One of the great things about being a blogger is that I can write whenever I want, and whatever I want. I have no bosses. I have no advertiser that I need to placate. Best of all, I have no deadlines! Once upon a time, I had a deadline every half hour. Not fun.
I haven't written for a while because... I had nothing new I wanted to say and my old posts still held up.
But time marches and the interminable political season meander on, and we find the candidates playing their version of "Gotcha", a game more appropriate to a junior high school class election. On the other hand, who is really listening to what they have to say? The election really is a case of impressions.
So let's go to the polls!
Hillary is in the process of manufacturing square bricks. The impression she wanted the primary electorate to have, that her campaign is a fore-ordained reality, an unstoppable juggernaut, "La Machine", has dissolved as Obama and Edwards are all in a statistical tie in Iowa. In light of the polls results, Hillary has "elevated them guns a little lower" and declared that she doesn't expect a blow out in order to make the best of the fact that she is not going to blast the opposition. It's called making lemonade from lemons. But no politician wants to be in a real race and you had better believe that her campaign cultivated the juggernaut image in order to drive out opposition and thereby preserve resources for a general election. However, reality has caught up with her carefully crafted image and people realize that she is as real as a three dollar bill.
My friend, the Votemaster lines up almost all the latest polls and together with this site we can see the trends. Whether you look at the last three polls, or whether you follow one pollster over time, Hillary is in a statistical dead heat, with roughly 25% of those polled in her corner. Obama and Edwards are drawing the same approximate level of support. On the other hand, I propose that you look at the poll results this way: Only 25% of those polled like Hillary, and 75% of those surveyed prefer someone else!
Next up in the primary schedule is New Hampshire, where some polls are showing Obama with as much as 31% of the primary vote. On the other hand, some polls show Hillary with the same level of support. Regardless, what once was a solid base for Hillary in New Hampshire has now turned very soft indeed. Edwards trails badly there.
In South Carolina, Hillary and Obama are neck-and-neck at around 40% according to one poll. Then again, another recent poll by CNN has Hillary ahead 42% to 34% over Obama.
It is clear that Hillary is vulnerable in Iowa, and the winner there will have tremendous momentum, especially in the form of media coverage, going into the New Hampshire primary. After all, everyone wants to back a winner and jump onto a bandwagon.
The big question is John Edwards. Edwards has spent years in Iowa building up an organization and making local contacts. If he fails to win there his candidacy is dead. If he manages a win, can he he seen as he person who can unite that 75% of the party who do not want Hillary? Well, the Obama candidacy is so unusual,and, yes, race matters, that the Illinois senator's supporters may very well be locked in. But there may be around 15%-20% of primary voters who will give up their backing of second tier candidates such as Richardson, Biden and Dodd (Kucinich voters are so left wing that they wont budge), and find in Edwards the person to eventually defeat both Hillary and Obama, and then go on to win a general election. I'm guessing that that is the hope of the Edwards campaign.
The Republicans pose an entirely different set of problems and more about them later. But before everyone gets too excited about Huckabee, let me leave you with this theological question: Are we about to see the Resurrection of John McCain?
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Horserace Update
Here is the latest and greatest from the CBS News/NYTIMES POLL. seems things might not be so smooth in Iowa for Hillary. Check the link from this site.which lead you here.
Bottom line: This poll indicates that Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are in a statistical dead heat in Iowa.
Remember , national polls mean nothing at this point.
Bottom line: This poll indicates that Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are in a statistical dead heat in Iowa.
Remember , national polls mean nothing at this point.
Monday, November 12, 2007
FEARLESS PREDICTION
The next President of the United States will be...........a man.
I'm not saying who it will be, and I'm not even saying whether it will be a Democrat or a Republican. What I am saying is that there is still a chance that Hillary will NOT be the Democratic Party nominee. Her howling about "the boys piling on" during the last debate shows that she is not capable of dealing with situations where she is not totally in control and in favorable conditions. I'd love to hear her complain about the Russians or Chinese "piling on" if she were President. Maybe she would get all weepy over Osama bin Ladin "piling on". Add her current performance, her lack of vision and ideas, and her projection of total phoniness to the strong negative reactions that she has always engendered across this country and you get the basis for my prediction. If she is the Democratic nominee, the Republican candidate will win.
Hillary is a loser.
I'm not saying who it will be, and I'm not even saying whether it will be a Democrat or a Republican. What I am saying is that there is still a chance that Hillary will NOT be the Democratic Party nominee. Her howling about "the boys piling on" during the last debate shows that she is not capable of dealing with situations where she is not totally in control and in favorable conditions. I'd love to hear her complain about the Russians or Chinese "piling on" if she were President. Maybe she would get all weepy over Osama bin Ladin "piling on". Add her current performance, her lack of vision and ideas, and her projection of total phoniness to the strong negative reactions that she has always engendered across this country and you get the basis for my prediction. If she is the Democratic nominee, the Republican candidate will win.
Hillary is a loser.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Gore.. What is it Good For?
Well, Al Gore is waiting to a. get his Nobel Peace Prize and then, b. become the anointed saviour of the Democratic Party. If you saw the NYTIMES today you read about the growing movement to draft Gore to be the Dems' candidate. People really fear a Hillary candidacy. Her polling negatives are so high and people just don't like her. They prefer not to hold their noses when they vote in the primaries.
Hey, let's play a game... can you define your favorite candidates positions on three key issues? Try education, free trade, and health care. Bet you can't. While you scramble to their web sites to find out, chew on these recent poll numbers from Iowa:
Democratic Polls
Des Moines Register Iowa Poll conducted by Selzer & Company
10/2/2007
N=399
Hillary Clinton 29%
John Edwards 23%
Barack Obama 22%
Bill Richardson 8%
Joe Biden 5%
Chris Dodd 1%
Dennis Kucinich 1%
Unsure 11%
Hillary has a 6 point lead over Obama. With a sample size of 399, the margin of error is about 5%.. see
Basically , there is a statistical dead heat between Hillary , Edwards and Obama in this poll of October 2, which was conducted by the Des Moines Register. This is not something Hillary's people want you to know. They prefer you to think her candidacy is an unstoppable juggernaut. It isn't. At this point a "surprise" is possible, but it won't be a surprise to the readers of this space.
VEEP?
I was discussing possible vice presidential candidates with a colleague. He thought Ricahrdson would be a good vie presidential candidate. Great balance for Hillary- male, Hispanic, Southwestern, governor,experienced. I said that Richardson will not take the number 2 position on a Hillary-headed ticket. I further predicted that neither Obama nor Edwards would accept the number 2 slot under Hillary. He thought I was nuts. We shall see, but you read it here first.
Hey, let's play a game... can you define your favorite candidates positions on three key issues? Try education, free trade, and health care. Bet you can't. While you scramble to their web sites to find out, chew on these recent poll numbers from Iowa:
Democratic Polls
Des Moines Register Iowa Poll conducted by Selzer & Company
10/2/2007
N=399
Hillary Clinton 29%
John Edwards 23%
Barack Obama 22%
Bill Richardson 8%
Joe Biden 5%
Chris Dodd 1%
Dennis Kucinich 1%
Unsure 11%
Hillary has a 6 point lead over Obama. With a sample size of 399, the margin of error is about 5%.. see
Survey
Sample Margin
Size of Error
2,000 2
1,500 3
1,000 3
900 3
800 3
700 4
600 4
500 4
400 5
300 6
200 7
100 10
50 14
*Assumes
a 95% level
of confidence
Basically , there is a statistical dead heat between Hillary , Edwards and Obama in this poll of October 2, which was conducted by the Des Moines Register. This is not something Hillary's people want you to know. They prefer you to think her candidacy is an unstoppable juggernaut. It isn't. At this point a "surprise" is possible, but it won't be a surprise to the readers of this space.
VEEP?
I was discussing possible vice presidential candidates with a colleague. He thought Ricahrdson would be a good vie presidential candidate. Great balance for Hillary- male, Hispanic, Southwestern, governor,experienced. I said that Richardson will not take the number 2 position on a Hillary-headed ticket. I further predicted that neither Obama nor Edwards would accept the number 2 slot under Hillary. He thought I was nuts. We shall see, but you read it here first.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
And now, a brief message from our sponsors.
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
I haven't posted to this blog for a while. Why? because nothing interesting has been happening, but let's take a brief overview of the cabbages among us and see if pigs fly.
