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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, December 08, 2006

Rummy Knows "THE Math", Too 

...it is perhaps cruelly instructive of just how deeply we are stuck in a bad hard place in Iraq to listen to Donald Rumsfeld's parting statements at today's little going-away party that the Pentagon bigwigs ginned up for the Big Guy. As one of the last unrepentent True Believers of the "Shining Beacon of Democracy" fantasy that has been getting Neocons physically aroused every time they thought about Iraq since...well, since about the day after GHW Bush called off the dogs after 100 hours of Desert Storm, he still sees hope and optimism where most rational observers see a civil war that the Bush administration and it's water carriers won't admit to, and he's not shy about saying so. Apparently, Rumsfeld is educated as to the same math that guided Karl Rove in the recent elections:

"We have every chance in the world of succeeding in both those countries, but only if we have the patience and only if we have the staying power..."

It's almost...well, no...it IS cheating to lump Afghanistan and Iraq together in this little thumbnail analysis of his, but there it is. Afghanistan was the "Good" invasion, successful in its own way even though it bore the same "on the cheap" stamp that seems likely to be Rumsfeld's legacy when it comes to war-making. The difference was that Afghanistan had a loose armed insurgency of its own in the warlords, while Iraq, aside from the Kurds in the north, had nothin'. The other major difference, also a direct result of the decision to send too small a force into Iraq, is the whole series of actions and behaviors that manufactured hatred for the American occupation force. Abu Ghraib is the most visible example of that little problem because of the likely detainment of so many probably innocent citizens, but it's just the tip of that nasty little iceberg...

There have been simply too many episodes like this (if local officials are to be believed, and too often in the past they have been believable), too many innocent individuals and families shot up at makeshift roadblocks, too many insufficiently explained stacks of women's and children's bodies in situations where the initial story was about the killing of insurgents - complete with the same silly-stupid body counts that those of us of a certain age remember all too well as the supposed measure of just how "We Are Winning" during the War in Vietnam, too many culturally insensitive intrusions on the lives and homes of the Iraqi people, too many tours for too few troops with too much pressure and too little effort by the leadership to try to maintain the troops on an even strain when so many of them have spent more time in a high-risk setting than any G.I. who made it all the way from D-Day on June 6, 1944, to Germany's surrender the next spring. We are losing in Iraq, not because of insufficient will of the troops or because of the efforts of all those dirty anti-war hippies in the U.S. rioting and burning flags or blowing up recruitment centers (oh....wait...wrong undeclared war...sorry). We are losing in Iraq because the Iraqi people in too many cases see us as being a problem rather than a solution and too many of the Iraqi people have their own views on how they think things should run. We are faced with the stout likelihood of having created a far worse situation in the Middle East than if we had just continued containing Saddam Hussein; it is a potential failure borne by the lies of the political leadership and the subjugation of the military leaders who, as witnesses to if not participants in our failure in Vietnam, should have known perfectly well that there was more life and truth in the Powell Doctrine of Desert Storm days than in the "new way" of warfare that Rummy wanted to demostrate to the world because he was the smartest kid in the class.

"We have every chance in the world of succeeding..."


No...

No, we don't.

Sorry, Rummy, but - as far as Iraq is concerned - no we don't. We have a damned narrow and exceedingly unlikely chance of succeeding. The broader chances we had of succeeding were taken away from us by an administration that was so blinded by its own set of untested "truths" that it didn't even have a plan for dealing with insurgency, providing for the security of the average citizen, or even supplying reliable electrical power to the capital city. Our in-country leadership is huddled behind dense layers of security in the Green Zone, and hardly a single one of them could even step outside the checkpoints to ask a local what time it is if that worthy doesn't speak English. Meanwhile, Iraqi's dressed in the uniforms of the very personnel that we are supposed to be training to provide the security for the country are running around kidnapping, beheading, raping, and shooting their countrymen and reducing life in the country to some simple raw atavistic tribal nightmare...

