Third time's the charm

John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN for George W. Bush's administration has written a column for NRO where he argues that the Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL) must be destroyed and that the US must do it.  http://www.nationalreview.com/article/386175/destroy-islamic-state-john-r-bolton

In his three page article Bolton articulates a vision of a redrawn map of the middle east.  It's a fascinating window into the mindset and worldview of  an influential neo-consevative (he does not describe himself as a neocon, but as one of the signatories of the PNAC it's hard to classify him as anything but a neocon). The article really sets itself up for an extensive fisking, but I like to think I am a busy man with important things to do, so I am going to skip almost to the end where he makes his point:

Obviously, the central problem is not Iran’s surrogates, but Iran itself, America’s main regional adversary. And until the United States confronts the ever more pressing need for regime change in Tehran, we can hardly expect others in the region to have the strength or the will to arrange things to suit our interests. Obama’s obsession with securing a nuclear-weapons deal means the odds that he would support overthrowing the ayatollahs approach zero. The regime is determined to possess nuclear weapons, so appeasing it in Syria, as Obama has done, was never going to cause Tehran to modify its positions in the nuclear talks. Far better to concentrate on regime change in Iran by overtly and covertly supporting the widespread opposition and watch Assad fall as collateral damage thereafter.
...
These possible outcomes constitute working hypotheses for U.S. objectives flowing from the destruction of the Islamic State. They are not philosophical abstractions, but practical suggestions that could well change as regional circumstances change. What we must not do is take our eye off the critical first step of destroying the Islamic State. Nor can we let theories about the kinds of regimes we would like to see emerge in the region blind us to what may actually be achievable.

What the hell?  John Bolton at this point has spent two and a half pages arguing for regime change in Iran, regime change in Syria, the dismantling of Iraq into two or three pieces one of which would be an independent Kurdistan made from bits of Iraq, Turkey and Syria. He does not ever explicitly state what the point of this exercise would be. What precisely would be the objective for which he advocates?

He advocates playing RISK with the entire middle east and completely forgets it isn't a single player game.  In his analysis he fails to mention little things like Saudi Arabia, Israel, and China.  He spares half a sentence to mention 'facing off with Russia' but not why one might want to do that.  He himself admits that he cannot predict what kinds of governments would arise in the wake of this project, and yet he seems to think the current status quo is so unbearable that we must undertake a third great middle eastern war (or series of wars) in order to stop IS and redraw the map for unspecified strategic objectives? 

I don't think it's out of order to ask why IS is a problem the US must solve and just what America is supposed to get out of his proposed course of action. 

Once again, Roy at alicublog has identified the stupid.  Today, David French of the National Review http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/384877/why-do-liberals-have-trouble-understanding-pure-evil-jihad-david-french says:"Why can’t so many liberals understand the pure evil of Islamic jihad?"

Why am I not worried about Islamic Jihad?  Because I'm not surprised by it.  Because it didn't come fully formed out of nowhere.  Because western foreign policy has been all about imperialism and oil in the middle east and fuck everything else, especially the welfare of the people that live there for nearly a century now.  Because what the fuck did they think would happen when they redrew the map time and time again for imperial dick waving, and propped up the leaders in the middle east that that gave the west the best access to oil and overthrew anyone who even thought about taking a bigger share of the oil money for themselves or the people whose ground it was being pumped out of? Because the only thing the west has been happier to do than buy oil from religious fundamentalists in the middle east is to sell them advanced weapons. Because the west seems have been using "Heart of Darkness" as a how-to manual for foreign policy since the days of Columbus.

So pardon us for not being surprised when butchery is met with butchery.  Pardon us for being right the whole fucking time when we said not to invade Iraq, or get involved in Syria or mindlessly support Israel every time they bomb the shit out of their neighbors.  Pardon us for not being surprised that desperate people do desperate things and lash out with horrifying violence.  So I dare you.  Corner a liberal.  Put him on the spot and ask him or her why they aren't outraged.  Just don't be surprised when you get an earful.  Because we are outraged.  We are outraged that Bush junior and senior and Cheney and all the neocons that excused torture and the goons that kidnapped and tortured and executed people aren't all roommates at the Hague.  We are outraged that the same people who advised us to kick over the hornet's nest sit on their fat asses while people get stung to death, and tell us to kick it again. 

