Vice Adm. Michelle Howard was nominated for reappointment to the rank of vice admiral today by President Obama, a move that allows three-star officers to serve longer than 38 years without being promoted.

But if you disagree about her qualifications, well,  go back and look here for the results.

The video below was made in 2001 in California. It is very, very, long. ( almost an hour). But it is worth your time. I am envious-I will never have the ability to use words the way this man can. You should read his books and hear his words. They are awesome. He is an ardent defender of Israel-for better or worse. Nonetheless-he makes one understand the pull of this one nation over all others in our world.

Watch it and observe for your self:

It is well worth your time.  It is important to hear-to understand the modern Jewish State. The State that I admire dearly-but only understand about halfway.

Yea-her friend thought it was funny.

More Israel pictures tomorrow-it was a good trip learned a lot, and hit the long ball a few nights.

Last year when the S.O. and I were here, the big movie sensation was 1453. This year its Canakkale. Same basic theme-just a different century. Turks beating the snot out of Westerners.

I wonder what’s behind all this outpouring of Turkish patriotic fervor.

Anyway-here is the trailer:

For those not familiar, this movie is about the Battle for Gallipoli. Suffice it to say the British Empire comes out on the short end of the stick.

It would seem that the US Navy has crossed over into that universe.

In the alternate universe of Star Trek, treachery is the norm and people move up by assassinating their superiors.  Witness the proof that it happens in  the Navy in this universe as well.

First it was the CO of USS Enterprise ( ironic considering), now they are moving up the ladder:

Read it and weep!

Commentary here.

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. 

On the plus side she seems to have re-learned the idea of gratitude sex-for now. We will see how long it lasts.

In the mean time here are some more Spain pictures. Click on them to see properly and in a larger view.

This was the old castle the Hapsburgs used in the 15 and 1600 hundreds. Easily accessible by bus from Madrid-that's what we took. It is known as El Escorial.

More pictures below:

It had a beautiful Basilica inside-but of course, no pictures were allowed.

Some pictures from the gardens:

One of the things that surprised me about Madrid was the geography-it was much more hilly than I expected. I guess I had envisioned it as flat.

As a result, thanks to our British satellite system,  we have been watching voluminous coverage of the memories of her life. What strikes me the most is how very different it is from the gushing American coverage. It speaks volumes about the naiveté of Americans in general, and conservatives in particular.

The British coverage on BBC has been much more even handed-unsparing of her failures while quite laudatory of here achievements-which were many-and trying to give a balanced picture of a life that shaped a great deal of Great Britain's post World War II history. American coverage, particularly on Fox-which I have the misfortune to have on my Sky system-not so much.

Americans tend to view her as a British version of Reagan, but in reality she was very different. Consider:

Thatcher slashed, but there was no Reaganesque free candy. She lowered the rates, but she also raised other taxes, such as the value added tax. She was about sacrifice, cutting government subsidies and programs in a way that Reagan never matched. Millions of people went on the dole because of her cuts, whereas the recession in the U.S. did not result from Reagan cutting the budget but from Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker slamming the brakes to wring inflation from the economy. (Reagan did reappoint Volcker once.)

Thatcher called Reagan "the second most important man in my life." And both drew strength from the other. It helped at home. It was hard for Americans or Britons to dismiss their leader as a crazy outlier if your most important ally had an elected leader with a similar worldview. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair would mutually reinforce each other in the same way as they took on their own party's established interests. When Thatcher and Reagan differed, as on the Falklands war, where the Reagan Administration had coddled the "authoritarian" regime in Buenos Aires, it strained the relationship but never broke it.

 

Consider too-that America later brow beat Britain into its wars,  but when the British Navy could have really used our help-in the form of AEW aircraft and refueling, we did the minimum acceptable to get by. The US could have done far more to support Britain in the Falklands, support that it had richly earned, but the US failed miserably in the undertaking. And a year later-it invaded an island where the Queen was head of State without so much as a "by your leave" to the British government.

