Category ►►► Commies

July 17, 2008

Shock News: Sandinista Ortega Snatches Land for Pals... Again

The reign of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas -- the Stalinists who held that country hostage for 11 years, against whom we supported "Contra" freedom fighters -- came to a strange end in 1990 when Ronald Reagan's "Contra" policy managed to force free elections in Nicaragua (held under Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush), and the Sandinistas were voted out of office. But before leaving, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega seized millions of acres of land and gave it to his friends and allies in the movement... thus committing one of the largest land snatches in Latin American history.

And proving once again -- it seems to need relearning every generation -- that if you scratch a Socialist, you'll turn up a thief.

Those who thought they had finally seen Ortega's backside (especially after the land grab) were stunned when the Nicaraguan people once again elected him as president just two years ago... with a scant 38% of the vote (worse than Clinton!) in a crowded field. But I don't think anybody is shocked in the least that, having once again wormed his way into power, he is back practicing his favorite hobby: Grabbing other people's property for himself:

President Daniel Ortega Saavedra beams from the billboards, promising "Citizens Power" as a solution to Nicaragua’s endemic poverty. "The world’s poor arise!" the signs say. But beneath the billboards, on walls and benches all over town, others have scrawled "No to CPC. No to dictatorship."

The graffiti alludes to Citizens Power Councils -- or C.P.C.’s. In December, Mr. Ortega established the neighborhood committees, which are controlled by his left-wing Sandinista party and administer antipoverty programs, despite a vote against the plan by the National Assembly.

Mr. Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla leader [former?], maintains that the councils are meant only to let community leaders have a say in where and how government money is spent.

But opposition leaders say the councils are another step in what they call the Ortega administration’s drift toward an authoritarian and secretive government that does not have to answer to the legislature -- mostly because the president controls tens of millions of dollars a year in aid from Venezuela.

Some of the president’s opponents charge that the Citizens Power Councils are nothing more than patronage mills, channeling government largess to supporters of the party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Surprise, surprise on the Jungle Cruise tonight. So a Stalinist thief is once again given the levers of power, and once again he abuses them to enrich himself and his pals; this is news?

But there is much more to this story; for what we are seeing in Nicaragua is stately but relentless "progress" from liberal democracy to Communist dictatorship, yet again under the direct command of the Sandinista Party... with Oogo Chavez as puppetmaster in Venezuela. These putatively private CPCs -- which are funded by low-cost loans from Chavez (and kept strictly off the books), and which are completely dominated by Sandinistas, despite that party's much smaller presence in the National Assembly -- have been given governmental power over many critical aspects of Nicaraguan society; they essentially take the place of government but are completely immune from legislative oversight.

Sandinista President Ortega has given these CPCs control over:

• Distribution of government food aid -- both who receives the food and which stores are picked to supply it; this is a critical function for a country that constantly mambos on the brink of utter economic collapse, and where a great many citizens are literally starving;
• Paving the roads, what few Nicaragua has left after decades of war;
• Approving small-business loans, typically the only funding source standing between poor villagers and welfare;
• Disbursement of free cattle, pigs, and seed stock as welfare for ranchers and farmers -- this way, Ortega gains control of both major sectors of society: the farmers and all other small businesses;
• Vaccinations for Nicaraguan children ('nuff said);
• And reading instruction for the poor, who are typically illiterate.

Overall control of the CPCs is in the hands of Daniel Ortega's communications director, Rosario Murillo; it's an irrelevant coincidence that Ms. Murillo also happens to be Ortega's wife. Council members are not elected; they are appointed by the president (or by his communications director). And while other party members can join the councils, the Sandinistas maintain a huge majority and can outvote everybody else combined.

This raises two interesting academic questions:

1. At what point does a private organization, run by the president's wife and funded by a foreign dictator, which seizes control of many functions traditionally associated with government, and which proclaims itself to be the real intermediary between the proletariat and the government, become the de facto new government of Nicaragua?

The rhetoric is quite suggestive:

Jeannette Suazo, a Sandinista, is the chairwoman of the committee in a Managua neighborhood known as September 14th. She insists that aid is handed out without regard to politics, and she said that her committee had four members who belonged to the opposition party [the remaining 11 members, including the chairwoman, are Sandinistas, a nearly 3-1 voting advantage]. All are volunteers and get no pay, though some have government jobs, she said.

