But once you cut through the endless coverage and your CNNs/Fox Newses/MSNBCs slpping any and every blithering, blooming, driveling idiot in front of the camera to repeat the same nonsense and you come to a pretty blasted quiet time, at least on the warfare front.

Now as an entertainer and blogger extraordinare I suppose it’s my sworn duty to come up with something. So here we go:

No one gets too excited about the half-dozen or so bush wars happening in Africa. You get the inevitable celebrity benefit concerts and alot of feel-goodery from the usual suspects, but no one is seriously interested in hopping between your Hutus and Tutsis until the machete arms are tired and everyone gets bored.

But there are few interesting bits kicking about.

Congo is getting steamrolled by the a small army of Tutsis led by dissident general Laurent Nkunda. The War Nerd has a great piece on this guy. Full of the usual diatribe and big boy language that makes the War Nerd so fun to read. I’m trying to catch up on my reading, so I’ll let the War Nerd do the talking here.

The real juicy info is oozing out of the festering wound that Somalia has become on the world scene. The brain trust in the UN decided a while back that the best way to calm Somalia down was by sending in that first-class fighting force, the Ethiopian Army. No one really sat down and thought about all the “wars” (used loosely) the two nations have fought in the past or what a grand idea it was to send in the Christian Ethiopians to rub the Muslim Somalis face in the mud for awhile. There must have just been a poster in some UN room where some general wannabe wrote “Send country A to calm country B” and everyone just went with the idea. I mean, what could go wrong?

Of course there isn’t much trade in sustained warfare out near the horn of Africa. The Ethiopians marched in and handed the Somalians a few humiliating years, now they’re marching right back out. Since the Somali government, never functional to begin with, was pretty much non-existant for that time, the religious nut branch of Islam went in and put into practice all the stuff it’s polished to a fine art in Beirut and Sadr City — it became the courts, the providers and the financiers. It showed the people what a grand old tradition Wahabbi Islam is. Now what was probably a small handful of nuts before the Ethiopians rolled in probably has multiplied into a trans-generational religious wave. After Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza the nuts have fine tuned the art of working underneath government while throwing just enough of your own people into the grinder to keep tensions high. Having completed defensive, and filling through the stalemate stage it proably won’t be long until we see a bit of counter-offensive in the works. Mao would be so proud.

The good news is that Africa being Africa no one will hold on to power for long. Even if the fundamentalist blaze a swath through to Mogadishu the usual infighting, disappearings and good old mutiny will mean Somalia will remain Somalia through and through. Religions have a way of thinking they deliver civilization, but Somalians have prayed to have a dozen strange gods before they started praying toward Mecca. And at the end of the day East African culture just won’t tolerate religious extremist for long without those long curved blades coming out.

Hopefully there are at least a few people at high level taking notes on flubbing an invasion. There’s sort of a golden moment where you’ve done all you can do and if you stay any longer you start losing ground. If the Ethiopians had gone in there and thrown all the clerics under the tank treads and then about-faced and high-tailed it back inland we wouldn’t be dealing with this now. There’d be just one more warlord grabbing what he could grab until he ran up against another warlord and the world would continue apace.

But as the saying goes, “The one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.” Trying to affect an outcome in Africa is an endless and expensive exercise in futility. After a few centuries of colonialism the lesson didn’t stick. But an endless supply of idiots with good intentions means an endless supply of intervention with the same dud results.

So, there. I found something to write about after all.

Post from: The Ball Gunner

By Anthony Shadid

Friday, January 2, 2009; Page A01

Washington Post Foreign Service

BAGHDAD — Maybe it was the only shot heard for days in a neighborhood once ordered by the cadence of gunfire. Perhaps it was the smiles at checkpoints and the shouts of Iraqi policemen navigating the always snarled traffic. “God’s mercy on your parents,” they beseeched. “God’s blessings on you.” Maybe it was the music box still playing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” at a kiosk overflowing with Christmas tree decorations and heart-shaped red pillows.

For anyone returning to Baghdad after spending time here during its darkest days two years ago, when it was paralyzed by sectarian hatred and overrun by gunmen sowing despair, the conclusion seemed inescapable.

“The war has ended,” said Heidar al-Abboudi, a street merchant.

