Far East Cynic

In recent days the military journals have run stories of how Congress wants to strip commanders of their authorities to confirm or overturn the results of courts martial. This due to several high profile cases where folks did not agree with the final decision of the convening authority.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., introduced legislation Thursday taking top commanders out of the process of deciding whether a sexual misconduct case goes to trial. For sexual offenses with authorized sentences of more than one year in confinement — akin to felonies in the civilian judicial system — that decision would rest instead with officers at ranks as low as colonel who are seasoned trial counsels with prosecutorial experience.

“‘What we need to do is change the system so victims know that they can receive justice,” Gillibrand said Thursday on CBS “This Morning.”

Let me state it clearly, to do this is a huge mistake. Commanders who have court martial authority HAVE to have the ability to decide how cases are to be prosecuted and the ability to affirm or reject the conclusions of the judicial proceedings.

There are fundamental differences between the civilian criminal justice system and the military justice system. Yet far too many people fail to understand those differences and the rationale for them.

It is important to remember that in a military proceeding there is no standing court -it has to be created. And because the commander is still trusted with the responsibility to maintain good order and discipline-he or she has to be quite careful not to create a stampede to make an example out of someone. That is a big difference between the military and civilian systems. The civilian court system is more removed from the proceedings after they occur. Not so in the military.

The specific case that prompted the desire for this change was one involving the 3rd Air Force commander overturning the conviction of a Lt Col accused of sexual assault. He had been convicted by court martial. LTG Franklin made the decision to overturn the decision, throwing out the sex assault conviction.

I don't know the details of the case-but I do know that the general, in making his decision,  did not make it lightly. He knew full well how particularly sensitive these types of cases are and how much visibility anything with the "sex" word attached to it gets right now. So I am convinced that he must have had access to some pretty good mitigating information to make the very serious decision that he made. We will never know that-but I am confident he would not have made the decision flippantly. Overturning a conviction happens very rarely.

And it should be his decision to make. If he made the wrong decision-then fine. Fire him and find a new 3 star. But don't take away the commander's ability to fully exercise his authority. That in the long run is a big mistake and is setting the stage for some innocent person to be wrongly convicted and railroaded for the rest of his life. Court Martial do make mistakes.

We claim that we want to enforce a culture of accountability. And then we turn around and deny commanding officers the tools they need to exercise their authority and lead their subordinates in fairness. That's not smart.

I was on the computer last night, surfing, when the S.O. ran into tell me the news was on with pictures of Boston. That it was all horrific-goes without saying.

All I could think about was two things-one, how truly awful it must have been with flying metal all around and very little places to go. And two, how soon would it be before someone linked it to some Arab or Islamic group somewhere.  As I told the S.O. at the time-this will get really ugly.

And of course, true to form, we have the first folks already doing exactly that. Even though-as far as I know-there is no definitive proof. All speculation about who did this is premature and pointless. We would do well to remember, that the last US bombing of a sports event came from a right wing extremist.

However people who stand on their pedestals and point out that "We are at war, there will be more bombings, and not just by Islamic terrorists." are both correct-and naive in the extreme. We are not at war-except in the places we chose to execute military action. However,  we are always fighting criminal elements. Regardless of who set yesterday's bombs-they are nothing but criminals and will be hunted down and treated as such. If there is one lesson we should have learned from the past 11 years-is not overreact. We did that in the early years of the decade, and where did it get us? Nowhere, except older, poorer, and more behind the rest of the world.

Criminals are always with us-and I can't help but wonder if the criminal who did this was "home grown" vice being imported from abroad. We don't-really-know.

But as the Atlantic points out these types of incidents are not the rule:

Remember after 9/11 when people predicted we'd see these sorts of attacks every few months? That never happened, and it wasn't because the TSAconfiscated knives and snow globes at airports. Give the FBI credit for rolling up terrorist networks and interdicting terrorist funding, but we also exaggerated the threat. We get our ideas about how easy it is to blow things up from television and the movies. It turns out that terrorism is much harder than most people think. It's hard to find willing terrorists, it's hard to put a plot together, it's hard to get materials, and it's hard to execute a workable plan. As a collective group, terrorists are dumb, and they make dumb mistakes; criminal masterminds are another myth from movies and comic books. 

Even the 9/11 terrorists got lucky. 

If it's hard for us to keep this in perspective, it will be even harder for our leaders. They'll be afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism — or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity — they will be branded as "soft on terror." And they'll be afraid that Americans might vote them out of office. Perhaps they're right, but where are the leaders who aren't afraid? What has happened to "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"? 

Terrorism, even the terrorism of radical Islamists and right-wing extremists and lone actors all put together, is not an "existential threat" against our nation. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn't do existential damage to our nation. Our society is more robust than it might seem from watching the news. We need to start acting that way. 

The events in Connecticut are so horrific-it is just painful still to think about. 20 children-CHILDREN-and six adults all of whom got up and went to the Sandy Hook school thinking it was just another day.

Now if the world were just, we as a nation would come together and craft a means to stop the possibilities of sick twisted people getting a hold of weapons.

But we won't.

Even now-morons like John Fund are already hard at work writing rationalizations as to why gun control does not work. And Uncle Dumbo is hard at work slandering anyone who believes we should do things differently.

Probably the best analysis I have read comes not from an American publication,  but a British one:

Switching to red-blooded conservative talk radio, I found two hosts offering a “move along, nothing to see here” defense of the status quo. One suggested that listeners should not torment themselves trying to understand “craziness”, though it would, the pair agreed, be understandable if some parents were tempted to remove their children from public education and homeschool them.

To that debate, all I can offer is the perspective of someone who has lived and worked in different corners of the world, with different gun laws………

The first time that I was posted to Washington, DC some years ago, the capital and suburbs endured a frightening few days at the hands of a pair of snipers, who took to killing people at random from a shooting position they had established in the boot of a car. I remember meeting a couple of White House correspondents from American papers, and hearing one say: but the strange thing is that Maryland (where most of the killings were taking place) has really strict gun laws. And I remember thinking: from the British perspective, those aren’t strict gun laws. Strict laws involve having no guns.

After a couple of horrible mass shootings in Britain, handguns and automatic weapons have been effectively banned. It is possible to own shotguns, and rifles if you can demonstrate to the police that you have a good reason to own one, such as target shooting at a gun club, or deer stalking, say. The firearms-ownership rules are onerous, involving hours of paperwork. You must provide a referee who has to answer nosy questions about the applicant's mental state, home life (including family or domestic tensions) and their attitude towards guns. In addition to criminal-record checks, the police talk to applicants’ family doctors and ask about any histories of alcohol or drug abuse or personality disorders.

Vitally, it is also very hard to get hold of ammunition. Just before leaving Britain in the summer, I had lunch with a member of parliament whose constituency is plagued with gang violence and drug gangs. She told me of a shooting, and how it had not led to a death, because the gang had had to make its own bullets, which did not work well, and how this was very common, according to her local police commander. Even hardened criminals willing to pay for a handgun in Britain are often getting only an illegally modified starter’s pistol turned into a single-shot weapon.

And, to be crude, having few guns does mean that few people get shot. In 2008-2009, there were 39 fatal injuries from crimes involving firearms in England and Wales, with a population about one sixth the size of America’s. In America, there were 12,000 gun-related homicides in 2008.

The numbers don't lie-and countries with very strict gun laws like Britain and Japan experience far lesser amounts of gun crime. It does exist of course, but not in the volumes that exist here. The easy way out for many Americans is to pretend that guns are not the problem-"its the society".

Well that may be-but easy access to weaponry makes the consequences of madness far, far greater than should have to be endured.

Probably the argument put forth that is the silliest one,  is the idea that somehow, the Founding Fathers intended the 2nd Amendment to be some sort of check and balance on the government. They never intended anything of the sort-the only reason the amendment was there was to form a militia. A well regulated militia. I remain firmly convinced that were the Founders drafting the bill of rights today-the 2nd Amendment would not be there. Its a very narcissistic expression of a "courage" that simply does not exist.

I would also say, to stick my neck out a bit further, that I find many of the arguments advanced for private gun ownership in America a bit unconvincing, and tinged with a blend of excessive self-confidence and faulty risk perception.

I am willing to believe that some householders, in some cases, have defended their families from attack because they have been armed. But I also imagine that lots of ordinary adults, if woken in the night by an armed intruder, lack the skill to wake, find their weapon, keep hold of their weapon, use it correctly and avoid shooting the wrong person. And my hunch is that the model found in places like Japan or Britain—no guns in homes at all, or almost none—is on balance safer.

As for the National Rifle Association bumper stickers arguing that only an armed citizenry can prevent tyranny, I wonder if that isn’t a form of narcissism, involving the belief that lone, heroic individuals will have the ability to identify tyranny as it descends, recognize it for what it is, and fight back. There is also the small matter that I don’t think America is remotely close to becoming a tyranny, and to suggest that it is is both irrational and a bit offensive to people who actually do live under tyrannical rule.

Nor is it the case that the British are relaxed about being subjects of a monarch, or are less fussed about freedoms. A conservative law professor was recently quoted in the papers saying he did not want to live in a country where the police were armed and the citizens not. I fear in Britain, at least, native gun-distrust goes even deeper than that: the British don’t even like their police to be armed (though more of them are than in the past).