Nope, Donny, we don't have that much of a chance. But we DO have you to thank for that fact. So thanks for everything, buddy. People of my age never dreamed that we would see such a remarkable reprise of the disaster that was the Vietnam war in our lifetimes; foolishly, we thought that the lessons learned there, things that we lived through rather than learned in a textbook, would offer sufficient guidelines for our current leadership. You tricked us all, though, you wilely ol' fox. Yes, thanks for that civics lesson, pal, and don't let those heavy swinging Pentagon front doors hit you in the butt on your way out...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:23 PM 0 comments

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Nobody Does Stupid Like Texas 

...who do we credit for this kind of bullshit? George W. Bush is a strong candidate, being so proudly a Texan and all, but it is more the product of all of his handlers, fixers, minions, mechanics, wet-men, and hangers'-on that we have come to the place where the mere existence of a mosque in your very own neighborhood was the harbinger of future carbombs and dusky-skinned youths with darty eyes and vests full of explosives at the local fast food place. This is no less than the full expression of the entire "fight them there so we don't have to fight them here" hatred for people who are adherents to one of the three great religions to spring from the Middle East...

While the tension between Islam and Christianity reaches back to the first Crusades of the Middle Ages, a reasonable person should be reasonably be excused for thinking that in this last great bastion of freedom known as the United States of America there would be room for the freedom to worship as one wishes. Clearly, in Texas, that isn't the case, but the current conflict hopefully can't be laid up against the rejection of a religion on its own merits. This bit of 'Ugly American' behavior has its roots in the whole idea of Islam as the root of all terrorism. Given the lack of introspection that so powerfully grips some of your and my neighbors, there is a completely unironic failure to acknowledge or even address the ultra-conservative (that's the most polite term) beliefs that lead to such things as the Christian Identity movement or the Christianist-based super-patriots who felt that it was their God-given duty to blow up 168 innocent men, women, and children in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City...

I suppose it's only right that we should assume that a state in which local jurisdicitons are more than happy to authorize the possession of firearms inside church sanctuaries would tolerate the existance of people who are willing to throw the whole foundation of this country and it's freedom of religious worship to the wind when a bunch of dirty terrorist Muslims dare to suggest that they would like to build a mosque for the benefit of these redneck wingnuts' very neighbor. Repudiation of constitutional rights used to be something of a rare thing in this country, but I suppose we have super-Texan George W. Bush and his unstated but grim determined battle against Islam, regardless of its very forms. This most recent Texan behavior is but a touchstone to the success that Gee Dub's minions must celebrate having achieved in capturing the fear of all Americans. They have no game at all if they don't have this bit of hatred, and all the pig-races in the world won't save them for being revealed as the hate-filled anti-Christian fundamental religionists that they really are...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:55 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

A Public Service Message On Winter Travel 

...searchers found James Kim's body just after noon today, local time, in a tributary drainage to Oregon's Rogue River, and with that the 11-day saga of the mysteriously missing San Francisco family came to a tragic end. It's a devastating outcome for family, friends, and coworkers...and even for the search and rescue teams that have been trying to find them over the last several days (when you're working on a SAR situation, you tend to acquire a tremendous amount of ownership in finding the victim alive; it can be the highest high in the world when things work out that way and one of the lowest, darkest feelings imaginable when they don't, even though we're talking about complete strangers here). This sort of thing happens far more frequently than you might imagine this time of year, but without the amount of press coverage generated by this most recent episode. Sometimes the stranded persons are found by hunters, sometimes by snowmobilers or other winter recreationalists, sometimes by loggers or people like me out in the woods in the course of our daily work. Sometimes the episode is just a cold night in the woods; sometimes it's a very near thing. In any case, there are things that folks traveling in the mountains of the intermountain west during the winter can do to either avoid - or, if things go bad - survive being stuck in the snow in the middle of nowhere...

First of all, have a map and use it to stick to the main travel routes. State highway maps show all sorts of secondary roads without indicating that some of these little grey lines aren't open during the winter. Don't take the little grey lines, no matter how attractive a short cut they may offer. Stick to the paved, numbered highways...