The war in Iraq is indeed over, at least the conflict as it was understood during its first five years: insurgency, communal cleansing, gangland turf battles and an anarchic, often futile quest to survive. In other words, civil war — though civil war was always too tidy a term for it. The entropy, for now at least, has run its course. So have many of the forces the United States so dangerously unleashed with its 2003 invasion, turning Iraq into an atomized, fractured land seized by a paroxysm of brutality. In that Iraq, the Americans were the final arbiter and, as a result, deprived anything they left behind of legitimacy.

Post from: The Ball Gunner

LIKE THE Lebanon war of 2006, Israel’s battle with Hamas in Gaza is producing a schism among Muslim states. Iran and its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon have joined Hamas’s Damascus-based leadership in calling for a new intifada, or uprising, against Israel — and also against the governments of Egypt and Jordan, which are accused of silently supporting Israel’s air attacks. Those governments, along with the West Bank Palestinian administration of President Mahmoud Abbas, have issued rote condemnations of Israel. But they have also accused Hamas of triggering the conflict by ending a ceasefire — and they have responded harshly to the Iranian camp, which has “practically declared war on Egypt,” as Cairo’s foreign minister angrily put it yesterday. Far from encouraging an uprising, Mr. Abbas’s police broke up demonstrations by West Bank Palestinians on Sunday. Egyptian security forces have forcibly prevented Palestinians from crossing the border from Gaza.

Israeli and U.S. officials see this divide as encouraging. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has frequently spoken of an emerging coalition of “mainstream” or “moderate” Arab states opposing Iran and its “extremist” allies. One problem with this analysis is that the split is more sectarian than ideological. Among those counted in the moderate camp is Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia, which shares Hamas’s fundamentalist creed. And among those joining in the unmitigated denunciations of Israel yesterday were the Shiite rulers of Iraq, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

It will be noted that it is correct, in part, because the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful, virile Ball Gunner said most of it, yesterday.

What we’re witness now is the phenomenon Randy Newman referred to as “♫ BIIIIG HAAAAT NO CATTLE ♫” The various mid-East countries pumping their fists at each other. Iran could not prosecute a successful border war against the T-ball league military of Iraq, much less declare war on Egypt. Jordan has made a decades-long policy of tactical disentanglement with the region. Syria hasn’t enough wild hairs to look cross eyed as Israel and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak has found a balance between stoking ignorant hatred with the Muslim brotherhood and making good dough with the Jewish brotherhood across the way.

Saudi Arabia, which is to moderate camp like the Detroit Lions are to the Super Bowl is not in the habit of making overt actions not blessed by the Powers That Be in D.C.

The Wa Po concludes with this assessment:

Yet, as in Lebanon, no decisive military victory is likely: Israel will not be able to topple Hamas unless it fully reoccupies Gaza, and it will probably not be able even to stop the rocket attacks on its cities without some kind of political settlement.

I’m going to conclude that this national-paper scouping Ball Gunner needs a raise.

_______________________________________________________________________

Good news from the NY Times in a world dreadfully short of it: The Marines are leaving a peaceful Fallujah:

FALLUJA, Iraq — In Falluja, a town that rises abruptly out of the vast Syrian Desert an hour west of Baghdad, nearly every building left standing has some sort of hole in it.

Mosques are without their minarets. Apartment walls have been peeled away by artillery shells. A family’s kitchen is full of tiny holes made by a fragmentary grenade.

Of all the places fighting has raged since the American invasion nearly six years ago, Falluja — the site of two major battles and the town where American security contractors were killed and their bodies hung from a local bridge — stands out as one of the bloodiest and most intractable.

This month, as the last American marines prepare to leave Camp Falluja, the sprawling base a few miles outside of town where many of the American troops who fought the two battles were stationed, Falluja has come to represent something unexpected: the hope that an Iraqi town once at the heart of the insurgency can become a model for peace without the United States military.

I’ve expressed doubt before about whether the Iraq military mission will be successful, and I think the utopian vision of Iraq as a western democracy is a castle with foundation firmly rooted in the clouds, but an Iraq that is stable and at least benign is vitally important for global security.

With the credit crunch likely spurning a period of retrenchment, a failure in Iraq would place the U.S. entering the new era already in retreat. Hope springs eternal that the U.S. will be able to pull off a successful withdrawal and let the nation continue its evolution; whatever happens after we leave is no longer on our hands. Rumblings from the President-Elect seem to be backpedaling on promises of a rapid withdrawal. This is, in my opinion, the worst possible decision. A time will soon be presented for us to leave Iraq gracefully, if we do not seize it then we will leave Iraq, regardless. There is gratitude in Iraq for our work, certainly, but Iraq is not Germany, they will not be content to house troops of a Christian nation on their soil indefinitely.

