Music of the Day: Hey Pockey Way, The String Cheese Incident

Ah, western Sudan and the Darfur region--our next military/peace-keeping/nation-building destination if the Democrats (and Joe Biden, the self-admitted law-school plagiarist Senator from Delaware) have their way in the 2008 presidential election. Yes, Sudan. Darfur.

First thing: Where the hell is Sudan? Why, it's sandwiched between Ethiopia to the east and Libya, Chad, and the Central African Republic to the west and it also shares its border with Egypt, Eritrea, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda.

Second thing: What the hell do we know about the Sudan? Here's what we know. Sudan has been an independent nation since 1956 and it has been "embroiled in two prolonged civil wars during most of the remainder of the 20th century." Approximately 2 million Sudanese human beings have lost their lives in the decades of internal struggle in this far away land, the largest country in Africa. The current estimated population is about 39,400,000 and most of the various governments of Sudan have been military regimes favoring the northern Islamists who have exerted "economic, political, and social domination of the largely non-Muslim non-Arab southern Sudanese."

Third thing: Why the hell are the Democrats suddenly so interested in Sudan and Darfur? If the nation has been embroiled in civil war and internal genocide (or, if you prefer, fratricide) for most of the second half of the last century and some portion of the current century, why the sudden interest in 2007? The Democrats controlled congress from 1960 through 1994 and in that time various Democratic presidents, such as John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton all managed to overlook the crisis in Sudan that Joe Biden wants to immediately address after taking his place in the White House.

Could it be that Darfur is just an election-year slogan for Biden? OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN AND INTO SUDAN! Now there's a campaign slogan that'll have 'em drooling on themselves in the blue states. Out here in the hinterlands the only people I see carrying signs calling for someone to "Save Darfur" are the trust-fund kids attending the local liberal (and I do mean LIBERAL) arts/enviro-geek college. I wonder if they have thought who might "save" Darfur--other college kids, their professors, peace activists, Senator Joe Biden? They likely have no notion that "saving" Darfur and Sudan would require troops, other young people in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.

Sudan's largest trading partners are China (71%), Japan (12%) and Saudi Arabia (2.8%) and Sudan's leading industries are, in order of importance, oil, cotton ginning, textiles, cement, edible oils, sugar, soap distilling, shoes, petroleum refining, pharmaceuticals, armaments, and automobile/light truck assembly. Sudan exports about 275,000 barrels of oil per day (in 2004) and it has about 1.6 billion barrels in proved oil reserves (a 2006 estimate). So, maybe for Senator Biden IT'S ALL ABOUT THE OIL! WHAT ABOUT HIS CRONIES IN THE OIL BUSINESS?!?!

Oops, sorry, I drifted over to the loony left there for a minute. . . .

Is there a moral justification for going into Sudan? One could certainly make that case; the fighting there, as noted above, has been going on for decades, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, and "Sudan is a source country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purpose of forced labor and sexual exploitation; Sudan may also be a transit and destination country for Ethiopian women trafficked for domestic servitude; small numbers of girls are reportedly trafficked within Sudan for domestic servitude as well as for commercial sexual exploitation in small brothels in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps."

However, any moral argument now put forth for inserting U.S. troops in Sudan must be followed by questions such as: How is that different, say, than going into Iraq or Afghanistan? Were there not compelling moral reasons for ending Saddam's murderous, corrupt, and dangerous regime as well as for sending the oppressive and deranged Taliban packing in Afghanistan? Is this a distinction without a difference?

Do we, Senator Biden, send troops with guns (and real ammo) and tanks (with live rounds) and airplanes (with bombs) and helicopters (with mini-guns), or do we just stand around and try to arm-twist the locals who have been fighting for almost as long as i have been alive. . .to. . .just. . .stop with the fighting already!?!? How do we enforce the no-fly-zone you propose to put in place without planes and pilots and shoot-downs and casualties and POW's and videos of tortured American pilots captured by the bad guys? Do you, Senator Biden, have an exit strategy if things go wrong? Are we nation-building? Are we going to impose democracy at the point of a gun? Are we just going to separate the disputants and hope for the best? Don't we need the permission and cooperation of France and Germany and China and Russia and Belgium before we commit troops to the ground in Darfur?

