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I’ve always sort of wanted an M-1 Garand, the weapon that General George Patton called “the single greatest battle implement ever devised by man.”
Used to be you could get in a queue to purchase an M-1 from the Civilian Marksmanship Program, but by the time I had the unobligated scratch to purchase a rifle I couldn’t really use for anything much more than historical appreciation, the inventory started running dry. Plus, you never quite knew what you were going to get quality-wise, and that was before CMP started bidding the rifles at auction rather than selling them outright.
Anyway, whenever the fancy struck me, I always had something better to spend a thousand dollars on.
Turns out a supply of nearly 90,000 rifles that defeated fascism and militarism were to be made available for purchase here in the States. Re-imported from South Korea, where they have finally been made surplus.
Except that dad said no:
The Obama administration approved the sale of the American-made rifles last year. But it reversed course and banned the sale in March – a decision that went largely unnoticed at the time but that is now sparking opposition from gun rights advocates.
A State Department spokesman said the administration’s decision was based on concerns that the guns could fall into the wrong hands.
“The transfer of such a large number of weapons — 87,310 M1 Garands and 770,160 M1 Carbines — could potentially be exploited by individuals seeking firearms for illicit purposes,” the spokesman told FoxNews.com.
“We are working closely with our Korean allies and the U.S. Army in exploring alternative options to dispose of these firearms.”
Dad promised us that he wouldn’t take our guns away. He never said that he’d let us buy new ones. After all, the peasants people aren’t to be trusted.
I probably still wouldn’t have bought one: 7.62x63mm is expensive, the rifle is heavy, I don’t hunt large game and for home defense purposes, it’d be over-kill. And I’m pretty sure that the All Girl Spending Team would have vetoed the purchase in any case.
But I would like to have the option of saying no.
In the WSJ, Danniel Henninger employs the alternate history strategy to close out the Iraq War, asking, “What if Saddam had Stayed?”
Let us assume that Mr. Obama’s “smarter” view (2002) had prevailed, that we had left Saddam in power in Iraq. What would the world look like today?
Mr. Obama and others believe that Saddam and his nuclear ambitions could have been contained. I think exactly the opposite was likely.
At the time of Mr. Obama’s 2002 antiwar speech, three other significant, non-Iraqi events were occurring: Iran and North Korea were commencing toward a nuclear break-out, and A.Q. Khan was on the move.
In March 2002, Mr. Khan, the notorious Pakistani nuclear materials dealer, moved his production facilities from Pakistan to Malaysia.
In August, an Iranian exile group revealed the existence of a centrifuge factory in Natanz, Iran.
A month later, U.S. intelligence concluded that North Korea had almost completed a “production-scale” centrifuge facility.
It was also believed in 2002 that al Qaeda was shopping for nuclear materials. In The Wall Street Journal this week, Jay Solomon described how two North Korean operatives through this period developed a network to acquire nuclear technologies.
In short, the nuclear bad boys club was on the move in 2002. Can anyone seriously believe that amidst all this Saddam Hussein would have contented himself with administering his torture chambers? This is fanciful.
Admittedly, but this is where Mr. Henninger’s analysis falls apart: The other two members of the “axis of evil” have been allowed to nuclearize, or are on the brink of doing so. If Saddam’s threat had to be eliminated, why do we tolerate Ahmadinejad’s and Kim Chong Il’s? If they can be tolerated, why could not Saddam?
Was Iraq exceedingly more dangerous than Kim Chong Il’s gulag, or the neighboring Iranian mullahcracy? North Korea’s despot class chiefly wants to ensure their own survival, and so their nukes form a weird, asymmetrical deterrent: They are allowed to indulge in provocations, and the South is denied the opportunity to respond. And who knows, perhaps a little off the top could generate some hard currency that goes a long way towards the importation of caviar, champagne and blonds to private parties at the workers’ paradise.
And while a nuclear rivalry between Iraq and Iran would have been problematical, it would have chiefly been their problem. Now Iraq is too weak to act as counter-balance and check Persian ambitions.
We are standing over the graves of 4000 US soldiers, let us at least be frank: We went into Iraq because we thought that a swift victory there was a worthwhile end in itself that could also serve to deter Iran and North Korea from nuclear adventurism. Clearly, we we wrong on both counts: Imposing order, not to mention the semblance of a civil society (far less its institutions) ended up being much harder than practically anyone suspected, North Korea has nukes and Iran is well on the way to joining the club. This is not to question the judgment of those who made our national decisions – we now know things that we could not have known before.
