Fight Fire with Cool

Via Instapundit, this outrageously gnarly firefighting recon vehicle just overloaded my Kool buffers. Practical or not (and it appears to be very much so, for certain specific applications), something this bad-ass simply needs to be photographed bounding out of some arboreal conflagration in a shower of sparks. James Cameron, take note.

Never Let Waste Go To a Crisis

Nice little piece by Nina Easton in (of all places!) Time Magazine. In it, Easton notes that, despite historical precedents which would incline one to believe the contrary, the current shambles which is the American economy has, by and large not driven vast numbers of people to seek succor at the teat of vastly increased government spending programs.

"Audacity" was a catchy campaign theme, but it's less attractive as a governing principle. The all-important swing voters who decide elections are nervous about dramatic expansions of the Federal Government--even and especially in this time of economic distress. As it turns out, this financial crisis was not the call to bold action that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said shouldn't "go to waste." Quite the opposite: if he doesn't want his presidency to be held hostage by a string of nail-biter votes in Congress, Obama needs to recognize that he overestimated the public's appetite for taxpayer-funded solutions.

 I do think Easton is onto something here. Where the New Deal and the Great Society gained quite durable (if debatably healthsome) traction by offering the promise of remedies for the common American in difficult times, the ambitious Obama agenda of pumping up government and injecting it into greater swathes of the private sector have little to offer the man/woman on the street. Quite the contrary, as Americans witness the grim spectacle of  a lumbering jobless recovery, logarithmically expanding debts and deficits, and the "promise" of inflated taxation to provide vaporware revenues in a steadily deflating currency, the thinking which underlies these practices has been losing market share rather than gaining it.

This is a point to be considered very seriously by any Democrats who hope to hold onto their majority in the upcoming midterms.  These are precisely the circumstances under which one would expect desperate people to look to their government to swoop in and solve their problems. The fact that there is a far smaller-than-anticipated appetite for such top-down solutions presents an opportunity for the Democratic party to read some pretty stark tea leaves (pun intentional) and swing toward the center as it was forced to do after its rout in 1994. However, I have no particularly strong sense that the Obama-Pelosi-Reid axis possesses the canny pragmatism which typified their Clintonian forebears.

Similarly, I hope that Republicans, reflecting on the party's loss of focus after the "Contract With America," will look very carefully at the calls for a "big tent" approach which would have them compromise too strenuously on matters of leaner government and fiscal conservatism. While the idea of an ideological "Purity test" makes me uneasy as a goal state for the GOP, the fact of its proposal can and should serve as an important call to action for a party which has ceded far too much political territory to the centralizing, tax-and-spend philosophies of its adversaries.

While the Tea Partiers and Libertarians may push the envelope a mite too far for my tastes (and they surely do), they offer unmistakable evidence that a continued blurring of the lines between the Republican and Democratic parties will not be tolerated. Rather than the "civil war" and "fracturing" of the GOP which so many Liberals so gleefully declare, I see this as a healthy dialogue taking place within the ranks of those for whom free markets and free people can offer a legitimate alternative to the central planning. It is a conversation which will, it is hoped, delineate the degree to which the GOP chooses to stake its claim to a true and valid antithesis to the thesis that government-controlled "fairness" is a viable organizing framework for a liberal, mercantile republic.

If Easton's observations are as on-target as I suspect that they are, then there is fertile ground in the American electorate for the synthesis which could emerge from this process.

Counter-Counterinsurgency

Obama's speech at West Point, and the politically calculated half-measures it proposed, are the occasion for the latest spot-on post by "Doctor Zero" over at Hot Air. Counterinsurgency is a Long Game, a dogged demonstration of dedication and integrity which is meant to woo a population from the camp of our foes to the circle of our friends. The President's dismal delineation of time-tables and "exit strategies" (Gods! How I have come to detest that phrase) signals the very antithesis of COIN's spirit. His short-changing of troop levels and characteristically naive reliance on NATO commitments (oxymoron spoken here) to make up the difference is nothing short of a declaration that victory (perish the thought that he should ever utter that word) is a long shot against which to hedge, rather than an unconditional prerequisite for joining the fight.

But, as Doctor Zero articulates with the usual blistering clarity, such is the monotonic tenor of the Obama presidency:

Every moment of the “historic” Obama presidency has been wrapped in the rhetoric of failure and decline. A nation slipping into endless debt, to buy off the social concerns of the moment, cannot help but feel helpless and doomed… because it wouldn’t be so quick to mortgage a future it believed in. To accept the leadership of Barack Obama, either in Afghanistan or at home, is to accept that triumph is a fantasy, and achievement is a relic of the past, so the only rational course is carefully managed decline.