Let us see what the New Year brings. Onward, yon Ball Gunnerettes.

Post from: The Ball Gunner

The international stink likely is going to bake in the sun for months to come. The cards are falling on predictable lines - the residents of the Arab nations don’t like Israel, which they see as an usurper. By default, the governments of the Arab nations have to appear not to like Israel or risk legitimacy. I expect a lot of noise and sabre rattling from Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey along with the impotent fist-pumping from Iran. Noise is likely all we’re going to get. None of the aforementioned military superpowers (har har) are going to risk going toe to toe with the already kicked up hornet’s nest. Lebanon, probably hoping none of those F-16s make a quick detour to Beirut, is keeping its trap mostly shut. Minus a few Hezbollahns.

The weird things about these battles is the real lack of a winner or loser. Israel can’t flatten Hamas outright from the air, much to the dissapointment of America’s far-right. Israel is firing up the reserve troops but they’d have to be flat out nuts to go marching into those slums - there’s nothing to accomplish short of shooting up a bunch of dirt farmers while getting shot up, yourself.

Man, these guys with nothing to live for sure do fight hard.

As for Hamas, they certainly can’t get rid of Israel by firing half-baked rockets across the border. Their best possible outcome, and a likely one, is to win the PR campaign. They can accomplish this by doing their best to keep people in Gaza to become red mist when the Israelis swoop down with the big bangs. After 60 years they surely realize that no one is about to swoop to the rescue and embroil themselves in the mess. Both Egypt and Lebanon are doing about everything they can to keep the gates up and the flood of refugees back. It must be an odd experience to be imprisoned in your own country.

The U.S. gets to do the usual balancing act. It can’t appear overtly pro-Israel without alienating the Arab world, specifically Iraq. On the other hand, the pro-Israel lobby will be looking for Uncle Sam to put some weight to the wheel (and for politicians to earn their campaign contributions.) What makes this round particularly interesting is the U.S. acting as the world’s great democratizer for the last seven years has to appear anti-Hamas without appearing anti-democratically elected-Hamas. The U.S. cannot afford the cynicism of past decades with so much policy still in the balance.

So what will be the grand finale of the recent flair up? Well……. any guesses?

Post from: The Ball Gunner

U.S. worried about need for warrants in Iraq

By Kim Gamel - The Associated Press
Posted : Tuesday Dec 16, 2008 16:49:27 EST

MAHMOUDIYA, Iraq — U.S. soldiers preparing for raids study maps, examine photos of wanted men and check their weapons. Starting next month, they’ll have to go see a judge.

For nearly six years, American troops have been free under a U.N. mandate to search any home and detain anyone deemed a security risk.

All that changes next month, when the mandate expires and a U.S.-Iraqi security agreement takes effect. From then on, troops must obtain Iraqi warrants for searches and arrests — and U.S. officers say the requirement is one of the biggest headaches in complying with the new rules.

“It takes away the option of saying, ‘Hey, this guy just came into town and we want him and we want him now,”‘ said Capt. Tom Smith, a company commander on his second tour in Iraq. “For some of us who were here before, it feels a bit slow.”

U.S. troops are scrambling to learn the ins and outs of an Iraqi legal system with unfamiliar rules and procedures, a cumbersome bureaucracy and a shortage of judges after years of violence.

“Unfamiliar rules and procedures” just sounds like a less-awesome way of saying compromised and corrupt. Iraqi justice, like Saudi justice, Kuwaiti justice, et al is a lot more about who you know and who you’re paying versus what can be shown. All that bunk about justice being blind, a big freaking ball of trust to put in any system, has more holes in it than Saddam Hussein’s kids.

Iraq’s courts are just lousy, with the all makings of any court in a half-baked state, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, take your pick of lousy court having countries. That article may be two years old, but the pie-in-the-sky expansionist dream that we’ll be able to graft western legal systems into non-western societies is about to be put through the wringer-on-the-ground of practicality.

Bear in mind, this is the same courts that summarily booted out 20,000 random convicts, detainees awaiting trial and just plain old folks thrown in jail to rot because… well, just because. See, Sunnis and Shias can agree on some things - like undoing a few years of legal work in a flash. POOF!

