The Pretext of Principles

There’s a piece in the WSJ, "The Case for Inhumane Intervention” which takes a mercifully brief look at how former SecState Madeleine Albright objected to the policy decisions of then-POTUS Bush and defended those of ex-POTUS Clinton. Well, sure she does, as surely does the sun rise – every morning! What’s interesting to me is that she did it on the basis of an overall principle rather than weighing and judging their respective policies based on their unique circumstances. The piece ends by saying, “Albright's position is simply incoherent.”

That’s not exactly true. Her positions are coherent but the principles invoked are in conflict. The Liberal penchant for framing an argument on the basis of principle appears to be a common approach to Democrat arguments, and what makes it particularly amusing is how the principles invoked are dependent upon the policies pursued. That is to say, policy guides principle, rather than the reverse, but they make a show of standing on principle. Federal deficit spending is outrageously bad, usually; dissent against government policy is patriotic, except when it's not; filibusters are obstructionist, or the fullest expression of open democratic dialogue, depending. Such arguments posturing on principled ground cannot be wholly reconciled one with another but for the common ground on which they all stand.

Their overarching and unspoken aim is to portray the Republicans as always wrong, whereas Democrat policy is sound and justifiable, i.e., it's wrong when Republicans do something but OK for Democrats. Democrats start from this assumption yet they must somehow circle that square and justify their positions by other means, and situational principles are their go-to tool for doing just that. Logical conflict often arises when these principles clash from one situation to the next. Let my try to illustrate this with a couple of examples:

During the height of the Iraq war a handful of retired generals, less than a half-dozen of them of the over six thousand who are retired and still amongst the living, had criticized the Bush policies of the war in one way or another, and the Right was admonished to “Listen to the Generals” – that was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi right around the time that Gen. Petraeus was unanimously confirmed as the U.S. Forces Commander in Iraq, and it was an imploration echoed by Liberals everywhere. The message was clear: The Executive Branch should take the advice of its experienced military leaders.

It’s a sound principle, but it became problematical later as the situation changed. When Lt.Gen. Sanchez made his criticisms at a gathering of Military Reporters and Editors (in Arlington, VA, Oct 2007). Sanchez spent the first half of his speech criticizing the deplorable reporting by the MSM, but this went unreported by the NYTimes and AP, and received only scant mention in the front-page article in the WaPo. Can we therefore conclude that the Left believes that Generals should be listened to except when they criticize the Liberal MSM for their shoddy reporting and partisanship, in which case nobody needs hear of it? Not at all; that would be to extrapolate a coherent principle from their varied positions, but that's not necessary for Liberals. Taking the idea of Liberal principles too seriously leads to cognitive dissonance - there isn't necessarily any coherence in their arguments when taking them at face value, for these are only useful cudgels couched in the pretext of principles. To illustrate this more fully, when General Petraeus returned stateside to report progress and improvements in Iraq, he was snubbed and insulted by Democrats.

The comments of General Sanchez were useful to the Left only insofar as they echoed what Liberals and Democrats were saying. His comments on how the press were not useful or flattering to the Left and so they were ignored. In contrast, the report by General Petraeus was not helpful at all to the Left because they wanted to end the Iraq war as soon as possible, whereas General Petraeus told us that the Iraq war was very much winnable. What he said in open Congressional testimony could hardly be ignored, and therefore his character was attacked by the Left, from the children of Kos, MoveOn and Think Progress to the top clown Democrat leadership, including, amongst others, Pelosi, Reid, and Clinton. Some and only some of the comments of Gen. Sanchez were useful to the Left as a cudgel, whereas the report of Gen. Petraeus undercut their position so thoroughly that he was accused of being a tool of the Bush Administration.

This brings us to the Obama Administration; in late June of 2009, National Security Advisor Jim Jones met with commanders in Afghanistan and to say: "My strong view is that we are not going to succeed simply by piling on more and more troops," he told them. The WaPo describes the key part of that meeting as follows:

Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have "a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment." Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF -- which in the military and elsewhere means "What the [expletive]?" Nicholson and his colonels -- all or nearly all veterans of Iraq -- seemed to blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all the troops they were going to get.

