Collapsed

Speaking Sunday August 3 with Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and with Aaron Klein, WND, in Jerusalem, re the surprise quitting of Ehud Olmert from the political scene. Under pressure for months by the public prosecutor investigating graft and harassing Olmert on his inconsistent testimony under oath about the investigation, the Prime Minister has at last collapsed to demands and announced he will not stand for his own party's elections. This ends his career for now and removes him from the argument after September.

Sharon's Last Bad Choice
Ehud Olmert has been a problem since the accident of his prime ministership in the winter of 2006. No one chose him; no one wanted him. Ariel Sharon installed Olmert as his deputy after moving the country through the wretchedly wrong-headed policy of withdrawing the Israeli farmers from the Gaza Strip and turning the whole beachfront property over to gangsters and their sponsors in Cairo, Damascus, Riyadh and Tehran. A ruinous policy that was apparent at the time if you just spoke to the farmers. Aaron Klein and I broadcast from the Gaza Strip just days before the withdrawal. We were adamant, our guests were adamant, that this was a bad choice. Olmert was another part of the bad choice.

Ariel Sharon expected to remain in office many years, and to live to his 90s. I spoke on-air to Sharon in September 2005, on his last visit to the United States, and he was confident hat he could hold together the Israeli state in the face of the swelling ambition of Hamas and the dissipation and deception of Abbas and the remains of Fatah and their enforces, Al Aqsa was obvious. Perhaps Sharon could have done, but his health decline and then permanent disability left the leadership of Sharon's creation, Kadima, in the hands of Sharon's last bad choice, his own deputy in the party, the banal, unloved, surly, unfeared Olmert. Olmert's miscues during the Hezbollah war (left) of July-August-September '06 were not a surprise to those who watched him. Olmert's popularity cratered and never recovered.

Beyond Cynicism
The puzzle to me these last two years is why the Israeli system prefers a flimsy character like Olmert to almost anyone. Coalition governments seem to favor the inert and goofily pretentious, and that is Olmert. The corruption charges seem trite. I am told that everyone of note in the Knesset understands cash, but cash in paper sacks in New York? It looks beyond cynicism to prefer the crook you know to the crook who knows what he's doing. Olmert bullied his way through the summer. His departure leaves no prints and no visible scars. The contest will turn between the confident generalissimo Shaul Mofaz (left) and the sympathetic T. Livni. I am told that Mofaz dislikes Ehud Barak, the other general who used to be a P.M. (just before Sharon in 2000) so much that he will tolerate forming a government with another strongman, Bibi Netanyahu.

The Iran Option
What makes the dance of bigwigs so compelling is that this is the crew that must defend Israel from the decidedly cocky Tehran tyrants. Who are coming on, this is not a game, coming on swiftly. Best signals source told me weeks ago that Tehran has communicated to Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Riyadh, Baghdad, that once the Americans are gone from the region, it is attacking Israel to finish it off. The post Olmert leadership must act effectively. The clock is running. The Iran option is strange. Israel cannot stop Tehran, but it can slow it down. Will Mofaz and Bibi approve a strike to bloody the nose of the Ayatollah? Not an air strike. A jab.

True, Tehran may make a mistake and over-react. Unlikely but it is possible. Waiting for the Gaza arsenals to fill up and launch into Ashkelon and Beersheba is no option. And the Hezbollah is fully re-armed in Bekaa. A repeat of '06 is unacceptable, especially since Damascus will join in this time. The Iran option is to move first. How? A repeat of September 6, 2007, will no answer, and might not describe the nature of the threat. Tehran means to provoke the attack. Jerusalem knows this. My best IDF source tells me there is a surprise. The skies remain good into October. What about the sea routes? What about another Karine A (right)? That frustrated Arafat in '02. Would it work today?

Jerusalem 

Olmert is gone. He was an aimless, trivial problem that went on so long it made Israel numb. Now Jerusalem wakes up. Now the problem is completely and simply the defense of Jerusalem.

PUMAs Rising

By John Batchelor. posted on July 30, 2008 at 1:53 AM

Party Unity...

Speaking Sunday August 3 of the PUMAs, the mystery club of the Election of 2008, who have constructed a political phenomenon from a strange defeat. PUMA is the spontaneous invention of Hillary Clinton supporters who, in response to various calls by Democratic bigwigs such as Howard Dean for party unity, replied, "Party unity my a--." Hence the PUMA icon of a feral, cunning cat in the wild is the accident of an acronym that now feels as if it was fate.

I met the PUMAs through my correspondence with a firebrand unit of Clintonistas, called Rezkowatch, where I was treated respectfully and briskly by the master poster, who remains anonymous to me. My education was swift. I went from knowing very little about Barack Obama's campaign, and the machinations of the DNC under Howard Dean and Donna Brazille, to an ability to see through each headline, each primary poll and vote on the Democratic side. I was an innocent in an undiscovered country called the Demorcatic Party 2008. Who knew it was so energetic, treacherous, slippery, wide-open, and dominated by ferocious, mature, savvy, relentless females, who made me blink at the scale of their endeavor, and sloppily dressed, jowly men with thick gray hair who struck me as ungrateful Lotharios (President Clinton seems an example). In the Republican party, we are all of us balding, hesitant, presumptive, gradually inarticulate, and confident the sun will come up directly on us. But these Democrats were like intellectual second-story types, busy, busy bandits, up and down ladders and stairs, and their women were both attractive and scary.

Cooked

I watched from behind the door marked "GOP Exit." I could hear the yelling as Mrs. Clinton won New Hampshire in a surprise, but then the strange noises told me that there was another game. That the Obama forces were skilled at battle, too. And that the Democratic Party rules were for manipulation, evasion, double-cross and especially for hire.

Mr. Obama pulled ahead in Candidates from mid January to mid February despite the fact that Mrs Clinton won Super Tuesday easily. It wasn't close in NY, NJ, California, and still Obama stretched out to a lead of several dozen and more. Now I know that what was happening was that the small states and the traditionally Republican states had been canvassed and organized by the Obama campaign to provide a disproportionate win for Obama. In the end, Obama's lead of approximately 130 to 140 delegates was from a large handful of states that were chiefly caucuses or Southern states. After February 19 and the Wisconsin victory for Obama, Mrs. Clinton won everything of significance except the Red state of North Carolina and the red state of Montana. She won Texas, Ohio, Indiana, and she still couldn't catch up. The game was cooked for the Obama forces. By who?

The Accusation

It comes now to the PUMAs in July. Obama will be the nominee at the Denver Convention. But the PUMAs are going to fight back. The video below is a new presentation of their case. Rather than emphasize how Obama bought the caucus states, and the red states, with his PAC money, the PUMAs are going to present that Obama bought the super delegates.

Accusing sitting Congress Democrats of selling their super delgate votes to Obama for contributions from his Hope Fund PAC to their own Pac is rough. But the fact as chosen for this video support that charge. It is hard to figure how a Democratic congressman in Pennsylvania, Jason Altmire, in a district that Mrs Clinton won by nearly 2 to 1, and in a state she won by ten percent, could pick Obama other than to look at the fact that the Obama PAC fun gave Altmire $10,000 and Mrs. Clinton's Hilpac gave him zero. There are similar examples in California, Ohio, Indiana and so forth. It doesn't pass the smell test.

Denver

What do the PUMAs want? They want a chance to vote for Mrs. Clinton at the Democratic convention, what is called a roll call of the states, so that the Clinton delegates can show how many they are and show how the Obama campaign bought the winning margin of super delegates. Bought. Will it happen? No. But there is so much frustration, cleverness, bloody-mindedness in the PUMAs, and in the stubborn Lotharios of the Democratic leadership, that Denver could be a hoot of acting out.

See below. The charge is simple attack: Barack Obama bought the nomination. Bought. Start the music, this could look like a donnybrook.

Categories: General

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Looking for a Pattern

Spoke Sunday 27 with B. Raman, formerly with Indian Intelligence and now at the South Asia Analysis Group, re the pattern of terror attacks in India (left) over the last several days, at Banglaore and again in Gujarat. And then we also spoke of the two bus bombs in China last week, July 21, at Kunming, the capital of prosperous Yunnan province in eastern China. We also mentioned the accusation by Beijing authorities that there is a terrorist bombing conspiracy in the hands of so-called Muslim terrorists, the Turkestan Islamic Party, from Xianjiang province, following a bizarre series of incidents over the last weeks in Xianjiang involving police raids, gunplay, public executions and grotesque intimidation toward the Uyghur natives.

I asked B. Raman if there is a pattern in all these strange incidents - terror in India and terror in China?  The answer is no.  Not for the two country's incidents being linked together.  But yes, there is a pattern in each case, and the difference between the two patterns is profound. The India attacks are sophisticated, domestic Moslems with continental wide infrastructure. Aided by Pakistan but not based in either Kashmir or Pakistan. Dangerous, savvy, well-organized, and capable of targeting both upscale Silicon Valley development, as at Bangalore, and BJP dominated Moslem-haters at Gujarat. A threat to the Congress government.

Dissent Abused

The answer for the China pattern was upside down and the exact opposite of India.  Not a threat to the Beijing leadership but instead a threat from the Beijing leadership -- an indication that the Beijing authorities mean to threaten and control the religious-based dissenters across the vast breadth of Chinese culture. The Kunming bus explosions were linked to repression of local Christians, chiefly Baptists from before the Revolution. The repression in Xianjiang, and the the so-called crackdown on the underground cell called the Turkestan Muslin League, is fear of the patriotic fervor in a country and culture (left) that was conquered by the Maoist imperial army and has never agreed to be part of the officially godless Han culture. The same is true in Tibet, a conquered country that now resists because the Beijing authority means to repress the Buddhists. Abuse toward Baptists, Muslims, Buddhists, and of course the sadism directed at the Falun Dafa practitioners, all a consistent pattern.

No News from Tibet

Later in the program Sunday 27 I addressed the China pattern question to Mary Kissel (left) of the Asia Wall Street Journal, at Hong Kong, and she didn't disagree that the Beijing authorities regard religious-based dissent as the most threatening to the central authority. Mary Kissel stated that the repression will worsen once the Olympics are passed. I asked her at the close if there was any news out of Tibet. "No," she answered. "None."

The news is that there is no news out of Tibet. The crushing of the Buddhists is well under way. The Baptists and Moslems and Falun Dafa are in the target zone. I will seek to speak again with Alim Seytoff of the Uyghur Humans Rights this Sunday August 3.

No news out of Tibet. And no protest from the West to the obvious and systematic violence directed against people of faith in China. At the least John McCain met with the Dalai Lama, to keep the story in the news on the internet into China.

Update:

AHMEDABAD, India, July 29 - Police found ten unexploded bombs in the western Indian city of Surat, one of the world's biggest diamond-polishing centres, on Tuesday, three days after a series of bombs in the same state killed 45 people.

October 1967

Spoke Sunday 27 with Doyle Glass, author of a meticulously researched and combat-heavy history of Marine Corps combat in Vietnam in October 1967, "Lions of Medina: The Marines of Charlie Company and Their Brotherhood of Valor." It is especially striking to study a book built around the memories of men in a disastrous combat episode that is now 41 years ago, October 12-15, 1967, because not only does that feel as fresh as the Persian Gulf because of the political turmoil that forged today's debates about foreign wars but also because it was that same month that John McCain was shot down over Hanoi by a Russian-made Sam missile.

"Lions of Medina" is a time machine back to the confusion, desperation, and political demagoguery of the Vietnam War. It at once points to the similarities of that time and this - the frustration to make sense of "Why are we in Vietnam?" matching the same for, "Why are we in Iraq and Afghanistan?" - and makes explicit the total differences of war-fighting and mission outcome. Along the way there are revelations about the political education of the now 60- and 70-year-old men and their wives, such as John and Cindy McCain, who are the Vietnam Generation. The flower children got older, and this is their cauldron of fear and yearning.