“We are the communicators between the people and the government,” she said. “It’s easier to solve these problems with an organized people than with a disorganized people.”

The other academic question:

2. How do these "Citizens Power Councils" differ in any significant way from Argentina's Fundación Eva Perón?

To recap, the Sandinistas dominate these "private" councils about 3-1... even though in the National Assembly, the two Sandinista parties together comprise 46%, while the two liberal parties together add up to 53%.

In the election of 2006, Ortega of the Sandinista National Liberation Front received 38% of the vote. Sadly, the two liberal parties, the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance and the Constitutionalist Liberal Party, split the anti-Sandinista vote, 29% and 27%. Had they unified, they would have had a clear majority of 56%, and Nicaragua would not be headed back towards Communist tyranny and government looting again. (Let that be a lesson to conservatives here who plan to "send a message" by voting for Bob Barr this November.)

This rolling catastrophe really makes one appreciate the hand of the divine that gave Colombia the brilliant Álvaro Uribe Vélez... instead of some Ortega-clone, who would have gotten his financing from either Oogo, the drug lords, or both. Too bad Barack H. Obama and the Democratic Congress are intent upon breaking our word to Colombia by tearing up the Colombian Free Trade Agreement and stamping on it; if we were simply to ratify the treaty, we could sell our own goods in Colombia and support freedom and democracy at the same time. Of course, that's almost certainly the exact reason the Democratic Congress won't even bring CFTA up for a vote.

Perhaps Democrats are hoping they can create some CPCs right here, ready to leap into the fray... just in case John S. McCain "steals the election" from the man who bought and paid for it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 17, 2008, at the time of 12:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 13, 2008

Forget It. It's Chinatown... Big Lizards Breaking Bombshell News!

Correction below: Secondary photographic charge refuted, but the primary charge remains; and even the secondary charge remains, albeit by other evidence, not the bottom photograph. See below.

The most iconic photograph from the riots attending the torch-bearing ceremony, the one that has every tongue wagging, is surely this one: A Tibetan supporter violently assaulting a wheelchair-bound woman carrying the torch through Paris.

This one picture came to symbolize the heartless violence of the Tibetan protesters, thus justifying, in many people's minds, the paramilitary troops that China sent to harass, beat, and brutalize the protesters in other countries -- from France and London to the United States to South America:

Note especially the bandana this vicious thug wears; it's clearly the Tibetan flag, as you can see from the image below:

For contrast, here is the Chinese Communist flag; the two are quite distinct, and you cannot mistake one for the other:

Rather like the infamous Mohammed al-Durrah photograph, used by the Palestinians to turn the world against Israel by claiming they shot a young boy, this photograph began to turn the world against the victims of Red China's brutal occupation and subsequent attempt at slow genocide.

But wait; that's an odd comparison to make, isn't it? For the al-Durrah footage is now known to be a fake; careful investigation has shown that the Israelis could not possibly have shot the child from the positions they occupied. He had to have been shot by Palestinians -- if he were shot at all.

So the video footage is infamous mostly because it is a clumsy fake, one of the first instances of "Pallywood."

Surely that can't be case with this photo of the Tibetan protester and the lady in the wheelchair; after all, we see him clearly -- and the camera never lies.

There are several Japanese-language blogs I read that are written by Chinese living in Japan. (This may seem like a detour, but it's not, I promise.) I believe the authors are mostly Japanese nationals, but they still have strong ties to China. And of course, they're usually anti-Communist... which is why they don't live in China in the first place.

Mr. Ching is one of them. He often introduces events happening in the Chinese blogosphere.

China has not broadcast any images to the Chinese people of what they are doing in Tibet; but according to Mr. Ching, the Communists did broadcast the image of that wheelchair-bound woman being attacked by a Tibetan protester. A number of Chinese bloggers (in China) were outraged by the attack; they started to look into the identity of the attacker. In the course of their investigation, they found something shocking...