The message is clear and wholly inappropriate. The role of the Executive Branch is to task the military with a desired outcome, after which the military presents a set of set of options for achieving that outcome, each of which has an estimate of probable success, cost, and risk. The Executive Branch must not, however, both decide military tactics for their objectives and assign resources; to do so is a reflection of deep ignorance and arrogance. I’m reminded of episodes of Star Trek (The Original Series), in which Captain Kirk would bark orders at Scotty or Spock, telling them to fix a problem after he’s been told it’s impossible to do so; he would then order them to do so anyway, i.e., pull a rabbit out a hat. In reality, the role of a commander is to be advised of facts and presented with options. One of the few Hollywood productions to get this right was “Apollo 13”, in which Flight Director Gene Kranz polls the team for reports on status and advice on options, and upon the basis of the information he’s received he makes decisions on which course of action to pursue.

As of this writing there is a crisis in Honduras which very well illustrates this pretext of principles. Only last month POTUS Obama declared that he would take pains not to be perceived as “meddling” in the affairs of Iran or other nations, only expressing admonitions about how Iran should not brutalize their citizens for rioting in protest of their sham democracy. The principle of not meddling does not apply to the government of Honduras after they legally ousted their Chavista protégé President; in that crisis, the Hondurans have been punished by the withholding of OAS funds on the basis of the principle of upholding democracy.

In contrast, Iranian elections under the Mullahs have always been a sham, and thus any claim of "democracy" in that country is a hollow lie. Surely the principles of upholding democracy are more urgently in need of support for Iran than Honduras. It appears to be a contradiction that the support of democracy is cited as the reason for meddling in Honduras whereas democracy-free Iran is not held to the that standard, and it is. The key to understanding this contradiction is that for Liberals and Democrats the principles they cite are entirely situational. What we’re left with is speculation as to their real motives. With the treatment of Iran vs. Honduras, I think POTUS Obama is eager to “hit the reset button” with our enemies because he believes that the poor relations between our countries are really the fault of past, mostly the Republican Administrations, whereas he casts a gimlet eye on any allies who had good relations with same. Further elucidation on POTUS Obama's motives are better explained by Noocyte in this post, and I am in agreement with the good points he makes.

Where we disagree is that Noocyte does POTUS Obama the courtesy of taking his words at face value, and concludes that the Obama policy is flawed on the basis of these principles in conflict. On the contrary, those principles are pretext and are therefore irrelevant, except insofar as they should be thrown back in the faces of the Liberals who hoist those high-minded banners to justify their policy choices.

Dropping some COIN on Afghanistan

The Christian Science Monitor has a couple of excellent articles (Part One and Part Two) on the hopeful developments and lingering challenges in the implementation of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations in the tribal regions of Afghanistan. Recommended reading, in that they lay out what appear to be the ingredients of a well-crafted COIN approach to the protection of civilian populations against the Taliban and al Qaeda forces in their midst. As usual, there is substantial mistrust and the weight of centuries of less-than-inspiring history standing in the way of the locals welcoming the Coalition forces who assume the risk of moving into close proximity with those populations (versus huddling in heavily fortified bases and emerging only to wreck things and kill folks)...but not so close that they violate traditions of privacy. Very tricky business, that.

Still, our people seem to be hitting all of the important marks: they are consulting with the local Tribal elders, staying visible, asking how they can help, and showing a willingness and capability to deliver on their promises. The results are, as expected, uneven, but this is not something which happens overnight. This passage in particular made an impression on me as a fine example of how COIN operations really begin to gain traction:

The troops admit there are no easy solutions. In the meantime, some soldiers are finding their own ways to win hearts and minds.

