• Many of the early reports are going to turn out to be wrong. There will be confusion, lies, and trolling. The media will speculate, politicians will reassure, and everyone will spread rumors. Don’t put too much stake in any of it.
• Reports of mass panic will almost always be wrong. For the most part, people don’t really panic, in the sense that they don’t act irrationally or without regard for others. The social order holds up, and most people will be as helpful and cooperative as they ever were. And yet the media will still report mass panic, even when there isn’t any.
• Try to ignore the stupid shit people say. This sort of thing kicks people’s emotions into high gear, and some of them say stupid things. My policy is to try not to get pissed off by anything anyone says for the first day or two. It’s not worth arguing about stuff said only in anger.
• Outspoken people will fit events to their own worldview. Whatever you believe, if you think this event proves your point, you’ll want to speak up about it. But if it cuts against your beliefs, you’ll probably find it confusing and remain quiet. So lots of people will be speaking out angrily about how this proves they were right.
• Everyone will say the same thing. There really aren’t that many different things you can say about something like this, so with all of us talking, a lot of us will be saying the same things. Someone else is no doubt writing their version of this post.
• Update: The news media distorts proportions. If you’re upset that so many people are saying or doing something bad, keep in mind that it may just be that the media is going out of their way to find people who say or do those things. And if you’re upset that someone didn’t say or do something good, keep in mind that the news media may just be ignoring them.

Keep calm, stay safe, don’t panic, and take care.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Few Brief Meta-Observations About the Paris Attacks

To the extent that they were terrorists and criminals, the President has a constitutional power to pardon people of crimes (even if they haven’t been convicted) or to grant clemency. I’m pretty sure that no law passed by Congress can change that.

Alternatively, if they’re being detained not as criminals but as enemy combatants, like traditional prisoners of war, then aren’t they being detained under the Executive’s constitutional power to wage war and not due to an act of Congress? It doesn’t make sense that the Executive branch could imprison people on its own authority but require permission from Congress to release them.

This is a sincere question. I’m completely willing to believe it was illegal, but I don’t understand why. And note that I’m not asking if it was a good idea.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at What’s Illegal About the Bowe Bergdahl Trade?

My tweet announcing this post was re-tweeted by Radley Balko (who is probably the most famous person who follows me) which lead to a few interesting responses:

Kevin Wilson tweeted:

There’s also the moral argument that conscription is basically slavery: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/05/how_could_the_d.html …

XM in Dallas tweeted along the same idea:

Great piece. But am I being obtuse by suggesting that we should keep saying out loud that slavery is wrong?

I think that conscription is slavery too, and I’ve said so before. I didn’t mention it explicitly this time because I didn’t think it was a useful response to David Sirota’s argument for conscription. Sirota’s presumably not an evil person, and if he were amenable to the idea that conscription is slavery, he probably would not have made the argument that he did. The people I wanted to reach, those who are swayed by his argument, probably don’t think “it’s slavery” is a compelling point.

But why don’t they? Why does the link between slavery and conscription — which seems practically self-evident to me and others — not seem sensible to so many other people? Bryan Caplan’s article that Kevin Wilson provided in his tweet offers one plausible explanation:

It’s tempting to dismiss all this as doublethink, but after many years of reflection I think I finally figured out what most people are thinking.  Namely: They implicitly regard slavery not as mere involuntary servitude, but as low-status involuntary servitude.  Since most of us honor, respect, and even adore all our soldiers, conscripts have high status – and therefore can’t be slaves.  From this point of view, saying “conscription is slavery” isn’t righteously standing up for the rights of conscripts; it’s wickedly denying them their high status.

That strikes me as quite likely to explain some people’s reactions, perhaps especially on the right. It explains how people can express admiration for our soldiers while simultaneously arguing that we should take away their freedom.

When it comes to liberal advocates of conscription, however, I think that there’s a different dynamic at work. Consider part of an argument made by my (somewhat less libertarian) co-blogger Ken in the comments:

Do we really choose our wars more carefully now? It seems we rushed headlong into the Iraq war with almost no legitimate justification. The monetary cost certainly didn’t seem to have had a detrimental impact on the decision to invade. Those costs weren’t even budgeted for at the time.

Even if we don’t explicitly debate the benefit-cost calculations of wars explicitly, we have had extensive debates about the size and structure of our military forces. Our military may be larger than most of the rest of the world combined, but in terms of total soldiers under arms, it’s smaller than it used to be. As the cold war ended, we took the opportunity to stand down about 1/3 of our active duty personnel, and there was a lot of discussion of how this would limit our strategic options. The invasion of Iraq strained the limits of our ability to fight battles abroad. At the risk of invoking Donald Rumsfeld, we can only warmonger with the army we have.

A completely different criticism comes from Jon S, who tweeted,

Who knew that only American deaths count??

Every death counts, of course. But I was responding to the argument that re-instituting conscription would make Americans more likely to oppose rampant militarism because they or their loved ones could be drafted into a war. The death rates of our foreign opponents (or even our allies) wouldn’t figure into that argument, so I didn’t take them into account in mine.

Jon S may have been trolling me, because a little later he tweeted:

Witnessing/participating in horrific violence is cost of war,eg PTSD. If cost spread over whole pop, less likely 2 support it

It’s hard to see how conscription in the U.S. could spread around the cost incurred by people from other countries, so he’s clearly talking only about the affect of witnessing/participating in horrific violence as incurred by U.S. participants, which is what I was doing too, and for the same reason.

(It’s possible I misconstrued his tweet and he was really objecting to my only counting fatalities and excluding other harm. I used war deaths as a proxy for total social cost of historic and current wars because I don’t know where to find reliable estimates for those costs.)

I did give the issue of foreign cost some thought as I was writing my post, especially the part about how giving potential soldiers the option to refuse to serve was forcing the military to spend more money on equipment and training. That effect protects American lives, but foreign solders wouldn’t benefit from it. In fact, the enormous investment in American soldiers makes them more effective at killing the enemy, which could conceivably offset the beneficial effect of saving American lives and fighting fewer and smaller wars. If the volunteer military has saved 90,000 American lives but American soldiers have killed an extra, say, half-million of our enemy, then ending conscription has arguably increased the amount of misery in the world.

For purposes of my last post, however, I decided to count the cost of war only in American deaths because (1) as I said, the deaths of foreigners were not part of the argument I was countering, and (2) it’s a much more complicated question requiring a lot more work.

Nevertheless, it is a fair question, so let me give it a shot. Regarding the first problem, let’s use the basic rules of welfare calculations and assume that everybody counts, and everybody counts equally. Some people may very well think that the lives of American soldiers are worth more than the lives of a bunch of terrorists hiding in caves, but that would be rigging the analysis: If you assume American lives are worth more than anybody else’s, then why bother to do the analysis at all?

The second problem is trickier to solve. For one thing, we don’t have good estimates of how many of the enemy were killed in some of our wars. The estimates of the number of North Korean combat deaths apparently spans a range of many hundreds of thousands, as do the estimates of North Vietnamese dead. The numbers for Iraq and Afghanistan are apparently even murkier, especially since people with political interests have interests in understating or overstating the estimate.

Another problem is that I don’t know how many enemy deaths to attribute to American combat action. Lots of North Koreans were killed by South Koreans. And lots of Iraqis were killed by regional militants rather than American soldiers, so then you have to ask how many of those killings would have taken place if we hadn’t invaded. Some of these answers are knowable, but it would take a lot more historical research than I can do.

