Another bloody century

This is a remarkably fine book, in which the Anglo-American war scholar Colin Gray takes an educated guess at what future warfare will be like. 'It is a rule in strategy,' he writes in one of his piquant declarations, 'one derived empirically from the evidence of two and a half millenia, that anything of great strategic importance to one belligerent, for that reason has to be worth attacking by others.' He happens to be speaking of space, and in particular the American communications satellites in earth orbit, but as China's recent hacking of American business sites has demonstrated, the warning is equally true of cyberspace. We depend on the internet more than most: ergo, the internet is a particularly inviting target for China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Al Qaeda, und so weiter. Eminently worth a read. Click here to find it on Amazon. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

It's the inheritance, stupid

Now in his second year as president of the United States, Mr Obama is facing a bunch of problems, and guess what? They're all Dubya's fault. 'For a president who campaigned on a promise to close Guantánamo, and who just missed a self-imposed one-year deadline to get the job done, the meltdown of a potential Manhattan 9/11 trial is the latest measure of the stubborn complexity of his national security inheritance,' gravely explains the New York Times today. One would think, rather, that they were the latest measure of his national security policies. Mr Bush, after all, did not force Mr Obama to close the Caribbean prison, nor to bring Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to trial in downtown Manhattan.

Federal law requires that a criminal trial take place where the crime was committed. (I didn't know that!) If Ground Zero has been ruled out, rural Pennsylvania would seem to be a prime candidate. But the Justice Department is also looking at Newark and Boston, from whose airports the fatal jetliners took off. That will thrill the folks who just sent Scott Brown to Congress. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The new shape of war

He might not be your first choice for scaling the walls of Troy, but this soldier spends his days on the cyberwar front, and we can hope he's agile enough for that. In Foreign Policy yesterday, Robert Haddick discusses the silent menace of Chinese, Russian, and al-Qaeda cyber attacks. This is warfare at which the Other has all the advantages, given that the US is arguably the most open and the most networked nation in the world. He links to a lengthy document from the Center for a New American Security, Contested Commons. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The root causes of terrorism

Meet al-Amriki--'the American'--a jihadist in Somalia. Reared in Alabama as a Southern Baptist, Omar Hammami was an immensely popular lad in high school, 'a gifted student with visions of becoming a surgeon', as Andrea Elliott tells us in the NYT Magazine. (A surgeon! Where have we seen that before? Doctors in my experience have a loathing of war that puts them on the edge of pacifism, but an astonishing number of jihadists seem to be doctors or would-be doctors.)

Just as poverty is supposed to be the 'root cause of crime' in western countries, so has it been advanced as the 'root cause of terrorism' in what we used to call the Third World (and indeed in the West). It's nonsense, of course, but these notions die hard, so Ms Elliott devotes much of her very long article to pondering the seeming contradiction. Worth a look. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Trillion-Dollar Barack

Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson became famous for an obscenely large settlement, the subject of a book and a feature film. Our president is making ‘Billion-Dollar Charlie’ look like a tightwad. Though his State of the Union made a Clintonesque pivot toward frugality, the ‘freeze’ proposed (for one-sixth of the national budget) is upon a level undreamed of by previous presidents. Mr Obama presided over a deficit in excess of a trillion dollars last year, is presiding over another this year, and will preside over yet another in 2011. That's the deficit, not the budget.

Three trillion dollars! How much money is that? Well, the accumulated national debt of the United States didn’t reach $3,000,000,000,000 until 1990. So it took 199 years—and every president from George Washington to Ronald Reagan—to do what Mr Obama will have managed in less than three.

Above: some of the Congressfolk who will be earmarking those trillions. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Most ignored news story of the decade

I woke up this morning thinking good thoughts about the people of Honduras, whose popularly elected president will be sworn in today, and I naturally turned to the New York Times to see what the Gray Lady (or should we rename her the Blue Lady?) has to say on the matter. Nothing! I then tried Google. I was encouraged by a link titled Honduras Inauguration Today, but it turned out to be a clip from a Spokane newspaper in 1986.

The fourth return from Google was a short squib in yesterday's Baltimore Sun, though the hinge wasn't the inauguration of Mr Lobos but the fact that El Salvador will re-establish diplomatic relations following the inaugural. Well, that's good to know. But what will Mr Lobos have for breakfast? And will the US State Department restore the visas it pulled from the members of the Honduran supreme court? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

China also is interested in you

Yesterday I quoted the aphorism about war being interested in you, even if you weren't interested in war. This morning the NYT has a piece about cyberwarfare, which China has busily been waging against Google, other American corporations, and probably the US Defense Department and your personal email account. Concludes Thom Shanker of a simulated attack: 'The enemy had all the advantages: stealth, anonymity and unpredictability.'