In government, the Bush administration continues its Bataan Death March towards its ultimate end. So sad to see the village idiot vetoing the S-CHIP legislation by saying it will give this country socialized medicine, while just a few years ago idiot crowed about his prescription drug plan. No action by the Democrats about Dweeb of the week Alberto Gonzales. No action about the war. No action on anything. All they do is try to score political points off each other like candidates for a junior high school class presidency (maybe the sophomore class).
In politics, both parties exude unlimited boredom. The pundits have already anointed Queen Hillary. They may be in for a shock. The punditocracy is looking at two elements, the results of national polls and amount of money collected by the candidates. By these measures, Hillary is doing superbly as she garners impressive poll numbers and an even more impressive amount of benjamins. However, the nominating process is not a one-day national event. Instead, it consists of a series of hurdles that the candidates must conquer, with the Iowa caucuses being the first, followed by the New Hampshire primary.
As for Iowa, it looks as though the pundits may be calling the race a bit too early as David Yepsen of the DesMoines Register reports that Barack Obama still has a lot of pull as he plays his "Kennedy Kard".
:: Tue 10.2.2007 6:11 PM
Barack Obama cloaked himself in John Kennedy’s legacy Tuesday as he sought to retake the initiative in the Democratic presidential campaign.
Invoking Kennedy imagery is a delicate thing for any politician to do but Obama succeeded in pulling it off.
The Illinois senator used the fifth anniversary of an anti-war speech he gave in Chicago to draw contrasts with his chief rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton. He brought former Kennedy speech writer and aide Ted Sorensen to Iowa to introduce him for the speech in Des Moines and again in Coralville.
Sorensen invoked parallels with the Cuban missile crisis decisions made by the young President Kennedy.
Obama is playing the Kennedy card because national polls show him trailing Clinton in the national contest. National observers are saying Obama’s not gaining traction and that Clinton is starting to lock up the nomination.
That’s not the shape of the race in Iowa, where polls show Clinton, Obama and John Edwards locked in a statistical tie for first place among likely Democratic caucus-goers. Obama’s spent more time than Clinton in the lead-off state, has plenty of money to deploy here and has built a formidable organization to go up against his two rivals.
Two hurdles confront Obama in Iowa. The first is the criticism he isn’t strong enough in his opposition to the war. The second is that he’s inexperienced. He used Tuesday’s speech to counter both and tweak Clinton and Edwards.
“The war in Iraq should never have been fought,” he said adding the American people were failed by a Congress “that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day. Let’s be clear: Without that vote, there would be no war.”
Edwards and Clinton voted for the war. Obama said “and now we need to ask those who voted for the war: how can you give the President a blank check and not expect him to cash it?”
In other digs at the two, Obama said:
*Americans “should ask themselves: Who got the single most important foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War right, and who got it wrong?”
*Also, “the American people get to decide: are we going to turn back the clock, or turn the page.”
*And “the first thing we have to do is end this war. And the right person to end it is someone who had the judgment to oppose it from the beginning.”
*Also, “we’ll reject torture, without exception or equivocation.”
*And “I wouldn’t be here, if time and again, the torch had not been passed to a new generation.”
That “torch” phrase was made famous by Kennedy. Sorensen, who wrote many of the late president’s speeches, told the Des Moines audience Kennedy was also criticized for lacking experience when he ran in 1960.
“What the country wants in a president is judgment,” Sorensen said.
He called Obama “the only serious candidate for the Democratic nomination” who opposed the war from the start. Like Kennedy, Obama has spent years of his life living abroad and so understands the importance of world opinion to U.S. policy objectives.
But not all of Obama’s speech was aimed at Clinton and Edwards. Bill Richardson is crowding him by appealing to anti-war activists with a promise to get all the troops out of Iraq.
Obama said clearly Tuesday he would “get all our combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months” of taking office. The only ones left will be those guarding diplomats or “carrying out targeted strikes on Al Qaeda.”
That may not appease the most rabid anti-war activists who like Richardson for his get-everybody-out stance, but at least it clears up an questions the left may have about what Obama intends to do with the combat forces.
For those who might have missed something very important, let me put it into large type for you:
Iowa, where polls show Clinton, Obama and John Edwards locked in a statistical tie for first place among likely Democratic caucus-goers.
here are some recent poll results:
American Research Group
9/28/2007
Iowa
w/o Al Gore
Hillary Clinton 30%
Barack Obama 24%
John Edwards 19%
Bill Richardson 10%
Joe Biden 3%
Chris Dodd 1%
Dennis Kucinich 1%
Unsure 13%
Source
Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International
9/27/2007
Iowa
w/o Al Gore
Barack Obama 28%
Hillary Clinton 24%
John Edwards 22%
Bill Richardson 10%
Joe Biden 5%
Chris Dodd 1%
Dennis Kucinich 1%
Unsure 9%
Source
Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International
9/27/2007
Iowa
w/o Al Gore
Hillary Clinton 31%
Barack Obama 25%
John Edwards 21%
Bill Richardson 6%
Joe Biden 3%
Chris Dodd 1%
Dennis Kucinich 1%
Unsure 12%
Source
Strategic Vision
9/22/2007
Iowa
w/o Al Gore
Hillary Clinton 24%
John Edwards 22%
Barack Obama 21%
Bill Richardson 13%
Joe Biden 4%
Chris Dodd 1%
Dennis Kucinich 1%
Unsure 14%
Source
Lets, see, Obama leads in one polls, ties in another and trails in a third. Yup, mighty conclusive evidence for a Hillary run-away.
Hillary seems to have a big lead in New Hampshire, but how firm will those numbers prove to be if Obama has a significant performance in Iowa? So many people dislike Hillary that her support will dry up like a creek in an Oklahoma summer if voters perceive another candidate can win the nomination and then the general election. Just look back a few years and study the candidacy of Howard Dean. He was going to blow everyone else away, until he himself blew up in Iowa.
Hmm, what else? Oh, yeah, there is a war going on in Iraq. Iraq, a country in name only. Nice to see that the legislature is back in session. Seems to be about as effective as that legislature in Washington. Does anyone believe ANY story that comes out of Iraq? Will American soldiers continue to die for the crime of launching an unnecessary war which was committed by the bush administration? Is that our national penance?
By the way, Move.On really screwed the pooch with their "General Betray Us" advertisement in the New York Times. They managed to deftly switch the issue from one of resolving this nasty mess, to one where they defamed General Petreaus. Nice going Eli Pariser!
Oh, yeah, one more thing: the press is in a tizzy because Barack Obama isn't wearing an American flag lapel pin. Sheesh! Maybe someone should point out that the lapel flag thing was started by none other than Richard Nixon, in his not-too-subtle appeal to law 'n' order.
Ennui marches on!
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Larry Craig.. Your Stall is Ready
"Bad" behavior has never been a stranger to either side of the political aisle, but nothing compares to the sheer deliciousness of right wingers caught, literally, with their pants down.
Whether it's a right wing politician or preacher, the delight of the exposure of their personal peccadilloes truly is beyond compare.
Never trust these guys (or girls). The reasons they are against so many things (usually involving sex) is because they either fear "it", want "it", or already engage in "it"!
My sympathies, though, to the Senator's family if they were caught unaware.
Whether it's a right wing politician or preacher, the delight of the exposure of their personal peccadilloes truly is beyond compare.
Never trust these guys (or girls). The reasons they are against so many things (usually involving sex) is because they either fear "it", want "it", or already engage in "it"!
My sympathies, though, to the Senator's family if they were caught unaware.
Monday, August 27, 2007
DWEEB of The Week
Alberto, we hardly knew ye! But what we did know made us wretch! Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out! Please take GWB with you.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Heck of a Job Brownie!
On Tuesday the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, called al-Maliki's government's progress "extremely disappointing." But the following day Bush said: "Prime Minister Maliki is a good guy, a good man, with a difficult job and I support him."
The Five-Sided Bone Yard
Today's (8/26) NY TIMES Magazine publishes Challenging the Generals. This is the important story about which I gave you that "heads-up" a couple of days ago. It makes a couple of interesting and important points: our younger officers are not extending beyond their initial required terms of service; many of our generals earn their rank by not rocking the boat and by not being creative or outstanding. Some of the younger officers are challenging the perceptions of the older officers. In other words, the Army is just another ossified bureaucracy that seeks to maintain its own cultures and traditions, and heaven help anyone who tries to change things or present a different perspective.