 Indeed. Whether it is the ham-handed intrusion of government into the auto industry and banking system, or  the on-going attempt to effect a fateful phagocytosis of the health insurance market, this administration has broadcast with unerring consistency the message that the proper management of our lives and resources are so far beyond the ken of the "average" citizen that nothing short of Central Planning stands the faintest chance of achieving the goals of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Doctor Zero quite rightly makes the analogy between the confidence and vigor of a civilian population, and the morale of a military force. Per Obama, both are in need of careful control from the top, so as to achieve the ultimate goal of an orderly and placid mediocrity. Try as I have (and I have tried mightily!), I can find no evidence that he believes this Nation can or should aspire to anything higher.

Needless to say, I disagree. And, as should be abundantly clear by now, I have officially abandoned the effort to give this administration the benefit of the doubt.

A properly resourced and inspired COIN force can achieve wonders, once it has shown itself willing and able to accept elevated risk, and to "walk the walk" for the sake of a host nation's population. An under-resourced and ambivalent COIN force sends the message to would-be insurgents and collaborators that they had best keep their powder dry, against the day of their inevitable abandonment.

So it goes with a people and their president. Tell us, in a host of ways, that we are ineffectual and in need of paternalistic control, and you offer us a choice: bow low before the beneficent State and accept its putative boons, or be moved by the affront to reclaim our dignity and repudiate your condescension. This American "insurgency" has taken the form of Tea Parties, raucous town hall meetings, and a rapidly growing grass-roots movement, self-organizing around the reclaiming of the muscular and pragmatic optimism which lies at the heart of the American consciousness. I live in hope (the real kind) that this insurgency will triumph at home....and in dread that its dark counterpart will do the same in the shadow of the Hindu Kush.

On Open Hands and Closed-Fisting

Needless to say, November has not been a banner month for posting this year. Tonight won't be making any significant dents in that.

However, I didn't want to let this post from Commentary magazine's blog, "Contentions" go un-linked. In it , Max Boot reflects on the altogether ineffectual approach of the Obama administration (the phrase still makes me cringe) toward the Mullahs of Iran, viz their nuclear program.

Obama’s efforts at glad-handing have been interpreted, correctly, as evidence of American weakness and a further spur to nuclear development. Khameini and Ahmadinejad & Co. aren’t even bothering to be polite as they brush aside offers, such as the one to export their uranium for enrichment abroad. They wear their contempt for the West quite openly because they are not afraid of suffering any repercussions.

Boot argues that the naive and toothless approach of this administration toward the Iranian threat has --as Liberal Utopian fantasies so consistently do-- only served to increase the probability of armed conflict by emboldening those for whom polite conversation offers nothing so much as the opportunity to arm for a chance at the dominance which they see as having been unilaterally ceded. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, When you take force off the table, you invite others to take the table by force.

It is a lesson which this administration seems hell-bent on learning the very, very hard way.

Thoughts on Fort Hood

I've been monitoring the coverage of the murderous rampage at Fort Hood (I steadfastly refuse to call it a "Tragedy."). I am as struck by the eagerness on the Right to declare it an unalloyed act of Islamist terrorism, as I am by the refusal on the Left to speak aloud the idea that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's religion played any role at all. In the former case, Hasan's contacts with known Islamist radicals are correctly highlighted, In the latter, his obvious signs of mental illness are emphasized. Both sides commit the error of allowing ideological bias to corrupt their perception (let alone their interpretation) of the available evidence.

It may well prove that Hassan was gripped by a delusional system which took the form of murderous religious grandiosity (clearly there were indications of thought disorder of increasing severity over time, and religious themes are common in delusional processes). It may be that a kind of vicarious traumatization did in fact take place in the course of his work with combat veterans, resulting in such a pronounced decompensation even in the absence of first-hand trauma in battle (i.e., exacerbating a pre-existing mental instability). These may prove to be legitimately mitigating circumstances in the eventual outcome of the case (vs. the steely-eyed, clear-thinking fanatic scenario, for example).

However, even granting these possibilities, the willful exclusion of the role which Hasan’s Islamopathy (as in “Osama bin Laden is not so much a Muslim as an Islamopath,” It’s a term I coined the other day, of which I’m growing increasingly fond) is itself a kind of madness. If ever there was a glaring example of how political correctness paralyzes the processes of rational thought, it is this. Whether Hasan was shouting “Allahu Akhbar” as a battle cry, or as a prayer to preserve his soul in what even he must have seen as a probably fatal act, the fact remains that his religion (and his demented interpretation thereof) was somewhere in the mix. To insist otherwise is willfully to exclude the evidence of one’s senses.

