietnam’s moment of greatest need, abandon them to the enemy. Our brave soldiers, the ones who John Kerry now claims to honor, were, in fact, stabbed in the back by John Kerry and those like him.

Given that the actions of Senator Kerry, and his friends, essentially rendered the deaths of 58,000 Americans as meaningless and led indirectly to the death of millions of friends of freedom in South-East Asia, it would be no exaggeration to say that I am entirely untroubled by the idea that those who committed treason ought to have been executed.

posted by Yoshi at 3:06 PM

Saturday, August 21, 2004

Is "Smoking Gun" Flyer a Fraud?

Shrill and partisan Democrats have been claiming over the past day that a flyer advertising a rally in Gainesville, Florida featuring the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Alachua County Republican Party, and the Alachua Bush/Cheney Campaign Committee is a "smoking gun" which proves "coordination" between the Bush Campaign and the Swift Vets. Well, leaving aside that whether or not a joint rally would constitute illegal "coordination", there's a serious flaw with this argument: it appears that the flyer is a fake.

This, in retrospect, should be rather obvious: the flyer claims that this "rally" will last for eight hours on both Saturday and Sunday. Needless to say, I don't know of many political rallies (especially local ones) that go on for eight hours. Also of interest is the fact that no speakers are listed by name for this eight hour rally.

More interestingly, this "rally" is listed nowhere on the otherwise extensive calendar of the Alachua County Republican Party. In addition, the Swift Boat Vets have denied any knowledge of this event.

Now, look at this picture floating about of this flyer supposedly up at the Alchua County GOP Headquarters:

Now, two observations:
1) The board in question seems to contain a listing of all party events, with the supposed "Pro U.S.A. Rally" not listed, but posted to the board.

2) If you look at the close-up picture, the flyer appears to have been posted in such a way as to cut off words on the main board. That just seems sloppy.

I could be wrong, but this seems like a set-up to me.

posted by Yoshi at 12:35 PM

Friday, August 20, 2004

Democrat Economic Fallacies

Frankly, I don’t know whether or not even the average Democratic politician is stupid enough to buy into their party’s positions on various economic issues this year. Democrat economics have become a tangled mess of old fashioned demagoguery about the wealthy (being spit out by the wealthiest Presidential ticket in history), a bunch of wild socialistic schemes, and protectionist nonsense. If President Clinton is to be given any credit for the growth of the economy under his watch it has to be because, after a disastrous start (the tax hikes and Hillarycare), he had the good sense to leave well enough alone and not attempt the sort of grand and bizarre schemes now being advanced by the Democratic Party.

Democrats are up in arms about the deficit. Suddenly, after spending decades defending them against evil Republicans who wanted to balance the budget by stealing busfare from orphans and war widows, the Democratic Party has decided to make the “cutting the deficit” a top priority. The only problem is that they have no idea how they’re going to do it.

The “detailed” Kerry-Edwards plan for putting eliminating the deficit (or, rather, cutting it in half) contains the following proposals side by side: cutting the deficit in half, making health care “affordable and accessible” for all Americans, and “universally accessible college.” He also promises not to raise taxes on 98% of Americans (which is a nicer way of saying that he promises to raise taxes on 2% of Americans though, if he’s arrived at that number the same way he’s arrived at other numbers…). To put it mildly, even if Jesus Christ himself returned to the Earth and suspended all of the basic laws of economics, all of those things are not going to happen.

Think about it this way (and this is a very basic, back-of-the-envelope calculation). The deficit is roughly $422 billion a year at the present time. So, in order to close it, you’d need to raise that much in additional revenue. Now, the total cost of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts for the top 5% of taxpayers (I know that John Kerry says 2%, but you know how these things are) is about $131 billion. Even assuming that, if you raised taxes on the top 5% of income earners, you’d get all of the money that you’re expecting, that still means you need to find another $291 billion somewhere. Candidate Kerry’s own estimate is that he’ll save $30 billion a year from reductions in “corporate welfare.” So, in other words, even before he’s started spending again, he’s got a deficit of at least $261 billion.

Now, according to one estimate, John Kerry promises at least $1.7 trillion in additional Federal spending over the next ten years. So, now we’re up to $431 billion: higher than we began with. Even if you accept that Senator Kerry will allow for some reduction in spending on operations in Iraq you’re still going to have a massive deficit (if you eliminated all spending on the War, period, you’d still end up with a deficit north of $300 billion, and that’s only until the terrorists blow up New York City). And all of this, of course, is premised upon raising taxes upon the top 5% of American taxpayers (when Kerry’s promised to raise them only upon the top 2%) and upon the idea that he can cut $30 billion a year in corporate welfare and that, if you raise taxes upon the top 2%, they’ll pay exactly the amount budgeted for and not find creative ways to avoid paying them (as the Senator’s own wife has and will).

In short, the Kerry economic plan is a lot of nonsense and anyone person with a brain who has examined the figures must know that. You can’t spend $1.7 trillion in a decade and cut the deficit in half anymore than someone can eat three large pizzas a day and lose fifty pounds.

The thing that makes me angry is that the Democrats (or, at least, Democratic politicians) all fully understand this. All except for a tiny minority of hard-core socialists accept that plans that violate basic laws of economics cannot be put into action. They know this. Yet they propose such plans anyways. Why? Because they think that the people are stupid enough to buy into them.

This also fully applies to the entire absurd debate over “outsourcing.” The Democrats know that they can’t bring back the jobs that have gone overseas and most of them understand that it would be futile to try. Remember this: a century ago the overwhelming majority of people in the world worked in agriculture: this is no longer the case. What sort of world would we have if the small-minded people who opposed the industrial revolution had triumphed?

For every American job sent overseas there’s a job sent into the United States by some foreign nation. In 2001, there were some 6.4 million Americans employed by subsidiaries of foreign companies. In South Carolina, where the Democrats are rally laying on the protectionism via Senate candidate Inez Tenenbaum, BMW maintains a factory that employs some 4300 people. In the state of Ohio, often cited has hardest hit by the “outsourcing” devil, the Japanese automaker Honda employs more than 16,000 people.

What do you think would start happening to these jobs if a Kerry Administration began punishing US companies that hire overseas (read: throwing people out of work in foreign nations)? Does he really think that foreign governments will simply roll over and accept what he’s got planned for them? For that matter, how is a Kerry Administration going to follow through with its plan to repair America’s relations with its “allies” overseas if it’s throwing millions of our allies’ citizens out of work?