They stumbled across some other photographs: pictures of the attacker, clearly that same Tibetan protester (still wearing his Tibetan-flag bandana), arriving earlier for the festivities -- and marching in the company of a number of Chinese carrying Chinese flags:

Is it possible that our "protester" friend is in fact -- a Chinese agent provacateur? That would require us to believe that the Chinese Communists could be so devious and duplicitous as to commit an atrocity, just to blame it on the Tibetan protesters and arouse retroactive justification for the crackdown by the Chinese paramilitaries we talked about in an earlier post.

Bah. That would just be -- too Clintonian.

The Chinese bloggers were still outraged; but when the truth became obvious, they switched targets. Once they posted the photos, and readers began to share the images with their non-blogging friends, public opinion in China also turned around. Now, according to Mr. Ching, Chinese citizens are inflamed by their own government's conspiratorial manipulation of public sentiment.

The plot backfired; and now the Chinese blogosphere is going into overtime. For example, there is also this:

Correction: Benign explanation alert -- but only of the photograph itself. Chinese bloggers evidently stumbled across this picture of Chinese soldiers with monks' robes more than a week ago; and it has actually been explained: The government says that the soldiers were just serving as extras in a movie. Whether or not this is true, the picture is actually old, dating at least from 2003 -- when there was no crackdown in Tibet (that we know of). So it turns out that this last photo does actually have a benign explanation. "Burglarly tools" or not, this one isn't what it seems.

However... while that photograph itself appears benign, the charge that the Chinese themselves fomented the rioting to justify a crackdown in advance of the Olympics is now being made by the Dalai Lama. And a Canadian newspaper links to a story reprinted in the Epoch Times (March 27th, 2008) that says the British equivalent to our NSA -- GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters -- believes that the Chinese People's Liberation Army may in fact have staged some of the rioting:

Britain's GCHQ, the government communications agency that electronically monitors half the world from space, has confirmed the claim by the Dalai Lama that agents of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, the PLA, posing as monks, triggered the riots that have left hundreds of Tibetans dead or injured.

GCHQ analysts believe the decision was deliberately calculated by the Beijing leadership to provide an excuse to stamp out the simmering unrest in the region, which is already attracting unwelcome world attention in the run-up to the Olympic Games this summer.

(This is reprinted from the G2 Bulletin, which requires a paid subscription to view, alas.)

So while the photograph has been refuted as evidence of anything, the actual substance of the secondary charge is still open.

And there is still no explanation for how the "Tibetan" attacker of the girl in the wheelchair happens to be such pals with supporters of Communist China that they would all march to the demonstration together, surrounded by Chinese Communist flags -- right before rioting against each other.

What follows is the original end of this post; while reading about the photograph, bear the above correction in mind:

This is a group of Chinese soldiers in Tibet. I can't say whether they're in the same paramilitary group as the "jogging-suit Janissaries;" but for some peculiar reason, each of these Chinese soldiers holds in his hands an ersatz Tibetan monk's robe.

Now, far be it from mere bloggers (on either side of the Pacific Rim) to make accusations against the noble fighting men of Red China. But it does occur to us that much of the armed violence committed by China against the Tibetan monks has been justified on the basis that Tibetan monks -- in their robes -- have been "attacking" Chinese civilians in Tibet.

Of course, just because a fellow is caught outside a house at midnight carrying burglary tools doesn't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is a burglar. But can anyone think of an innocent reason why a company of Chinese soldiers should each have a Tibetan monk's robe, when they are trying to suppress protest by a bunch of robed Tibetan monks?

China is beginning to discover what Americans -- Dan Rather in particular -- learned to their chagrin some years ago: We live in the age of new media; and in this epoch, we know that cameras lie all the time. They lie about the "death" of a Palestinian boy; they lie about exploding trucks and fraudulent Air National Guard memos... and they can most certainly lie about who really attacked a beautiful, young girl in a wheelchair.

But those infernal recording devices have two edges; where one photo lies, another can reveal the truth.

Truth to the Left is like Kryptonite to Superman. All the lackeys, minions, and lickspittles of Hu Jintao will never be able to live down this blow to their carefully constructed public image -- not just the violence itself, but the repugnant way they have tried to shift the blame to the very victims of that violence.