The latter is by no means an exclusive proclivity of ideologues on the Right or the Left, to be sure. But I have noted with dismay that the comments I have read on the Right do factor in his mental illness (even if they discount any exculpatory value it may have to the matter at hand), while their counterparts on the Left have widely been characterized by a deafening silence on the matter of Hasan's religion...except to note that it may spur the widespread anti-Muslim backlash which even 9/11 conspicuously failed to bring about.

Events such as these serve to underscore that we live in times in which bias and bigotry and willful blindness can both speed the bullets with more or less equally devastating effect.

Whose Party is it Anyway?

Time is short, and I'll likely have more to say about this later, but I was just struck by a tire-iron of an irony. Have you noticed that the very same people who were going on about how the Tea Parties were "astroturfed" passion plays put on by the GOP, are now saying that these events and the movement they represent are evidence that the GOP is engaged in a "circular firing squad," that it is flying apart and being undone by the "radicals" in its midst? How are we to square this circle?

Can it simply be that the populist, small-government, Party-scorning movement in Conservative thought is simply a force unto itself, which is making both Liberals and establishment Republicans just about equally nervous? What might it say about those who live in a world in which this is a bad thing?

A Double Cross to Bear

Earlier, I linked to Dick Cheney's very excellent October 21 speech to the Center for Security Policy. Portions of this speech centered on the Obama administration's "dithering" on the question of how best to implement Gen. McCrystal's counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy for Afghanistan (mainly re: how many troops to send and how soon to send them). Embedded in the subsequent back-and-forth on that speech is an example of the sort of chicanery which is merely the latest in a series of deal-breakers for any vestige of a benefit of a doubt I may once have been inclined to give this POTUS' administration.

As summarized by this post by Stephen Hayes from the Weekly Standard, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' peevish prevarication went something like this:

"What Vice President Cheney calls 'dithering,' President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and to the American public," said Gibbs. "I think we've all seen what happens when somebody doesn't take that responsibility seriously." Gibbs went on, calling Cheney's comments "curious" and claiming that a request for troops from General David McKiernan during the final year of the Bush administration "sat on desks in this White House, including the vice president's, for more than eight months."

Gibbs is saying here that the Bush Administration --which, presumably, did not take the "solemn responsibility" to the troops as seriously as his successor is currently running out precious clock cycles to do-- let requests for more troops sit idly by, lacking a clear strategy for the mission of those troops. Pretty serious stuff. Too bad the charge bears not the slightest resemblance to what actually transpired, as cited by Hayes:

"The idea that we just sat on our f--ing asses--it's really a slander," says one senior Bush administration official. "It's just not credible that we didn't take this seriously."

In fact, the Bush administration did ask those questions. From mid-September to mid-November 2008, a National Security Council team, under the direction of General Doug Lute, conducted an exhaustive review of Afghanistan policy. The interagency group included high-ranking officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, the office of the director of national intelligence, the office of the vice president, the Pentagon, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its objective was to assess U.S. -policy on Afghanistan, integrating a simultaneous military review being conducted by CENTCOM, so as to present President Bush with a series of recommendations on how best to turn around the deteriorating situation there. The Lute group met often--sometimes twice daily--in a secure conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. (The group used the room so frequently that other national security working groups that had been meeting there were required to find other space including, occasionally, the White House Situation Room.)

The Lute review asked many questions and provided exhaustive answers not only to President Bush, but also to the Obama transition team before the inauguration. "General Jones was briefed on the results of the Lute review, and that review answered many of the questions that Rahm Emanuel says were never asked," says Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley. Jones and Hadley discussed the review, and Lute gave Jones a detailed PowerPoint presentation on his findings. Among the recommendations: a civilian surge of diplomats and other non-military personnel to the country, expedited training for the Afghan National Army, a strong emphasis on governance and credible elections, and, most important, a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy.

