Showing posts with label Gulf War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gulf War. Show all posts

Saturday, September 11, 2021

September 11, 2001. Where we were then, and where we are today.

 I was getting ready for work.  My wife was getting ready to take our son to preschool.

She was watching the Today Show, and called me up because a jet had hit one of the Twin Towers.  I came up and watched the footage.

Then the second one hit.  I was watching from the stairs.  Right away, I told her it was terrorism.

We all seemingly know the story.  Another jet hit the Pentagon.  Heroic passengers stormed the cockpit of a fourth and in the resulting struggle it went down, taking all of them, and the Islamic jihadist who justified murder in the name of God, to their deaths.

President Bush promised revenge and retribution.

The nation united.

The Administration soon went off course, mistaking necessarily retribution against Al Queda, to whom the jihadist belonged, with the Baathist of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, with whom the same didn't get along.  The nation soon set ground in Afghanistan, but the commitment was small.  A larger one went to war in Iraq, leading to the end of the Baathist regime there, but a guerilla war against ISIL thereafter which was eventually won.  In Afghanistan, the larger commitment, and one to rebuilding the nation with a democratic model after the Taliban regime that gave safe harbor to Al Queda was removed.   The slow commitment lead to a messy and protracted war.

That war was more or less won, but a guerilla war against the armed Islamic students of the Taliban, a force that exists only because of Pakistan's support, continued on for 20 years.  President Obama tried to extract the US and then reversed course.  At the end of his administration President Trump negotiated with the very entity which had given safe harbor to those who attacked us on this day 20 years ago and then committed to withdrawal.  President Biden, whom never approved of the nation building mission in Afghanistan, completed what Trump had started with an inept and messy withdrawal that amounted to a surrender to the Taliban and an abandonment of our allies in Afghanistan.

The nation will look back on this day with sadness, as it should.  But what it should be considering as well is what its recent acts mean in terms of its immediate future.  We've left our enemies in power and rejuvenated in a region which gave rise to this attack 20 years ago and their dedication to an isolated and extreme interpretation to a religion that started as a Christian heresy and spread first by excusing primitive and male vices, and then spread by the sword remains unabated and will not abate.

Killing Osama Bin Laden and devastating Al Queda has made us safer, to be sure.  But the ineffective and misdirected nature of our following efforts, followed by the abandonment of that which we created, has not made the world safe.

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Surrendering in Afghanistan. Maybe the Senate has learned history even if the President has not.

Make no mistake about it, the "peace" that's being considered in Afghanistan isn't a peace.  It's a withdrawal which will be followed by the collapse of the Afghan government and a return to power of the Taliban. 

Saigon, 1975.

It's the helicopter from the Saigon Embassy roof all over again, after a fictional peace with Hanoi, except in this instance, it's worse.  Much worse.

Which is why its refreshing to see the Republican controlled Senate find its backbone, as noted here in the New York Times:
WASHINGTON — The Senate, in a bipartisan rebuke to President Trump’s foreign policy, voted overwhelmingly to advance legislation drafted by the majority leader to express strong opposition to the president’s withdrawal of United States military forces from Syria and Afghanistan.

The 68-to-23 vote to cut off debate ensures that the amendment, written by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and backed by virtually every Senate Republican, will be added to a broader bipartisan Middle East policy bill expected to easily pass the Senate next week.
I hope the Senate's view prevails.

It's frequently noted that the war in Afghanistan is the longest running war in American history, which it is if you don't count the Indian Wars as a single war.  If you do that, no other American war even compares as those wars started sometime in the 1600s and concluded, depending upon how you look at it, in 1890 or 1916.  They're a bit longer.

But the war in Afghanistan is pretty darned long, to be sure. 

Donald Rumsfeld, who reprising the role of Robert Strange McNamara chose to ignore the lessons of history and presume that the United States was not subject to them.

A lot of that can be laid at the feet of the second President George Bush, or perhaps more accurately at the feet of his controversial Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.  Rumsfeld took the view that all prior laws of war were no longer applicable to the United States, and therefore even though we knew that Al Queda was headquartered in Afghanistan and sheltered by the Taliban, we could commit an absolute minimum of force to the war there, fight the war with a few specialists and air power, rely on dubious native allies, while taking on a second war with Iraq for what turned out to be dubious reasons, and still win the war in Afghanistan.

Carl von Causewitz looking on with disdain at Donald Rumsfeld from history.

Carl von Clausewitz would have whacked Rumsfeld with his riding crop for thinking such a stupid thing.  

Classic military Clausewitzian thought would have held that having determined that war in Afghanistan was necessary, which it was, it was then incumbent upon the U.S. to use overwhelming force to crush the enemy immediately and leave Afghanistan basically compliant in the wake of a crushing defeat of the radical Islamists.  Instead, we chose to engage basically with special forces and air power while we built up a force to attack Iraq and left much of the ground fighting to Islamic militias of dubious dependability.  That in turn meant that we didn't get around to really committing until well after the war in Iraq, which we didn't have to engage in, in the first place, had become a second guerrilla war which in turn meant that no how badly the Taliban did in combat they'd learned that they could keep on, keeping on.

U.S. Special Forces troops with Northern Alliance troops. The Northern Alliance was a genuinely anti Taliban force, and truly useful in the field, but it wasn't the sort of force that was any more likely to result in a stable government long term than the Montagnards were in Southeast Asia.  Using them was wise and necessary.  Leaving the war nearly entirely to them was not.

Since that time we've fought a war of decreasing commitment sort of hoping against hope that the Afghan government we supported and created after the Taliban were driven out of Kabul would be able to take over, much like we hoped that successive South Vietnamese governments would be able to take over the Vietnam War after 1968.

That didn't work then and its obviously not working now.

Which has lead to the conclusion that we need to do is dress up a defeat, like we did in Vietnam, and get out.  

Of course getting out meant the ultimate fall of our ally, the Republic of Vietnam, and the installation of a brutal communist regime that still remains in power.  The analogy there probably ends, as Vietnam isn't Afghanistan and it never posed any direct threat to the United States.*  Afghanistan has been used as the headquarters for a global radical Islamic war on the world with the goal to establish a new Caliphate and subject the world to Islam.  Hanoi just wanted to subject Vietnam to communism, which it did, but which it is now loosing due to the pervasive nature of American pop and consumer culture.**

If and when we leave Afghanistan, if we haven't succeeded there, it will return to the control of the Taliban in short, probably very short, order.  Compelling the Afghan government to include the Taliban in the government will be no more successful than Hanoi's promise not to resume the war with Saigon, or the fusion of the Royal and Pathet Lao armies was.  The result is inevitable.

Of course, a person might also ask if the same results as the Vietnam War might also be inevitable.  If we haven't won after an eighteen year commitment, why would we win now?

Well, the numbers are part of the reason.

The United States has less than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.  At the absolute height of our commitment, in 2011, when we "surged", we had 110,000 men there, which we built up to rapidly after we crossed the 20,000 number in mid 05 and which then fell off rapidly, falling below 20,000 again in 2014.

10th Mountain Division troops in Afghanistan in 2005.

Now, before we go on, something about this should be obvious.  A country which proposed to unseat its de facto, if not de jure, government of the size of Afghanistan but which didn't even get up over the division level commitment for the first three plus years of that was either acting stupidly or wasn't serious.  And a nation that would commit over 100,000 men for a very brief interval and then presume, when it was known that the war wasn't won, that everything would be fine, also wasn't acdting particularly rationally.  The U.S. should have committed that 100,000 men in the first three months of the war in which case we probably could have totally withdrawn by 2011.

Donald Rumsfeld, here's your sign.

United States Drug Enforcement personnel burning  hashish as part of an American policing operation in an ancillary quasi military operation guaranteed to make enemies of the rural populace.

The thought was, of course, or rather the naive hope was, that the Afghan army we built would take over.  Just like the ARVN. That in fact was not an irrational hope in the late 1960s, but in the case of the Afghan army, given the way we went about it, it certainly was.

