Fourteen Years Of War On Terror And Counting

In January, 2007, the Bataclan Theater in Paris received threats, reportedly since the owners were Jewish. Le Figaro reported in 2011 that there were still threats.

So why can't we provide 8 years of security for every place - not just government offices - that Islamists do not like?

Eight years?!

What do you think Sun Tzu (The Art of War)would say about our War on Terror?

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”

“There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.”  (like 14 years since the World Trade Center)

“One may know how to conquer without being able to do it. ”

“There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must not be attacked, towns which must not be besieged, positions which must not be contested, commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed.”

What did we do this week? We had a media slobber-fest over killing Jihadi John.
Then we lost over a hundred people in Paris.
We can't even begin to talk about ending our support of the destabilization of Syria, and Mr. Obama is going to find that this growing disaster everywhere - not just the Middle East - will tarnish his legacy as sure as the Iraq War did George W. Bush's.


And think about the USA...

How would you like to be flying for Thanksgiving or Christmas? 
If you remember, my wife ran into a serious slow down in Baltimore three weeks ago, and that was before all this happened. People will stay home, and the parts of the economy devoted to travel will slide into recession.

We shall sit around the fire and cling fervidly to religion and guns.

You can kiss any form of gun control good-bye.
I'm going to learn to shoot a handgun... just in case eight years from now someone wants to shoot up the movie house I'm sitting in.

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Thoughtless Thoughts

In The Intercept:

Wesley Clark Calls for Internment Camps for "Radicalized" Americans
Murtaza Hussain    July 20 2015, 10:12 a.m.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/20/chattanooga-wesley-clark-calls-internment-camps-disloyal-americans/

Retired general and former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark on Friday called for World War II-style internment camps to be revived for “disloyal Americans.” In an interview with MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts in the wake of the mass shooting in Chatanooga, Tennessee, Clark said that during World War II, “if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.”

He called for a revival of internment camps to help combat Muslim extremism, saying, “If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine. It’s their right and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.”...

First Congress has to declare that a state of war exists.

Right now, the War on Terror has the same legal status as the War on Drugs.
The immense grey area of a popularly designated "War" makes it even easier for the state of Constant War that this lobbyist for War and Its Continuance desires.

Failing that, go back to being a cable-TV-talking-head-general-body-counter.

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How Do We Exist Without Compulsion?

photo: (TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP/Getty Images)



National Journal
How to Defeat ISIS With Millennial Spirit and Service
Terrorism and other 21st-century challenges require sacrifice shared by all Americans.
By Ron Fournier
http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/how-to-defeat-isis-with-millennial-spirit-and-service-20150616

June 16, 2015 I know a better way to fight ISIS. It starts with an idea that should appeal the better angels of both hawks and doves: National service for all 18- to 28-year-olds.

Require virtually every young American—the civic-minded millennial generation—to complete a year of service through programs such as Teach for America, AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, or the U.S. military, and two things will happen:

1. Virtually every American family will become intimately invested in the nation's biggest challenges, including poverty, education, income inequality, and America's place in a world afire.

2. Military recruiting will rise to meet threats posed by ISIS and other terrorist networks, giving more people skin in a very dangerous game.

This may seem like a radical plan until you compare it with two alternatives: the status quo, which clearly isn't working, or a military draft, which might be the boldest and fairest way to wage the long war against Islamic extremists.

[...]

I spoke about the concept with retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and now chairs the Franklin Project, part of the Aspen Institute that is trying to position a year of full-time national service—a service year—as a "cultural expectation, a common opportunity, and a civic rite of passage for every young American." His logic tracks with mine.

First, he's not sure Obama is fully committed to the goal of destroying ISIS.  Note A

Second, if this president or his successor gets serious about ISIS, McChrystal said the effort would require an international coalition and more U.S. troops. "Even if we didn't need a draft" to drum up the required troops, McChrystal said, "I would argue we need a draft, because it forces national commitment."  Note B

He knows a draft isn't in the cards. A national commitment to "service years" would prime the pump of an all-voluntary military, McChrystal said, while uniting the country in sacrifice.