Regardless of the type of road, if you find yourself battling through snow that suggests the road may not have been plowed the last few days, stop, turn around, and retreat to some known point or outpost of civilization to check on your route. If it hasn't snowed in a couple of days but you are wallowing around in snow up to your hubcaps, you are someplace you don't want to be...

There are any number of lists of "things to carry" while engaged in winter travel. While you are making sure that you have all those things, make doubly sure that you have a complete set of outdoor winter clothing (including shoes) for each passenger, water, and nonperishable food in case you need to spend some time stranded (we have packaged MRE's - Meals, Ready to Eat - that I have put in all of the family vehicles, which have the added advantage of providing matches and firestarter material). Even on a main route, the weather can sometimes cause road closures that - if you become stranded in a snowdrift - can foretell a stay of many hours before some rescuer comes by to help, especially in some more remote parts of the west where even the primary route through a given area isn't a heavily-travelled road...

If possible, plan your route, tell somebody what your route is, and stick with your route. If things still go wrong, stay with the vehicle, especially if you aren't familiar with the country. Vehicles are easier to find that people wandering all over to hell and gone out yonder somewhere...

Every so often there is a story like the Kim's; some end happily and others tragically. Driving in the mountains in the winter is not a casual experience and getting stranded is a true survival situation. Preparation is the key; preparation is life...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:47 PM 0 comments

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Howard Speaks Truth to Power 

...every pundit and his half-brother’s second wife’s first cousin has some reason to offer for why the Republican party lost so completely, in detail and by the numbers, a few weeks ago. Even the Chairman of the Republican party, Kenny-boy his own self, has offered his own observations as to why the Democrats are in charge, even going so far as to highlight all of the close Congressional contests that the Republicans won - not allowing for the fact that many of those close-fought victories weren’t even supposed to be contested contests, but never mind that for now. Howard Dean, once again, has it right, and the Democratic leadership will prosper if they listen to him instead of all those sucking praising little voices that want to keep telling them that it was the glint in their eye, the cut of their jib, and the rock-solid cleverness of their campaign ad’s that put them into the majority. They will prosper even more if they can get beyond the misguided old-school objection to Dean’s 50-state strategy at the cost of the traditional method of doing things that has resulted in over a decade of beat-downs and defeats...

Despite the continual drumbeat of noise from the old school and the DLC slow-talkin’ Looziana wanna-be’s who would like to think that it was somehow their philosophy that carried the day, Dean is still out there, still speaking truth to power. He is saying the things that need to be said to the new Democratic majority, sounding the cautionary note that - at the end of the fairy tail - continued electoral success will come from taking action on the concerns of the people and playing the game clean and not from perceiving some foggy mandate to layer some more progressive face on the same game that the Republicans so quickly decided to play. The Republicans didn’t lose their majority because of the failure of their message; they lost because they didn’t have any message that could overcome the appearance that they were simply ruling for the perks that rule offered in an atmosphere that featured unquestioned allegiance to the failed policies of the Bush Administration. They lost because they repudiated the long-standing principles for which their party stood and showed no particular interest in getting back to those principles. While the array of principles that various Democrats espoused spans a fairly wide spectrum, the opportunity exists for the new Democratic majority to honor most, if not all, of these principles if - and only if - they understand that it is the needs of the voters that need to be addressed rather than the needs of the money men and fat cats...

Democrats lost their majorities in the mid-90's because they had finally after 40 years lost touch with the will of the people and were ripe for assault over their sense of entitlement. Republicans set records that may never be challenged in getting to the same point of hubris in a mere 10 years. The fall of a party from majority status is always instructive, and Howard Dean is trying to sound the alarm to keep Democrats from falling into the same old trap that they once and the Republicans later fell into. This will be a short stint in the majority if Democrats, for whatever reason, decide not to listen to him....
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:29 PM 0 comments

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