All Alone in the Night

For those who have been wondering what has happened to Zathras recently (yes, both of you), let me explain.

Zathras' master here in the Great Machine is a very demanding person. No matter how well, or how quickly Zathras performs his duties, it is never enough to satisfy him. Even when Zathras exceeds his requirements, or finishes faster than expected, he only sees that as justification to give Zathras more work, and less time to do it...

Stepping back out of character for a moment, I'll give you an example. Like another blogger on this site, I am in the Army. My current assignment is running part of a training site where we prepare Soldiers who are getting ready to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. We take our mission here very seriously, because each of us knows that the training we give these young men and women could literally be the difference between life and death.

Unfortunately, our dedication and success to date may come back to haunt us. Because we have been able to handle a truly phenomenal number of Soldiers in the past couple of years, and because the units we have trained have had very few casualties in theater, the Army has decided that we should train even more of the units getting ready to deploy! Of course, the fact that last year's training load stretched us to our limits on manpower and resources is irrelevant - so this year we are getting twice as many Soldiers to train. As of yet, no one has explained to me where the additional 30 trainers I need will come from, or lacking that, where I can get another 20 hours scheduled in each day.

As always, we'll do our best, and work until we drop, because we do believe in this mission. But sometimes I fear we may reach the end of human endurance, and I'm not sure what will happen then...

Every day, we do more and more, with less and less. Soon, we will be able to do everything with nothing.

With the ranges behind us, we transitioned to a more sedate classroom pace for most of the rest of the week. Wednesday morning we got to go to the Leader's Reaction Course, a kind of obstacle course that requires each team to get through various obstacles while giving them odd limitations. For example, the last obstacle we had to traverse was a ~20 foot high cargo net with a six foot wide platform on top. We had to get the entire team across, plus a 'wounded' soldier (a dummy) on a stretcher. To do this we had a stretcher, a back board, and three ropes. That was a rather straightforward challenge: we tied the ropes to the stretcher and pulled the casualty up one side and lowered him down the other. Some of the others were more esoteric, requiring us not to touch the ground and so on. The purpose of the course is to help the team learn to work together while challenging them to be creative, and it worked pretty well. It was a good time.

Most of the rest of the week was classes on communications and various other technical systems. They're good classes, but the instructor-to-student ratio is so high that it's hard to get as much out of the classes as you should. Given the Army's current financial woes, it's unlikely things will get any better.

Saturday we had a great time, as we went out to a range to practice reflexive fire. As the name implies, reflexive fire involves learning how to fire your weapon rapidly. You start at 25 meters from the target and bring up your weapon as quickly as you safely can and put two rounds in the target before returning the weapon to the low ready. You do this while facing the target and while turned left and right from the target. Then you move in to 20 meters and fire from the kneeling position, still bringing the weapon up to fire two rounds and returning it to the low ready. Then the real fun begins: you walk towards the targets, stopping when a target is presented. We burned about 200 rounds per man and had a great time, as it's a lot more challenging than simply engaging targets on a qualification range. Better yet, we then took the rest of the weekend off, so I was able to spend a little time with Delenn.

This week is all classes. Yesterday we trained on calling for fire, including artillery, rotary wing, and fixed wing. I've done artillery before, but calling in air support is a whole new ballgame and the training was interesting and challenging. Explaining target location to a guy moving at at least 100 mph is a lot different from telling a fixed artillery piece to fire at a target, to put it mildly. Today we had two hours of Iraqi before moving on to personnel recovery, which helps to train you on what to do if you are cut off or captured. That's valuable training, but the execution was horrid. Hopefully the rest of this week's classes will be much better done.

Holding grudges is, sadly, a quintessentially American trait, and it seems bureaucracies are no less prone to the malady than individuals. Case in point, the decision by the Army to deny Joan Baez the chance to sing during a concert at Walter Reed.

Yes, Baez opposes the war. So? Baez seems intelligent enough not to try and turn a concert for soldiers into an antiwar rally. More likely than not Baez would have sung a few songs, perhaps entertained a few soldiers, and moved on without incident. Why the soldiers should be denied the opportunity to hear her sing simply because she holds views diametrically opposed to those of some fraction of the Army is beyond me. Soldiers hold a lot more diverse views than the media tends to portray.

What is supposed to make America great is that people are free to disagree. Granted, Baez isn't really being punished by not being allowed to sing to soldiers; that's a loss for the soldiers. But the notion that the service is going to vet artists based on their political views is anathema to what the U.S. is supposed to stand for and is a disturbing trend.

Some people really, really need a day job. Case in point, the Carpetbagger Report's hypersensitivty regarding House Republican Ted Poe, who (horror of horrors) quoted Confederate General and KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest's infamous dictum to 'get there firstest with the mostest'.