Soldier of the U.S. Army (Michigan National Guard) on patrol with Afghans and, in German desert camouflage, Latvian soldier

Afghanistan has had an army since 1709, and a fairly good one in the 1950s, but that all came apart following the Communist coup that took over the country in the 1970s. The army fell apart and the country fell into civil war, from which its never emerged.  Reconstituting a real army after a twenty five year gap has proven extremely difficult and like most armies that exist in a scenario in which a foreign power is putting them together, it's been infiltrated by the enemy.  It's going to take quite a while before that army can stand on its own.  By comparison again, the French put together what would become the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in the early 1950s and it wasn't until the late 1960s that it was capable of somewhat standing on its own, although it never really achieved that status.  And like the ARVN its not only has very loyal soldiers, but it's subject to being accused of being a colonial puppet by its clearly nativist opponent.  So while it has 174,000 men, it can't field that number as an effective fighting force.

Afghan commandos waiting for airlift from Russian made helicopters.  With their western airborne transportation and American arms and equipment they bear a worrisome resemblance to crack ARVN units of the late Vietnam War.

Indeed, it's lost over half the country.

So we've lost, right?

Well, we might have, but before we give up, we better at least try to win.  And we can do that.

Indeed, there's no doubt that a second surge, like the first one, would reoccupy the country and drive the Taliban out, probably into Pakistan, in the case of the survivors.  We can debate what to do about that, but serving notice on Pakistan that its border will be regarded as fictional would be one thing to do.  Pakistan isn't going to fight the Untied States under any circumstances, and indeed India would dearly love it to even suggest that it would.  An effort of that type would reoccupy the country and, if a remaining commitment of at least 50,000 men stayed for at time, as in a decade, the country would have a chance.

A chancier, but also probably likely to work means, would be to commit a large, but lesser, force of 50,000 to 60,000 and do the same thing.  Of course, that's not a small commitment either.

The odds are better, however, that we'll simply abandon it, and our effort there, and live to regret the consequences.

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**Whatever the results of the war have been, the inevitable trend of Vietnam is exhibited by the presence of a Victoria's Secret in Hanoi and V-pop in the country at large.  The South Vietnamese never ended up embracing Communism and the North Vietnamese are abandoning it.

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Century Delayed Synchronicity?

The New York Times is reporting today that demonstrations spontaneously broke out in at least one airport yesterday over President Donald Trump's Executive Order (now stayed, maybe, by a Federal Court) barring entry by citizens of certain nations.

And yesterday, we reported here, on the start of three days of rioting, in 1917, over the recently imposed delousing policy of the United States on the Mexican border.  What we didn't note, but likely should have, is that rioting spread from El Paso to at least one other border town.

Anyhow, interesting sort of similarities.  It isn't history strictly repeating itself, but history rarely does that.  But it's in the same room.  Entrants from another nation that was experiencing a civil war and policies regarding the same.

And both at ports of entry.

Friday, September 16, 2016

9/11 Fifteen Years On, How Are We Doing?

As is well known, on September 11, 2001, the United States endured an attack by Al Qaeda, an organization that was dedicated to the Wannabe sect of Sunni Islam, and which dreamt of the restoration of an Islamic Caliphate, someday.

Since that date, the United States has been continually at war, to some degree. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but never not.  Iraq was invaded by the US in what may perhaps be regarded as an undeclared war, even though there was no clear connection, and indeed no connection, between the Wannabe jihadist and the secular Baathist Iraqi state that we defeated.  U.S. forces entered government-less Afghanistan and drove out the Taliban, the Islamic Punjabi Sunni movement allied to Al Qaeda, which is and was principally Arabic.  The war in Afghanistan continues on with the Taliban struggling to remain and return, fighting against an Afghan government we support.  In Iraq, the defeat of Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship resulted in a civil war between Al Qaeda allies who evolved into ISIL or ISIS, depending upon which term you prefer.  Initially defeated that group regrouped and came back in such force that it occupied large sections of Iraq and neighboring Syria and changed Al Qaeda's goal of an eventually restoration of a Sunni Caliphate to an immediate restoration of one, one which indeed it declared to be in present existence.

War is never predictable, and it was not a war that we wanted or started. But a war none the less. So the question remains?  How have we done, and how are we doing?

Prologue:  How did we even get here?

Before we look at the question, at some point it's worth asking how we got here in the first place.

I'd note, on that, that often during war it's not healthy, nor necessary, to really ask that question. Was it necessary on December 7, 1941, to ask how it was that the Japanese Imperial Navy had launched an air raid on Pearl Harbor?  I think not.  The moral imperative at that time was to address Japanese aggression, not debate  the  history of the Japanese since Admiral Perry.  This question, however, might be necessary to answer now, given that he war has lasted so long, and it's been unique in some ways.

 
Indeed, this was the moral imperative at the time.  Folks wanting to debate and discuss the history of Japan since the US opened it up would have been well off the mark at hte time.

And I use the term "the war" advisably.  Others might not, and some of them advisable as well.  And that gets, I suppose, to part of the point here. We're in a war with a certain world outlook, and we were before September 11, 2001.  We had been at war with it probably since some point in the 1990s perhaps, or at least for a year with the attack on the USS Cole in October 1990. Be that as it may, perhaps we were not incorrect in not realizing that, and indeed for those who would argue that viewing this as other as a war is a better option are not without their point.

To really look at the roots of this we need to go way back, and indeed we should do that if we are to understand the nature of the enemy that attacked us.

Americans in particular, and Westerners in general, have a hard time with conceptualizing the war we are in, and its probable length (Europeans less so) as our world outlook is so different from other cultures, which is to say that the European and European American outlook is distinctly Christian. Even non Christian's in the West have a Christian outlook on the world, and it's fair to say that their outlook is both Catholic and catholic in a larger sense.  That's due to our history and the remaining impact of it, even though we dimly perceive that.

As a result of that our culture emphasizes the concept of all men being equal in nature, free will, and indeed as an aspect of that, free choice. Additionally, the Hellenic nature of early Christianity (most, maybe all, of the early Gospels were written in Greek, contrary to what some commonly believe,  and the version of the Jewish writings commonly cited by the New Testament, which we call the "Old Testament", was the Septuagint, a Greek translation of those texts.) caused much of the Hellenic world view to be incorporated into Christianity.  At least some Christian theorists have maintained that this was far from accidental, but rather Providential, in that Christ's appearance in the Middle East came at the point at which Greek thought and the Greek language was common in the region.

Other cultures and non Christian religions, however, do not have this wort of world outlook and Islam does not.  This reflects its early history.  Indeed, early in its post Muhammad history there was a struggle between a Hellenized branch of Islam and the rest of it, with the Hellenized branch loosing.  When people cite to early Muslim theologians who take a world outlook similar to our own they often fail to note that those who held that view fell more than a little out of favor, and aren't looked upon by Muslims today as influential.

Now, the early history that I'll give here is certainly not one that a Muslim is likely to give, but it's the one that's most likely correct, and it is the source of the problems that Islam has in its relationship to the modern world today.

Much of the really early history if Islam is poorly known.  Unlike Christianity, which spread enormously rapidly and which had foundational writings nearly immediately after Christ's Crucifixion, Islamic texts, including the version of the Koran now used, seem to have had about a three century or so gap before their appearance following Muhammad's death. For that reason, there's a lot we don't know about Muhammad or early Islam, unlike Christianity which has an early history that's extremely well documented (although many Christians are wholly ignorant of it).  Even Muhammad's real name is a mystery, as the world "Muhammad" is almost certainly a title, not a name.  The first depiction of him, coming on a coin, shows a figure with a miter and a cross, and that provides quite a clue as to who he likely really was.

Young Muhammad encountering a Christian monk in his youth.  In Islamic tradition the monk predicted his mission as a prophet, but what's more likely is that this demonstrates an exposure by the illiterate Muhammad to Christian theology very early on.  Christianity itself took no note of Islam until well after Muhammad's death at which time it was noted simply as another Middle Easter heresy, which it no doubt was.

At the time of its first appearance Islam was treated as a Christian heresy, as that's almost certainly what it actually was.  Muhammad, who was illiterate, was married to a Christian woman before he started his proselytiziation.  She had an uncle who was a Gnostic priest.  Chances are very high that Muhammad was a Gnostic through these influences.

Depiction of Khadīja bint Khuwaylid, Muhammad's first wife, who died in 619.  Twelve more wives would follow.  She was a  Christian and in Islamic tradition converted to her husband's new faith. But what was that faith?  Chances are high that an infant Islam was more Christian than the religion that exists today, but probably in a Gnostic from.  Indeed, its easy to see how the illiterate Muhammad could have taken the basic Gnostic message and added a few elements to come out with a heretical evolution of Gnostism, which itself was a heresy.