Sounds a lot like the Taliban, doesn't it? Not to mention the Viet Cong, the Chindits, the Irish Republican Army, the Arab Legion, the Boers, Quantrill's Raiders, Commandante Theresa of the Peninsular Wars, the Minutemen, Roger's Rangers.... Irregulars have been baffling regulars ever since warfare was defined as the exclusive business of the nation-state, at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Cyberwarfare is just another front in this endless contest of the weak against the strong.

Colin Gray wrote a brilliant and overlooked book on the subject of how war was going to play out in the 21st century: Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (Phoenix Press). I'm reading it now. I can't believe it wasn't required reading in War in the Modern World. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

From Osama to Obama

Most of my friends (Good People, all!) don't believe that we are at war, except in two mistaken campaigns of our own choosing. Their arguments to this effect bring Leon Trotsky to mind: 'You may not be interested in war,' the old Bolshevik may or may not have said, 'but war is interested in you.' We may not be at war with Osama bin Laden, but he is most certainly at war with us, as we are reminded by a recent audio tape claiming credit for the underpants bomber of Christmas Day:

In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful

Peace be upon those who follow the right path

On behalf of Osama to Obama: if our message could be sent to you by the word, we should not have sent in by planes.

The message we wanted to provide you with the aircraft of the hero Umar Farouk, May God lighten his sufferings confirms the previous messages transmitted by the heroes of September 11, which were repeated before and after that date.

The message is that the United States can not aspire to security before it becomes a reality in Palestine. It is unfair that you have a quiet life while our brethren in Ghaza live in bad conditions."

By the will of God, our attacks against you will continue as long as your support the Israelis.

Peace be upon those who follow the right path.

Like Trotsky's quote, the warning may be misattributed, and even if genuine Osama may be taking credit for something he had little to do with, but the words nonetheless worth hearing. Al Qaeda is interested in us. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Lucky son of a bitch

The New York Times website has a fine sequence of photos by Tom Hicks, showing a Marine patrol in the 'Stan, in the course of which Lance Corporal Ryan Mathison (left) stepped on a mine that didn't explode. 'Lucky son of a bitch,' said his corporal. Indeed. The story, by C J Chivers, is here, and in Saturday's paper. Blue skies, Ryan! -- Dan Ford

It's the tribes, stupid! (or not)

I’ve twice featured Jim Gant’s essay on the subject of ‘It’s the tribes, stupid!’ Alas, not everyone is so taken by it as I or, more recently, Generals Petraeus and McChrystal. Take Christian Bleuer, who blogs at Ghosts of Alexander from the standpoint of his studies of Afghanistan language and culture at Indiana University and Australian National University, where he’s a doctoral student. Recently he brought all the academic guns to bear on Major Gant. It’s easy to make fun of a graduate student arguing with a footsoldier, especially when it’s not entirely clear that Mr Bleuer has ever been to the ‘Stan, but his essay is certainly worth reading. It’s long, and I admit I skipped here and there. It ends with this rhetorical question: ‘And we’re supposed to expect that American soldiers can navigate all of this while embedding with a local tribal leader?’

Well, if they can’t, then we might as well bring them home, because not much is going to happen otherwise. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Don’t blame us; we’re from Massachusetts!

I Googled in vain for an image of the famous bumper sticker from 1974, when Mass. residents crowed over the fact that theirs had been the only state in the nation not to line up behind Richard Nixon’s second term, then going down the drain: Don’t blame me; I’m from Massachusetts. The closest I could come was this tee-shirt.

As it happens, the 1970s were also the last time Massachusetts had a Republican representing them in the US Senate. In Harry Reid’s infamous formulation, Ed Brooke was a light-skinned African-American who spoke without a ‘Negro’ dialect. (Indeed, at the time, I heard some grumbling that Mr Brooke was actually a white man passing as black.)

I would prefer to regard Scott Brown’s electoral triumph—in a snowstorm, at that, traditionally Democratic weather—as a referendum on Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, and not on the president they have so badly served. Mr Obama is, after all, the only president we’ve got, and it’s bitter to see him fail, just one year after he took the oath of office with universal acclaim. The people of Massachusetts, that bluest of blue states, have sent him a wake-up call. Let’s see what he does with it. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Of IUDs and IEDs

I’ve mostly been amused by the hoo-hah over the installation of body scanners in airports, most especially the ruling in Britain that they can’t be used on travelers under eighteen because of child pornography laws. (Doesn’t this just guarantee that the next airline bomber will be a youngster with melting chocolate eyes?) But in today’s Wall Street Journal, the war scholar Edward Luttwak discusses a more important drawback to body scanners: the ones now being deployed won’t work for the simple reason that every human being has at least one body cavity large enough to contain explosives that can bring down an airliner.