It’s been pretty much established that protectionism is a bad idea, especially for developed economies. Everyone does the best for themselves when goods, services and, yes, jobs can be moved freely across the world. John Kerry is smart enough to know that starting trade wars with the rest of the world is a good way to shed American jobs, not to create them. So what, then, would he do as President?

The obvious answer is that he’d do nothing about “outsourcing” because there’s pretty much nothing he can do that wouldn’t simply make the problem worse. In other words, he’s deliberately lying to the most vulnerable people in America: giving them false visions of a dawn that he knows shall never come. Their jobs aren’t coming back no matter who is elected President and so they’re going to have to move on. Manipulating them by playing their desperate hopes is simply wrong.

The best way to grow the economy is to ensure that people have the most money possible in their pockets and otherwise leave well-enough alone. That’s George W. Bush’s strategy and it’s one that’s clearly working and will grow the economy if it’s allowed to do so.

posted by Yoshi at 12:38 AM

Thursday, August 19, 2004

Telling Numbers from China

Read this buried nugget in a Reuters article on rising world oil prices:

China's refineries have processed 17.2 percent more crude so far this year than in 2003, the country's State Statistical Bureau said on Thursday. Crude imports to the end of July have soared nearly 40 percent from last year.

Did you catch that? Do you think that China's domestic production is declining?

And these are only the numbers they want to tell us about. Mark my words, China is stockpiling oil. A lot of it, it would seem.

posted by Yoshi at 7:41 PM

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Former US President Helps in Venezuela Recall Vote...

That President, of course, is Lyndon Baines Johnson. It's increasingly clear that the Recall Vote in Venezuela has, to put it simply, been rigged. Read this from today's International Herald Tribune (a bastion of neo-connery if I've ever seen one).

In one poll, when the boxes themselves were opened and counted, the "yes" vote was found to have been undercounted by 75%. Immediately after this was discovered, the ballot boxes in question were seized by the military (the boxes were opened by the local poll workers themselves).
A number of voting machines in an area which voted overwhelmingly for the recall were found to have the exact same number of "yes" votes (133) versus unrealistic numbers of "no" votes.

I don't know why the left hasn't embraced this, it's a great argument against electronic voting machines. It looks like what happened here was that the voting machines were rigged up and tampered with.

posted by Yoshi at 7:15 PM

Truman’s Folly

I believe that history will ultimately record that Harry Truman’s greatest mistake was declining to listen to General of the Army Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, when he advised Truman to respond to China’s intervention in Korea by launching an attack upon the Chinese mainland. In so doing, President Truman both threw away America’s best chance for a total victory in Korea and missed a golden opportunity to end the Chinese threat to the United States once and for all. While it is certainly true that Truman had many reasons for caution, I firmly believed that many of us will live to deeply lament his choice.

Let’s review the basic situation as it stood at the time. In June of 1950, the Army of Communist North Korea launched a surprise invasion of the free South. The United States (with the sanction of the United Nations) rapidly deployed combat forces to Korea in an effort to save the nation from totalitarian rule. Initially Allied forces were pushed back into a tiny corner of Korea around the port city of Pusan. However, under the command of General MacArthur (who was, arguably, America’s greatest living solider) the UN forces launched an amphibious invasion, seizing the port of Inchon and allowing Allied forces to break-out from the Pusan Perimeter and begin a headlong rush to the North, liberating the South Korean capital of Seoul and pushing beyond the old border and into the Communist North. Quickly the Allied offensive turned into a rout, with the North Koreans apparently totally defeated by MacArthur’s army. At that point, as UN forces approached the Yalu River that divides North Korea from China, the Chinese Communists launched a massive surprise offensive which forced UN forces to retreat back into the South.

At this point MacArthur sought permission to strike the bases on Chinese soil which were supporting offensive operations in Korea. Such permission was denied. US aircraft were even refused permission to pursue Chinese aircraft into Chinese airspace. MacArthur, now declaring he faced an “entirely new war” prepared plans for strikes against China itself, but no one higher up the chain of command supported them.

By this point President Truman had more or less already reconciled himself to the acceptance of a stalemate in Korea. General MacArthur did not accept this and so, when the US began to attempt to negotiate a peace, he essentially sabotaged the negotiations. In response, President Truman fired him.

So, why didn’t Truman strike? By 1951, the US had a nuclear stockpile of six-hundred and forty bombs versus twenty-five possessed by the USSR. Over the course of the next year the United States produced an additional three hundred and sixty-five bombs while the USSR managed only twenty-five. In other words, had President Truman taken the necessary measures, the United States could have dropped three hundred nuclear bombs on China while still outnumbering the USSR in weapons by a factor of more than ten to one, easily enough to deter the Soviets from launching a nuclear attack upon the United States. Any reasonable person ought to have seen that the United States had, in 1951, a window of opportunity to weaken the USSR and utterly destroy a nation which was, quite certainly, a long-term threat to the United States and which had already initiated a conventional war with the United States on the ground in Korea.

However, by that point, the fear of the bomb, especially in an increasingly weak and socialistic Europe, was so great that no one was willing to risk such a war, even when such a war was both unlikely and manifestly winnable if it occurred. In a very real sense, Korea provides the prototype of the syndrome which has since crippled US foreign policy: excessive deference to European cowardice and a public which is easily deceived by a media which tends to favor our enemies and oppose any effort to confront (or better yet, destroy) them.

In Korea, as they later did in Vietnam, the American people were convinced to accept something less than victory rather than risk all for something really worth winning. The nervous won out over the bold, accepting bloody stalemate as the alternative to a necessary fight. As MacArthur reminded us at the time, “in war there is no substitute for victory.” This is a lesson we ought to have learned from Korea: we’re had to keep troops in that nation for five decades and still have to worry about the North Korean threat because we didn’t have the will to finish the job once and for all then. We must worry about Chinese power overtaking that of America in the future because we didn’t finish off the Chinese when we had a chance to do so.

Now don’t get on me about how horrific what I propose would have been. It must be evident to anyone with a brain that such a war would have been morally justified: China had attacked the United States and killed its soldiers. While I have no idea as to the exact extent of losses which would have been suffered by the Chinese in the event of a massive attack in 1951, it does not seem at all unreasonable me to believe that the Chinese should have been made to pay in the blood of a thousand of their own for every American they killed upon the battlefield in Korea. Such a war would have punctuated the lesson of the Second World War: those who challenge America’s might end up dead and their nations end up so destroyed that they can only be reconstructed with American aid.

Of course, there is nothing which can be done about this now: the past is the past and (short of the invention of time travel) there’s nothing we can do about it now save learn an important lesson: when we have the chance to destroy our enemies we should not turn it down. Because we hesitated our easiest chance to devastate China and prevent it from ever taking over the leadership of the world was lost.