My advice for commander’s on the ground is to familiarize yourself with the old fashioned world of greased-palms. Bribery in the third-world is a subtle affair. Show up with piles of cash and you’re going to get hurriedly shoved out the door. There is finesse to the art.

But back when the Ball Gunner was but a lad he traveled to South America with Ball Gunner Sr., who was the ship captain for a merchant line. The custom’s officials came and left shortly thereafter, their wealth increased by a few cartons of cigarettes and perhaps some mid-grade scotch or bourbon. The trade off being that the customs papers were cleared with little hassle. The alternative, high-and-mighty approach, is to send the customs officials packing and prepare for your ship to sit idle, while paying buckets in port fees, for a thorough customs inspection. This is what those with good sense refer to as “the cost of doing business.”

Well, my guess is that commanders are about to learn all about “the cost of doing business” in the Iraqi courts. Paltry offerings, smokes and cheap booze, keep a lid on rampant corruption that gets greasy and entangling real quick.

Of course, if we’re going to have success, the coalition will have to show Joe Iraqi that Al-Scalia and Bin-Ginsburg are in charge of Iraqi justice. Iraqi courts have to dispense Iraqi justice, at least on the surface. Of course, if Iraqi justice steps on the coalition mission, the strategic poo will hit the legitimacy fan.

Post from: The Ball Gunner

2) Hints of god news:
U.S. to raise irregular war capabilities (via the Wa Po)

By Ann Scott Tyson

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 4, 2008; Page A04

The Pentagon this week approved a major policy directive that elevates the military’s mission of “irregular warfare” — the increasingly prevalent campaigns to battle insurgents and terrorists, often with foreign partners and sometimes clandestinely — to an equal footing with traditional combat.

The directive, signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England on Monday, requires the Pentagon to step up its capabilities across the board to fight unconventionally, such as by working with foreign security forces, surrogates and indigenous resistance movements to shore up fragile states, extend the reach of U.S. forces into denied areas or battle hostile regimes.

The policy, a result of more than a year of debate in the defense establishment, is part of a broader overhaul of the U.S. military’s role as the threat of large-scale combat against other nations’ armies has waned and new dangers have arisen from shadowy non-state actors, such as terrorists that target civilian populations.

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“The U.S. has considerable overmatch in traditional capabilities . . . and more and more adversaries have realized it’s better to take us on in an asymmetric fashion,” said Michael G. Vickers, assistant secretary of defense for special operations/low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities, and a chief architect of the policy.

This, if it bears fruit, and that is a big IF, is good news.

Directing the Pentagon to do something and the Pentagon doing it are, quite obviously, very different things. And as any defense contractor lobbyist will tell you, there simply is not much money to be made in counter-insurgency (I can’t remember now, but I read somewhere that the U.S. is not engaged in true counter-insurgency, but in counter-counter-occupation.)

Ultimately, a thorough effort in counter-insurgency means putting your fabulous military toys: jets and tanks and fancy weapons, long-range missiles, aircraft carriers, attack helicopters and the like — on the shelf to gather dust and mildew. Undoubtedly Lockheed Martin could develop a fabulous new system for distributing rice while Northrup Grumman devoted effort to a more efficient way to build roads and lay power lines. Boeing could then partner with Wal Mart to make consumer commodities affordable and accessible. The downside (for them) being that rice distribution, road graters, trenchers and retail are not multi-million if not billion dollar items. When war becomes highly profitable (which it always does for those not fighting it) those seeking high profits will want war. I have high hopes for Gordon England’s plan, and high skepticism that it will supplant the footing for traditional warfare so unshakably embedded in the Pentagon.

3) Now that the pathetic and corrupt Pakistani army is being split to botch the Indian border mission in addition to the Afghan border mission, supply lines have become a source of concern. Unless you’re this guy:

BRUSSELS, Belgium — NATO operations in Afghanistan will not be affected by escalating attacks on the alliance’s supply lines through Pakistan, Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said Tuesday.

The militants “should not be under any illusion that they can disrupt the lines of communication, since we have alternatives,” de Hoop Scheffer said.

Alternatives being, of course, air power. Like any trendy war writer, I remain highly-skeptical about the ability of air-power to project anywhere but the air. Al Qaeda’s air force is certainly no threat, but everything from fuel shortages (which must be supplied conventionally) to bad weather can turn a world-class airlift into a ground force within minutes.