Surrounded, Outnumbered, Night

Operation Medina was tasked to jump into the antediluvian Hai Lang National Forest of South Vietnam in October 1967 to clear out major combat elements of the North Vietnamese Army. This is near the so-called Demilitarized Zone between the warring halves of the country. This is just south of Quang Tri City and east of Khe Sanh. The terrain is a critical factor, making for a total distinction between 1967 and 2008 for the combatants. In this case, the unit assigned was the Marine Corps, First Division, First Regiment, 1st Battalion. And calling the terrain a national forest is misleading. It was a triple-canopy jungle; primitive, uncharted, impenetrable except on trails, and without any sizable population. In sum, a total war zone that was also the staging area for what turned out to be three NVA divisions.

Charlie Company, led by the diligent Captain William Major (left)  and Gunny Thompson, landed in a trap on October 11, 1967, and proceeded on the morning of October 12 to follow orders to cross a stream and several uphill kilometers toward a high ground that was labeled Regimental Objective 5. Crossing the stream in good order, Major and Thompson deployed the 187-man company in good order, Third Platoon in lead, Second Platoon in support, and First Platoon covering the rear guard. The Third Platoon strung along the route properly, using their machetes to cut through the wall of growth, slow-going and frustrating. The sounds were wildlife and hacking and numbing humid heat. When they broke through to a well-marked, broad, well-trod trail, they were relieved and tempted. And what was wrong with the trail? There should not be a trail in enemy territory unless it has trouble at the end of it.

What followed, when doomed point main Cahill turned the bend to climb to the objective, was that two NVA regiments, the 5th and 6th, launched an ingenious and devastating ambush. NVA had tied themselves to the trees and now dropped grenades onto the Marines. Machine gun crows peppered the trail. The firefight brought Second and First platoons up, and Charlie fought the rest of the day and set a perimeter to get through the night. Cut off, surrounded, without details to call in artillery or air, Charlie prepared for the end. The NVA launched wave after wave of penetrating attack in the dark. A nightmare.

Belleau Wood

Doyle Glass told me that the reason Medina stands out in the minds of the survivors now forty years later is that  each man thought he was going to die. They fought like Marines. Their escape, with eleven dead and nearly 100 wounded, is a monument to training and courage. I told Doyle it all reminded me of the way the Marines had fought at Belleau Wood in June 1918; outnumbered, overwhelmed, defeated, they refused to accept defeat.

And yet now, here in 2008, watching McCain of the Charlie Company mind-set, McCain who was shot down (left)  and imprisoned for five years with the same thoughts those men of Charlie had at the time, I think of how Mr. McCain as a candidate must struggle to convey to the voters his sense of confidence and faith in the United States and his fellow veterans. The NVA were brave men, too, and they were led by ruthless men, Giap, Ho, who threw away their lives in order to defeat the United States Empire. McCain knows this. He knows the Vietnam War was directed by political leaders, Johnson and Nixon and McNamara, who did not listen, or who would not listen, to the facts on the ground. Those Marines and the NVA fought, and John McCain fought, for their brothers in arms. Not for Lyndon Johnson, who was deaf to the futility of fighting in triple canopy jungle against patriots who had been at war since 1945; not for Hanoi that was deaf to the tragedy of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who lost their lives smashed against he American firepower - but for each other.

The Vietnam War was badly conceived and poorly led by Washington. The Iraq war was not poorly conceived, as it is part of the theater of operations against the Axis of Evil, now chiefly the Tehran tyrants and their House of al-Saud fellow-travellers, who fund, house and direct the jihad; and the Iraq war has not been poorly led, as the major combat operations, and even minor ones, are now at an end. If this is hard to see sometimes in the newspaper reports, read some of Doyle Glass's book.  You will quickly gain a sense of proportion.  The Vietnam War was a futile and hopeless combat operation in league with rascals against a ruthless and well-supplied patriotic army.  None of this is true in Iraq today, none of it.

Refused to Give Up

There is a distinction that John McCain recognized two years ago that Iraq was not Vietnam, and that Barack Obama has never recognized that Iraq is not Vietnam. There is the distinction that John McCain knows what it is to fight on for the guys next to you, and Barack Obama does not. There is the distinction that John McCain knows what defeat feels like, and Barack Obama does not. There is the distinction that Charlie Company and the McCain types refused to give up, even when surrounded, even when retreating under fire across a rain swollen river with dying wounded.  Refused to give up, to quit, never talked about it while reloading, screaming, bleeding, puking, scrambling to fight again, never even thought about it.  And that Barack Obama thinks about giving up in Iraq all the time.

 Supermax

Speaking this evening Sunday 27 to Philip Carlo, author of the gritty, operatic new "Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss," -- the vile, murderous, faithless, pointless life of Anthony Casso, one-time boss of the Lucchese gang in the 1980s, who is now serving the fifteenth of 455 years at the living Hades of "Supermax," the maximum security federal prison in Florence, Colorado for men-only-Satan-can tolerate.

Mr. Carlo tells a breathtaking story not only with rude energy but also with the unusual connection that his family, his mom and dad, were next door neighbors to Anthony Casso (left, 1995) and his wife and childhood sweetheart Lillian Delduca, in Bensonhurt, Brooklyn, once upon a time. Gaspipe Casso is infamous in late 20th century American crime, and his arrest, surprise cooperation with the DOJ - he is officially a "rat" -- and jailing forever were a sensation in 1993-94.

Worse than Alligators

Gaspipe Casso's tale is not unfamiliar to Scorsese audiences: the growing up virile, cruel and Sicilian or Italian in Brooklyn, the five infamous so-called families of organized crime, the way of the world in East and South Brooklyn in the 1960s and 1970s, and then the sensational events between the decision by John Gotti to assassinate boss of bosses Paul Castellano in 1983 (success, left), and the revenge decision by Gaspipe Casso and his colleagues to assassinate John Gotti in 1984 (failure). All is ceaseless human depravity, so unpredictable that it is hard not to read it quickly and very hard not to feel creepy afterward. It is human beings acting worse than alligators; it is Beyond the Valley of the Zombies. Mr. Carlo's skills include the ability to make the minds of mobsters and cops seem logical, much the way Martin Scorcese would make the movie, "Goodfellas Go to Hades," with Rossini's score, or Frankie Valley's score, with a cameo at the close by Rudy Giuliani as a restaurateur catering the funeral wake.

Satan's Team

Yet the biggest discovery to me is to learn how Gaspipe spends every remaining day of the rest of his 66 year-old life in Supermax at Florence, Colorado. Up at 5, lights out at 9, in a six foot by eight foot plastic and aluminum cell, a brightly lit crypt box, in the collective community of the most notorious human evil of our age, a satanic dream team. There is Ramzi Yousef and Omar Abdel-Rahman of the World Trade Center 1993; Terry Nichols of Oklahoma City; Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Zacarias Moussasoui of 9-11, Wadih el-Hage of the 1998 East Africa embassy Al Qaeda bombings; Sammy "the Bull Gravano, who is dying of Graves's Disease, (the man who fingered John Gotti, who died of cancer at Supermax in 2002, pictured left near the end); also the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern foils of 9-11 as John Walker Lindh and Richard Colvin Reid; and not to forget the vilest fish at the bottom of the hole, Robert Hanssen of the FBI, the man who sold us all to Russia for peanuts and pornography.

Barbershop Lesson

I mentioned to my barber yesterday that I was speaking to Philip Carlo about Gaspipe, and I thought I was contributing to the conversation when I described how Casso hired a bomb-maker to kill John Gotti, in revenge for Castellano, by buying toy cars with remote-activated motors from a Toys "R" Us and connecting them to C-4 that was attached to Gotti's car with a magnet.  The assassination failed (left) when the strike team chose a man who looked as dapper as John Gotti but who was actually -- I couldn't remember the name.

"Frankie DeCicco," said my barber amiably.  He then proceeded to explain to me why John Gotti killed Castellano because John Gotti's brother Gene was dealing drugs and Paul Castellano was going to destroy him.  "It was personal," my barber declared.

From this moment, I realized that all the ears in the barbershop had been listening to us, and that everyone, being either Sicilian-Italian or very familiar with the Sicilian-Italian way of life, understood all of these relationships as if we were talking about the Brooklyn Dodgers.   I didn't say much more other than that I understood all the violence was "just business."

Hate

The puzzle for me, which does not have an answer in this early part of the 21st Century, is how much alike are Satan's team at Supermax.   Are these men all of them the same thing, worthless, self-involved rats who have no purpose, no meaning, who are only and completely the false witness of the moment?

Gaspipe Crasso hates Sammy Gravano (left, but who now reportedly weighs 100 pounds, is bald and toothless in Supermax) and vice-versa, because while they are both "rats," accordng to Gaspipe the federal prosecutors could not keep a deal they made with him to flip and talk because his testimony would have wrecked Sammy Gravano's testimony against John Gotti (apparently they killed so many and so often, that they they each lie just to get through the carnage and depravity), and keeping John Gotti in jail forever was more important to the DOJ in the 1990s than getting the facts out for historians to sort.  The expedience of law enforcement to a conviction and sentence while criminals are still alive to punish superseded the mandate of just the facts. 

But is this same self-involved passionate hatred for other human beings, just anyone and everyone, also true of Ramzi Yousef (left, in 1995) and Abdel-Rahman?  Of Robert Hanssen and Terry Nichols?  Does Richard Colvin Reid just hate and hate?  What of Theodore Kaczynski, does he live inside a mind of hatred for living things around him?  Is that why they did it, the World Trade Center, the drugs, Oklahoma City, the Gangster Disciples, Eric Robert Rudolph and his murder rages?  Not jihad, not money, not cultism, but each of them hates everything?  Because they live only with hatred every hour of every day?  And now they live their hatred in parallel with each other in each exactly alike days in Supermax.  Lights on at 5.  Lights off at 9.

Goodfella

Philip Carlo does mention that a phenomenon of the Supermax regimen is that Gaspipe Casso's moods are fragile, and his thoughts are often a mushy, irrational, aimless pile of memories.  His wife died of a massive stroke in 2005, triggered by a mobster who was shaking her down.  Gaspipe Casso is drifting into a self-torture zone that may not have a better name than madness.  A goodfella in Hades.  

Categories: Liberty

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Greenland Eureka: Another Modest Proposal

by John Batchelor. posted on July 26, 2008 at 12:35 AM

Slip-Sliding Away

Speaking Sunday 27 of the Greenland ice sheet melting from global warming, described by Stephan Faris, NYT, in "Phenomenon: Ice Free;" however the turn of the screw is that the melting is a bonanza for the Greenlanders.  Not only potatoes and broccoli in the shops, not only warm water cod filling the catches of the sturdy fifty-six thousand Inuits, but also there is a sudden mining boom.    Underneath the ice is a cornucopia of minerals.  Nearby the spectacularly named town of Uummannaq, there is a zinc and lead rush.  Gold and diamonds are now part of the search.  The glaciers are scooting on water and just slip-sliding away to reveal what lies beneath. 

The Eureka moment is that the seabed off the northeast coast has 31 billion barrels of oil, untold natural gas;  and the western side toward Canada has more.   As the climate softens, Big Oil's Chevron and so forth are pushing hard for advantages in the pending fields.