In the early years we told ourselves that by breaking Saddam’s grip we had unleashed pressures that had been bottled up by 35 years of repressive tyranny. After a few years, with our senses dulled by daily scenes of unspeakable violence, we stopped trying to imagine motives: The capacity of some Iraqis and their Arab “brothers” for inflicting barbaric punishment – mostly on their own co-religionists – was hitherto unimaginable.
Granted the stand-up fight, the set piece battle is apparently not quite their form. But find some loser who can’t find a girlfriend, hop him up on heroin and the promise of heavenly virgins and you’ll find any number willing to drive explosive laden buses into crowds of school children. If he won’t do that, there are also jobs to be had setting up pressure plate IEDs and popping off small arms and RPG rounds around the corner. You can’t buy that in Kansas.
We say we “love freedom” and “hate tyranny”, but we had a failure of imagination – political love and hate are abstractions to us, mental models. We simply were not equipped to envision hate on this vector or scale.
Not everyone of course, not all of them. Not even most. But enough.
The “Sunni Awakening” had less to do with any sudden realization of the benefits that US-style democracy might confer, or even any weariness from fighting and much more to do with the realization by the sheiks of al Anbar that 1) al Qaeda was the more lethal threat to their ambitions and 2) the US Marine Corps was the “strongest tribe” with which to ally themselves. The surge brought order to the capital by offering more troops for jihadis to shoot at, who in turn were recipients of (usually much more accurate) return fires and dead men kill no more. It also forced Moktada Sadr – who is cleverer than he looks – to husband his strength and await better opportunities.
We stayed and fought because while the cost of doing so was roughly calculable – another thousand dead, another hundred billion dollars – the consequences for failure were not.
Alternate histories are entertaining. But ultimately, they are acts of fiction.
The upside: SU-27 Flankers to fly as opfor for €160k a year.
The downside: The work is in Iceland.
The real downside? I very much doubt that they can make it work, from a financial standpoint. Those beasts are expensive to operate, tricky to maintain and, well: Sort of out of the way.
Calvin Coolidge famously complained to the War Department about the cost of aircraft procurement, saying, “Why don’t we just buy one airplane and let the pilots take turns flying it?”
The UK and France have taken the notion to a national extreme:
BRITAIN and France are preparing to reveal unprecedented plans to share the use of their aircraft carriers in a controversial step to maintain military power in an era of cost-cutting…
David Cameron and President Sarkozy are expected to outline the proposal in a November summit, which will lead to British and French flagships working together and protecting the interests of both countries…
Critics questioned the viability of such a partnership, noting British and French interests historically differ. Gwyn Prins, a research professor at the London School of Economics, said: “At first glance it may seem sensible to pool aircraft carriers with the French. But a moment’s reflection in the light of past history and of modern geopolitics shows why that is unwise.”
Nelson would be spinning in his grave.
Speaking of simulations, the airline industry’s suppliers could be doing a better job:
More than half of the 522 fatalities in U.S. airline accidents since 2000 have been linked to problems with simulators, devices that are used nearly universally to train the nation’s airline pilots, the records show.
Simulator training is credited with saving thousands of lives. But the problem, according to National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) case files and safety experts, is that in rare but critical instances they can trick pilots into habits that lead to catastrophic mistakes…
Simulators revolutionized training starting in the 1970s by allowing airlines to train pilots almost exclusively on the ground.
However, as realistic as they may seem, simulators are only as good as the data used to program them. Current simulators aren’t accurate when a plane goes out of control, which has prevented their use in training for the leading killer in commercial aviation.
Color me naive, but I’m a little surprised that loss of controlled flight is a “leading killer” in commercial aviation. And simulators are quite capable of modeling the six degrees of freedom involved in aircraft moving through space.
It all depends upon how much the customer is willing to pay.
The universe, many physicists agree, is “fine tuned” for life. If any one of a number of different of fundamental, physical constants were altered only just a little, life – at least as we know it – would not be possible.
One of these fundamental constants is the so-called “fine structure” constant, so named because by multiplying a number of other fundamental constants together a pure, unitless number is attained. The fine structure constant, known to physicists as α is elegantly dimensionless, and utterly mysterious, as quantum mechanic Richard Feynman wrote:
Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.” We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
Except it turns out that, perhaps – maybe – α is not constant at all:
What (a research team) found shocked them. The further back they looked with the (very large telescope), the larger alpha seemed to be—in seeming contradiction to the result they had obtained with the Keck. They realised, however, that there was a crucial difference between the two telescopes: because they are in different hemispheres, they are pointing in opposite directions. Alpha, therefore, is not changing with time; it is varying through space. When they analysed the data from both telescopes in this way, they found a great arc across the sky. Along this arc, the value of alpha changes smoothly, being smaller in one direction and larger in the other. The researchers calculate that there is less than a 1% chance such an effect could arise at random. Furthermore, six of the quasars were observed with both telescopes, allowing them to get an additional handle on their errors.