    The tiny house movement has been described as "white people discover trailer parks".  I forget who described it that way because I'd love to quote them, but my Google fu is not up to the task of tracking it down.  I like the idea of the tiny house movement though, the rejection of ever larger dwellings to house ever larger collections of stuff required to maintain giant houses and lawns and accessorize a properly materialistic lifestyle.  That said, I have 3.5 bicycles, 2 motorcycles, 2 snowboards, a half a dozen pairs of skis, SCUBA gear, several desktop and laptop computers and a hang glider that I acquired in a moment of irrational financial optimism, and that's only my half of the household goods.  I want to fit my life into a pocket sized dwelling, where my housing costs aren't the biggest single item in my budget, and I can focus on my true goal of... pursuing excellence in dilettantism? or whatever my goals actually turn out to be.  I don't want to share walls with my neighbors, I want to be able to store my stuff and I don't want to spend every non-career moment as a groundskeeper for Chateau Monotreme. 

    And yet, the popularity of the movement is partially attributable to the increasing inaccessibility of that house in the suburbs with a white picket fence.  With real wages stagnant since the late 1970s and a succession of bubbles and recessions where none of the recovery seems to make it to the lower and middle classes, this movement, to me, is a revolution of lowered expectations.  It is a fraction of American consumers surrendering to an economy that no longer supports a large prosperous middle class.  And maybe it never could.  Maybe the post WWII boom in prosperity was a fluke. Perhaps now that the industrial and digital revolution has reached every corner of the globe, and organized labor is a shadow of it's former size and power, and cheap energy is a thing of the past, the historic advantages of the USA no longer apply.

     Tiny houses seem like a way to make lemons out of the lemonade life has to offer.  They are a way to tailor the size of one's dwelling to the size of one's needs.  But they are- to a greater extent than a larger house, dependent on location.  A tiny house offers no place to hide from a tornado, would be completely submerged by a flood, and given that many of them are actually on wheels, are possibly subject to the mercies of aggressive parking enforcement.  A tiny house in a bad neighborhood is still in a bad neighborhood, and a tiny house in a good location, may not save much money over a full sized house depending on the cost of the lot.

If there is home ownership in my future, I am betting it involves a tiny house.

Bad analogies with Victor Davis Hanson

Roy Edroso of alicublog has mentioned  in a tweet that Victor Davis Hanson has written a blog entry at http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/?p=7734#more-7734 and it is very special.  In it he tells of the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman and his march to the sea.  As a recap, during the civil war, General Sherman destroyed a whole bunch of southern plantations, freed a whole bunch of slaves, wrecked every railroad track and telegraph line he could find and not least, burned Atlanta to the ground.  By doing this, General Sherman crippled the financial ability of the Confederacy to make war, and demonstrated that the majority of the Confederacy had been stripped of defenses in order to equip their troops in the field.

Dr Hanson then claims that this very same tactic is being employed by the IDF in their current military operations in Gaza.  This is what many armchair military historians like myself would refer to charitably as a bad analogy and more pithily as utter horseshit.  If we summarize General Sherman's march to the sea into it's defining elements, we have a large conventional army conducting anti infrastructure campaign deep behind enemy lines with the intent of causing financial hardship to the enemy thereby reducing it's capacity to wage a conventional war.

Setting aside value judgments regarding the ongoing violence in Gaza, it is clear that none of those elements apply.  If the IDF wanted to recreate Sherman's march to the sea, it would require the IDF to be conducting its operations completely on enemy soil, primarily in an anti infrastructure role, taking pains to minimize civilian casualties far away from the nonexistent conventional army of Gaza which if analogy were to work, must be marching in strength towards Tel Aviv.  Given that 50% of Hamas's funding comes from Saudi Arabia, and much of the rest comes from Iran and Egypt, there are a wealth of enemy lines to march behind.  (my source is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas As I mentioned, I am an amateur historian)

Which is not to say that a case can't be made for the IDF to try and stop rocket attacks. Convincing arguments in favor of military force can and has been made with varying degrees of success by allies of Israel around the world. However, when trying to make an argument by analogy, pick one that works.  Unfortunately all of the close analogies for what the IDF is doing in Gaza tend to show the IDF in an unflattering light. Sieges are not pretty.  And when a population is surrounded, cut off from food, water and power and continually bombarded, siege is the word that applies.