Indeed, he may have never ceased being one, as we know little about what he actually did from direct contemporary sources. But assuming that this is not the case, what he seems to have been is an example of a Christian preacher who was poorly educated and who began to reinterpret his religion heavily, or began to excuse personal vices as allowed behavior. This is not an atypical story.  In Muhammad's case, moreover, the gap between his actions and the writings concerning them is sufficiently long so that his teachings, whatever they were, may have evolved in the meantime, perhaps considerably.  We could think of him, in this sense, of being somewhat like Rasputin, whom people often imagine to have been a Russian Orthodox monk, but who in fact was not ordained and was simply a layman with a self declared religious mission.

Muhammad, veiled, advances on Mecca.  The residents of Mecca, a town with was home to a wide variety of religions, were not keen on Muhammad when they first encountered him.

This combined would explain why some aspects of Islam closely mirror Christian teachings, including some that closely mirror Gnostic beliefs in circulation at the time, while some radically depart from them.  It would also explain why so much of Islam it self seems self contradictory in some aspects.  Islam both praises peace and advocates war, but in the context of Muhammad's own experiences this makes sense.  Proselytizing, at first unsuccessfully, in the Arabian Peninsula and suffering as a result, when he returns with followers they were armed and charged was a holy mission. Finding themselves far from home and their wives, he found that the taking of female slaves was just fine.  Finding himself personally attracted to multiple women, rather than carry the cross of the attraction, he found it sanctioned.  Finding women in general problematic, he placed most of them in Hell in the afterlife.  Finding lust a personal cross in his lifetime, he found that it would be perpetually satisfied in the afterlife.  Had he not encountered difficulties of the type he did, and had he not gone into the Arabian peninsula, probably originally simply as a Gnostic lay minister, he probably would have simply been a nameless forgotten Gnostic, and to some extent he actually may be.  The beliefs now attributed to him may, in fact, not have been so fully, and some would say not at all.

At any rate, that early history does indeed charge Islam with license to act violently in its name, and to dominate over everything where it exists.  It expanded by the sword.

But it hasn't always acted fully in that way, and it doesn't act fully in that way everywhere now.

It did early on, as it spread.  Distinctly different from Christianity, it spread by the sword and nearly exclusively by that means.  Where it came to conquer it frequently didn't succeed in converting for centuries.  Christian communities in remote North Africa held out for nearly a millennia after it came to politically dominate t here.  It spread by violent means all the way until the armed progress of Islam was arrested at Vienna in 1529, by which time the Protestant Reformation had already commenced.  Had the Ottoman's not been turned at Vienna, Europe would now be Islamic without question.  Further to the West, however, Islam had already been turned back, starting much earlier with the Battle of Tours and, in 1492, by the final reconquest of the last remaining Islamic principality in Spain.

It's worth recalling, which is rarely done now, that by and large Islamic occupation of Christian lands was never pleasant for Christians. While its frequently noted that Muhammad called these people the "People of the Book", in apparently reference to the Old Testament, they were definitely not equals, merely tolerated. Subject to punitive taxation and less than third class citizens, they endured for centuries, but never in pleasant circumstances.  In a few locations, notably Iraq, Turkey Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt, they endured into current times, sometimes doing well, and other times not so much.

But Islam quit expanding in 1529.  And Europeans started expanding their world in the 1600s.  And a much different sort of situation took place.

From the 1600s through the mid 20th Century Europeans came to dominate an increasingly large expanse of the globe, including many Muslim nations.  Europeans never reconquered (which is what it would have been) Turkey the seat of the Ottoman Empire, but they came to essentially occupy or influence much of the rest of the Islamic world save for the Arabian Peninsula itself, which they did not attempt to take in any fashion.  And in Turkey, the forces of secularism itself came to displace Islam up until very recently.

This provides an interesting counter story.  From the 1600s Islam was in retreat, but not in the face of Christian expansion, but in the face of European economic expansion. European colonialism was not religiously motivated, but motivated by financial interests.  While Christian missionaries typically followed in the wake of European colonialism, they were never the motivation for it, and indeed in the case of the French, they actually reflected a bit of a counter culture to the dominant secularism of the French republics.  This is hugely significant to our story as while Christian missionaries were enormously successful in most places that Europeans conquered, in North Africa and the Middle East they met with little success, which is further interesting when its recalled that in much of this region a a remnant of Catholic or Orthodox Christianity remained, as well as a remnant of Oriental Judaism.  Indeed, that may be why it did not succeed, as it was not the case that anything new was really being introduced and lines had hardened long ago.

Beyond that, however, while the opposite is commonly assumed by snotty moderns, by and large in the 19th and 20th Centuries European colonial powers not only did not sponsor missionary activity they didn't accord any advantage to those who converted, and that also likely played a role in what occurred, as we will see.  In the case of hte English, moreover, that was always true.  The United Kingdom itself was distinctly anti Catholic in its early colonial period, but at least as of point at which it acquired Quebec it never acted on that.  Indeed, it was remarkably tolerant of every Faith in the regions in which it ruled.  18th Century France and Spain did combine a missionary aim with their colonial enterprises but they'd stopped doing that by the 19th Century and, after the French Revolution, French missionaries, while they were taking advantage of the French presence, were often out of sync with their own governments.  Everywhere the Europeans ruled missionaries had the ability to go, and the advantage of legal protection, but by and large they had very little, if any, state assistance.  And converts were not given an advantage in local administration.

European missionaries were often spectacularly successful in this era in many places, but what's notable about that is that the conversions were highly genuine, which likely explains why in many places today the Christian churches are highly vibrant.  Unlike conversions under the Caliphates to Islam, there wasn't an advantage to be gained by converting, however, during the period of high European colonialism of the 19th and 20th Centuries.  In the Middle East, the British and the French had the policy of being tolerant towards all the native religions and protecting them, and affording all of them roughly equal opportunities in colonial administration, keeping in mind that in many instances these roles were definitely inferior to those afforded to Europeans. Given that, the opportunities and the prejudices were pretty much equally doled out on an ethnic, but not a religious, line.  So in a place like the Middle East, which had a very long existing Christian and Jewish minority, there wasn't a big reason for Muslims to convert other than religious ones. That's to the European's credit, but it forms part of the background to the complicated story.

What did take root, however, was European political thought, but oddly, that part that took was the highly radicalized variation.  As the local populations developed politically and began to have nationalist yearnings they tended to gravitate towards European political extremes, which welcomed them.  That this occurred is highly understandable as the European mainstream was large tolerant of, or supportive of, colonialism.  So, in looking to break the chains with their colonial masters, they tended to integrate with the extreme forces at work.  Communism, socialism and fascism all found their expressions in Middle Eastern nationalist movements.  Very significantly for us today, all of these forces were very secular and in fact many of them were quite hostile to Islam, which they saw as a force that would hold their populations back from reaching the political state they sought. So, when revolutionary movements broke out in the Middle East in the 30s through the 60s, they were not Islamist as a rule.

Which doesn't mean traditional Islam went away.  Rather, when oppressed by authoritarian forces, it went underground.  Always part of the culture, it did not go away so much as it became a subversive force.  It did so in Egypt, Iran, Algeria and Syria.  While westernized, which is to say secular but authoritarian governments, sought to  create new, Europeanized, Middle Eastern countries, they suppressed and repressed any other force, including the hard edge of Islam.

During the Cold War this did not perhaps matter much.  With the entire world seemingly at play, secular forces in the Middle East benefited from Superpower sponsorship that allowed them to seem both permanent and dominant.  The alignments themselves were more than a bit bizarre, however, as Middle Eastern politically totalitarian regimes tended to receive Soviet support, while traditional authoritarian, and what few democratic regimes there were, received Western support.  So, governments such as Nasser's in Egypt or the Baath regime in Syria tended to be backed by the Soviets, even though their ideology could not be described as communistic.  Regimes like that of the Saudis (which the British actually plotted to depose in the 1950s) received Western support even though they were no more democratic than that of the Baathist. 

Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, leader of Egpyt in the 1950s and 1960s.  Personally an observant Muslim, his government wasn't a theocracy

This continued through the 1960s but by the 1970s it began to break down as alignments began to change. At the same time, suppressed Islamic forces began to emerge demonstrating the age old situation that minority movements tend to gain support where suppressed, but in a malignant form.  In the 1970s they became strong enough to topple the Western backed government in Iran and they began to challenge the military dictatorship in Egypt and the Baath regime in Syria.  The success of the Iranian revolution, in and of itself, greatly boosted Islamist movements everywhere in the Middle East.