Pfc. Joshua Lipori has decided to learn Pashto, the prevalent language here. While standing on guard duty one day at a combat outpost in Sayadabad, he practices his fledgling Pashto with some passing locals.

"Tsenga Ye?" or "How are you?" he asks. "Jore Ye?" – "Are you doing OK?"

The Afghans stare in wide-eyed astonishment at the foreign soldier speaking their tongue. They whisper to each other in Pashto.

"See," one says to the other, "there are some good Americans."

This is a modest but meaningful example of how COIN operations are really more about building relationships then they are about killing insurgents (though the latter can help with the former...which in turn can yield actionable intelligence for more effectively performing the former, etc., etc.).

Of course, the Predator drone attacks continue. They have a very special importance in the "Clear" part of "Clear-Hold-Build." These should continue, but with extra-special caution, owing to the even greater sensitivity of tribal Afghan (predominantly Pashtun) people to 'collateral damage' than that which exists in Iraq. Beginnings are such delicate times, and we have scarcely begun to crinkle the paper on the surface of this onion we must peel. But for every tribal sura we can win over, for every village which sees its people breathe easier in the absence of enemies we are seen to be pursuing and neutralizing resolutely and successfully, we move incrementally closer to the tipping point which was passed in Iraq.

And there are signs that this combination of approaches is having the desired effects on our enemies in theater:

"I haven't ever seen this kind of language from senior Al Qaeda commanders before," said Daniel Lev, who works for MEMRI. "In general, Al Qaeda speaks in a very triumphant tone," but in the new book Al-Libi speaks of the group's dire straits and serious problems, Lev added.

"Such an admission of distress on the part of a senior Al Qaeda commander makes this a very unique book in terms of the author."

The signs of fragmentation and distress which come across in the aforementioned new book by senior al Qaeda leadership attests to the degradation of that organization by the relentless attrition which we have been visiting on its organizational structure. The more demoralized and --alas!-- desperate and brutal the Taliban/al Qaeda nexus becomes, the less they will be able to rely on the silence and passivity of those locals with whose lives they have become so interwoven. Even the title of this new al Qaeda book, "Guide to the Laws Regarding Muslim Spies," points to the paranoia spreading through the minds of our enemies. This is an advantage which can be greatly expanded through the implementation of intelligent PSYOPS. The need to vet recruits, spy on the membership (and on the spies!), and periodically (and not always accurately) purge suspected double-agents greatly slows the tempo and effectiveness with which al Qaeda and the Taliban can mount and maintain their attacks. It also signals weakness to those who are standing on the sidelines, trying to decide which is the stronger horse. Like Napoleon said, "never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." True enough. But when the opportunity arises to magnify the scope of that mistake, it would be foolish to squander it. I can just imagine the havoc we could wreak with a few carefully-placed bits of disinformation...

The more we can trap al Qaeda and the Taliban in the vise between ordnance and ostracism, the greater our chances of repeating the spectacular reversals we won in Iraq. But it would be perilously unrealistic to think that we've done more than saddle up the camel on this one ("watch out, they spit").

Breaking: Cyber Attack on US Federal, South Korean Sites (UPDATED)

Via the AP comes this sobering story about an unusually sophisticated and tenacious DDoS attack on several notable web sites:

The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, according to officials inside and outside the government. Some of the sites were still experiencing problems Tuesday evening. Cyber attacks on South Korea government and private sites also may be linked, officials there said.

This is a very worrisome business, and both the timing and the targets lend themselves to some very uncomfortable speculations as to possible sources of the attack. For all the brayings out of Pyongyang about 'fireworks' for the Fourth of July, the North Koreans "only" popped off a few mid-range missiles. Is is possible that the main thrust of their attack was not chemical/kinetic at all? If so, then it was a clever if foolhardy feint on Kim's part. Clever, in that the US deployed missile tracking hardware to the region, poised to interdict anything which threatened Hawaii or any other interests of the US or its allies, and thus would have been successfully misdirected. Foolhardy in that a traceable attack on US Government computer systems would be difficult for even the Obama Administration to treat as anything but a blatant act of war.