Yet another problem is that some of these wars arguably had a net benefit. The UN apparently estimates that Operation Restore Hope in Somalia helped support humanitarian intervention that saved 100,000 lives. After North Vietnamese forces conquered South Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of people were executed, died in concentration camps, or died trying to flee, and the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people in Cambodia. So how many lives did we save by not allowing North Korea to do the same thing to South Korea? How many lives, if any, did we save in Bosnia-Herzegovina or Yugoslavia by preventing some unknowable amount of ethnic cleansing? I have no clue how to account for lives saved by warfare, so I won’t. I’m only going to count the cost.

For the time period I was considering (World War II to the present) it’s not unreasonable to make the simplifying assumption that all our wars were wars of choice. We could have kept our troops at home instead of sending them to places like Korea and Vietnam and El Salvador and Afghanistan and Iraq. That means we can reasonably attribute all American combat deaths from those wars to decisions made as part of our national security policy. The same cannot be said of the deaths of our enemies, who may have been killed as a result of non-American action.

To avoid turning this into a life-long research project, I eventually settled on a simple methodology. I would visit Wikipedia’s page on United States military casualties of war and click through to the Wikipedia page for each war after World War II to look up the number of enemy casualties, choosing low or high estimates conservatively with respect to my hypothesis. I’ll fill in a few other numbers from other sources. (If you have better data handy, let me know.)

Counting only Korea and Vietnam, I get a low-bound estimate of 817,000 enemy dead before the United States ended conscription. (The high estimate is 1,915,000 dead, not including 1.5 million civilian deaths on both sides of the Korean conflict.)

In the post-conscription era, I’ll stick to the high-end estimates and include 20000 dead in the El Savadoran Civil war, 70 in our invasion of Grenada, 60 in the bombing of Libya, 3500 in our invasion of Panama, 29,600 in the first Gulf War, 1000 in Somalia (from Operation Irene, the Blackhawk Down incident), 25,000 in Bosnia-Herzgovina, 11,000 in Yugoslavia, and all 13,000 guerrilla soldiers killed in the Columbian conflict so far. I’ll assume all deaths were the result, directly or indirectly, of American involvement.

Wikipedia says there are no generally accepted numbers for the number of casualties from the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. For Afghanistan, I’ll use the estimate by Jonathon Steele of the Guardian (no shill for United States militarism) of 50,000 dead. Finally, for Iraq, I’ll use the death toll of 655,000 from the Lancet‘s survey of Iraq War casualties, which includes a large number of people killed by militant attacks against the population. (There was a higher estimate by another organization, but the Lancet‘s work was peer-reviewed.)

That brings the grand total to 818,000 non-U.S. dead, which is coincidentally only a thousand more than than during the conscription era. Since the post conscription period was about 1/3 longer (29 vs. 38 years) it ends up being about 25% less deadly for people outside the U.S.

This is not, of course, a very robust finding, and neither was my previous analysis of American war deaths, even though it found a much higher ratio. I have no idea how to determine significance. I’m pulling numbers from dubious sources and disregarding conflicting estimates. I’m using a proxy measurement for the total social cost, and I’m not controlling for other independent variables — most obviously, the end of the Cold War.

(A better approach to studying the subject would probably not rely on statistics. Instead, we should examine the actual historic decision making behind all conflicts entered into — and all conflicts avoided — during the period before and after the end of conscription. This is well beyond my capabilities, but I suppose historians have studied the process at various times and places.)

That said, I do have a plausible theory — that forcing the government to pay the full market price for military service (rather than allowing it to confiscate the labor, freedom, and lives of American soldiers) forces it to protect soldiers more thoroughly and use them more wisely. The numbers we have available seem to support my theory, and they don’t support the theory that eliminating the draft has caused an increase in militarism.

There’s also the question of whether conscription would really “work” by spreading the cost around. One of the criticisms of conscription during the Vietnam war was the ease with which non-disadvantaged people could get deferments or find other ways to avoid being drafted. What reason is there to believe it would be different this time? Unless you really think progressive forces would have the political power to establish a truly class-neutral conscription system. In which case, why not use that substantial political power to fight militarism directly?

Finally — and the only thing that matters to some of us — an all-volunteer army avoids the moral blight of slavery. Seriously, when has slavery ever been the solution to a progressive social problem? Should we encourage higher wages by randomly forcing hundreds of thousands of Americans to work in factory assembly lines or serve in battalions of migrant farm workers? Could we end the sexual exploitation of women by forcing everyone to sell sex? Maybe we could get better healthcare by forcing a larger percentage of the population to become doctors and nurses? And who would get to make those decisions?

I think the all-volunteer system is an important way to ensure that those who serve in our county’s military have a strong say in their conditions and terms of service. And I think that in turn will discourage the use of our military forces for dubious adventurism. Which is, I think, something we should all want.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at More on the Liberal Argument for Conscription

Then yesterday I read that similar attacks in Libya resulted in the death of Ambassador Stevens and several others.

Again, I was astounded by the dangerous insanity on display. Put simply, if you think your religion demands that you kill people who disrespect it, then your religion is stupid, and you are stupid for following it.

[Update: This first detail section appears to be a false report. It’s now being reported that Ambassador Stevens was killed in the embassy.]

Then I read the details of the attack:

The U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other embassy staff were killed in a rocket attack on their car, a Libyan official said, as they were rushed from a consular building stormed by militants denouncing a U.S.-made film insulting the Prophet Mohammad.

Gunmen had attacked and burned the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, a center of last year’s uprising against Muammar Gaddafi, late on Tuesday evening, killing one U.S. consular official. The building was evacuated.

The Libyan official said the ambassador, Christopher Stevens, was being driven from the consulate building to a safer location when gunmen opened fire.

“The American ambassador and three staff members were killed when gunmen fired rockets at them,” the official in Benghazi told Reuters.

Oh.

That doesn’t sound so stupid. In fact, it sounds less like mob action and more like special ops. The crowds gathering outside the embassy may have been the usual ignorant fools, but somebody with tactical smarts was hiding amoung them. Whoever it was, they knew enough to hold off the rocket attack until they had a high-value target out in the open. They may or may not have whipped the mob into a frenzy, but they sure used the mob to suit their purposes.

I’m just guessing from reports, but it looks like our ambassador wasn’t killed by the mob. He was killed by somebody’s soldiers.

Update: And then the story changes again. It now appears the the ambassador died in the fire at the embassy, but the remaining Americans were followed to their safe house, which came under siege:

Here, two more things went wrong. First, Obeidi found four times as many Americans at the single-storey, fortified house as he had been told expect – 37, not just 10. So he did not have enough transport. Then, the villa came under massive attack.

This time, there was little doubt in the minds of Libyans who experienced it that this was a well-organized assault by men who had mastered the complexities of military mortar fire.

“This attack was planned,” Obeid said. “The accuracy with which the mortars hit us was too good for any ordinary revolutionaries.”

While some Libyan officials suggested that former soldiers from Gaddafi’s army may have been involved in Benghazi, some of the Islamist fighters also have substantial military experience from years spent fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

So, yeah, it was a military operation against U.S. personnel. A small act of war.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Stupid Muslim Fundamentalists?

Proposed for your consideration: We should be allowed to hunt Thomas Ricks for sport. I’m sure it would be great fun for us, and I think that if skinned and properly tanned, his silver-haired visage would look great on my living room wall.

Find out why, read the whole thing: Enslaving our kids.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Enslaving Our Kids

Back then, I knew I didn’t know enough to have a well-informed opinion (and I was still new enough to blogging to let that stop me), so I wrote very little about the invasion except for a tongue-in-cheek strategy suggestion. I was hardly a war booster, but if pressed I would have said that invading Iraq was probably a good thing.

To start with, getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a great idea. He was a tyrant and I say death to tyrants.