Are we now so frail that we cannot even quote bad people who said reasonable things because they were bad? Yes, Forrest wasn't much of a human being, but he was one hell of a cavalryman and his observations on military strategy are probably pretty good. The fact so many people can get worked up over such a minor thing makes me weep for this country.

Apparently Wonkette's take on the Fort Dix six's plan to attack soldiers at Fort Dix is becoming the accepted wisdom about the attack.

Ok. So, the plot was: six dudes from New Jersey buy some guns and storm Fort Dix. The Fort Dix that is full of lots and lots of Army reservists with way, way more guns. And, like, extensive military training and shit. Yes, thank god these terrorists have been caught and locked up before they could be killed within minutes of deciding to carry out the dumbest fucking terrorist plot we’ve ever heard of.

It is not my intent to blow up the attackers beyond their means. They were clearly not too bright, and the incident serves as an important reminder that law enforcement and intelligence are critical tools in this war. (BTW, would these men have been caught pre-Patriot Act? I'm pretty sure they would have, but I'm not certain of that. If I'm right, that's a good reminder of how little the act really did to further secure the U.S. against attack.) But slightly more competent terrorists could have done a lot more damage than people who've never served seem to realize.

Yes, Fort Dix is filled with soldiers, as are all military posts. Contrary to what a lot of people appear to believe, however, soldiers don't wander about 24/7 with weapons, and even soldiers who are armed only have live rounds when they're on a range, with the exception of on-duty military police. So six men with weapons and live rounds could pose a non-trivial risk to a lot of soldiers, depending on how they executed their attack. Again, I'll note that these individuals in particular don't strike me as too likely to have done their due diligence, so they probably wouldn't have been overly effective, but they certainly could have killed at least a few people before they were brought down, and a more intelligent bunch could kill a lot more than a few people.

As Ann Althouse properly notes, the September 11 attacks would have sounded preposterous if someone had suggested them ahead of time, yet they worked disturbingly well. The price of living in a free society is having a lot of places where people can kill effectively. Personally, I'd rather live in that society than one where my safety is guaranteed by taking away most of my rights, but poo-pooing the threats strikes me as an ignorant response to the problem.

Update: Edited for clarity. In the immortal words of Ralph Wiggum: "Me fail English. That unpossible!"

Is anyone really surprised that the Democrats, now safely ensconsed in power, are turning their back on the promises they made about ethical reform back in the fall? It amazes me that anyone could be, yet I assume that some people must be, as I recall various left-wing bloggers talking about how important it was to get Democrats in office in order to stop Republican corruption. And maybe some of them are expressing their surprise or disappointment in print, but I've yet to see any of them.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. Corruption was a great issue to run on, but like term limits there was no way Congress was going to pass any meaningful ethics reform no matter who is in charge. I do not generally subscribe to a view of America that sees the country as stratified into classes, but it is reasonable to argue that there are at least two classes in America: the governing class and the rest of us. Whether it is traveling the roads at speeds that would get the average citizen tossed in jail or receiving a slap on the wrist for crimes that would rate far worse were the perpetrator not connected to the right people, there is little question that the governing class considers itself too important to be tied down by the rules they're too happy to impose on the rest of us.

Nor is it a surprise this news isn't being mentioned much by those who claimed the Democrats would do a better job with ethics reform than Republicans. It is the rare person who is willing to admit when they have erred; take a look at how many pro-war blogs are talking about General Petraeus' letter to the troops about torture to see the same phenomon from the other side of the fence.

Update: Kudos to Kevin Drum, who tells the Democratic leadership to "show some spine. If Democrats want people to believe that there's really a difference between the two parties, then show them there's a difference." Amen.

Just as with lobbying reform, the Democrats want people to see them as the party better able to deal with national security issues, but the plain truth is that while they're not likely to be any worse than Republicans, they're not going to be any better, either.

With the U.S. in a war that is only going to get worse as we withdraw from Iraq (which doesn't necessarily mean that isn't the right decision; my own position on Iraq remains informed uncertainty), the Democrats have decided that our intelligence assets need to spend some of their limited time and assets evaluating the national security implications of global warming.

Does global warming pose a threat to national security? Quite possibly yes, but there's no way to know right now given the state of the science: we just don't know how soon changes may occur, what changes they may be, or to what extent. Those variables make all the difference in a global warming scenario, and without more information, any assessment offered about its effects on global warming will tell us more about the assumptions underlying the assessment than the real problems.