But the problem remains-American politics are anything but rational. And as Tom Levenson pointed out, "An armed society may be a polite one. But it’s not one that is free. It is not one in which a civic life in any meaningful sense of the term can take place. Guns kill liberty."

And too many Americans can't or won't think rationally on the subject of guns. So we will remain stuck right where we are today and have been for some 50 years in both this and the previous violent centuries.

But here is the thing. The American gun debate takes place in America, not Britain or Japan. And banning all guns is not about to happen (and good luck collecting all 300m guns currently in circulation, should such a law be passed). It would also not be democratic. I personally dislike guns. I think the private ownership of guns is a tragic mistake. But a majority of Americans disagree with me, some of them very strongly. And at a certain point, when very large majorities disagree with you, a bit of deference is in order.

So in short I am not sure that tinkering with gun control will stop horrible massacres like today’s. And I am pretty sure that the sort of gun control that would work—banning all guns—is not going to happen. So I have a feeling that even a more courageous debate than has been heard for some time, with Mr Obama proposing gun-control laws that would have been unthinkable in his first term, will not change very much at all. Hence the gloom.

Thus the editors of the Economist are right. We Americans are simply going through the motions. Since we, collectively, have no intention of fixing the root problem-we, collectively, have no rights to "mourn" the helpless children and their teachers. "It's our fault, and until we evince some remorse for our actions or intention to reform ourselves, the idea that we consider ourselves entitled to "mourn" the victims of our own barbaric policies is frankly disgusting.".

 I want write about the abomination that is the Romney campaign-and the failed dirt digging that is the Liars Club and their reaction to a reasonable statement. John Cole framed it well when he voiced the same sentiment I have:

What a crazy position for an American President to take- to actually focus on American security concerns and American foreign policy goals. It’s almost like Obama understands we are not an Israeli client state.

Call me an anti-Semite, but I guess I just have no problem with my President looking out for US foreign policy goals. Crazy, that.

Five trips to Israel in the last year have convinced me of a couple of things: 1) Israel is a vital ally of the United States and will remain so, and nothing this President has done has effectively denied that fact. In fact he's worked steadily and privately to strengthen the United States support for Israel. 2) Israelis are among the most obstinate and unreasonable people on the earth. I know that will offend some people-but its the truth. Yes there is a historical background for it-but time has marched on, and despite what the religious right believes, Jerusalem is not at the center of the world vortex right now.  Americans, as a whole, do not understand what Israel is really like-rather they have a preconceived idea of what they think it is like.

Finally, Israel's interests and ours are not in complete alignment. No nations is-but particularly the interest of a nation that is founded, rightly or wrongly, as a religious state. Or the secular representation of a particular religion. It is natural, that in the course of events-Israel and the US will disagree.  That does not make the US any less of a friend nor does it make the Israeli whining about certain matters nothing more than noise on particular issues. The President was right to say that and the folks over at the Weekly Standard can just go suck eggs. There is more to foreign policy than the views of AIPAC.

William Kristol and Benjamin Netenyahu should both realize that.

There! I feel better for having gotten that off of my chest. There are others who agree with me.

And here we see the perils of believing your own hype — apparently Bibi and friends actuallybelieved the idea of the all-powerful Israel Lobby. Whether through Romney's bald-faced pandering to that perceived lobby with his ugly comments about the cultural inferiority of Palestinians or, more shockingly, through Netanyahu's decision to take sides in the 2012 presidential campaign, they seem to think that if they can portray Obama as "weak on Israel" they will materially advance their own causes. It's worth noting, of course, that those interests are different. For Romney, the approach only works if it undermines Obama in key states, notably Florida. For Netanyahu, it would work if the fear of losing Jewish support pushed Obama to get visibly tougher on Iran, to accept, for example, the Israeli leader's call for clearly demarked and more aggressive "red lines" with Iran.

The Supreme Court actually got it right for once-but the fact it was a 5-4 decision is troublesome for many reasons. This should have been a no brainer for the Court. Of course to do that-you need high caliber Justices.

The Supreme Court led by Chief JusticeJohn G. Roberts Jr. upheld the heart of President Obama's healthcare law Thursday, ruling that the government may impose tax penalties on those who do not have health insurance.

 

The decision came on a 5-4 vote, with the court's four liberal justices joining with the chief justice.

On one hand, Roberts agreed with the law's conservative critics who said Congress does not have the power to mandate the purchase of a private product such as health insurance.

But the Affordable Care Act does not impose a true legal mandate on Americans, he said. It simply requires those who do not have health insurance by 2014 to pay a tax penalty.

And that is constitutional, Roberts said. "The federal government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance," he wrote in the majority opinion. "The federal government does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance," he added.

The mandate is expected to raise about $4 billion a year to help pay for healthcare coverage.

The opinion by the chief justice is likely to surprise his liberal critics and his conservative admirers. He played the decisive role in rejecting the Republican-led legal challenge to theDemocrats’ most ambitious social legislation in decades.

Thanks be to God! Now the ruling is going to have to be parsed for some days to come.

Women in particular should pop the champagne and celebrate. Of those millions of uninsured, 19 million are women.

Justice Ginsburg (joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) agreed with the Chief Justice’s bottom line – that the mandate is constitutional under Congress’s ability to tax – even while disagreeing with his Commerce Clause conclusion; those four Justices would have held that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce to pass the mandate.  With five votes to uphold the mandate, it will survive, and the Court did not need to consider the “severability” issue — that is, what other parts of the law would have to go if the mandate were unconstitutional.

And so-by a very narrow majority the Court did the right thing. 

I tried to watch the US news about this when I got home. Because I have Sky Satellite all I get is Fox News. I lasted all of 40 seconds watching Lindsay Graham prove what a worthless piece of shit he is by whining about the decison. It took me that long to flip a bird at the TV and tell him to go fuck himself. Then I switched to Bloomberg for much more rational news.

Unexpected though it may be- A great day for America.

The folks over at Foreign Policy Magazine have a pretty interesting article up-pointing out that in a lot of ways, the current situation Vis a Vis Iran is similar to that which John Adams faced: A foreign power creating headaches for American policy and a distinct segment of the US population clamoring for a war. Adams faced the latter group down-albeit at great political cost to himself-and in so doing may have saved the young Republic from real disaster.

In the summer of 1798, U.S. President John Adams faced the gravest crisis of his time in office. Hostilities with the revolutionary, expansionist regime in France had been rising since his election, with French privateers seizing American merchant ships off the Atlantic coast. Adams's effort at diplomacy had backfired. The envoys he had sent to France had been met with extortionate and insulting demands; the publication of their dispatches, in what came to be known as the XYZ Affair, had provoked a firestorm of outrage and war fever, the likes of which the young republic had never before known. The public, led by Adams's own Federalist Party, was demanding a declaration of war. Adams himself had stoked those public passions. But now, in the summer, he hesitated between belligerence and yet more diplomacy.

The United States is now locked in conflict with Iran, another revolutionary, expansionist power. It is not yet summer 1798, but it's getting close. Today's president, Barack Obama, as firmly committed to the principle of engagement as Adams was to the principle of neutrality, is still giving diplomacy a chance. But the bugles are sounding. Israeli officials openly and urgently talk about the need for military action; Iran has apparently responded with a barrage of assassination attempts abroad; and polls show that a majority of Americans are prepared to use force to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The president is under pressure, not from his own party, but from his adversaries, to issue an ultimatum to Iran. We may be only one stupid mistake away from the point where an attack becomes unavoidable.

Just like the lies being spread around Washington in the present day-so too were lies spread about Adams by his political opposition. Adams well understood the threat, just as Obama does now. However Adams also knew that a war would be a disaster for the new Republic.

Unlike Bush, however, Adams did not want war, and neither, it turned out, did France. Once Charles M. de Talleyrand, France's foreign minister, saw that the United States was preparing for war, he began authorizing intermediaries to tell influential Americans that France had no wish for hostilities and would accept a new envoy with none of the onerous conditions (including the payment of adouceur, or bribe, to himself) imposed on the previous mission. Adams began hearing from private citizens and diplomats, including his son John Quincy, then minister in Berlin, that France wanted peace. None of this was publicly known, and opinion remained no less inflamed. But Adams concluded he had to take a risk on Talleyrand's bona fides. In February 1799, he appointed his minister to the Netherlands as envoy to France. And in October 1800, the two sides signed a peace treaty known as the Convention of 1800.

Of course there are some very big differences. 1) Adams did not have the albatross of Israel draped around his neck-which Obama does. Iran may not want war with the US ( I firmly believe the Iranians are not that stupid-what they want is regional dominance, but not national suicide), but they haven't come to terms with Israel's existence yet and that's a problem. They also have not grasped the true ability of Israel to retaliate against them-nor the commitment that the United States has to Israel. 2) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  can hardly be considered a rational actor-unlike France's Talleyrand. 3) There is the wild card of Iranian leadership's commitment to the apostate religion of Islam-whereas in 1798 religion was in its proper place, on the sidelines. And Adams had time and distance on his side-Obama doesn't,  thanks to the march of technology.