I wonder; are they starting to regret getting the Olympics after all?

Hatched by Sachi on this day, April 13, 2008, at the time of 5:12 AM | Comments (47) | TrackBack

June 20, 2006

What Goes Up Must Come Down... But How?

So here is the syllogism; you supply the conclusion:

1. North Korea insists that it has "the right" to launch a test of its new ICBM, the Taepodong-2.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea has no intention of abiding by any treaties it may have signed against the proliferation of missile technology; and they are known to be working hard on a nuclear warhead (with a lot of help from the mad Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan) and may indeed already have a few. Now they say they have a right to missiles that can carry those warheads thousands of miles:

North Korea declared Tuesday it has a right to carry out long-range missile tests, despite international calls for the communist state to refrain from launching a rocket believed capable of reaching the United States.

The bristling statement from North Korea to Japanese reporters in Pyongyang came as France and the U.N. secretary-general raised the alarm over what are believed to be the reclusive nation's preparations for a test of the Taepodong-2, with a range of up to 9,300 miles.

In a totally unrelated move, the United States has decided to make a minor change in our defense posture:

2. The United States has just activated our ground-based ballistic missile defense (BMD) system, in addition to the sea-based Aegis BMD system.

We have tested the Aegis extensively, and it has been considered fully operational for a long time now... despite not having been used yet in actual combat, so far as I know:

Two Navy Aegis warships are patrolling near North Korea as part of the global missile defense and would be among the first sensors that would trigger the use of interceptors, the officials said yesterday.

The U.S. missile defense system includes 11 long-range interceptor missiles, including nine deployed at Fort Greeley, Alaska, and two at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The system was switched from test to operational mode within the past two weeks, the officials said.

All right, so they launch; but where do they launch? What direction, and over what countries?

3. The DPRK is not likely to launch an ICBM -- even as a test -- west across China or north across China and Russia; that leaves only east over Japan (which they have done before) or south over Taiwan and the Philippines, all three strong and vital American allies.

So put the three together, and what conclusion do we draw about our course of action? You guessed it:

One senior Bush administration official told The Washington Times that an option being considered would be to shoot down the Taepodong missile with responding interceptors....

White House spokesman Tony Snow declined to comment when asked if shooting down a launched missile was being considered as an option.

I suspect the only real question here is how likely we are to succeed: attempting to shoot down the Taepodong-2 and missing would be much worse than not trying in the first place; but trying and succeeding might reap huge dividends, as the generals behind North Korean leader Kim Jong Il probably think our BMD system is "all chopstick and no rice" (much like the DPRK food supply).

Proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that we really have it and it actually works might shock them out of their nutty idea that they can threaten us with nuclear missiles and back into at least a working definition of sanity.

But it's a gamble; let's not kid ourselves. Our tests so far have been controlled, in that we've been shooting at American missiles launched by American troops as part of a controlled engineering experiment -- as we should be; that's the correct way to develop a new weapons system. But making the shift to knocking down an actual enemy missile is a whole 'nother layer of complexity.

I believe it will work, so we should do it; still, none of us has access to all the classified data the president does.

But jeepers, would I love to see the collective gasp of a billion people if the NoKos were to launch -- and we were to swat their Taepodong out of the sky like it was a slow-moving fly. It would make my decade!

Sometimes the best thing to do in a "no-win" situation is to give the box a vigorous shake and see how the pieces realign themselves.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 20, 2006, at the time of 5:10 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

April 13, 2006

Argument By Redefinition - Again

So now we have a new "civil war," according to the creative redefinition of the New York Times. This one is in India, of all places -- and the other side of the supposed "civil war" are the Maoist guerillas in the northern mountain regions in the Himalayas, hard up against war-torn Nepal, and the poor, indiginous, central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

The comparison with Nepal is instructive. This is from the introductory paragraph from the Nepal entry of the CIA's World Factbook:

A Maoist insurgency, launched in 1996, has gained traction and is threatening to bring down the regime, especially after a negotiated cease-fire between the Maoists and government forces broke down in August 2003....

In October 2002, the new king dismissed the prime minister and his cabinet for "incompetence" after they dissolved the parliament and were subsequently unable to hold elections because of the ongoing insurgency....