It has always been the field grade officers, the 0-4s and 0-5s, the majors and LTCs who were the biggest proponents of change. In other words, they were in that delicate in-between age, not so young as to be stupid and reckless and not so old as to protect possible stars from gracing their shoulders.They were in the system long enough to know what needed to be done and not in it so long that they had sold their souls.
It's a good thing that the younger guys are speaking up, but will they be heard? Many months ago I referenced LTC Paul Yingling's "A Failure of Generalship" and I suggest that you read his indictment of the senior military in conjunction with the TIMES article.
In our system of government, which places control of the military under civilian authority, one must seriously consider consider how and to what extent a military officer should go when he or she disagrees with civilian orders. One must also consider how far a military officer must go when he or she disagrees with military orders, because the military does not, and perhaps can not, tolerate the degree of debate and discussion that occurs in the civilian world. What is flexible are those times when debate must be encouraged.
Read the articles for yourself.
It has always been the field grade officers, the 0-4s and 0-5s, the majors and LTCs who were the biggest proponents of change. In other words, they were in that delicate in-between age, not so young as to be stupid and reckless and not so old as to protect possible stars from gracing their shoulders.They were in the system long enough to know what needed to be done and not in it so long that they had sold their souls.
It's a good thing that the younger guys are speaking up, but will they be heard? Many months ago I referenced LTC Paul Yingling's "A Failure of Generalship" and I suggest that you read his indictment of the senior military in conjunction with the TIMES article.
In our system of government, which places control of the military under civilian authority, one must seriously consider consider how and to what extent a military officer should go when he or she disagrees with civilian orders. One must also consider how far a military officer must go when he or she disagrees with military orders, because the military does not, and perhaps can not, tolerate the degree of debate and discussion that occurs in the civilian world. What is flexible are those times when debate must be encouraged.
Read the articles for yourself.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
DANGER, Will Robinson! DANGER!
If you say, "hey, only bad guys are getting caught up by the administration's unconstitutional jailing of so-called enemy combatants.", here is a story to turn your stomach. American whistle blowers were jailed and interrogation methods were used against them.
Here is a taste of that story:
It's what the lawyers call "the slippery slope". Yes, we have a war on terrorism, which is being fought incompetently on so many fronts, but the real danger to "The United States of America" occurs when we curtail what makes us so special, our constitutionally guaranteed rights. At that point we no longer exist as the country we think we are, but we become another corrupt dictatorship.
Benjamin Franklin said,"those people willing to give up a little freedom for a little security, wind up with neither freedom nor security."
Here is a taste of that story:
One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.
Or worse.
For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.
There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.
He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers — all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.
The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.
“It was a Wal-Mart for guns,” he says. “It was all illegal and everyone knew it.”
So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn’t know whom to trust in Iraq.
For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.(TRM emphasis)
It's what the lawyers call "the slippery slope". Yes, we have a war on terrorism, which is being fought incompetently on so many fronts, but the real danger to "The United States of America" occurs when we curtail what makes us so special, our constitutionally guaranteed rights. At that point we no longer exist as the country we think we are, but we become another corrupt dictatorship.
Benjamin Franklin said,"those people willing to give up a little freedom for a little security, wind up with neither freedom nor security."
Friday, August 24, 2007
Like Fourteen Monkeys..
OK, here's the deal. Sen. John Warner, ancient Republican from Virginia, now calls for US troops-- some but not all-- to be withdrawn from Iraq.
The NY TIMES runs an editorial that says, in essence, "Well let's get the troops home even if there will be a genocide in Iraq". Oh, they don't quite say "genocide", they use the term "brutal".
How delicate, how precious, of the TIMES.
In the meantime, an Army general says if we pull troops out, we are ceding hard won gains.
Last week, the TIMES ran an op-ed piece from several NCOs which stated that Iraq was a mess. This coming Sunday, the TIMES Magazine will run a story which states that junior officers have lost faith in their senior officers. I have it from a source I trust that this assessment is spot on.
Senators just returned from Iraq says the government isn't governing. A recent National Intelligence Estimate says pretty much the same thing and that the situation there won't get better soon.
Our president first says the Iraqi PM better get his act together. Then, after the PM goes into a snit and says we can get other friends (let him!), Bush backtracks and says "Maliki, you're doing a hell of a job!"
Then Bush has what can only be a drug induced flashback and says this is 1969 and we had better stay in Vietnam or the Commies will take over (and excuse him while he blows off his Texas Air National Guard duty. Oh, and VP Dick Cheney had "better things to do with his time then to serve in Vietnam", so he got FIVE deferments!)
Soooo. let's put it all together, shall we? We have a president who is out of touch with reality. A vice president in the same condition. Republican Senators who say let's get out. A General who says stay. An officer corp that has lost confidence in its senior leaders. And enlisted ranks that publicly disagree with policy.
Want more? Look at thisTIMES story regarding a photographic exhibit of wounded American soldiers.
As a bosun's mate I knew used to say, "You look like fourteen monkeys fucking a football!"
Best damned description of this administration.
What hath Bush wrought?
The NY TIMES runs an editorial that says, in essence, "Well let's get the troops home even if there will be a genocide in Iraq". Oh, they don't quite say "genocide", they use the term "brutal".
The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be.
How delicate, how precious, of the TIMES.
In the meantime, an Army general says if we pull troops out, we are ceding hard won gains.
Last week, the TIMES ran an op-ed piece from several NCOs which stated that Iraq was a mess. This coming Sunday, the TIMES Magazine will run a story which states that junior officers have lost faith in their senior officers. I have it from a source I trust that this assessment is spot on.
Senators just returned from Iraq says the government isn't governing. A recent National Intelligence Estimate says pretty much the same thing and that the situation there won't get better soon.
Our president first says the Iraqi PM better get his act together. Then, after the PM goes into a snit and says we can get other friends (let him!), Bush backtracks and says "Maliki, you're doing a hell of a job!"
Then Bush has what can only be a drug induced flashback and says this is 1969 and we had better stay in Vietnam or the Commies will take over (and excuse him while he blows off his Texas Air National Guard duty. Oh, and VP Dick Cheney had "better things to do with his time then to serve in Vietnam", so he got FIVE deferments!)
Soooo. let's put it all together, shall we? We have a president who is out of touch with reality. A vice president in the same condition. Republican Senators who say let's get out. A General who says stay. An officer corp that has lost confidence in its senior leaders. And enlisted ranks that publicly disagree with policy.
Want more? Look at thisTIMES story regarding a photographic exhibit of wounded American soldiers.
As a bosun's mate I knew used to say, "You look like fourteen monkeys fucking a football!"
Best damned description of this administration.
What hath Bush wrought?
Sunday, August 19, 2007
To Ensure Domestic Tranquility...
Now they want the law enforcementlaw enforcement to have access to spy satellite information? Why, oh, why do I not trust Little Alberto and his minions?
ON Iraq- First Hand Account
The Sunday NYTIMES (subscribe, please, before they shrink the paper to the size of a microdot!) has this account of the war by the grunts who fight it. You can decide whether they are in the best or worst position to opine on the war in general, but they know what they saw and heard so you must read their account, which strikes me as one of the most truthful pieces of reporting on this tragic war.
Here are some highlights:
Well done, soldiers! If General Petreaus issues a report as truthful as yours, we will find out we out of this morass.
Here are some highlights:
Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.
At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.
In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”
In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.
Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.
Well done, soldiers! If General Petreaus issues a report as truthful as yours, we will find out we out of this morass.
Dweeb of the Week
AG Alberto Gonzales has been Dweeb of the Week longer than the Boston Red Sox have been in first place int eh American League-East. "Have you no shame, sir?"
The FBI says Little Alberto kinda, sorta got his story all bollixed up about getting the OK for domestic spying operations from former AG John Ashcroft.
Not only does Little Alberto not know the Constitution, he doesn't even know reality.
The FBI says Little Alberto kinda, sorta got his story all bollixed up about getting the OK for domestic spying operations from former AG John Ashcroft.