 Leaders of Algeria's FLN, the movement that successfully expelled the French from Algeria. Every one was no doubt at least nominally a Muslim, but it wasn't that which motivated them but rather Algerian nationalism.

By the 1980s there were very serious, and seriously radical, Islamist movements throughout the Middle East all of which looked towards a highly traditional interpretation of the religion.  By that time they'd taken a run at the government in Syria, assassinated Anwar Sadat in Egypt, and threatened the governments in Algeria and Tunisia.  And they'd made the sectarian strife in Lebanon an added nightmare. All of this was regarded as serious in nature, but as a regional problem.  They were regarded more, for example, as a threat to Israel and oil exportation than as an outright threat to the United States itself.  Elsewhere, the civil war in Afghanistan that had broken out over the communist government's alignment with the USSR, which in turn had resulted in a Soviet invasion that would fail, left that country with a provisional government ruled as a radical Islamic theocracy.  That development destabilized democracy in neighboring Pakistan, which had showed promise in that direction up until then.

Then came the First Gulf War.

The First Gulf War and the changing of the game.

An odd feature of wars is that looking back they appear inevitable, but really only because they actually occurred.  Looking at them in context, it's frankly amazing that some of them actually happened.  The Vietnam War, for example, strikes me particularly that way.  An American war in a region of the globe we had no traditional interest in.  Pretty unlikely.  But it happened none the less.

So too with the First Gulf War.

 U.S. armor during the First Gulf War.

That war was about oil, that's easy to say, but not in the greedy sense we so often like to imagine. The dynamics of it were simple.  Saddam Hussein lead his country into an invasion of neighboring Kuwait.  It wasn't the first time Iraq had tried that.  It was a pure territorial land grab.  It's clear that the Western powers couldn't allow that to occur.  Iraq was a fascistic state and unstable.  Kuwait was a stable monarchy aligned with  the West.  Iraq would be pushed out, and it was.

The problem rapidly became what to do with Iraq, and the George Bush I administration decided to basically leave it in place, but restrained.  I have been critical of this in the past, but that was probably the correct call.  It was fascistic, but it was not Islamist, and it was a buffer state for the Middle East against Islamist Iran, which detested it, and which it detested.  Liberal revolutionary movements attempted to overthrow the Baath government as it started to loose the war, but we did not support them.  In retrospect, that was likely the correct course.

In order to take Kuwait back it was necessary to stage our forces, and those of the other western allies, in Saudi Arabia.  Even though the Saudis were threatened they understood the difficulties that this placed them in.  Much less stable than they would appear, the Saudi monarchy is one of the most repressive regimes on earth.   A Wannabe monarchy, in effect, like Franco's Spain it has not been afraid to suppress even the forces that support it and which brought it to power, on its own soil. Repression of real political movements and other religions other than the Sunni branch of Islam (and there are other religions that are there, and have long been) is extreme.  The Saudis feared what having Western soldiers on their soil would mean.

But they had to allow it, and it occurred.

It might be noted here that there should be a real question as to whether the American lead effort in the Gulf War, which I think was necessary, was legal.  Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was an act of war.  Our participation in the retaking of Kuwait was also a war.  No Declaration of War was made.  As this was more than a local police action, and this wasn't in the nature of our supporting an established government, such as the Vietnam War, so a Declaration of War appears, at least to me, to have been legally necessary.

Be that as it may, we quickly won that war but some US forces remained in Saudi Arabia.  And in that country, amongst hard core Islamic adherents, in a land where Wannabeism had long been sponsored, it sparked outrage.  Women in uniform, even restrained Western behavior, Christians on Saudi soil, it was all more than they could tolerate.

This gave rise to the Al Qaeda war on the United States.

Caliphatist war on the West

Al Qaeda arose in the Arabian Peninsula as a movement that really did not vary greatly from Wannabeism.  It was an extreme form of Sunnism, and indeed it likely would have been regarded as heretical had Saudi Arabia not long sponsored Wannabeism.  The difference, perhaps, between the officially extreme version of Sunni Islam and Islam as viewed by Al Qaeda is that Al Qaeda looked to the reestablishment of the Caliphate and the utlimate creation of a global Sunni monarchy.  Not immediately, as even it, as illusionary as its goal clearly is, recognized that it could not bring that about overnight.


 The black flag of the Wahhabi combatants that brought the House of Saud to power.  The Islamic State has its own black flag.
 
 The green flag of Saudi Arabia.

As an extremist movement at war with the West, it could have no home in Saudi Arabia, and soon it became repressed there, but not before it had already struck at the U.S. Navy in the form of the attack on the USS Cole.  From then on it, and closely aligned movements, would strike at the US whenever they could. The September 11, 2001 attack on the United States was when we really took notice of it, however.

 Damage from the October 12, 2000 attack on the USS Cole.  It's interesting to note that we widely remember September 11, 2001, for obvious reasons, but the opening shot had been fired on October 12 of the prior year.

By that time it had entrenched itself in Afghanistan for the simple reason that it was welcome there.  That was already well known to us, and therefore the war in Afghanistan would become an inevitability after the September 11, 2001 attacks.  It had to be.  Afghanistan was effectively a country without a government that harbored a vile terrorist organization.

The second war against Iraq, however, didn't have to be.  Indeed, again in retrospect, it didn't make sense and it was a mistake.  Highly secular Baathist Iraq had no love for Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda despised it, claiming that the Baathist were "Communist". 

Again, as an aside, the second war against Iraq was clearly an illegal war given that it was an invasion of that country and it required a Declaration of War that was never asked for.  The war in Afghanistan, however, was different.  Lacking a legal government of any kind, the lawless nation could not really be regarded as at war, so much as in anarchy, and our role there, while certainly a war in terms of what it entailed, was not legally one.

So where are we at?

Following September 11 we were a united country. So much so that the country supported an invasion of Iraq in spite of there being no real reason at the time to do it.  In our minds, the war there blended with the one in Afghanistan.  It was all one effort.


We removed the Taliban from control of Afghanistan and crushed Al Qaeda there.  But we must admit that the country remains very unstable and the Taliban has managed to somewhat regroup and remains a threat.  So, after fifteen years, we really haven't completed that job and we speak fairly routinely about simply leaving the country.  Typical American short attention span has kicked in, apparently. Forgetting what Afghanistan can be, we choose to pretend the country is ungovernable, rather than press for the end of the job.  That the country can be stabilized should not be doubted, as it has been a stable country in periods of its past.  The question is whether we choose to complete the job or not.  Right now, in spite of commemorating fifteen years past, its doubtful that we will.

Our war in Iraq massively destabilized Mesopotamia and our bungling of that has in turn brought about a disaster.  As the Baath regime collapsed Al Qaeda moved in and a new war commenced.  That religious war was successfully concluded by making alliances with Sunni chieftains, but not before Al Qaeda in Iraq had evolved into the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a new strain of the same movement which determined to bring about t he Caliphate right now, thereby taking the delusion into the presence.  Biding its time, it struck after we prematurely pulled out of an Iraq whose civil government fully aligned itself with the Shiia's of Iran and thereby made itself massively unpopular with the Sunnis.  Taking advantage of destabilization in Syria, and the isolation of that regime, it rose up with success there by taking advantage of an existing rebellion and then spread it self into Iraq, where it remains.  The tide does seem to be turning against it, but it has a lot of fight left in it yet.

The problem is, however, that ISIL, while declaring the Caliphate in existence right now, has changed Al Qaeda's "strike at the west" strategy to a new one, which basically amounts to strike everywhere, with everybody.  It has appealed ti Muslims in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the West with an amazing degree of success, and its organization is so loose that it can effectively take credit for barbarities that stretch from Iraq to Florida.  We are so stunned by this that we can hardly effectively recognize that its a fact, preferring to rationalize and excuse the attacks that come closest to us.

An Existential War

We're so accustomed to thinking of war in territorial terms, and ultimately all war is about territory, that we have not been able to really grasp that the current war is for all the territory, everywhere.  Indeed, in real terms this war shares that feature with the long struggle with Communism.  We face an enemy that conceives of itself having a global mission.  Unlike the Communist, however, it also conceives of that struggle in a sort of eternal terms that can withstand the loss of territory, which the Communist never did, fearing that territory lost was lost for ever.