There were those who opposed the invasion on the grounds that Iraq was a sovereign nation which we had no right to invade. I had a simple answer to that: The only legitimate governments are democracies. Any government which is not of, by, and for the people is not a government we should respect. Dictators are the moral equivalent of gangsters, and Saddam Hussein was no more the legitimate ruler of Iraq than John Gotti was the mayor of New York.

What give us the right? I think everyone has the right. You don’t need anybody else’s permission to free someone from tyranny. (You wouldn’t want to free someone against their will, of course, but in the absence of a clear and uncoerced statement to the contrary, I think it’s safe to assume that people want to be free.)

Then why not invade some other dictatorship such as Iran, Syria, or “our friends” the Saudis? I wouldn’t have a moral problem with overthrowing any of those governments, but an illegitimate government only keeps it from being immoral to invade, it doesn’t mean we have to invade.

Just because we believe people would be better off if we invaded, doesn’t mean it’s our duty as a nation to do so. Even back then, it was clear that an invasion would have a cost in blood and treasure, and we owe it to our soldiers and our taxpayers not to squander what they give us on wars that do not serve our national interest. We should only invade Iraq, I thought, if it also served a legitimate national interest.

That’s where the weapons of mass destruction came in. Keeping such weapons out of the hands of terrorists was a clear matter of national security.

Then there’s the oil. Protesters can chant “no blood for oil” all they want, but that doesn’t change the fact that American civilization will crumble if we don’t get oil. The safety of our oil supply is a matter of national security as well, and if invading Iraq and setting up a free democracy will help stabilize the region, all the better.

I thought invading Iraq would serve a confluence of interests. A successful operation would

• overthrow a tyrant
• eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
• free the Iraqi people
• spread democracy in the middle east
• help stabilize the region
• safeguard our oil supply

But if an invasion is such a great idea, why wasn’t I a war booster?

Well, although that list makes the invasion sound like a terrific idea, there’s one very important point I left out which concerned me very much at the time: Invading Iraq and accomplishing the items on that list is only a good idea if it actually works.

The problem was, I knew far too little about the middle east, the Bush administration, and modern warfare to make many confident predictions. I was sure the initial invasion would sweep the Iraqi army from the battlefield, but when it came to picking up the pieces afterward, I had no idea what would happen.

The best I could figure out is that it all depended on the Iraqi people. If they welcomed us as liberators and enthusiastically started the hard work of building a free democracy, everything would be fine. But if they cooperated with an organized guerilla resistance movement, we’d be stuck in an ugly situation for a long time.

The best I could do was listen to what all sides were saying and decide who made the most sense. The Bush Administration had Colin Powell and access to everything our intelligence agencies knew about the middle east.  The anti-war crowd had Hollywood celebrities and giant paper-machete heads, and they seemed to think that insulting George Bush for not approving the Kyoto agreement was a compelling argument against the war. (I’m simplifying a bit.) Also, the anti-war crowd had been wrong every step of the way in Afghanistan.

At the time, I still believed that, whatever their faults in other areas, the Bush administration was serious about national security. Also, without free speech the Iraqi people couldn’t tell us what they would really do if we invaded, but I figured our intelligence agencies had the assets and capability to make some really good guesses.

So, I figured the invasion would probably be successful, and therefore it was probably a good idea. I didn’t love the idea, but I thought evertything would turn out better in the end.

Once the war was underway, as I expected, we quickly accomplished the first goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Troublingly, the second goal, destroying the weapons of mass destruction, proved to have been unnecessary.

As the war dragged on, we went backwards on the last two goals, stabilizing the region and safeguarding our oil supply. As for the middle two goals, I’m not sure if what the Iraqis have now can really be called freedom, and I don’t think we’ve impressed the Muslim world with the benefits of democracy.

Even after the war started to go bad, the question that kept nagging at me was “Would the world have been a better place if Saddam was still in charge in Iraq?” The answer, I thought, was “no.”

But here we are after five years of violent confict and Iraqis are still dying, Iran is emerging as an unopposed power in the region, and the enemy has learned a lot about how to fight us. I’m beginning to think it’s a no-win situation, and our best move is to admit it and cut our losses.

Of course, given my track record on this subject, it’s just as likely that the resistance is going to collapse next month, the Iraqis will begin to build a working society, and the liberals will gain power in Iran.

It’s probably better if you don’t pay attention to a thing I say.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Five Years Later In Iraq

Founded in 2003 by Debi Rickert, OSOTIL sends out care packages to our troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. They follow Department of Defense security standards and guidelines. Most of the items they send are not available through the military supply system and are difficult to find locally.

Just to give you an idea, the current list of most desired items includes Canned Fruit, Crackers, Beef Jerky/Slim Jims, Nuts, Shaving Cream, Deodorant, Hand lotion, Body wash, Foot Powder, Socks, Cold drink mix, Gatorade, Coffee, Unscented baby wipes, Pringles, Peanut Butter, Jelly, Bug Spray, Fly Strips, Fly swatters, and Sunscreen.

That’s just the top ten list. They accept a lot of other stuff as well.

OSOTIL has drop-off locations for goods all over Illinois, or you can just send them money using PayPal to help cover their $2400/month shipping bill. Details for all of this are available on their home page.

If you’re not from Illinois, then check out the national parent organization, Operation Support Our Troops

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Operation Support Our Troops – Illinois

In 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger led the United States away from supporting a Kurdish homeland.

After the first Gulf War against Iraq in the early 1990s, “we believed (President George) Bush senior,” Talabany said. When the current President George H.W. Bush’s father called for Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein and promised support, the Kurds and Shiites in southern Iraq did, only to see the United States turn its back.

The end result was Hussein killed thousands of Kurds and caused others to flee into the Turkish mountains for protection, where many died of exposure.

…

“We didn’t trust the United States after that,” Talabany said.

But with the full commitment of American forces finally toppling Hussein in 2003, Kurds once again were willing to take a chance on America.

If the United States decides to pull out before the job is done, “we Kurds want guarantees we will be protected,” he said.

If the Democrats succeed in getting the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq, they need to ensure that we leave behind enough forces to protect the Kurds. All the good things we say we want for Iraq—democracy, freedom, wealth—the Kurds have been building for themselves. When we invaded, they really did welcome us a liberators. We owe them our support.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at What Will Happen to the Kurds?

If you prefer something more abstract, check out icasualties.org. As I write this, there are 3133 confirmed U.S. war dead. Here’s a list of all of them.

The same site shows 23,471 wounded in combat, and another 6,835 with non-combat injuries bad enough to need medical air transport.

We can stop all this bloodshed, just by leaving.

(See also this companion piece.)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Why We Must Leave Iraq Now

So the surge will work, but the surge is not the plan. Baghdad is the plan. Instead of talking about the surge, we should be talking about the Baghdad strategy.

The plan is to secure Baghdad. Our troops will attempt to kill or chase away most of the enemy insurgents and prevent them from re-entering the city. Planners say that will require putting five additional bridades of U.S. soldiers into Baghdad. Rather than pulling those soldiers away from other duties in Iraq, the plan is to keep our existing forces in place and bring in additional troops to support the additional operations in Baghdad. That’s the surge.

If you think this would have been more effective three or four years ago, you’re in good company. A lot of people who support the broad goals of the war are not happy with the way it’s been fought. (I haven’t followed the war in detail for a long time, so I can’t claim to have been calling for reform, but it did seem like our military goals became a lot less clear after the first few months. I assumed it was just me, and maybe it was.) I’m sure the historians will figure out how it went wrong, but I think it’s more than just a coincidence that the U.S. military is once again seizing the initiative now that Rumsfeld is gone.