Citing dissatisfaction with the government's lack of progress in addressing the Maoist insurgency and corruption, the king in February 2005 dissolved the government, declared a state of emergency, imprisoned party leaders, and assumed power. The King's government subsequently released party leaders and officially ended the state of emergency in May 2005.

Gentle readers, that is what a real civil war plus Communist insurgency looks like. So what does the fighting in India look like, according to the Times?

Mr. Markam's ragtag forces, who hew to Mao's script for a peasant revolution, fought a seemingly lost cause for so long, they were barely taken seriously beyond India's desperately wanting forest belt. But not anymore.

Today the fighting that Mr. Markam has quietly nurtured for 25 years looks increasingly like a civil war, one claiming more and more lives and slowing the industrial growth of a country hungry for the coal, iron and other riches buried in these isolated realms bypassed by India's economic boom.

While the far more powerful Maoist insurgency in neighboring Nepal has received greater attention, the conflict in India, though largely separate, has gained momentum, too. In the last year, it has cost nearly a thousand lives.

"Mr. Markam" is Gopanna Markam, "company commander" of some Maoist guerilla gang that even the Times admits is "ragtag." Yet Markam and his "company" are the subjects of this puff piece, which reads almost like the Times has become a PR firm for the Indian Communist insurgency. The "article" begins thus:

The gray light of dawn broke over the bamboo forest as the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army prepared for a new day.

With transistor radios tucked under their arms, the soldiers listened to the morning news and brushed their teeth. A few young recruits busied themselves making a remote-control detonator for explosives.

The company commander, Gopanna Markam, patiently shaved.

"We have made the people aware of how to change your life through armed struggle, not the ballot," said Mr. Markam, who is in his mid-40's, describing his troops' accomplishments. "This is a people's war, a protracted people's war."

The rest of the piece drips with respect, even awe at the sincerity and success of this band of brothers:

Mr. Markam and his Maoist forces appear undaunted. They drill in their forest redoubts. They haul villagers to propaganda meetings. They build their own weapons, including crude pistols and mortars.

To see them in their jungle camp, sleeping on tarpaulins, armed with antiquated rifles and pistols, with no real territory under their full control, it is difficult to fathom how they have maintained their movement for so long, let alone expanded it across such a wide swath of the country.

Throughout, the writer -- Somini Sengupta -- takes at face value every wild claim of the Communists, as well as the equally fanciful and agenda-driven claims of local cops hoping for national funding from New Delhi. Whenever he describes some atrocity committed by the Communists -- using "child soldiers," for example -- he partners it with some similar atrocity committed by local anti-Communist insurgents; he plays the "moral equivalency" card like the ace of trump.

Mr. Sengupta's argument is simply to assert that the low level of violence and mayhem caused by the Maoists "looks increasingly like a civil war"... which he can only maintain by redefining the meaning of the term "civil war," just as other liberals do for Iraq.

Here, from the CIA World Factbook's entry on India, is the only reference to "Maoist insurgents." It's found at the end under Transnational Issues:

India maintains a strict border regime to keep out Maoist insurgents and control illegal cross-border activities from Nepal.

Note there is nothing here about the Maoists "threatening the bring down the regime" or India being "unable to hold elections because of the ongoing insurgency."

Is India in an actual "civil war" with the People's Liberation Guerrilla Army? What evidence does Mr. Sengupta muster? After all, if "attacks have become more brazen and better coordinated," as he claims, what kinds of attacks are we talking about?

• The Maoists "robbed two banks and looted arms from a police station" last June;
• In November, they "orchestrated a jailbreak," freeing 300 prisoners and murdering (Mr. Sengupta writes "executing") nine security guards;
• In February, they stole 19 tons of explosives from a government warehouse, again murdering (Mr. Sengupta writes "killing") nine security guards.
• Later that month, they set off a land mine under a truck convoy, murdering 28 people (at least this time, Mr. Sengupta uses the word "butchering;" but then, this time the victims weren't security guards).

Pardon my local pride, but Southern California street gangs, from the Crips to the Bloods to MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha), have done worse than that (albeit with guns, not land mines) in the last eight months... and California has a total population of 36 million, only 3% that of India.