To use the terms so often applied to the Vietnam War, this is somewhat of a war for "hearts and minds".  We and our enemy conceive of it in that fashion, but they further conceive of it as a war against Devine Good and evil. We may talk of good and evil in this war, but our leaders have a very immediate and sometimes washed out concept of that means.  Our enemies don't.  They are charged with a world outlook that's definiative and vast.  It appeals to people who look for meaning in their lives.  In order to defeat them, if we are to, we have to have a cogent world view as well.

But do we?

Earlier on this blog I've argued that we do not, and I'll argue it here again.

I'll also note that this was not always the case for us.

Here's one of the places I recently noted the nature of our struggle, although it is not the only one:
We're in a war, whether we like it or not, with a variant of Islam that retains a very, very primitive view of the world and men and women's role in it.  Hardly any of us would agree with the social aspects of our opponents movement, but in opposing it, we actually have to have a point.
We don't have much of one.

Which is why I will say, form time to time, that we could lose the war.

We could, truly, simply because we're fighting for. . . well what is it? The right to wear pants that are too tight? The right for men to self identify as gerbils? What was it?

Okay, I know what our core values are, and so do you, but how often does anyone actually think on those core values and where they come from?  Not very often.  But our opponents do.

Indeed, endowed with a strong sense of right, wrong, and the order of the world, even if we don't agree with it, our opponents have been remarkably successful in recruiting simply by using our libertine example as a recruiting too.  And, part of that it might be noted, has been a distressing success rate with Europeans, including European women.

When we think of Islamic extremist groups in Europe, or the US, we tend to think that they're all radicalized Syrians, basically. But that's very far from true.  Some of them are, but others are radicalized first generation Muslims in Europe, and more than a few have been Europeans with no Middle Eastern heritage. What's going on here?

Well, agree with it or not, Islam stands for something. That's much less true of the modern West.

Now, I'm sure people will react that we stand for democracy, and liberty. But do we?

I think we do, but in such an unthinking way that our examples are pretty hollow, as we've forgotten what democracy and liberty, in the modern context, were supposed to mean. They are not the same as social rationalization and libertine.

Indeed, democratic thought is deeply embedded on a concept of the natural rights of man. And the natural rights of man is a principal that stems from the concept of a natural law. Natural law holds that there are certain fundamentals, observable as "self evident", that all people have.  People, although not poorly educated modern lawyers, like that idea as it is self evident and it seems so very fair.

But what is seemingly forgotten in our modern world is that a natural law that recognizes natural rights will care not a wit about an individual's sense of what rights would be, were he creating them. That's something else entirely.  Indeed, that's so debased that its' basically sick.

Natural law credits nature, and if we're to understand what our entire concept of the world, government, liberty and the like is based on, we have to do the same.  We have free will, but we are not free to will what we will. We cannot, that is, create 6 billion individual realities, there is only one.  Everyone's window on that reality will be different, at least somewhat, but that doesn't mean that there's more than one reality, it means that we're too small to grasp the whole.

Anyhow, properly viewed, we believe in individual liberty as we believe that people are endowed with free will. But that means that people are at liberty to act in accordance with the nature and the natural law, but they can't change it.  Nature, and its law, is bigger than we are, and unchanging.

That may seem not to fit in here (and this post is stunningly rambling, I'll admit) but it very much does.  We have looked out at the rest of the world since 1776 and maintained that we are the champions of liberty and justice, as that's part of the natural law. We've sometimes done it badly, but we've done it well enough that we've been a major factor in bringing about a "liberal" sense of the world globally.  We've certainly had the assistance of the the political and philosophical cultures of other European powers in that, even though not all of us have quite the same sense of these things as a national culture.  I'd maintain, however, that down on the street level the overall concepts are not far removed from each other.  That is, the ethos of 1798 may have been the spark of 1917, but at the same time, the average Frenchman, up until mid 20th Century, held views more akin to an Irish tenant farmer than a member of the Parisian mob.

Since 1917, however, that being the returning and focusing of 1798, we've struggled with an opposing view that detests the concept of anything but an animalistic view of our species and which has been largely at war with nature.  In more recent years even though its political expressions have failed, it philosophical ones have not, and since the turmoil of the late 1960s most western political thought, both at home and abroad, has been devoid of any deep meaning.  Long habituated to our political culture, we have not noticed much until recently as it slipped its moorings and became fully devoid of a deep meaning, although many now do sense that, but others have noticed.

In the Islamic world some certainly have, and in a Europe that took in a lot of Muslim immigrants post World War Two, post Colonial retreat, and post Algerian defeat, many residing there, where assimilation is poor, undoubtedly have.  In the years following 1968 a Europe that had grasped that its political and cultural outlook was fully Christian in origin now doesn't know what it even is.  It's for "fairness" and "human rights", but it doesn't know what those concepts are grounded in.  We aren't doing all that much better, although we are doing better, which is frankly why our enemies view us somewhat differently.

For a people who retain a sense of a deep purpose, a larger culture that is grounded on nothing more than "if it feels good, do it", comes across as abhorrent, because it truly is abhorrent.  That it is abhorrent provides the basis for young Europeans, particularly European women, crossing over into the minority culture.  It's notable that more than a few of these women have been Scandinavian or British, as these areas are where the fall is amongst the most expressed.

This doesn't mean, of course, that they're right, and we're wrong, overall.  I'm not urging that we all become radical Muslims and salute the black flag.  Not hardly.  Rather, I'm urging that we take a deep look at the deep things.
And that would mean recognizing that "if we feel good, do it", not only is a moronic philosophy, it's contrary to nature, its contrary to nature's law, and its extremely destructive.  We need, apparently, to get back to where we started from and do some serious thinking.
Our enemy, to put it simply, has a world outlook that looks outside of the world, to an eternal something.  Right now, in the West, we pretty much stand for the proposition of absolute relativism.  The problem with that is not only is it not emotionally satisfying, it's demonstratively false.

There is, very obviously, a set of absolutes as nature exists.  No matter what a person's view is of nature, it doesn't care much about that view.  It is clearly outside of us, and it clearly has its own set of laws.  Early on, and indeed up to very recently, we clearly understood that ourselves.  Now we don't.  This is so much the case that five of the current Supreme Court justices actually believe that the law protects any sexual union as long as it makes individuals feel good.  That's stupid.

And it puts us at a disadvantage against an enemy that recognizes a natural law, even if its a debased version of it.

So, in a war like this, gaining territory will help, but it won't determine the war.  This is a war of ideas. They have some. We have. . . low, low prices and Justice Anthony Love! Kennedy.  We aren't going to win a war based on that.

So, in terms of how we're doing.  Well, we're loosing interest in winning in Afghanistan and Iraq is a mess. We will probably prevail in Iraq, but we have some serious thinking to do. What do we stand for? We need to think about that. We have the high side of the argument, if we don't simply wash it all away.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

The disappearnce of the bridging company and the reappearance of infantry.

Yesterday a spokesman for the Wyoming Army National Guard announced that the 1041st Multi-Role Bridge Company will soon cease to exist.

The units is, rather obviously, just of company size, but it was somewhat unique for the Wyoming Army National Guard. The unit was created, if I recall correctly, back in the 1980s.  I can't recall if it existed or not while I was in the Guard, but I don't think it did.  I recall it existing at the time of the First Gulf War, however, but by that time the two battalions of the 49th Field Artillery here in Wyoming had been consolidated into a single battalion, which in turn meant that they had significantly fewer men than they had just a few years earlier. That reflected the downsizing in the military that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.  When that occurred, some armories were closed and in some regions of the states there were no more positions for artillerymen.  That was the case in southwestern Wyoming, which is where the bridging company was put in.  A friend of mine who was a career Guardsmen was in it for a time. The unit was activated for the First Gulf War, and the Second Gulf War, which the newly consolidated artillery was not, but because the wars did not develop as planned they were not deployed into combat.  If I recall correctly, during the second war the unit was held up due to problems with its anticipated deployment (i.e, it might have been anticipated that it would be sent to Turkey).  By all accounts it was a good unit.



"Engineers from the South Carolina Army National Guard’s 125th Multi-Role Bridge Company (MRBC), train to slingload the unit’s Bridge Erection Boats (BEB) with a U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook on Strom Thurmond Lake at the Clarks Hill Training Site in Plum Branch, S.C., June 18, 2014. The airlift operations were part of the unit’s annual training where platoons trained to transport their boats by air in response to a natural disaster when transportation by road was not possible. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Brian Calhoun/Released)".  The Wyoming Army National Guard's MRBC unit had boats of this type and indeed was this type of unit.