Air forces routinely overestimate what they are capable of, as is best illustrated by one of the world’s most notorious air force commander. I doubt there are many men left from the horror days of the Kessel, but I’d like to speak with some of them about their opinion of air power.

Post from: The Ball Gunner

From the LA Times:

By Julian E. Barnes, Paul Richter and Christi Parsons
November 26, 2008

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has agreed to serve in President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet, advisors said Tuesday, setting up the unusual situation in which a wartime Pentagon chief remains to work under a president who has condemned the previous administration’s policies.

An official close to the Obama transition team said it was likely that Gates would be named Defense secretary when the president-elect begins to unveil his national security team in announcements expected next week.

A former government official who has advised the Obama transition said it was “99% certain” that Gates would remain as Defense secretary for about a year in the Obama administration.

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“Nothing is definitive,” said the former official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing transition plans. “But Gates did agree to stay on.”

Gates continuation is the likely final nail in the F-22 Raptor’s procurement coffin. Gates, who famously said, “We’re fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the F-22 has not performed a single mission in either theater,” is not going to give the Air Force the funding it wants for the program, nor is he likely to bow down to a Congress hoping to score political points by requiring their purchase. The chances for a procurement boom, already slim under a democratic presidency, are all but evaporated.

Part 2:

The Ball Gunner is pleased to hear that Al Qaeda has abandoned an area it never had:

From the Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON — Pakistan has replaced Iraq as al Qaeda’s main focus, and the terror group has stepped up its efforts to destabilize the nuclear-armed South Asian nation, according to a senior U.S. military commander.

“Iraq is now a rear-guard action on the part of al Qaeda,” said Gen. James Conway, the head of the Marine Corps and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an interview. “They’ve changed their strategic focus not to Afghanistan but to Pakistan, because Pakistan is the closest place where you have the nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons.”

Gen. Conway also offered a stark assessment of the Afghan situation, saying the Taliban has built a rudimentary command-and-control network that enables the group’s leadership to direct attacks across the country.

“They move troops around. They resupply. They provide money,” he said. “It’s effective and it’s real. It’s not just happenstance that these guys know where to go and what to do.”

It’s an uphill battle to beat these fires out. But as has been noted time and again, Al Qaeda in Iraq is hardly the enemy we so desperately want it to be.

The monger sect likes to claim these arguments are mere semantics, which demonstrates only that they wield a keen judo grip on ignorance. Iraq’s long history of secular government has made the majority of Iraqis particularly poorly suited for the Salafist Islam espoused by the Osama Bin Ladin (may demons eat his flesh) and the structure of Al Qaeda (may demons eat their flesh, too). We need to get this through our head; if we can’t identify who we are fighting we surely won’t be able to beat them.

Finally:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Post from: The Ball Gunner

BAGHDAD – Iraq’s two most powerful Shiite clerics on Friday challenged the government’s planned security pact with the United States, undercutting efforts to reach a deal before the U.N. mandate for American troops in Iraq expires Dec. 31.

Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr renewed threats to unleash his militia fighters to attack U.S. forces unless they leave Iraq immediately, and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani vowed to intervene if he concludes the proposed agreement governing the presence of U.S. forces infringes on national sovereignty.

Iraqi officials have said they will seek a renewal of the U.N. Security Council’s mandate if the pact, which would allow American troops to stay in Iraq through 2011, is not passed by parliament by year’s end.

Not only has the ever-growing pain in our rear bit Muqtada Al Sadr come out against the arrangement, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has shouted his opposition, too. This coalescing of the moderate and radical Shia in Iraq under one opinion is nothing good for the coalition forces. The balance of power that consisted of Al Sadr’s radical forces vs al-Sistani’s moderates kept things moving forward in a slow, but steady, direction. If the Shia as a whole wrinkle their collective noses at the SOFA then we’re in for a spin.

The other side of this, is that the paralysis of the Shia has meant the Sunni have expanded their power. The Sons (and daughters) of Iraq were intended to be folded back into the country at large. As it turns out, the government has found it easier to keep buying them off.

For “Sons of Iraq,” being paid in U.S. dollars is becoming a thing of the past. Members of the armed civilian groups, credited with helping to curb violence in Iraq, received their pay from the Iraqi government for the first time this week.