Kind of sad, really. The people of Iran have great potential. However they are being led to the trough through accidents of history and a revolution gone badly wrong. One might hope that eventually there will be a reckoning with the Mullahs. But don't kid yourself that's not happening anytime soon. " It may be, in short, that Iran will stop at nothing to reach at least the capacity to build a bomb. And then Obama or his successor will have to choose, not between war and diplomacy, but between war and containment. And in that case, it will take much more political courage to stick to a policy of patience and restraint."

As is the norm for many a writer at year’s end-I have been doing a lot of thinking about the year past-and since the coming year will celebrate the 55^th anniversary of my birth ( God willing), a heck of a lot of time is also being devoted to the years ahead-which most probably do not outnumber  the years behind. (In and of itself a cause for great depression and thought).

This past year has been a tumultuous one for me-what with observing up close the mean-spiritedness of a government agencies attempt to screw people in the guise of “saving money” ( when it was later admitted that no money was saved at all) to executing a move across the ocean from the New World to the Old World, and dragging a more than reluctant S.O. with me, from a warm house with a yard, to a not so warm house with very little yard-but a great view. Balanced out by slow reponse to the need for utilities and digging out from boxes and boxes and boxes.

I think most of us get to a certain point in life where we outgrow our ambition. I know I certainly have-and I cringe when I think back to my 38 and 39 year old self motivated by the desires to advance and compete. I knowingly smile now, as I work among a group of similar 38-45 year olds, some of whom are already “preferred customers” and others are striving to become one of them. Others still, have seen that any path to advancement is not going to come through their first chose of profession and will have to make the same transition as I did –in mid life-from a career they dearly loved to simply a career/income stream they dearly need.

Now mind you, I’m not whining. I made some choices and they are mine and mine alone. My current place of employ is actually very satisfying and the location where I am living is fascinating to be in and to observe. Symbolically it is a lot closer to where I wish to be, and it my days are not filled with hearing the futility and outright stupidity that constitutes the daily political news cycle of the land of my birth.

And yet-there are times I wonder if this really the best I can be doing. For myself and for my fellow humanity. I have been thinking a lot recently about the parade of history that is represented by the places I pass by each day now, and the parade of history represented by my current place of employ. I think a lot about the warning words from former President Eisenhower about the rise of the military industrial complex. He uttered those words when I was 4 years old. They appear to have become appallingly true in my life time.  “Is the really the best I can do?”

I chose the military profession with the idealism of a 18 year old-without a long term vision,  really. I simply wanted to fly and to see the world. The Navy made good on both promises I am proud to say, and the military has continued to be an enabler of the high flying lifestyle that I deeply enjoy. It’s enabled me to live overseas where I doubt any other profession would have-given my background and lack of commercial career skills.  It also gave me a lifetime of vivid experiences that simple “office work” would never have provided. That alone made it worth the price of admission.

But at the same time-the passing of this last decade have started to give me pause. Because in the work that I and literally tens of thousands of others do-we produce nothing of value. Nothing of long term benefit to the human race as a whole. Do PowerPoint presentations on missile arcs of the missiles belonging to our adversaries do one thing towards providing a cure for cancer? Do they improve the lot in life of the 2/3 of the world’s population who live on less than $2100 dollars a year.

I can hear the response to that statement now-and the comments to come: “It prevents those missiles from being fired”,  you may say,  “we keep the peace through our strength.” Perhaps it does-but does that strength really come from a staff of over 1000 who do nothing in the way of maintaining or sailing with those weapons of deterrence? Just directing and coordinating their employment-and passing around taskers like so much toilet tissue.  And for that matter-does deterrence really deter anymore?

Deterrence did not prevent the colossal waste of the Iraq War, where-as Thomas Ricks and Daniel Drezner have pointed out-we have precious little to show for our efforts.

The continent I am living on has a 2000 year violent and bloody history of fighting-imagine what could have been accomplished if they had fixed their borders and put the manpower and money to more productive pursuits. Imagine what the 600 billion the United States will spend on defense and defense related spending could accomplish if we did not live in such a violent and un-peaceful world.  As I mentioned earlier-in this one week alone, I have three times stood in front of memorials to the Gefallene.  Unlike our war memorials, German ones are not so pretentious as to state that they died "for humanity." I don't think so.

At least when I was on active duty and I had such thoughts-they could always be easily offset by the little victories one could accomplish for your Sailors. Helping someone get the orders they wanted, helping them get over a financial or emotional scrape-stretching the rules just enough to give them the time they needed to work things out themselves. Those things outweighed the inability to influence major decisions. At the time it seemed enough. Receiving the occasional “thank you’ from someone you helped, was worth more than all the gold in South Africa. Post retirement-those days don’t happen anymore. As a contractor, you are reviled for being greedy. ( Thank you for that Mr. O’Reilly) and as a government employee you are reviled for being a part of the national deficit-undeserving of more money, benefits or thanks. And you certainly don’t have the direct ability to impact the lives of others, even though you want to. The bureaucratic straight jacket sees to that.

There are times I envy doctors, or for that matter car designers. They at least get to see the product at the end of the line. Doctors get to help people feel better (I like to think their victories outnumber their defeats at the hands of the reaper). Car designers see their product take form and life. Even computer technicians get to make people happy for a short while-by fixing a hard problem. But purveyors of the Power Point? They have no such satisfaction.

“Its not about the what at this point-its about the where.”, I tell myself. And for the most part-at this point in my life-that statement sums up my view towards the professions anymore. Money is not the most important thing or even the second most important thing. To be able to live comfortably, in the place you want-seems sufficient.

Or it only seems to. What I would really like to see for the New Year is the end of the cycle of violence. The bitter hatreds and conflicts that are getting simple people killed for absolutely nothing. People who for the most part are pretty much the same-they want food on the table, a warm roof over their head and a warm attractive body to love them physically and emotionally. That’s a new year’s wish I am pretty certain will go unfulfilled this year.

But the bills are going to pay themselves you know. So off to work each morning I shall go. Ein Gluckliche Neues Jahr.

Maybe.

I am no longer an active commenter over at Lex’s place-but I still take the time to peruse his scribblings, if for no other reason than to try to grasp the thinking of the “conservative” class-and help to codify where and how their thinking has gone off the rails. I would love to continue to comment there-however I can no longer abide the close minded thinking that occurs, and the increasingly rude and misguided attacks that seem to immediately rise up if one deviates from what is the “accepted” wisdom. It should also be pointed out that I have no use for people who will not allow trackbacks or links to his articles-just because he believes he resides on some type of higher moral plane than I do. I too am a retired Naval Officer, Naval Flight Officer and a member of the naval aviation community, with just as much right to my opinions and thoughts, as he is. That I have drawn a much different conclusion from the evidence of history and current events does not mean that my thoughts are not worthy of inclusion. It’s hardly a consistent viewpoint from a blog that prides itself on the “quality” of its discussion. Accordingly, it seems best to abide by Thumper’s rule-if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

However, from time to time, I come across something  so misguided, that I cannot stifle my urge to comment. Lex’s recent comments regarding the upcoming super-committee fiasco and the inevitable draconian cuts that will occur when they fail to come to a budget agreement-particularly in the defense department. Lex takes exception to Walter Pincus asking a reasonable question in regard to Admiral Clingan’s recent testimony regarding the unsustainability of the current level of naval employment. Lex says its knee jerk-I happen to think its a more than reasonable question to ask. Namely, ‘How much is enough?“-when it comes to the level of Naval deployments. Which ones are essential and which ones could be reduced?

Let’s start with Admiral Clingan’s example of how overextended the United States Navy is today:

“In total, 152 of the Navy’s 288 battle force ships were underway or forward-deployed on March 19,” Clingan said, adding that the service was operating “at an unsustainable level.”

Actually the story is much worse since in addition to the ship’s and their crews, there are somewhere between 10,000-13,000 Sailors engaged in the abominable Individual Augmentation program. Clingan cites 8000-but that only includes Iraq and Afghanistan, and ignores the continuing and growing appetite to have more bodies and more bodies in divergent beautiful spots to be deployed to such as Djioubouti, GTMO, Bahrain, and some closer ones too-like Kosovo. When you say 8000, the real “body tax”  of people screwed affected by the program is closer to double that, since replacements have to be identified and put in the training pipeline.

Pincus asks the reasonable question, namely isn’t a great deal of this strain on our fighting fleet self induced?

But wait a minute. Does Clingan really want to call March 19 typical, with the United States fighting two wars, beginning another, and providing assistance to a unique natural disaster in Japan? Or is he suggesting that more than two heavy military engagements at one time, plus a major foreign natural disaster will be the norm? And what about those other 136 ships?

Now I will concede to Lex that Pincus’ questions about the remaining 136 ships is steeped in real ignorance of the mechanics of how trained and ready combat vessels to be deployed become that way. However both Lex and Pincus are not asking the deeper question, one directly related to the budget / debt “crisis”: Does “Pax Americana” really provide our nation the benefit we think it does? And more importantly, in light of our refusal to provide and maintain sufficient revenue streams to pay for both guns and butter-can we really afford to continue to be world’s policeman in all the world’s oceans?

