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A review of Keith L. Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America's Military Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Over the last twenty years, the US has engaged in wars in Iraq (twice), the Balkans, Somalia, and Afghanistan. It has done so with a fearsome military that has availed itself of technological advancements since the seventies. Shimko looks at this “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) in the context of military change over the years and the recent wars the US has been in.
The US military went hi-tech before the term was widely used. Over the last forty years, precision-guided munitions (chiefly those delivered by airpower), surveillance systems, communications equipment, and other technologies have been adopted and their lethal capabilities have been demonstrated in several conflicts. This RMA has offered the promise of shorter wars that use smaller forces and inflict far fewer civilian casualties than in previous wars. If that last part seems dubious, compare Baghdad in 2003 and Berlin fifty-eight years earlier. Baghdad was pockmarked; Berlin was flattened.
Is this RMA truly a revolution? That is, do these changes constitute a military revolution comparable to the one effected by the French when they fielded huge armies against enemies of the Revolution or the one Germany set loose on Poland and France in World War Two? Shimko believes it does but gives fair treatment of those who disagree – so fair that a reader might come to agree with the other school. But that debate is one for conclaves at political science meetings, not for policy makers or concerned citizens.
. . . a deal: If you feel that strongly that Obama has done the right thing and has managed politics in the last year and nine months then you will most assuredly take the challenge. It's time to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak.
Also, to prove my good faith: I'll vote for the Democrats in this election.
The Brunette and I drove out to the Hill Country this weekend, passing through Johnson City, the home of President Johnson. In the early thirties this region was one of extreme rural poverty. Not your typical Southern poverty, however, as African-Americans have never much been in evidence here. The Hill Country was a region of mostly German and Scotch-Irish extraction. The Hill Country has always been a strange place, open to progressive economic ideas, but a touch xenophobic and racist. LBJ and other New Deal Democrats had a great deal of success here. The New Deal Social Contract lasting here until the early eighties. I say all this as a semaphore of sorts to my argument.
As we drove through Johnson I saw an old, fifties-style sign that read, "Johnson City, Home of the Pedernales Electric Co-op. Most people don't realize but it was LBJ and the New Deal that brought electricity to these areas in the 30s. Fresh farm to market roads, as well. And many other government projects that improved people's lives. That the region was (and remains) a touch xenophobic and racist, didn't matter. "Good economic policy," as I told The Brunette, "real benefits they could see is what made these people vote Democratic for almost two generations."
Behind the scenes, he has worked to form what he calls the "Black Robe Regiment," a coalition of Christian leaders to foster Christian values in American society. Sounds kinda icky, almost like the KKK in a photo negative.
Or Hitler's Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts or volunteer stormtroopers of the Nazi party.
A mysterious fire last Friday destroys all of the voting machines in Harris County (Houston), Texas. Arson investigators have not yet issued an opinion. Meanwhile, a well-funded right-wing group emerges in Houston and begins raising unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud. A video on their website pictures only people of color when it talks of voter fraud. White people are shown talking patriotically about the need for a million vigilantes to suppress illegal votes.
Two score and seven years ago the nation’s dispossessed thronged the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King define the struggle for African-American civil rights.
Today it was the turn of the nation’s disenfranchised to gather at the same place, lamenting their lost supremacy as a superior race, and longing for a prophet to lead them back to the mountain top. That prophet, America's self-anointed Jeremiah, was FOX News entertainer Glenn Beck.
Glenn Beck, a man who only ten years ago was wallowing in drug addiction, is a reformed sinner who has seen the light and believes he has a God-given obligation to bring America out of the wilderness. Whether God has anything to do with Glenn Beck’s mission is subject to personal belief, but no one can doubt that Glenn Beck has someone as powerful as God behind him – Rupert Murdoch.
So, you cut back on your lifestyle; performed a so un-Greek personal austerity reset but your credit card balance is still creeping up; or perhaps you are slowly burning through your savings; or you are at the end of the line; abandon ship. Whatever, you have a lot of company out there.
Why is it so hard to make ends meet these days? The days of living high on the credit hog are over and we all have to get small but in the end, we still have to make ends meet; we have to pay for food, pay for utilities, buy gas, etc. How to make that work?
We all bought a lot of stuff during those days of easy credit. Debt driven demand drove up the value of lots of things. Homes increased in value so much that they became a kind of income harvested through a home equity line of credit. Autos got big and powerful again making them unaffordable to buy and operate now that we have to live within our means. Cell phones replaced land lines and cost a lot more; especially when everyone in the family has to have one. Maybe you have a home that you cannot sell and you are stuck living 20 miles or more from your workplace and your car is fast reaching the point when you will need a new one just to get to work.
A restaurant opening in Berlin offers gourmets something completely different, human flesh on the main menu. The restaurant aiming to serve man iscalledFLIME. The web page boasts that, "Flime is the first restaurant in the world to serve you a menu of original Wari tradition." What tradition would that be? It's the tradition of Amazonian cannibalism practiced through 1960 by the Wari culture. (Image)
Vanderbilt University researchers found that members of the Wari culture, located in the Peruvian Amazon, would eat their enemies in battle as, "an intentional expression of anger and disdain for the enemy." They also ate their loved ones as a part of the burial ritual. This was, according to the researchers, "done out of affection and respect for the dead person and as a way to help survivors cope with their grief." Researchers mentioned that a chalky aftertaste is frequently reported by some ritual participants.