Our new Baghdad forces will be accompanied by a large portion of the new Iraqi army, bringing the total of additional forces in the capital city to over 40,000. Smaller forces will be sent to help pacify Anbar Province and to interdict enemy infiltration into Iraq over the borders with Syria and Iran.

Actually, some of this activity has already started:

U.S. and Iraqi troops moved into a Sunni neighborhood in southern Baghdad on Thursday, while insurgents struck back with car bombs that killed seven people. In southern Iraq, British troops sealed off the border with Iran to prevent weapons smuggling.

Helicopters buzzed overhead as a joint U.S.-Iraqi force headed into the Dora neighborhood – a longtime Sunni militant area – on the second day of a long-awaited security operation in the capital, according to Iraqi officials. U.S. troops searched three Shiite areas Wednesday, meeting little resistance in house-to-house searches.

The Interior Ministry also said U.S. and Iraqi forces were sweeping through four main districts, including Sunni and Shiite areas, seizing weapons and ammunitions.

It’s unfortunate that so much of the focus in the media and in Congress has been on the surge rather than on the new strategy the surge is supporting. It has lead to a lot of discussion about the number of troops in Iraq, with very little discussion of what they should be doing there.

I don’t know much about military matters, so I have no idea how the new strategy will work out. Maybe it will work, maybe it’s too late, and maybe it would never have worked. But it’s what we should be talking about.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Surge Is Not the Plan

Yes, I’m certainly willing to believe that we’d be better off if we had never invaded Iraq, and I might even be willing to believe that the Iraqis would be better off if we had left Saddam Hussein in charge. But we can’t undo the things we’ve done. We can’t put Iraq back together the way it used to be.

We can only try to control what happens next.

Here’s the problem with withdrawing our troops from Iraq, in a single paragraph from an article about something else:

AQI is both feared and hated,” Capt Broekhuizen said, referring to Al Qaeda in Iraq. “They’ve been running a brutal terror campaign. No city leaders are left here who will take a leadership role.” Marines from Golf Company said they recently fished two bodies out of the local river: a man had been decapitated, and his 4-year old tied to his leg before both were thrown into the river and the little boy drowned. The killings were a product of Al Qaeda terror.

If we leave Iraq now, we will be leaving it in the hands of the people who did that. We will be giving the beheaders control over the lives of 26 million people.

What happens next…is genocide.

[Update: See also this companion piece.]

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Why We Can’t Leave Iraq Yet

This is the second installment of a series of modest proposals for victory in Iraq.

Proposals for changing our Iraq strategy have often been given simple names such as Go Big (send more troops), Go Long (plan a permanent occupation), or Go Home (the core of my previous proposal). I guess this proposal’s simple name would be Go Nuclear.

Many people claim that this is a war against Islamofascism—the desire by some Islamic leaders to conquer the world and convert it to Islam—and that it’s our job to fight it. I’ve also heard people claim that Islamic culture (or maybe it’s Arabic culture) is oriented to respect power and authority, not democratic cooperation, meaning that the hoards of people fighting for our Islamofascist enemies won’t recognize the advantages of a western liberal democracy and won’t take an opportunity to form one.

In other words, if we believe these two theories, our enemies are an implacable foe who would rather fight than live a better life. They cannot be bargained with or reasoned with. They feel no pity or remorse. They are not deal makers or coalition builders. And they seek to destroy our civilization. Our only recourse is to defeat them by force of arms.

Then that should be our strategy.

The United States has a stockpile of about ten thousand nuclear warheads. According to our arms reduction plans, we’re planning to reduce this stockpile considerably. One way of doing so is to expend the warheads in the middle east. Think of it as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

We start at the top, by launching a multi-pronged attack against Iran.

Our first priority is to establish air supremacy by sending nuclear-armed stealth missions to suppress all the major airbases, beginning with the air force headquarters at Doshan Tapeh Air Base and the large airbase at Mehrabad International Airport just outside Tehran, then Ghali Morghi, and then Imam Khomeini International Airport under construction to the south. Other air supremacy targets should include Tabriz (which also has nuclear facilities), Hamadan, Dezful, Umidiyeh, Shiraz, and Isfahan in the Western Command, and Bushehr, Chah Bahar, and Bandar-e Abbas in the Southern Command.

These targets overlap with several other kinds of targets, such as weapons of mass detruction. Thus, the mission to Tehran should also include the Tehran Nuclear Research Center and the missile program facilities in the southwestern suburbs. In addition to bombing the airbase at Isfahan, we should also bomb the the missile plant, the chemical weapons factories, and the Nuclear Technology/Research Center, along with the nuclear fuel production center at Roshandasht to the southeast.

Shiraz also has chemical weapons facilities and is home to Iran’s special forces, and they could form the core of a pretty effective terrorist organization and cause a lot of trouble in the aftermath if we don’ t catch them at home, so Shiraz should be one of the first places we hit, along with the special forces garrisons at Kermanshah, Zahedan, Orumieh, and Mashad.

If we don’t catch the Iranian navy in port, we’ll have to chase them down on the ocean. That wouldn’t be a huge problem, except maybe for the submarines, so we should be sure to destroy the submarine pens at Bandar-e Abbas while we’re bombing the airbase. We should also send missions to destroy the naval yard at Bushehr, the chemical weapons and anti-shipping missile sites in the Abu Musa islands, and Kharg island, all of which threaten shipping in the gulf.

Another prime set of targets are the nuclear facilities at Anrak, Arak, Ardekan, Bonab, Chalus, Darkhovin, Fasa, Gchine, Karaj, Kolahdouz, Lavizan, Mo’allem Kalaych, Natanz, Neka, Parchin, Saghand, and Tabas. We will probably also want to either bomb or capture the uranium mines in Yazd, Khorassan, Sistan va Baluchestan, Hormozgan, Bandar-e-Abbas, and Badar-e-Lengeh Provinces.

We could also bomb the chemical and bio-weapons facilities in Damghan, Parchin, and Qazvin, along with the chemical and missle sites on Qeshm island and in Abadan, Aliabad, Dasht-e Kavir, Dorud, Emamshahr, Gamsar, Gotaresh, Hama, Islaker, Khorramabad, Kukh-e-Barjamali, Maghdad, Mashhad, Okaraman, Pairzan, Saidabad, Sharud, Sultanatabad, Sarji, Semnan, Shahriyar, Shiraz, Seman, Shahroud, Sargfabad, Sirri Island, Sirjan, and Taba. Some of those are only suspected missile sites, so with a little intelligence we might be able to save ourselves the cost of a few multi-million dollar warheads. Or not.

Iran’s land forces are spread out all over the place, but in addition to the special forces units mentioned earlier, we would also want to bomb the ones closest to the border with Iraq, including Abadan, Khorramshahr, Ahvaz, Dezfuland, and Mahabad.

That takes care of the purely military targets, which were the most time-critical. After that, we can set about nuking the industrial and commercial centers at Tehran, Mashad, Esfahan, Tabriz, Karaj, Shiraz, Qom, and Ahvaz, some of which will already be damaged from the military attacks. We could also use nuclear weapons to close mountain passes and major river crossings.

To be clear about our strategy, the goal here is not mere military incapacitation. The plan is to destroy our enemies’ industrial civilizations, reducing them to a state of struggling for subsistence. It’s hard to mount an international terrorist conspiracy, let alone a religious empire, when most of your people are scavenging for scrap copper and aluminum in the rubble of your cities.

