Category: News

The parable of David and Goliath has re-emerged on the world stage. Ironically, the most recent battle cast the Israeli State as the heavy. The “David” of the piece was decentralized “4GW” (4th Generation Warfare) as deployed by an estimated 3,000 Hezbollah fighters.

The outcome of that battle is a serious blow to central governments everywhere. If one of the most effective government militaries in the world can’t protect its people from 3,000 militiamen, what good is it? The inevitable outcome of the ill conceived U.S. Government action in Iraq will almost certainly deliver a second and much more lethal blow to Goliath.

“The central secret to Hezbollah’s success is that it trained its (global) guerrillas to make decisions autonomously (classic 4GW), at the small group level. In every area — from firing rockets to defending prepared positions to media routing around jamming/disruption — we have examples of Hezbollah teams deciding, adapting, innovating, and collaborating without reference to any central authority. The result of this decentralization is that Hezbollah’s aggregate decision cycles are faster and qualitatively better than those of their Israeli counterparts.” Global Guerrillas, Sunday, July 30, 2006 THE SECRETS OF HEZBOLLAH’S SUCCESS, Organizational Improvements

In fact, this effect — Goliaths being in trouble at the hand of more decentralized structures — isn’t limited to military operations. Lacking mercantilist links to governments in the current age, all economic structures (corporations, etc.) larger than justified by “economies of scale” are vulnerable.

Micro-power (termites of power) is spreading to all areas of human endeavour. Rather than the bi-polar world of the 20th century, we are entering a hyper-polar world — a world with hundreds, thousands of smaller centers of power. Central Banks used to call all the shots, but now there are hundreds of independent hedge-funds that limit central banks, for one example. I don’t know what the ultimate outcome will be and I don’t think anyone does. –Moises Naim, Venezuelan Minister of Industry, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria, July 25, 2006, 12:21:36

Several years ago, when President Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, I sent an email to several people to explain that in the original German, it would be called “Heimatsicherheitsdienst. ”

Heimat is “Homeland” in German. Sicherheitsdienst means “Security Service.” The Third Reich had a Sicherheitsdienst – SD – and the German Democratic Republic had a Staatsicherheitsdienst – State Security Service. So parallel to Nazi Germany and Communist Germany, America now has a Heimatsicherheitsdient.

Yesterday I did a google search to see how many websites or blogs had a reference to “Heimatsicherheitsdienst” and 54 hits came up. Today I did the same search, and got 66 hits. Most hits were postings criticial of the Homeland Security agency on various libertarian or left-liberal blogs. But both yesterday and today, the final hit that came up on google was the official website of the Department of Homeland Security www.dhs.gov !

Try it yourself.

~ Gene Berkman, Renaissance Books.

I asked once before: “Is the United States a Terrorist State”?

Politics1.com is a very useful site for political information. The politics1.com site includes pages for each state, with lists of announced and potential candidates, links to party websites and news websites for each state. Politics1.com also carries long, interesting profiles on the various political parties — not just the two major parties, but all the little parties on the right, on the left and on various tangents.

The editor of Politics1.com carries information on candidates and parties without bias , but occasionally lets his own views be known. He was enthusiastic for Howard Dean’s campaign last year, because of shared opposition to the Iraq War. Apparently he has taken a position that while the war was wrong, we are now responsible for Iraq and cannot pull out until it is safe and stable.

Today (August 5, 2005) he carried an editorial worth reading headlined:

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS … BY BRINGING THEM HOME
“Until this week, I was in the ‘You break it, you bought it’ camp…” (a position shared by Howard Dean and other mainstream “opponents” of the war.)

“We were misled into the war and never should have crossed the line that turned us into one of the bully nations that unilaterally starts so-called “pre-emptive” wars. “(This is a view that now more than half of Americans agree with, according to recent polls.)