Americans should also remember that whatever success she had came at a painful cost. 3.3 million were unemployed with no hope of a job. The economy went into recession and the dole was being withdrawn unless you could "prove" you were actively searching for work.  It ruined millions of people's lives and put millions more into unproductive boredom and hardship. It cost the country £40b in lost productivity and the only thing Margaret did was make it worse.  Furthermore, just as in America 20 years later-it accelerated a gap between the wealthiest 1% and the majority of the population. Tony Blair came to power in part because of that-just as Barak Obama did some 10 years later in the US. Americans tend to forget how bad it really was in Britain for a great while.

Here is a point of view you will not hear on American TV-but probably should:

Thatcher was an evil, twisted woman who encouraged greed and isolation. she decimated the North of England and virtually destroyed my father during the miner's strikes.

I remember one Christmas particularly, during that dark time. The rotary club turned up at the door with a food parcel complete with turkey, veg and a small bottle of sherry.

This was our Christmas – all I can recall of Thatcher's wonder years was imminent threat of redundancy and penury.

Maybe Thatcher did something good for the country, but as a child growing up in Newcastle, I am at a loss as to what this good actually was.

Conservatives in America will love the woman because they will view her through the prism of her friendship with Ronald Reagan. She was, like Reagan, probably what her country needed at the time-but one must never forget the actual facts of her time in office, which had a lot of bad to balance out the good. Just as it was with Reagan.

Regardless of what one thought of her-she did a lot to earn a great deal of respect. However one should never forget the undercurrent that came with that legacy and the deep divisions she fostered in her country. British politics still lives in her shadow-for both better and worse.

But the key point is this: those who admire the deceased public figure (and their politics) aren't silent at all. They are aggressively exploiting the emotions generated by the person's death to create hagiography. Typifying these highly dubious claims about Thatcher was this (appropriately diplomatic) statement from President Obama: "The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend." Those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms.

Regardless-I really enjoyed my trip to Madrid. Surprisingly, the city was very clean, the subways worked much better than those here in Stuttgart, and the wine and food were simply marvelous. The down side of course being, that to eat the food, you had to wait till 8:30 PM or later. I was fine with that-the S.O., not so much. Rather than adapt, she thought she could bend the city to her will. As a result I got to be witness to a few episodes of "the ugly Nihonjin". Suffice it to say, it wasn't pretty and I wanted to go hide in a corner. But, of course, I couldn't do that-I had to pay the bill.

Nonetheless the architecture in the city is marvelous. Below you can see some examples of it. In many ways the city looks like Paris-and why not? considering the lineage of the King is from France. ( Yes its true. The Hapsburgs lost the toss and France has influenced Spain ever since. If they could not win by invading-as Napoleon found out-they just influenced the monarchy. ( click on all the pictures to see them as they should be)

Taken in front of the Teatro Real.

And of course there is the Royal Palace:

Let's not forget the parks:

And the music in the parks:

How a Mariachi Band ends up in a Madrid Park is beyond me. But they had a cute looking lady singer:

More to follow in three subsequent posts.

However,  on the flight down here, I came across this quote in a section of the in flight magazine.  For a long time now-ever since I went off the deep end, and decided that life in Japan and the expat life style was for me-  I have repeatedly gotten the question from friends and former friends to the extent of, " Why can't you just settle down, put down some roots and build a solid life in just one location? Don't you realize what an isolated lifestyle you lead?"

No I don't. And for what it's worth, it beats the hell out of a suburban lifestyle in any one of a 100 cities in the USA. Here is why:

Without the possibility of travel, we would be confined within meager limits; travel raises us up the status of gods, with no restriction or obstacles. The myth of the flying carpet is this: there is something magical in the inner transformation that comes from leaping a new frontier. The customs officer believes he's locked you into your official identity by checking your passport. But in fact you have only handed over an empty shell, the photo of someone who is no longer you. Your true life is about to begin, the multipile possibilities within you start to soar, and you are snatched from your small private self to become a citizen of the world.- Dominque Fernandez.