Or put another way, and in another context, “”What we’re suggesting is that something that can’t interact with anything is changing something that can’t be changed.”
Maybe Bostrom was right.
I didn’t get a chance to see it, I was heads down on a project at work until 1900, although it’s clear from the LA Time’s text that the president is not a lurker about these premises.
Sweeping from right to left, William Kristol thought that it’s about as much as a hawk could expect from a dove, while VDH thought that we had somehow stepped through a looking glass:
The general framework of withdrawal was scheduled as part of the Bush/Petraeus status of force agreements with the Iraqis. Obama is to be congratulated for keeping to it, but chastised for suggesting that it was his own — and more so for not referencing the surge that made it all possible. So, again, it was a weird moment: Are we supposed to think that after 20 months a president is responsible for his own record (e.g., Bush need not be credited for his lonely, but critical support for the surge that allowed the withdrawal), but not quite responsible when it is inconvenient (Bush must be blamed for leaving a bad economy that Obama’s borrowing cannot cure)?
Slate’s Fred Kaplan, meanwhile, found the whole affair something of a muddle and implying that this whole “Oval Office speech to the nation” thing might not be President Obama’s format.
The New York Times on the other hand lauds the president’s “usual calm clarity and eloquence” (!) while taking potshots at his predecessor:
President George W. Bush tried to make Iraq an invisible, seemingly cost-free war. He refused to attend soldiers’ funerals and hid their returning coffins from the public…
The speech also made us reflect on how little Mr. Bush accomplished by needlessly invading Iraq in March 2003 — and then ludicrously declaring victory two months later.
This is so unfair as to be childishly petty and mean: The issue was never one of President Bush “refusing to go to funerals” or “hiding coffins” it was of respecting the grief of stricken families and refusing to let that grief become a grotesque political club in the hands of opposition politicians and media. After all, it took the New York Times to make Iraq invisible, and then only after President Not Bush had been inaugurated.
Finishing our sweep, Glenn Greenwald(s) has Something Really Important™ to say, but I couldn’t quite get through it. (Update I, II, III, IV, etc.)
Reading the president’s speeches is often a different affair than hearing them. When he is at his most rhetorically eloquent, I often find on closer observation that he hasn’t really said much. If it’s true, as some critics have read, that the speech felt flat and purposeless in real time, it is at least gratifying to read in the president’s words praise for the success of our troops, his troops. I’m really not surprised that his only real mention of the surge was to parallel it with his own increased deployment of forces to Iraq, even as he fails to note that it was a significant factor in our fragile success in Iraq, or that he and virtually everyone in his camp opposed the idea. But if imitation really is the highest form of flattery, then former President George W. Bush could have fellt quite flattered.
But then there was this:
Unfortunately, over the last decade, we have not done what is necessary to shore up the foundation of our own prosperity. We have spent over a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits. For too long, we have put off tough decisions on everything from our manufacturing base to our energy policy to education reform. As a result, too many middle class families find themselves working harder for less, while our nation’s long-term competitiveness is put at risk.
The phrase “over the last decade” has become shorthand for “George W. Bush,” who after all was president for 8 of those 10 years. In the race to become president, being “Not Bush” was a winning campaign strategy, but 20 months in to President Obama’s stewardship, even the euphemism has lost whatever electoral charm it might once have had. It took Bush eight years to rack up a trillion dollar deficit. President Obama doubled it in less than six months.
With unemployment remaining stubbornly high and the domestic economy sputtering, it is certainly not clear that he did so to any noteworthy effect. Nor is it clear what the president intends or can do about the nation’s manufacturing base, while his energy policy – if and when it comes to fruition – will almost certainly be a jobs killer. Education, meanwhile, remains in the province of state and local governments.
Most of all I was sadly unsurprised to hear the president admit that he was wrong about Iraq. Looking at it from his perspective though, he had nothing to be ashamed about. In the successful campaign to be “Not Bush” he had to say a number of things that he didn’t really believe to be true once he was elected. There was that bit about wiping clear the national stain of Guantanamo, for example. Extraordinary renditions. Warrantless wiretaps. Foreign wars.
They are just words, empty words. Like the words about the manufacturing base and education reform.
Just things you say to get elected. What could be more important than that?
Update: John Boehner says it’s a little too soon to “turn the page.”