It's not a draft, but it's not nothing.

"A problem in America is we've let the concept of citizenship diminish into a series of gripes," McChrystal told me. "One of the ways we can rebuild that sense of ownership, sense of shared ownership, is through experience, and so I believe that every young person deserves—I don't think this is an onerous thing—deserves the experience of being part of something bigger than themselves."  Note C

Bowing to political realities in risk-averse Washington, the Franklin Project aims to make a service year a social expectation rather than a legal requirement. I would mandate it. So would McChrystal—if he had his way.  Note D

While ISIS and other terrorist groups are having no trouble recruiting suicide bombers, McChrystal said, Americans are struggling to redefine their national identity for the 21st century. "A year of service for young Americans would be a step," he said. "Not a panacea, a step."

I think we should take it.

This is one of the worst thought out articles I have ever read.

That judgement may surprise you, since it appears that the writer agrees with my view of the situation: that the success of IS may have a  psychological side that adds greatly to its success. Mr. Fournier - and his amigo, General McChrystal -  want to inspire a similar psychological fire in the hearts of US citizens to fight against the fire of IS.

The big difference is this: IS relies on supporters who freely flock to their banner;  Fournier, McChrystal et al. want to compel support.
This whole idea of forcing  (Note B)  people to become psychologically inspired is not even worth spit.

Since when is IS the event which defines our lives? IS is the ghastly effluent of the river of lies and treachery of the Iraq War. IS is the karma we are burdened with for an unjust war. We are already spiritually burdened by our guilt, so does it make sense to double, triple, or quadruple down with more and more military effort --- let's be clear" MISGUIDED military effort! because nothing we have since 2001 when we drove the Taliban from Afghanistan has been guided by any strategy other than "Let's get them boots on tha ground!"

Note A  is nothing more than implicit criticism of President Obama, and has no place in this post.

Note C  is absolute crap.  I do not believe in being part of something "bigger" than myself, especially when "bigger" than is defined as a bunch of schlubs drafted into ill-defined organizations.

Note D  is interesting, in that it shows the role of force and compulsion in the minds of those who believe that persuasion is a dish best served like a force-fed meal in Guantanamo.

What does Mr. Fournier make of the history of the USA before the introduction of the compulsory draft temporarily in the Civil War, World War I, and the third incarnation from 1940 to 1973 during World War II and the Cold War?

How did the USA function without compulsion?

It had a dream.

It had a psychological and a spiritual reality that it now lacks, and this lack is very much in evidence in the insipid imaginations of Mr. Fournier and General McChrystal.

 Unconscripted Citizen Soldiers Fighting for Ideals

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Just Say No To Bombing!

 Bombing... of Civilians... pretty much...

Asia Times:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-030913.html

...We need to keep coming back over and over again to that fateful meeting in Moscow barely four weeks ago between Putin and Bandar Bush. (the SAudi embassador).

Bandar was brazen enough to tell Putin he would "protect" the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. He was brazen enough to say he controls all Chechens jihadis from the Caucasus to Syria. All they needed was a Saudi green light to go crazy in Russia's underbelly.

He even telegraphed his next move; "There is no escape from the military option, because it is the only currently available choice given that the political settlement ended in stalemate. We believe that the Geneva II Conference will be very difficult in light of this raging situation."

That's a monster understatement - because the Saudis never wanted Geneva II in the first place. Under the House of Saud's ultra-sectarian agenda of fomenting the Sunni-Shi'ite divide everywhere, the only thing that matters is to break the alliance between Iran, Syria and Hezbollah by all means necessary.

The House of Saud's spin du jour is that the world must "prevent aggression against the Syrian people". But if "the Syrian people" agrees to be bombed by the US, the House of Saud also agrees.

Our sins will indeed be visited upon our children!

Say NO to bombing!