A similar strategy will serve in Syria, beginning with the destruction of air bases in Abu-a-Dhur, Aleppo, Blay, Damascus Dayr az Zawr, Dumayr, As Suwayda, As West, Hamah, Kamishly, Khalkhalah, Latakia, Marj Ruhayyil, Messe, An Nasiriyah, Neirab, Quasayr, Rasin el About, Shayrat, Tabqa, Tiyas, Tadmur, and Sayqal, then continuing with the naval bases at Latakia, Baniyas, Minat al Bayda, and Tartus, and finishing with the special weapons facilities in Al Safir, Cerin, Homs, and Palmyra. We should also strike Damascus, because that’s the seat of government.

Many people reading this far will ask why the Saudis get a pass, when they were at the heart of the 9/11 terror attacks and they’re financing radical extremism all over the world. For purposes of this proposal, they don’t. However, rather than destroying Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons, I propose a conventional attack aimed at bringing down the House of Saud because I have other plans for the region. I want to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians by giving the Arabian peninsula to the Palestinians as their new homeland.

As with any plan, there are a few drawbacks.

For one thing, it would make us the biggest mass murderers of all time. In histories written about this period, Stalin and Hitler will be reduced in status to mere portents of the calculated savagery yet to come.

Of more practical concern, we’d be bombing the places where they keep all our oil. To mitigate this, we may want to use conventional attacks on some sites to preserve oil production capacity.

Another concern is nuclear fallout, which will spread throughout the region and (to varying degrees) all over the world. Naturally, we can expect protests from other nations.

We can meet these protests in three ways. First, we can point out that we set off about a hundred nuclear weapons in our own country during World War III (a.k.a. the Cold War) to protect western civilization, and you didn’t hear us whining all the time about a little fallout. Second, we can offer them compensation for damages. As we’ve learned from our experiences in Iraq, conventional warfare is expensive, so even a few hundred billion dollars in reparations would be a bargain. Third, we can point out that we just killed several million people whose existence annoyed us, so they should just shut the hell up.

In conclusion, although not without controversy, a massive nuclear strike in the middle east would be quick, it would be cheap, and it would save American lives that would be lost in a long conventional war.

(A note on sources: All information about foreign military facilities was drawn from GlobalSecurity.org, and all errors herein are theirs and theirs alone.)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Modest Proposal for Iraq: Scorched Earth

President Bush has offered his plan for Iraq, and in fielding criticism of it, Press Secretary Tony Snow has said anybody who didn’t like it should offer a better one. I’m rising to that challenge with a series of modest proposals addressing not just the conflict in Iraq, but the emerging larger war against Islamofascism.

My first proposal is simple: We declare victory and go home. This is completely different from “cut-and-run.”

People say we haven’t won in Iraq, but that’s rigid literalist thinking. Just because we haven’t succeeded at every single one of our goals doesn’t mean we haven’t scored some meaningful victories. Consider:

• The United States no longer neads to fear Iraqi weapons of mass descruction.
• Saddam Hussein is dead. There’s your regime change right there.
• Iraq is no longer a military threat to other nations in the region.

We should just put those victories in our pocket and leave.

True, Iraq is not a peaceful democracy like we were hoping, but is that a real problem? If you live in Iraq, then obviously yes. That’s why so many people who advocate a withdrawl are insisting it will make the Iraqis stand up for themselves. They don’t want to be blamed for the chaos and bloodshed that will follow our departure.

That’s where my plan differs from cut-and run: Under my plan, we don’t pretend to care what happens in Iraq after we leave. So let me restate my original question: True, Iraq is not a peaceful democracy like we were hoping, but is that a real problem for us?

I don’t think so, because I don’t think Saddam Hussein was feeling very victorious as they tightened the rope around his neck. From his point of view, it didn’t matter if we stayed or left. All that mattered is that we’d been there and kicked his ass.

We no longer care what mattered to Saddam Hussein, but we do care what matters to other people like him. When we declare victory and leave Iraq, we want to leave behind a message that matters to people like Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad, Syrian President Bashar al-Asad, and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.

That message is simple: Piss us off and we’ll fuck you up.

Sure, we may not replace you with a peaceful democracy, but we will replace you. In the process of doing so, we’ll destroy your military and kill a whole bunch of your supporters and probably you too. Heck once your supporters realize they’re going to die because of you, they just might do the job for us.

In short, this is a strategy of deterrence. We want our enemies to believe we’ll destroy them if they misbehave. Hopefully this will discourage them from misbehaving so we won’t have to go through the wearying exercise of destroying them.

One of the biggest advantages of this strategy is that it’s quick. If we’re going to declare victory and go home without rebuilding anything, we can get it over with in a jiffy. We could have left Iraq three years ago, pausing only to shoot Saddam on the way out so he didn’t regain power during the descent into chaos.

Alternatively, since we would have finished the job so quickly, we could have done a few more jobs. Why try to threaten and deter other countries when we have plenty of time to destroy them? In the four years we’ve been fighting in Iraq, we could have destroyed Syria, Iran, and the parts of Pakistan we don’t like.

There are a few downsides to this strategy.

First of all, Al-Qaeda will see our withdrawl from Iraq as a victory for them. Even worse, some of the very people we’re trying to frighten will see this as an Al-Qaeda victory and won’t think we’re all that scary because of it. Maybe we need to stage a big attack on Al-Qaeda to show them we mean business…but then we’re not really going home, are we?…I still need to work on this part of the plan…

The second problem is that Iraq didn’t really do anything to piss us off right before we attacked them. Oh, they’ve been shooting at our aircraft in the no-fly zone for years, interfering with weapons inspectors, and causing all kinds of trouble, but it’s not like we were responding to a sudden change in their behavior. That’s going to make it hard for other countries to tell when we’re pissed off at them until we actually blow them up…which defeats the purpose of having a deterrent.

Fortunately, having just watched the DVD of Snakes On a Plane, I think we can borrow a solution from Mother Nature. Rattlesnakes shake the rattle on their tail just before striking. It’s a built-in reflex, so when a snake shakes its rattle, you know it’s not bluffing. Other animals have recognizable pre-attack behavior as well, such as screeching birds or growling dogs. We need to find the equivalent of an animal’s attack cry for an American military attack, so our enemies will know when we’re serious.

I have an idea about that, and a Democratic congress is a start. We should also elect a Democratic president. Then, if our enemies do something to piss us off again, we scare the crap out of them by electing ourselves another Republican from Texas. Or maybe we elect Jeb Bush. He’s another Bush (and you know how those Bush guys are about middle eastern wars) plus he’s from Florida, so you know he’s much crazier than his brother.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Modest Proposal for Iraq: Pocket the Victory

Jennifer the Feral Genius wrote in her blog:

…I can’t quite bring myself to believe we’re going to hit Iran. I’d never be able to defend this position in an actual debate, though, because my reasoning amounts to me waving my hands in the air and sputtering “We can’t! Our military’s stretched as it is! We don’t have the ability!” …

It depends what we’re trying to do. Do we need to conquer and rebuild Iran? Or do we just need to damage it a bit? Building an entire democratic nation is hard, but our military finds it pretty easy to hurt people and break things.

Military planners differentiate between control and denial. It’s the difference between using an asset yourself and preventing your enemy from using it. For example, if your enemy has people and supplies crossing a bridge over a river, it may be enough to simply blow it up with a guided bomb from an aircraft, thus denying it to your enemy. But if you want to use the bridge yourself, you probably need to capture it with ground troops. Control is a lot more difficult than denial, and it’s important not to confuse the two.

Arguably, that’s been the problem with the war in Iraq. Denying control of Iraq to Saddam Hussein was easy. Controlling it ourselves…that’s a lot harder.