It would seem Lex comes down wholeheartedly on the side of guns-by way of this slightly snarky comment:

The cuts would amount to about $1.2 trillion over ten years starting in 2013, and would have devastating effects on the military’s modernization, operations, manpower and maintenance accounts, which have already slashed $400 billion from their spending projections for the next decade. Enough to fund a few dozen more Solyndras, at least. (So-called “mandatory” spending accounts would not be affected. This is where the lion’s share of the unsustainable federal spending increases threatening to bankrupt the country will occur. Unlike discretionary accounts, mandatory spending automatically indexes for inflation each year, and does not require congressional re-authorization.)

Butter it would seem, in the form of providing a society worthy of defending and providing a reasonable set of services designed to improve the quality of our national life, seems to be not that important an expenditure at all. Or at least he implies that in a rather backhanded way. Because if you are going to be jumping wholeheartedly on the bandwagon of “its the spending stupid”, then by implication-if you accept the premise that Pax Americana is worth spending money on, and needs to continue; but you don’t want to raise tax revenues to pay for it-then cuts have to come from the side of “butter”.

Pincus actually is closer than Lex is to getting to the deeper question both our government and our populace need to come to grips with:

1) Can we, or should we,  continue this level of employment around the world? If so, what is the real benefit to the only people who really matter in this budget equation? ( American Citizens).

2) If it is a decision that we decide to continue, then we need to come to the second question-what kind of society do we want at home for the citizens who must pay for “Pax Americana”. And do we really want to give up the things we will have to in order to pay for that “Pax” ?

Truth in advertising, I have rejected for the better part of a decade, Lex’s notion that Pax Americana  keeps “an inherently unstable world in a state of trembling balance”. I believe that fully 50% of our actions in the last 15 years have contributed to that instability rather than contained it. Certainly the War in Iraq and the last 7 years in Afghanistan have done nothing to make the world safer for American citizens. And other actions such as Libya would have come to a conclusion one way or another without our “help”-certainly in the manner we actually provided it, the costs were drug out for longer than should have been necessary.

And if in fact the United States cannot afford all of its domestic budgetary commitments-then it becomes evident to me, that Pax Americana is a luxury we also can no longer afford.  Even if we choose to return to the world of 1896 with no social safety net, no food or drug standards, and no premise that the government has a  responsibility to provide a foundation of an acceptable quality of life for its citizens.

“But what will happen to us from those who wish to harm our nation?”, you ask. A good question-and one that probably begs the notion that a robust and deployable defense is very much a necessity.  But if it is a necessity-which it clearly is, you need to find the resources to pay for it, and more importantly it has to serve a purpose. That purpose to be to defend a nation worthy of that effort. In particular if we wish to maintain a nation centered on a capitalist ideal. I firmly believe a social safety net goes part and parcel with the a well functioning and properly regulated capitalist economy.  The safety net was a reaction to the lack of living wages given to the American worker throughout the 1800s. The capitalist and wealthy leaders of today do not like the safety net because it takes from their profits and earnings and gives it to the average person. In the past their predecessors knew they at least had to play the game and act like they supported it. Thanks to the naked selfishness of today’s brand of conservatives-it is become no longer unfashionable to voice publicly the desire to destroy the benefits gained through over  50 years of effort. So now-granting those benefits is something our moneyed class are obviously and historically unlikely to do on their own.

The wars of the last decade have come at a tremendous cost, a cost much greater than what the cost of a “war tax” ( bemoaned by Lex) which would have not only kept the wars on a cash and carry basis-but would have shown the average American the real costs, economic and human of a policy of war without end, amen. That alone might have forced the requisite outcry to bring those efforts to a much speedier conclusion.

And the fact that those wars are on distant shores, contrary to Lex’s assertion, are really not of any real benefit to us.  Its not a feature as he suggests, its an anachronism, a vestige of the peculiarly American post WW-II trait of having all of the burdens of Empire with none of the perks. At least our British cousins got land to claim and native vestal virgins to take advantage of.  Thanks to our throwing our European allies under that bus some 54 years ago, we don’t get that luxury. The multi-polar world that is now unfolding is one we are powerless to stop from developing, no matter how much we think we are able to. We set off on this path in the 50′s and now are too far down the path to change it. Also-contrary to his assertion, great nations vested in deep entrenchments overseas, tend not say no to wars of choice, they tend to find reasons to make them a necessity.

Like it or not-if you want to keep a forward deployed presence in the world oceans, then you have to pay for it. And that will require, like it or not, tax increases as well as targeted budget cuts in the right areas. I personally believe there is a middle path when it comes to national security, just as I believe there is a middle path that will preserve Social Security and Medicare-and perhaps also move the nation down the path to the level already achieved by all of the other major industrial nations, universal access to health care for all Americans. It will require a certain amount of overseas retrenchment-but it need not look or feel like isolationism. We have commitments we have to keep-but we need not seek to expand them. And there are commitments that never should have been made or have long ago out lived any usefulness-and are worthy of abandonment. Leaving Iraq is something long overdue, so too is leaving Afghanistan.  Both nations-in different ways- are useless to us now. Our work there was done when we toppled their previous governments, now they have to find their own path,and we should leave them to their own devices. There are other ways to work influence events in both the Gulf and Africa, than having literally boatloads of people trapped in encampments in Kuwait and Djiobuti. Certainly the size of Ft Apache in Bahrain could be sizeably reduced. And I will continue to question the need for the increased number of domestic staffs we have created. ( This comes back to the baggage of having more flags than ships).

Certainly the money is out there to accomplish that middle path. When one lives in  or comes from a country where there top 1% controls an astronomical percentage of the nations wealth-and that wealth increasingly fails to be finding it’s way to trickle down to its average citizens, something is clearly wrong with that country.  I’ll come back to my point-for the United States to be a “shining beacon on a hill” it actually has to shine. It tends to tarnish the light beam when other nations are able to well accomplish the societal goals that we should be able to. However we choose not to.

The world has changed, and changed dramatically. The knee jerk reaction is to  tenaciously cling to a status quo that no longer serves the national interest, not to question those who have expressed the proper questions. Its not Pincus who has jerked his knee-it is those who somehow think March 19, 2011 is any rational way to run a Navy.

To watch this video. Conan O’Brien gave the commencement address at Dartmouth this year. It is a great speech-the last 4 minutes really spoke to me. Take the time to watch it. If you don’t have time-just pick it up at about the 14 minute mark or so.

““There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized.”

I can attest to that, eleven years ago it was true-and I think it will come true again this year too:

It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.It’s not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound reinvention. . .no specific job or career goal defines me, and it should not define you . . . Whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity; with clarity comes conviction and true originality. . .whatever you think your dream is now, it will change, and that’s okay.”

Watch for yourself:

I have been watching with considerable interest, the generally unhinged reaction of many prominent mil-blogs and other commentaries about President Obama’s speech last Thursday regarding Israel and the Palestinians. It would be funny, if the consequences were not so serious.

The most unhinged reactions I have read to date-have come from several sources, retired military officers ( many of whom ought to know their history better), hysterical Fox News commentators,  and today’s outraged column in the Wall Street Journal. Obama hates Israel. Obama is picking on poor little beleaguered Israel. The Palestinians are thugs and terrorists and have no right to settle in the holy land of Zion. Why can’t Obama just leave Israel alone?

This of course leads, in the American context, to the not so subtle innuendo’s from all of the usual suspects. Obama must be a Muslim not to support America’s best buddy in the whole world, he’s obviously arrogant, and he’s throwing Israel under the bus.  Israel, in their eyes, has done nothing wrong. Those settlements in the West Bank?  Just good business-not colonization of in support of the goal of Yeretz Israel. Don’t even think about calling it an occupation! Bibi says so.  Israeli-and more specifically Likud obstructionism to any settlement with the Palestinians? Just plain good faith diplomacy.

Now I will put my cards on the table-if I had my way, a third party along the lines of the British (preferably Britain) and their mandate would administer Palestine-just as was done in the years prior to World War II. I base that wish on the fact that for the long term I: 1) Do not believe a Palestinian state is viable along the West Bank and 2) I don’t think that Israel wants or can, come to a long term settlement with Palestinian authority.

Of course that is just nostalgic and wishful thinking on my part. It’s not going to happen-nor is it representative of what the current situation on the ground,  its sheer historical fantasy on my part.

And fantasy is what it seems Americans love to indulge in when it comes to Israel. Commentators over at OPFOR-when they are not attacking anyone who supports Obama’s speech as a raging anti-semite, are indulging in some historical fantasies of their own.

Fantasy #1.

Obama’s statements differ from previous US presidents. Flash traffic sports fans-they don’t.

But on substance, what did we learn yesterday? Certainly not that a Palestinian state must be “based on” the 1967 borders. Why this has been described as some kind of radical betrayal of Israel (“thrown under the bus”, in Mitt Romney’s words), is utterly beyond me. When Bill Clinton pushed the same thing, Aaron David Miller said America was acting as “Israel’s lawyer”. George W. Bush, whom Israelis saw as a staunch supporter, said the same. According to my colleague in Jerusalem, the innovation seems to have been the invocation of “1967″ in so many words. Why this is substantial is a mystery to me.