 

I love that quote. It speaks to me in so many ways-and I understand it so very well. There are some men who are meant for the familiar suburban lifestyle, tending to the yard and driving whoever, back and forth to [fill in the blank of mindless mundane suburban chore here]. That is not me. Nor can it be me. And if you are wondering why, Ms Fernandez has an explanation for that too:

Go your way, seducers, flatterers, idlers, those glib of tongue and charlatans; I am not a seed that you can force to grow; my goal differs so from yours that I would be wasting my time in trying to explain where my inclination drives me. 

 

When I get back, I will fill in some of my observations of the city that is Madrid. I really like it-and it was very different from what I had expected. Stay tuned. Till then-the prowl beckons.

And since my erstwhile employer is not cooperating by providing me with the kind of travel I both need and should have as a job perk-I guess I will have to do it myself. So its on a plane today to the heart of Spain. I really don't have the money to do this right now-and the timing is not the best. But its March 27th, there is still snow on the ground and people are watching Charles Krauthammer be stupid.  ( I realize using the name Krauthammer and "stupid" in the same sentence is repetitive-but its a great example of how really deluded a certain segment of the American population is.)

So I need a break.

Pictures to follow if I can my laptop to work right.

Hasta la vista baby!

Over at The Atlantic. Conor Friedersdorf points out the latest example of Steyn's hypocrisy by examining his unaplogetic defense of the decision to invade Iraq. You should read Steyn's self serving blabber first, then read Friedersdorf's skilled dissection of it.

He exposes Steyn as the complete hypocrite he has always been.

What neoconservatives never seem to understand is that you go to war with the citizenry that you've got. Urging a war of choice that requires more years of fighting to win than the citizenry will permit is itself an error. If guys like Steyn didn't realize, when they were calling on the U.S. to invade Iraq, that Americans would tire of fighting there after a decade of conflict, thousands of troops killed, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, they should blame themselves for missing the obvious. If America looks weak for failing to win the war, we have Iraq hawks to blame for urging a war that required far longer to win than a democratic citizenry was ever likely to want to fight (and that might well have been unwinnable regardless of how long we remained an occupying force).

The Iraq hawks would be culpable even if they'd encouraged war without making any predictions about its likely cost. Instead, the hawks spent the pre-war period assuring Americans that victory would be sure and swift; proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" soon after the invasion; and started speculating in those heady days about regime change in Iran and Syria. It isn't ADHD that caused so many to support the invasion only to turn against the occupation. Many of the Americans who changed sides were misled by the faux-assurance of writers like Steyn, who puffed themselves up as if they were speaking obvious foreign-policy truths, openly mocked academics and pundits who warned of impending calamity, and most incredibly, continue all these years later to act as if subsequent events have vindicated their analysis. The hawks who say we'd do well to stay in Iraq and secure Bush's victory aren't winning converts in part because their predictions about how the war would unfold have been proven so spectacularly wrong by events — without their admitting it — that no one takes them seriously.

Some things just never change can always be counted on.  The sun coming up every day, for example, and the fact that you can always count on Mark Steyn to be a douchebag.

You know it as Passover.

And Holy Week.

Nonetheless it was a productive week if at the same time a very frustrating one. Israelis can be very difficult especially when you have to tell them no-several times.

Like spoiled children, however, you still have to love them-even if you don't always like them.

We got a lot done-and now I am in the middle of "meeting cleanup"-producing notes, sending out PPT's and wishing I was on a plane to Israel. ( Or anywhere else for that matter). Damn you sequester!

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While I was out, Britain passed a new press law. This, in reaction to the clear cut crossing of the line that the Rupert Murdoch controlled print media accomplished through the phone hacking scandal. One of the most interesting phenomena was the complete over-reaction to the news by uber conservatives and their designated propaganda outlets.Particularly telling was the depth of the over reaction by those who are the worst offenders when it comes to media responsibility and their supporters in the blogosphere. To say that kind of reaction is overwrought, is slightly something of an understatement..