The best news is that the largesse will free the colonists from Denmark after the annual subsidy is paid off.  Yes, the waters are rising everywhere - and when Greenland's ice sheet goes (like half a million years ago, left) , the oceans will be up to seven yards higher, meaning all beachfront will become clam and lobster beds; however there is opportunity for the near term in saltbox real estate, ice-fishing tourists, and resorts over waterfalling glaciers.

Global Warming the Cult

And while Greenland sun bathes and prospers, there is a delicious story from Great Britain that combines two celebrity social causes of the last forty years, population control and global warming.   Two physicians, John Guillebaud and Pip Hayes, writing in the British Medical Journal now call for limiting family size to two children, especially in the post-industrial cultures such as Europe and America, because our children generate more greenhouse emissions than the children of the Third World.  Yes, the third child is presented as the culprit.  Greenland melts because we have too many children.  I was suspicious at first that this was a dead-on send-up, but upon close examination there does not seem to be any irony whatsoever in the proposal.  Still, I find it impossible to read the following without breaking down laughing:

"But what about planned pregnancies? Should we now explain to UK couples who plan a family that stopping at two children, or at least having one less child than first intended, is the simplest and biggest contribution anyone can make to leaving a habitable planet for our grandchildren?

"We must not put pressure on people, but by providing information on the population and the environment, and appropriate contraception for everyone (and by their own example), doctors should help to bring family size into the arena of environmental ethics, analogous to avoiding patio heaters and high carbon cars." 

Twenty-First Century Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift's original genius, in mocking the English cruelty toward the Irish, was the "Modest Proposal" that London can manage the Irish population by dividing the children into categories of edible and breedable.  Then feed the former to the latter until the riotous beggarly population of useless, papist, filthy Ireland was contained and even reduced.  The burningly brilliant passage below, admired by Samuel Clemens and every wit since, is astonishingly close in tone to the recommendation by the British physicians.   You are not permitted to laugh while reading the "Modest Proposal" aloud.   An appalled gasp is useful.  There is the strange twist that the British global warmists have turned Jonathan Swift upside down by proposing to limit the lordly in order to save the planet for the beggarly:

"I can think of no one objection, that will possibly be raised against this proposal, unless it should be urged, that the number of people will be thereby much lessened in the kingdom. This I freely own, and 'twas indeed one principal design in offering it to the world."

Poppystan

By John Batchelor. posted on July 25, 2008 at 1:11 AM

"You have a tough job"

Speaking Sunday 27 with Thomas Schweich, New York Times Magazine, re a lengthy testimony of his efforts as part of the American efforts to solve or curtail the poppy farmers of Afghanistan who contribute the vast portion of the opium that becomes the worldwide heroin trade. Mr. Schweich lays out in vivid detail, with names, dates, accusations, naming the names in Afghanistan and in America's allies, that the poppy/opium trade is grander than ever, and that it not only finances the Taliban but also makes rich as Croesus the big politicos in the Hamid Karzai government and especially Mr. Karzai's ethnic Pashtun tribe.

Mr. Schweich's narrative spans the last two years, and he makes clear that the facts in his article are well known to all the players in State, Defense, and the White House; he mentions Dr. Rice, Mr. Gates, the President and the First Lady, and Vice-President Cheney especially, who told Schweich, "You have a tough job."  Mr. Schweich is not a whistle-blower; he is a man on a mission.   Everybody knows about the pervasive, comprehensive, overwheliming poppy crop of Afghanistan.  The NATO and U.S. military commanders will not and do not intend to task their commands to stop the farmers, interdict the trade or destroy the poppy fields.  There seems an apparent one-to-one relationship between poppies and Taliban.  The stronger the poppy trade - which is Afghanistan's supremely profitable crop, organic gold - the stronger the Taliban.  And the Taliban is the most potent in the ethnic Pashtun Helmland (above) and Kandahar provinces where the poppy trade is in a growth spurt.

Eradication

Mr. Schweich is a counternarcotics officer. His mandate is to eradicate the drug trade.  Afghanistan frustrates him to a degree he cannot contain.  The U.S. wants to apply the same large-scale tactics that it employs in Central America, Southeast Asia and Pakistan - spraying the crop with poison from the air - and this is adamantly refused by the Karzai government.   The fall back plan of eradication on the ground, hectare by hectare, is self-defeating because of the scale of the crop and the lack of manpower.  When a new American ambassador arrived in 2007, William Wood, there was a burst of eradication effort. An Anti-Poppy Eradication Force, protected by the Afghani Army, deployed to destroy a quarter of the crop.    It so happened that where the force deployed, Helmland and Kandahar provinces, voted 95% for Karzai, according to Schweich.  The American expectation was that this level of support for the central government would lend a hand. It didn't happen. With passionate particularity, Mr. Schweich levels the charge with a mountain of evidence and anecdote that not only is Afghanistan a narcostate, but also the narco-corruption has turned the Hamid Karzai government into druglords and the U.S. and NATO military into co-dependents.

Poppystan

I sent the Thomas Schweich piece to my best source in Afghanistan and also to Ann Marlowe, who writes persuasively of her experiences in Afghanistan for the WSJ.  Ms. Marlowe responded immediately, acknowledged the vast frustration with the poppy crop, and mentioned a bold idea that the U.S. and its allies just outright buy the poppy crop before it leaves the country to become heroin traffic.   Recall that Afghanistan has billions of dollars in pledges from the G-8 and so forth, and that buying the crop is not far-fetched.  Mr. Schweich mentions that the money flows despite the poppies. (Because of the poppies seems too much vice for Mr. Schweich.)    In fact, the safer the poppies, the more likely it is that the development money will be spent on the people and not on fighting.  During that eradication sweep in Helmland province last year, the locals fought back with heavy weapons and the Afghani Army refused to show up. The effort failed after 1 percent of the crop was erased.

Decriminalize it

My best Afghan source writes that the opinion in-country is that the U.S. in imposing its morality on a country that didn't ask for it.  Afghanistan grows poppies. It has grown poppies for at least five thousand years.  The farmers like it; it makes cash money; it's a traditional way of life in a forbidding landscape of family, faith, magic.  And what authority does the State Department have to make war on poppy farming? What right does the U.S. have to use very dangerous chemical sprays from the air, chemicals that kill the poppies and then push into the food chain and damage every living thing, including humans?  Schweich mentions a counterterrorism tough guy named Kilcullen who growls, "If we are already bombing Taliban positions, why won't we spray their field with a hamless herbicide and cut off their money."

The answers, according to my best Afghan source, are that it won't work, that the herbicide is not harmless, and that the major source of Taliban money is Saudi money through the sticky fingers of the Pakistan ISI who are the rainmakers of the Hindu Kush.  The more the ISI commands the Taliban to attack the Americans -- and the order is easily obeyed when the Americans threaten the poppy farmers --, the more the ISI can collect from the self-destructive and deeply irrational Saudi princes who like to spend their vast wealth on cheap, remote jihad.

Schweich's Rules

Mr. Schweich closes his passionate case with five forceful recommendations that begin and end with -- do something definitive to eradicate the crop.  He aims his darts at Hamid Karzai directly with a bald task; "Enable force-protected eradication with the Afghan set goal of eradicating 50,000 hectares as the benchmark."   He also blasts our allies, "help in this effort of stand down and let us do the job."

I will turn all this over with Mr. Schweich, and with Ann Marlowe as well. Importantly, Ann Marlowe is well known for memoirs about how she survived both a heroin addiction and a romance with an educated Afghani.  I will also correspond the more with my Afghan source, who is not persuaded by Mr. Schweich's case.  Sometimes you have to destroy a country to save it is more cynical than ironic.  Is Hamid Karzai, lord of druglords, not incorrect?  Can we accept that Afghanistan means poppies?

Categories: Liberty, Ummah

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President of the World (auf Deutsch)

By John Batchelor. posted on July 24, 2008 at 6:52 PM

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Windy Pickens

by John Batchelor. posted on July 24, 2008 at 12:35 AM

Don Quixote Pickens Rides Again

Speaking Sunday 27 with Sheila McNulty of the Financial Times Houston re her notice of Texas oilman and tyro T. Boone Pickens, now on a national crotchety-old-coot promotion for his wind power plan. Mr. Pickens's plan is not new, not revolutionary, not impractical, not unlikely, which makes his presentation enjoyable, convincing and sentimental. The useful fact is that the U.S. just passed every other state including Germany to become the number one wind energy producer. American wind power even has a savvy lobby, the America Wind Energy Association (AWEA), on busy 14th Street in Washingon, that is pushing out confidence building news headlines on wind milestones, wind networks, wind legislation. AWEA clearly knows how to whisper affection to Congress (and is in the running to be one of the energy darlings of the 44th president). It also helps that we have much stronger winds than Europe.

Mr. Pickens's plan identifies the Plains from the Mississippi to the Great Divide as the optimum wind ranch, and he names big numbers for development and construction and uses the goal of ten years to produce 20% of our energy needs from wind (other less grandiose figures say twenty years is more likely). Importantly, Pickens is an oilman with a business interest in a wind farm and clean energy gambits, therefore this is all profitable talk for him, especially the wind farm. The Texas legislature just approved nearly $5 billion to construct transmission lines from the wind swept mesas of West Texas (left) to the Dallas Fort Worth complex.  That scale of cash does explain with Mr. Pickens is selling hard, because the Lone Star State is paying hard.

Spencer Tracy Jobs

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the AWEA is swelling with achievements nationwide. The annual convention just held nearly doubled in attendance over '07. The convention for June 2009 in Minneapolis will likely be oversubscribed and a block party. The jobs center at the AWEA website is dense with romantic, far-flung, clever chances.

At random, I toured the AWEA site for business partners and found Magnetech of Maryland, founded in 2000, that offers many jobs across the country such as a wind technician based at Massilon, Ohio. What does a wind technician do? "Up-tower electrical and mechanical maintenance." And what does such a worker need to know? "Electro-mechanical fundamentals, including lubrication, VRCC checks, pitch system calibration, yaw system, capacitors, thyristors, alignment and clearance inspections, plug in service panel." The Spencer Tracy wildcatter part I liked was "Outdoor work in all weather conditions."

Swept Away

In sum, America is swept away by wind, and with cause. There is much to do and learn. Several weeks ago I spoke with Robert Tomsho, WSJ, who reported on the small beach town of Hull, Massachusetts, where two turbines, one of them on the shoreline, had saved the town money and made it popular to the Massachusetts governor and legislature. The astonishing fact is that the long wind tower at Hull is the closest the whole of America has to sea based wind farm. Why don't we have sea based wind farms like Europe? Why don't we build them near our coastal cities with short transmission lines to the customers? Why were forty turbines blocked off the coast of Long Island? The view.

What will make wind power effective is when there is great profit in it. There are strong hints that the day is near. The iconic gigantic pinwheel design is expensive, invites the Not-In-My-Back-Yard crowd, and needs much maintenance. There are many new designs to be pitched, funded by the vultures and transformed into General Electric. I am now one of 1333 viewers of Alternative Eneryg Wind Power website where I learned of a design from Greentech Media in Massachusettsthat proposes a turbine (left) that is based on the ramjet engine concept. No great arms, just a high-speed turbine spinning like a 767 engine, with the winds directed, and an ability to turn to the wind like a weathervane. The company notes that the famous smart Sand Hill Road Kleiner, Perkins is looking at funding the the next stage. There is also a comment from a developer runningWindEnergy7 website for rural wind power customers that warns the concept is already patented in China.