When I think of the great Douglas MacArthur I am often mindful of something from the Bible: a prophet is not without our honor, save in his own country and in his own house. General MacArthur understood that a failure to win in Korea would have disastrous consequences for America and for the world. We must accept danger rather than risk dishonor for, if we do not, we shall someday have to face an increased danger with reduced honor.

posted by Yoshi at 5:10 PM

Bizarre Attempt to Explain Away Kerry’s Lies

A reader of Virginia Postrel’s blog attempts to explain away Kerry’s “Christmas in Cambodia” lie by claiming that it’s possible that Senator Kerry simply confused “Christmas” and “Tet” in his mind an explanation which, given the number of times that Kerry’s told the story over the years, simply does not stand up to elementary logical analysis unless you believe that John Kerry is dumber than the media used to claim Dan Quayle to be. To put it mildly, it’s extremely difficult to believe that anyone, under any conditions, would confuse December 24th /25th with February 17th, especially when they only spent four months in Vietnam and claimed, at considerable length, that the memory of what happened was “seared” into them.

In any case, the record doesn’t state where Senator Kerry’s Swift Boat was on February 16th or 17th in 1969, so the only way we’ll know for sure is if the Senator consents to release his complete military records.

Now, I suppose that someone will seize upon the gap in the record (PCF’s last recorded action before February 18th comes on the 14th) as proof for this claim, to which I say: if that is so, why doesn’t Kerry release records of this, why doesn’t he have someone come forward and confirm this, and why didn’t anyone else claim this? It can’t be that the mission is “too secret” to talk about, because Senator Kerry’s been talking about it for at least twenty-five years even if he has (in revision six of the story) suddenly gotten the date wrong by two entire months.

posted by Yoshi at 2:26 PM

Sunday, August 15, 2004

Talking Down the War

During the 2000 campaign, when then-Governor George W. Bush discussed the faltering economy, he was (absurdly) accused by Democrats of “talking down” the economy. In other words, according to Democrats, George W. Bush was both an imbecile incapable of communicating in the English language and also a brilliant orator and communicator capable of changing the economic behavior of people, markets, and nations with his words alone. Of course, it would have been possible for Bush to “talk down” the economy were he inclined to do so: a having a Presidential candidate tied in the polls who, say, wanted to nationalize all banks or double income taxes would, without question, send markets swiftly downwards. Of course, this wouldn’t have so much to do with the words of the candidates themselves as it would the anticipated effects of that candidate’s policies were they to win the election.

With that being said, I suggest this to you: by his words and, more importantly, the popular perception of what his actions as President would be, John Kerry is “talking down” the war and, in so doing, he is ensuring additional American deaths in Iraq and giving courage to terrorists abroad. For all of John Kerry’s strenuous efforts to appear “tough enough” to be President, the wider world knows the real truth. Once you get beyond all of the lies and dissembling, John Kerry’s real policies with regard to the war on terror are painfully obvious.

First, all talk of toughness aside; John Kerry will cut and run in Iraq. He won’t call it that, of course, but that’s exactly what he’ll do. He’ll use bribery, flattery, and whatever else he can to assemble a UN force of third-rate third-world troops and pull US troops out of Iraq as soon as possible. If the Iraqi “resistance” and its allies are smart, they’d immediately call a halt to any attacks the moment they hear that John Kerry’s been elected. John Kerry, President wouldn’t be able to simply pull out of the country overnight, such a move would be politically suicidal, but he’ll be able to use whatever excuses he can to get out as fast as possible.

All rhetoric aside, our enemies are rational: that’s what makes them so dangerous. They know that John Kerry, while unable to exit Iraq immediately, won’t be sticking around there for long and that he probably wouldn’t send troops back into the country under any circumstances once they’re gone. They also know that if George W. Bush were to get another four years in the White House, they’ll all end up dead sooner or later. Given this, this would certainly prefer a President Kerry to a President Bush.

Think about it for a second. Imagine the following scenario: your nation is occupied by a relatively mild foreign power and you’re asked to join up with a rag-tag force of guerrillas, and told that, “the enemy will be here for at least five more years, and his forces kill one hundred of us for every one of theirs we kill.” How many would sign up to fight on those terms? Now, imagine this: you’re told that, “if we can just hold out against this enemy for a few months, their leader will be replaced and they will leave and then we will run the country.” How many more would join up for that?

So long as there’s hope that the Democrats will win the election, our enemies will take courage from this possibility. Whatever official position the Democratic Party adopts, whether Kerry runs as an anti-war candidate on a pro-war platform or a pro-war candidate on an anti-war platform, everyone knows the real position of both Senator Kerry and his party: they’re not for Iraq, they never were, and they will exit as soon as they can and on whatever terms they can.

I compare the situation to that of late 1864, during the Civil War. The South knew it was beaten: its forces were starving and its territory was being systematically occupied. Yet the South fought on. One of the main things which preserved Southern morale in those dark days was the widespread belief that Abraham Lincoln would be defeated for re-election and that George McClellan, whose party’s pro-Southern sympathies were widely known, would be the next President. Though, of course, he didn’t come right out and say he was for Southern victory: the Democrats of 1864 wanted to have a cease fire and then negotiate the restoration of the Union. However, since the only terms the South was willing to accept for negations was a promise of Southern Independence, the likely result of negotiations was obvious to all. McClellan eventually denounced this platform (he was for it before he was against it), but everyone knew the objective truth: President McClellan would be less capable of waging the war to a successful conclusion than President Lincoln.

Rationally therefore, the Confederates believed that they would, at an absolute minimum, get much better terms under McClellan than they could ever hope to get from Lincoln. This it may be fairly said that the initial success of the Democratic campaign in 1864 resulted in more deaths (on both sides) than might have occurred if it was clear from early on that Lincoln would be overwhelmingly re-elected.

Who are the terrorists for in this election? To put it simply: Anybody But Bush. George W. Bush is the only man with a realistic chance of being elected President who will seriously confront and, yes, kill the terrorists. And I know that the Democrats are trying to push the line that the terrorists want Bush because he’s created “hatred” in the Islamic world and such, but that’s simply nonsense. People don’t flock to join the guys getting killed in the hundreds by the First Marine Division (and prior to that by the thousands by the First Armored Division), nor is it anyone’s life ambition to spend one’s days hiding out in a cave. Before George W. Bush was President al-Qaeda had free reign in Afghanistan, plenty of funding and support from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and was welcome in various places across the Moslem world. Three years of war has destroyed the centralized structure of al-Qaeda, largely as a result of the killing and capture of virtually every operational terrorist of serious importance (Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are important, but not really involved in the planning or execution of day-to-day operations).