Here are a couple of other comparative facts that Senator Biden might want to consider: In terms of size, Sudan is 2.5 million square kilometers, which is about one-quarter the size of the entire United States and, as noted above, the population of Sudan is about 39 million people. By contrast, Iraq is slightly more than twice the size of Idaho, with about 437,072 square kilometers, and a population of about 24 million people. I guess the thinking is that if we withdraw all our forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and ratchet up recruiting (or maybe institute a draft, as the Democratic Congressman C. Rangel has proposed) we can get enough folks to take care of the police action/peace-keeping mission in Sudan.

Foreign policy realists might well ask: What strategic importance is there to the Sudan? Is going into the Sudan vital to prosecuting the war on terrorism carried out by Islamic fundamentalist crazies? Other folks might want to know why we would insert U.S. troops into a civil war fought between Sunni Muslims and the small number of Christians and rebels in the Sudan--aren't we already "bogged down" in a "lost cause" of a civil war in Iraq? What if the introduction of infidel Americans, including (gasp!) women, onto sacred Muslim soil only further fuels sectarian violence and religious indignation? What's the logic here, Senator Biden?

The sad and obvious truth is that there isn't any logic here. This is just another example of the muddled thinking conducted by Democratic presidential hopefuls who seem to be afraid to take on the real bad guys and who wish to at least appear to be doing good works in the world by going after the 98-pound weakling in Sudan. Meanwhile, the people who seek to kill as many of us as possible will continue to plot and plan and probe for our soft spots here and abroad, hoping to strike again (and again). If the Democrats get the White House, we might well make Darfur safe, but things in our own neighborhood just might get a little dicey and a little more dangerous.

AJ

All quotes and statistics are from the CIA's World Factbook on Sudan, which can be found at http://www.cia.gov/library/publications.the-world-factbook/geos/su.html

Music of the Day: Poncho Sanchez, Out of Sight!

One: Last evening I was channel-surfing the TeeVee while trying to recover from spending about two hours on the tennis court with my young, fitter, more athletic opponent and friend Steve, when I came across good old CSPAN and the former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani. This was a replay of an event that took place the previous Thursday, some kind of gathering of New York Republicans and apparently Giuliani was the opening speaker. I didn't catch the whole thing--just the most important part which was this: There are lots of important issues to consider when choosing a president in 2008, including abortion, immigration, the environment, growing the economy, lowering taxes, and the like--but the single most important thing according to Giuliani is combating terrorism and securing the safety and freedom of the United States of America. This, he said, was something that ALL of the current crop of Republican candidates understood; he also said that it's clear that NONE of the current crop of Democratic candidates gets this idea despite the fact that he graciously said they were as patriotic and thoughtful and rational as the Republicans.

He also said, in no uncertain terms, that the Democrats would not "get " this idea until they stopped tip-toeing around the fact that the greatest threat to American safety and security comes from, and he actually used this term, "Islamic terrorists." This term, said Rudy, is one that none of the Democrats will give voice to, which means that they cannot name or identify the most profound threat to the country that we will face in the near term. I'm glad Mr. Giuliani "gets" it--I'm not sure if he's the guy to win the Republican nomination or the office of the Presidency itself, but right now what he says about this issue makes perfect sense to me. We'll see if he waffles on this in the months ahead, but I haven't heard any of the other candidates speak with this kind of clarity about what I think is the single most important issue that we face.