Big Guys

On the other hand, the field is so new, the Malta-based inventor of floating turbines posts a comment on the notice of his development that he is eager to hear from folk who want to learn more. What reading at random taught me is that wind power is where the web was in the 1970s. The AWEA site still reads like a booster club working harder on selling than managing.  It will come in quick time.  We have moved from the old reliable (left) to the next best thing (right) and we're just getting serious.  Once upon a time, we had a toy design called Apple with a graphics-based operating system. We had a text-based operating system called DOS. The names were Jobs, Woziak, Allen and Gates. IBM was curious. Still, it's toy, right? The big guys will never go for it. And what's the big deal.  Everybody with a clunky, expensive, glowing typewriter on the desk? We still have to talk to each other on the phone, right?

Cellphone Taliban

By John Batchelor. posted on July 23, 2008 at 12:16 AM

Another Quagmire

Speaking with Ann Marlowe on Sunday 27 on the deterioration in Afghanistan. Senator Obama's remarks have awakened the sleeping Afghanistan beast, and the senator's assertion, "We need more troops..." is argued by Ann Marlowe as the senator's self-concerned rationalization, not bright policy. The senator is compensating for missing the surge victory in Iraq, Ann Marlowe argues, so now Mr. Obama wants a surge in Afghanistan for the new year; and this is a non-starter at best and very likely the preview of another year of living dangerously.

My Afghan source read Ann Marlowe's piece online and wrote that he agrees with her -- the present approach by the U.S. military is clumsy, economy-sized and futile, and that more of it will just increase the alienation of the Afghani people and push the war to the American front pages as another quagmire. Source is specific as to how the U.S. military does not learn from past mistakes. This is not about all the provinces, and is directed to the tactics in the frontline provinces along the Pakistan border where the Taliban operates freely.

Cellphone Taliban

The problems created by the U.S. in Kunar and Nuristan stem from a signals intelligence fortress mentality. Source reports that the FOBs and other Ops are planted with the sigint wire dividing the US from the natives. No mixing encouraged. Source opines that old-fashioned Green Beret living in the wild would be effective. Instead the military discourages active counter-insurgency, called COIN. After a firefight, brigade and so forth do not permit soldiers to go out and gather up cell phones and other communications devices left on the battlefield. The cellphones are filled with information. Nearly every Taliban, or hired gun, carries a mobile. Daoud Sultanzoy told me weeks ago that the most significant development in Afghanistan is great cell reception.

Also, source argues that more troops will just crowd up the FOBs with support elements. More snake-eaters (macho talk for Spec Ops) are okay, says the source, as long as they go out and mix.

Oddly, compellingly, source says that certain of the bad guys now designated generically as Taliban are actually ready to come in from the cold and be hired by NATO. One group that received much U.S. aid during the Russian war is said to be willing to come out of hiding for the right price. The challenge will be to control the turncoats once they are on NATO's side. Hire the muj to control the muj seems too clever for the U.S.; it does sound sinisterly effective, like setting a backfire.

The Afghan source also provides the stunning fact that some of the villages in Afghanistan are so isolated, and have so little contact with the Americans marching by or flying over, that they believe the GIs are Russians.

Pagans

Ann Marlowe (left) closes her piece by reminding us that one size does not fit all in Afghanistan. What works in one valley will not always works in the next. This is an excellent reminder that Afghanistan is not Iraq, not Iran, not anything recognizable, even for the raggedy and pre-modern Ummah. Ann notes that the Nuristanis of Nuristan Province, where the American FOB was struck at the beginning of July, were pagan peoples about 100 years ago. Not Islam. Pagan. The Taliban looks modern in comparison. Why should pagan rooted villages, without central authority, respond to Americans in armored redoubts, rather that to Iphone carrying guerillas that talk the talk and walk the walk?

Single Greatest Threat

Ann Marlowe also argues that the Want village FOB incident of early July, that I have called a massacre with nine KIA and 15 WIA, "does not demonstrate that the American effort in Afghanistan is on the brink of disaster, as some commentators have risibly argued." Ann Marlowe and I have in passing disagreed on this point, and we will examine it again on Sunday 27. Our colleague, MP Daoud Sultanzoy, declares that the Hamid Karzai government is rotten with graft artists and is the single greatest threat to the Afghanistan future. My Afghan source agrees with Daoud Sultanzoy's judgment.

Pakistan and Iran

Combine a dishonest and slothful cluster of governors and cabinet officers who only want big projects in the country (because the officials and apparatchiks can bleed off their share), with big footprint U.S. military tactics in the mountains against a handful of cellphone-toting mercenaries, and the result is gross fraud, gross violence, and a surly spiral.   And traffic jams in the downtown fortress of Kabul (right).   It's not Vietnam 1975, which looks too organized in comparison, and Hanoi really did then believe in loopy Marxist central control. The only precedence that comes to mind for Afghanistan in the 21st Century is Afghanistan in the 19th and 20th.   Am I negative on Afghanistan? As long as it is attached to the British created monstrosity called Pakistan, as long as it shares a border with the hallucinatory Twelvers who tyrannize Iran, yes I am negative on Afghanistan.

Categories: Ummah

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The New Cold War, Summer

By John Batchelor. posted on July 22, 2008 at 12:17 AM

Mother Russia Wants Respect

Stephen F.Cohen of New York University reported on the New Cold War, Sunday 20, and the lines in the sand that Moscow has clearly drawn over the last year. Moscow relations with Washington and London are as bad as they have been since the end of the Soviet state.   The major issue is that the West, and especially Washington, continues to treat Russia as a defeated state that is no longer central, capable or vital to other regions.  The Americans treat Russians as a conquered and beggarly peoples.  President Bush's peculiar remarks about Mr. Putin's soul do not sound respectful of a co-equal.  In sum, America disdains Russia as a junior savage.  This is baldly wrong-headed with oil well over $100 barrel.  Russia is an energy superstate that is also the possessor of arms, and arms industries, that can project power from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Lines in the Sand

The first line in the sand is the Ukraine.  The presenting issue is the NATO proposal to include Ukraine.  This is unacceptable to Moscow because the Ukraine is the Slavic center of Russia.  Another line in the sand (it is a busy beach) is the Washington proposal to build a missile defense system, the first phase to be placed in the Czech Republic.  A second phase is proposed for Poland.  Moscow regards both these events as provocations that will require counters.  There is also a dispute between Russia and Washington over NATO using Russian radar at Azerbaijan.  Steve Cohen said that Moscow is adamant.  And Moscow finds Washington stubborn, illogical, and also advancing a false argument.  How does a missile shield in Europe prevent an Iranian missile?   The result of all this is that recently Mr. Putin remarked that if the missile shield goes up in Eastern Europe, Russia will be obliged to reawaken short range missiles and target them at Europe. This was the premier success between Reagan and Gorbachev at the end of the Soviet state. Its threatened reversal is alarming.

Georgia and Oil

Another line in the sand, though less deep than Ukraine and missiles, is the tiny but famous state of Georgia.  Georgia has the only pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the West that does not cross Russian territory. Russia does not want Georgia to join NATO; and to warn Tblisi off, Russia stokes the rebellion of two break-away provinces in Georgia who are under the protection of Russian soldiers.  Steve Cohen points to the fact that there are only five million people in all Georgia, and modest industry, so that this is not a dispute over profits.   It is about oil and gas. and  A significant issue also is that Moscow and London squabble over the

Poison

The Litvinenko investigation is another line n the sand that is at the center of the chill between London and Moscow, and may explain why Medvedev was rude to Brown at the G-8 in Japan.  Steve Cohen's opinion is that Litvinenko (left, before and after polonium poisoning) was a smuggler and was killed by his own hand or the hands of his gang. London's opinion is that it wish to question a suspect who is in Russia and who Moscow will not hand over. Bronwen Maddox of the London Times told me a week ago that the Litvinenko matter is profound for the Brown government, not a trifle to be solved with phone calls. Steve Cohen's overall case with each of the lines in the sand is that the Russian empire objects to be treated as second rate and inconsequential by Washington and Europe, and that the new president, Obama or (unlikely) McCain does not have a fresh Russia policy to deal with an energy superstate that also has nukes pointed we know not where.

Moscow and Tehran

My questions to Steve Cohen did not get far enough. Next time I mean to press him on the issue of Russia's power to constrain Tehran, or to impose order in the Middle East.  Does Moscow need Tehran to block the jihadists from Central Asia trouble-making.  Does Tehran seek to out Russia against China to give it room?  Does Moscow see the destruction of the House of al-Saud as a good or bad thing for Russia.  And what of Russia's line in the sand to Tehran that it must not attack Jerusalem?

Ummah Troubles

by John Batchelor. posted on July 21, 2008 at 9:33 PM

Spoke Sunday 20 with several voices reporting on the troubles in the energy-soaked Ummah, in light of the Obama campaign trip through the region and the shifting political canvas in Mr. Bush's Washington (and the total disappearance of the McCain campaign), and there were several surprises:

1. Re Afghanistan, Daoud Sultanzoy, MP from Ghanzi Province, Afghanistan, reached in Kabul, reported that the Obama campaign now makes the same errors of the Bush Administration by placing confidence in the Karzai government. Sultanzoy regards the corruption Kabul to be the major threat to the future of Afghanistan. He believes that President Karzai uses the piecemeal threat of the Taliban as a spur to the UN, to NATO as well as the U.S., to gain money, time and more power. The quote below from Mr. Obama did not much convince Daoud that the next likely president of the U.S. understands that more soldiers, more fighting, more war is not the way forward for Afghanistan. Security along the border with Pakistan is not, says Mr. Sultanzoy, the largest threat to the Afghan people.   Roads, jobs, education, law, transparency, a credible Afghan army and police, these take precedent over patrolling far flung mountain regions such as Kunar province. Mr. Sultanzoy believes that the genuine risk in Afghanistan is the U.S. continuing to support a deadbeat government of graft-artist, favor-seekers and their relatives.

2. "We have to understand that the situation is precarious and urgent and I believe this has to be the central focus, the central front, in the battle against terrorism." Mr. Obama on Afghanistan, July 20.

3. Re Iran, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-president Majr American Jewish Organizations, reported that the Bush administration's recently announced overture to Tehran, sending the third ranking envoy, William Burns, to Tehran to explore talks about the nuclear weaponsprogram and the refusal of Tehran to comply with the IAEA and the UN sanctions demands, is now at a stand-still.  Malcolm said that Mr. Burns (left) had already gone at and returned returned from Tehran and that there will be no change in Tehran's posture. And why should Tehran change now?  The calculation is simple for Tehran: Ahmadinejad threatens and rants, Tehran does not cooperate with the UN, Tehran continues to announce more centrifuges, more enriched uranium, and the Western powers make more concessions and ever larger promises of cooperation in the future. This same calculation works for the Assads of Damscus as well with regard the recent French appeals. Malcom said that French President Sarkozy asked Bashar Assad to greet P.M. Olmert at the recent Union of Mediterranean States, for a phot-op similar to the one that Mr. Sakozy had arranged with P.M. Olmert and President Mahmoud Abbas of the PA (left), and Assad refused. Why do more when reluctance and rebuke wins favors?

4. Re Israel, Aaron Klein reported from Jerusalem that all will be very quiet from the terrorist camps this week pending the visit by Mr. Obama to Amman, Jordan, to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Ramallah. Nonetheless the threat to the region remains Gaza and the Hizballah of Lebannon. The major alert focus right now is on the IDF report hat the Hizballah have positioned first-rate Russian-made ground to air missiles in the Lebanese mountains that can bring down the routine IAF patrols over Bekaa. Hizballah sees this as a potential quick victory over Israel that will gain much in propaganda and has little risk of retaliation. In Gaza, the Hamas remains quiet as it rearms with long-range rockets and sophisticated anti-armor and anti-air weapons. However there is the threat that the rival Fatah in Gaza will strike again in order to shatter the Hamas posture as a peace partner.