To the extent that al-Qaeda (or, rather the various fragments of it) continues to gain any new support, it’s because that support is founded in the belief that George Bush will be defeated in November and the terrorist group will be able to achieve its aims. If George W. Bush is re-elected, al-Qaeda will have difficulty finding new support for the obvious reason that if George Bush is re-elected they will spend the next four years dodging missiles and Special Forces raids and, in all probability, will end up dead sometime before January 20th, 2009. People in the Moslem world are, to put it simply, hedging their bets.

Remember Bin Laden’s claim that people would back al-Qaeda in its war against the West because, when people see a weak horse and a strong horse, they prefer the strong one? Well, under George Bush, America is looking like a strong horse: one that will win if it stays under the present course. Were John Kerry to be elected, a signal of American weakness would be sent to the world. The Election of John Kerry would proclaim, as big and as loud as a comic book bubble, that America has no stomach for the fight, that it can’t confront terror: that it’s ready for the glue factory.

posted by Yoshi at 8:29 PM

Bye-Bye Hugo?

The UK's Indepedent is reporting that exit polls show that Venezualan President Hugo Chavez appears likely to be recalled by voters in a referendum today.

If so, it'll be bad in the short term (expect some chaos, probably a little death, and a bit of a further spike in oild prices), but great in the long term, we've just saved ourselves from another Castro, if he actually leaves office that it.

posted by Yoshi at 5:48 PM

Napoleon Muhammad: A Brief Biography

Napoleon Muhammad: The “Emperor” of the Islamic Republic of France is a distant relation of the original Bonaparte- a half-French, half-Algerian who was initially elected as the President of the Fifth Republic in 2037, the new Napoleon fused together France’s rising Islamist tide with a growing and virulent strain of ultra-rightism. Though, like most French politicians, in his initial years he rose to power with the support of Socialists desperate for Moslem votes and so willing to look the other way as to the more unseemly aspects of their new friends’ views, he gained much greater heights as French ultra-nationalists began to embrace Islamic values as the last bulwark against socialism, social liberalism, and the growth of the European Super-State.

Under his reign, France has both officially become an Islamic state and become a dictatorship. The ideological base which has allowed this has been the government’s revelation that, while in Egypt in the 18th Century, Bonaparte himself became a secret Moslem. This (along with the discovery of other secret Moslems throughout French history) is repeated on a continuous basis by the government and is widely believed both by increasingly indoctrinated French youth and the nation’s Islamic population (which is now nearing a majority). The same history textbooks also take advantage of the uncertainty surrounding Napoleon’s lineage to claim him as a direct descendent of Mohammed. These books also claim that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake

The Fifth Republic was finally destroyed in 2044 when the last desperate remnants of respectable French nationalism attempted a coup, which allowed him to cancel the elections and declare himself to be the “Emperor” in an elaborate ceremony in the Notre-Dame Cathedral, which has since been desecrated by its conversion into a Mosque.

Islamic France’s state religion/political ideology, which is generally known as “French Islam”, is a combination of Islamist anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism (along with other peculiarly Islamist traits) and Gaullism. Given the failure of Islamists in the rest of the world, the purported goal French Islam is to create “Islam in one nation” which may then be re-exported to the increasingly secular nations of the Middle East as well as to the increasingly restive Moslem populations of the rest of Europe.

posted by Yoshi at 5:22 PM

Thursday, August 12, 2004

The RNC Riots

It was nearly six months ago that I first predicted that Republican National Convention in New York City would be marked by rioting on a scale comparable to, at the very least, Seattle in 1999 and, even more likely, to that of Chicago in 1968. In the intervening time little has occurred to change my mind and much has changed to reinforce my earlier conviction: there will almost certainly be political violence in New York City during the Convention and the days surrounding it. This is both a danger and an opportunity to exploit.

Frankly, I don’t think that much of the public has any idea of the degree to which a fair-sized chunk of the American left has slipped the surly bonds of sanity. The sort of pathological paranoia which infected elements of the American right during the Clinton years has spread throughout the whole of the left. During the Clinton years Michael Moore-style conspiracy theorizing was the pastime of a kook fringe (a fringe which, I might add, had a great deal to be paranoid about) among the Democratic Party in the years of George W. Bush it has simply become mainstream discourse.

More than a hundred thousand people are going to descend upon New York City. A hundred thousand people who, due largely to their own laziness and stupidity, have few prospects of a truly successful career and who also happen to passionately believed that the United States is already in the grip of a fascist regime who seized power via a coup and who are prepared to destroy the whole of the world for profit’s sake. That many people, in that sort of place, in these sort of times: that, to say the very least, is an extremely worrisome thing.

Where I modify my earlier prediction is this: I don’t think that the violence will be isolated. From the look of things, I think it’s highly likely that the violence will be widespread and well-organized. The planning for these protests has transcended anything I’ve ever observed before. The protestors have apparently organized themselves into hundred of small cells which can be linked together for large operations but which also, because of their intimacy, will be difficult to infiltrate. They have, however, managed to infiltrate the staff of the convention itself. Frankly, their method of organization seems to be one better-suited for waging a guerrilla war than for protesting.

Don’t expect what we’ve seen in the days of old: big mass marches ending in a rally with lots of speeches and songs. Do expect deliberate efforts to obstruct both New York’s transportation and security systems. Expect constant disruption and disturbance. The operation of a great modern metropolis like New York City is an operation which depends upon the cooperation of the people and, if people set out to deliberately disrupt that, they can do a great deal of damage.

Think about what happens to traffic in any major city if, say, a pair of cars get into an accident along a major bridge during Rush Hour. Now, imagine if a group of “activists” were to take a dozen or so old cars and deliberately disable them along vital New York arteries during that period of time and imagine as well that a hundred other activists, at various points throughout the city, lay down to form human chains, further obstructing traffic. These are the sort of plans which the activists are making: plans which almost blur the line between legitimate political protest and a mild form of terrorism: the use of force to achieve one’s political ends.

Of course, it’s also relatively easy to imagine that the violence might be something more than simply “mild”. The great danger of calling the President “Hitler” and comparing Republicans to “Nazis” on an everyday basis is that, sooner or later, someone is going to take your words based upon face value and act upon them. Remember when, in 1995, President Clinton tried to suggest that Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing radio hosts were responsible for the Oklahoma City Bombing because of their “anti-government” rhetoric? Well, turnabout is fair play. If Rush complaining about tax rates and the inefficiency of government can somehow be sold to the public as a motivating factor for Timothy McVeigh, than the liberals should hardly expect us to remain silent if their irresponsible and provocative words provoke some lone nut into action.