As the same colleague also mentions, there was an innovation, one not of substance but of sequencing—always close to the heart of these negotiations, since everyone knows what the substance must be. Mr Obama talked about settling borders and security first, and refugees and Jerusalem later. The more intransigent Israelis and their American supporters dislike this; they want a comprehensive settlement or nothing. But it’s not clear to me why this is the best option, even from their point of view. Israel is going to give up most of the West Bank in any settlement, and will and must only do so with security guarantees, as Mr Obama reiterated today. Land-for-peace would be most of what Israel wants. Meanwhile the status quo on refugees and Jerusalem favour Israel, which has its way on both at the moment.

Fantasy#2

The 1967 borders are indefensible. First of all-this statement presumes that Israel will actually end up back at the 67 borders. The odds of that happening are slim to none. For one thing-there is no way on God’s green earth that Israel will ever give up East Jerusalem, and there is no opposing Army that would even have the gumption to try. What part of “mutually agreed land swaps” did you not understand? ( or care to listen to). Since most folks are learning impaired when it comes to Israel, let me show you a visual aid that will show you why the 67 borders have to be the starting point for a final settlement:

If you have ever been to Israel and to the West Bank, as I have, you will know right away why Israel has the land to the East in the West Bank-that’s where the flat farmland is. The territory rises in elevation as you head west towards Jerusalem. Furthermore, the big takeaway from that graphic is that “Palestinian living space”, such as it is-is an archipelago of distinct ghettos. I guess I am the only person who appreciates the irony of a state that was formed as a result of outrage about rounding people up into ghettos and placing movement restrictions on them-doing the same thing to other people 40+ years later. The reason the territory is so chopped up? Jewish settlements that Israel was never supposed to allow in the first place, but did as a way to appease its orthodox population.”The settler movement could put down settlements in much of the sparsely populated south of Israel proper with no problem. Instead, they insist on taking Palestinian land. They are not colonizing the West Bank only to make it more ‘secure’ (they are making it less so), but rather out of greed, ambition, and expansionism. It is not about defense, it is about offense.”  (and water availability).

Those orange spots are not a way to create a viable state-and Netanyahu knows it. And that’s perfectly fine with him. But it shouldn’t be for any thinking American. The 1967 lines dividing Israel from the West Bank and from Gaza have always  been Washington’s point of departure for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But now, for the first time, the four digits have become formal American policy.

Now that position has a pretty firm basis in international law-but this is where the irrational factor comes into play with American supporters of Israel. They don’t care-they just want the Palestinians to go away and die. After all, in the eyes of some wild eyed conservatives-they are all terrorist savages anyway.

There are only a couple of problems I can think of with this line of thinking. 1) They are not going away and dying-they are breeding like rabbits. and 2) they have no place to go. Any chance for them to go someplace else evaporated in 1988 when Jordan ceded its claim to the West Bank to the PLO.  The Oslo accords formalize that by paving the way to a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. That peace treaty recognized the Mandate border between Palestine and Jordan, but specifically makes note that the treaty does no prejudice the status of the territories occupied( there is that pesky word again) by the Israeli military. Don’t forget too, that in 1987, Jordan and Israel actually tried to negotiate giving the West Bank ( but not East Jerusalem) back to Jordan, but the deal was nixed by Yitzak Shamir. So like it or not-Jordan is not a part of this picture anymore.

Fantasy #3

‘Jordan is Palestine’. Good luck with that. King Abdullah is not that stupid-and it also ignores the reason Britain broke Jordan away from the Palestine to begin with.  See Fantasy 2 above.

Fantasy #4

Israel is ringed by enemies on all sides, so it has to take drastic action to defend itself. Oh really? Those peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt don’t mean anything? And last time I checked-the Syrian military is a little busy right now trying to keep Al Asad in power. A better way to describe the situation is “Israel is ringing a lot of really pissed off people with no place to go“. And why not? Half of Palestinians in Gaza are unemployed and Israel will not allow them to export what they produce  and deeply restricts imports.  Restrictions within the West Bank make it difficult for Palestinians to commute to their places of employment and for goods to be transported to where they are needed. This has increased the costs of transportation and has thus led to lower profits for companies operating in the territories. Any wonder they are all pissed off?

It’s probably also a great time to point out that Israel is the only nation in the Levant with nuclear weapons and a military that outclasses any military,  with the sole exception of the United States.

However-Israel’s security rests on achieving a deal with the Palestinians. Because right now they are facing two ticking time bombs they can’t control. One is the “Arab Spring”:

Netanyahu ignored a very important historical reality on Friday in Washington, that Israel’s intractable enemies are always replaced with something worse. The PLO was replaced with Hezbollah in Lebanon and supplanted by Hamas in Gaza. There is a very real possibility that Hamas could be overtaken by an al-Qaeda inspired or affiliated group in the near future. Waiting for a more agreeable negotiating partner is an exercise in folly, if only because one has never appeared before.

On the other hand, I could be wrong. Problematically, that could be even worse for Israel. That would be widespread blooming of democracy in the Arab world. There is no reason to believe that democratic Arab governments would demand anything less than their autocratic ones do now. But they would have a great deal more credibility with the international community generally, and the United States in particular.

It should be remembered that America’s great democratic ally, Iraq, does not recognize Israel, nor does it denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations. There is no reason to believe that any other democratic Arab government would behave any differently, but their positions might seem a tad more reasonable when unattached to names like Bashir Assad or Saddam Hussein.

Add to that the possibility that the Palestinians might have learned from their mistakes and come to understand that violent resistance isn’t going to get them anywhere. A peaceful intifada might be an irresistible force in the international community and could very well isolate Israel, especially an Israel with a hardline Likud government. There’s no way of knowing how even Israeli public opinion would react to demonstrations like the ones in Tahrir square, but it’s virtually certain that the American consensus in support of Israel would fracture.

 

 

 

 

The other is, the fact that for a population that hates sex-Palestinians sure seem to f*ck a lot:

The most likely outcome of Israel’s present course is a one state solution, achieved over decades, with much heartbreak and violence and ruined lives in the meantime. The Jews of Israel will likely end up like the Maronite Christians of Lebanon. France created Lebanon in 1920 for a then Christian majority, but Christian out-migration and rapid Muslim population growth reduced the Maronites to only about 22 percent of the population today if we count children. Likewise, Israeli Jews have already lost their majority among first-graders in what was Mandate Palestine in favor of Palestinians and Palestinian-Israelis. Current demographic trends will likely produce an Israel that is a third Arab by 2030 and that is not even counting the Occupied Territories. The instability in the Arab world and the Greater Middle East, which is growing, could well over time increase Jewish out-migration (out of sheer nervousness) so that it outstrips in-migration of Jews. I can’t see a way for Israel to escape this demographic and geopolitical fate and remain viable as a nation-state. Plans on the Israeli right to denaturalize and expel the 1.5 million Palestinian-Israelis are unrealistic and do not reckon with the likely backlash from the Arab world, which won’t remain weak and abject forever.

In summary-a whole lot of Americans would do well to look at Israel as it really is-not as they think it is. It’s not a Jewish version of America. It is a complicated society with some very unique things foisted upon because its foundation based on a religious basis and not a national one. More importantly, Israeli and American interests are not always aligned. None of this is to suggest that Washington should turn its back on the Jewish state. But this is also a time when a more evenhanded position on the conflict is desperately needed. That’s what Obama is trying to do-and if he has to kick Bibi in the nuts to do it-well I won’t cry salt tears. You know who told me that? David Petreaus:

“Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples [in the region].” His statement provoked controversy in Washington, but ask any seasoned Middle East observer and you’d be hard-pressed to find one who disagrees with the general’s assessment. It is not Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya which is the greatest source of anti-American attitudes in the Arab world — it is the continued lack of resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the view of many in the region that the United States has its thumb on the scale in favor of Israel.

At some point, you have to ask yourself the legitimate question of who is looking out not for Israel’s interests, but America’s. It certainly wasn’t the slobbering idiots on the floor of the US Congress today.

My Canadian Counterpart makes a lot more sense about Pakistan and Afghanistan than our beloved King David[Petreaus] does. He’s got two posts up that should be mandatory reading for any one of the current crop of idiots in Congress. And should be read twice to learning impaired assholes like Allen West-and most of Lex’s fan’s too.

First, he points out, that having allowed the abominations that are India and Pakistan to come into existence-we are woefully misinformed about what is important to them:

With very few exceptions, American foreign policy over the last six decades been conducted on the mistaken premise that everyone shares the same interests with the United States. That’s definitely not true in Pakistan and never was. Americans were concerned first about Soviet expansionism, then global terrorism. Pakistan’s first, last and only concern is India.

And they aren’t wrong, necessarily. Imagine if the Soviet Union was ten times as powerful as the U.S, but was situated where Mexico is and had cut America in half as recently as forty years ago. Do you think that Washington wouldn’t be every bit as paranoid as Islamabad is? Now imagine that America’s closest and most powerful ally had deepened relations with Moscow and made the unprecedented move of exempting it from the nuclear non-proliferation rules that bind everyone else. Looked at that way, Pakistan’s conduct makes infinite sense.

 

 

More importantly-he points out what the boneheads at Fox News and Powerline have yet to recognize-that the war on terrorism, is a huge tactical mistake by the United States. Whole hordes of people are still whining about how George W. Bush should be getting “credit”.