5. Separately, P.M. Olmert's legal jeopardy deteriorates weekly.  Last week, one of his own lawyers either quit or was fired because he was advocating or working out a deal with the prosecutors for jail time for Mr. Olmert.  If Olmert is indicted, he has said he will resign.

6. Stephen F. Cohen, Russian historian of New York University, reported from New York on the vast trouble of the new Cold War. Moscow relations with Washington and London are as frayed and volatile as they have been since the end of the Soviet state.  More of this in Tuesday 22 report.

7. Finally, I remind myself that best signals source last week presented to me that the best case for the now imminent U.S. military departure from the Gulf region is that Russia asserts power and money.  Russia offers the best alternative to U.S. power in the oilfields.  Russia can use Tehran to block the Sunni-Jihad expansion into Russia's oil rich Moslem populations, while also limiting the influence of energy hungry and amoral Beijing in the region. It is the Great Game, the Russian Bear contesting with the British Lion over the Oil Rich Pasha.   And Washington is going home in disrepair.

Belleau Wood

By John Batchelor. posted on July 20, 2008 at 1:30 AM

  June 6, 1918

Fort Apache, Afghanistan

By John Batchelor. posted on July 19, 2008 at 1:47 AM

"If you saw them, sir, they weren't Apache."

Hoping to speak on Sunday 20 to Daoud Sultanzoy, an MP of the Afghanistan Parliament from Ghanzi Province, who is inbound to Kabul.  The landscape in Afghanistan is reported to be deteriorating rapidly, especially along the Pakistan border in mountainous Kunar Province (left).  My best signals source reported that part of the rush by the Bush Administration to hand over Iraq to the Maliki-Sistani duet is because there needs to be a shift of combat brigades to the Pakistan border. 

An Afghan source reports that the massacre of nine American soldiers and wounding of fifteen in Kunar Province in the last week, at a Forward Observation Base (FOB) that is now abandoned, was the result of deliberate arrogance by command and control, bad tactics at the FOB, and a general deafness to the locals by the NATO-American forces in the region.  The U.S. Army is reported investigating the incident and reviewing the decisions made by the brigade command.  This is Army speak for SNAFU, and we need a scapegoat.  The report about the Kunar massacre is so alarming -- the FOB was surprised by 200 Taliban at dawn --that it reminds me immediately of John Ford's 1948 U.S. Cavalry epic, "Fort Apache," that was based loosely on Custer's defeat.

You recall that Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda), a West Point popinjay, joins his raggedy command at undermanned Fort Apache with a yearning to find glory now that the Civil War is over and the heroes of Appomattox Courthouse, such as himself,  have been forgotten as relics of bad days.   Thursday gets the picture wrong from the first day when he speaks disdainfully of Indian beggars at the main gate to his second in command, Captain Kirby York (John Wayne):

"We here have little chance for glory or advancement," sneers Henry Fonda. "While some of our brother officers are leading their well-publicized campaigns against the great Indian nations - the Sioux and the Cheyenne - we are asked to ward off the gnat stings and flea bites of a few cowardly 'digger Indians'."

"Your pardon, Colonel," says John Wayne. "You'd hardly call Apaches 'digger Indians', sir." 

"You'd scarcely compare them with the Sioux, Captain."

"No, I don't. The Sioux once raided into Apache territory. Old-timers told me you could follow their line of retreat by the bones of their dead."

"I suggest the Apache has deteriorated since then, judging by a few of the specimens I've seen on my way out here."

John Wayne closes, "Well, if you saw them, sir, they weren't Apache."

Massacre at Kunar

My Afghan source reports that the massacre at Kunar demonstrates the same arrogance as "Fort Apache."   Our brigade just recently stationed this FOB at the bottom of a valley, not on the high ground, and placed it near a village named Want that may have provided good cover to the attackers.  Source reports that the Nuristani locals had long warned brigade not to place an FOB in this valley and that this decision was machismo by brigade.  Source reports that the FOB relied upon signals intelligence and did not patrol aggressively.  Source reports that there were warnings for days before the attack that the Taliban was mounting a force.  Source reports that all or most of the nine KIA were slain at one observation post that was overrun.  The FOB defenders fought off the assault.  But source reports that brigade has now withdrawn all teams and the FOB is abandoned.   All of these points are under investigation.  What is not in dispute is that Kunar is a big talking victory in Kunar for the Taliban.

Obama Afghanistan is McCain Afghanistan

Senator Obama made heralded remarks this past week that he wanted to shut down combat operations in Iraq and shift two combat brigades to Afghanistan.  (And Mr. Obama has nowtravelled to Kabul to meet with the Karzai cadre to start his tour of the region before going on to Europe.)  John McCain has made many remarks supporting continued combat operations in Afghansitan against the Taliban and in pursuit of the Al Qaeda leadership that certain enjoys refuge along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

In sum, the 44th president of the United States is promising more of the same in Afghanistan.  Despite the facts on the ground that the Konar massacre came nearly six years into the mission with no clarity of the mission and no demonstrated success. 

Daoud Sultanzoy has reported on the show and in print that the Kabul government is a disgrace of graft and sloth.  Daoud Sultanzoy has named President Karzai and his family as men at the center of the corruption, men who were not trained to govern to begin with and who are now the permanent, pass-the-hat government.  It is grimly reminding of General Big Minh and his wormy successors at Saigon.  (Is it too early to weigh who will be on the last helicopter out of Kabul?)

Ann Marlowe, who has reported on her ten trips to Afghanistan during the war, does not dispute Sultanzoy's judgment, though she does point to some success among the Afghani Army and some savvy by the NATO forces.  However the prison break at Kandahar some weeks back, which Marlowe and Sultanzoy reported on air, demonstrated that the Taliban is cocky and fearless.  The Canadian troops guarding Kandahar are reported to have stayed in their camp.

Colonel Thursday's Last Stand

At the climax of Fort Apache, Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda) orders a charge of the troop mounted in fours into a trap laid by Cochise of the Apaches.  York cannot stop him, not with reason or insubordination.  The trap is transparent to the audience, and somehow this suggests that Thursday, though he is a knucklehead, is our knucklehead.  At the same time, the men who ride behind him do not choose to die.  They follow stupid orders and are forgotten afterward.  At the last, York find Thursday fallen on the battlefield, somewhat back from his command, which is now surrounded in the valley.   Thursday aims to die with his command, and the exchange with Captain York (John Wayne) sounds  irony:

"Trouble you for your sabre, Captain," says Henry Fonda

"My sabre?" asks John Wayne.

"I must rejoin my command." 

"The command is wiped out, sir, and there's nothing we can do about it."

"I'm not asking your opinion, Capt. York. When you command this regiment - and you probably will - command it! Your sabre, sir."

John Wayne hands over his sabre.

"Henry Fonda asks, "Any questions, Captain?"  

John Wayne watches the doomed Thursday ride to his death.  "No questions. " 

Afghanistan Questions

What is the mission in Afghanistan?  Why after six years is the government no more than Kabul and a few conclaves?  Where are the roads?  Why does Pakistan find it useful to promote the Taliban?  Why are the Northwest Provinces of Pakistan in rebellion from Islamabad and from the 21st Century?  Does Al Qaeda hiding in the wastes of Waziristan represent a credible threat?  Who supports Al Qaeda and why?  If Afghanistan is critical to the region, why aren't Iranian and Pakistani and Russian troops involved?  If the Obama Administration can withdraw combat troops from Iraq and leave the disputes to Iraqis, why not leave Afghanistan's disputes to the Afghanis?  And does John McCain believe the the security of the Persian Gulf depends upon the security of Kandahar, Khost, Jalalabad, the Khyber Pass?

Did the security of the United States of America in 1876 depend upon containing the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Apache?  It did?  Did Captain York think so when he took command of the the troop (right)?  Did Colonel Thursday deserve to die for his blindness?  None is so blind who will not.... JB.

Categories: Liberty, Ummah

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Mr. Bush Sues for Peace, Tehran Wants More

by John Batchelor. posted on July 17, 2008 at 12:09 PM

 The 300 Surrender

Speaking this Sunday 20 with John Bolton and Malcolm Hoenlein re the world turned upside down as the Bush Administrationannounces in this news cycle that it will send an envoy, William Burns, to Tehran to negotiate openly with regard Iraq, nuclear weapons and the on-going stand-off in the region.

What this looks to be right now is conditional surrender by the Bush Administration.  History just rewrote the legend of the 300.  When King Xerxes tells Leonidas that he can keep his crown, just surrender and become my warlord in all Greece, the King of Sparta rises up to make Xerxes bleed and ignite all Greece.  Now President Bush sues for peace at the court of Xerxes and asks for terms.  Tehran does not look to be generous.

What are the conditional terms the Bush team asks for at Tehran?

1.   The US asks, through the ever appeasing Wiliam Burns, to be permitted to withdraw from Iraq at an accelerated pace, right now this fall, getting as many combat troops out as possible and turning over security to the Iraqi army and police.  The Bush administration does not have a choice here.  According to my best signals source, P.M. Maliki in cahoots with Ayatollah Sistani have accepted the Grand Bargain.  Iran gets dominance in Shia-dominated Iraq in exchange for peace to sell oil and rebuild, and the U.S. gets out in humiliation.  Mr. Bush is looking to put the best face on this deal.

2.  The U.S. asks that Tehran make concessions about the nuclear fuel cycle and provide some credible case that the sanctions have worked and that the IAEA can resume inspections.  This is a non-starter.  John Bolton is comprehensively correct when he says this is the one issue that there cannot be concessions if there is to be peace.  Best signals source tells me that there will be concessions, appeasement, weasel words, and then the US and Europe will give up on everything.

3.  Mr. Bush seeks to leave office as a peace-maker rather than as a defeated invader.  Tehran will talk as long as Mr. Bush is president, then it will talk to his successor.  If this looks to be peace-making in the New York Times and London Times, Tehran is not fussing.

4.  Mr. Bush seeks to withdraw some of his brigades from Iraq to shift them to Afghanistan where the sitrep deteriorates rapidly.  I do not have more on this.

5.  Mr. Bush seeks guarantees from Tehran that it will not move against Israel as soon as the U.S. has left the region in defeat.  Another non-starter.  Tehran controls the battlefield form the Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean.  The Supreme Leader commands unwavering loyalty from the apocalyptic Mahdists.  Tehran has reconquered the Persian Empire that Xerxes commanded.  But it will not be complete until it is an Islamic Empire, and that means that Israel is not acceptable to Tehran.

And what of the other players in the new Xerxes Empire under construction?

Sarkozy the Magnificent

President Sarkozy is the new player in the region, and the deal he concluded with Syria and Lebanon last weekend to repopen the French embassies in Beirut and Damascus is a first phase.  Mr. Sarkozy (left, hugging Olmert and Abbas)aims to be the new Western power in the region, more than Tony Blair, more than Mr. Bush or the next U.S. president.  Best signals source says that Mr. Sarkozy is very ambitious.

The House of al-Saud

The picture grows dimmmer.  I do not see anything, and I was not able to learn anything from what I did see.  Not good.  Tehran takes the eastern shore of the Arab peninsula, where the oil is, and leaves the Sauds the vastness and smoke.

