Oh well, never mind!

So here's the headline of the day, fifteen months after Mr. Obama promised to close Gitmo and try enemy combatants in civilian courts: Guantanamo war court resumes hearings amid uncertainty. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On being Hamid Karzai

Robert Haddick of Small Wars Journal has a provocative piece online that’s summed up in this sub-head: “Note to the White House: You don't own Karzai -- he owns you.” With each escalation of American forces, Mr. Haddick argues, the Afghan president has a firmer grip on Mr. Obama’s testicles. The essay concludes: “the United States is fighting in Afghanistan not against terrorism but for its reputation, for its ability to convince the wider world that it is in control of its affairs and that its power can achieve challenging goals. But this means that the world audience, and not the U.S. president, will decide for itself whether it is convinced about the efficacy of American power.” Which was pretty much the case in Vietnam forty years ago. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

If you can't beat them ...

Say what you like about Hamid Karzai, but you can’t call him an American puppet. On Saturday, we’re told, he said to members of the Afghan parliament: “If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban.” (The quote appears in the ninth paragraph of one of those Gray Lady “analyses” that are really editorials in disguise. This one beats the old drum that if only we get rid of the incumbent, everything will be fine.... Right! We had great success with that in South Vietnam!)

No doubt Mr. Karzai is playing the Cold War game of increasing American aid by threatening to cozy up to the enemy. (Alternately, he may have noticed the weird tendency of this administration to apologize to its enemies while pulling the rug from under its friends.) But his threat ought to be taken seriously: at a certain point, joining the Taliban is exactly what the West must consider doing: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!”

As it happens, my favorite military theorist made just that argument in his Patterns of Conflict briefing of 1986. The object of a counter-insurgency campaign, he begins, is to “Undermine guerrilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of people—rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.” That is: we must prove that we represent the good guys. To which he adds a sly footnote: “If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides!”

Blue skies! – Dan Ford

Thinking about the ObamaTax

The curious thing about Mr. Obama is that he is both the first American president not to consider his heritage to be that of northern Europe and the first to believe that the U.S. would be better off if it turned itself into a European society. Government ownership of the means of production, mandatory health insurance, higher taxes on "the rich," demonization of disfavored industries and activities ... and inevitably, the value-added tax. Irwin Stelzer of the conservative Hudson Institute has a piece in the WSJ this morning about the VAT, as it is nicely abbreviated. (Nice, because the acronym is as ugly as the tax.) He takes the British VAT as his model for discussion. It's hilarious, especially the bit about bras and body stockings: bras up to 34B and body stockings up to 27.5 inches crotch to shoulder are deemed children's clothing, hence free of tax; above those limits, add 17.5 percent to pay the salary of the bureaucrats to wrote the rules. Read it and weep. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On saving employers money

The Gray Lady has a curious story this morning, damning a company that contests bogus unemployment claims. "When fewer former workers get aid, a company pays lower unemployment taxes," explains the reporter somewhat disingenuously. Um, right, but doesn't the American taxpayer save money as well? So isn't this a good thing overall?

One would hope that this is just an example of overambitious muckraking on a dull morning, but it fits into a pattern of finding businesses and blaming them for all our problems. A meltdown of the financial system--blame the banks, never the Federal Reserve or Barney Frank. Exploding health-care costs--blame the drug companies and, more recently, blame the insurance companies for raising rates. And now we have this niche company named Talx (an odd name, as the reporter ominously notes in his very first sentence) being demonized in a time of unemployment. (But not for government workers, and evidently not for reporters with imagination.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On losing control of the border

There's a depressing analysis on Nightwatch about the "cartel" warfare on the American border, where the Mexican military are proving unable to defend themselves, let alone control the gangs. Mr. McCleary speculates that the cartels are hoping to establish a lawless zone like the one the Taliban enjoy on the AfPak frontier.

This resonates because last night I finished reading Sam Huntington's splendid The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. A recurring theme in that book is that the Southwestern states of the United States have become a Latin American sub-nation with the potential to turn this country into what Huntington calls a "cleft nation."

This is an astonishing book. It was published in 1996, the year Osama bin Laden issued his little-noticed "declaration of war" against the United States, but it predicts and explains the bloody battles to come between Islam and the West. Some time ago I blogged about a later book by the same author that addressed this question more directly: Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity. Now we seem to be living the history that Sam Huntington foresaw. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

We do not anticipate that Guam will tip over

I really do have projects more pressing than watching YouTube videos, but this performance by Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson ought to be seen in every civics class in the land. (Do we still have civics classes in our highschools? If not, this is the place to begin.) Blue skies! -- Dan Ford