It was announced that soldiers in the unit would be folded into a new Wyoming Army National Guard infantry company.

All this is really interesting in regards to what now calls itself "the Cowboy Guard" (when they were bigger, when I was in it, they didn't use that nickname).  

To start of with, this is an interesting example of the further contraction of the Army, even while we are fighting a war, which is fairly amazing. Granted, we aren't engaged in heavy combat to the same extent we were just a few years ago, but we are still fighting and yet we're still shrinking the military.  No doubt it's not anticipated that we'll need to deploy bridging units against ISIL, but none the less, this is fairly surprising.

On the other hand, the folding of the unit into infantry is perhaps telling.  In our recent wars the fighting has been done by infantry.  Indeed, we've gone from the situation of World War Two and Korea, in which infantry were heavily used and always in short supply, but where the majority of casualties inflicted in combat by the U.S. Army were inflicted by artillery, to a series of wars starting with Vietnam were infantry, and indeed small unit actions, have become increasingly important.  In terms of a long cycle, we've actually seen the reemergence of infantry, and indeed infantry squads, as perhaps the most significant element of our current wars.

"U.S. Army Soldiers wait to be picked up by UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters south of Balad Ruz, Iraq, March 22, 2009. The Soldiers are assigned to the 25th Infantry Division's 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team. DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Walter J. Pels."  Modern U.S. Army infantry.

It's also interesting as it is the first time that the Wyoming Army National Guard will have infantry in over 100 years.

I'm not exactly sure when the last Wyoming Army National Guard infantry unit was disbanded, but I suspect it was just prior to World War One.  The state's Guard was mostly infantry from statehood up until some point just prior to the Great War.  Artillery entered the Wyoming Guard nearly from the onset, and there were artillery units in the Guard here at least as early as the Spanish American War, but there were infantry units as well.  Oddly, the existence of the infantry units is hardly ever noted and even the State's Guard today doesn't list them in its official on line histories, but they were there.  Photographs of infantry units mustered for the Spanish American War and just prior to World War One are available at the State Archives and I've seen them.  I suspect that there were some infantry units right up through the mobilization for the border crisis with Mexico, but the one source I've seen that mentioned them is one that I don't own.  During World War One, however, the Wyoming Guard served as heavy artillery.  Infantry did not reappear here again until just now.

One of the things about infantry is that it's always needed, and while it isn't cheap, any longer, to train and equip infantry, it's cheaper to do so than other units, and a bit easier to train as well.  All of that is probably why infantry shows up in a state like Wyoming, which you would otherwise suspect to have been cavalry, early on, and the Wyoming Army National Guard was horse cavalry, and then horse mechanized cavalry, from the early 1920s up into World War Two, when it became mechanized cavalry.  Artillery came and stayed after that.  Now, with the  Guards continuing to shrink, infantry has returned, although only as a company.

In that took, however, the Guard sort of oddly recalls the Guard prior to World War One.  After World War One, the Guard existed in fairly large, statewide units.  Following the Cold War, it seems, the Guard here started to see the reemergence of small single purpose units, although some always existed. The reappearance of infantry in this fashion strongly resembles this old form.  Of course, the return to a small American military also recalls the historic norm. So in terms of trends, the past is sort of repeating, or rather perhaps echoing, the past here.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Converse County Courthouse, Douglas Wyoming





This is the Converse County Courthouse in Douglas Wyoming. This modern office style building houses all of the principal offices of Converse County, as well as one of the four 8th Judicial District courtrooms.

The Converse County War Memorial is located in the lobby of this courthouse.

Monday, April 27, 2015

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Fremont County Courthouse, Lander Wyoming

Courthouses of the West: Fremont County Courthouse, Lander Wyoming:




This is the Fremont County Courthouse in Lander Wyoming. The courthouse includes all of the administrative offices of Fremont County as well as housing two courtrooms for the Ninth Judicial District, which also has courtrooms in Pinedale Wyoming and Jackson Hole Wyoming.

The courthouse lawn has a nice memorial to all war veterans from Fremont County since statehood, naming them in the memorial.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Everything old could be new again: Letters of Marque and Reprisal

In the old days, when a nation went to war, it issued piracy licenses.  I.e., letters of marque and reprisal.



Letters of marque and reprisal were just that.  In times of declared belligerency, nations licensed individuals to outfit their own vessel for the purpose of raiding enemy shipping, by which we mean commercial shipping.  It was legal, and it was lucrative, as the raiders claimed the enemy ship and its content as a prize and divided it up amongst themselves.  Indeed, the practice was so lucrative that navies occasionally had trouble recruiting men to their national navies during wartime, as signing up for a privateer was a better economic bet.

Letters of marque and reprisal are provided for in the same section of the Constitution; that the never used and nearly forgotten section providing for Declarations of War, are.  Specifically, it states that Congress has the power to:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
Congress is too chicken to declare war anymore, and hasn't since 1941.  The Korean War, the Vietnam War, both Gulf Wars, etc., were all without declaration.  This has been addressed here a couple of times before, and clearly some of the non declared wars shouldn't have been declared, and we've always experienced that to some degree.  So, while I suppose its only musing, I left wondering why Congress can't issue letters of marque and reprisal in situations of near war.

For example, I wonder what issuing them following 9/11 would have been like?  Piracy licenses to that new type of pirate, the Cyber Pirate, might have cleaned out Al Qaeda's bank account in about a week.  And now that we've been raided by pirates ourselves, in the form of oversensitive North Korean Clown College pirates, and as we've seen what private hackers can do to a country like North Korea's internet just for entertainment, I have to wonder what they'd do if they feared that Congress might debate letters of marque and reprisal?

Friday, July 25, 2014

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and the Fate of Arab Christians

I've started a couple of threats on the topic of ISIL and what's going on in the Middle East.  In doing that, I wiped one out and decided not to publish it, and another I have still in the draft stage.  Post that appear here are sometimes in the draft stage for a very long time.

But that does no good if the intent is to comment on something topical, which this is.  The Sunni insurgent group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant is acting to bring about the absolute end of Christianity in Iraq, and should it succeed in Syria, it will do the same there.

Christianity is one of the oldest surviving religions in the region, older than Islam in that region we so heavily identify with Islam, and even within relatively recent historical times its been fairly vibrant there, although it's always been repressed since the region came to be dominated by Islam.  In those areas where it remained strong, and they are surprisingly numerous, it was in part because populations of Christians remained relatively numerous.

And by Christians we mean Catholic and Orthodox Christians.  Not necessarily the Latin and Greek branches of those Faiths, but part of them.  Iraq, due to English influence, once had a small population of Anglicans, but by and large Christians in the region are some type of Catholic or some type of Orthodox Christian.

Americans tend to believe that all people are tolerant democrats at heart, which they are not.  One of the things that has been very difficult for Americans to accept is that large patches of the Islamic world are heavily intolerant to any other religion, and always have been. The violent suppression of other religions is a hallmark of Islam since its early days.  Now, it is true, as some will not doubt point out, that this isn't universally true, and there are plenty of contrary examples. Still, the exceptions don't make the rule, and by and large the cradle of Islam has been pretty consistently hostile to other Faiths.

In the Middle East, where this has not been true, it has tended to be the case that there remained reservoirs of significant populations of other peoples.  And where the governments in power have not acted to suppress Christianity in recent decades, its tended to be for this reason, or because the leaders and elites of those countries have been Westernized and tended to adopt some of our values, or because the governments were minority governments which themselves feared the majority.  And, finally, in some instance the governments were, whether we like it or not, secular governments that were heavily influenced by authoritarian philosophies.

This latter example is significant in that Islam really doesn't recognize a distinction between a secular and religious authority, and it its early days the two were the same.  Indeed, the entire concept of a Caliphate, which ISIL states its seeks to restore, is based on that.  For much of its history made no recognized distinction between civil and religious authority, so most early Islamic governments made some claim to having religious authority.  And the religion was spread at sword point early on. And the early part of its history resulted in a vast Islamic empire, whose titular ruler was the Caliph.