Jones asked Hadley not to release the results of the Lute review so that his boss would have more flexibility when it came time to provide direction for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Bush officials reasoned that Obama was more likely to heed their advice if he could simply adopt their recommendations without having to acknowledge that they came from the Bush White House. So Hadley agreed. (emph. added)

 Got that? An exhaustive, comprehensively interdepartmental review was conducted, comprising myriad meetings, and arriving at recommendations which bear a striking resemblance to those at which Obama's own review arrived. Further, those findings were offered to the incoming administration sub rosa, with the full expectation that  Obama's team could claim credit for them, and implement them seamlessly, and without the political complications of accepting (and having his flexibility constrained by) his predecessor's policy recommendations. See also this quote, via Power Line, from Kristopher Harrison, who served as Chief of Staff to the Counselor of the Secretary of State during the Bush administration, and was intimately involved in the review process for the strategy in Afghanistan:

It is also true that Obama's transition team asked us to hold the Afghanistan review findings, a request to which President Bush acquiesced because (as it was relayed to me) he did not want to box the new president into a narrow set of options. In March, when Obama announced his new Afghanistan strategy, I did not notice a single change from the new plan that we had given him...only Obama did not resource it with enough troops.

And how does this Great Uniter repay this professionalism and graciousness? Why, of course, by taking endless swipes at his predecessor's policies, and accusing him of squandering the chance to turn the Af-Pak theater around while "wasting" time wresting victory from the jaws of defeat (and landing some vicious body-blows on al Qaeda) in Iraq.

Whatever. Politics is politics, and class is optional. Obama plainly still believes that he can score political points by trashing the Bush administration, and he is probably right...up to a point. That point begins where the interests of the United States, of its troops and its allies become endangered by political maneuvering at the expense of substantive action on vital issues. On that frontier, Obama is demonstrably floundering.

The stated (and endlessly re-stated) rationale for Obama's sitting on the decision to deploy more troops to Afghanistan lies with the results of that country's demonstrably tainted national elections. Makes a certain kind of sense, since one of the goals of COIN is the fortification of a host nation's confidence in its government by providing security and stability and civil affairs support. If that government is viewed as illegitimate, then there are hard limits on the amount of good which COIN operators can bring about in the field. Therein lies a not altogether incoherent argument for waiting till the the run-off election, and coordinating operations with the hopefully more well-regarded government which emerges from it.

And if we were talking about just about any place besides Afghanistan, that would be a convincing argument. But we're not, and if there is one thing about Afghanistan which has held true for decades, it is that any central government is going to be viewed with suspicion and/or hostility by the denizens of the largely unpaved hinterlands which make up the majority of the country's territory. "Legitimate government" is practically an oxymoron in the average Afghan's eyes, so the niceties of electoral politics in Kabul amount to less than a hill of rotted poppies. 

The task is not so much to shore up a government which is generally viewed as legitimate, as it is to establish pockets of security and the concrete promise of prosperity, by crushing the Taliban and its al Qaeda proteges, denying them re-entry into the communities from which we chase them, and training locals to shoulder the burdens of picking up where we, in due course, leave off. It is from those deeds that the legitimacy of the government which partners with us will arise, rather than descend from some abstraction of a polity, far away in an alien city, whose words the villagers and tribal elders of the primordial hills and steppes are somehow supposed to take on faith, pending the delivery on the promises of foreigners.

Naturally, however, this concept is apt to be just as foreign to an inveterate statist like Obama.

It is, however, worse than even such naivete. As per Mr. Hengists's superb and destined to be oft-cited post on the "pretext of principles," this whole matter of waiting on Afghanistan's elections does not bear scrutiny as anything but a smoke-screen, a cover story for what is more properly viewed as a political matter for internal consumption. Obama is struggling with the question of how to create political cover for the implementation (or  parsing) of a policy which both his hand-picked general and his predecessor's team have determined to have the lowest probability of failure in "The Necessary War."  As the Left wrings its hands about troop deployments, and the Right continues to be embarrassingly supportive of  the policy which Obama articulated back in March, the President feels his hands to be tied...and he is loath to take responsibility to cut the knot.

And so he plays the blame game, shifting responsibility hither and yon, while even NATO grows restive at the delay in declaring a clear course of action.

If there is one thing at which the Bush Administration displayed a singular talent (probably to a fault), it was absorbing the vicious and mendacious attacks of its foes. The Obama team's crass and dishonest attempt to shift its indecision onto its predecessors is hardly the worst political stunt in the history of the Republic, and it is a double-cross which --for all of Cheney's characteristic piss and vinegar in response-- the Bush team is uniquely well-prepared to bear. But it is the brave and long-suffering service-people in Afghanistan (to say nothing of the Afghans themselves!) who stand to be counted as collateral damage in this beltway boogie.

And that is simply inexcusable.

Campaigner In Chief

Scathing (and, thus, fitting) little Telegraph editorial on the eternally stumping and chronically stumped Obama presidency. Not exactly a unique insight -- many have already noted that the Obama camp appears to be stuck in perpetual campaign mode, showing little stomach for the actual business of governing. But it tickled me this morning.