Today we get to see the starting gun of the great crisis of the 21st century.  All of those children swept up in the net of the INS and held in holding facilities without enough beds or bathrooms?  That's the preview reel.  This situation has been racking up big numbers in foreign markets, but it's going to come here in a big way.  Illegal aliens, undocumented workers, refugees, sans papiers if you speak French, displaced persons.  Unless we want our border fences to be built from the skulls of huddled masses yearning to breathe free, America is going to need a better immigration policy.

We are going to need to figure out how to house and feed people, by the thousands as quickly as overnight.  Because storms aren't getting any milder and the sea level doesn't look like it will be sinking anytime soon.  If that means FEMA trailers, ideally mark 2 or 3 ones that don't give off formaldehyde or rot with poisonous mold, then let's build FEMA trailers.  If that means re-purposing old shopping malls, let's do that too, if that means we can spare golf courses from becoming brand new homes for displaced people, let's not because golf is boring as hell and it's a fucking waste of water, fertilizer and real estate, and if there's enough land and fresh water for a golf course, there's enough land and fresh water for a small town.  

Realistically the immigration crisis is not much more urgent today than it was yesterday.  We still have time to plan.  But it's coming and it doesn't have to be a catastrophe.  Building cities from scratch is a thing that used to happen all the freaking time in US.  Welcoming immigrants is a thing we used to know how to do.  Turning from immigrants into Americans is the central narrative of nearly every family in the US.  We can build schools, and factories and homes.  We have rust belt cities that have been bleeding population for decades  There are counties in rural America where the population is in free fall,  there is room for more Americans.  The energy that it takes to cross the desert, or ocean to reach the relative safety of our shores is the same energy that could revitalize our economy and rebuild our infrastructure.

Grinding my teeth at the goddamn chutzpah of this guy

I'd like to get around someday to talk about things that I like, things that I love, things that make me happy.  But goddamnit, Roy Edroso points out in this tweet https://twitter.com/edroso/status/477889362445623297
that Jonah Goldberg wrote another column, which, according to Roy's law means, it is the stupidest thing ever written.

The column is pretty standard horseshit.  Any of the dozens conservative critics of the Obama administration who have a national platform could have whipped this out over a short lunch break.  Anyone of those partisan hacks whose job it is to find fault with him for everything short of ending human suffering forever, and they'd probably throw a tantrum about that too- regularly writes a similar line of condescending "Democrats are weak on foreign policy" column filler.  I can excuse that... Jonah is deep in the grip of the Dunning Krueger effect, entranced with the idea that because he is paid to spew his uninformed drivel on the pages of newspapers nationwide, he is clearly a respected figure of authority and not a textbook example of the kind of public boob whose entire career is based on nepotism and sustained by the hothouse of the wingnut welfare system and so to ask him for just one occasion to do some research, talk to informed sources and compose a reasoned criticism is as far beyond him as any demonstration of journalistic integrity would be.

 It looks dead easy to crap out this bafflegab, (and it is) but I encourage all (which is to say 'both') of my readers not to quit their day jobs to seek a seat on the gravy train unless they too have a family tree drooping under the weight of assorted professional toadys and lickspittles and a social circle full of the kind of terrible billionaires that hire out fourth rate propagandists to justify their life of avarice.

In any case, Jonah's column is fairly unsurprising bad advice to the president until he writes these sentences:

A better option would be a time machine. That way today’s President Obama could go back and give first-term Obama the benefit of his experience. He could tell him that foreign policy should define his talking points, not the other way around.

He just can't fucking help himself.  As if in the history of American dealings with the middle east, the worst mistake; the first option of anyone with a time machine would be to give Obama a stern talking to about the pitfalls of getting out of Iraq.  As it wasn't transparently obvious that he'd rather talk about the time travel movies "X-men: Days of future Past" or "Edge of Tomorrow" than Iraq again, the subject about which he has so consistently revealed his laziness, his blood lust and his ignorance since 2001.

I have to write this or the rage would make my head explode.  The history of the US in the middle east has been a litany of foreign policy failures.  At every turn the search for profit and to a far lesser extent the fight against communism, have dictated policy and the welfare of the average Arab or Persian or Kurd or Turk on the street has never once been a motivating concern. From supporting Britain and France's colonial dissection of the Ottoman empire, to toppling the democratically elected government of Iran, to supporting every single murderous thug that claimed to be anti-communist, to enriching fundamentalist theocratic despots to gain access to oil, there's basically no foreign policy mistake the US hasn't made and then repeated over and over again.  And in this litany of failure the biggest mistake that Jonah wants to avoid is getting the hell out?  What.  The. Actual. Fuck.