The Caliphs claimed authority by virtue of the delegation of that authority from Mohamed, and blood relationship to Mohamed, in some cases. The problem here, from that point of view, is that only two early Caliph are universally recognized by Moslems as a Caliph.  After the first two, the Sunni and Shiia split occurred, and they thereafter have a different view on who was legitimately a Caliph.  Hence the concern that Shiia Arabs in Iraq and Shiia Persians in Iran have over Sunni ISIL.

At any rate, it is definitely the case that for many long decades a Sunni Caliph held a claim of authority over a huge track of the Middle East, and even up into Spain at one point, before the Islamic tide began to recede.  Different dynasties arose and over time the claims to authority became murky.  The last person to claim any such authority was the Ottoman Abdülmecid II, who lost that position as a result of the revolt of the Young Turks and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.  In the 1920s the Turkish parliament abolished the position, and it passed into history.  That established the concept of a secular government in the Islamic world, but one that was a military backed authoritarian one.  For the most part, most governments in that region that haven't somewhat followed that model haven't been successful.  And some of those that didn't follow it, but were still somewhat successful, were based on a quasi fascist model.

The net result of this is that since George Bush II we've been pretty naive about the region and we failed to recognize that if we took the lid off anywhere, the resulting mess would be very bad indeed.  In wiping out Baathist fascism in Iraq, we succeeded in unleashing rural radicalized primitive Sunnism there.

Now, I am not claiming for a second that every Sunni has murder of Christians in his heart.  That was never the case,  and it is less the case now than ever. But its less the case now than ever because the Arab world is slowly entering the globalized western world, and as it does the concept of a global theocracy appeals less and less to its base.  It's just not going to happen.  And most don't want it. For that matter, for much of its history, when there was a Caliphate, its legitimacy was open to question and its actual administration had fallen into the inevitable corruption that such things do.  The Caliphate ISIL imagines is one that didn't exist for a very long time.

But there are still a lot of poorly educated, or just desperate, Sunnis who will and are turning to the root core of their faith, and that root core has always advocated the violent evangelizing of the entire world, and the conversion of it at sword point.  Most of the time, most weren't acting that way, but there are spectacular examples to the contrary.  That's what  they are now trying to do in Iraq.  Christians are being ordered to convert or die.  Churches are being destroyed.  And there's even an order to Christians for them to give up their daughters to Islamist for marriage.

I fear that we're going to do nothing about this, even though it was our act in bringing down Saddam Hussein, who as a Baathist was a secularist, that caused this to come about.  And we're likely to watch this story repeat itself in Syria, to our shame.  We're going to ignore the situation as the hard truths of it don't fit the My Pretty Pony world we like to pretend exists.  We don't like to admit that there's a large group of people who are not democrats, and not tolerant.  We don't like to admit that those people will act lethally. And we don't like to admit that we blew it in invading Iraq in the first place, and blew it again by leaving too soon, and blew it further by thinking the the government we left there was going to work.

And we also have a hard time, or at least many Americans do, in appreciating that the Christians in the region are real Christians.  They definitely aren't evangelical protestants.  They trace their communities to the very earliest days of Christianity, and they are Arab Christians.  To many in the west, that seems very foreign and strange.

There are lessons here in great numbers, but I fear that nobody is going to bother learning them.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

The "Greatest Generation". Admiring the generation while disliking that monkier.

WESTMORELAND. O that we now had here
    But one ten thousand of those men in England
    That do no work to-day!
 
KING. What's he that wishes so?
    My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
    If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
    To do our country loss; and if to live,
    The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
    God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
    By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
    Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
    It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
    Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
    But if it be a sin to covet honour,
    I am the most offending soul alive.
    No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
    God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
    As one man more methinks would share from me
    For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
    Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
    That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
    Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
    And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
    We would not die in that man's company
    That fears his fellowship to die with us.
    This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
    He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
    Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
    And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
    He that shall live this day, and see old age,
    Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
    And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
    Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
    And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
    Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
    But he'll remember, with advantages,
    What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
    Familiar in his mouth as household words-
    Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
    Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
    Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
    This story shall the good man teach his son;
    And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
    From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remembered-
    We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition;
    And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
    Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
 From Henry V.

 Members of the 4442nd Regimental Combat Team in action in Italy. The 4442nd's enlisted ranks were entirely made up of Japanese Americans, largely recruited from internment camps.  It is the most decorated unit in the American Army of World War Two.

The recent anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, which commenced on June 6, 1944, and which started the nine month period in which the Allies in the west marched towards Germany, and into it (while of course the Soviets marched  in from the east at the same time) has caused a lot of public recollection of the nation's World War Two veterans. And that's a good thing.  But one of the things we hear a lot in such recollections, not by the veterans themselves, but by those recalling them, is the term applied to them by Tom Brokaw in his book about their generations; i.e., "The Greatest Generation".

It may be a minor thing, but the term has long bothered me to a certain extent.  I was surprised recently when author Rick Atkinson, who wrote the phenomenal three volume series on  the American Army in the ETO during World War Two, The Liberation Trilogy, stated the same thing, in much blunter terms, in an interview on the occasion of the release of his third volume, The Guns At Last Light.  He flatly stated that they aren't the "greatest" generation and was slightly condescending regarding the term.

I don't mean to suggest that the American generation that fought World War Two isn't highly admirable, I think they were, but I am glad to hear at least Atkinson make that comment.  Here's why.

For those with long memories, or perhaps just for those who grew up in the 60s and 70s, "the war" meant World War Two.  We all knew a lot of World War Two veterans.  So, "the war" was World War Two.  Even when Korean War veterans like my father spoke of "the war", they meant World War Two.


A soldier comforts a comrade grieving over the death of a wounded comrade.  Fought using a mix of new and World War Two weapons, the Korean War caught the American Army off guard when it featured conventional combat recalling World War Two and World War One.  It never achieved the status in the public's mind that World War Two had, and it quickly seemed to be forgotten by the nation during the booming 1950s.

Unless people were speaking in the present tense.  In that case, the "war" was the Vietnam War, which the country fought actively from 1965 to 1973, and which came to its final end the year before the nation's bicentennial, in 1975.

 
American soldiers in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.  Fairly significantly younger on average than their World War Two counterparts, they were also better educated and more ethnically diverse.  In spite of the common myths about them, they had volunteered for service in Southeast Asia in fairly significant numbers and their desertion rate was one of the absolute lowest of all time for a U.S. War (the Mexican War has the highest) up until the wars following 1990.

It's important to remember that life went on for the survivors of World War Two, who remained active in public life well into the 1980s, and in many instances well into the 1990s.  And they resumed, or in many instances sort of started their lives, after World War Two.  Indeed, one of the greatest films of all time, for those who like to follow movies, is 1946's The Best Years Of Our Lives, which dealt with the subject of restarting a life while that topic was still a bleeding wound in American society.  It's stunning, watching it, to realize the war had just ended when the film was made.

When I was a young, it was common to call this generation "The Depression Era Generation", and in some ways that term is a better one than "The Greatest Generation", as it includes the larger population of men and women  and it stretches the generation out a bit on both ends, including people whose age or occupation exempted them from service in World War Two, or who were a little to young to serve in it.  Be that as it may, a feature of this generation is that they'd grown up in an era of economic strain and deprivation that's nearly unimaginable now and went on to fight a war that was so Titanic we frankly can't imagine it now.

Food line, 1937.

None of that is  news, nor is it news that a "baby boom" followed the war as that generation returned home and made up for nearly 15 years of lost time.  

It's Holscher's Fourth Law of History that "war changes everything." and this is certainly true of World War Two and the generation that fought it as enlisted men (it's often forgotten that the oldest American commander in the war had been in the Army during the Spanish American War, and that there were plenty of old soldiers in World War Two in every army).  The war opened up education and opportunity, following the war, for the survivors of it in a way that had not existed before. Very often missed by current commentators, the war and the Depression produced a political outlook in that generation that was quite Liberal in political orientation, while remaining socially conservative.  That expressed itself in a definite comfort with the Federal government being active in funding and expanding education, with education otherwise remaining traditional in its structure.

The net result was that the fortunes of those who fought World War Two were fairly good following the war, although for a variety of reasons, and by the 1950s this was expressing itself to even a greater extent in the fortunes of that generation's children, who were reaching university age.  For the first time in American history a university education went on from being a privileged to a middle class expectation.

And its here were, I think, we return to the term "The Greatest Generation."  The Depression Era Generation was a great one, and suffered and rebuilt in ways we can hardly imagine, but pretty early on, as a generational characteristic, that was lost on their children.