The Russian Empire

The Russians are the last best hope in the region.  Oil-rich, militarily sophisticated, with three cash cow businesses in oil, arms and nuclear technology, Russia is in position to stabilize the situation following the U.S. retreat.  Will Russia help?  Russia likes the rise of Tehran.  Best signals source reminds me that the enhanced and victorious Tehran becomes a potent blocking force, a wedge, to keep the Sunni-based jihadists out of the energy regions of Moslem Russia and Moscow's Moslem vassal states, the underbelly of the empire.  Russia is a bright light here.  So long as the new president does not challenge Moscow over NATO in Ukraine, over Georgia, over the missile shield, Russia can impose order.  Also, Russia can make alliances with Europe that will block Tehran from moving on the Mediterranean and also block the Eurabian momentum to make Europe a dhimmi.  Russia is very important, almost inestimably important.  Speaking with Russian historian Steve Cohen, NYU, this Sunday 20 re Medvedev at the G-8, re Moscow disputing over Georgia and the proposed American-built missile shield, re the new Cold War with Europe, especially London.

The State of Israel

I do not have a positive report from best signals.  P.M. Olmert's legal troubles are profound and likely final.  Jordan and Egypt will not help.  Syria and Lebanon remain unsolved and hostile.  Tehran is a known mortal threat into the future.  Senior Israeli security officials are visiting Washington to persuade the decision makers not to surrender to Tehran.  The pending celebrity trip of Mr. Obama to Amman, to Ramallah and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, is not encouraging, since Mr. Obama will treat with the doves in Israel.  I will say little more and wait form a sitrep from Malcolm Hoenlein, who has been traveling in Africa and is just back.

I can add that Russia has told Tehran that the red line is Jerusalem.   Putin communicated this to Ahmadinejad in person.  To Mr. Putin's credit, it was not a polite conversation.  Mr. Putin is a nationalist.  The Russian Orthodox Church controls most of Christian Jerusalem.  Tehran is warned that it is not to attack Jerusalem.  Russia can combine with Europe to block Tehran's predation.  Best signals says that a strong Israel is in Russia's and Europe's interest.  Europe must accept subservience to Russia and its energy (and natural gas), and Europe must agree that the Eurasian bloc is more significant than the American European (NATO) bloc, and after that, Russia and Europe will abide as siblings.

The American Empire

I do not have the picture.  It is not good that many countries are now temped to take oil off the dollar and use the Euro.  It is not good that our banks are underwater.  It is not good that we are retreating from the Gulf.  It is not good that Mr. Bush surrenders, as he did with North Korea, as he will soon do with Iraq.  It is not good that Mr. Obama fights with Israel over the fate of Jerusalem.  Yet in surrender, there is opportunity.  Who is best for an alliance with North America?  The US, Canada, Mexico have energy aplenty (especially natural gas, coal and wind) and can build much more (nuke), if America can buy the time, if America can deal with China.  Chavez is an obvious factor, and is clever and already linked strangely with Tehran; but I do not have more now.

The Chinese Empire

Best signals source ends with this puzzle.  China is strategic partners with Tehran.  China is wholly mercenary and almost inhumanly utilitarian, as in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, North Korea.  It must maintain and expand upon its development of oil and gas from Tehran.  Best signals asks, will China encourage Tehran to go too far?  The best blocking force to China is India.  I speak with B. Raman of Indian intelligence routinely.  India is savvy, willful, able, fast.  Best signals worries that India has not solved its internal mechanisms to function as a power state.

The 300 Surrender

After Leonidas refused to surrender, he was beaten anyway.  The story does not have a happy ending.  Neither does the U.S. surrendering to Tehran.  There is the small detail that it is not final yet.  Watching.  Where is the early sign of surrender?  The House of al-Saud.  It always goes with the sure winner once it is very sure.   JB

Colonel Motors

by John Batchelor. posted on July 16, 2008 at 2:39 AM

The End of the Beginning

Speaking to Lou Ann Hammond of Carlist.com, my car reporter, Sunday 20 re Rick Wagoner's rapid fire press conference remarks in this news cycle and the meaning of the so-called $15 Billion savings/additions applied to General Motors by 2010.  Lou Ann Hammond is outspokenly sympathetic to the good, hard-working, imaginative and deft people she knows at GM who will be paired, dropped, blunted by this self-mutilation.

All this ads up to a future in which GM will wither to Colonel Motors.  Being generous, we can call this day, July 15, 2008, the end of the beginning.  I have read the microfilm of the 1916 day that there was mention of a pending issue of a General Motors stock in the New York Times.  By 1960, General Motors (left) was the Federation Headquarters of the American Empire. This is the end of all that.

Why is it happening? Rick Wagoner doesn't know.  I am convinced, watching him spew palaver like an airline pliot with three engines gone to his passengers, "Ladies and gentlemen, nothing to be too alarmed about, but..." in that self conscious monotone, that he does not comprehend the cause -- with a voice that can only please the board of directors with whoppers like this:

"We remain committed to bringing to market great products that target changing consumer preferences for more fuel-efficient vehicles."

Why GM Failed

Three summers ago, Lou-Ann Hammond arranged for me to drive the General Motors concept hydrogen powered vehicle then under development, called the HydroGen3.  It was a soft sunny day in Central Park, at the gawdy Tavern on the Green, and I turned up in a bowtie concerned that I might not be able to handle a hydrogen car.  Perhaps it was some gizmo that required a standard shift.  Or timing.  It turned out to be a modest German built minivan.  The power is also modest, and it works because of the very expensive batteries under the hood (you can put them anywhere, even the roof) that create two by-products, heat and water.  That is it.  A car that produces heat and water and takes you where you want to go.

No noise.  It makes no noise when you drive.  The engine is silent, since it is all battery driven wheels.   I met the GM hosts, was shown the car, and off we went on Central Park West.  No noise.  I pretended to make noise like a child.  It has two gears, forward and backward.  It goes equally well in either direction, because the motors that turn the wheels are in the wheel bases  I was purring along (I was making the purrs) at the usual city 35 mph, with taxis and Mercedes around me.  The other drivers could not tell I was a fake car -- not making noise nor spitting CO2 and other unpleasantries.

We returned to Tavern on the Green.  I was thrilled.  The solution to the 20th Century.  A vehicle for the 21st.   "How long till this is everywhere?"

The answer was, "Well, John, there's the service station issue.  We'll need about ten percent of a region's service sttions to have hydrogen to refil your car every 200 to 300 miles...  And there's cost. The battery is still too expensive to get to a sales range..." And there's fuctionaility.  It has to go sixty like your gas van..."

We were inside the Tavern on the Green now.  My hosts were pleasant, young, well-dressed, obliging.  The excitement at the buffet was about the mixing with other pros and journalists, not about the little blue HyrdroGen3 out at the entrance.

"How long till the show room?  For Moms?"

"Well, 2020."

I wandered away politely to watch the energy of several journalists and GM execs as they admired a vast, gleaming, two seater- Cadillac coupe.  I asked, and the designer, a polite, well-dressed Detroiter, told me it was a concept car.  Not in production yet.   I was agreeable and flabbergasted.  The coupe was about as practical as a night at the Met watching Russian melodrama.  Thinking back on it, now I know why GM failed.  Rick Wagoner wasn't present that afternoon.  Too busy collecting the margins on Tahoes and Hummers and Caddies.  Maybe he didn't see the memo, so I will repeat what I learned.  No vision, no future.

Defense of Colonel Motors

Lou Ann Hammond tells me that GM is doing very well in China, where the world's growth has moved.  "Eighty percent of GM vehicles in China are four-cylinders," she says.  "GM has many, many vehicles that get better than 35 mpg."

"Where that's little blue hydrogen minivan I drove?"

"Still in development."

"Where's that Caddie?"

"It's the Cadillac CTS.  It's in the show rooms."

"Lou!  That trifle got built?  And no hydrogen minivan for twelve years!"

"I know."

I looked up the CTS.  The engine is something called a 6.2L supercharged V-8 (LSA).  Do I read this right at 556 horsepower at 6100 rpm?  What is this in mpg?  How many have they sold?  What's the margin?  Who is the executioner?  Because Cadillac is on the gallows.  Sell yourself to China or India or twist in the wind with Rick Wagoner, the board, the stockholders, and the laughable characters who will now find merit to GM's recovery plan.

The Excuse

Couldn't see $140 barrel oil.  Couldn't see a recession based upon credit lies and a Federal Reserve with a yearning for Kremlin scale power grabs.  Couldn't see the American consumer's intelligence to dump SUVs.  Couldn't see.  Can you see what this means, Rick?

"Mr. Bush said the federal government wouldn't take action to rescue other U.S. companies like General MotorsCorp. and Ford Motor Co. Both automaking giants are having to make cuts and raise funds as buyers have turned away from their products with increasing gasoline prices." 

Last Episode of Star Trek

By John Batchelor. posted on July 15, 2008 at 1:02 AM

Enterprise Grounded

The Klingons, the Romulans and James T. Kirk could not wreck the Enterprise, but the genuine Black Swan panic on Wall Street has now grounded the Federation's premier starship.  Deutsche Bank has noisily nixed  the $450 million financing deal needed by Viacom's Paramount Pictures, leaving the Enterprise in drydock along with 30 other movie vehicles we are now forced to live without, including the no doubt deathless poetry in "Hotel for Dogs" and "G.I Joe."  What will get the attention of the American electorate is when Paramount must auction off the sets and costumes and Kirk mementos, such as those cheesy pajama uniforms.  Paramount claims that the reason the deal failed was because the terms for $300 million of the senior debt became too "onerous."   This is double-speak for the fact that the movies couldn't handle the rates. 

Strange Doings

Spoke to Jim McTague more than a week ago of strange doings in credit, Sunday 6; and he warned via a source that the spread between what the best customers (read, bank) could get at the Fed discount window and what these same customers were charging private borrowers (read, Paramount) had reached a prohibitive 360 basis points.  This was a warning signal that the credit system was not working.

One week later, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman's started their nose dives, then IndyMac of Pasadena failed and was taken over after a bank run by customers, then the market opened Monday 14 to a blood-letting on banks.

Jim McTague warned something was dying.  He restated his position more succinctly on Sunday 13 when he agreed that Hank Paulson and Ben "Crazy Professor" Bernanke were nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Credit is dying.  If two junkies like Fan and Fred can go the front of the line for cheap money to pay for their habits, what good is credit?  

Meantime, the warning announced to me from Singapore by Jimmy Rogers on Sunday 13 - a reprise of what he'd said on the show in March and April after Bear-Sterns collapsed --  that the banks are rotten, that the Fed is run by a numbskull, that  the only fix for Fan and Fred is to let them fail, that to bail out the rich guys who own Fan and Fred stock and bonds is folly and also won't work, all this led to Jim Rogers saying that everyone should move their money so that they have less than the FDIC insured $100k in any one bank.    Even that will fail if too many fail, since the FDIC has just $50 billion left after IndyMac.

Jim Rogers is still short FNM

"They can keep printing the money," Jim Rogers told me.  "It won't help now."  I asked him if raising Fed rates would stop the slide.  Raising.  Jim Rogers said, "Yes."

(Mention that is it is a small satisfaction in this present Black Swan episode to see that Bloomberg New York followed my interview with Jim Rogers at 00:05 hours Monday 14 with its own interview by two alert New York reporters.  The Occam's Razor of major media is to assume that the New York reporters were alerted by my preview of the interview during the East Coast show, and then either waited until the KFI show to hear the first version, or made contact immediately.  Given the hours for the interview, and they filed the next morning, I suspect they listened in past midnight New York time.  Smart.  Jimmy was on fire on the streets of Singapore.  (Fire Ben Bernanke?  You bet!)   Jim Rogers restated the next morning to Bloomberg online his trenchant, sincere and always witty warnings; and then later in the New York day, Bloomberg TV followed again with Jimmy on camera about the time that Fan and Fred were trying to rally. Jimmy also restated that he was not covering his short position in Fannie Mae -- which he'd emphasized to me -- and the Fan and Fred stocks fell, along with a raft of bank stocks.  Truly, you could imagine the screaming as Jim Rogers spoke.  On air to me 12 hours before, Jim had said that just a handful of people know about this stuff, and that Larry Kudlow and I and a few others in media were paying attention. Of course, my audience was paying attention (Bloombergians too)  and all were well warned of the bank massacre coming the next two days.  BloombergTV, to great applause,  recognized the opportunity to scare the plutocrat planet with my conversation with Jim Rogers.  Is this a good thing to scare the planet?  I will brood on it.)