Credit for what? For involving the United States in a war that is laying the seeds of its own economic and political destruction? Sure-good job asshole! You should have gotten him five year before to get “credit”. You snoozed, got fixated on another worthless country-you lose.

The jihadis are pissed at American foreign policy. Period. But if a president actually had the balls to go on TV and say that, most Americans – who are genuinely peace-loving to point of having an almost  studied ignorance of the rest of the world – would say “Well, why don’t we change our foreign policy?” And that can be problematic for a people who like buying their oil at fifty cents a barrel.

If the Bush administration knew anything, they knew that anything worth doing was worth overdoing. Even after 9/11, they never relented in telling us that we were making war to ensure that girls were going to school eight times zones away, which had never before happened in all of human history. The inhuman incineration of nearly 3,000 innocents in New York City was just no longer enough. The war in Afghanistan wasn’t long about retribution. It became, by the military’ s own branding, a “just crusade.”

The historical problem with a crusade is that they tend not to go well unless they’re won quickly. If they aren’t, they tend to become problematic. Assuming that you’re going to forcibly change anyone’s religious virtues is about as silly as thinking that they’ll change yours.

And that’s really what the “War on Terror” comes down to. “Terror”, in and of itself, isn’t an enemy. It’s a tactic. The United States didn’t win the War of Independence by fighting against outflanking maneuvers any more than they’ll win a War in Terror. If you think about it really hard, you might just understand that you’re an idiot for even having thought very hard about it in the first fucking place.

Al Qaeda is the enemy today, every bit as much as the Nazis were in World War Two. Well, when you kill bin Laden, you defeat the enemy. Unless you don’t. Then you’re fucked, just as you would be if you thought that killing Boy George would have prevented the 1980s.Then you’re you’re in a position where you think that you’re a hero, until Kajagoogoo rises in to destroy us all and there’s no one to defend us because you’re off collecting your trophy.

Yeah, we got bin Laden. But when you really think about it, that’s like thinking that murdering Donald Trump is going to cancel The Apprentice. No one ever counts on NBC’s bringing Warren Buffett out of the darkness, do they?

Doing a Fredo on Osama is important, have no doubt about it. But in the grand scheme of things, he’s only Fredo. It doesn’t matter how many times that you dump him off of the rowboat if his ideas survive. 

 

 

But hey, why let the facts get in the way of a good pro-war narrative? The simple truth is that the United States can no longer afford these protracted crusades-even if they were in our best interests. ( Which they are not). This is especially true, given the fact that Pakistan’s enemy ( who in my perfect world would still be subjects of the British Empire)-are sitting on the sidelines making obscene profits at our expense. And India’s enemy is doing even better. And they never had to send one chugokujin to fight anywhere. Remember that the next time you shop at Wal-Mart.

“Victory only has meaning in its effect on the events of the future”-Herman Wouk

Remember this phrase as we discuss the events of Sunday Night.

As we were laying in bed-the sun having gone down long before, and the only light in the room being that of the solar walk lamp(s)-my cell phone wrang? “What’s going on? Why is the President coming on TV?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about-all I know is I paid 500 bucks for a generator and I am not happy about it.”  After reminding him that here in Shopping Mall we had no power to view a TV-he explained what was happening. And he called me back after the President’s speech to confirm it. I thanked him-turned the battery powered radio on-listened for a while and went to sleep.  Well that’s one thing done, but too bad it doesn’t solve the rest of my problems. ( Or the nations.).

The celebrations afterwards may have made everyone feel good (even me-Osama deserved to be killed and I am glad no one thought they should capture him and bring him home to some sort of a trial, it would have been a nightmare. Just look at what happened with the guy they are going to try). However the kind of wild eyed enthusiasm we saw may have been a great thing in 2002, culimating a successful invasion of Afghanistan-the fact that it occurs in 2011 makes all the difference. People want to forget that the intervening eight years happened,  but they did. And Osama dead or alive-we still have to live with those results.

So seeing Osama gunned down in 2011, simply leads to a sigh of relief. ” Thank God that’s over with.”

Now what?

A good question!

This is not the same as saying that the US and Europe can now stop worrying about terrorism. The west will need a serious counter-terrorism policy for many years to come. But the Bush-inspired drive to make terrorism the centrepiece of US foreign policy was a mistake. The declaration of a “Global War on Terror” distorted American foreign policy and led directly to two wars – in Iraq and Afghanistan. The war on terror has guzzled billions of dollars in wasteful spending and spawned a huge and secretive bureaucracy in Washington. The death of bin Laden gives President Barack Obama the cover he needs to start quietly unwinding some of these mistakes.

I happen to agree with that sentiment. I also will not go down the rathole of thinking, ” Oh great-the fact that we got Bin Laden somehow makes all the bad things that are at odds with our national ethos,  somehow OK now.” Because they don’t answer one or more underlying questions:

“If they [torture] worked so great, why did it take so long?”

The problem with arguments about how well torture “worked” is that they invariably justify future acts of torture,  as well as past ones. The Obama administration appears never to have fully understood this, decrying Bush-era excesses while continuing to deploy them.  Sunday marks our best opportunity not only to turn the page but also to close the book on claims that our legal regime was inadequate to address terrorism. It is clear Bush never understood it-and that was one of the many reasons he deserved, and still deserves,  a healthy dose of national scorn.

Furthermore, no one is answering the really really important question-namely, now that Bin Laden is dead, how will this expedite the removal of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan? The answer is it won’t-nor will it put a cork in the mouths of those who advocate for permanent war. If Bin Laden’s killing was about creating a turning point so we could leave both of those conflicts behind, pull out our troops,  and begin the necessary adjustments to our overseas presence to successfully compete in the multi-polar world, then that would be something really worth celebrating. Unfortunately, Americans seemed to have learned remarkably little from their pain and disappointment in both countries.  And regrettfully, we have too many in our leadership who have a vested interest in keeping the conflicts going. ( Cue “God Save the King”-for David Petreaus). And as long as the conflicts go on, they drain our national treasure, kill and maim the elite of our youth-and on the whole diminish our ability to stand up and compete with those forces that are the real enemy to American life and prosperity. And those enemies are not located anywhere in Afghanistan, Iraq, or for that matter much else of the Middle East. Many of them trade on Wall Street and the Hang Seng.

Andrew Baecevich is right:

As long as the American way of life – American freedom itself in however warped a form – depends on access to large quantities of foreign oil, US exertions to determine the fate of the Greater Middle East will continue. So, too, will efforts by violent Islamic radicals intent on thwarting the West’s vision of a New Middle East serving the West’s purposes. Bin Laden’s passing – like his entire vile career – will have decided nothing.

The opportunity cost of the mistakes made getting to the villa in Pakistan are huge. And if the United States does not seize the opportunity to reverse those mistakes, turn the corner and get out of the hell holes we find ourselves in, then we will continue on a road of economic and influence decline. If we use the opportunity to turn the page of history-that will be the best gift the SEALS could have given us.

That’s what Lex continues to fail to understand. Not just him, but too many others who influence others with bad ideas.

When we finally put the wars behind us and leave Iraq and Afghanistan-then I will break out the champagne. Till then, its just a really positive development in war that has gone on way too long already.

But I’m glad Osama is dead.

 One of the ideas that has come to the forefront in our current political debate-is a very flawed one. That it has been allowed to take root in our civil discourse is indeed a tragic development for the nation as a whole and it is probably the one thing that is holding America up from advancing into the 21^stcentury.  That idea is the idea of American exceptionalism-that hoary and totally ridiculous idea foisted upon our populace by our politicians- that the United States of America is somehow qualitatively different from other nations. I’ve stated it before and I will continue to state it-I firmly reject that idea and so should any sane inhabitant of the United States.

Regrettably, it would appear that the current President of the United States has not rejected that idea. And that’s a bad thing in the long run-because it would appear that he is taking the country down the same rat hole that his predecessor did. For the record-the United States is not uniquely called to solve the world’s problems. Even if it was capable of doing so ( which it is not-and especially now is not resourced to do), the obligation to intervene in the hope of creating a better world is simply not there.

 It is unfortunate that acceptance or rejection of the idea of American exceptionalism has become a litmus test of one’s patriotism and sense of civic responsibility. In Tea Bagger parlance-if you don’t accept the theory you are some kind of lost soul who is not fit to be involved in the affairs of the nation. Like most Tea Party viewpoints-this idea is based on a flawed conclusion drawn from the available historical data. As with other things they espouse,  they are 100% wrong.

Here’s why. The key principle of American exceptionalism derives from the flawed premise that America’s ideals are unique to the country of America and are not resident in any other country on earth.  That is clearly nonsense. America is a product of its own history and the European history that preceded it.  One begat the other. Seeing American ideals and principles as unique to America is to erase the British building blocks of that tradition, as well as the French thoughts of the Enlightenment that are at the core of the thoughts and ideals of the founding fathers. Furthermore-embracing this idea that America is somehow gifted and unique is to ignore some incredibly ugly segments of our own history.  That’s a bad thing to do-especially in our current context-where so many bad ideas are passed around as if they are factually based.

Furthermore, it is an arrogant proposition to state, as some of the more devout devotees do, that God has somehow “favored the United States” over other nations. If that’s true-what is says about God is not really good.  It certainly does not square well with idea of an all loving God who loves all the people of the world on a basis of compassion for them as His children.