Not only does Little Alberto not know the Constitution, he doesn't even know reality.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Fraud In The NYTIMES
Well, I came across this blog that really clobbered that O'Hanlon and Pollack op-ed piece that ran in the NYTIMES a couple of days ago. It seems that Pollack and O'Hanlon did go to Iraq-- on a trip that was put together by the Pentagon. Everything that they saw, and everything that they did was put together by the military. Everyone that they spoke with was selected by the military.
I admit that I was greatly disappointed to learn that the Pollack and O'Hanlon piece was a fraud. I so hoped that the sacrifices of our soldiers would ultimately achieve a noble end, despite the lies, incompetence of this administration. Our troops are far better representatives of the best of this country than the current inhabitants of the White House.
So where do we go in Iraq? I think both Republicans and Democrats admit that we will be there for several years to come. Both republicans and Democrats have no desire to be caught in the middle of a Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish civil war. And yet, a hasty departure on our part surely will lead to a genocide, an ethnic cleansing, that we will not be able to ignore and which will stain our national soul for years to come. As Colin Powell stated, "We broke it, we own it."
And the Iraqi parliament is still on vacation.
I admit that I was greatly disappointed to learn that the Pollack and O'Hanlon piece was a fraud. I so hoped that the sacrifices of our soldiers would ultimately achieve a noble end, despite the lies, incompetence of this administration. Our troops are far better representatives of the best of this country than the current inhabitants of the White House.
So where do we go in Iraq? I think both Republicans and Democrats admit that we will be there for several years to come. Both republicans and Democrats have no desire to be caught in the middle of a Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish civil war. And yet, a hasty departure on our part surely will lead to a genocide, an ethnic cleansing, that we will not be able to ignore and which will stain our national soul for years to come. As Colin Powell stated, "We broke it, we own it."
And the Iraqi parliament is still on vacation.
I Love This Guy's Work
LTC Bob Bateman had a super solid guest blog on Eric Alterman's "Altercation" today(8/16). What he says about the military, I feel you can take to the bank-and get a mortgage! Here it is:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hello, Altercators, Lt. Col. Bob Bateman here again today.
Schofield Barracks, June, 1991: The main buildings on this infantry-dominated post are called "Quads." Massive, squat structures, built by the Work Projects Administration during the Depression, each is large enough to house an entire brigade of men, three full battalions. Beyond that, they also have enough room left over to fit the offices for the company and battalion headquarters of each unit.
That summer I was a newly minted First Lieutenant, promoted up and away from my beloved rifle platoon and onto the battalion staff. My battalion of "Light" (meaning we carried all that we would take to war, on our backs, but required fewer airplanes and ships to get us there) Infantry was about to deploy to the Egyptian-Israeli border as part of the peacekeeping force that had been on site since the Camp David accords. It was a static mission, but tensions remained high in the region in the wake of Desert Storm.
Our role was to "Observe, Report, and Verify" any violations of the accords. The system worked because peace was already in place. Still, the mission required significant retraining from our normal role as assault troops. That training occupied much of the preceding six months, though as is always the case, as the deadline of our deployment approached, there always seemed to be more and more that had to be done. On this afternoon the assembled company commanders (captains), the battalion commander (a lieutenant colonel), and the battalion staff (captains and majors, mostly) were meeting for the weekly "Battalion Training Meeting." These meetings are recurrent rituals played out at every Army post around the world. Here, every week, we laid out the plan for the next week, month, and quarter, so that the actions of 750 men might be coordinated. There is no time to be wasted in these meetings.
Captain Dave T, known among his peers by his nickname "Trash," commanded one of our companies. He was one of the best leaders I have ever known. Direct, intelligent, approachable for even the most junior private, and honest -- Trash did not suffer fools gladly, and we junior officers and men who followed him loved him for it. On this afternoon he sat midway down the length of the conference table. Slouching almost to the point where his eyes were level with the table, as was his norm, Trash soaked it all in. Boredom visibly poured from his soul. The meeting, normally planned for an hour, was approaching its third. Yet still the battalion commander continued.
"Finally, we need to address the critical issue of safety. As you all know, 'Herb's Beach' is right outside the wire of South Camp," Lieutenant Colonel H____ said, "and it represents our primary threat."
Lieutenant Colonel H___ had recently returned from a reconnaissance to the Sinai Desert and his mind was, literally, overflowing. Given that there was nothing actually in that desert at the time but sand, rock, some Bedouin, and some camels, this does not speak well of LTC H___. "South Camp" was, and is, the base for the American battalion on rotation. The beach to which he referred was 40 yards of sand at the edge of the Red Sea, where a dry wadi ran to the water's edge. A decade earlier, another unit cut a notch through the coral, thereby making it possible to swim. (The coral shelf that lines the coast of the Gulf of Aquba has only a few feet of water over the top otherwise.) It was, in the South Sinai, a very small refuge of relaxation for our men. LTC H___, however, saw it through another lens.
"The 82nd lost a lieutenant on that beach last year. It's a threat," LTC H___ said, referring to a unit from the 82nd Airborne Division, which had done a rotation the previous year, yet ignoring the fact that the lieutenant in question had been scuba diving, not snorkeling or swimming on the surface, as our men would be doing, since scuba had now been banned. "We need to have every man in the battalion swim tested at the division pool, and those who do not pass must take remedial lessons until they can."
What he was ordering was, literally, thousands of man-hours of training, let alone the time needed to coordinate it all. It was not possible. We were to start leaving in six weeks. You could take a crowbar, a 10-pound sledge, and a bucketful of grease and you still could not jam that much into the little time we had remaining. But the company commanders were silent. They just took it in. It is a long way from captain to lieutenant colonel. They were quiet, I should say, but for one.
From his nearly subterranean seat, Captain Trash raised two fingers. This, for Trash, was significant motion. The Battalion Commander nodded.
"Sir, you're kidding, right?" Trash began, sitting up and giving LTC H___ at least the nominal benefit of the doubt. Every officer in that room knew we did not have the time remaining to do as the LTC demanded. Every officer also knew, from experience, that it was useless presenting this boss with inconvenient facts. Trash was about to become my hero and my role model. LTC H___ insisted that he was not, in fact, joking, and that this was a critical issue of safety, and that we would just have to make it work for the sake of our men.
That last is a telling call-out. "The safety of the men" really is something we take seriously. Sometimes, however, common sense gets overruled. Trash had common sense, and he knew that he would not convince our numerically challenged leader with an analysis of the time remaining versus the potential threat. He cut to the point.
"Sir, I don't know if you've noticed this," Trash began, sarcasm whispering from his posture, "but right now, I mean today, and pretty much every day for the past two years since I've been here ... we've been surrounded by 2,500 miles of open ocean, thousands of feet deep, with beaches 360 degrees around us that our men visit every weekend, and not a man has drowned from this unit at all, probably since Vietnam."
Schofield Barracks, you see, is on the island of Oahu, in the Hawaiian Island chain, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The battalion commander wanted us to force 750 men to take swim training ... in order to go to the desert, from an island.
The room was hushed, and then we could not contain it. We erupted in laughter. It was the only "weapon" with which it was possible to win even a small victory with that particular battalion commander. He ceded Trash's point, and the idea, the very-stupid-but-very-safe-idea, was unceremoniously dropped.
One year later that LTC was selected for the War College. He went on to be promoted to full colonel. Captain Trash, who was evaluated by LTC H____ on a yearly basis, never made it past major. He was "non-selected" and inevitably forced out of the Army.
What I have just described was not an entirely uncommon situation, not in the 1990s or, indeed, ever. There have always been idiots in uniform, and some of them get commissions. This is a fact of life, in war and peace. But during the 1990s it may have reached its peak. "Safety" and risk avoidance are good things. But unlike, say, the factory floor at General Motors, my profession is about taking calculated risk with human life. Training, for combat, is itself inherently dangerous. Sometimes crazily so. But to make it possible for your men to survive when other men are really seriously trying to kill them, you have to train them under conditions as close as you can get to the insanity that is war.
We lost some of that focus in the 1990s. We lost our edge, our willingness to push to the limits, not just physically, but intellectually as well, which is understandable in that rudderless decade. The result was a generation of officers who saw the most risk-averse of those above them advance while those who took the correct risks, or spoke candidly, felt the mallet.
In any sufficiently large organization, especially one paranoid and averse to risk, one route to the top is to avoid being wrong, even if that means also avoiding being right. There are generals I know, some with four stars, who I am personally convinced made it to their great rank because they never, ever, made a decision. This works because if you make a decision, you might be wrong, but if you never make a decision, statistically, you are always going to appear as "better" than those who made 95 percent correct decisions, since the only thing that would stand out would be the wrong one.