The great danger with having opposing political factions whose words make it sound as though they’d like to go at eachother in the streets with fists, rocks, knives, and guns is that, sometimes, something will happen to make them actually do it. From the level of anger I’m hearing come out of the left I’m envisioning that New York is going to see smashed windows, Molotov Cocktails, and perhaps even worse. Unless the NYPD is very careful, we might well end up with street brawls as well. I’ve no idea how many leftists have infiltrated the convention, but it isn’t hard for me to imagine that a dozen or so of them might well attempt to start some sort of fight right on the convention floor was the President accepts re-nomination.

Frankly, were I running al-Qaeda, I’d look at activist crowds as an ideal target for attack. After all, from their point of view, dead Americans are dead Americans and, in all probability, the protests will be the least well protected (from outside attack) mass grouping of people in the United States in memory. The helpful codicil to any such attack for al-Qaeda would be, of course, that most radical leftists in the United States would probably blame President Bush for such an attack and that Democrats would be soon be making politically-loaded charges that such rallies were deliberately stripped of protection from terrorist attack because they were made up of Bush’s opponents.

Of course (as long as the final danger does not come to pass), there’s a real opportunity in this for the Bush campaign. Namely, if we spin things right, we can use the protestors to our great benefit. After all, no one really likes protestors very much and people like rioters even less. If we react quickly enough and aggressively enough we can do several things. First, any rioting should be blamed on the “overheated rhetoric” of the Kerry campaign and its surrogates, most notably Michael Moore and Howard Dean men who are (arguably) the two most important mass-appeal figures on the left of the Democrat Party and who are widely known to the public as a whole. As soon as the first riots start, Republican spokespeople need to be in front of the media with those quotes saying things like, “in the atmosphere that’s been created by some people, something like this was bound to happen. For example…” This, naturally, would be followed by the production of a list with some interesting phrases.

Now, there will be some who will say that this is all the President’s fault: for making these people mad, for going to New York City, for striking his deal with Satan and a cabal of Jewish Bankers, etc, etc. This pernicious nonsense needs to be dealt with up front: George W. Bush is the President of the United States and the delegates assembled to nominate him are all citizens of the United States. To suggest that, because a radical and potentially violent minority opposes them, some areas of the nation ought to become “no go” zones for them is obscene. The leaders of any free nation can never let themselves be cowed our bullied by gangsters and thugs. To suggest that any leader of a nation ought to avoid some area within his own nation because he is threatened by a minority of violent or dangerous individuals is to suggest the very surrender of freedom itself to the tender mercies of the mob.

In any case, in the spirit of the Chinese curse, the days ahead are going to be interesting ones. Throughout them we must all have to same goal in mind: to re-elect George Walker Bush in November so we can get on with the real business of killing the enemies of the United States of America.

posted by Yoshi at 9:47 PM

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

Read this article in the Summer Parameters

Ralph Peters is one of the few commentators (very few) who understands the core point of this war (the point, I might add, that I've been making for two years now). Read this here.

Trust me. We don’t need discourses. We need plain talk, honest answers, and the will to close with the enemy and kill him. And to keep on killing him until it is unmistakably clear to the entire world who won. When military officers start speaking in academic gobbledygook, it means they have nothing to contribute to the effectiveness of our forces. They badly need an assignment to Fallujah.

Consider our enemies in the War on Terror. Men who believe, literally, that they are on a mission from God to destroy your civilization and who regard death as a promotion are not impressed by elegant maneuvers. You must find them, no matter how long it takes, then kill them. If they surrender, you must accord them their rights under the laws of war and international conventions. But, as we have learned so painfully from all the mindless, left-wing nonsense spouted about the prisoners at Guantanamo, you are much better off killing them before they have a chance to surrender.

Call this man back to active duty and give him a Brigade.

Remember what I've said countless times: "We will win this war when we can bring ourselves to comprehend the mathematics of the situtation."

posted by Yoshi at 6:48 PM

The Coming of a Moslem Canada

When, late last year, it was announced that the Province of Ontario would be allowing courts operating on the principles of Shariah (Islamic) law to settle civil disputes between Moslems, those of us who objected were ridiculed as bigots and racists. After all, what could possibly be wrong with allowing people to operate legally by the dictates of their religion if it cannot harm anyone else? Only someone with a prejudice (an unjustified animus) towards Islam could object, this logic goes.

Of course, this ignores the possibility that someone might have a reasonable animus towards a religion. The argument that any opposition to any religion (except, of course, for opposition to Judaism or Christianity) is somehow inherently immoral is silly. If there were a major world religion which advocated actual cannibalism of babies, ought we accept that religion and its practices based upon our deep belief in the principle of tolerance? Tolerance only stretches so far as the intolerable and then it must go.

We of the West need to pull our heads out of the sand and face up to the real demographic threat that is posed to our civilization by Islam. So long as our own fertility rates remain low and we accept huge numbers of immigrants from high-fertility Islamic nations, we are setting into motion the process of our own destruction. This problem may seem remote in Canada, where Moslems make up only 2.5% of the population but, in reality, it is already knocking upon the door for the way in which are politically correct elites are beholden to minority groups already enables them to punch drastically above their weight.

Can you imagine, twenty years ago, what would have been said if anyone had suggested that, at some point, some form of Shariah law would be enforced in a country like Canada? People would have laughed. Well now, when I warn that the Canadian nation as a whole is in danger of falling into the clutches of Islam, I’m sure people will laugh. Well, we’ll see who’s still laughing in 2030.

The Dangers of Islam:

I don’t deny that Islam can be benignly practiced and observed: so can pretty much anything. For every Jew-killing Nazi concentration camp guard there was a harmless Nazi shoe-maker in Dresden. Now, I’m not saying that Islam and Nazism are one and the same, but I am saying that Islamism and Nazism are (to corrupt a phrase used by pro-Palestinian activists, “Islamism is Nazism.”). There’s a big difference between Islam the religion and Islamism the political ideology which fuses Islam and Totalitarianism. They are not one and the same: but they are linked. Nowhere in the world will you find Islam without Islamism. Even in places such as the Phillipines and Thailand, far from the supposed Saudi sources of modern terrorism, you’ll find Islamists running about shooting, killing, and murdering as they please.

The reason for this is obvious: Islamism is merely Islam put into practice. If you read your Koran and Hadith and ignore all of the parts which instruct you to beat your wife and kill Jews in order to bring on the end times, then you’ll probably turn out alright. But if you take your Islam seriously and actually accept it as face value, the odds are rather high that you’re eventually going to end up blowing up buses full of Jews and beheading infidels on tape.