At another time, this might just be another government boondoggle, spending other people's money to benefit the cause or group of the week. But intelligence is a bit more important than studies on cow flatulence or another building named for Robert Byrd. Al Qaeda has shown a definite pattern in its attacks: it goes after targets more than once, and it seeks to up the ante with each new attack. Further, it is a patient organization. It took them eight years to launch a second attack on the WTC. Defeating those kinds of attacks requires good intelligence, and that is something the United States sorely lacks. Tossing off some of those limited assets to create a largely speculative report is little more than a concession that national security isn't really an issue for the Democratic Party.

Fortunately, both parties are blessed with the knowledge the American system doesn't hold anyone responsible for failures any longer. George Tenet walked away from his tenure as CIA director, having overseen the failure to stop the September 11 attacks and having guaranteed the presence of WMDs in Iraq, with a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his troubles. When the next attack comes, nobody is going to blame the Democrats for sending intelligence assets on a wild goose chase, nor the Republicans for launching a war than inspired who knows how many new jihadis to strike at the United States.

Isn't democracy wonderful?

First Lieutenant Andrew J. Bacevich Jr., son of BU professor and author Andrew J. Bacevich, is dead. He was killed by an IED in Salah ad Din province on Sunday while serving with 3-8 Cavalry.

His father is the author of the excellent book The New American Militarism and has argued against the war for some time now. Our thoughts go out to the Bacevich family.

James Lileks and his family recently visited Walt Disney World, and Lileks naturally published a small travelogue reviewing his visit. As I am something of a Disney-phile, having visited The World some 15-20 times in my life, Lileks' prose was even more interesting than I usually find it because he was describing things that I am very familiar with. If you enjoy Lileks' work or you like Disney World, you'll enjoy his take on all things Disney.

MR. GOLER: Congressman Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq, who would bring the troops home as quickly as -- almost immediately, sir. Are you out of step with your party? Is your party out of step with the rest of the world? If either of those is the case, why are you seeking its nomination?

REP. PAUL: Well, I think the party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy.

Senator Robert Taft didn't even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy -- no nation-building, no policing of the world. Republicans were elected to end the Korean War. The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War. There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.

Just think of the tremendous improvement -- relationships with Vietnam. We lost 60,000 men. We came home in defeat. Now we go over there and invest in Vietnam. So there's a lot of merit to the advice of the Founders and following the Constitution.

And my argument is that we shouldn't go to war so carelessly. (Bell rings.) When we do, the wars don't end.

MR. GOLER: Congressman, you don't think that changed with the 9/11 attacks, sir?

REP. PAUL: What changed?

MR. GOLER: The non-interventionist policies.

REP. PAUL: No. Non-intervention was a major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East -- I think Reagan was right.

We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?

REP. PAUL: I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, "I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier." They have already now since that time -- (bell rings) -- have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary.

MR. GIULIANI: Wendell, may I comment on that? That's really an extraordinary statement. That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. (Applause, cheers.)

And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Congressman?

REP. PAUL: I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.

They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. I mean, what would we think if we were -- if other foreign countries were doing that to us?

For those who don't recognize it, that was the now-infamous exchange between Republican presidential candidates Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) and former mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani (Complete transcript begins here). Giuliani got a lot of great press out of it, as his position seems to be one held by a sizeable fraction of Americans. It's difficult for me to express how unfortunate I believe this to be, and what it probably means for the U.S. in the future.

Americans have a fascinating view of the world. When other nations get in the U.S.'s business, it's considered only proper and just that they be put in their place. Yet when the U.S. bombs a sovereign nation or goes to war in a distant land, Americans seem to think that the world should simply accept the benevolent motivations of the U.S. I happen to believe that, contra the blood for oil crowd, U.S. motivations generally are pretty good. But whether they are or not, the results are often mixed at best. Regardless of American intentions in Iraq, the situation on the ground there is a disaster right now, for example. And it should surprise no one that some Iraqis will blame the U.S. for what has happened to them and will be willing to act on that belief.

There is an unfortunate tendency among people to dismiss motivations they don't understand. So when Osama bin Laden cites the occupation of Andalusia as a motivation for his attacks on Spain, a lot of people shake their heads and assume the man is irrational. Maybe he is and maybe he isn't, but if he believes that the reconquista is a justification for attacking Spain, and he can find enough other people who believe that to make effective attacks against Spain, it doesn't really matter whether his reasoning makes sense to us or not. It is sufficient for him and his followers, and they're willing to kill for it.