We are, in war, now regaining that edge among our officers. Historically this is about the only thing at which the American Army actually excels when compared against all other armies. We do learn. But it is a slow war, and changing a culture is a slow thing, even for us. We are finding officers who speak clearly, who lead candidly, who take the calculated risks that their experience tells them are necessary, and who accept when they are wrong. I believe that there are at least some of my peers who speak truth, regardless, because doing the right thing is more important than looking "right" in front of the boss.
I have no clue what General David Petraeus will say next month when he gives his assessment. I do know that no matter what he says, some significant percentage of the American people will write him off as a stooge, or a fool, while others will hail him a hero. Both groups will cite the same words Petraeus speaks as their "evidence" for their opinion. I suspect General P knows this as well. What I would like to pass to you, today, is my assessment. Take it for what it is worth. General P is smart, and he is savvy, both of which make him come off to some people as "political." He is not. But he is more like Trash than he is like LTC H, and that, Altercators, reassures me.
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Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific.
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Sadly, this is not surprising. Even accounting for the society-wide difference between males and females (and their "success" rates), and the fact that the Army is about 77 percent male, the numbers are sad.
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There is something wrong here. This is my media criticism point for the day. Even if you say, "Well, there are language problems between the photographer and the caption writer," that doesn't account for this. Somebody needs remedial training, at a minimum, which is annoying after the essay I wrote in defense of journalism yesterday.
WARNING: When I originally linked to this photo this morning, it was on the Yahoo news site containing image feeds from Agence France-Presse. The image was shot by an AFP stringer. I should note that I generally like AFP -- hell, they took me to the White House Correspondents Dinner last year just after I came back from Iraq, so I got to see Colbert. But they have yanked and apparently changed the label on the image, so now the only place the original can be found is on conservative blogs. This one gets to the point that I was trying to make. So, fair warning: Ignore the rhetoric and focus on the content.
permalink
One should understand that in India, being on the political left means demanding the unilateral right to explode nuclear weapons in military tests.
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I lived in Ohio when Dennis Kucinich was the "Boy Mayor" of nearby Cleveland. There is a reason he is now in Congress.
permalink
Last week, Lt. Gen. Doug Lute said, in an interview with NPR, that a draft is something that "makes sense to certainly consider." First, take the advice of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe: don't panic. That is a political decision, and none of the politicians on either side would seriously touch the idea with a 10-foot pole. But the encouraging point is that LTG Lute, a man at the top of the profession, did not offer a wiggly-wormy non-answer political answer to a direct question. He gave his honest and direct assessment, "it should be considered." He really meant "considered." Not "implemented," not "placed in execution," but "considered." Which, folks, is what Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has been saying all along.
permalink
Heinz Barth, grocer and Untersturmführer, dead at 86. May you rot in Hell. Seriously.
Official site (French only, sorry). An unofficial, but clear, site.
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Remember Elian Gonzalez? That case has nothing on this one.
You can write to LTC Bob at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hello, Altercators, Lt. Col. Bob Bateman here again today.
Schofield Barracks, June, 1991: The main buildings on this infantry-dominated post are called "Quads." Massive, squat structures, built by the Work Projects Administration during the Depression, each is large enough to house an entire brigade of men, three full battalions. Beyond that, they also have enough room left over to fit the offices for the company and battalion headquarters of each unit.
That summer I was a newly minted First Lieutenant, promoted up and away from my beloved rifle platoon and onto the battalion staff. My battalion of "Light" (meaning we carried all that we would take to war, on our backs, but required fewer airplanes and ships to get us there) Infantry was about to deploy to the Egyptian-Israeli border as part of the peacekeeping force that had been on site since the Camp David accords. It was a static mission, but tensions remained high in the region in the wake of Desert Storm.
Our role was to "Observe, Report, and Verify" any violations of the accords. The system worked because peace was already in place. Still, the mission required significant retraining from our normal role as assault troops. That training occupied much of the preceding six months, though as is always the case, as the deadline of our deployment approached, there always seemed to be more and more that had to be done. On this afternoon the assembled company commanders (captains), the battalion commander (a lieutenant colonel), and the battalion staff (captains and majors, mostly) were meeting for the weekly "Battalion Training Meeting." These meetings are recurrent rituals played out at every Army post around the world. Here, every week, we laid out the plan for the next week, month, and quarter, so that the actions of 750 men might be coordinated. There is no time to be wasted in these meetings.
Captain Dave T, known among his peers by his nickname "Trash," commanded one of our companies. He was one of the best leaders I have ever known. Direct, intelligent, approachable for even the most junior private, and honest -- Trash did not suffer fools gladly, and we junior officers and men who followed him loved him for it. On this afternoon he sat midway down the length of the conference table. Slouching almost to the point where his eyes were level with the table, as was his norm, Trash soaked it all in. Boredom visibly poured from his soul. The meeting, normally planned for an hour, was approaching its third. Yet still the battalion commander continued.
"Finally, we need to address the critical issue of safety. As you all know, 'Herb's Beach' is right outside the wire of South Camp," Lieutenant Colonel H____ said, "and it represents our primary threat."
Lieutenant Colonel H___ had recently returned from a reconnaissance to the Sinai Desert and his mind was, literally, overflowing. Given that there was nothing actually in that desert at the time but sand, rock, some Bedouin, and some camels, this does not speak well of LTC H___. "South Camp" was, and is, the base for the American battalion on rotation. The beach to which he referred was 40 yards of sand at the edge of the Red Sea, where a dry wadi ran to the water's edge. A decade earlier, another unit cut a notch through the coral, thereby making it possible to swim. (The coral shelf that lines the coast of the Gulf of Aquba has only a few feet of water over the top otherwise.) It was, in the South Sinai, a very small refuge of relaxation for our men. LTC H___, however, saw it through another lens.
"The 82nd lost a lieutenant on that beach last year. It's a threat," LTC H___ said, referring to a unit from the 82nd Airborne Division, which had done a rotation the previous year, yet ignoring the fact that the lieutenant in question had been scuba diving, not snorkeling or swimming on the surface, as our men would be doing, since scuba had now been banned. "We need to have every man in the battalion swim tested at the division pool, and those who do not pass must take remedial lessons until they can."
What he was ordering was, literally, thousands of man-hours of training, let alone the time needed to coordinate it all. It was not possible. We were to start leaving in six weeks. You could take a crowbar, a 10-pound sledge, and a bucketful of grease and you still could not jam that much into the little time we had remaining. But the company commanders were silent. They just took it in. It is a long way from captain to lieutenant colonel. They were quiet, I should say, but for one.
From his nearly subterranean seat, Captain Trash raised two fingers. This, for Trash, was significant motion. The Battalion Commander nodded.
"Sir, you're kidding, right?" Trash began, sitting up and giving LTC H___ at least the nominal benefit of the doubt. Every officer in that room knew we did not have the time remaining to do as the LTC demanded. Every officer also knew, from experience, that it was useless presenting this boss with inconvenient facts. Trash was about to become my hero and my role model. LTC H___ insisted that he was not, in fact, joking, and that this was a critical issue of safety, and that we would just have to make it work for the sake of our men.
That last is a telling call-out. "The safety of the men" really is something we take seriously. Sometimes, however, common sense gets overruled. Trash had common sense, and he knew that he would not convince our numerically challenged leader with an analysis of the time remaining versus the potential threat. He cut to the point.
"Sir, I don't know if you've noticed this," Trash began, sarcasm whispering from his posture, "but right now, I mean today, and pretty much every day for the past two years since I've been here ... we've been surrounded by 2,500 miles of open ocean, thousands of feet deep, with beaches 360 degrees around us that our men visit every weekend, and not a man has drowned from this unit at all, probably since Vietnam."
Schofield Barracks, you see, is on the island of Oahu, in the Hawaiian Island chain, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The battalion commander wanted us to force 750 men to take swim training ... in order to go to the desert, from an island.
The room was hushed, and then we could not contain it. We erupted in laughter. It was the only "weapon" with which it was possible to win even a small victory with that particular battalion commander. He ceded Trash's point, and the idea, the very-stupid-but-very-safe-idea, was unceremoniously dropped.