“There is a very thin line between liberator and occupier — a line that usually gets get crossed very soon after the “victory” is declared…the distinction today between Iraqi insurgent and Iraqi citizen seems almost non-existent…”

“I fear that if we stay in Iraq another year (or another ten years), the internal situation in Iraq will remain largely unchanged — but the horrific body count will be so much higher. They obviously don’t want us there…”

His solution: “…let’s declare victory today (“The world is rid of Saddam Hussein…”), bring our soldiers home, and give them some great parades and our thanks for their sacrifice…No more American mothers should have to bury sons who died “defending” a foreign nation that doesn’t want us there. Bring ’em home. Every single American soldier. Starting today.

Read the whole thing here: (scroll down to the 7th post)

Gene Berkman

… on bombarding someone with spam, why not try Matt Welch, who issued this haymaker about you and your ilk a few weeks back:

God, if there’s something I’m tired of, it’s former Trotskyites, or Castro-huggers, or Weathermen-sympathizers, lecturing me or anyone else about how we are objectively pro-whateverist because we don’t agree with their modern prescriptions for foreign policy or personal comportment. Some of us out here in hard-to-define-but-not-right-of-center land have NEVER apologized for dictators, NEVER flirted with Communism, never sat in the fetid pools of our own self-regret over “the college years,” or whatever. I suppose it’s neat that some people have “grown,” but I wish they’d stop inflicting their overcompensation on the rest of us.

Heh.

Via Matt Welch at Reason, on the recently discovered FBI torture memos:

The FBI memos, which included more graphic descriptions of detainee abuse (including “strangulation, beatings, [and] placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings”), bore an uncanny resemblance to previous accusations made by 10 Gitmo prisoners. They are also consistent with two years’ worth of evidence that the Bush Administration has consistently sought legal wiggle-room to expand the limits on what the U.S. military (or the countries it cooperates with) can do to the people it captures.

The news was something of a last straw for a weblogger known as Publius, who on Dec. 21 published a much-linked “Conservative Case for Outrage,” which posed a question that’s been asked a few times before: Where’s the outrage from prominent conservatives?

An excerpt from Publius’s insightful post:

If the prisoner torture should piss off anyone, it should piss off Iraq hawks the most. Although my views of the war are well-known, I know that there were many good-faith supporters of the war who believed strongly in the cause and who believe strongly in democracy promotion. But there is nothing – and I mean nothing – that undermines our efforts and our mission more than the torture of Muslims, especially when that torture is coldly calculated to exploit Arabs’ religious views. The whole thing has a level of sophistication far beyond what nineteen-year old reservists from West Virginia could devise. And to those we most need to persaude, it vindicates bin Laden’s claims that we are hostile to Islam.

You can’t defeat an insurgency – whether in Iraq or in the war on terror, which is essentially a global insurgency – by military force alone. That’s because an insurgency isn’t finite. Its numbers and resources expand and contract with public opinion. (This is the main reason why the whole “so-we-don’t-fight-them-at-home” line doesn’t make much sense, logically speaking. Our efforts have increased the ranks of those that hate us.) We can raze every city in the Sunni Triangle (and we’re well on our way), but we will never defeat an elastic insurgency if we can’t win the hearts and minds of the local population. If you care about the success of this mission, both in Iraq and more globally, logic demands outrage. I mean, imagine if an Islamic army conquered America. Then imagine if you watched your countrymen get raped, tortured, and murdered by a foreign army who you didn’t really like anyway. Do you think you’d sign up for the Iraq 2.0 police squad or would you join the local insurgency with your family and childhood friends?

When the administration authorized torture, it threatened our troops and it threatened our mission, most likely fatally and beyond any hope of recovery. It is hard to underestimate the damage caused by the ripples of Abu Ghraib.

Read the rest here, and Matt’s article at Reason in which he tries to answer the question posed by Publius.

To help begin to locate an answer, I conducted Lexis searches on “Abu Ghraib,” “prison,” “abuse,” and the names of three prominent conservative commentators: William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Rich Lowry.

Also, see this post at Matt’s own blog where he writes about an interesting interview he ran across while researching the Reason article from the ancient history (last spring) of the first assault on Fallujah.