Especially liked this bit:

Late-night comics, although unabashedly liberal and at a loss last year as to how to poke fun at the rather humourless Mr Obama, are having a field day portraying him as a do-nothing prevaricator obsessed with his own image.

"President Obama agreed to commit an additional 40,000 troops to help fight Fox News," quipped NBC's Jay Leno. "Senior White House adviser David Axelrod told reporters that Fox News is just pushing a point of view. Well, yes, but at least they've got a point of view."

Zing!!

GITMO Alumni Update

Via the Long War Journal, comes this addition to the Annals of the Utterly Unsurprising. It seems that a fellow named Yousef Mohammed al Shihri, who was remanded from Club GITMO, into the careful custody of Saudi authorities in November 2007, got himself into a bit of a fire-fight on the Saudi-Yemeni border. This concluded his tenure on planet Earth, but not, apparently, before he'd had a chance to update his Jihadi resume:

Yousef Mohammed al Shihri was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in November 2007 along with thirteen other Saudi citizens. At least several of them have returned to al Qaeda’s ranks. One of those who rejoined al Qaeda is Said Ali al Shihri, who has become the deputy chief of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was reportedly involved in the September 2008 attack on the US embassy in Sanaa, Yemen. According to memos prepared at Gitmo, Said Ali al Shihri is Yousef Mohammed al Shihri’s brother. However, according to a report by Caryle Murphy in the Christian Science Monitor, Saudi authorities have said the two al Qaeda terrorists were brothers-in-law.

Regardless, Yousef and Said were relatives. And their stories demonstrate the pitfalls of the US government’s transfer and release decisions. Prior to their transfers, US intelligence officials at Guantanamo had determined that Said was “a known al Qaeda operative.” Moreover, when they inquired about Yousef, they found that he was considered one of the more dangerous Saudis held at Guantanamo.

Well, that certainly inspires confidence in the policies and procedures governing the disposition of these hapless prisoners of the Booosh Regime. Here's another choice tidbit:

That Yousef Mohammed al Shihri returned to jihad after being released from Guantanamo is not surprising given what the US government alleged about him in three memos written between Sept. 25, 2004 and Oct. 12, 2006.

The publicly-available documents do not include any record of al Shihri attending his combatant status review tribunal (CSRT) or administrative review board (ARB) hearings, so it is not clear if al Shihri attempted to answer all of the allegations against him. However, the US government’s memos note that when al Shihri was challenged with the inconsistencies in his cover story and his lies concerning his time in Afghanistan, he “flatly refused to cooperate” and “told more lies.” It is therefore possible that he never attended either his CSRT or ARB hearings, both of which required voluntary participation.

Refused to cooperate with the review process, eh? All right then, off to the care of the Saudis with you! Thus do the ranks of GITMO transfers and releases who have returned to the field of the Jihad grow still larger. And with around four months remaining till the deadline set by POTUS Obama's bold Executive Order for the closure of the Guantanamo facility, it is good to see that the process continues to remain in capable hands...oh, wait...

He's Making a List...

Disconcerting stuff. We face real enemies abroad, and it is dangerous folly to turn our attention inward to attack (and endlessly counter-attack) "enemies" here at home.

But this is characteristic of an administration whose focus seems eternally inward, resulting in an involuted, post-modern mess of a foreign/domestic policy. Obama's focus is all-but exclusively on the domestic, on the striving to re-make American society. All other priorities are seen as secondary, since there appears to be a sincere belief that a "properly" re-made America will fare very differently on the world stage.

Well, that much at least is true. But the changes which appear to be afoot do not bode well for allowing the luxury of extensive and expensive societal re-tooling. If nothing else (and there's *plenty* of "else!"), the geopolitical correlates of our gargantuan debt to China constitute a powerful lever on the course of our interests (e.g., how hard to push the PRC over sanctions on Iran...).

The choice of Classical columns for Obama's inauguration may have been more apt than I'd thought. Nero spends his political capital on a Stradivarius.

UPDATE: By the way, here's the text of that speech by Cheney to which Gibbsy chose to make his characteristically snide, waspish, and content-free retort. It is truly superb, and underscores the calamitous injustice which is routinely done to the caliber of leadership we'd had during the opening years of the Long War.

UPDATE 2:  Well, good to see that Joe Biden is on hand to offer a trenchant and substantial response to Cheney's very specific criticisms. I believe he later added "Oh yeah?!"