One year later that LTC was selected for the War College. He went on to be promoted to full colonel. Captain Trash, who was evaluated by LTC H____ on a yearly basis, never made it past major. He was "non-selected" and inevitably forced out of the Army.
What I have just described was not an entirely uncommon situation, not in the 1990s or, indeed, ever. There have always been idiots in uniform, and some of them get commissions. This is a fact of life, in war and peace. But during the 1990s it may have reached its peak. "Safety" and risk avoidance are good things. But unlike, say, the factory floor at General Motors, my profession is about taking calculated risk with human life. Training, for combat, is itself inherently dangerous. Sometimes crazily so. But to make it possible for your men to survive when other men are really seriously trying to kill them, you have to train them under conditions as close as you can get to the insanity that is war.
We lost some of that focus in the 1990s. We lost our edge, our willingness to push to the limits, not just physically, but intellectually as well, which is understandable in that rudderless decade. The result was a generation of officers who saw the most risk-averse of those above them advance while those who took the correct risks, or spoke candidly, felt the mallet.
In any sufficiently large organization, especially one paranoid and averse to risk, one route to the top is to avoid being wrong, even if that means also avoiding being right. There are generals I know, some with four stars, who I am personally convinced made it to their great rank because they never, ever, made a decision. This works because if you make a decision, you might be wrong, but if you never make a decision, statistically, you are always going to appear as "better" than those who made 95 percent correct decisions, since the only thing that would stand out would be the wrong one.
We are, in war, now regaining that edge among our officers. Historically this is about the only thing at which the American Army actually excels when compared against all other armies. We do learn. But it is a slow war, and changing a culture is a slow thing, even for us. We are finding officers who speak clearly, who lead candidly, who take the calculated risks that their experience tells them are necessary, and who accept when they are wrong. I believe that there are at least some of my peers who speak truth, regardless, because doing the right thing is more important than looking "right" in front of the boss.
I have no clue what General David Petraeus will say next month when he gives his assessment. I do know that no matter what he says, some significant percentage of the American people will write him off as a stooge, or a fool, while others will hail him a hero. Both groups will cite the same words Petraeus speaks as their "evidence" for their opinion. I suspect General P knows this as well. What I would like to pass to you, today, is my assessment. Take it for what it is worth. General P is smart, and he is savvy, both of which make him come off to some people as "political." He is not. But he is more like Trash than he is like LTC H, and that, Altercators, reassures me.
permalink
Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific.
permalink
Sadly, this is not surprising. Even accounting for the society-wide difference between males and females (and their "success" rates), and the fact that the Army is about 77 percent male, the numbers are sad.
permalink
There is something wrong here. This is my media criticism point for the day. Even if you say, "Well, there are language problems between the photographer and the caption writer," that doesn't account for this. Somebody needs remedial training, at a minimum, which is annoying after the essay I wrote in defense of journalism yesterday.
WARNING: When I originally linked to this photo this morning, it was on the Yahoo news site containing image feeds from Agence France-Presse. The image was shot by an AFP stringer. I should note that I generally like AFP -- hell, they took me to the White House Correspondents Dinner last year just after I came back from Iraq, so I got to see Colbert. But they have yanked and apparently changed the label on the image, so now the only place the original can be found is on conservative blogs. This one gets to the point that I was trying to make. So, fair warning: Ignore the rhetoric and focus on the content.
permalink
One should understand that in India, being on the political left means demanding the unilateral right to explode nuclear weapons in military tests.
permalink
I lived in Ohio when Dennis Kucinich was the "Boy Mayor" of nearby Cleveland. There is a reason he is now in Congress.
permalink
Last week, Lt. Gen. Doug Lute said, in an interview with NPR, that a draft is something that "makes sense to certainly consider." First, take the advice of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe: don't panic. That is a political decision, and none of the politicians on either side would seriously touch the idea with a 10-foot pole. But the encouraging point is that LTG Lute, a man at the top of the profession, did not offer a wiggly-wormy non-answer political answer to a direct question. He gave his honest and direct assessment, "it should be considered." He really meant "considered." Not "implemented," not "placed in execution," but "considered." Which, folks, is what Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has been saying all along.
permalink
Heinz Barth, grocer and Untersturmführer, dead at 86. May you rot in Hell. Seriously.
Official site (French only, sorry). An unofficial, but clear, site.
permalink
Remember Elian Gonzalez? That case has nothing on this one.
You can write to LTC Bob at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.
I Love This Guy's Work
LTC Bob BAteman had a super solid guest blog on Eric Alterman's "Altercation" today(8/16). What he says about the military, I feel you can take to the bank-and get a mortgage! Here it is:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hello, Altercators, Lt. Col. Bob Bateman here again today.
Schofield Barracks, June, 1991: The main buildings on this infantry-dominated post are called "Quads." Massive, squat structures, built by the Work Projects Administration during the Depression, each is large enough to house an entire brigade of men, three full battalions. Beyond that, they also have enough room left over to fit the offices for the company and battalion headquarters of each unit.
That summer I was a newly minted First Lieutenant, promoted up and away from my beloved rifle platoon and onto the battalion staff. My battalion of "Light" (meaning we carried all that we would take to war, on our backs, but required fewer airplanes and ships to get us there) Infantry was about to deploy to the Egyptian-Israeli border as part of the peacekeeping force that had been on site since the Camp David accords. It was a static mission, but tensions remained high in the region in the wake of Desert Storm.
Our role was to "Observe, Report, and Verify" any violations of the accords. The system worked because peace was already in place. Still, the mission required significant retraining from our normal role as assault troops. That training occupied much of the preceding six months, though as is always the case, as the deadline of our deployment approached, there always seemed to be more and more that had to be done. On this afternoon the assembled company commanders (captains), the battalion commander (a lieutenant colonel), and the battalion staff (captains and majors, mostly) were meeting for the weekly "Battalion Training Meeting." These meetings are recurrent rituals played out at every Army post around the world. Here, every week, we laid out the plan for the next week, month, and quarter, so that the actions of 750 men might be coordinated. There is no time to be wasted in these meetings.
Captain Dave T, known among his peers by his nickname "Trash," commanded one of our companies. He was one of the best leaders I have ever known. Direct, intelligent, approachable for even the most junior private, and honest -- Trash did not suffer fools gladly, and we junior officers and men who followed him loved him for it. On this afternoon he sat midway down the length of the conference table. Slouching almost to the point where his eyes were level with the table, as was his norm, Trash soaked it all in. Boredom visibly poured from his soul. The meeting, normally planned for an hour, was approaching its third. Yet still the battalion commander continued.
"Finally, we need to address the critical issue of safety. As you all know, 'Herb's Beach' is right outside the wire of South Camp," Lieutenant Colonel H____ said, "and it represents our primary threat."
Lieutenant Colonel H___ had recently returned from a reconnaissance to the Sinai Desert and his mind was, literally, overflowing. Given that there was nothing actually in that desert at the time but sand, rock, some Bedouin, and some camels, this does not speak well of LTC H___. "South Camp" was, and is, the base for the American battalion on rotation. The beach to which he referred was 40 yards of sand at the edge of the Red Sea, where a dry wadi ran to the water's edge. A decade earlier, another unit cut a notch through the coral, thereby making it possible to swim. (The coral shelf that lines the coast of the Gulf of Aquba has only a few feet of water over the top otherwise.) It was, in the South Sinai, a very small refuge of relaxation for our men. LTC H___, however, saw it through another lens.
"The 82nd lost a lieutenant on that beach last year. It's a threat," LTC H___ said, referring to a unit from the 82nd Airborne Division, which had done a rotation the previous year, yet ignoring the fact that the lieutenant in question had been scuba diving, not snorkeling or swimming on the surface, as our men would be doing, since scuba had now been banned. "We need to have every man in the battalion swim tested at the division pool, and those who do not pass must take remedial lessons until they can."
What he was ordering was, literally, thousands of man-hours of training, let alone the time needed to coordinate it all. It was not possible. We were to start leaving in six weeks. You could take a crowbar, a 10-pound sledge, and a bucketful of grease and you still could not jam that much into the little time we had remaining. But the company commanders were silent. They just took it in. It is a long way from captain to lieutenant colonel. They were quiet, I should say, but for one.
From his nearly subterranean seat, Captain Trash raised two fingers. This, for Trash, was significant motion. The Battalion Commander nodded.
