perfidy

George Will discusses Marine General Charles Krulak, who is the son of Marine General Victor Krulak, who we have been discussing in relation to the CAP program in Vietnam. Will talks about Krulak the Younger's (sounds like a character in a bad fantasy movie) theories on modern warfare, which he describes as the 'Three-Block War':

In today's conflicts, he says, you can have a Marine wrapping a child in swaddling clothes. And a Marine keeping two warring factions apart at gunpoint. And a Marine in medium- or high-intensity combat. It can be the same Marine, in a 24-hour time frame, in just three city blocks.

"You can't," he says, "defeat an idea with just bullets -- you need a better idea." But first you need bullets. You need, Krulak says, the enemy "to be petrified," as were the Germans who gave U.S. Marines a name that stuck -- "devil dogs" -- as a term of respect when, at Belleau Wood, Marines blunted the Germans' 1918 drive on Paris.

There is a heart-rending ingenuousness to U.S. efforts at amicability, even to the point of encouraging Marines, before they entered Fallujah last month, to grow mustaches, as many Iraqi men do. Shiloh, where almost 24,000 Americans were casualties, was where both sides in the Civil War lost their illusions about its being a short and not-too-bloody war. After Fallujah, it is clear that the first order of business for Marines and other U.S. forces is their basic business: inflicting deadly force.

Niall Ferguson offers an historical perspective on the recent difficulties in Iraq. It seems that the British had some difficulties when they occupied the region in the wake fo the Great War. A while back, Military History Quarterly (I believe) had a fascinating article on the campaign that led to the British occupation of Baghdad, but I was unaware of the level of casualties that the British sustained after that.

The Instapundit has a good article up at TCS, looking at the reasons why the X-Prize is getting results.

The money quote is from X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis:

The results of this competition have been miraculous. For the promise of $10 million, over $50 million has been spent in research, development and testing. And where we might normally have expected one or two paper designs resulting from a typical government procurement, we're seeing dozens of real vehicles being built and tested. This is Darwinian evolution applied to spaceships. Rather than paper competition with selection boards, the winner will be determined by ignition of engines and the flight of humans into space. Best of all, we don't pay a single dollar till the result is achieved.

Faster, please.

[wik] The title of this post has been changed. I completely forgot, and did not notice until just now, that I had never changed the boring auto-generated title to one of my trademark half clever personalized titles. It will never happen again.

A lifelong democrat is very concerned about the direction of his party. This expands, rather eloquently, on the point I was raising in my recent post (and in the comments thereof) about the ad placed by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club.

... okay, maybe that's a little harsh. But read this Grammar Police post on our new super-ambassador to Iraq, John "Honduran Death Squads? What Honduran Death Squads?" Negroponte.

How, exactly, will sending a non-Arab-specialist with a big black mark (and a whole bunch of red spatters) on his record into Iraq help things? Is it just because John's a friend of Cheney and Bush the Elder?

See also the Yglesias and Kleiman links Grammar Police has. This is the guy in charge after June 30th? Shit, might as well put John Wayne Gacy in charge of a kid's birthday party.

[wik] It occurs to me that this might just be a trial-balloon rumor, designed to see if people are really against Negroponte like they were against Kissinger and Poindexter. Calpundit points to another possibility:"there's another thing to keep in mind here anyway: who the hell would want this job? Bush's shortlist is probably really short."

True that.

In light of our earlier post about scientologist's secret arrangement with the IRS, I thought I'd throw this one into the ring: A court ordered a prominent critic of the cult to pay $500,000 in damages in a breech of contract dispute.

Superior Court Judge Lynn Duryee issued that order in a breach-of- contract lawsuit against Scientology defector Gerald Armstrong.

The Church of Scientology had sought $10 million from Armstrong, who joined the church in 1969, left the fold in 1981 and later became one of the movement's harshest critics. He was sued by the church in 1984 for allegedly stealing thousands of pages of private papers that shed new light on the movement's mysterious founder, the late L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard, a prolific science-fiction writer and freelance philosopher, founded the Church of Scientology in the 1950s and died in 1986.

During his years in Scientology, Armstrong says he worked as an intelligence officer and communications officer and compiled documents for a church-sponsored biography of Hubbard. He says he has been in Scientology's sights since the church filed its 1984 lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court to get control of Hubbard's private papers.