There will be no rescue for the Enterprise.  The rates cannot save it.  Now the Enterprise waits, in the dark, without a crew, for the end of commercial enterprise, to be sold to a Vulcan scrap dealer for trinkets.  How bad is it?  We need Busby Berkeley to stage a fund-raiser on the Engineering Deck.  Time for fantasy, though cheaply produced fantasy because we can't handle the gas to drive to the movies to watch the Enterprise wither along with the banks.  JB.

Categories: Liberty

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Olympic Crimes

By John Batchelor. posted on July 14, 2008 at 11:54 AM

East Turkistan Conquered

Spoke Sunday 13 with Alim Seytoff of the Uyghur (wee-gur) Human Rights Project re the brutality and murder of Uyghurs in the conquered vassal state of the Republic of East Turkistan. The unelected Bejing leadership, following the Maoists cadre, calls this vast region Xinjiang; it is located between China and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.  It is not China.  The Maoist army invaded and conquered it, and for the last sixty years the Bejing Cadre has practiced the usual occupation and repression tactics.  The choice Bejing propaganda these past years in the global war against the jihad is to claim that Uyghur patriots are terrorists who must be crushed.

Now, with the Olympics at hand, the crushing becomes news.   The Bejing Cadre authority has chosen to make show raids and show trials against Uyghurs, and to put them in the Beijing-run Xinhua News Agency, in order to intimidate not only the regional population but also the other ethnic dissenters and nationalists under the Chinese boot, such as the Tibetans, the North Koreans, the underground Christians and democracy activists, the Falun Dafa.

Alim Seytoff told me of the raid on July 9 by Bejing authorities using SWAT team tactics to surround and storm an apartment in the Uyghur East Turkistan (Xinjiang) capital.  The Bejing news agency explained the extraordinary action with propaganda language of terror and threat:

"When 15 policemen surrounded the apartment where the suspects were hiding, they found themselves face to face with 15 knife-wielding Uighurs, all shouting 'sacrifice for Allah'."

Alim Saytoff explained the event most differently.  There were fifteen young people, between the ages of 17 and 21, gathered to pray at a secret mosque.  The mosque must be secret because the Beijing authorities suppress Islam and have recently taken to destroying mosques and intimidating the pious (left, praying on the Silk Road near Hotan at the grave of a revered Islamic scholar).  One mosque near Aksu in the southwest of East Turkistan was wrecked in mid-June because it was said to be insufficiently loyal to the center and the Olympics.

"Criminal Gang"

During the July 9 raid in Urumchi, the East Turkistan capital, the police attacked, opened fire, killed five and arrested the others.  The claims of knives and expressions about Allah are obvious distortions.  The police later called the fifteen young people a "criminal gang."  No crimes were charged, no evidence has been produced, no witnesses have been offered to state how these fifteen were a gang.

Alim Seytoff also described another outrage by the Bejing authorities in another large Uyghur town on the same day as the police raid, July 9.  Five Uyghur patriots were put on a show trial in a stadium.  At the same time, ten thousand residents were forced to sit in the stadium.  The trial concluded quickly with death sentences for rebellion.  Two of the five were immediately executed in front of ten thousand Uyghurs - who were forced to applaud the sight.

Again, Alim Seytoff made the point on air that the stadium brutality was orchestrated because of the approaching Olympics.  (This bizarre conduct by Beijing, persecuting dissent in order to secure nationalist pride, is these days routine in Tibet.)

The National Press Club

On Wednesday 16 July, a coalition of activists representing the persecuted peoples of the Beijing emprire -- Friends of Falun Gong, American Tibetan Alliance, China Aid Association, Uighur American Association, North Korea Freedom Coalition, Open Doors USA -- will present the case of the Olympic crimes at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C..  The case is anecdotal; the case is vast.  This history will be stored by the patriots to honor the victims of the unelected Beijing Cadre. 

President Bush aims to attend the opening day of the Olympics in August.  At this time, the Uyghur American Association states that President Bush has promised to raise the issue of the brutality toward Uyghurs and others with the Beijing cadre.  Specifically, President Bush has communicated that the will speak with Beijing unelected President Hu Jintao.  The conversation is straightforward.  Relate the events of July 9 in East Turkistan, even in the contradictory fashion above with the Xinhua News Agency claiming "criminal gang" and Alim Seytoff saying "young people" and "praying" --  and declare these matters unacceptable.

The unelected Beijing leadership, the Cadre descended from the Maoist cadre that conquered East Turkistan and Tibet and Mongolia, is an anachronism, a dark remnant of 20th Century tyranny. China must be successful for the 21st century to be successful.  The Beijing Cadre must go.  The crimes it commits at this moment in preparation for its Potemkin Olympics in order to cover up its crimes for the last seven decades are a demonstration of its ignorance, failure, fear and self-destruction.

Anarchy 

How is it governance to dragoon ten thousand innocent people into a stadium to force them to watch the torture and murder of a handful for no crime other than being Uyghur patriots?  The same question holds for Tibet patriots, and Falun Dafa practitioners, and ethnic Koreans, and Christians, democracy activists, human rights dissenters.   Imagine ruling California or Brazil or France in such a fashion in the 21st Century.  We would call it for what it is, a crimeland of warlords, also known as anarchy.  JB.

The Assads of Damascus

By John Batchelor. posted on July 13, 2008 at 1:21 AM

Watch on the Titanic

By John Batchelor. posted on July 12, 2008 at 2:10 AM

 "I hope it'll be tomorrow."

Mohammed Meets Bambi

By John Batchelor. posted on July 10, 2008 at 11:26 AM

 To the Cartoon Shores of Tripoli

Supreme Leader in Command

by John Batchelor. posted on July 09, 2008 at 4:29 PM

 Rockets Red Glare

PUMAs at Fargo

By John Batchelor. posted on July 08, 2008 at 4:01 PM

 PUMAs

The Laughing Airplane

By John Batchelor. posted on July 07, 2008 at 11:04 PM

 War of the Worlds

Happy Birthday, America

By John Batchelor. posted on July 06, 2008 at 2:07 PM

 Grandfather July

Schwarzenegger and Binoche star in Betancourt Libre!

By John Batchelor. posted on July 06, 2008 at 12:01 AM

The Entebbe Moment

Speaking Sunday 6 July with the cheerful Mary Anastasia O'Grady, Americas editor of the WSJ, re the new facts of the thrilling rescue (left, in a video frame) of Ingrid Betancourt and others from the terror gang FARC last week.

We will speak especially to a surprising scene the evening before the operation when Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe shared the secret of the pending rescue  -- the Entebbe Moment -- with John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, who were visiting at Bogota.

The rescue, "Operation Check-Mate" was a Colombia military caper, a small scale Entebbe rescue, designed by daring officers, constructed from cunning parts, rehearsed like a Hollywood movie.  Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Colombian colonel who takes on heart-stopping risk - as if Arnold was sent back into the jungles to rescue hostages from the clutches of theinvincible Predator (right).  French citizen and Euro cause celebre Ingrid Betancourt and fourteen other hostages were certain to be murdered if the FARC spotted a trick.  The operation was flawless theater, using two Russian-made helicopters painted like similar machines used in previous hostage exchanges, manned by Colombian soldiers wearing Che Guevera tee-shirts and pretending to be FARC sympathizers, even including a fake Venezuelan TV crew looking to interview the brute boss "Cesar" (aka Gerardo Aguilar) while the exchange took place.

Nothing about "Operation Check-Mate" makes sense except that it worked like  a Schwarzenegger thriller is supposed to work, with a cheers and tears third act.

The Secret

For me the strangest detail is that scene the night before at Bogota's presidential palace, just before dinner, when President Alvaro Uribe chose to reveal the plan to John McCain (left with Mrs. McCain)  and his travelling senatorial colleagues Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman.   Mr. McCain was on a campaign jaunt that many pundits called pointless, leaving the holiday run-up to the agile Mr. Obama.  The McCain campaign could reply that Colombia is a critical partner with the US in the drug war.  However none of this can explain Mr. Uribe's decision to read McCain, Graham and Lieberman into the secret.

Recall that when you are given a secret of a major military operation, you become the operation.  It is a burden and a lifetime responsibility.   Mr. Uribe had to have deep confidence in McCain, Graham and Lieberman.  On the one hand, if the operation failed, and everyone was killed, and McCain and Lieberman knew about it, then Uribe could expect to be derided by the U.S. Congress that he must please to maintain the $5.4 billion aid.  Mr. Uribe was already unpopular, and his long fought war with FARC was knocked by domestic and Euro critics.  It was a big, reckless, unnecessary risk for Mr. Uribe to reveal "Check-Mate" to anyone.

On the other hand, John McCain does inspire a can-do heroism that makes folk feel breathless and sturdy.  Mr. Uribe must have felt it.  Perhaps he didn't plan to tell the secret.  Perhaps it just burst out. And perhaps there was a moment that John McCain looked over and told Uribe, "You're right, Mr. President."

The Hollywood movie, "Betancourt Libre!" would insist that the camera follow Ingrid Betancourt into the arms of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who is enormously boosted by Betancourt's freedom.  It would follow Ingrid Betancourt to Mr. Uribe, who is enormously boosted by her rescue and his daring and also the apparent collapse of the FARC in the disgrace of stupidity added to the disgrace of their savagery.  Hollywood would also follow Ingrid Betancourt to Mr. Bush, who was briefed beforehand as the U.S. military was deeply involved in the prep, and because three of the hostages, now being debrief, Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes, Marc Gonsalves - are American citizens.

"Betancourt Libre!"

And would the Hollywood thriller, along with protagonist Colonel Arnold Schwarzenegger, humble and shy in his Colombia uniform and broken English, follow Ingrid Betancourt, played by Audrey Hepburn played by Juliette Binoche, into the embrace of the 44^thpresident of the United States, John McCain, played by Dennis ("Apocalypse Now!") Hopper?  Nobody'd believe it!  More notes!  JB.

Categories: Liberty

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Happy Birthday to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.

By John Batchelor. posted on July 05, 2008 at 12:01 AM

Neo Red Guards Outrage

Sunday July 6 is World Tibet Day, a celebration of the Dalai Lama's birthday. Speaking next Sunday 13 July with the resourceful B Raman, retired of Indian intelligence, re the on-going outrage in Tibet.

Since March, following the anti-Bejing protests and riots in Lhasa (left), the Bejing Cadre has purposefully abused the population of Lhasa and, so goes the report, perpetrated outrages throughout the vast, lightly populated countryside.  Since April, B. Raman has identified the thugs as the Neo Red Guards, an outgrowth of the Red Guards that was created by the dictator Mao in the mass murder of the 1960s.  The billion people of 21st Century China are passionate patriots; however those older than 45 remember the insanity and degeneracy of the terror.  Through May and June, B. Raman has reported that the Neo Red Guards have launched a smaller scale terror in all of Tibet.