This is only speculation at this point, and should be taken with a shaker of salt. The bar should be set very high for making any accusations, since the consequences could not fail to be dire.

UPDATE: Here is a follow-up on the investigation into these incidents. It highlights the difficulties in tracing the ultimate origins of the attacks (not to mention who gave the go-ahead and signed the checks). I'm thinking plausible deniability, here. If the provenance of the plot can be credibly held to be uncertain, then the range of responses remains rather broader than it would be if a clearly demonstrable hostile act, with Li'l Kim as its author, could be unambiguously established.

As much as I would love to see that demented homunculus on the receiving end of a JDAM, I also recognize that a hot war in the region would be Very Bad News. Almost as bad as having such a blatant act of aggression go publicly unanswered.

For those with eyes to see, though, the intentions and capabilities of the Putz from Pyongyang have become rather more clear. If (big "if") this should result in firmer ties with South Korea, and perhaps a less laissez-faire stance from Beijing, then it would be worth it to keep this on a cooler, more covert tip.

If nothing else, I hope it spurs more aggressive attention to cyber-war countermeasures!

Bajíos y Honduras

Handy thing about being bilingual: double the puns.

"Honduras" means "depths," or "deep waters." All the more ironic, given the shallows ("bajíos") in which the thinking and coverage (such as it's been) of this country have languished.

When leftist President Manuel Zelaya defied the judgment of his country's supreme court and pushed for a referendum on changing the constitution to allow for the removal of term limits, it was a gambit right out of the Hugo Chavez playbook. The law of the land had been pronounced, and the Executive of those laws was choosing to ignore it. Further, when the head of the military refused to participate in distributing that referendum's ballots, Zelaya just up and fired him. None of this boded especially well for Zelaya's respect for democratic institutions, an opinion which was shared by the Honduran legislature, which voted to have Zelaya removed from office for violating the trust which had been placed in him by the Honduran people.

If the execution of that ouster was handled in a needlessly ham-handed and arguably itself illegal fashion (military personnel rousting the villain from bed and shuffling his pajama-clad carcass onto a plane for Costa Rica in the dead of night, ferchrissakes), this does not take away from the fact that the aforementioned military immediately handed power back to the civilian leadership. Further, that leadership has even offered to consider holding elections early, rather than declare some sort of "emergency" and clutch onto its newly-wrested power.

Some "coup."

Then we get Barack "I won't meddle in the affairs of other nations" Obama coming out, promptly and strongly, for the "restoration of democracy" in Honduras, and suspending aid until the power-grabbing Chavista in question is restored to his office...the one which the other branches of Honduran government had acted within their laws and declared him unfit to occupy. Naturally, then, the near-universal media consensus coalesced around the cries of Zelaya supporters demanding their guy back, drawing sickening parallels to the brutal oppression of demonstrators in Iran after the outright theft of the election there by theocratic thugs. Shortly thereafter the Organization of American States and the UN (those bastions of democratic ideals and justice around the globe) declared that Honduras will be on their mierda list until the status quo ante is restored. The government of Honduras just as promptly told these bodies to pound fine white sand. Gutsy move, that, since Honduras can scarcely afford to lose the aid, but the only one which preserves Honduran national sovereignty from erosions external and internal. And they seem to be putting their money where their mouth is.

As wrong-headed and dangerous as I perceive many policies of the Obama Administration to be, they have generally made a certain kind of sense to me. This one had me scratching my head. Why on earth would the POTUS see our nation as having a dog in this fight? It's not as if Zelaya exactly had clean hands in his purported championing of the downtrodden. The idea that this was some sort of tactic to curry favor with Chavez, ahead of some overture to come, seemed a bit too pat and partisan for my tastes (though I haven't ruled it out altogether). The whole "masked soldiers in the dead of night" thing rightly arouses discomfort, but every other aspect of the ouster struck just the right tone of lawfulness to get out most of the stain. So what gives?