This is a broad statement, of course, and nothing that can be said about any one generation is true of everyone in the generations, which is extremely important to remember. But it is also the case that people grow up in an environment and accustom themselves to it, unless they are aware its abnormal.  The Depression Era Generation regarded the Depression and World War Two as abnormal, which it certainly was, and they reminded their children of that quite a bit.  Their children grew up in a time of economic plenty and educational opportunity, and regarded that as normal.

In our society, we're accustomed to speak of youthful rebellion as a norm, and something that repeats itself every generation.  But there's no good evidence of that whatsoever. By and large, that doesn't occur, and quite often the difference between one generation and another is thin indeed.  But the difference between the youth of the Boomers and the lives of their parents was vastly different.  And this seems to have at least contributed to the massive social upheaval in the western world in the 1960s and 1970s.

During that period, it was pretty common for those in their early adulthood to hold the World War Two generation in contempt, and those holding that contempt were their children's generation.  Individuals certainly admired the lives of their individual parents, but there was a pretty widespread contempt as a generational aspect.  Frequently the World War Two or Depression Era generations were regarded as "squares" or the like, with their children probably not even grasping the extent to which their parents lives had been transformational.  Contempt tends to be returned, and to some extent in this case it was, but with not much of an effect.  A person can't take this too far, of course, but that it was a feature of the climate of that times can't be really denied.

This really began to change in the 1990s.  By that time the aging Boomers had abandoned revolution themselves and were looking back to an imagined more conservative time for  guidance.  In doing that, the generation began to redress some things had felt guilty about from its youth.  In regards to the Vietnam War, it's interesting how the Boomers who fought that war, and who had been vilified to some extent for doing so, were suddenly regarded as heroes.  And shortly thereafter, the same generation rediscovered their parents and were awestruck by the ordeals that their parents had endured.  With a short view of history, they went from regarding their parents as squares to their being "The Greatest Generation".

But are they?  Well, that's a pretty long claim, and a person has to look at it pretty carefully. For one thing, if that claim is a valid one, does it apply to those in that generation form any of the Allied nations of World War Two?  The Great Depression, for example, was even worse in Canada than the United States, and Canada entered the war in 1939.  Shouldn't the term apply to them as well?  And certainly it must to the generation of British youth who served in the war.
 
The Winnipeg  Rifles land in Normandy, June 6, 1944.  Up until late war, Canadian solders serving overseas, including my Uncle Terry who participated in Operation Overlord, were all volunteers for overseas service.

Those British youth, it should be noted, if university educated (which only a tiny minority were) had infamously declared in the early 1930s that they'd never serve in another war, turning their back on the sacrifices of the UK during World War One. But when the time came, they more than rose to the occasion.

What about Soviet youth?  No European nation had suffered more in the first half of the 20th Century than the Russians, although often at their own hands. Those who fought as young men in the Red Army had grown up in a period of horrifying oppression and deprivation, and they died in droves during World War Two.  Over 80% of all German battlefield deaths were due to the Red Army, and yet at the same time, but at the same time the Red Army served a political leadership that was as evil as any that the world has ever produced.

Taking it out further, however, is The Greatest Generation greater than the generation that fought the Civil War?  That seems a pretty tall order.  Or what about the generation that fought in the Revolution?  For those men, who signed up to fight on the side of the Continental Congress, they were taking a step which arguably made them criminals for a crime punishable by death. And even if the British did not take that view, at the time they engaged to serve the new nation, the volunteers did not know that and could not be assured that the view of Parliament would not change. 

Union cavalry, Civil War.  By the second year of the Civil War those entering the service had no illusions about winning quickly, but they showed up anyhow.

And what of the generation that fought World War One?  Recently I've heard a couple of interviews of authors who wrote on that generation of Americans and their findings are shocking by modern standards.  That generations seemed to have regarded the war as one more hard bad thing in a hard life, not expecting much going in, and not expecting much going out.  If they aren't perceived as great it might be because they expected nothing much out of life other than hard work, and World War One was just one more example of it.

First Division Victory Parade, Washington D. C.  The sign nearby is still urging the public to "Save Food".

Sometimes the term The Greatest Generation is used ironically by those now in the Boomer generation to castigate the youth of today.  No doubt the world and our nation has changed enormously since 1945, but much of the change that commentators now complain about came about due to the "revolution" that that very generation brought about.  If the youth of today do not seem to have the values and views of the generation that fought World War Two, and which we now so admire, perhaps the generation that brought so many changes about and created the world that the youth of today are living in should take stock of that, and no doubt many do.

But also, that just sells the youth of today short.  There are plenty of reasons to worry about things, including culture and society, but to assume that people would not rise to the occasion is to assume a lot without much evidence.  What we have seen is that today's youth has volunteered to fight in three wars in 25 years and it has done so without compulsion.  No draft exists today, as it had for every American War since the Spanish American War leading up to the first Gulf War. Indeed, the war in Afghanistan is the first American war that has ever been fought in which the combatants were 100% free of some sort of compulsory service at some point.  There has not been a draft since 1973, but the last soldier brought into the Army via conscription retired only last year, that being a long serving NCO who had first come into the Army as a conscript.  Up until 1865 every American male had some sort of compulsory militia duty and there were still men who had entered service in that fashion, or through Civil War conscription, serving as late as the Spanish American War. This current generation of servicemen is therefore really unique.
Solder of the 1st Infantry Division, with M14 rifle, in Afghanistan.

All that goes to say, I suppose, that some generations rise to their times, and some sink.  The World War Two generation certainly rose to theirs, but then the one that immediately followed and served in Korea did as well. The one that had fought World War One also had, and certainly the Civil War generation did as well. The current generation lives in the richest times the country has ever known, in spite of a widespread assumption to the contrary, and while it faces a lot of challenges, those challenges aren't of its making.  All in all, they're doing well. 

Epilog

Recently the Federal Court interviewed some of the seventy (that's right, seventy) World War Two veterans who are still serving on the Federal Bench.  I'll comment on that elsewhere, but one of the questions the interviewer asked is whether they thought they were the Greatest Generation.  The answers were interesting.

Federal Judge Tom Stagg, a Nixon appointee who plans on serving on the bench until he dies, sure thought so:
Q. Do you consider yourself to be part of a “Greatest Generation”?
A. Compared to what I see today, yes. I think you get duty pounded into you, or did in those days, and you learn it as boy, as a Boy Scout, as a member of a military unit. You have assigned duty and you have to do it. You even want to do it. I would no more have stayed home during World War II. I can’t imagine doing that. This is my country. I’m proud of it.
They didn't all feel that way, however.  Here's the quote from another serving Federal Judge who is a World War Two veteran:
Q. Do you like the phrase “the Greatest Generation”?
A. I don’t like it. I think it glosses over the imperfections of the American society in that time. They forget that we were terribly racially biased in the Army. Black troops were treated miserably. … This is part of the Greatest Generation that isn’t mentioned, and I’ve seen terrible things that the military did. That inevitably will happen. I think it’s overblowing the character of the people who were in the Army, were in the Navy, in the Air Force. Which is not to diminish what they did, or in any way detract from their contributions, but I think to blow up any particular generation as the Greatest Generation is a mistake.
Judge Leonard Wexler, however, also agreed with the Greatest Genreation tag:
Q. Do you like the phrase “the Greatest generation”?
A. Yes, I like it. I think it fits. We were the greatest generation. I mean, everybody was united. Everybody stood together. I’ll give you an example. When I got home and I would take the train, a Brooklyn kid, I had a cane, everybody would stand up to give me a seat. Everybody was so nice. I really felt good that we were a great country at one time, united.

Judge Jack Weinstein sure didn't, however:
Q. Do you like the phrase “the Greatest Generation”?
A. It’s nonsensical. Every generation is great. We responded to difficulties of the depression and the war, and people I see today are responding to other problems. Every generation has greatness, and it has despair and has things that it should be ashamed of doing. For us, it was no different. I remember seeing things that were absolutely disgraceful—the way African Americans were treated and the way women were treated. Ours was not the greatest generation.

Judge Arthur Spatt agreed with the term, but had a more nuanced view:
Q. Do you feel you were part of a “Greatest Generation”?
I think the greatest generation was this country as a whole. It was united. Everybody worked toward one goal, whether it was giving up your food, rationing, or becoming an air raid warden on the block to make sure the lights were out at night. Everybody participated, with a full heart and no dissent. So, when in the history of this country does this ever happen?