The Iraqi government took over the “Sons of Iraq” program from the U.S. on Oct. 1. But only now are the Iraq security forces taking over from U.S. troops the task of paying the members, in Iraqi dinars.

Maybe its just my Ball Gunnie sense tingling, but does anyone else think elevating a sectarian militia to legitimate status is a cockamamie idea? As the Sunni militias grow in political power, it seems they will inevitably begin to demand more from the Shia government. If the Shia government denies their demands then the militias have the power and ability to destabilize sizable portions of the nation. Militias and governments do not play well together. Just ask the Pakistanis how it’s working in the tribal areas.

What the coalition, in specific the U.S., is likely finding is that ideological leaders, al-Sadr and al-Sistani, are a lot more difficult to manipulate than politicians. What it means in the long-term is yet to be figured out. There’s no telling what deals might be cut to keep operations in the clear before the deadline expires. I doubt if the deadline passed that anyone from CENTCOM on up would tell the boys to call it a mission and sleep it off in the FOBs until it’s time to come home. But it could greatly change the nature of the game.

Primarily, it gives the signal that the Shia, the majority of Iraq, are ready for us to go, and to go now. The idea of using Iraq as a base of operations in the Middle East, long unrealistic, has now become a chimera. The U.S. excursion into Syria, launched from Iraq, was widely denounced. Iraq is simply unwilling to be the top rope for the U.S.’ pro-wrestling style atomic elbows, for obvious reasons.

Second, if the Kurds get a wild hair during the power vacuum and make a break for full autonomy the whole region could get sucked into hell.

Admittedly, some of the Iraq demands for the SOFA were simply unworkable from the start. Man will walk on Pluto before the U.S. would allow an American troop to be tried in an Iraqi court, everyone in the Iraqi government knows that. This leads me to believe that these negotiations might have been loaded from the onset.

The U.S. better be preparing to do something else to enact its Middle East peace policy. The current administration’s efforts might unravel before the new guy even plops himself down in the office. As I’ve been saying for some time, if the situation deteriorates there is no political will for a second “Surge.” Any attempts to build support for it could torpedo the shaky support for ongoing operations in Afghanistan. If the U.S. objectives in both nations are left unfulfilled our nation’s credibility will likely never recover. Unfortunately, their failure or success may already be determined and out of our hands.

Post from: The Ball Gunner

His latest mad dash (Hyah! Mule!) “Obama First Test” is half partly right and half completely wrong.

President Obama’s first test in the national security arena is likely to come not from al Qaeda or Iran or the Taliban but from within his own Democratic Party. Powerful constituencies in that party, the Feminists and the gays, will demand that he open the ground combat arms to women and allow acknowledged homosexuals to serve in the U.S. armed forces. If he agrees to either of these demands, or both, he will begin his Presidency by doing immense damage to the fighting ability of the America military.

First and foremost, I simply can’t fathom anyone forcing the Army and Marines to open the “ground-pounding grunt” fields to women. There are good reasons to keep women out of infantry, engineers artillary and a few other professions. Simply put, any standard fitness routine will crank out stronger men than women. There are plenty of arguments to be made about agility, flexibility, dexterity, whatever, but when it comes to hauling a M-240B, with tripod and ammo, in addition to food clothing and whatever else a woman is never going to have the raw strength of a man. Ditto pounding pickets, loading Paladin rounds, doing a fireman’s carry, etc. The best metaphor I’ve ever heard is that when two guys are goofing around and wrestling their primary concern is winning (within bounds), when a guy is wrestling with his girlfriend his primary concern is not hurting her.

But Lind really heads out on a shaky limb when he speaks of “the gays” as unfit for duty for any of the same reasons as women.

Barring indisputable sissies, of which there are a fair few gay, straight and other, there is no reasonable explanation for why a gay man should not be allowed to volunteer to defend his nation. He tries to conjur up the usual imagery of two dudes doing it in the shower or of young Pvt. Billy getting raped in his foxhole by the evil predatory gay man and ends up conjuring nothing more than a ridiculous idea that no one with any sense would accept.

First, militaries must represent the society they spring from. There were grim forecast of death and destruction when the services were integrated, and there were unpleasantries. The result was a better, stronger, military. The modern U.S. military must represent the U.S., and our nation increasingly is ambivalent about homosexuality. This is, despite protestations to the contrary, a promotion of the Founder’s dream of creating a nation where “all men are created equal,” (which isn’t to say we haven’t fudged other parts of the Founder’s dream.)