It was this post from the Huffpo which brought it together for me:

A democratically elected president has been ousted by a military strongly supported and trained by the US government as apparent punishment for his adoption of progressive ideals. Where is the outrage, or at the least, the intrigue? Where are the solidarity movements?

Well, here are all the ingredients: mistrust of anything touched by the US military, check. Reflexive sympathy for even a transparently illegitimate regime, so long as it adheres to "Progressive," statist ideals, check. Concomitant repudiation of any government which lives even close to the center (let alone the Right), checkarooney. Throw in a dose of untenable moral equivalence, and the formula is complete.

Look, I get that Obama and his supporters believe in consolidating the business of a nation in the operations of its central government, rather than in the hurly-burly of free markets and federalism. I understand that there will tend to be a measure of sympathy for governments which operate along similar sets of values, and will even grant the good intentions of those who yearn for social justice (even as I recoil from the redistributionist policies which flow from those intentions).

But this is one which the Obama Administration has gotten flat-out dead Wrong. It is an epic fail, borne of the most superficial reading of a sloppy and unappealingly handled but ultimately lawful execution of a sovereign nation's governance. It can very defensibly be said to have been none of our business. However, if one were inclined to "meddle," then it should have been in the opposite direction. After all, as Krauthammer put it: "Whenever you find yourself on the side of Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro Twins, you ought to re-examine your assumptions."

"We shall not sleep, though poppies grow..."

This is just good sense, and good counterinsurgency.

For too long, the chief modality employed for depriving the Taliban of the revenues from opium production (not to mention protecting the lives of countless addicts abroad) has been the eradication of poppy fields. Trouble is that the main victims of that policy were the poor farmers who would monetize the poppy crop, owing to their ability to store that crop for long periods of time, and sell it off to feed their families (as previously discussed in the comments section of this post):

So, instead of torching the livelihoods of rural farmers, the emphasis is shifting to interdicting the products further down the supply chain, while simultaneously providing aid and instruction in the production of alternate crops. Thus, the farmers are not alienated to the point that they throw in with the extremists, while the poisons and profits are denied the true villains in this travesty. Smart.

The libertarian in me is strongly in favor of judicious legalization of recreational substances. The Sisyphean effort to regulate behavior is a costly and destructive boondoggle which destroys more lives than it saves, and squanders precious resources for a doomed and wrong-headed goal. However, the psychologist in me cannot deny the recent uptick in the number of clients who labor under their addictions to pernicious and ignoble mind-killers in the opiate family, owing at least in part to cheap and plentiful supplies of the "good" brown heroin (as opposed to the black tarry stuff from Mexico) in recent years. Any project which simultaneously makes it more difficult to maintain a multiple bag-per-day habit, while also starving the miscreants who throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls counts as a win-win in my book.

As for the costs involved in aiding Afghan farmers to transition from poppy to some other crop (which may be less profitable by a wide margin, but which allows them to come in out of the cold), they are non-trivial in an absolute sense. However, given the obscene excesses of spending and debt with which the Obama Administration seems hell-bent on saddling our grandchildren, this at least has the rare distinction of appearing to be money well-spent, and a drop in the reservoir, at that.

The Streets of Tehran

I've not blogged on the goings-on in Tehran, both out of life-business, but also out of a numb fascination which has daily chased the words right out of me. The best I could manage was to change the colors of my blog to the green of solidarity with the protesters. I watched as the outrageously clumsy and transparent election-rigging took its course. I looked on as the Iranian people took to the streets, at grave personal risk (and, in numbers which are proving impossible to tally, at the cost of their very lives). I took stock of the mettle of Mousavi, the unlikely lighting-rod of this popular uprising (since he can hardly be seen as a 'reformer' in any sense that would be meaningful in the West). I have watched the increasingly brutal repression perpetrated by the regime's thugs on people crying out for justice and freedom and self-expression.