"Sir, you're kidding, right?" Trash began, sitting up and giving LTC H___ at least the nominal benefit of the doubt. Every officer in that room knew we did not have the time remaining to do as the LTC demanded. Every officer also knew, from experience, that it was useless presenting this boss with inconvenient facts. Trash was about to become my hero and my role model. LTC H___ insisted that he was not, in fact, joking, and that this was a critical issue of safety, and that we would just have to make it work for the sake of our men.
That last is a telling call-out. "The safety of the men" really is something we take seriously. Sometimes, however, common sense gets overruled. Trash had common sense, and he knew that he would not convince our numerically challenged leader with an analysis of the time remaining versus the potential threat. He cut to the point.
"Sir, I don't know if you've noticed this," Trash began, sarcasm whispering from his posture, "but right now, I mean today, and pretty much every day for the past two years since I've been here ... we've been surrounded by 2,500 miles of open ocean, thousands of feet deep, with beaches 360 degrees around us that our men visit every weekend, and not a man has drowned from this unit at all, probably since Vietnam."
Schofield Barracks, you see, is on the island of Oahu, in the Hawaiian Island chain, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The battalion commander wanted us to force 750 men to take swim training ... in order to go to the desert, from an island.
The room was hushed, and then we could not contain it. We erupted in laughter. It was the only "weapon" with which it was possible to win even a small victory with that particular battalion commander. He ceded Trash's point, and the idea, the very-stupid-but-very-safe-idea, was unceremoniously dropped.
One year later that LTC was selected for the War College. He went on to be promoted to full colonel. Captain Trash, who was evaluated by LTC H____ on a yearly basis, never made it past major. He was "non-selected" and inevitably forced out of the Army.
What I have just described was not an entirely uncommon situation, not in the 1990s or, indeed, ever. There have always been idiots in uniform, and some of them get commissions. This is a fact of life, in war and peace. But during the 1990s it may have reached its peak. "Safety" and risk avoidance are good things. But unlike, say, the factory floor at General Motors, my profession is about taking calculated risk with human life. Training, for combat, is itself inherently dangerous. Sometimes crazily so. But to make it possible for your men to survive when other men are really seriously trying to kill them, you have to train them under conditions as close as you can get to the insanity that is war.
We lost some of that focus in the 1990s. We lost our edge, our willingness to push to the limits, not just physically, but intellectually as well, which is understandable in that rudderless decade. The result was a generation of officers who saw the most risk-averse of those above them advance while those who took the correct risks, or spoke candidly, felt the mallet.
In any sufficiently large organization, especially one paranoid and averse to risk, one route to the top is to avoid being wrong, even if that means also avoiding being right. There are generals I know, some with four stars, who I am personally convinced made it to their great rank because they never, ever, made a decision. This works because if you make a decision, you might be wrong, but if you never make a decision, statistically, you are always going to appear as "better" than those who made 95 percent correct decisions, since the only thing that would stand out would be the wrong one.
We are, in war, now regaining that edge among our officers. Historically this is about the only thing at which the American Army actually excels when compared against all other armies. We do learn. But it is a slow war, and changing a culture is a slow thing, even for us. We are finding officers who speak clearly, who lead candidly, who take the calculated risks that their experience tells them are necessary, and who accept when they are wrong. I believe that there are at least some of my peers who speak truth, regardless, because doing the right thing is more important than looking "right" in front of the boss.
I have no clue what General David Petraeus will say next month when he gives his assessment. I do know that no matter what he says, some significant percentage of the American people will write him off as a stooge, or a fool, while others will hail him a hero. Both groups will cite the same words Petraeus speaks as their "evidence" for their opinion. I suspect General P knows this as well. What I would like to pass to you, today, is my assessment. Take it for what it is worth. General P is smart, and he is savvy, both of which make him come off to some people as "political." He is not. But he is more like Trash than he is like LTC H, and that, Altercators, reassures me.
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Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific.
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Sadly, this is not surprising. Even accounting for the society-wide difference between males and females (and their "success" rates), and the fact that the Army is about 77 percent male, the numbers are sad.
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There is something wrong here. This is my media criticism point for the day. Even if you say, "Well, there are language problems between the photographer and the caption writer," that doesn't account for this. Somebody needs remedial training, at a minimum, which is annoying after the essay I wrote in defense of journalism yesterday.
WARNING: When I originally linked to this photo this morning, it was on the Yahoo news site containing image feeds from Agence France-Presse. The image was shot by an AFP stringer. I should note that I generally like AFP -- hell, they took me to the White House Correspondents Dinner last year just after I came back from Iraq, so I got to see Colbert. But they have yanked and apparently changed the label on the image, so now the only place the original can be found is on conservative blogs. This one gets to the point that I was trying to make. So, fair warning: Ignore the rhetoric and focus on the content.
permalink
One should understand that in India, being on the political left means demanding the unilateral right to explode nuclear weapons in military tests.
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I lived in Ohio when Dennis Kucinich was the "Boy Mayor" of nearby Cleveland. There is a reason he is now in Congress.
permalink
Last week, Lt. Gen. Doug Lute said, in an interview with NPR, that a draft is something that "makes sense to certainly consider." First, take the advice of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe: don't panic. That is a political decision, and none of the politicians on either side would seriously touch the idea with a 10-foot pole. But the encouraging point is that LTG Lute, a man at the top of the profession, did not offer a wiggly-wormy non-answer political answer to a direct question. He gave his honest and direct assessment, "it should be considered." He really meant "considered." Not "implemented," not "placed in execution," but "considered." Which, folks, is what Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has been saying all along.
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Heinz Barth, grocer and Untersturmführer, dead at 86. May you rot in Hell. Seriously.
Official site (French only, sorry). An unofficial, but clear, site.
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Remember Elian Gonzalez? That case has nothing on this one.
You can write to LTC Bob at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hello, Altercators, Lt. Col. Bob Bateman here again today.
Schofield Barracks, June, 1991: The main buildings on this infantry-dominated post are called "Quads." Massive, squat structures, built by the Work Projects Administration during the Depression, each is large enough to house an entire brigade of men, three full battalions. Beyond that, they also have enough room left over to fit the offices for the company and battalion headquarters of each unit.
That summer I was a newly minted First Lieutenant, promoted up and away from my beloved rifle platoon and onto the battalion staff. My battalion of "Light" (meaning we carried all that we would take to war, on our backs, but required fewer airplanes and ships to get us there) Infantry was about to deploy to the Egyptian-Israeli border as part of the peacekeeping force that had been on site since the Camp David accords. It was a static mission, but tensions remained high in the region in the wake of Desert Storm.
Our role was to "Observe, Report, and Verify" any violations of the accords. The system worked because peace was already in place. Still, the mission required significant retraining from our normal role as assault troops. That training occupied much of the preceding six months, though as is always the case, as the deadline of our deployment approached, there always seemed to be more and more that had to be done. On this afternoon the assembled company commanders (captains), the battalion commander (a lieutenant colonel), and the battalion staff (captains and majors, mostly) were meeting for the weekly "Battalion Training Meeting." These meetings are recurrent rituals played out at every Army post around the world. Here, every week, we laid out the plan for the next week, month, and quarter, so that the actions of 750 men might be coordinated. There is no time to be wasted in these meetings.
Captain Dave T, known among his peers by his nickname "Trash," commanded one of our companies. He was one of the best leaders I have ever known. Direct, intelligent, approachable for even the most junior private, and honest -- Trash did not suffer fools gladly, and we junior officers and men who followed him loved him for it. On this afternoon he sat midway down the length of the conference table. Slouching almost to the point where his eyes were level with the table, as was his norm, Trash soaked it all in. Boredom visibly poured from his soul. The meeting, normally planned for an hour, was approaching its third. Yet still the battalion commander continued.
"Finally, we need to address the critical issue of safety. As you all know, 'Herb's Beach' is right outside the wire of South Camp," Lieutenant Colonel H____ said, "and it represents our primary threat."
Lieutenant Colonel H___ had recently returned from a reconnaissance to the Sinai Desert and his mind was, literally, overflowing. Given that there was nothing actually in that desert at the time but sand, rock, some Bedouin, and some camels, this does not speak well of LTC H___. "South Camp" was, and is, the base for the American battalion on rotation. The beach to which he referred was 40 yards of sand at the edge of the Red Sea, where a dry wadi ran to the water's edge. A decade earlier, another unit cut a notch through the coral, thereby making it possible to swim. (The coral shelf that lines the coast of the Gulf of Aquba has only a few feet of water over the top otherwise.) It was, in the South Sinai, a very small refuge of relaxation for our men. LTC H___, however, saw it through another lens.