If America’s ideals are universal, they cannot be reduced to the ownership of one country. And our country’s actual history – as opposed to Tea Party mythology – is as flawed as many others.   It ignores the intended and unintended genocide of those who already lived here, as well as ignoring our almost 100 year embrace of a concept such as slavery which was indefensible then-and certainly more so now. It also ignores the unique influence of some incredibly lucky events that kept the nation on a path of unity-when clearly the global trend was in the opposite direction. The simple truth is that America was very lucky-and its success had many fathers, but the path of the success was uneven at best.  Our wealth did and does not now exempt us from making hideous national mistakes. The invasion of Iraq was one such mistake, as is our current misguided intervention into what is essentially an internal matter in Libya.

This is not to say the United States of America does not have a lot of advantages going for it. Our Constitution-when properly interpreted-is an amazing and very durable document. The fact that the nation has not followed the “independence” path of fragmentation that we saw in Africa during the 1960’s and Central Asia in the 1990’s is another. More continents should be like  America with larger single nations than the opposite model.  But we owe that to some unique circumstances-not the least of which is being un-bombed and uninvaded for over a century and a half. Americans would do well to remember that and not think other nations will who have been bombed and invaded will behave the same way.

In the period following World War II, this misguided belief in the oneness of the American experience may actually have served a useful purpose. Certainly it kept the US from becoming isolationist and it allowed us to help a generation of Europeans, Japanese, and others to get back on their feet economically and politically. But now-in the multi-polar world we willed into being by our lack of recognition that not all anti-colonialism was in our best interest-the idea of American exceptionalism is more of a stumbling block to progress . Glen Greenwald sums it up:

The fact remains that declaring yourself special, superior and/or exceptional — and believing that to be true, and, especially, acting on that belief — has serious consequences. it can (and usually does) mean that the same standards of judgment aren’t applied to your acts as are applied to everyone else’s (when you do x, it’s justified, but when they do, it isn’t). It means that you’re entitled (or obligated) to do things that nobody else is entitled or obligated to do (does anyone doubt that the self-perceived superiority and self-arrogated entitlements of Wall Street tycoons is what lead them to believe they can act without constraints?). it means that no matter how many bad things you do in the world, it doesn’t ever reflect on who you are, because you’re inherently exceptional and thus driven by good motives. And it probably means — at least as it expresses itself in the American form — that you’ll find yourself in a posture of endless war, because your “unique power, responsibilities, and moral obligations” will always find causes and justifications for new conflicts.

As a business proposition, not to mention a moral proposition, continuous war is a loser. Your competitors are under no such special obligation, and are able to sit out the conflicts-while all the while accumulating wealth and prosperity for their own ends. Thanks to the Faustian bargain our politicians have made the likes of evil men like Grover Norquist, we can’t even raise our own revenue for such endeavors because it has become an accepted (and equally flawed) principle that you can never, ever, raise taxes-no matter how many wars you are in at one time, or how many of your own population are unemployed. So the “unexceptional “ nations get the privilege of loaning you money.

They also get a free ride off your distraction and potential failure.

What Sarah Palin and the rest of the ilk like her have not grasped is that exhortations of American greatness aside-the facts are unchangeable and in our case, don’t tell a good story. The 21’st century is about competition: competition for resources, markets, and capital.  Our competitors have learned well enough how to “play the game”-saying the right things to avoid outright provocation, while still doing the actions that undermine the local position of the US within and around their countries.  Because the American Empire is “empire light”-empire with all of the responsibilities and bloodshed, but none of the perks ( conquering and exploiting land and the local natives)-the competitors know they only have to match the capability within their neighborhood.

President Obama had a chance to reverse all this nonsense.  That’s what he was elected to do-end the insanity of the wars started by George Bush. Instead Obama reverted to embracing the forces he was elected to resist and restrain. Politically-thanks to the warped political environment created by an electorate that is stupid enough to elect someone like Allen West-it was the pragmatic choice for him to take. But it does  not make it any less wrong-or in the long run any less self destructive for the nation.

As a result we are still at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya. And because these Arabs and other brands of the lower end of the human food chain-they will screw up any advantage given to them by our intervention. And as I have pointed out previously-in the case of Libya we don’t even know who these so called rebels really represent. Algeria, you will recall, became independent-only to spend 40 years worse off than under French rule.

Obama could have lead a retrenchment from all that-and focused effort on improving the lot of our own people. Instead we cave to the noisiness of a group of spoiled children-doing the bidding of a wealthy few in our own country-while giving in to the neocon wet dreams of the  utopian notion of the US as the rescuer of all those subjected to tyranny.

Trust me-we have seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well.

I’m not sure what it will take for us to learn our lessons. Perhaps it will come when the rebellion in Libya or elsewhere fails-and we face an even murkier choice-or it will come when we finally wake up and realize that we are arguing over cutting minuscule amounts of federal spending-while wasting billions on worthless Arabs who are unworthy of the privilege.

What’s perhaps the most astonishing to me, is that some of the same people who are so outwardly supportive of this incredible generosity of effort towards a foreign people who will eventually turn on us-have not the slightest bit of compassion for their own fellow citizens. Following the tea party script-they are all too willing to attribute any shortfalls among those folks to their own failings-while giving an Arab rabble a free pass.

If that does not seem abhorrent to you-then you lost sight of the ball early in the game.

I’m not sure whether we will realize it in time before our competitors force that realization on us. Either way its not exceptional-its a stupid drama that has been replayed many times.

When you make changes in haste-they seldom turn out to be good ones. What I am about to chronicle in this post is an example of a change made by these guys-that is 100% at odds with what they supposedly want from those they inflicted it on.

In their haste to show their rotund and ill-informed followers how manly they could be about cutting the federal budget, several really stupid cuts were made-that will end up costing the government more in the long run. The Reed Amendment to HR1 would do away with compatibility pay matches for Foreign Service officers serving overseas. Reed , an asshole Congressmen from New York’s 29th district proposed this as stopping “an automatic pay raise” to FSO’s when they leave DC and move to their posts overseas. Besides the obvious grandstanding of a cut that is in fact not a cut-it is a bad idea and counterproductive to getting the kind of people America wants in its foreign service.

The Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act of 1990 was adopted as a way to reduce the government-wide disparity between the public and private sectors and is a basic component of salary for all civilian Federal employees, based on annual survey data collected by the Department of Labor. As a result of this law, every federal government employee working in the United States received “locality pay” as part of their salary. Until 2009, the only United States government civilian employees who did not receive this part of their salary were entry-level and mid-level Foreign Service personnel serving their country overseas. All others, including senior level State Department officers, and other agencies represented overseas, such as CIA officers under State Department cover, DOJ and DHS, have locality pay factored into their base salary.

Locality pay for Foreign Service personnel and other federal employees serving in Washington, D.C. is now approximately 25%.  Under the law prior to 2009, Foreign Service personnel serving abroad sacrificed this part of their salaries and took large pay cuts to their base salaries.  Those posted in Washington earned more money than colleagues posted in Pakistan, Yemen, and Beirut to name a few.  As a result, because retirement packages are based upon base pay (including “locality pay”), Foreign Service officers representing their country abroad received smaller retirement packages than their colleagues who stayed in Washington. This was not sustainable and in 2009 a bi-partisan solution was found to correct this policy problem. Closing the pay gap is not a pay raise — it is a correction of a 17- year-old unintended inequity in the worldwide Foreign Service pay schedule—an inequity that grew every year.

Today thousands of Foreign Service employees serve in hardship assignments around the globe, which now constitute nearly 60% of all posts thanks to: the fact that there are too many nations and a lot of them are basket cases and because that was what was stated as a goal for the state department. One of the persistent raps against the state department is that they are doing enough to support the War on Terror.  As business model-handing someone a 24% percent pay cut when they complete FSO training is a bad way to encourage that behavior. There has been strong bipartisan recognition that it is time to invest in diplomacy and development.  Penalizing Foreign Service employees – specifically those of us at the junior and mid-level – whose mission is to serve overseas to advance and protect our national interests by cutting their base pay undervalues the importance of the Foreign Service.

Now I have personal experience with folks who work with and in US Embassies. As a part of my stint in Romania last year-I was embedded in the Embassy splitting my time between it and the Romanian Ministry of Defense. The State Department personnel I worked with were very professional-put in some pretty decent hours and were always courteous and helpful to the things that I needed to get done.

I also have another kind of experience with Foreign Service Officers-the kind I think guys like Reed just don’t appreciate.

When my sister was killed in Panama back in 1997-it was a Consular Officer, working in American Citizen services in the Panamanian Embassy who helped our family get through a very rough time. He went above and beyond what he was required to do-to make sure all of the logistical arrangements and the other ancillary things that happen in an incident of that kind were handled with grace and dignity. As result-I did not have to get on a plane and fly down there, such was the totality of the work that he did. He has our undying gratitude-and he certainly earned every penny of his salary that month.

And in the end -it really does not save a whole lot of money, especially when you hold it up to the amount we are wasting supporting three wars in places we have no business being.