(Al-Qaeda has the same problem. They have been able to deny us complete control of Iraq, but captured Al-Qaeda communications indicate they are frustrated by our ability to keep them from gaining control.)

As I understand it, the Cold War shaped the U.S. military to perform a role that was ultimately defensive in nature. We expected an attack on Europe from the Soviet Union, and our military goal was to thwart that attack. To do that, we were going to counterattack and destroy the military forces of the Soviet Union. This counterattack would almost certainly have involved an invasion of the Soviet Union, but our invasion was only for the purpose of stopping their invasion. We had no designs on Soviet land, people, or natural resources. Our goal was to stop the invasion, not take over the country. The U.S. military is designed to attack our enemies but not to conquer them.

By 1990, our military had evolved to to perform this role very well. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, we counterattacked into Iraq and destroyed much of the Iraqi army in only a couple of months.

Note that when we re-invaded Iraq in 2003 we continued to use the terminology of defense. A “preemptive” attack is a counterattack that is launched to stop an enemy attack before it starts. During the Cold War, if we had seen the Soviet army massing for an invasion of Europe, we might have decided to preempt that attack by attacking first. In Iraq, our counterattack was nominally intended to preempt terrorist use of chemical and biological weapons.

By this time, our military had become even more effective at destroying enemy forces, and within three weeks the Iraqi army was destroyed or driven from the field of battle.

President Bush has taken a lot of abuse over the “Mission Accomplished” banner, but in many ways it was accurate. U.S. military forces exist in their current form for the purpose of destroying other nations’ military forces, and by that standard, they had accomplished their mission.

Unfortunately, destroying the Iraqi army was not the only thing we had planned to do, but the U.S. military wasn’t designed for nation building.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Iraq: Why We Didn’t Win When We Won

When I first started hearing about the 20,000-troop surge, the reports seemed to imply that this would be little more than a broad increase in troop levels—a few extra companies for every commander.

That wouldn’t be much help. In almost any war, you want to concentrate your forces in order to overwhelm the enemy at a particular location, and you want to choose the location that will do the most good.

The new plan seems to do that. Some of the troops are headed to Anbar Province to make sure it doesn’t fall to the heavy concentration of Al-Qaeda forces there. Nearly all the rest of the troops—probably about 15,000 I’m guessing—are headed for Baghdad.

I’m not saying this is a plan for victory, because I sure don’t know enough to tell, but at least it sounds like a plan. 20,000 more troops in all of Iraq won’t do much good. 15,000 more troops in Baghdad…that might make a big difference.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Plan For Iraq?

I’m not sure what to make of this story. Israel planning to nuke Iran just is the inevitable consequence of Iran’s threatening to develop nuclear weapons. Iranian leaders have been calling for Israel’s destruction for years. Now that they are acquiring the means to do so, Israel is making plans to nuke them first.

Iran wanted to be a nuclear power. Well, that’s how it works. Now you have enemies that plan nuclear wars against you—balance of terror, mutually assured destruction and all that. Welcome to the nuclear club.

It’s hard to know how serious Israel’s plans are. A nuclear war will happen fast, and there won’t be much time for thinking about it when it starts. Therefore any country that has nuclear weapons is going to have planning staff to decide how to use them. When not fighting a nuclear war (which is, so far, thankfully, always) the staff conducts wargames and puts together canned plans for attacking enemies. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the U.S. also has a plan for a nuclear attack on Iran.

(Heck, I have a plan for a nuclear attack on Iran, but that’s a topic for another post…)

A conventional bombing attack against Iranian nuclear facilities would require a huge force. The United States could do it easily, but Israel would have a hard time conducting such a large air operation. Israel is therefore planning an alternative attack using small nuclear bunker-buster bombs in the one-kiloton range, according to the article.

The middle east has been a troubled region for a long time, and it may be about to get even worse. If Israel launches a conventional air strike against Iran, the Iranian leadership will have just minutes to decide whether to let it continue or to try to stop it and then hope the Israelies don’t have the willpower to use their nuclear strike plan.

If Israel does nuke Iran, the Islamic powers will go insane, which would be bad for U.S. interests in the region. This raises the possibility that the United States should destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities in a conventional attack so that the Israelies won’t do so in a nuclear attack.

Interesting times.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Israel to Nuke Iran?

I always felt this was a little unfair because “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a lot better than the previous military policy, which might be characterized as “Ask, then Discharge” (or before that, “Investigate, then Imprison”). A gay person wanting to serve in the military before 1993 could only do so by lying when questioned about it. Now at least they weren’t supposed to be questioned. Clinton’s new policy may have required gays to stay in the closet, but the old policy used to pull them out of the closet even if they were willing to stay in.

It turns out there may be another advantage to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” that I didn’t even think of (but should have):

Last year I held a number of meetings with gay soldiers and marines, including some with combat experience in Iraq, and an openly gay senior sailor who was serving effectively as a member of a nuclear submarine crew. These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers.

This perception is supported by a new Zogby poll of more than 500 service members returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, three quarters of whom said they were comfortable interacting with gay people. And 24 foreign nations, including Israel, Britain and other allies in the fight against terrorism, let gays serve openly, with none reporting morale or recruitment problems.

I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.

That’s from a New York Times op-ed column. The writer is retired Army General John M. Shalikashvili, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” people who opposed gays in the military could claim that it might undermine the moral, discipline, and efficiency of the United States military, and that it was foolish to conduct social experiments in such a vital institution. What “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” did was allow us to conduct that experiment. Gays could serve in the military and then come out of the closet so we knew who they were.

One benefit of this was information: After a decade and a half of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” the results of the experiment are in. Gay soldiers don’t have problems serving in the military, and the straight soliders don’t have problems serving with the gay soldiers.

I think this will bring an end to the military’s opposition to gays in the service, and Congress will follow their lead. It may not have happened as soon as it could have, but I think it will happen.

(Hat tip: Ronald Bailey)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…Yet

Saddam Hussein
1937 – 2006

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Mission Accomplished

My proposal is that we follow a strategy of encroachment. We just slowly keep creeping into Iraq, building air bases and fuel dumps, military hospitals, roads, bridges, rail links, civilian aid stations, and whatever else we can think of until we control 90% of Iraq without firing a shot.

I’m hardly an expert on military matters, so I was just making stuff up for the fun of it, and a couple months later it didn’t matter because our forces captured Baghdad in only three weeks of fighting.

The way things have gone in Iraq since then, however, I’m beginning to think my plan wasn’t so silly after all.

As our forces crept into Iraq, they would presumably have run into all the problems we’re seeing now, except on a much smaller scale because initially they would have occupied only a small fraction of the country. They’d have had a much better American-soldier-to-insurgent ratio, so they would have a pretty good chance of defeating the insurgency, especially since it’s a lot easier to adapt operations to a small theater than a large one.

Once the insurgency was crushed, our forces could have gone about the process of setting up a working civilization of sorts, with schools and hospitals and trained police and a new Iraqi army to prevent future insurgencies. Only when all this was accomplished would our forces have invaded a little further and repeated the process.

I think the military calls this concentrated piece-at-a-time approach defeat in detail. In my little software engineering world, we call it iterative development. There are three principle advantages of an iterative approach that seem to apply here.

First, with an iterative approach you discover problems early and you can quickly adapt your solution to overcome them.

Second, an iterative approach gives you the option of changing the scope of the problem you’re trying to solve. One of our goals in Iraq was to establish a western-style democracy as a demonstration of a better way for other countries in the region to follow. If we had used in iterative approach, we would quickly have discovered that this was a lot harder in some parts of Iraq than in others. We could have withdrawn from the difficult regions and focused our efforts where they’d do the most good. In other words, we’d have built a democracy from the green zones and left the red zones to Saddam.