An average Moslem is a lot like an average Christian in that they don’t really take the things that their holy books say very seriously. Oh, sure, they might read them from time to time- and they might even pray on a daily basis: but they aren’t actively preparing for the end of time of wishing for a crusade (or Jihad) to wipe all of the unbelievers off the face of the Earth. The difference comes in the “extreme” wings of both religions. As a general rule, a Christian “extremist” these days is someone who opposes technical instructions for homosexual sodomy being distributed to second-graders and a Moslem “extremist” is someone who likes blowing up Pizza restaurants full of Jews.

In other words: Islam is a religion of peace so long as you ignore its core theological tenant which, luckily for us, most observers of any religion tend to do. In 99% of cases the most trouble someone who reads their Bible five hours a day is going to cause will come in the form of their getting arrested for passing of flyers in a “bubble zone” around an abortion clinic. The most trouble someone who reads the Koran five hours a day is likely to cause can be seen on the evening news.

Look: what else would you expect from a religion founded by a murderous pedophile? Yes, a pedophile: what else would you call a man who, at the age of fifty, married a six year-old girl and who then went on to consummate the marriage when she was nine? Should we expect a religion which was spread almost entirely by the sword to, in the age of its long-decline, peacefully co-exist with other religions? Of course not. Given this, we cannot treat it like other religions either.

The Growth of Islam in Canada:

Right now, of course, Moslems in Canada are a small minority- roughly 2 to 2.5% of the population, depending upon whose numbers you believe. But, let me ask you this: what happens when Moslems have grown to be 10% of Canada’s population? Do you think that they will be so benign then? Do you think that they’ll have no demands? Do you think that, if they do have demands, that the Liberals will resist them? The road ahead, to me at least, seems to be the road to the Dhimmitude of Canada.

It isn’t that far off. The 2001 Census (already three years old) claims that there are roughly 580,000 Moslems in Canada. Seeing as how those numbers are not only dated, but also fail to include people who are in the country illegally or who are otherwise interested in not coming to the attention of the authorities, I don’t believe that the Canadian Islamic Congress is lying or exaggerating when it claims that there are 700,000 Moslems in Canada. By way of comparison, there were 253,000 or so Moslems in Canada in 1991 (out of a then-population estimate of twenty-seven million versus about thirty million in 2001). In other words, during a period when the Canadian population grew by roughly 11% the Moslem population of Canada grew roughly 129%. During the same period, the number of Protestants in Canada fell by 1.1 million.

To give you an idea of the scale of Islamic immigration to Canada, in the years 2000, 2001, and 2002 alone the Montreal area absorbed 20,500 immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan, and Lebanon alone- immigrants where were likely mostly Moslems. Toronto, in the same three-year period, took in 58,000 immigrants from Pakistan, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Even Vancouver (where immigrants hail mostly from Asia and India, took in more than six thousand immigrations from Moslem nations in the same period. When you factor immigrants from other Islamic countries not grouped by name and the obvious fact that some people from predominantly non-Moslem nations (such as the Phillipines) are going to be Moslems, it stands to reason that Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas took in more than 100,000 Moslems in those three years alone.

Given this (and that, as immigration from China and India declines with the rise of economic prospects in both of those nations, Middle Eastern immigration will go up) it would not be at all unreasonable to expect Canada’s Moslem population to maintain the same level of growth in the years 2001-2011 while, over the same period as a whole, Canada’s population would increase only slightly. In other words, the 2011 Census would show a population of about 33.5 million (the actual population would, of course, be higher than the Census figures) with an Islamic population of 1.33 million. In other words, in twenty years Canada’s Moslem population would have increased from just less than 1% of the population to a hair under 4% of the population. If the same trend continued for another ten years, the 2021 census would show a Canadian population of 37.2 million and an Islamic population of 3.05 million. Carried through to 2031, you’d see a Canada with 41.2 million people, seven million of whom (or 17% of the population) would be Moslems. In this scenario, Canada would become an Islamic-majority country somewhere around the year 2045 or so.

Surely this must be impossible? Well, I’m not so sure. The fertility rate for Canada’s aging population is declining and, in the long-term, the only way to maintain our present numbers will be to solicit immigrants and large numbers. At a certain point the trend would become self-sustaining: as increasing numbers of Moslems entered the country they in turn would both have children (who would then have children of their own) and sponsor relatives who in turn would both have children (who would then have more children) and sponsor their relatives. The numbers are not, after all, very big. When you hit a big number like five million or so, then I think that the trend becomes irreversible. When you pit a group of people who refuse to breed (or bring their own relatives along to breed for them) with one which does both, the latter group is going to win out every time. In fact, were I a Moslem leader with a strategic mind, I’d be deliberately encouraging immigration to Canada on the grounds that the Canadian government, of all major Western governments, will probably be the easiest to control and that, because of Canada’s proximity to the United States, control of it would be most rewarding.

Towards and Islamic Canada?:

At what point does Canada begin to fall under the grip of Islam? I’d say that the tipping point comes when Moslems become 20% of the population, which should be roughly twenty years from today if the present rate of increase continues. Obviously 20% does not constitute a majority in and of itself, but that 20% will be tied into the dynamics of the Liberal Party. Exit polls showed that 71% of Moslems who voted in the recent Federal Election voted Liberal and more than 80% turned up to vote. In other words, if Moslems turn out to vote for Liberals at the same rate in the same percentages, then the Liberals will already be assured of 19% of the vote (they won a minority government with about 35% of the vote in the recent election) before any campaigning is done.

The Liberals, of course, will then become increasingly beholden to the Moslem vote and will grant them pretty much whatever they want. An immigration policy which favours Moslems? Certainly. An anti-Israel, anti-American foreign policy: we’ve already got that. What about separate criminal courts for Moslems?

It sounds improbable, but that’s exactly what the recognition of Shariah law has opened the door to. After all, Canada already allows Native Indians to be tried by the bizarre and primitive traditions of their own peoples (“judgement circles” and the like). It doesn’t seem improbable to me that, in the name of cultural sensitivity, eventually they’ll allow Shariah courts to try crimes committed by Moslem against Moslem, and then crimes simply committed by Moslems and then, eventually, crimes committed against Moslems by others.

Another step, of course, will be to make defamation of the “Prophet” Mohammed a crime. It’s already been proposed that it be made an international crime (I fully expect to end up being extradited to the Hague sooner or later), so I imagine that sooner or later someone will propose making it a crime under the Criminal Code of Canada and that our various Barons and Baronesses of multiculturalism and sensitivity will go along.