I have written my Senators and asked them to ensure this gets deleted from the continuing resolution. You should too.  America gets talented people to apply for the Foreign Service, the selection process is long and competitive, and contrary to popular belief-they do not all start out as fresh college graduates. Some actually transition from other careers later in life-usually taking a pay cut to do so because they want to serve their country. The country should incentivize the service-and enjoy the results. You get what you pay for.

I’ve been watching the events in Bahrain with considerable interest. Not because I think we can influence events one way or the other, in fact I think our best course is to sit tight and wait events out. I am however, amazed at the naivete shown by many American journalists about the country and about region of the Middle East as a whole.

No one, perhaps, symbolizes this overall lack of perspective more than Nicholas Kristof, who I follow on my Facebook page and who has been in the country for the last week. To quickly sum up his reporting-it can best be described as “Stockholm Syndrome“-he’s  fallen in line with the protesters without considering the entire sequence of events from an American point of view.

Now all of this would make for compelling drama if we did not have a stake in the outcome of events-but we do. If for no other reason because Bahrain is the home to the Fifth Fleet. Which is why, I find the cheerleading Kristof has been conducting more than a little strange.

Many here tell me that this is a turning point, and that democracy will now come to Bahrain – in the form of a constitutional monarchy in which the king reigns but does not rule – and eventually to the rest of the Gulf and Arab world as well. But some people are still very, very wary and fear that the government will again send in troops to reclaim the roundabout. I just don’t know what will happen, and it’s certainly not over yet. But it does feel as if this just might be a milestone on the road to Arab democracy.

For King Hamad, who has presided over torture, gerrymandering and lately the violent repression of his own people, I don’t know what will happen. Like HosniMubarak, he could have worked out a deal for democracy if he had initiated it, but he then lost his credibility when he decided to kill his own citizens. Some people on the roundabout were chanting “Down with the Regime,” and they have different views about what precisely that means. Some would allow the king to remain in a largely figurehead role, while others want King Hamad out.

Kristof-without coming out and actually saying it-has implied that is a good thing. He did come out and make a statement that to me was utterly astounding , about how no matter what happens, the Bahrainis would not throw the Fifth Fleet out of Bahrain.

He’s wrong about that-and if the King and the royal family go, and Bahrain becomes something other than a monarchy, Fifth Fleet better start thinking about where it’s going to move to. The decision to get rid of the command ships could prove a costly one.

As my Canadian counterpart noted a while back about Egypt,

Unlike most observers and bloggers, I’ve spent the last several years afraid of widespread “democracy” protests in the Middle East. Because so many people are so ignorant of the history of the region, or just overly optimistic, they don’t understand what the ramifications of what we’re seeing today.

To be fair, President George Walker Bush didn’t understand the ramifications of democracy, either. After the death of YassirArafat, Bush pushed for elections in the Palestinian Authority, over the objections of both Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and PA President Mahmood Abbas, who feared that Hamas was poised to win large majorities. Bush prevailed and, predictably, Hamas won large majorities. The same thing happened in Lebanon after the Syrians evacuated, and Hezbollah won the balance of power.

Democracy, especially in the Middle East, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just look at Iraq, an artificial country with deep sectarian divides. Freedom unleashed those divides and they proceeded to kill as many or more innocent people as Saddam did. Let’s assume that Iran became a true democracy tomorrow. There is absolutely no evidence that this would cause Tehran to end it’s nuclear program or abandon its enmity toward Israel. Sure, there’s a lot of wishful thinking to that effect, but no actual evidence.

That last sentence could well be applied to Kristof’s reporting from Bahrain. He needs to come back to the US for a while,eat American chow and start thinking like an American again.

Because these are the facts of Bahrain’s unique demographics. Bahrain has approximately 1.25 million people. Of that 500,000 are of foreign extraction and do not hold citizenship- roughly 275,000 Indians, 125,000 Bangladeshis, 45,000 Pakistanis, 45,000 Filipinos and 8,000 Indonesians, according to various media reports and government statistics.

That leaves roughly 750,000 native Bahrainis split between Arabs and descendants of Iranian descent. They are split, according to unofficial sources such as the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office,  approximately 33% Sunni and 66% Shia. The Royal Family is Sunni-the bulk of the rabble(UPDATE: Several people find this term offensive)people out in the Pearl Roundabout are not. Add to that a long history of Iranian meddling on the Island and you can say that you’re not exactly looking at a brave new world full of folks sympathetic to American interests.

And you can bet your bottom dollar that more than few Iranian stringers are in that bunch practicing a verbal form of anti-American subliminal suggestion. I’ll bet that number has increased in the last two weeks. I can practically guarantee it-because if Iran can get a government more sympathetic to its interests and more conducive to flows of Persians south across the Gulf, they know they have gained an important stepping stone to turning the tables on its American adversary.

Now add to that fact, the other reality- that economically, Bahrain’s interests are not allied with the United States,  but with Asia and with Europe. The country is no longer a major oil producer, and the willingness of the monarchy to cooperate has been tested more than a couple of times in the past few years. Normally they are supportive-but not always. ( I was witness to one of the smaller occasions in 2003 and again in 2005 when they f*cked us at the drive through). The primary motivator for Bahraini support of US basing has been the implied provision of US defense of the island against attack. But take away the Royal family and its relationships with the other nations in the Gulf, and that particular incentive to help America does not possibly look so imperative.

Plus-we need to play the tape all the way to the end. And like in Egypt-a fully functioning democracy cannot spring up overnight.  Depending on the timing of any subsequent elections, an overthrow of the King and the Royal Family could lead to just getting a new set of bullies in their place.

Now to be fair, Bahrain has some differences from Egypt. For one thing,  the  King granted limited reforms at the beginning of the last decade and the country has a parliament ( of sorts) and functioning political parties. The problem is, the strongest party in Bahrain is not exactly a beacon of hope to Western interests.  To date they were kept in check by methods similar to what is used in Hong Kong to rig the results of Legco elections: coalition blocks and an unelected upper house. A straight up democratic election removes those obstacles. So what do we get as a result of that?

We get the Al Wefaq National Islamic Society, the strongest political party and a Shia religious party-that’s not exactly a friend of women or the freewheeling expatriate wanna be such as myself. In point of fact they have advocated some Islamic codes that can only be described as racist and South Africa like. For example, in 2004 and again in 2006 they advocated segregation of South Asia nationals from native Bahrainis because they “‘make the neighborhood dirty”. They also taken a hard line on women’s issues. They insist that on family law and family issues it is the role of the Islamic religious leaders to determine what is right in terms of dress and roles of women. Yea right-we’ve seen how well that works in other Arab countries.

Now the thing that Bahrain has going for it-if they choose to take advantage of it, is the structure of a functioning government through the vehicle of the monarchy. Reforms could be implemented and perhaps, if implemented over a drawn out period of time, it might allow other, more secular and more moderate groups to make gains. That’s where I see the western reporter’s cheerleading and lionizing of the demonstraters as a big mistake. If for nothing else it will fill their heads with ideas that are simply impractical to obtain. Just the facts please-and point out the down side of instant democracy in countries with no tradition of it. ( This is not Eastern Europe and these are not Europeans, which means they are starting out with the count 0-2 against them.).

The violence of Friday was not surprising-and neither is the pull back.  They are simply a way of driving the point home that if the herd goes too far there are going to be consequences. ( With tragic consequences I might add).  I have no doubt the army would be back in their faces in a minute if the government felt that there was no other way to squelch them. However for now- I think they have seen the need to have further reforms, but they have to be reforms that leaves the royal family intact. We’ll just have to wait and see where that leads.

And that, brings me back to the issue of Fifth Fleet. Would they get kicked out? If the Royal Family stays and Bahrain becomes a constitutional monarchy of some sort-I doubt it. If they get booted out though-I’d say the chances of an eventual eviction rise to just under 50%-downstream, not immediately. If we do get to stay-you can be damn sure the price of staying is going to go up monetarily and in other ways. Just give it some time. ( and don’t underestimate the influence that other Shias in other countries will have in making that happen).

If Fifth Fleet did get booted, what are the options? Since I am of the mindset that the current level of military presence in Bahrain and the rest of the gulf is too high to begin with, I can’t decide if us getting booted out is actually doing us a favor in the  long run. But if it did happen, I think the immediate reaction would be to move the Witless Mt. Whitney to the Gulf and embark the primary fleet staff with a lot of the NAVCENT type functions being moved to either Europe or Tampa. I’ve long been a believer that some of the ancillary task force staffs ( specifically CTF-53 and CTF-57 and 54) could and should be moved to Europe, regardless of what happens in the Kingdom. ( the actual functions of moving parts and people could be handled by detachments wearing civilian clothes and keeping a lower profile than is now the case.).

Were the fleet staff  forced to re-embark, I would forsee a whole host of command and control problems that would need to be worked through-those are best discussed in another time and place. But Fifth Fleet would still be able to do its mission-just that the workarounds would not be pretty or popular.

Foreign policy requires a hard hearted pragmatism that cannot be swayed by the emotions of a particular moment. In that regard Mr. Kristof and the rest of the cheerleaders are doing their country -nor the country of Bahrain-no favors by advocating for that which does not foster our long term interests. Be careful what you wish for-because if you wish incorrectly, you just might get it.