For starters, there are limits beyond which a responsible media should not go. The principle enforcers of that are supposed to be libel laws that demand irresponsible media players ( such as Murdoch and his clone Fox News) pay a pecuniary price for their irresponsibility. That is what Britain is trying to accomplish- with a media that is far less constrained than American media ( although the Americans are doing their best to be just like their British counterparts). The paranoid amongst us-decided to maintain that it was threat to freedom of the press and freedom of speech. In reality neither was the case -and British media coverage ( which I get through my satellite coverage) was much less hysterical. When it was pointed out that there was a large number of folks in the UK who had decided that enough was enough-and that it was time to put a halt to London's being the libel capitol of the world-the responses in general represented the basic level of American stupidity. The "Oh yea! What about MSNBC?" line of thinking gets really tiresome and old. And validates for me, again, the basic stupidity of a large segment of the US population.

For one thing-it ignores the fundamental illogic of Phibians argument. When someone tries to defend the British government and point out that something, somewhere has to be done about the increasing inability of the news media to police themselves-the contrarian arguments come out. "What about Dan Rather?" " What about Andrea Mitchell?" "MSNBC is liberal"…and so on and so forth. "Its impinging on free speech". They completely miss the point. Which is, that they are in effect arguing in favor of those shameful media practices-for the sole purpose of avoiding detailed scrutiny of equally egregious conduct by their darlings: Fox News and the right wing blogosphere.  That's crazy.

There is no impingement of free speech. There is a recognition however, when you just tell out right lies, or publish recklessly-there is a price to be paid. I have been following most of the British coverage of the debate leading up to this law-and the previous 18 months that led up to it. The simple truth is that the Murdoch organizations crossed a line-going into an area they had no business going into, and ruined a lot of good people in the process. There is a difference between printing a dissenting opinion, and publishing an blatant lie with malice aforethought. All they are trying to do is put teeth into their libel laws-something that used to be present in the United States. If we enforced our libel laws it would put slime like Hinderaker and Malkin out of business. Besides, it may not survive a court challenge in the UK, something that "fair and balanced" news outlets in the US neglected to report.

It is always interesting the things our Galtian overlords get bent out of shape about. They are perfectly OK with strangling rights to live one's life in peace, have access to decent health care, the right to have sex as much as they want-and not be told what to do with their own bodies vis a vis reproduction. But take away the non existent right of the Breitbart children or Michelle Malkin or Hindrocket to lie with impunity? That gets their panties in a bunch.

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And finally I think its important to recognize the anniversary that occurred this week, the 10 th anniversary of the worst foreign policy decision made by the United States in the last 40 years. No Phib, on this issue you are completely wrong again. You can cling to your flawed beliefs and be a surgeaholic-but the war was not worth it, it created more problems for the United States than it solved and most importantly-needlessly sacrificed thousands of American lives.

Lets turn it over to some more objective observers shall we?

This, obviously, was all a fever dream. There were no biological or nuclear weapons; there may have been a few rusty chemical shells lying around, just as there had been for decades. Iraq was not an important sponsor of Islamicist terrorism. Islamicist terrorism was fueled not by fascist dictatorships such as Iraq, but by non-state actors in failed states such as Afghanistan and Somalia; and our invasion of Iraq promptly turned it into precisely the sort of failed-state sectarian war zone that does fuel terrorism. Thousands of American soldiers died in a war in Iraq that only exacerbated the danger of anti-American terrorism. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers died as well, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died in the resulting civil war, most killed by the Iraqi militias who emerged in the power vacuum the US invasion created, but many killed by US armed forces themselves. In the name of pre-empting a non-existent threat, America killed tens of thousands of people and turned Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorism. And we spent a trillion dollars to do it.