There’d be exactly one advantage to an Islamic takeover of Canada: the next time Svend Robinson stole a ring, he’d get a lot more than a conditional discharge. If he lived that long, mind you, despite Mrs. Robinson’s shameless and consistent support for various terrorists of the Religion of Peace, I imagine that, if vested with the power of law, they wouldn’t long tolerate his… proclivities. And if they’d cut off his hand for theft, God knows that they’d cut off for the latter!

posted by Yoshi at 6:22 PM

Monday, August 09, 2004

Rumor: Al-Sadr Captured

Developing now.

posted by Yoshi at 4:49 PM

Sunday, August 08, 2004

John Kerry’s Absurd Military Plan

For all of his talk about “strengthening America” and all of his reliance upon his own military record to bolster his candidacy, John Kerry’s plan for America’s armed forces is surprisingly light in detail and short on substance. In fact, it reads like something that was thrown together in three minutes of thought and six days of focus group discussion. In truth, it’s a non-plan- a plan that promises very little and can deliver little of what it promises.

The Kerry-Edwards plan consists of a handful of firm commitments, the two most notable being to “double” the strength of the Army’s active duty Special Forces and to increase the active duty strength of the Army by 40,000 personnel. This, with a few promises to increase the number of military police and civil affairs soldiers as well as a promise to create new specialized units to deal with the problems posed by weapons of mass destruction, is the sum total of the Kerry-Edwards plan with regards to the combat capabilities of the Armed Forces.

Significantly, the phrase “missile defense” appears nowhere within the plans for improving America’s defense contained within the Kerry-Edwards campaign book “Our Plans and Priorities.” It does appear three times in the padding section of the book (selected statements of John Kerry and John Edwards thrown in to ensure the book would be of a decent length). The first time it appears is one page 197, where Kerry affirms that, “we must invest in missile defense. But not at the expense of other priorities.” The second mention comes a few sentences later where he declares that, “(w)e cannot afford to spend billions to deploy an unproven missile defense system.” The phrase appears a third (and final) time on page 224, where it’s again brought up to be criticized, with Senator Kerry lamenting the amount of money spent on Ballistic Missile Defense, comparing it to the amount of money spent on securing nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union. Just to prove to you that I’m not relying upon deceptive searching tactics, let me also inform you that the word “missile” appears exactly five times in the whole of the book and only in relation to missile defense in the three instances which I have mentioned.

The word “Navy” appears exactly twice in the whole of the book, both times in reference to John Kerry’s time in the United States Navy. The phrase “Air Force” appears twice, once promising to add a single squadron of helicopters and once referring to the fact that Harry Truman created it. The phrase “Marine Corps” does not appear once in the book’s two hundred and fifty-two pages.

Simply for the sake of comparison, I would point out that the word “Vietnam” somehow manages to appear in the book eight times. Of those eight, five explicitly reference John Kerry’s service (“when I was in Vietnam I learned,” “when I came back from Vietnam I”, etc, etc, etc).

So, I think that any reasonable person would have to concede that John Kerry’s defense promises are a little bit slim. He likes to talk a lot about strengthening the military, but he’s light on ideas for how he’s going to do it. But he has given us a few ideas, so let’s talk about those.

First of all, his promise to “double” the Army’s active-duty Special Forces while increasing overall force strength by only 40,000 is simply absurd. At the present time the Army’s Special Forces contain roughly 13,300 active duty personnel. At the present time the authorized strength of the active duty army is 502,400. So, in other words, the Special Forces represent about 2.5% of total Army personnel. If the Army was increased by 40,000 (or to 542,400) and the Special Forces doubled (to 26,600), the Special Forces would suddenly become 4.9% of the Army.

The problem with this should be obvious: you can’t just stick anyone in the Special Forces. The various branches of the Special Forces are the best of the best: the Green Berets, the Rangers, and Delta Force. Only a small percentage of the Army is capable of meeting the standards necessary to become a Green Beret or a Ranger. As it stands now, most who attempt to qualify for either force will fail. This doesn’t reflect badly on them as people: after all, most of the people who try to qualify for the Special Forces have already qualified for the Airborne, something that puts them in an elite group in and of itself. It simply means that, as good as they are, they aren’t quite in the 98th percentile of all soldiers.

So, if the Special Forces are increasing as a percentage of the Army, how are they going to find enough personnel of the same quality as their existing personnel? There are two answers. First of all: they aren’t. They’re going to have to, to some degree, reduce standards for qualification. The second thing that they’re going to have to do is reach into the ranks of the Army in search of those soldiers who could be members of the Special Forces (or were at one time) and pull them in. This, of course, would have a severely deleterious effect on the remainder of the Army. After all, which officers, non-coms, and soldiers are you going to pull in from the rest of the Army if you need to fill the Special Forces?

In other words, while John Kerry’s plan will make the Special Forces more numerous, it will also make them (on a man-for-man basis) weaker. At the same time, it’ll rip the living heart out of other units, especially the 82nd Airborne Division and the 101st Air Assault.

As for the other major part of John Kerry’s plan (to add an additional 40,000 active-duty troops to the Army), I have little to say. I have little to say because Kerry has little to say. He doesn’t promise that these 40,000 will be used to from X number of new combat units (and in fact, it appears that a substantial part of the 40,000 is already committed by the few specific commitments he’s made). For example, 13,300 of them will be used up in the increase in Special Forces (either replacing individuals from the rest of the Army send to the SF or representing new recruits). Ultimately, the increase in the force strength of the regular army proposed by Kerry appears to be less than 20,000: less than enough to add a single Division and hardly enough to cure the problems about which he complains.

It is notable that John Kerry’s military plan seems to completely ignore the massive organization transformation going on within the Army as we speak. Under the plan presently being put into effect, the role of the present Division will fade over time with the “Brigade Unit of Action” (BUA) becoming the primary combat unit in the United States Army. The new Brigades will be restructured to emphasize “teeth” over “tail”, reducing administrative staff and increasing the number of combat soldiers while decreasing the overall number of personnel per brigade. In the “Future Force”, like in the present day Marine Corps and Army Special Forces, everyone will be trained as a rifleman first. The result is that, under current plans, the active duty Army will increase from thirty-three Brigade Combat Teams today to forty-eight in 2007. In other words, the combat power of the Army will be increased by half again without actually increasing the number of personnel on active duty.

John Kerry’s plan for the military makes exactly zero mention of any of this (and, in fact, attacks Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for failing to follow through on “transformation”) leading one to jump to the conclusion that either he’s unaware of this plan (perhaps he was “too busy” for the briefings) or he and his advisors don’t think it to be significant. In either case, the implications are troubling.