(This is similar to modern armor doctrine in which enemy strongpoints are bypassed in favor of achieving other battlefield goals. The strongpoints are then isolated and reduced by follow-on forces.)

Third, an iterative approach keeps your initial commitment small so that if you decide the problem is unsolvable, the cost of giving up is not too high. If you’re going to give up anyway, it’s best to do it as soon as possible to limit your casualties. (The ideal, of course, is to quit before you start.)

Since I know so little about warfare, this is all just mental games. It’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek hindsight on a terrible situation. Someone with real military skills could probably trash my ideas easily, unless they found them too incoherent to analyze (i.e. so bad they’re not even wrong).

I knew that when I started this post. Now that I’ve written it, however, I’m starting to believe that maybe there’s some core bit of a good idea here.

In any case, I’m planning to write a few more modest proposals for winning in Iraq, so stay tuned.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Iraq Victory That Might Have Been

The answer is not military conflict in Afghanistan. The answer is taking gender-based oppression into account in refuge claims. We could “rescue” every oppressed Afghan woman who wants asylum by simply opening our doors to all female refugees from Afghanistan, and any other regime that doesn’t afford full civil rights to women.

The message to patriarchal regimes: Keep this up, and we’ll take all your women and children. Heck, if you don’t knock off this tin-pot dictator shit, we’ll take all your scientists, all your engineers, all your doctors, and all your journalists–regardless of gender! Our gain, your loss.

Sounds like a plan to me.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at How to Defeat Islamofascism

I am concerned, in particular, that our enemies will be emboldened if we leave the area without a clear victory. I’ve heard that when President Ronald Reagan pulled our troops out of Lebanon after the Marine barracks was bombed, a lot of our potential enemies in the region saw that as proof that the United States would back down if they suffered enough casualties.

According to Mark Bowden in Black Hawk Down, Somali warlords in Mogadishu specifically planned to pin down and kill a bunch of American soldiers, even at great cost to their own forces, because they were pretty sure it would create pressure for President Bill Clinton to remove our forces from the area.

If we let our enemies do that to us again in Iraq, we’ll be sending them a message that violent opposition to U.S. interests is a strategy that works. We will be rewarding them for killing our troops.

On the other hand, it’s hard for me to disagree with what Senator Carl Levin said at a recent press conference, especially the second quoted paragraph:

“Most Democrats share the view that we should pressure the White House to commence the phased redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq in four to six months — to begin that phased redeployment, and thereby to make it clear to the Iraqis that our presence is not open-ended and that they must take and make the necessary political compromises to preserve Iraq as a nation,” Levin said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. “We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves.

“They, and they alone, are going to decide whether they’re going to have a nation or whether they’re going to have an all-out civil war,” he said. “We have given them the opportunity, at huge cost of blood and treasure, to have a nation, should they choose it. But it is up to them, not us, not our brave and valiant troops — it’s up to the Iraqi leadership: Do they want a civil war or do they want a nation?”

It seems our choices are to leave and appear weak or to stay and keep paying the price in blood. These are not good choices.

Maybe we’ll luck out. Maybe our talk of a phased deployment will embolden the Iraqis to step up and pay the price to stop the violence.

We could use a bit of luck right now.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Blood and Treasure

SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea said Tuesday it considered U.N. sanctions aimed at punishing the country for its nuclear test “a declaration of war,” as Japan and South Korea reported the communist nation might be preparing a second explosion.

The North broke two days of silence about the U.N. resolution adopted after its Oct. 9 nuclear test with a statement on the official state news agency, as China warned Pyongyang against stoking tensions.

“The resolution cannot be construed otherwise than a declaration of a war” against the North, the statement said. North Korea is known officially as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The chief U.S. nuclear envoy, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, said the North’s response was “not very helpful.”

So…has North Korea declared war on the entire United Nations? Or just the Security Council?

The last time something like this happened was when Noriega declared that Panama was in a “state of war” with the United States. We invaded almost immediately.

I think this is just Kim Jong-il running his mouth off as usual. But now that he’s more-or-less a nuclear power, people pay some attention. For example, China, his biggest supporter in the region, is now slowly backing away, like someone beginning to realize that their eccentric friend may actually be dangerously crazy.

With a little luck, some of his military people—who would bear the brunt of any warfare—will take the initiative and assassinate him. Then again, he and his father probably made sure that people with initiative were kept out of the high ranks of the military for exactly that reason.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Kim Jong-il v.s. Everybody

By comparison, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, and the United States’ first test at Trinity, over 60 years ago, was 18 to 20 kilotons. Most U.S. nuclear weapons today are capable of yields over 100 kilotons, with many in the 300 kiloton range. Much larger weapons have been built, including a variety of strategic weapons in the 5000 to 15000 kiloton range.

So what does the low yield of the North Norean test mean? I’ve heard a number of possible explanations:

• Mismeasurement. Something has caused a false low estimate of the blast. As more and more people analyze the seismic shock wave, this seems less unlikely.

• Fizzle. The Norks were trying for a typical 10-20 kiloton test blast, but the bomb didn’t work right, resulting in a very small blast. This seems a little unlikely because atom bombs aren’t all that hard to build once you have the fissionable materials. No other country has had a failure of their first test. Then again, this is North Korea we’re talking about. The likely launch vehicle for a nuclear weapon, the Taepodong-2 missile, failed its big test last July.

• Fake. The unit of weapon yield, the kiloton, means literally the explosive power of 1000 tons of high explosive. To fake a 1-kiloton test blast, the North Koreans would simply have needed to bury 1000 tons of high explosives and set it off. Note that they were quick to announce that no radioactive materials leaked from the test site, which would certainly be true if none was ever produced.

• Suitcase Nuke. The blast was small because the weapon was small. The North Koreans are developing small portable nuclear bombs that are intended to be smuggled to their targets by spies or—in the worst-case scenario—by whatever terrorists North Korea’s crazy leader sells them to.

• Artillery Shell. An alternate explanation for a small weapon is that the warhead is intended to be fired by artillery, which would limit its size.

If the North Korean nuke is intentionally small, the last possibility makes the most sense.

Whenever the Daily Show has a Republican guest and they start talking about the war in Iraq, Jon Stewart likes to stump them by asking why the U.S. isn’t doing something about the serious threat of North Korea. For some reason no one ever explains it to him, even though the answer is pretty simple.

Much of North Korea’s national security depends on the fact that Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is only 30 miles from North Korea. It has 10 million inhabitants, and an additional 13 million people live in its suburbs. All of these people are within range of about 700 North Korean artillery guns and missile launchers. North Korea simply has 23 million hostages, half the population of South Korea, that it can start killing in the event of a U.S. attack.

By building nuclear weapons small enough to fire at South Korea from existing artillery and short-range missiles, North Korea would be strengthening their deterrence against an attack from the United States military.

My best guess, however, is that the North Korean nuke was a fizzle.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at No Nork Nuke?

SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea said Monday it had performed its first-ever nuclear weapons test, setting off an underground blast in defiance of international warnings and intense diplomatic activity aimed at heading off such a move.

The North Korean statement said there was no radioactive leakage from the test site.

An official at South Korea’s seismic monitoring center confirmed a magnitude-3.6 tremor felt at the time North Korea said it conducted the test was not a natural occurrence. The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition his name not be used, because he was not authorized to talk about the sensitive information to the media.

Australia also said there was seismic confirmation that North Korea conducted a nuclear test.

Kim Jung-Il has been claiming North Korea had nuclear weapons for a while now, but when it comes to nuclear weapons, you’re not for real until you set one off. The final analysis isn’t in yet, but it looks like this is for real.