I have waited through the Obama Administration's timid and timorous declamations for something approximating an honorable statement of support for the Iranian people with whose dictators it has shown such baffling eagerness to "engage."

To be clear, I do not think that it is appropriate for the American President to comment on the results of Iran's election; that is an internal matter to Iran, and staking out a strong position on it would indeed constitute "meddling." Still, although the Head of State could not come out thus, the Legislature quite laudably stepped up with a clear statement of condemnation for the crackdown on dissent (with the tediously predictable exception of Ron Paul, of course). There is merit to the argument that too strong a position by the Executive in support of the opposition to the regime in Tehran would feed into the propaganda of US Imperialism (though it can hardly be seen as needing much additional fuel).

However, the Obama Administration waited altogether too long, and its statements have been entirely too "measured" for my tastes, in the matter of stating support for free expression of dissent without fear of violent repression. We need not have endorsed Mousavi, nor offered speculations (however well-grounded) on the mechanics of Iranian electoral procedures to have stood strongly behind those who sought to have their voices heard. The failure to have done so right from the outset is an enduring shame on our Nation and the ideals for which it purportedly stands.

I have no idea how all this will turn out. I do not pretend to be able to prognosticate about what form the Iranian regime will ultimately take in the wake of all this. I do know that this situation has revealed and amplified some very deep fissures within the Iranian power structure, and probably irrevocably damaged the veneer of infallibility which the clerical body at the top has at least nominally enjoyed since 1979. It is likely that some sorts of accommodations will have to take place, lest the Mullahs be forced to set up the sort of frank dictatorship which they have worked so hard to conceal under the guise of a wafer-thin "Republic."

Michael Ledeen sums up the situation ably:

Those who think they can foresee the outcome of this revolutionary war have greater confidence in their prophetic powers than I. I don’t think Mousavi or Khamenei has any such confidence; they are fighting it out, as they must. Victory or defeat can come about slowly or rapidly, the result of cunning, courage or accident, and most likely a combination of all three. One thing seems certain: the Iranian people were right when they realized that nobody in the outside world would help them. They’re on their own.

Which is indeed a great pity, and a terrible stain on our national virtue.

Indeed. And may the gods save them...and us all.

Mr. Zawahiri? Meet Ms. Miranda...

[by Mr.Hengist]

It's long been one of the defining ways in which hawks and doves have differentiated their framing of the post-9/11 world, with hawks arguing that 9/11 was an act of war as opposed to a criminal act. The differentiation between the two is neither academic nor semantic as it goes the to the heart of the ensuing disagreements between the two camps on the strategies employed by the Bush Administration.

The notion that doves would have us advise captured terrorists that they are entitled to Miranda rights has long been derided by hawks, and rightfully so. Acts of war are not covered by the American criminal code of law. Nevertheless, in accordance with their fantasies, POTUS Obama has reportedly instructed the FBI to issue enemy combatants a reading of Miranda rights - which apparently includes the right to remain silent.

I suppose this will give a rhetorical boost to their argument that harsh interrogation of detainees in the GWOT are inappropriate, but this is only a policy change and neither adds to nor subtracts from the bodies of law governing these detainees. Parenthetically, it's little wonder then that the Obama Administration thought it inconsequential to reveal our catalog of allowed interrogation techniques; Miranda gives these evildoers the option to simply opt out of talking.

At any rate, if the lawyer quoted in the Weekly Standard article is to be believed and these detainees may soon be prosecuted in United States courts of law, the logical extension of this policy change is to apply the U.S. laws regarding the sanctity of the chain of custody. Imagine a world in which U.S. Armed Forces are issued little plastic baggies into which they must drop and seal evidence. In a war zone. During a firefight. In the meantime, exploitation will have to wait, as these baggies are transferred to a stateside FBI crime lab or evidence room.