Second, to assume a gay man’s future service would be lessened because of his sexuality is also to declare that all past service by homosexuals is lessened. You’d have to be stupid to assume that none of them men killed at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, Verdun or the Ardennes Forest were gay. You’d have to be insane to think none of the names inscribed on the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial are names of gay men. Should those names be chisled away?

And you’d have to be way adrift on moron sea to think none of the volunteers in our current military are gay.

Bottom line, there are gays serving in our military, openly. They are deploying with regularity. And the only ones that seem to care are the pogues in charge of the linguists program who are merrily booting Arab linguists (good thing we don’t need any of those right now.) Even when I was in, way back yonder from 99-03, there were guys that didn’t leave much question. They neither flaunted it nor hid it and behaved almost like you’d expect adults to behave. Other than a few oafs that remained perpetual privates, no one cared, and I never heard of anyone getting an unwilling rogering in the foxhole, either.

So, with all due respect to Mr. Lind, this column was a stinker. History is full of gay men serving in and even, ahem, leading militaries, and the nation most famous for turning out a true turd booting military culture was notorious for everyone shagging just about everyone else.

I’ll give a nod to Lind for being an idealist, there’s nothing wrong with that, and he’s a brilliant military thinker. But he also is an ivy league educated, Washington worker. He’d be about as comfortable slamming Bud Light with grimy Army Privates as he would be on a bed of nails. So when he writes things like,

One of the most basic human factors is that men fight to prove they are real men. They join fighting organizations, whether the U.S. Army or U.S. Marine Corps or MS-13, because those organizations are made up of fighting men. Their membership is a badge of honor that says, “We’re not sissies or pansies. We are men who fight, serving alongside other men who fight.” That tells others and themselves they are real men.

If ideologically-driven policies deprive fighting organizations of their ability to convey that message, men who want to prove they are real men will not join. Instead of men who want to fight and will fight, they will end up recruiting men who join for good pay, or education benefits, or because they can’t get a civilian job. Armies like that may fight when they have no other choice, but if they come up against opponents who want to fight, they will be in trouble.

I feel like he needs to be sat down for a good talking to. Bill, history is full of people who join up for pay, for the benefits and because they’re too aggressive, too undisciplined and too uneducated to do anything else. I’ve served with them, starved, roasted, froze, marched, suffered and at the end of the day gotten plowed like a champ.

Try feeding a Marine lance corporal or a young airman with a 19-year old pregant wife all that ideological stuff and be prepared for some weird looks. People serve for all sorts of reasons, and if a man wants to raise that right right and spend 3,4 or 20 years pounding pickets or hauling mortars we shouldn’t be in the business of stopping them.

Post from: The Ball Gunner

From the AP (via Yahoo news)

Iraq outlines changes it wants in pact with US

BAGHDAD – Iraq wants a security agreement with the U.S. to include a clear ban on U.S. troops using Iraqi territory to attack Iraq’s neighbors, the government spokesman said Wednesday, three days after a dramatic U.S. raid on Syria.

Also Wednesday, the country’s most influential Shiite cleric expressed concerned that Iraqi sovereignty be protected in the pact. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani wields vast influence among the Shiite majority and his explicit opposition could scuttle the deal.

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the ban was among four proposed amendments to the draft agreement approved by the Cabinet this week and forwarded to the U.S.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said U.S. negotiators in Iraq are closely reviewing the new amendments from the Iraqis to see if they are acceptable to the administration.

I have little doubt that the new amendments are completely and totally unacceptable to the administration. The purpose of securing Iraq has long been billed as creating a stepping stone against other belligerents in the region — primarily Iran.

The new amendments would represent a colossal failure of the war’s objectives by tying the U.S. to Iraq. Those who think the U.S. could sign and then simply renege when it became opportune lack any reasonable understanding of foreign policy. Were we to do so, every nation, organization and alliance with a treaty with the U.S. would view that treaty as worthless.

It’s pointless to speculate at this point, but no one in the Middle East is looking to be the launchpad from which the U.S. attacks its neighbors. I would not be surprised if Turkey is the next nation to slap restrictions on U.S. operations originating from its soil.

The price for this attack will be steep, possibly steeper than was anticipated. We can only hope it was worth it to kill a logistics expert.

Post from: The Ball Gunner