There is some small suggestion that the Neo Red Guard terror has met effective resistance by the Tibetan patriots (who have been know to flash His Holiness's image to wily visitors, left).   The recent planned three days of the Bejing-orchestrated Olympic Torch run in Tibetfailed.  The three days became one day and then became three hours, as reported by B. Raman on air on the June 29 Los Angeles show.   In Lhasa, the Panchen Lama was supposed to welcome the torch-bearers but was not seen outside the Potala Palace.  The only spectators were obeisant, hand-picked ticket-holders; otherwise the streets of Lhasa were dramatically empty.  Neo Red Guard boss Zhang Qingli boasted in front of the Potala Palace: "Tibet's sky will never change and the red flag with five stars will forever flutter high above it."

Split the Motherland

Some days later it was reported that the Neo Red Guards used the Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius (faster, higher, stronger) to threaten Tibetan patriots as splittists and as tools of the so-called Dalai Clique.  The Neo Red Guards have total command of the streets with their battalions (left, from March), and any protest in Lhasa is now futile and self-destructive.

The Neo Red Guard Qin Yizhi, Lhasa Party Secretary, boasted,"Encouraged by the Olympic spirit of 'Faster, Higher, Stronger', Lhasa people of all nationalities will... resolutely smash the Dalai clique's scheme to destabilise Tibet, sabotage the Olympics and split the motherland."

The IOC protested this vulgarity.  The deaf Bejing Cadre sneered in return and used a freign ministry flack to speak nonsense, "For the officials concerned to express their views on some issues is not a politicisation of the Olympics."

The abuse of Tibet is not in spite of the approaching Olympics, argues B. Raman and other observers, rather the abuse of Tibet is because of the Olympics.

Tibet Party Boss Zhang's fantasies of what happened in March (left) have deepened into unhinged statements of an international conspiracy organized by the Dalai clique:  "They harboured the evil intention of turning the incident into a bloodbath," Zhang told Tibet TV on July 2, "of disrupting the Beijing Olympics and destroying Tibet's stability and political harmony."

Zhang offers no evidence of such a plot, nor does he speak to the facts of the protest, the reports of widespread jailings, man-hunts, beatings and executions, including reports in April of deliberate shortages of food and water in the countryside.  Zhang speaks nonsensically, and his Bejing bosses, led by former Tibet party boss (Zhang's predecessor) President Hu Jintao, are not even challenged by the G8 nations lining up to attend the traffic-choked, food-and-water-challenged,  Potemkin Olympics. 

Countdown Begins

World Tibet Day, 2008.  Happy Birthday to His Holiness.   There may be small satisfaction for him that , with his ceaseless humility and travel, he has rallied the free peoples of the planet to the Tibetan cause while the inheritors of Mao's disgrace need expose themselves as blockheads and wreckers.  And the very thing Maoist squawkers have wrecked the most is the Bejing Olympics 2008.  Note: Within a decade of the Moscow Olympics 1980, the Soviet thugs were ashes.  Let the countdown begin.  JB.

[Right: In September 1954, at the first National (Subjugated) People's Congress in Bejing, the teenaged Dalai Lama (left) walked with the zestful dictator, Mao Zedong, and the very same Panchen Lama (right) who is now imprisoned at Lhasa along with the other, yet unnamed Tibetan patriots.]

Blackberry Day at Fargo

By John Batchelor. posted on July 03, 2008 at 7:33 PM

"Never give a sucker an even break." 

Speaking to my professional roundtable in the early and late shows on Sunday 6 about the sunny day in Fargo, North Dakota in which Mr. Obama made an unforced error, a tiny uh-oh -- he looked at his Blackberry! -- and momentarily fogged up his reputation as the Give Peace A Chance candidate.

Mr. Obama started July 3 in Fargo with a vow to "refine my policies" about withdrawing from Iraq.   Impossible not to hear this as the predicate for a sharp change of course in face of the successes in Iraq and the price of oil at the marketplace, touching $146 a barrel early in the day's trading.

Confirming that he was being clever, there was more lawyerly talk from Mr. Obama of using his pending trip with other senators to Iraq in order to make "a thorough assessment."

No one could not smile at this pompous and predictable double-talk.   I received a droll text message from a trusted Democratic source, a man I regard as the Rock of Progressivism: "Never give a sucker an even break."

A groaning, tsk-tsking scramble to control the narrative started when Mr. Obama's shopworn cynical spin hit the news and posted on the New York Times "The Caucus" blog mid-afternoon on a getaway day for the long weekend. 

The AP set the tone of the "he said what?"  frenzy with a terse bulletin:

AP Top News at 3:37 p.m. EDT FARGO, N.D. (AP) -- Democrat Barack Obama is opening the door to altering his Iraq policy. Campaigning in North Dakota, Obama says his upcoming trip to Iraq could alter his plan to bring U.S. troops home within 16 months....

The Republican National Committee, a paragon of pettifoggery on its own, emailed a wordy version of, "We told you so!"

Soon the Obama campaign came to its senses and made matters worse by ushering the candidate out before the cameras and press team for a second press avail attempt to explain the confusion.

Blackberry Day 

Why a second attempt?  The NYT "The Caucus" blog explained still later in the day that Mr. Obama was scrolling through his Blackberry on the news and saw that AP report, and so he ordered his obedient campaign aides: "We're going to try this again...". 

This time the cable cameras were rolling on the uncomfortable scene of a man trying to talk with a foot in his mouth.   Eventually, after making more ambiguous remarks about a theoretical 16-month timetable to leave Iraq, the candidate fielded a hypothetical question from an unseen journalist about his apparently variable (changing?)  remarks, and what followed was YouTube delight, a decidedly unvarnished performance:

Pettifoggery the Hope and Change Way

"As I've said before..."

"...I have always said that, and again you can take a look at the language, that as commander in chief, I would always reserve the right to do what's best in America's national interest..."

"...and if it turned out, for example, that we had to, uh, insert months, slow the pace...,"  

"...I would be a poor commander in chief if I didn't take facts on the ground in to account, alright?"

A second journalist asked about the candidate's repeated campaign promise, when president, to direct an exit from Iraq in 16 months.

The candidate smiled in some frustration, hesitated, then restated the restatement:

"...Here's what I can tell you, I will bring our troops out at one to two brigades a month, and at that pace we will have our combat troops out in 16 months."

The candidate's body language was shoulder-hunched, crisply impatient, not beaming, reaching out with his left hand to fix on a point that only he saw.  The worst mistake was to smile in frustration at his own strange repetition of a policy that he had just twisted into semantics and confusion.  This isn't the worst mistake he can make, but it points to the weakness in the candidate.  He talks unhelpfully off script - argumentatively, condescendingly, ambiguously, even archly.  Today is a teaching example of a front-runner stepping badly on the trail - "Let go the Crackberry, Mr. O?" -- and then making the worst out of a bad day at Fargo.

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Maysan Province, Iraq: Money Changes Everything

by John Batchelor. posted on July 02, 2008 at 9:00 PM

Maysan Dragnet

Speaking Sunday 6 with the intrepid and savvy Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal re the startling transformation underway in Iraq the last year - not just from anarchic and pointless to authoritarian, but also from fractious and beggarly to bright-eyed for the oil bonanza.

Before Prime Minister Maliki (left) and his ambitious government can enjoy the bounty from the bids rolling in from Big Oil, it must defeat the subversion by Tehran's Al Qods special operations predators; and that is what Bill Roggio reports in today's Long War Journal.  Over the last two weeks, arrests in Maysan Province's mud-brick capital city Amarah by the Iraqi police and military units, a dragnet in light armor, have included the mayor of Amarah and now the the governor of the province and the deputy chief of the security committee -- in sum, the Quislings among us.

This is a surprising achievement for the presumed brittle Iraqi battalions on the home field of the notorious mercenary Mahdi Army, headed by the bilious, devious Mookie Sadr.  It is especially a defeat of the so-called Ramazan Corps - the puppet gang constructed out of the Mahdi Army by Tehran agents in order to dominate the Basra region.  Maysan, jammed against the Iran border, is shot through with Tehran's dupes, gunmen, victims.  Unearthed were training manuals for guerilla operations, a vast weapons cache, and a torture room.  Torture room?  (Am not expecting to find the torture room on the BBC update.)

More significant to me is that this Maysan Province sweep represents that Prime Minister Maliki  is asserting vigorous, cagey control with his own forces over territory controlled till now by the Tehran directed Mahdi Army, the so-called Sadrist faction (right), and that these arrests are a blow to Sadrist prestige in Iraq.

Bill Roggio recounts with the precision of a machinist the expanding Iraqi operations against Tehran in Basra Province, Maysan Province and now in adjoining Dhi Qhar province.  This does not sound like photo ops for TV.  This looks, on the map, to be part of a strategic plan to search and find and shove Tehran's ops out of Iraq.

Money changes everything.

Bill Roggio writes, in response to my puzzling about what Tehran's Plan B could be now that it has lost its snakeheads in Maysan, "I think Iran's Plan B is to try to wait us out and ditch the Mahdi Army for a smaller, more disciplined force. That is why Sadr made the decision to create the small cadre. Not sure what Tehran can do about the Maysan guys. Maliki has it in for Mahdi/Sadrists. They threatened to kill him & his family in 2006."

Bill Roggio writes in response to my supposing that the Sunnis are coming in from the cold, rejoining the Maliki government soon, because of the oil money pouring in, "Agreed on the Sunnis. I think they see we will be around for a bit..."   Bill adds that the Sunnis are impressed that Maliki is attacking the homicidal Mahdi army, and that the Sunnis may now believe they have a chance with a man who will enforce security throughout the country.

Iraq is no longer a rogue state under the Baathists or a failed state under the CPA; Iraq is a petrostate with a dominating income and an agitated, yearning population that is battle-tested and liberated.   A future like Japan, a future like Germany?   Money does change everything.  Check the famous snapshot of the original nomad Wahabbist warlord King Ibn Saud himself sitting on FDR's aircraft carrier, 1944.   Why is this man smiling?  JB.

Wildcatters (and Bleak House comes to Baghdad)

by John Batchelor. posted on July 01, 2008 at 6:24 PM

Wildcatter Century

Speaking Sunday 6 July to battery of voices re the search for energy security that now animates and threatens the stable, the rogue and the failed states of our modest planet.

Three news items in this cycle underline wildcatter century.

1.  Kuwait announces it has contingency plans to transport its oil to market in the event that Iran closes the Straits of Hormuz.  This is calamity planning, and it underlines why the spot oil market is firm at  $140 plus.

2.  Baghdad invites Big Oil, after thirty years of knuckleheaded Baathist tyranny, to develop the bountiful fields in the Basra region and in the Kurdistan region.  Mesopotamia is open for another delicious chapter in the Great Game.

3.  A comet has landed on Detroit.  No recovery planned, as the car companies are said to be bulldozing their unwanted trucks, SUVs, vans and other outsized machines into the dustbin of history.

In sum, oil is dear, rare and in dangerous places that will get worse because the dear, rare oil is not moving without colossal effort.  (And my trusted correspondent Aaron Klein of WND reports that the IDF watch on Iran's nuclear weapons program is focused and grim.)

Wildcatting creates opportunity for the American genius to find profit from non-oil: speaking to Dow Jones correspondents Michael Totty on nuclear energy (left), Jim Carlton on renewable energy, Brian Baskin on natural gas, and Dow Jones Clean Energy Newsletter's Yuliya Chernova on solar energy.  Also hope to find FT London Carola Hoyos re OPEC's dilemma (rich and ignorant) and to FT India Joe Leahy re the broken infrastructure system in the world's fastest growing and power hungry democracy.

Bleak House

For added thrills, also speaking to the cheery Claudia Rosett of Foundation for the Defense of Democraciesre the announcement by Baghdad that it will pursue with tort law the rascals in the UN Oil-For-Food fiasco 1997-2003.  Bleak House meets the wildcatters.  Paul Volcker answer your text messages!  JB.