Judge Paul Breckenridge Jr., who presided over that case, issued a ruling in which he called Hubbard "virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background and achievements." In settling that case in 1986, Armstrong agreed to return the documents. He says that the church paid him $515,000 ($800,000 including his lawyer's fee) and that his attorney at the time persuaded him to sign an agreement promising to "maintain strict confidentiality and silence with respect to his experiences with the Church of Scientology."

That agreement says Armstrong would pay $50,000 for every utterance about Scientology. The church maintains that Armstrong has violated the agreement at least 201 times and owes it just over $10 million.

...Armstrong still vows to never pay a penny to the church.

I'd just like to say that Scientology is weird. Battlefield Earth was a half decent space opera. But the over the top bios in Hubbard's books are a little, well, over the top. I remember reading in one of these that Hubbard was one of the greats of the field, and implied that he was right up there, and good friends with Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke. Which is manifest bullshit. Before Battlefield Earth, I had never heard of him, so he wasn't one of the greats. And I read a lot of sf. If he would lie about something as obviously false as that, in the author bio for a widely published book, well you can only imagine what he'd lie about to his followers. (Go to this site for an outline of the extent of those lies.)

Further evidence that the Bush spin machine is in, well, a tail-spin: What idiot just stuck him out in front of cameras with a small-grain black-check tie? It's called a moire pattern, folks...any experienced media person knows you don't wear one in front of a camera (resolution + digital transmission + other junk == funny rainbow colors).

No serious media person checked the President before he went on TV tonight.
Press Conference, my ass. It's just another speech, so far.

- No mention of short or medium term strategy for Iraq.
- "No brainer" we-support-the-troops crap.

- "No one can predict all the hazards that lie ahead." Well, we should at least try to predict some of them, shouldn't we? Isn't that what all those "highly qualified" people around you are paid to do?

- Sounds like June 30 is the date, no matter what. There may be no functional entity to hand power over to, but we're gonna hand it over anyway. He's cemented the date in stone.

- On the Viet Nam message; there aren't enough parallels (yet) to make that comparison. The press likes the convenience of it, but it doesn't really fit.

- "A year seems like a long time, to the families of the troops, overseas...been really tough for the families, been tough on this administration". Yeah, real tough what with all that golfing you've been doing over the past week.

What the heck is a "must-call"? Sounds like they're reporters that the President has been instructed to call upon, who have, oh, let's say, pre-set questions. Helpful!

- Mr. President, why are you and Vice President Cheney appearing together, instead of separately, as the committee asked? BECAUSE.

- Good God! Which reporter just had the cojones to tell Bush that all his speeches use similar phrases, and sound alike? I mean, the guy's totally right, but to just say it like that, to the President? Damn.

- David Gregory? asked the President what he considered to be his most significant mistake since 9/11. It's my very favorite question in the world! Fellow Perfidians know this already -- if you can't name something you did wrong, you don't know a damn thing. Guess what happened to Bush when he was asked. And guess what happened off-camera, as his assistants apparently panicked. ;)

One word comes to mind, from this speech: BLUSTER. Loud, and clear.

Fareed Zakaria for President!

Dean Esmay has another post on the whole jobs thingy. He excerpts a bit from a New York Times article:

The sharpest contrast can be seen by looking at the Labor Department's household survey, which shows a record high level of total employment. This survey reported an employment level of 138.3 million as of March - 600,000 more working Americans since President Bush took office in 2001.

Since the recession ended in November 2001, the payroll survey has reported 323,000 fewer payroll jobs, but the household survey has found 1.9 million more overall jobs. Common sense tells us that payroll jobs aren't the end-all, be-all of jobs in the new economy. Economists reflexively like payroll data because it has a bigger sample, but quantity doesn't always ensure quality.

An even bigger problem with the payroll survey is the evolution of what constitutes work. We can think of the payroll survey as counting all workers at traditional firms, plus some workers at start-up companies who have payroll records. But the payroll survey doesn't count individuals who are self-employed - despite the fact that their ranks have surged by at least 650,000 in just two years.

To which I would add this bit:

The payroll survey counts jobs, not workers. But counting payroll jobs is a questionable way of measuring America's evolving work force, especially in light of declining job turnover. The payroll survey's biggest problem is that it systematically double counts workers when they change jobs. Since somewhere between 2 percent and 3 percent of the work force changes employers every month, payrolls tend to be noisy. The illusion of lost jobs in recent years occurred because job turnover declined after 2000, first with the recession, then even more sharply after 9/11. As a result, 1 million jobs have been artificially "lost" in the payroll survey since 2001.