Just say no to long range massacre. Just say no to a ruling elite that is too effete and frightened to go in and fight themselves, but needs to send in the children of the poor and middle-classes! Or send in drones from afar, so our afternoon tea is never interrupted by the death rattle of third-worldies.

Say NO to the war mongers! Say NO to Netanyahu! (Yes! to Israel, however... this is a tricky question now.)
No to Likud! No to Neo-cons! No to McCain and Graham and their Republicans toads!

We have enough Karma from Iraq ...

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The Logic of Constant War

From The Mex Files
http://mexfiles.net/2013/08/19/the-war-profiteers-on-the-border/

>In 2012, the Migration Policy Institute reported that immigration and border enforcement spending totaled almost $18 billion. That is 24 percent more than the $14.4 billion combined budgets in the last fiscal year of the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Add the billions anticipated in the Senate bill, and you have what the trade publication Homeland Security Today calls a “treasure trove” for contractors in the border security industry.

Projected as an approximately $19 billion industry in 2013, defense contractors seem, in the words of one representative from a small surveillance technology company hoping to jump into the border security market, to be “bringing the battlefield to the border.”

and that is the logic of the military-industrial-surveillance complex:  To Bring The Battlefield To Wherever it is that we may make billions.

War on Drugs, War on Terror, War in Iraq, War in Afghanistan, the list goes on. And now because the neocons in Washington have had a grudge against Al Assad, we apparently will walk blindly into a War in Syria on behalf of radical Islamists backed by the Saudis.

The Logic is to reshape everything into a war.........

IF YOU recall, back in Waco, the ATF initially described the situation as being not just an arsenal of guns, but also some sort of drugs in the Branch Davidian compound, which then allowed them to get much more fire power and put the operation on a War on Drugs military footing.
The profits there were normal profits for supplying the weapons that killed them Davidians!
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America's 1984 Game of War in the Middle East

At Informed Comment:
http://www.juancole.com/2013/03/accomplished-americas-blunder.html#more-31616

A look at the destabilizing policies of Washington, which serve to ensure that there is a state of constant war:  a war which we cannot win, but at least we shall not lose.
Furthermore, our opponent cannot be allowed to win (e.g., insurgents in Iraq), but neither can they be totally defeated and, thus, pacified. Otherwise, the game of war would end

How do we design such a game where no one can win and no one can lose?
How do we ensure that Stability is never really achieved?

From http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tom/Game_Theory/comb.pdf
Consider the following simple Take-Away Game.
Here are the rules of a very simple impartial combinatorial game of removing chips from a pile of chips.

 

(1) There are two players. We label them I and II.
(2) There is a pile of 21 chips in the center of a table.
(3) A move consists of removing one, two, or three chips from the pile. At least one chip must be removed, but no more than three may be removed.
(4) Players alternate moves with Player I starting.
(5) The player that removes the last chip wins.
(The last player to move wins. If you can’t move, you lose.) How can we analyze this game? Can one of the players force a win in this game? Which player would you rather be, the player who starts or the player who goes second? What is a good strategy? We analyze this game from the end back to the beginning. This method is sometimes called backward induction .

If there are just one, two, or three chips left, the player who moves next wins simply by taking all the chips. Suppose there are four chips left.
Then if the player who moves next leave either one, two or three chips in the pile, his opponent will be able to win.
So if Player I leaves 4 chips in the pile after his move, it is a win for Player I and a loss for the next player, Player II.

It comes out that if a Player leaves 0,4,8,16,20 chips in the pile at the end of their move, they have a winning position. The numbers 0,4,8,16,20 are called Target Positions.

Thus, if we can eliminate target positions for our opponent as well as not taking full advantage of them ourselves, we may thus assure that the simple Take-Away game has no winning positions for either player. Nor, since we have taken away the Target Positions, one of which is 0, are there any losing positions.
(for "full" advantage, see #2 below)

How do we accomplish this?