As for the metal detectors now in place, he scoffs: ‘At enormous cost, and by inflicting enormous inconvenience, [the technology] almost guarantees the detection of any explosive device—so long as it is firmly attached to a nail clipper.’

There is of course a simple, cheap, and effective alternative, though it would rouse up the Good People in righteous anger—especially those Good People who have transportation laid on for them by the US Air Force, hence aren’t inconvenienced by Homeland Security lines—and that is … profiling! ‘To screen passengers as persons instead of their bodies and belongings has an overwhelming advantage: It can detect a would-be terrorist even if the specific technique he tries to employ is not previously known. To inspect all shoes after a shoe bomber almost succeeded, or to pat down passengers after the underwear bomber almost succeeded, provides no defense against the next techniques that could be tried at any time.’ Mr Luttwak has some sensible suggestions as to how this might work in practice. We can only hope that Homeland Security adopts them before somebody explains to Osama bin Laden how easily an IUD could be converted to an IED. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Carmen in hi-def

If you are okay with the concept of Carmen as a six-foot-tall, blue-eyed northerner with dimples, Elīna Garanča has just redefined the role of Bizet’s eponymous gypsy. In the Met Opera’s high-definition telecast on Saturday, you could practically see the steam rising from her. When the cigarette girls emerge from their factory—oddly situated in a hole in the ground—they are sweating from their labors. Garanča raises the ante by taking a wet rag, reaching past her breasts, and mopping her armpits. Later, after the knife fight with a colleague, it transpires that she’s been cut on the thigh, and she uses what is presumably the same rag to clean the wound and of course to flaunt the thigh to Roberto Alagna’s corporal. Then she throws the rag to the ground in front of him. He picks it up, clasps it to him, and all but inhales it. I was reminded of the scene from A Fish Called Wanda, in which Kevin Kline rouses his animal spirits by inhaling deeply from his armpits before leaping into bed with Jamie Lee Curtiss.

The only downside of broadcasting the opera into movie theaters is that sometimes the audience brings its television manners to the performance. I hadn’t noticed this in my earlier forays to the Showcase Cinema, but Saturday afternoon I had chattering ladies to my left and a hectoring European behind me, two sets of running commentaries. May they choke on their popcorn. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Lawrence of Afghanistan

On November 25, I published a link to Major Jim Gant's online essay, One Tribe at a Time, and suggested that Mr Obama could do worse than adopt it as his new-new Afghan strategy. I assessed the chances of that as little or none. But according to the Washington Post today, the chances have suddenly and hugely improved:

'A decorated war veteran and Pashto speaker with multiple tours in Afghanistan, Gant had been assigned by the Army to deploy to Iraq in November. But with senior military and civilian leaders -- including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command -- expressing support for Gant's views, he was ordered instead to return to Afghanistan later this year to work on tribal issues.

'"Maj. Jim Gant's paper is very impressive -- so impressive, in fact, that I shared it widely," Petraeus said, while McChrystal distributed it to all commanders in Afghanistan. One senior military official went so far as to call Gant "Lawrence of Afghanistan."'

If you aren't willing to read his monograph, at least look at the WaPo's slide show with a narration by the major. It's the essence of his argument. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Moteurs de gouvernement

Like General Motors and Chrysler in the US, the French automaker Renault has discovered that bailouts inevitably result in governmental meddling. The company hoped to shift production of its next-generation Clio subcompact to Turkey. Pas aussi rapidement! said employment minister Laurent Wauquiez: ‘Renault is not just any ordinary company - the state holds 15% [of its stock] and we are not going to be spectators because this is a company that has received a lot of assistance during the crisis. A company that sells to French consumers must, as much as possible, produce in France.’

The photo shows the current Clio, built in France and Spain. At that, it’s cuter than the Fiat 500 that is supposed to save Chrysler from ruination. Perhaps Turkey could build the Clio for the American market? Blue skies! – Dan Ford

On not being evil

It's never wise to underestimate the cynicism of politicians and businessmen, but two cheers at least to Google, which has threatened to pull out of China unless the People's Republic (what a name!) backs down on its attempts to control internet search. It's pretty clear where the people stand in this dispute, as indicated by the flowers being placed on the Google logo.