Despite last month's jobs surge, the payroll survey remains stubbornly out of whack with other economic indicators, even other labor indicators. Unemployment has been very low and is now near what economists call a "natural" rate. Real earnings rose by 3 percent over the last three years. Jobless claims are 10 percent below their historical average, and that's without adjusting for population.

Dean also links to this interesting post from soundfury, who makes the argument that except for the low payroll survey reports, the economy is better in every respect than in 1996, just before the tech bubble started inflating. Something to keep in mind, and bad news for Kerry.

I have been criminally lax in keeping up with Insults Unpunished lately, but today I tried to catch up a little. First I discovered that it is now a group blog. Surprise! Robert invited longtime companion, I mean commenter (not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you) to join him. Read his intro piece, it's a good one. Almost as good as Crooked Timber's inaugural post.

But, the point of this post, and it does actually have one, is the counterfactual exercise that Robert linked to (and excerpted) here.

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: washington, april 9, 2004. A hush fell over the city as George W. Bush today became the first president of the United States ever to be removed from office by impeachment. Meeting late into the night, the Senate unanimously voted to convict Bush following a trial on his bill of impeachment from the House.

Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.

Reaction was swift and furious. Florida Senator Bob Graham said Bush had "brought shame to the United States with his paranoid delusions about so-called terror networks." British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused the United States of "an inexcusable act of conquest in plain violation of international law." White House chief counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke immediately resigned in protest of "a disgusting exercise in over-kill."

When dozens of U.S. soldiers were slain in gun battles with fighters in the Afghan mountains, public opinion polls showed the nation overwhelmingly opposed to Bush's action. Political leaders of both parties called on Bush to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan immediately. "We are supposed to believe that attacking people in caves in some place called Tora Bora is worth the life of even one single U.S. soldier?" former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey asked.

When an off-target U.S. bomb killed scores of Afghan civilians who had taken refuge in a mosque, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Aznar announced a global boycott of American products. The United Nations General Assembly voted to condemn the United States, and Washington was forced into the humiliating position of vetoing a Security Council resolution declaring America guilty of "criminal acts of aggression."

Bush justified his attack on Afghanistan, and the detention of 19 men of Arab descent who had entered the country legally, on grounds of intelligence reports suggesting an imminent, devastating attack on the United States. But no such attack ever occurred, leading to widespread ridicule of Bush's claims. Speaking before a special commission created by Congress to investigate Bush's anti-terrorism actions, former national security adviser Rice shocked and horrified listeners when she admitted, "We had no actionable warnings of any specific threat, just good reason to believe something really bad was about to happen."

The president fired Rice immediately after her admission, but this did little to quell public anger regarding the war in Afghanistan. When it was revealed that U.S. special forces were also carrying out attacks against suspected terrorist bases in Indonesia and Pakistan, fury against the United States became universal, with even Israel condemning American action as "totally unjustified."

Speaking briefly to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before a helicopter carried him out of Washington as the first-ever president removed by impeachment, Bush seemed bitter. "I was given bad advice," he insisted. "My advisers told me that unless we took decisive action, thousands of innocent Americans might die. Obviously I should not have listened."

Announcing his candidacy for the 2004 Republican presidential nomination, Senator John McCain said today that "George W. Bush was very foolish and naïve; he didn't realize he was being pushed into this needless conflict by oil interests that wanted to seize Afghanistan to run a pipeline across it." McCain spoke at a campaign rally at the World Trade Center in New York City.

Counterfactual exercises are fascinating to me. This one meets the essential requirements of plausibility, and departure from actual events in one particular. What if Bush had acted in advance of 9/11? The situation is carefully left the same - but the exploration of a different course of events throws the recent claims of many on the left into a very bad light. This is another tack on the post from the Queen of All Evil, that I linked to earlier. We really, really can't have it both ways. You can not simultaneously blame Bush for preemption and not being preemptive.

There is no question, that absent the horrible fact of the 9/11 attacks, there is really nothing that the current, or any president could have done that would have been adequate to the demands presented by the threat.

"We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say 'This is one of our bad days,' and pull the trigger."

Thus reads an ad placed in a local paper in St. Petersburg, Florida by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club. Club Vice President Edna McCall said her club is in direct contact with John Kerry campaign.

"We're all working together."