The WSJ is hosting a discussion among some “leading thinkers” about what moderate Islam looks like. First up is Anwar Ibrahim, a Malaysian opposition leader taking a break between sodomy trials:
The vast majority of Muslims already see themselves as part of a civilization that is heir to a noble tradition of science, philosophy and spirituality that places paramount importance on the sanctity of human life. Holding fast to the principles of democracy, freedom and human rights, these hundreds of millions of Muslims fervently reject fanaticism in all its varied guises.
Yet Muslims must do more than just talk about their great intellectual and cultural heritage. We must be at the forefront of those who reject violence and terrorism. And our activism must not end there. The tyrants and oppressive regimes that have been the real impediment to peace and progress in the Muslim world must hear our unanimous condemnation. The ball is in our court.
No argument here, whale away at that ball.
Next at bat is Princeton’s professor emeritus Bernard Lewis, who has written movingly and effectively about the great advances the world owes to Islamic science and medicine in such scholarly texts as “What Went Wrong?“:
A form of moderation has been a central part of Islam from the very beginning. True, Muslims are nowhere commanded to love their neighbors, as in the Old Testament, still less their enemies, as in the New Testament. But they are commanded to accept diversity, and this commandment was usually obeyed. The Prophet Muhammad’s statement that “difference within my community is part of God’s mercy” expressed one of Islam’s central ideas, and it is enshrined both in law and usage from the earliest times.
This principle created a level of tolerance among Muslims and coexistence between Muslims and others that was unknown in Christendom until after the triumph of secularism. Diversity was legitimate and accepted. Different juristic schools coexisted, often with significant divergences.
Sectarian differences arose, and sometimes led to conflicts, but these were minor compared with the ferocious wars and persecutions of Christendom. Some events that were commonplace in medieval Europe— like the massacre and expulsion of Jews—were almost unknown in the Muslim world. That is, until modern times.
Well, yes, although the professor does rather gloss over a millennium worth of conquering by the sword, disenfranchisement and dhimmitude. Spain, the professor will remember, had to be “reconquered.”
To be entirely fair, it’s difficult to protest that Saladin and his heirs were especially cruel. By the standard of their times, they were less noted for their barbarism than for their successes. Successes enabled, as much as anything else, by a vigorous tendency towards intramural murder in the “Christian” West.
Who as a consequence of which got so very good at killing that the former conquerors became in time the colonized. But all of that was quite some time back, and does rather pose the question of, “what have you done for us lately?
Ed Husain, who founded the Quilliam Foundation to combat extremism and would prefer to be called a “normal Muslim” rather than a “moderate” one, can answer that question:
The claim, made today by the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia, that they represent God’s will expressed through their version of oppressive Shariah law is a modern innovation.
Ay, there’s the rub.
Reuel Marc Gerecht gets to play the Western beard for this otherwise Oriental discussion, and has a charming personal anecdote that really adds little of substance, while Tawfik Hamid offers up the sensible prescription that one cannot entirely discount all of those horrible Koranic injunctions:
Moderate Islam must not be passive. It needs to actively reinterpret the violent parts of the religious text rather than simply cherry-picking the peaceful ones. Ignoring, rather than confronting or contextualizing, the violent texts leaves young Muslims vulnerable to such teachings at a later stage in their lives.
Finally, moderate Islam must powerfully reject the barbaric practices of jihadists. Ideally, this would mean Muslims demonstrating en masse all over the world against the violence carried out in the name of their religion.
Yes, that would be ideal. It would doubtless set the re-interpreters up for charges of apostasy that are punishable by death, but apart from that, ideal indeed.
Finally, Akbar Ahmed provides us a useful categorization scheme between the mystics, modernists and literalists. The good news is that it’s only the latter category that wants to kill whomever they cannot convince.
It’s an interesting read by some deep thinkers.
In other news, 21 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan over the last 48 hours. And four Jews – including a pregnant woman – were murdered on the West Bank yesterday on the eve of peace talks. Three thousand Gazans spontaneously gathered in celebration, even as Hamas’ Qassam Brigades took credit for the “heroic” attack.
Hamas, the alert reader will recall, is the terrorist organization that the Ground Zero Mosque’s Park51 Project for inter-faith learning’s Sharif el-Gamal cannot quite come round to condemning.
Terrorism being a “very complex question.”
And the beat goes on.
A cell phone taped to a Pepto Bismol bottle. Cell phones taped together with watches. $7k in cash. Large knives and a box cutter in checked baggage. Baggage re-routed from the passenger’s intended destination.
American law enforcement officials cautioned on Monday night that the men had not been charged with any crime and that the episode might be a misunderstanding. “There’s nothing at all confirmed at this point that’s associated with terrorism,” one official said.