The PRC seems to operate on a two-tier system, whereby the masses are heavily restricted and an elite are allowed to go around the restrictions, for example by using proxies and virtual networks. Silencing Google may have the odd result of making it even more influential among the minority with the skill and determination to 'scale the wall'--fanqiang--in reference to censorship's popular name as the Great Firewall of China. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Farewell to a solider

In May 1964, a helicopter dropped me off in a paddy field in the U Minh Forest of South Vietnam. As was my custom, I immediately set off to find an American. In The Only War We've Got, I described him as 'a grizzled man in drenched fatigues, with three or four days' growth of beard on his chin, and no rank or insignia except the crossed-bayonet emblem of the Vietnamese Rangers. He also wore the Rangers' rust-brown beret, with a tattered towel beneath it to keep the sun from burning his neck.... I honestly wasn't sure whether he was an American advisor or a soldier of fortune, perhaps a French sergeant who'd stayed on to join the Vietnamese army.'

He proved to be Sgt William Sindledecker of Spring Lake, North Carolina. Many years later, I got an email from his daughter, who had seen this photo in the book. She told me that he'd resigned from the army he loved in order to could bring up his daughters, who were alone in the world after their mother divorced him. The meetings that the internet makes possible!

This morning I heard from her again, to say that the old soldier died January 13 from an aneurysm. 'He was healthy, happy and strong,' she wrote. 'His passing was fast, which is what he would have wanted. I promise you when I say the man never stopped living. He was full of life and love for his family and friends.' His obituary is here. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Mr Bean goes to heaven

These haunting photos were distributed by the Associated Press from Middle Eastern television stations. They show the CIA suicide bomber (left) as a young physician with a distinct resemblance to Rowan Atkinson's comic character, Mr Bean, and (right) robed and bearded and armed for jihad. Given that the underpants bomber was the son of a banker, the Fort Hood shooter a psychiatrist, and the British terrorists from a few years back all with medical connections, we seem to have a phenomenon by which middle-class Muslim men act out their frustrations by blowing themselves up, along with whatever infidels happen to be in the vicinity. (Dr al-Balaw and Major Hasan share another characteristic: they both have the hangdog look of men who were were bullied by their schoolmates when they were growing up.) What a waste! -- Dan Ford

Terrorism? No big deal!

Well, let’s see: in the past couple of months, Islamic terrorists have had two successes and a scary near-miss—at Fort Hood on November 5, aboard Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, and in Afghanistan last week. Do you have any doubt that if they happened on Dubya’s watch, the media would have been swarming over him, like blackflies in the Maine woods? But with the light-skinned, non-dialectical Mr Obama in charge, the story is played rather differently: hey, no big deal! This very morning, the New York Times has a ‘news analysis’ arguing that ‘the politically charged clamor has lumped together disparate cases and obscured the fact that the enemies on American soil in 2009, rather than a single powerful and sophisticated juggernaut, were a scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor than skill’. (The suicide bomber in the 'Stan isn't part of the 'analysis'.)

To be sure, our chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are vanishingly small. I'm really not sure what the takeaway is supposed to be. Shall we set al-Qaeda aside as a nuisance on the lines automobile accidents and the seasonal flu, or do we conclude that the war again terrorism has been won? Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Democracy moves in Honduras

The supreme court of Honduras, which gained universal condemnation last year for the sin of ousting a president bent on becoming Latin America's latest caudillo, has agreed to hold hearings on the military officers who sent President Zelaya into exile in his pajamas. (One suspects that the US and like-minded governments were more offended by the pajamas than by what they labeled a 'coup'. Emperors have ever been afraid of being caught out without their clothes.) The offer was made by the country's joint chiefs of staff.

This is the act of a democratic nation, and heartening news in an era when democracy has been on the wane throughout the world. Can you imagine anything similar happening in Venezuela? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The 60th vote

The Wall Street Journal this morning is positively salivating over the possibility that Ted Kennedy's Senate seat might be filled by--a Republican! 'The Public Policy Poll found that likely Bay State voters oppose the Democratic health plans by 47% to 41% and that they give President Obama only 44% job approval,' the editors write. 'This in a state he carried by 26 points only 14 months ago. It also found Republicans much more motivated to vote than Democrats.' (They would have to be, given Massachusetts's deep-dyed blue tint.)

The contenders are Martha Coakley, in the donkey suit, and Scott Brown, the elephant in the healthcare china shop. Mr Brown either has a 15 point lead or no lead at all, depending on whose poll you believe. (One of his campaign ads shows Jack Kennedy touting the advantages of a tax cut.) The special election is January 19. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Harry Reid regrets

Poor Harry Reid! Not only does he have to face Nevada voters annoyed at him for ramming a despised healthcare bill through the Senate, but now he must walk the walk of shame in what was supposed to be our ‘post-racial’ nation.