Does that sound insane? That's what hawks thought about reading Miranda to terrorists, and yet here we are. In fact, only a couple of months ago POTUS Obama assured Steve Kroft and the American people on "60 Minutes" that Miranda for detainees was ridiculous. As Hugh Hewitt would say, every Obama promise has an expiration date.

Balance Tilting Against the Taliban?

This afternoon, I was listening to NPR and heard a report on the "new" tactics being employed by US Special Forces operators in the tribal regions of Afghanistan. The report described public works projects, outreach to tribal elders, protection of civilians, and training of indigenous security forces. If none of this sounds particularly new to any of you out there, then do keep in mind that this was NPR. Any clear acknowledgment that this is precisely the sort of COIN strategy which had been implemented so very successfully under the Bush Administration in Iraq would have robbed the Obama Administration of its credit for a Bold New Approach in the 'Stans. Context is everything.

Still, I have long thought that some variant of the COIN doctrine which has been so effectively applied in Iraq could be adapted to take root in Afghanistan and Pakistan, provided the local conditions were taken into account and the strategy adjusted accordingly, and if the Jihadis would over-play their brutality hands as egregiously as they had in Iraq. Encouragingly (if tragically!), there have recently been growing signs that the latter may be occurring in Taliban-controlled areas of the 'Stans:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Villagers are rising up against the Taliban in a remote corner of northern Pakistan, a grass-roots rebellion that underscores the shift in the public mood against the militants and a growing confidence to confront them. More than a thousand villagers from the district of Dir have been fighting Taliban militants since Friday, when a Taliban suicide bomber detonated his payload during prayer time at a mosque, killing at least 30 villagers.

The Pakistani government is taking advantage of this tentative groundswell against the militants and gangsters and terrorists loosely assembled under the rubric of "Taliban," but they have their work cut out for them. Resentment against the atrocities perpetrated by Islamist militants is indeed growing...but that does not mean that the fiercely independent, downright xenophobic peoples of the tribal regions have any more love to spare for the interference of distant bigwigs in Islamabad or Kabul...let alone the US. It will indeed be a long row to hoe for the Pakistani government and military to convince the Tribes that their interests will be respected, their lives and livelihoods protected, and their insurrections supported against reprisals. There is a lot of unlearning to be done there.

Meanwhile, on the Afghan side of the border, Army Rangers and other operators are, as previously mentioned, hoeing that row as we speak. The extent to which the Tribal elders feel respected, their Lashkars backed up, and the influx of replacements for the miscreants they succeed in dispatching is successfully stemmed is going to make all the difference. Extremely valuable operational memory from Iraq is available to be deployed in service of this end, and the leadership of General Petraeus and his chosen officers should not be underestimated.

All in all, these are some tentatively promising signs on the COIN front in a far more complex operational environment than it has faced to date.

Que Sarah, Sarah...

I'm probably just tilting at eco-friendly, bird-dodging, serenely sustainable wind mills here.

When it comes to Sarah Palin, after all, it seems people's minds are pretty well made up, and no number of pesky facts nor nettlesome contexts will make a whit of difference. She's a theocratic zealot bumpkin wolf-killing book-banner who misuses the privileges of her office and callously neglects her errant and altogether too-numerous children...for Jesus. Right?

Well, maybe not so much. Seems her opponents just can't seem to gin up ethics violations, outright illegalities, and personal peccadilloes as fast as she keeps getting cleared of them (at considerable and still-mounting taxpayer expense).

It's a good thing that a compliantly hostile media machine isn't busy blazing every lurid accusation across the clouds like the Bat-Signal, and allowing every subsequent refutation to sink with nary a bubble, because...oh...wait...

Say, did you hear that Sarah Palin has bed slippers made from Real Puppies?

Chaka, When the Walls Fell...

So, we've got the disgruntled denizens of EUtopia voting down their Leftoid governments, right and center...while here in the Home of the Free, our sickening slide toward socialism seems only to be accelerating like a plunge down a thousand-foot waterfall.

That's it. I'm following the sleestaks to the nearest pylon.