Mr. Sengupta somberly informs us that "in the last year, it has cost nearly a thousand lives." Later, he refines that calculation: "so far this year, the conflict has killed nearly two Indians a day" (which would be something less than 730). I'm not sure how "nearly" 730 becomes "nearly" 1,000 -- perhaps he has created a new version of addition to compliment his new definition of "civil war." In any event, 730 people killed in India -- even in the sparsely populated regions of the countrh -- is considerably below any threshold of "war" that I would accept, civil or otherwise.

This is the state of debate in what is allegedly the premier news source of the entire class of antique media: there is a "civil war" in India because the Times says so; there is a "civil war" in Iraq because the Old Gray Lady thinks it fit to print that there is. When words are redefined to mean anything you want, they instead wind up meaning nothing at all.

Yes of course; deliberately evocative of the famous "G.K. Chesterton" quotation (which he actually never said, appropriately enough, though he more or less implied it):

Nobody would deny that Communist terrorists in India are a serious problem; nobody would deny that it's a crime when an innocent person is murderd, whether by militant Islamists, by Communists, or even by counter-insurgency forces overreacting.

But if we lose the ability to discriminate between the low-level, low-intensity terrorist campaign in India, the bloodier but even less coherent string of terrorist attacks in Iraq -- and the full scale civil wars found in Nepal, Bosnia, and Rwanda, then we lose the ability to respond appropriately to each challenge. Imagine a person who could not discriminate between being verbally insulted, being pushed, and being shot.

Arguing with a liberal is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. They move the goal posts; they lower the bar; they simply cannot help themselves... it's in their natures. See Æsop's fable "the Scorpion and the Frog" -- which, true to the rest of this post, is not actually one of Æsop's fables.

But at least on this side of the aisle, we're honest about our lies!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 13, 2006, at the time of 5:22 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 20, 2005

Movement vs. Presence -- Updated with bump

UPDATE: See bottom.

Over on the must-read blog Patterico's Pontifications, Patterico wonders at the timing of North Korea's abrupt about-face on its nuclear-weapons program. For those of you living in Carlsbad Caverns, the Kim Jong-Il regime agreed late yesterday night (or early this morning, depending on whose time zone you prefer) to end their nuclear-weapons development in exchange for basically nothing from the United States -- just the assurance that:

"The United States affirmed that is has no nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula and has no intention to attack or invade (North Korea) with nuclear or conventional weapons," according to the statement, assurances echoed by South Korea.

Here is what puzzles Patterico:

In the comments, AMac asks: why are the North Koreans making this concession now? One possible answer is in the linked story:

[U.S. assurance quoted above]

That is a concession that I believe we have been unwilling to make until now. So the relevant question might be: why is the United States making this concession now?

Patterico's question crystalized my own vague sense that something was funny here. Not wrong, necessarily, though of course I am highly skeptical of anything that comes out of the mouth of Kim -- especially in light of the rapid about-face from their previous about-face, now demanding that we first give them light-water reactors before they dismantle their nukes. We'll see if they get stubborn, of if this is just a last-ditch attempt to get something for nothing before finally agreeing to what they already agreed to.

Still, I have the sense that something momentous is motivating below the surface, like floating in the ocean and having a whale swim beneath you. That something is not North Korean: it's American; there is a reason why we're willing to make certain assurances today that we were not willing to make last year.

I'm not worried about North Korea cheating, assuming the deal even goes through; the agreement evidently includes boots on the ground in the DPRK verifying the destruction of their nuclear weapons and weapon-manufacturing facilities. As with Libya, I believe this will either be done honestly -- or else we'll know immediately that it isn't. Since we don't give them anything in advance, there's no particular incentive to cheat. (That's another reason we can't give in to their demands for the reactors: they would get something tangible in exchange for nothing but a promise to cooperate.)

There are some obvious possibilities to answer the "why now?" question: maybe the North Koreans finally figured out that Clinton really isn't president anymore (and won't be in the future -- no, not even via his wife). Maybe they'd gotten themselve in too deep and were just looking for a facesaving way to back out, and the declaration by the U.S. mentioned above finally gave them that. (Asians must save their faces; Americans have to cover their posteriors.)