How did America's policymaking community ever commit itself to such a catastrophic delusion? I don't truly understand it now, and I didn't understand it then.  ( SS note-emphasis added).  I found the developing consensus for an unprovoked attack on Iraq in late 2002 absurd. But I had an advantage: I wasn't living in America at the time. Viewed from the defamiliarising distance of West Africa, the American polity's effort to talk itself into invading a country that hadn't attacked it was baffling and disturbing. That reaction was widely shared in the country where I was living among locals and expats, Americans included.

My opposition to the war began the day I was shown plans for the deployment of five carriers to the Gulf in 2002. Among many others we asked two specific questions: "Why do we need 5 CV's especially since it will force you to keep 2 of them on cruise for over 9 months?" ( The Lincoln was kept on Cruise for 11 months-all to ensure the F-18 E's and F's she carried did not miss the conflict). That was an irresponsible decision then-and I remain so convinced today. And the second question was, "Why now?" Why not finish one war before starting a second one?" That too,  is still a pertinent question to ask.

Being still in the Navy at the time-I got a first hand view of the cascading effects of that one mistake over and over again. I have written about my disdain for the war, and the American military's pursuit of it a lot since I started this blog in 2005. It was NOT "the right war, fought imperfectly through three of four phases. No one can see alternative presents, but my bet is that both we and Iraq are better because of it. ". No-it was a colossal mistake, a huge waste of time , resources and lives and it was built on a foundation of lies and deception.. To paraphrase Herman Wouk, victory only has meaning in its effects on the politics that occur after the war-and more importantly should be waged with an eye towards what is solely in the national interest. US interests-not those of Arabs living in Iraq.  

There is a new book out, by Toby Dodge called "Iraq: From War to a New Authoritarianism".  

Iraq was Chinatown, an unknowable entity where it was unwise to linger. As a result, contemporary Iraq, a very different creation from what America’s occupation had intended, has been poorly chronicled. The best recent books in English have been military histories, aimed at showing how America’s generals performed. Few have explained what happened to Iraq itself.

Toby Dodge, who teaches at the London School of Economics, does much to fill that gap in his new book, published under the auspices of the nearby International Institute for Strategic Studies. It is a short academic work and makes no effort to present the human side of a generally bleak picture. But Mr Dodge is clear, concise and unsparing about the country’s ongoing agony. For anyone who wants to know how Iraq arrived at its current state, and wonders what might happen next, this is an excellent place to begin.

Mr.  Dodge helps set to rest this myth that neo-conservatives continue to believe that we "won the war"-and all it took was new leadership. The facts simply do not support that assertion-and the surge in both foresight and hindsight was as much of a mistake as starting the war was. By its own benchmarks the surge failed-because whatever time it bought the Iraqis to solve its political differences, the Iraqis simply screwed away.

When people say it was worth it, they have to force themselves to dance around some annoying facts. There will of course, be some inconvenient truths that will need to be danced around:

Annoying fact #1: The Iraqi government is still worthless.

Annoying fact #2: Violence in all of Iraq is not reduced as it is supposed to be. 

What is clear to any objective observer is that the only winners were the Chinese and the Iranians. By any objective standard-from the standpoint of advancing US interests in the world-Iraq was a complete and total failure.

Just about all of the current economic troubles-particularly the size of the deficit can be laid at the feet of the war. The inability of the US to influence events in other lands-e.g., get Europeans to pay more for their own defense-due to the war. The rise of the Chinese in Africa-due to the war. Higher energy prices-due to the war.

It was all a colossal waste.

And second, I have been fighting off  spell of birthday induced depression, conjured up by being a year older and no closer to my dream of returning to Asia. Curse the financial burdens that weigh upon me! I want to shed them all and move off to paradise. In the olden days one might have been able to do that-now with the advent of electronic banking- they can hunt you down and find your ass(ets).

I can't even celebrate St. Patrick's day in proper style-as I have to be up and gone very early tomorrow.

More to follow when I can break free.