"The 82nd lost a lieutenant on that beach last year. It's a threat," LTC H___ said, referring to a unit from the 82nd Airborne Division, which had done a rotation the previous year, yet ignoring the fact that the lieutenant in question had been scuba diving, not snorkeling or swimming on the surface, as our men would be doing, since scuba had now been banned. "We need to have every man in the battalion swim tested at the division pool, and those who do not pass must take remedial lessons until they can."
What he was ordering was, literally, thousands of man-hours of training, let alone the time needed to coordinate it all. It was not possible. We were to start leaving in six weeks. You could take a crowbar, a 10-pound sledge, and a bucketful of grease and you still could not jam that much into the little time we had remaining. But the company commanders were silent. They just took it in. It is a long way from captain to lieutenant colonel. They were quiet, I should say, but for one.
From his nearly subterranean seat, Captain Trash raised two fingers. This, for Trash, was significant motion. The Battalion Commander nodded.
"Sir, you're kidding, right?" Trash began, sitting up and giving LTC H___ at least the nominal benefit of the doubt. Every officer in that room knew we did not have the time remaining to do as the LTC demanded. Every officer also knew, from experience, that it was useless presenting this boss with inconvenient facts. Trash was about to become my hero and my role model. LTC H___ insisted that he was not, in fact, joking, and that this was a critical issue of safety, and that we would just have to make it work for the sake of our men.
That last is a telling call-out. "The safety of the men" really is something we take seriously. Sometimes, however, common sense gets overruled. Trash had common sense, and he knew that he would not convince our numerically challenged leader with an analysis of the time remaining versus the potential threat. He cut to the point.
"Sir, I don't know if you've noticed this," Trash began, sarcasm whispering from his posture, "but right now, I mean today, and pretty much every day for the past two years since I've been here ... we've been surrounded by 2,500 miles of open ocean, thousands of feet deep, with beaches 360 degrees around us that our men visit every weekend, and not a man has drowned from this unit at all, probably since Vietnam."
Schofield Barracks, you see, is on the island of Oahu, in the Hawaiian Island chain, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The battalion commander wanted us to force 750 men to take swim training ... in order to go to the desert, from an island.
The room was hushed, and then we could not contain it. We erupted in laughter. It was the only "weapon" with which it was possible to win even a small victory with that particular battalion commander. He ceded Trash's point, and the idea, the very-stupid-but-very-safe-idea, was unceremoniously dropped.
One year later that LTC was selected for the War College. He went on to be promoted to full colonel. Captain Trash, who was evaluated by LTC H____ on a yearly basis, never made it past major. He was "non-selected" and inevitably forced out of the Army.
What I have just described was not an entirely uncommon situation, not in the 1990s or, indeed, ever. There have always been idiots in uniform, and some of them get commissions. This is a fact of life, in war and peace. But during the 1990s it may have reached its peak. "Safety" and risk avoidance are good things. But unlike, say, the factory floor at General Motors, my profession is about taking calculated risk with human life. Training, for combat, is itself inherently dangerous. Sometimes crazily so. But to make it possible for your men to survive when other men are really seriously trying to kill them, you have to train them under conditions as close as you can get to the insanity that is war.
We lost some of that focus in the 1990s. We lost our edge, our willingness to push to the limits, not just physically, but intellectually as well, which is understandable in that rudderless decade. The result was a generation of officers who saw the most risk-averse of those above them advance while those who took the correct risks, or spoke candidly, felt the mallet.
In any sufficiently large organization, especially one paranoid and averse to risk, one route to the top is to avoid being wrong, even if that means also avoiding being right. There are generals I know, some with four stars, who I am personally convinced made it to their great rank because they never, ever, made a decision. This works because if you make a decision, you might be wrong, but if you never make a decision, statistically, you are always going to appear as "better" than those who made 95 percent correct decisions, since the only thing that would stand out would be the wrong one.
We are, in war, now regaining that edge among our officers. Historically this is about the only thing at which the American Army actually excels when compared against all other armies. We do learn. But it is a slow war, and changing a culture is a slow thing, even for us. We are finding officers who speak clearly, who lead candidly, who take the calculated risks that their experience tells them are necessary, and who accept when they are wrong. I believe that there are at least some of my peers who speak truth, regardless, because doing the right thing is more important than looking "right" in front of the boss.
I have no clue what General David Petraeus will say next month when he gives his assessment. I do know that no matter what he says, some significant percentage of the American people will write him off as a stooge, or a fool, while others will hail him a hero. Both groups will cite the same words Petraeus speaks as their "evidence" for their opinion. I suspect General P knows this as well. What I would like to pass to you, today, is my assessment. Take it for what it is worth. General P is smart, and he is savvy, both of which make him come off to some people as "political." He is not. But he is more like Trash than he is like LTC H, and that, Altercators, reassures me.
permalink
Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific.
permalink
Sadly, this is not surprising. Even accounting for the society-wide difference between males and females (and their "success" rates), and the fact that the Army is about 77 percent male, the numbers are sad.
permalink
There is something wrong here. This is my media criticism point for the day. Even if you say, "Well, there are language problems between the photographer and the caption writer," that doesn't account for this. Somebody needs remedial training, at a minimum, which is annoying after the essay I wrote in defense of journalism yesterday.
WARNING: When I originally linked to this photo this morning, it was on the Yahoo news site containing image feeds from Agence France-Presse. The image was shot by an AFP stringer. I should note that I generally like AFP -- hell, they took me to the White House Correspondents Dinner last year just after I came back from Iraq, so I got to see Colbert. But they have yanked and apparently changed the label on the image, so now the only place the original can be found is on conservative blogs. This one gets to the point that I was trying to make. So, fair warning: Ignore the rhetoric and focus on the content.
permalink
One should understand that in India, being on the political left means demanding the unilateral right to explode nuclear weapons in military tests.
permalink
I lived in Ohio when Dennis Kucinich was the "Boy Mayor" of nearby Cleveland. There is a reason he is now in Congress.
permalink
Last week, Lt. Gen. Doug Lute said, in an interview with NPR, that a draft is something that "makes sense to certainly consider." First, take the advice of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe: don't panic. That is a political decision, and none of the politicians on either side would seriously touch the idea with a 10-foot pole. But the encouraging point is that LTG Lute, a man at the top of the profession, did not offer a wiggly-wormy non-answer political answer to a direct question. He gave his honest and direct assessment, "it should be considered." He really meant "considered." Not "implemented," not "placed in execution," but "considered." Which, folks, is what Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has been saying all along.
permalink
Heinz Barth, grocer and Untersturmführer, dead at 86. May you rot in Hell. Seriously.
Official site (French only, sorry). An unofficial, but clear, site.
permalink
Remember Elian Gonzalez? That case has nothing on this one.
You can write to LTC Bob at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
PANIC!
Drunken German joyrider kills 300 chickens
Teen crashes into shed, sending poultry into a panic
Reuters
Updated: 11:27 a.m. ET Aug 12, 2007
BERLIN - Three hundred chickens died in panic early on Sunday when a drunken German teenager on a joyride crashed a van into their shed, police said.
"Apparently some of the chickens were so desperate to get away that they ran into the wall and died," the spokesman said. "Others suffered heart attacks."
The 17-year-old from the western city of Kassel crashed the van through the wall of a shed containing around 1,000 birds and then returned to a nearby fairground where he was staying, according to a spokesman for the local police. The youth was arrested.
Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20236625/
Teen crashes into shed, sending poultry into a panic
Reuters
Updated: 11:27 a.m. ET Aug 12, 2007
BERLIN - Three hundred chickens died in panic early on Sunday when a drunken German teenager on a joyride crashed a van into their shed, police said.
"Apparently some of the chickens were so desperate to get away that they ran into the wall and died," the spokesman said. "Others suffered heart attacks."
The 17-year-old from the western city of Kassel crashed the van through the wall of a shed containing around 1,000 birds and then returned to a nearby fairground where he was staying, according to a spokesman for the local police. The youth was arrested.
Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20236625/
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