Now we have a situation where the U.S. has, for many years, intervened in the Middle East. It doesn't matter to a lot of Arabs whether those interventions were justified and it doesn't matter what motivations underlaid them. All that matters is that they saw the U.S. come in, push people around, and humiliate Arabs, no small issue for an honor-shame culture. And so a nontrivial number of them have been radicalized enough to try and kill Americans to avenge these perceived slights. And when they do occasionally succeed, what does the U.S. do? It strikes back in such a manner as to radicalize still more enemies. I think the whole 'cycle of violence' concept is overrated in many quarters, but it this case I think there is some justice in it.

Any counterinsurgency fight lies mainly in the non-military realm. If the counterinsurgency focuses all its efforts on killing insurgents, it may be able to reduce the number of problems markedly, but it will not destroy the insurgency. The cause will still draw new followers to replace those lost, perhaps even more quickly than the counterinsurgent can kill them depending on how heavy handed they are. The COIN fight can only be ultimately won by addressing the root causes of the insurgency. For 30 years, the U.S. has attempted to fight a type of insurgency using strictly military means, and the results have been predictable.

Yet when Paul points out the plain facts, that while terrorist attacks are not justified, our actions can justify them in the eyes of our enemies, the audience wants to cheer Giuliani's robust defense of American blundering.

Are there people out there who hate America for its freedoms? Yes. Some Islamists look at the U.S. and are appalled by all they see. They would do anything to wipe the U.S. out. But their numbers are trivial. They can only strike at the U.S. by drawing on other grievances, the kind the U.S. keeps handing them.

I do not support an isolationist policy. But there is a gap between isolationism and sending American troops around the world on a regular basis to intervene in areas they're not wanted. Were the U.S. to stop throwing its military weight around the world on a regular basis, its leaders might be surprised to see how quickly the world demonstrated its appreciation by ratcheting down a lot of the anti-American rhetoric that stirs so many to act against U.S. interests. It wouldn't solve all the problems by any means; what solution would? But it's hard not to notice that countries like Japan and Switzerland are able to be economically and politically stable without throwing their military muscle around every few years.

But that prescription will never last as long as demagoguery like Giuliani's is preferred to reason and analysis.

On the one hand, campaigns like the VoteVets, which attempt to undermine support for the Iraq War by having former generals speak out against it, seem like logical moves. Generals, after all, have a great deal of training in war and the military art, so if they say that the war is lost, their words should carry some weight.

On the other, some of them seem an awful lot more interested in getting in the news than in really helping. Via Mudville Gazette comes this exercise in compare and contrast from retired Army Major General Paul Eaton.

Last year, pre-surge (pre-US elections) retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton appears before congress, excoriates the Bush administration and demands a surge of troops for Iraq.

Batiste and his colleagues offered their solution: more troops, more money and more time in Iraq. "We must mobilize our country for a protracted challenge," Batiste warned. "We better be planning for at least a minimum of a decade or longer," contributed retired Marine Col. Thomas Hammes.

"We are, conservatively, 60,000 soldiers short," added retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who was in charge of building the Iraqi Security Forces.

This year, in television advertisements for his political group "VoteVets", he says:

President Bush says he listens to his military commanders.
Well, Mr. President, I was one of those commanders, and you weren't listening when we warned you of the dangers we would face invading Iraq. Now our military is overcommitted, and America is less secure.

Mr. President, you're being told we need serious diplomacy, not escalation, and you're still not listening.

If the president won't listen, Congress must.

And now, as they say, for something totally different. Yes, it is (finally, some would say) I, Marcus, back at long last. To those puzzled by my long absence from posting, and infrequent posts when I was present, I will simply ask how many times Marcus showed up in the early episodes of the series. However, now that G'Kar is getting ready to depart for realms most sandy, my appearances here will hopefully be more frequent.

This morning I'd like to talk about a series of books that I've recently discovered, the Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. It is now also a series on the SciFi channel, but you needn't worry about spoilers as I haven't seen a single episode as yet.

The Dresden Files are a series of books chronicling the adventrues and misadventures of modern day wizard Harry Dresden. Given that 'wizarding' doesn't pay all that well in modern day Chicago, Harry also works as a police consultant on arcane matters. The books feature excellent characters, adventurous plots, a bit of mystery, and plenty of dry wit.

Buthcer's characters are very well developed, and have plenty of warts. Like the real world, few are ever 100% good or bad, and Dresden lives in a world full of various shades of gray. These include Dresden's nominal boss, police detective sergeant Murphy, gentleman mobster Johnnie Marcone, a faerie godmother who wants his soul, a pack of werewolves, and vampires too numerous to mention.

In each volume, Harry is confronted by both normal crime and all kinds of nasty critters from the NeverNever, Butcher's version of Faerie that lives next door to our own reality. His writing is definitely improving with each volume, and the books provide hours of entertainment. The 9th volume in the series was published in hardback earlier this month.