Two: Last week I finished reading a book on loan from the Good Doctor, Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr., and I was struck by some of the passages in the book that referred to how the South Vietnamese were abandoned by the United States. Puller wrote, if memory serves me correctly, how that made him feel as a double-amputee Vietnam veteran--the sacrifice that he made, and that others made, some lesser sacrifices, some greater, seemed to be invalidated by the jettisoning of our titular South Vietnamese allies to their North Vietnamese conquerors and eventual masters. It seems to me that we are now faced with a similar situation in Iraq, with Democrats essentially calling for the abandonment of the Iraqis (friend and foe alike) to whatever genocidal future that awaits them--and with another generation of American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen whose service and sacrifice is flushed down the toilet of political expediency in Washington. In a time when we should strengthen the resolve of our fellow citizens in uniform, we have one of the two political parties actively planning to invalidate their service--and if you thought the military was "damaged" after Vietnam, imagine the next twenty or more years facing Islamic nut-jobs with a demoralized and de-fanged military.

Three: At present, I'm reading two books, one of which I mentioned in a previous posting here, James Bowman's 2006 book Honor: A History; the other is something called Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green: A Year in the Desert with Team America by Johnny Rico, a pseudonym for someone named Stephen Hites. I bought both books simultaneously at our local chain bookstore and while Bowman's book is both good, and heavy, the Rico book represents another fourteen bucks (minus the 10% discount) down the drain. I've only read the first 90 pages of this thing and already it reminds me of a truly worthless book I read a few years ago, a piece of over-hyped screed entitled Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, by Anthony Swofford. This thing was made into a movie that lasted about two days in theatres before being relegated to the back stacks at Uncle Marvin's Movie Mart and Iguana Feed Store. Swofford's book, ostensibly about his actions in the first Gulf War, eventually revealed that Swofford himself never fired a shot in anger at anyone and that no one ever fired a shot in anger at him. The primary message of the book was that, even though he volunteered to serve in the military, he hated serving in the military and that the military was not much more than a collection of screw-offs and retards, all of whom existed well below Anthony Swofford's elevated intellectual level and beneath his fine aesthetic sensibilities.

Johhny Rico, or Stephen Hites, must have read Swofford's book. This guy voluntarily enlisted after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but Army leadership is always described as "incompetent," his fellow soldiers are all "losers," and he immediately regrets his decision to enlist (which he describes as a "mistake"). Predictably, it's somebody else's fault that he's miserable--the title of one of the early chapters is Satan and His League of Army Recruiters. He's very upset that he's going to take "a rather drastic deduction [sic] in income." Rico has, he claims, two masters' degrees, but he eschews a commission as an officer because he wants to be "an infantry combat killer." On his first so-called patrol in Afghanistan, the twenty-six year old "infantry combat killer" neglects to load his weapon because he was too busy playing a video game on his laptop and he vows to remind himself to take care of this bit of minutiae before heading out on all subsequent patrols. He claims that "we control this two-kilometer radius with a vivacious indifference and mediocrity."

Do you get the drift here? I do, and I'm only 90 pages into this thing--Johnny Rico is a whiner, he is likely also a dissembler, and for good reason he is assigned to the "shitbird" outfit after basic training. This is going to be a quick read--I'll finish the book, but I think I already know everything about Johnny Rico that I need to know. He openly states, on page 39, the following observation while traveling as a civilian in the Middle East: "Unlike most Americans, I didn't mind if they hated us. Hell, I kind of even hated us." I'm not sure how the book will play out, but I know that this self-loathing American "now permanently resides in the United Kingdom with his girlfriend."

Good for us, too bad for the UK.

AJ

Music of the Day: Ray Obiedo, Sticks and Stones

Here's a sweet little passage from James Bowman's 2006 book, Honor: A History:

"The threat to America and the West from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" was "the issue we could all agree on," according to Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense at the time of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The result was fury when the WMD's were not found, and subsequent and frequent repetitions of the charge that the administration had "lied" in order to go to war. The opposition to President Bush and his allies within their own countries and to the American invasion of Iraq in the Middle East was energized by this charge in ways sure to have long-term repercussions for political life in America and throughout the world. YET TO BELIEVE THIS ACCUSATION, YOU WOULD ALSO HAVE TO BELIEVE THAT WHEN, BEFORE THE WAR, THE PRESIDENT MENTIONED THE WMD'S AS A REASON FOR IT, HE ALREADY KNEW THAT IN FACT THERE WERE NO SUCH WEAPONS IN IRAQ. NOT ONLY DOES THI S SEEM IMPLAUSIBLE IN ITSELF, SINCE IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A LIE THAT HE HIMSELF WAS ABOUT TO ENSURE WOULD SOON BE FOUND OUT, but his claims about the WMD's were seconded not only by his own intelligence services but also by those of other Western countries, including France, Germany, and Russia, which opposed the war." (emphasis added)

Keep this in mind, loyal readers, when you hear the current crop of Dem-pol presidential candidates yowling about "lies."