Corn harvest is near done and the end can’t come soon enough. I am seriously considering not planting corn again as a commercial crop. Like many that have studied sustainable agriculture, I decided to get away from genetically modified grains. So the corn we planted was non-Roundup-ready corn. Not only non-Roundup-ready corn, but also a non-hybrid. The idea was to grow corn from which I could keep back my own seed.
Our fields lie along the banks of two rivers, the San Marcos and the Guadalupe. We had an unusually wet spring and early summer this year, a good thing. Actually, too much of a good thing. Every time we cultivated the field it rained and some of the weeds survived the disruption. After the third pass through the field, we had a single day rain of ten inches and much of our field land was flooded, particularly the 120 acre field bordering the San Marcos. By the time the ground had dried, the corn was too tall to cultivate again.
One in five prisoners who are assaulted are raped on their first day in prison. Let me repeat that. One in five assaulted are raped on their very first day of incarceration. And that doesn't even begin to tell the whole story of prison rape. For example, contrary to popular myth, more prisoners reported sexual assaults involving prison staff (2.8 percent) than other inmates (2.1 percent). And women are more likely to be victimized than men.
Theses are only some of the findings of a newly released study by the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports that 88,500 adults held in U.S. prisons and jails are sexually abused each year. Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder has already missed a deadline of June, 2010 to institute reforms mandated by a bipartisan commission created by the passage of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (signed by George W. Bush), reforms that could help prevent these nearly 88,500 individual tragedies from continuing unabated.
The United States government needs to take steps to preserve its top AAA-rating, a Standard & Poor's Ratings (S&P) official told Dow Jones newswire in an interview published on Thursday.
The measures taken in response to recommendations President Barack Obama's commission on fiscal responsibility would be crucial in the view S&P takes on the U.S. credit rating, he said.
"It is very important for the credit standing of the United States that the Congress considers very carefully what the fiscal commission proposes," John Chambers, chairman of S&P's sovereign rating committee, was quoted as saying.
The ratings agencies were one of the key culprits in the financial crisis and now they are lecturing (and enabling) politicians about the Catfood Commission. That's rich!
This is not a surprise to people who have spent any time at all over the past eight years listening to even the mildest gossip about Republicans. During the 2006 pedophilia/men's bathroom scandals of the GOP, Mehlman was talked about fairly frequently. I suspect there were several bloggers who really wanted to out him. I also suspect that his own personal stance (no pun intended) on gay issues probably saved his bacon from embarrassment.
Ken Mehlman came out last night, and vowed to defeat Proposition 8 in California. This takes a lot more courage than we suspect, but not as much courage as he'd like us to believe.
Former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman announced this week that he was gay. “It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life,” he said to reporter Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic
Mehlman makes it sound like he has engaged in a titanic internal struggle to understand and face up to his sexuality, and that recently, in his fifth decade, he has finally accepted the liberating truth that he prefers to sleep with men. Congratulations are coming in all around, from other former officials in the Bush Administration who admire Ken Mehlman’s “honesty”, to gay activists enthused that there is at least one closeted Republican who hasn’t fondled little boys.
Michael Collins
Wikileaks offered its first release since the controversial distribution of documents related to the United States effort in Afghanistan.
The leak describes Red Cell as a CIA unit created by the Director to develop "out-of-the-box" analysis offering "alternative viewpoints" on key intelligence issues.
This document doesn't disappoint in being out-of-the-box.
CIA Perception Management - How the World Sees the United States
CIA Red Cell starts out by stating, "This report examines the implications of what it would mean for the US to be seen increasingly as an incubator and exporter of terrorism." Don't hold your breath. There's nothing there about the School of the Americas, the shock and awe invasion of Iraq and the carnage that entailed, or 300 dead Panamanians and United States soldiers as a result of the 1981 manhunt for General Manuel Noriega, a former US asset.
As Todd B notes it is time for a good news post. My good news? First, The Brunette got a new kitten Saturday. He's adorable. It's hard to be negative while watching a young kitten flail around. Lots of smiles. His name is Finn, as in Huck Finn. I like it!
Also, the heat broke last night here in Central Texas. It's in the low nineties today. This morning was actually unseasonably cool. Hooray!
This post by Ian reminds me of my career at Morgan Stanley. In the early 90s I was hired by a guy I'll call Rob.
Rob's imperative about investing and asset management was this: "do the right thing for your clients and you will prosper. It may take time, but over the years your business will improve."
For the first three years of my time at Morgan Stanley he was correct. It was easy to do the right thing, because my immediate superiors supported it. My business grew, actually it flourished. I had fun. I was reasonably content, professionally and, more importantly, personally. I made a lot of money. More money, in fact, than a late twenty early thirty-something had any business making.
When the horror of nuclear warfare was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the term "Ground Zero" entered our lexicon. The expression has come to mean the epicenter of a catastrophic event. . . . the point from which damage spreads. [While] it's not an apt analog for the physical destruction that resulted from the attacks on the World Trade Center. . . . it is an appropriate metaphor for the . . . bigotry against Muslim Americans that has radiated out from Ground Zero and spread across the United States.
Ironically, not long after 9/11, you could walk the streets of Manhattan and still see Islams praying in a storefront mosque with a vendor outside selling Islamic ware, as well as Middle-Eastern food vendors playing tapes or CDs of muezzins. No inhibitions; no harassment.
Over the last twenty years, the US has engaged in wars in Iraq (twice), the Balkans, Somalia, and Afghanistan. It has done so with a fearsome military that has availed itself of technological advancements since the seventies. Shimko looks at this “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) in the context of military change over the years and the recent wars the US has been in.
Glenn Beck, Religious Nut
"Restoring Honor"