But that still begs the Patterico question: why were we willing to make such a commitment today but not last year? I believe the real answer to Patterico lies in what Don Rumsfeld has been doing for the last few years (in between fighting a couple of wars and secretly running the White House, timesharing with Dick Cheney, Karen Hughes, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condoleezza Rice, of course): he has been busy with a radical restructuring of the armed forces, in composition, mission, and style of warfighting.

It's tough being a pundit. I don't actually know anything. Well, I know something about mathematics, since that was my field at university; but what I really need to be right now is a military historian, which I emphatically am not. So I'm going to play one on the blogosphere... all you real military historians out there, quick, shield your eyes! (Actually, I would appreciate just the opposite: please correct me where I go awry.)

I'm actually pretty sure of my basic point: Don Rumsfeld has been almost obsessed with reforming and modernizing the American military to fight the wars he envisions for the the twenty-first century... as opposed to what we had in the early 1990s, which was a military organized in 1947 to fight the Warsaw Pact and perhaps the ChiComs -- or when Bush-43 took office in 2001, which was the cut-rate, stripped-down, Clintonized version of the above.

I already had the basic sense, but for the specifics, I'm relying on this April 2004 story on GlobalSecurity.org; the details will evolve, but it's probably more or less accurate still.

Rumsfeld has a vision of what tomorrow's combat will be. In response, he is transforming our military, starting with the 3rd Infantry Division as guinea pigs, into a lighter and faster military with fewer non-combat personnel, organized into smaller units. Instead of focusing on the division as the basic warfighting unit -- say 15,000 to 20,000 troops -- he wants the basic warfighting unit to be the much smaller brigade... in fact, an even smaller version of the brigade. Instead of the classic three brigades per division, Rumsfeld wants four or five per division, plus an aviation brigade of attack helicopters. We currently have ten divisions comprising 33 brigades; the Secretary of Defense wants to have between 43 and 48 brigades.

Thus, instead of 5,000 to 6,000 troops per brigade, we would have 3,500 to 4,000 troops per brigade. Also, technology would take the place of much of the support personnel, so there would be fewer typists, storekeepers, clerks, cooks, and so forth traveling to the war. The brigade, not the division, would become the primary warmaking unit -- the idea being that we do not need to send a division when a modernized, fast, and every bit as lethal brigade will do. For larger conflicts, send several brigades. It gives us more flexibility and faster mobility.

The upshot here is, I believe, a radical change in how the United States responds to global threats. During the Cold War, our basic strategy was presence: we would have bases all over the world, putting a troop presence in every potential hotspot. This served two purposes: first, these American forces in Germany, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, and (recently, but no longer) Saudi Arabia acted as "triggers." To roll into Western Europe, for example, the Soviets would first have to attack the American forces in West Germany; this would not only delay them and remove any doubt about intentions, it would give us unassailable casus belli that not even the most dovish liberal in Congress could ignore or reject.

Second, having troops right on the scene meant that we had a force that could (we hoped!) hold off the enemy, or at least delay him for the months it would take to get a major army into the field. Our buildup in the Gulf War, Operation Desert Shield, lasted for four months before we finally attacked... and that was a comparatively small mobilization, compared to what we would have had to do in an all-out World War III in Europe.

But Rumsfeld's vision (it seems to me) is that we would move away from the "presence" model in future wars, relying instead on a strategy of rapid movement. Currently, I think it would take about fifteen days to plant a fully equipped division anywhere in the globe. This is pretty fast (assuming we can actually make it that quickly in a real situation), though not as fast as it ought to be. But if we're only planting a brigade, not an entire division, we could probably get them in much faster... a week, maybe, or even less.

The brigade needs to be tough enough to hold the line until more brigades can arrive, so it needs to be a lean and lethal fighting machine full of experienced soldiers who drop in from above, move too rapidly to be effectively countered, spread massive damage among the enemy, hunt them out in the dark and house to house if necessary, but which can disappear over the horizon like ghosts before enemy forces can truly be brought to bear... only to reappear shortly on another flank.