I realize that once again, Jonah wins.  He gets paid for making me and anyone else who can spare five minutes to read the history of the middle east on Wikipedia furious, and he wins when I link to his column to prove that I'm not making shit up when I quote him.  He's a brand, a media personality and unlike people who work for a living, he is only punished when he is boring, never when he is publicly, obviously, fundamentally, wrong.  Still, I can't help but wish that his employers had held out until they could afford a third rate propagandist.

Privately Owned Firearms- Preventing Tyranny Since Never

Once more I feel it is necessary to state the obvious at tedious length.  Privately owned firearms will not stop government tyranny.  You are not a revolutionary soldier and King George is not quartering Hessians in your houses to make you pay taxes on tea.

The government does not engage in fair fights.  If the FBI or the Sheriff or the BATF or the local police come for you and they think you are armed, there will be a midnight, no knock raid and any resistance will be met with overwhelming force.  Any handgun or rifle it is possible to own in the US is useless against a modern military.  It may be possible to kill a government agent or two if an attacker is very lucky.  But when the Feds or local police are hunting a cop killer, they are not very careful about the "alive" part of "wanted dead or alive".

The movie "First Blood" where a veteran single-handedly defeats an entire town's police force, is a movie, a fantasy, and is the same level of gun worshiping porn as any issue of "Soldier of Fortune" ever was.  There is a reason so many mass shooters end up dead before they can be arrested and it is not severe peanut allergies.

Video games, action movies, and overheated political rhetoric from people that ought to know better have fostered a group of people that believe the only thing separating themselves from mighty deeds of heroic valor is ownership of a private arsenal and some kind of righteous crusade.

Well, that's not enough.  Untrained individuals don't win against the government in a violence fight.  The local cops may be corrupt, corpulent, and feeble, but they have radios, telephones, and the internet.  They can and will summon help.  That help will be increasingly competent at violence.  To use a video game metaphor, after defeating a wave of low level enemies (schoolchildren and teachers seem to be the standard), the boss fight in a confrontation with police is not a seven foot tall cyborg with an obvious weakness, it is the SWAT team snipers hundreds of yards out.  If you doubt this country's historic proficiency in the area of violence, ask yourself why your landlord is not Native American or British.

Resisting the authorities with firearms, or with any level of violence at all is a game for suckers at best, and suicide at worst.

If you own a firearm, you are more likely to die from a self inflicted gunshot, or kill a family member or spouse than you are likely to successfully use it to kill a criminal.  Every year, in the US, 10,000 people die from being shot by someone else.  And 20,000 people die from shooting themselves.  Unless you live in deadly fear of being oppressed by yourself, it's hard to find in those numbers a convincing argument for firearm ownership.

Gun owners also suggest that even beyond self defense and the defense against tyranny, that hunters and sportspeople every day use firearms in a responsible manner.  Which is both true and entirely beside the point.  Hunters and sportspeople could do 95% percent of their activities with a bow, crossbow or airgun, none of which have the rapid fire deadliness so easily available at any gun store or Wal-Mart in the country.

I know what it is like to love a hobby which the majority of the country views with suspicion.  As a motorcyclist, nearly every time I go for a ride, someone is all too ready to tell me how dangerous it is, how their wife would never let them ride, how a guy they know died messily from an accident.  There have been groups that lobby to outlaw various kinds of motorcycles, to limit their speed or their power or their noise output.  And in a democracy that is the kind of give and take we have to put up with.  But in order to operate my motorcycle, I have to be licensed, I have to be insured, I have to meet minimum vision and health standards and if I am operating it in an unsafe manner I have to answer to the police.  I have to suffer the negative publicity anytime anyone on two wheels acts out in an antisocial manner.  And if the actions of the Hell's Angels and the local squids and stuntaz and the hooligans that plague Baltimore on stolen motocross bikes give the rest of us a big enough black eye, our two wheeled recreation might be face a ban.  That is the situation gun owners find themselves in today.

Gun owners find themselves trying to justify their love for the tools of murder with increasingly shallow justifications.  We have a long and storied tradition of firearm ownership which is baked into the foundational document of our country.  Which like the long and storied tradition of slave ownership which was also in our foundational document, we need to change.  It's time to grow up and put down the tools which make killing ourselves and each other easier so we can pick up the tools to make our country and our world better.