(1)
Referring to    
Mission Accomplished: Iraq As America's Biggest Blunder
http://www.juancole.com/2013/03/accomplished-americas-blunder.html#more-31616
we read about the Iraq chicken processing plant that cost $2.5 million:

 

...Elegant in conception, at least to us, it failed to account for a few simple things, like a lack of regular electricity, or logistics systems to bring the chickens to and from the plant, or working capital, or… um… grocery stores. As a result, the gleaming $2.2 million plant processed no chickens. To use a few of the catchwords of that moment, it transformed nothing, empowered no one, stabilized and economically uplifted not a single Iraqi. It just sat there empty, dark, and unused in the middle of the desert. Like the chickens, we were plucked. 

In keeping with the madness of the times, however, the simple fact that the plant failed to meet any of its real-world goals did not mean the project wasn’t a success. In fact, the factory was a hit with the U.S. media. After all, for every propaganda-driven visit to the plant, my group stocked the place with hastily purchased chickens, geared up the machinery, and put on a dog-and-pony, er, chicken-and-rooster, show...

and

...The harm was this: we wanted to leave Iraq (and Afghanistan) stable to advance American goals. We did so by spending our time and money on obviously pointless things, while most Iraqis lacked access to clean water, regular electricity, and medical or hospital care. Another State Department official in Iraq wrote in his weekly summary to me, “At our project ribbon-cuttings we are typically greeted now with a cursory ‘thank you,’ followed by a long list of crushing needs for essential services such as water and power.” How could we help stabilize Iraq when we acted like buffoons? As one Iraqi told me, “It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked.”

This is the manner by which we ensure that there is no winning position, and ensures that Stability is not achieved; i.e., by spending much money on things which are good display, but are fated to fail. Thus, we use the display to propagandize and essentially "use up all the bandwidth" available for information to be filled with the "celebrity" projects, which will fail to furnish clothes for the naked man with a hat on.
Thus, the information from the game of war is never useful for the public at large to make decisions.
Therefore, no one wins, for Stability means there is at least one winner.

(also refer to Al Jazeera from 2011:
How The US Taxpayer Got Plucked In Iraq 
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011103122342839536.html )


(2)
Technology and power are used to ensure that America does not lose, but it also guarantees that the opposition does not totally vanish. Just remember how the Taliban was allowed to remain viable after being decisively defeated in 2003.
We do not take full advantage of a target position or a winning situation in the simple game example above by the simple expedient of having recourse to a "technological" ruse: we manufacture more chips and add them to the pile.
While America engaged Al Qa'ida in a struggle to the death, the Taliban was left in reserve to provide an alternate Player in the game of war should America succeed in rendering Al Qa'ida out of the game. SO we can add the Taliban chips to the pile of chips in our simple game illustration. Similarly, we create ill-will by our overall policy that appears to be anti-Muslim and effectively "add more chips to the pile."

 

The Second String Waiting On The Bench

We are playing against more than one opponent, and currently we are focusing on destabilizing Syria, a game in which there are no target positions for us and perpetual faction for the rebels.
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A State of Undeclared War

I woke up this morning with the idea that being in the position that the USA is in militarily - ostensibly being the most powerful military on the face of the earth - means that one never has to worry about losing a war anymore.
Of course, this does not guarantee one will win such a war, as history as pointed out to us with our ongoing commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nobody in their right mind thinks that we'll be out of either place anytime soon, certainly not 2014 for Afghanistan - although a force majeure may force us to leave... another economic crisis.
We were actually quite lucky that we were not bogged down forever in Vietnam. We could still be there if our leaders had their way, still fighting a losing war, still creating dysfunctional relations within a region of the world (by the way, a European report just came out that the USA backed and just elected Kosovo Prime Minister was the head of a Kosovo mafia-like gang.)

By Congress never declaring war anymore, it is off the hook, so to speak. It has been off the hook for a lot of things. These long term commitments have not been entered into with the approval of myself nor my elected representative. In school we learned this is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. Now it seems no longer to be a representative democracy. And no one wins anymore, although there are plenty of losers. Undeclared war serves a different sociological function than declared wars did.
I have to work on how I feel about the loss of representative democracy for a while; I am bemused by it all.