‘I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words,’ as he is quoted in the New York Times. ‘I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African-Americans, for my improper comments.’

Omigod, what could the senator possibly have said? Did he use what we now call the N-word? Did he speculate on the reasons for minority school performance? Did he, could he, have argued that blacks have a special talent for basketball? No, much worse than that: he seems to have told a journo that Barack Obama could become president because he is ‘light-skinned’ and has ‘no Negro dialect, unless he want[s] to have one’.

Well, duh. Here is a truth, and everyone in the United States and most of the rest of the world knows it’s the truth, but in America it simply can’t be said. ‘Improper comments’! I am reminded of the 1930s show trials in the Soviet Union, and the mea culpas, more recently, of erring apparatchiks in Saddam’s Iraq and the People’s Republic of China. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

How to place fourth in a two-party election

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan writes about the ‘catastrophic victory’ that Mr Obama is determined to achieve by remodeling the healthcare system, when the public doesn't want him to. She then goes on to project a similar ‘catastrophic victory’ for the Republicans, who she assumes will take control of the House of Representatives in November. I’m not so sure! It’s not just that Mr Obama has blown away his popularity; it’s not only that the voters are fed up with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. It’s that Washington is in the national doghouse.

Among the Rasmussen Polls’s recent findings: Republicans lead Democrats by nine points in a generic Congressional matchup. That sounds like great news for Republicans, and a vindication of Ms Noonan, except for the fact that one doesn’t get to run against a generic opponent; it’s always a real candidate, and so must you be.

But the hilarious finding is what happens when Rasmussen restricts his probing to independents—those who claim to be a member of neither party yet are likely to vote. When asked whom they’d support among a Democrat, a Republican and a tea party candidate, independents chose the tea party candidate by 33 percent. Undecided came in second with 30 percent. The Democrats came in third with 25 percent and the Republicans fourth with 12 percent. Other recent findings that ought to cause seismic changes in Washington but probably won’t:

* 52 percent of Americans oppose the health care bill
* 53 percent don’t want the bill to cover abortions
* 55 percent say it’s better to let California go bankrupt than bail it out
* 58 percent think Congress is doing a lousy job, and the same number favor waterboarding the underpants bomber
* 67 percent think the country is on the wrong track
* And 78 percent think the health care plan will cost more than they’ve been told.

Blue skies! – Dan Ford

'We are at war' - really!

I can be forgiven for not noticing, since I get my early morning news from the New York Times online, but it seems that yesterday Mr Obama actually said this, according to CBS: 'We are at war.... We are at war against al Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, and that is plotting to strike us again. And we will do whatever it takes to defeat them.'

This, by contrast, is the headline on the NYT story: 'Obama Details New Policies in Response to Terror Threat'. Ho hum, right? Right: I didn't read it either.

Talking about burying the lead (or lede, as journos like to spell it)! Not until the fourth paragraph does the Gray Lady quote the president's first phrase, and that bit about 'far-reaching network of violence and hatred' appears nowhere in the story. All the news that's fit to print.... Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Berlin Blockade, 1948-1949

There's a really good account just published about the Berlin Blockade that arguably started the Cold War. My review of it is in the Wall Street Journal this morning. And here is the book on Amazon.

It's sloppily edited, which seems to be the norm in the 21st century, but it's an excellent read. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Girlie GI

I’m not a great fan of a gender-neutral military, perhaps because all of my descendants are of the female persuasion. Anyhow, there are a whole raft of reasons why, during most of recorded history, warfare has been a masculine pastime. But even I must admit that there are aspects of warfare that benefit from a woman’s touch. Can you imagine GI Joe replacing this splendid young Marine in Afghanistan? Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Better late than never

The State Department has revoked Farouk Abdulmutallab's visa, which means he can’t visit the United States any longer. So what will we do now with the underpants bomber—deport him? Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Goodbye California, hello DC!

During the 1930s, Southern California (odd that we should still capitalize it, as if it were a state distinct from the northern half) was filled with aircraft companies. It would be an exaggeration to say that they thrived—nobody thrived during the Great Depression—but they did survive, and they enabled the US to build almost as many warplanes from 1940 to 1945 as the rest of the world combined. Now the last of them has pulled up stake and moved to—Washington DC! Northrop Grumman has announced it will relocate its headquarters to the capital city, the better to hold hands with (and write checks to) the US Congress. I shouldn’t make too much of this, given that only 300 jobs will actually change locations. But it does show how American power has shifted in the past eighty years, from the periphery to that steamy city on the Potomac. Blue skies! – Dan Ford