Donald Rumsfeld, in other words, wants the Mobile Infantry from Robert Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers: heavily armed and armored, veteran shock troops which can be dropped into anywhere on a moment's notice and hold the real estate until more troops can arrive.

If we could do that, it would not be as important to have large numbers of troops everywhere in the world: they need to be forward-deployed... but they wouldn't have to be actually in South Korea, for example, in order to get to the DMZ fast enough to make a difference.

And that may be why the president can now make those assurances to North Korea about what we will actually have in the Korean peninsula: Bush can say, in all honesty, that we don't need to have troops and tanks and especially nukes in country, because Bush knows that if we needed them, we could insert them into the country -- and North Korea could not stop us. What Bush did not and would not say is that we will never have nuclear weapons on the peninsula or that we will never have plans to invade the DPRK: that, after all, depends upon the facts on the ground.

Which should be a good incentive for Kim to keep his word. Assuming he can actually bring himself to give it!

UPDATE Sep 20th, 2005 05:34:

Commenter Teafran, a Marine, makes a very important point :

What is missing from this argument is the lack of Division level support once an area has been shocked and awed. Rumsfield has it right for the initial level of confrontation - the MI hits the ground initiating the kicking ass and takeing names phase, but they are not designed to hold and control an area which clearly is a Division level function for ordinary grunts and MP support.

Wretchard over at the Belmont Club has actually written about this; alas, I cannot recall exactly which post, or I would link it. He noted that the British during the days of the Empire truly understood how to "hold and control an area," not just for a few days or weeks but literally for decades... more than a century in some cases.

What they used was a "colonial corps." Hey, wait a minute! I think I -- yes, I did! I actually wrote about this already, over on Patterico's Pontifications -- and I do have a link. Doh!

Ahem. Wretchard over on the Belmont Club wrote a post called More Men on the Ground 2, in which he discussed this point. As I wrote about Wretchard's post back in May (this is Dafydd quoting Dafydd, not quoting Wretchard),

Wretchard contemplated what it would take actually to carry out the mission we seem to have chosen for ourselves: to institute regime changes around the globe, casting out the most repulsive, venomous dictatorships, the ones that test the will of civilization, in favor of democracies that allow the people of those lands the greatest expression of individual liberty they have ever known. Wretchard noted the obvious: the United States is ill-equipped for what we would really need: a “Colonial Corps” specifically designed for long term occupation of hostile nations, rather like the British army of the nineteenth century....

This Colonian Corps would not be entirely military; it would include administrators, engineers, diplomats, jurists, politicians -- everything needed to tear down the repugnant elements of a terrorist state and build on the ashes the foundations of a modern democratic, liberal state. One presumes it would not be hamstrung by the rampant racism that infested the Raj and other European colonial institutions.

I don't think he put the two ideas together, Mobile Infantry and the Colonial Corps. That was my contribution. I continue quoting myself... one of my favorite pasttimes!

So the question arises: is it possible for a military to be both a Colonial Corps and also a Blitzkrieg Batallion?

Conventional wisdom says no: it would require two entirely separate armed forces, one for colonial occupation, the other for warfighting against technologically sophisticated enemies... and no country could afford both at the same time....

And this is exactly where, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, the “army of one” trendline comes into play. Where is the empowerment of the individual American soldier headed? What is the omega? It is possible in theory that a single, “hyperpowered” soldier of the realistic future could defeat an entire army of today?

....Imagine an army with just one of these soldiers a scant twenty years from now. Now imagine ten of them. Imagine ten thousand “armies of one.”

Ten thousand soldiers is not a lot. It’s a single division. And one extra division of Mobile Infantry would hardly break the bank, leaving plenty of money left over for the Colonial Corps. If we were to go this route, we would end up the first “empire” in the world that conquered only to liberate, colonized only to build independence, and yet still could shake the Earth with our thunderbolts.

Yes, I think we really could do it -- if we wanted badly enough to do so. I'm not even sure I, myself, would want us to go this route.

It wouldn't be cheap; we would likely have to nearly double our military expenditure. But the possibility is there; only the will is problematical. (This is a big enough addition that I'm going to bump this to the top.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 20, 2005, at the time of 5:34 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

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