Of course, joining the nuclear club has a downside. If the U.S. didn’t have plans to nuke North Korea till it glows before, they’re gonna start making them now.

Update: According to an AP wire report, South Korean analysis indicates the test happened at 8:36 pm CDT. The ground shock from the blast has now reached seismic sensors in the United States. With numerous other seismic detections near the Korean peninsula, sketchy reports say that early analysis shows it was a small nuclear blast, possible indicating a “fizzle.”

North Korea is claiming no leaks from the test site. Such leaks are not generally dangerous, but analysis of their composition would give experts in other countries a better idea of how well the bomb worked.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Uh Oh.

We called it the Cold War. Sure, it didn’t result in a world-wide eruption of total warfare (thank God) but almost every country was involved in some way or another. The United States was involved in two major conflicts during this war, suffering 54,000 war-dead in the Korean War and and 58,000 in the Vietnam War. Our allies suffered additional casualties in the thousands, including thousands dead or injured by left-over land mines. Our enemies got the worst of it though, with a combined death toll of 2 to 4 million.

(But do we count the Khmer Rouge? They took over Cambodia as we pulled out of the area and promptly decimated it. I mean that in the ancient literal Roman sense: They executed about 10% of the Cambodian population of 7 million and then they killed another million through policies that lead to starvation and disease.)

The U.S. wasn’t much involved in fighting the communist insurgency that became the Greek Cival War, but about 50,000 people died in that war. The list of people killed in side conflicts goes on and on, 75,000 in the El Salvador civil war, a half million in the Angolan civil war…

We may not have called it World War III as we lived through it, but with everybody in the world picking sides and millions dead, that’s what it was.

I don’t know if we’re at the start of another World War now, but if we are, it’s World War IV.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at This Ain’t World War III

“It’s a number,” said Tony Snow, the White House press secretary.

“Every time there’s one of these 500-benchmarks, people want something,” Snow added at his near-daily press briefing at the White House. “The president would like the war to be over now. Everybody would like the war to be over now.”

He’s got a point. 2500 is a nice round number, but it’s not terribly significant by itself, except to the news media. 2500 deaths is just an arbitrary number, worse than 2499 deaths but not as bad as 2501 deaths.

Then again, the So-Called “Austin Mayor” Blog has a point too.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at “It’s a Number”

Larger ImageLCPL Thomas Amos

Tommy is the son of a couple of good friends of ours. He returned to the United States this week, and his mother and father are driving to Camp Lejeune this weekend to see him. He’s got a new baby daughter that he hasn’t seen yet, but she’s too young to make the trip.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Welcome Back Marine

As I write this, Britain has 40 dead from a series of bombings. The BBC found a note on an Islamist website that claims the attack for al-Qaeda:

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and undaunted fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God’s peace be upon him.

Well isn’t that a nice way to start a message claiming responsibility for a terrorist attack?

Nation of Islam and Arab nation: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge against the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh, yes. Wouldn’t be Islamist terrorism if they didn’t mention the Jews.

The heroic mujahideen have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters.

Uh, “fear, terror and panic”? From the Brits? I doubt it.

I’m not saying that nobody in Britain is scared today. Of course they are. But…let’s not forget that these are Brits. Londoners. They’ve been bombed before.

The German Blitz during World War II lasted eight months, damaged a million houses, and killed 43,000 people. It was intended to knock Britain out of the war. It didn’t. I don’t think it will this time either.

We have repeatedly warned the British Government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahideen exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid.

We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. He who warns is excused.

“He who warns is excused”? This is just a version of what every two-bit creep says to the cops as they put the cuffs on. “I told him I’d stick him if he didn’t shut up!”

If issuing a warning made it okay, then the Islamists ought to excuse the United States for the invasion of Iraq, right? That came after years of warnings, some of them even from the U.N.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Fear In London?

Why any such terrorists should be captured alive in the first place is a real question.

Because we’re the good guys. That’s what good guys do.

Later, Sowell writes:

The Times of London refers to a Marine “killing an unarmed man in cold blood.” If that was his purpose he could have opened fire when he entered the room[.]

That’s what I mean. Look, if we’re not going to be the good guys, if we’re not going to try to preserve some sense of justice or mercy, then the Marine should’ve done exactly that. Even better, why don’t we avoid the dangerous infantry actions and just burn the whole city of Fallujah from the air?

But he didn’t, and we don’t. Because we’re the good guys.

If you want a more practical reason, letting the enemy surrender discourages them from fighting to the death and, inevitably, taking a few of our guys with them. We want each enemy fighter to know that he can simply drop his weapons, raise the white flag, and the war will be over for him.

There will be plenty of time for killing people later. The idea of civilized behavior in wartime always erodes as the war drags on. By the end of World War II we were killing enemy civilians by the tens of thousands with napalm and nuclear fire.

For whatever it’s worth, the incident sounds like a routine combat misunderstanding. The Marine must have noticed that these men didn’t have weapons, but believing them to have been shooting at Marines only minutes before, he probably concluded they were hiding their weapons. No one at the time seemed to know this was a different group of enemy who had been disarmed much earlier by someone else. I’m just guessing, but once you think the enemy are hiding weapons, and you see one of the ones you thought was dead start to move, shooting probably seems like the smart move.

At worst, this was bad decision making under stress and uncertainty. That’s almost a definition of war.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Be the Good Guy

Point 1: Before the last Gulf war went hot, President Bush and his advisors were concerned that Saddam would back down. This would have been a huge problem because one of the reasons for going to war was to permanently reduce Saddam’s war-making capabilities. Just before the war started, Saddam gave in and started withdrawing troops. President Bush responded by moving the line in the sand and saying that removing the troops wasn’t good enough after all, they also had to leave all their equipment behind in Kuwait.

Point 2: I’ve heard, although I can’t find a reference, that when the allies called a cease-fire in the last Gulf War, Saddam Hussein’s reaction was one of jubilation:  "We’ve won!" It didn’t matter how many Iraqi soldiers had died, or how many of their tanks had been destroyed. From Saddam’s point of view, as long as he was alive, he was winning. I believe that as in the last war, the coming battle is not about Iraqi sovereignty, it’s about Saddam’s survival.

Point 3: We’ve been fighting Saddam for years. Our air force has been blowing stuff up for so long that Saddam doesn’t even bother to complain about it anymore.  Again, I believe he doesn’t care because the destruction of a radar installation in southern Iraq doesn’t affect him personally.

Put all this together, and it looks like it’s Saddam Hussein who’s following a policy of appeasement.  We’ve been flying over Iraq and bombing stuff for the last twelve years, and we’ve probably had special forces in Iraq for weeks now.  Heck, the Strategy Page reports that there’s an obvious U.S. airbase already built inside Iraqi borders. Part of the reason all this is possible is that the bulk of the Iraqi ground forces have been withdrawn to the capital and are arrayed in two rings around Baghdad. Saddam has essentially already conceded all the rest of Iraq to U.S. forces.

My proposal is that we follow a strategy of encroachment. We just slowly keep creeping into Iraq, building air bases and fuel dumps, military hospitals, roads, bridges, rail links, civilian aid stations, and whatever else we can think of until we control 90% of Iraq without firing a shot.

What about Baghdad? Saddam is trying to force our armies to fight a gritty urban street battle against prepared positions if we want to defeat his forces in the capitol. How do we overcome that? Simple: we don’t. We take the whole rest of the country, isolate his troops in Baghdad, and then wait for them to either attack us on our terms or run out of fuel. We can play that game a lot longer than they can.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at How to Win the War in Iraq.