And:
Omar Sufi of Detroit, who said he was a cousin of the passenger who boarded in Alabama, said his relative’s actions did not sound unusual.
He said that his cousin had most likely been trying to take medication and phones back to his family, and that it was common to bind together items meant for the same recipient. “This is our culture,” he said.
Cue Janet Napolitano: “The system worked.”
That’s Washington’s culture.
“My fellow Americans, today marks the end of America’s involvement in combat operations in Iraq. Our operational forces have withdrawn with honor from the field, leaving behind a free, if troubled democracy secure in its own borders, presenting no threat to its neighbors. Some 50,000 trainers and special operations forces remain in Iraq. They will help to sustain the victories we have labored so hard to earn in partnership with the vast majority of the Iraqi people. In nature of things, some of them may end up in combat, and some may yet die. But as a country, we have done what we can do, for better or worse. The destiny of Iraq now lies with the Iraqi people. We will continue to support them in their fight for freedom, but the fight is now theirs.
The war in Iraq has cost the United States and its closest allies nearly 5000 lives, and wounded many tens thousand soldiers whose debt we cannot ever fully repay. It has cost our treasury the better part of a trillion dollars. It has cost the Iraqi people untold tens of thousands of lives. Through our sacrifices we have liberated 25 million minds from grinding tyranny. I am not entirely sure that it was worth it.
As most of you know, I opposed my predecessor’s plan for the invasion of Iraq. I thought that decision was wrong. I thought then, and continue to believe now, that the war was fought on questionable premises. I believed that this was a war of choice, when – in my opinion – war ought to always be fought only of necessity. Despite the brilliance of our military campaign to overthrow the thuggish and dangerous regime of Saddam Hussein, I remained unconvinced that sufficient planning had gone in to what would happen after the regime had been destroyed. Today, I remain unsure whether the gains we have achieved are worth the cost we have borne, and the casualties we have inflicted. If nothing else, we have learned the limits of military power. After such costly expenditures of blood and treasure, this was hard won knowledge.
But let me be clear: A great nation undertook a great campaign against great evil. We did so through the democratic processes enshrined in our constitution. We did so out of the best intentions, if perhaps with limited foresight and imperfect intelligence. My administration will continue to endeavor to ensure that no such mistake can ever again be made, while also seeking to ensure that our sacrifices were not in vain.
Let me also make something else clear: My predecessor, nearly alone in perhaps all the world, remained convinced of the necessity to see the conflict in Iraq through to a successful resolution, just as he remained convinced that our military could, in conjunction with freedom loving people, find a way to precisely target al Qaeda, train the security forces of our Iraqi hosts and create the conditions for an honorable withdrawal of American combat power. Some labeled this stubbornness, some determination. I have come to learn that the distinction between the two is very much in the eye of the beholder.
As a presidential candidate 2007, I believed that all hope was lost in Iraq, that nothing much more could be expected of our forces than to redeploy them home. I thought it would be necessary for us to find some way to tolerate the consequences of our misadventure, consequences that I admitted might amount to genocide.
I was wrong.
Our armed forces fought valiantly under tremendously exceptionally challenging conditions, and without the united support of the people they defend, support that they deserved. They fought with unprecedented courage and humanity. Those that died in the effort gave their last full measure of devotion to the prospect that others might win the advantages that most us take for granted.
The vast majority of the Iraqi people rejected the tyranny of fear that al Qaeda and its affiliates threatened to impose and export, bravely facing death to vote for their own future, when everything in their history taught them to hunker down, to hide, to grovel. Rarely in human history have so many braved so much in the face of such implacable barbarity. It is not easy for us, who were given freedom as a birthright, to appreciate the sacrifices of those who have plucked it from the fire.
Iraq today is a far better and more hopeful place than it was in 2002. A great evil evil has been eliminated. Whether the gains we have forged will be worth the pain we have both endured and afflicted is not yet clear. It may not be clear for decades. History does not stand still.
But I am now convinced that we have done what we could reasonably hope to do. We pass the torch of freedom to the Iraqi people, even as we remain committed to supporting their successes. But although we remain engaged, we cannot commit ourselves further than they will commit themselves. We have at great cost removed from them the past boot of tyranny. We have given them their present. It is up to them to decide what kind of future they will craft for themselves and for their children. Where their aspirations align with our values, we will endeavor to assist them. But the fight for freedom is now theirs to fight, just as our fight for our freedom belongs to us. We wish them every success.
May God bless the people of Iraq, and may God bless America.”
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Credo "Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
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