Kerry’s plan totally ignores the virtual revolution that is taking place in the organization of both the Army and the Navy under the stewardship of Donald Rumsfeld. At long last the Armed Forces are breaking free of outdated Cold War organizations and reshaping themselves to fight our new enemies. Not only will the “Future Force” massively increase the power of the Army, but Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Navy has strongly augmented the combat strength of the Navy.

Little noticed, but very important, was last year’s decision to discard the Cold War-era “Carrier Battle Groups” (CVBG’s) and “Amphibious Ready Groups” (ARG’s) for new-model “Carrier Strike Groups”, “Expeditionary Strike Groups”, and “Surface Strike Groups.” While this might sound like a bunch of Naval jargon it represents, in truth, nothing less than a revolution in military affairs.

See, during the Cold War, Aircraft Carriers had to operate under the constant threat of massive attack by Soviet forces. As a result Carrier Battle Groups, big units often consisting of as many as a dozen ships, were created. With the end of the Cold War the major air-sea threat to our Carriers disappeared, but the Carriers continued to travel in these big groups, largely as a result of inertia. This slowed down deployment rates and created a Navy which more or less entirely revolved around the Carriers. Additionally, with the increase in the number of AEGIS ships in the Navy and the development of Cooperative Engagement Capability, a trio of ships today can be more effective than a dozen were twenty years ago.

By reducing the number of escorts per carrier, the Navy is now capable of a much higher deployment tempo. Operating this way during the Iraq War, the Navy managed to place seven Carriers on station, more than it was able to deploy during the first Gulf War when the force consisted of fifteen Carriers. At this very moment there are a full seven Carrier Strike Groups underway as part of “Summer Pulse ‘04”, an exercise designed to demonstrate the awesome power and majesty of the United States Navy.

In addition to this, the reduced number of escorts per ship has allowed the creation of the new Expeditionary Strike Groups, centered upon the Navy’s Amphibious Assault Carriers which can, if needed, essentially function as small Aircraft Carriers (in addition to carrying Marines about). Where the old Amphibious Ready Groups were often accompanied by just a single escort, the new ESG’s are accompanied by a number of surface ships, allowing them to truly project power as necessary, even acting as a substitute for a Carrier where required. (After all, a US LHD carrying eighteen Marine Harriers and escorted by a pair of Arleigh Burke-class Destroyers is probably the equal of any non-American Aircraft Carrier in the world).

You’d think that John Kerry, a man so determined to defend America, might be interested in this: after all, he is a Navy vet. But he doesn’t bother to comment on it either positively or negatively. In fact, he doesn’t bother to say anything about the Navy at all, save that he served in it.

Frankly, I suspect that his failure to mention the Navy, Air Force, or Marines in his plans should be considered somewhat alarming. A sin of omission. Certainly I can’t be the only one who suspects that he may well seek to compensate for his increases in the Army by going after some of the other services? I can already see the arguments being trotted out about the Navy’s Carriers. Probably the Air Force’s new fighter programs too.

Reading his “plans” one begins to wonder if he’s ever shed his true anti-military beliefs. His promises are so minor, so inconsequential, and leave so much unmentioned.

In closing (and the audience cheers!) I’d simply add that John Kerry’s military program, for someone who claims to be for a strong national defense, is alarming to say the least. Someone needs to start asking Senator Kerry just what he thinks about individual military programs and overall military spending.

posted by Yoshi at 10:38 PM

Saturday, August 07, 2004

The Growing Chinese Threat

Abstract: China's massive increase in oil imports is part of a plan to influence world oil prices and therefore destablize the American economy in order to create conditions more amicable to their plans for the invasion of Taiwan in the later years of this decade.

Those congenitally anti-American individuals who blame the United States and its foreign policy every time they’re forced to pay an extra quarter for a gallon of gas are looking at the failing, as they often do, to think of anything beyond their hatred of Washington and everything that it touches. In truth, while some percentage of the spike in the price of oil can be attributed to instability in the Middle East (and, certainly, some day-to-day fluctuations can be so attributed) and to problems in other oil-producing nations (most notably Russia and Venezuela) the fault for the long-term rise in oil prices can be laid at the feet of a single culprit: China.

It is my belief that China’s much commented upon increase in the importation of raw resources is not only a function of its growing economy, but also part of a deliberate strategy to influence American electoral politics and work towards reunification between China and Taiwan.

Chinese Resource Consumption Soars:

Consider this for a moment: in May of this year the United States imported 10.342 million barrels per day of Crude Oil. China has, to date, imported an average of 3.02 million BPD. Now, that sounds like a ratio heavily in favor of the United States until you consider the fact that, in 2003, the Chinese average was 2.02 Million BPD. In other words, Chinese oil imports have increased by roughly 50% in the space of a single year.

Last year the average world oil production amounted to roughly seventy million barrels of oil per day. The average to date this year is roughly seventy-two million BPD. In other words, in a world of growing economies, the Chinese increase in oil imports can be used to account for more than half of all production increases. Every single economics student knows what happens when supply is greater than demand: prices go up. It is the seemingly insatiable Chinese thirst for oil (and other raw materials) which is behind all of this.

This, I think, lends itself to a somewhat sinister question: just what the hell are the Chinese doing with all of that oil? While I believe that China’s production is increasing, I don’t think that any reasonable person can believe that China’s need for oil has grown that much in the space of a year (or, for that matter, that China’s need for scrap copper grew by 40% in the first eight months of 2003, or that China’s need for steel increased by 20% in 2003). I’m not an expert: but these numbers don’t add up to me. Already many are postulating that a major part in China’s increase in oil imports is due to stockpiling. I agree, and I wonder if that doesn’t apply to other commodities as well. Though, I wonder, might something more sinister be at work?

For example: China’s imports of cotton from the United States alone increased by 700% in 2003. As a result of increased Chinese trade, reported one publication, shipping rates have quadrupled in the past eighteen months. Something isn’t right here. I believe that China’s economy is growing rapidly: but not that it’s growing by that much or that quickly.

There’s also the matter of the growing quantity of US Government Bonds held by the Chinese, presently totalling something in the neighbourhood of $150 billion and rising. It’s undeniable that China is acquiring these bonds for reasons beyond the purely monetary: they’re stockpiling them as insurance for the day when they must confront the United States in some foreign policy crisis.

China’s Strategic Objectives:

In short, China is willing (as any great power ought to be) to use its growing economic might to undermine the military and political powers of its enemies. It is in that spirit that I put forward this question: is China deliberately stockpiling vast quantities of various commodities (notab