AJ

Music of the Day: Bob James, Restless

That phrase above, "It seemed like a good idea at the time," is one that always gets a laugh, or at least a chuckle; it is mostly used by the office/family/organizational bonehead after he screws up and somebody, usually his boss or mom or spouse, asks him, "Why the hell did you do THAT?" Answer: "It seemed like a good idea at the time. Ha ha." The questioner, feeling sorry for the bonehead, almost always goes along with the joke, so the scolding or riot-act-reading that follows is typically somewhat soft-pedaled.

I don't know the provenance of the phrase "It seemed like a good idea at the time," and I'm disinclined and unwilling to search for it, but I do know that a more sophisticated version of the phrase (or, if you prefer, a more "nuanced" version of the phrase) exists and here it is--"If I knew THEN what I know NOW. . . ."

The latter phrase is all the rage these days, particularly amongst Dem-pol presidential wannabe's who are being asked, again and again, why they voted to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their answer to the question usually begins with, "If I knew THEN what I know NOW, yadda yadda yadda, and I was deceived by the President, yadda yadda yadda, there were no WMD'S, yadda yadda yadda, etc., next question please, how about an easy one this time, Brian."

This is the best they can do? These people are seeking votes for the highest office in the land and the best line they can come up with to explain their thinking about, or a vote on, a vital issue is more or less the same line the office bonehead uses to explain his most recent screw-up. (NOTE to Office Boneheads: Use the more nuanced version next time; maybe the boss will think you're ready for a promotion.)

Let's assume for a brief and thoroughly chilling moment that any one of these people is elected to the Presidency (including, most frighteningly, the man from the Planet Whackazoid, Dennis Kucinich, who represents the 10th Congressional District in Ohio where, apparently, the largest known population of Whackazoidians settled when the came to earth from their distant, clueless, lightless, humorless galaxy). When the first big crisis arises after (say) the Mrs. takes her seat in the Oval Office, her thinking might go something like this: "I don't know NOW what I will know in the FUTURE, so I don't know what to do about that massive terrorist explosion in San Francisco--but I have to do something--wait, what do the latest poll numbers indicate? Damn! This leadership stuff is tricky and hard! Is there a Republican-appointee left over somewhere that can be blamed down the road for whatever it is that I'm going to do or not do? I know--if that doesn't work, I can always say "I didn't know THEN what I know NOW." Yeah, that's it. . . ."

NOTE to Dem-pols: No one ever knows in the NOW what they will know in the FUTURE--except in fiction and the sweet never-never land of Hollywood films. There is no political equivalent of the Terminator, nor a Michael J. Fox-McFly character, coming back from the future to tell the next president what actions to take to achieve success or what actions to take to avoid disaster.

No one ever knows in the NOW what they will know in the FUTURE, so this CANNOT be the standard by which one makes judgments about what course of action to take or to avoid. Present knowledge is almost always incomplete compared to future knowledge. And that means we should reject out of hand this kind of philosophical-dodge, the old rhetorical soft-shoe, and start asking questions about what PRINCIPLES underlie a person's thinking. If a principle is at the root of a decision, we can disagree with the decision, but the principle will remain intact. Any person who utters the phrase, "If I knew THEN what I know NOW" probably does not base decisions on principles, but instead makes decisions based on. . .what? God only knows.

Leadership in a crisis demands a principled stance, not vacuous blathering about imperfect knowledge preventing forthright and decisive action. When you hear some yahoo politician of any stripe utter the phrase, "If I knew THEN what I know NOW," remember the office bonehead.

AJ