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A Giant Passes
Go read it . My apoligies for not posting this last night but I didn't have internet access. *** (I do have internet access tonight but it's showing signs of not being 100% reliable and I don't have a very comfortable place to work. I'm about half way home from my daughter's place and should be able to resume normal blogging tomorrow night or Wednesday morning.) |
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Contributed by Bill Faith on August 4, 2008 at 09:26 PM in , | | | |
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An Old War Dog in Moscow
, for it is worthy. |
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Contributed by Bill Faith on September 6, 2007 at 08:05 PM in , | | | |
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This summer's must read
Read the whole thing . |
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Contributed by Bill Faith on August 15, 2007 at 12:03 AM in , , , , | | | |
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Colonel Bud Day, American Patriot
Many thanks to Rurik for permission to copy of an excellent book we were both privileged to receive review copies of. I may or may not manage to put together a review of my own later, knowing that anything I do will suffer greatly by comparison to Rurik's piece. In the short term, I'm nowhere close to done with my copy, due in no small part to the fact my sister and nephew both recognized it as something they'd enjoy. I have read enough of it to know I heartily agree with Rurik's recommendation to buy a copy at the first opportunity. (I've provided a convenient link for that purpose .) For now then, Rurik's review:
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Contributed by Bill Faith on May 18, 2007 at 12:56 AM in , , , , , , | | | |
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Someplace new you'll want to visit often
Click the image, bookmark the site. You may have noticed already that the pack has gotten a little smaller. There have been some "philosophical differences" behind the scenes for a while now but since and have been decent enough not to air them publicly I'll follow suit. The Gray Dog will be contributing to the new site and to Old War Dogs, some of the Dogs who left the pack will be posting only at the new site, and you may have heard the last of some of the others altogether for all I know. I'll be linking to the new site on occasion and I hope they'll link back to OWD now and then. I'll allude to "philosophical differences" just enough to say I think and are aimed at ecosystem niches sufficiently different to allow both sites to prosper and I wish the new group well. *** Rurik's comment captures my sentiments toward the new site far better than I was able to express them myself:
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Contributed by Bill Faith on January 27, 2007 at 09:19 PM in , , , , , | | | |
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Our First Wine Column
These days it seems as if every media outlet feels the need for a Wine Column. From the Wall Street Journal and the Self-important New York Times on down to the irrelevant little local free shopping news papers. Without an occasional wine column, yew just ain’t got no class nohow nomore. Now Old War Dogs shall have one too. And Rurik does like wine anyway. So it was a good thing that I brought home a bottle with a new label to taste and to review. The wine is California Red Table Wine, which the back label informs us was vinted and bottled by Firestone Vineyards of Los Olivos, California. The back label informs us that
The label does not tell us the type of grape used, but judging by the characteristics of the wine itself, I guess it is Carignane, an inexpensive, and prolific grape not used for premium wines, but much favored for jug and table wines, or for blending with other more prestigious grapes. In the glass, Jarhead Red has a very deep and dark red color and a At about $12 a bottle, this wine may seem a little overpriced since Carignane is not a serious grape. But the label is priceless, and the cause is much more serious than the wine itself. Remembering that this wine honors Jarheads and the proceeds support the , the wine is actually a remarkable bargain. On the Left Coast, where many of the winery owners are pinker than their Zinfandel Rose’, Jarhead Red deserves special attention. I’ll give it my highest rating and encourage you to buy Jarhead Red for your next picnic. Semper Fi’ -Rurik Note: After posting this review, I learned that Jarhead Red was not made from Carignane but from 100% Cabernet Sauvignon. So the hardness would imply youthful exeuberance, and suggests that Jarhead Red may have some potential to improve with age. |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on January 12, 2007 at 09:40 AM in , , , | | | |
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I Opposed the War Before I Supported It
It was August 2, 1990, and the Cold War was coming to an end. The Soviet Union was already selecting its preferred spot on the ashheap of history, and peace seemed to be lurking on the horizon. Then the news broke. Iraq had just invaded and overrun Kuwait. Some brief fighting had occurred before the remnants of Kuwait’s Air Force and Army fled across the border into Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein announced that Kuwait had been incorporated into Iraq as the Nineteenth Province. Almost as quickly George II, a.k.a. Bush I, condemned the invasion and pledged to reverse it. And despite the diplomatic small talk, it became obvious that we were moving toward war. Though I did not yet know all the facts later to emerge, I thought it was a really bad idea for us to involve ourselves. It was obvious that Saddam Hussein was a monumentally bad man, even though we did not yet know the full scope of his badness. But as Harry Truman had said about Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, a generation earlier, "He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard." Our real enemy was someone else. Khomeini’s radical Shiites had overthrown the Shah and seized the American Embassy and hostages in 1979, and not long after that, Iraq had invaded Iran. Thus for the next decade, Iraq and America unofficially supported Iraq against the Mullahs. Khomeini was Enemy Number One. We may note that during the first year or two, Israel provided weapons and spare parts to Khomeini, "seeking to maintain traditional influence", and not yet having met Hezbollah. And Kuwait was one of Iraq’s leading supporters, both politically and economically. So Saddam was our bastard, just as Trujillo had been, and as "Uncle Joe" Stalin had been before that. Among the Arab countries, none had very good human rights reputations, and few could be mistaken for real friends. As for Kuwait, they had never been particularly friendly to the United States. Though they bought some of their weapons from us, they bought far more from Britain, France, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. Officially neutral, they had one of the more anti-American voting records in the UN, even among the Islamic World. We had no defense agreements or treaties in place. And the Kuwaitis had been one of the leading financial bankrollers for Arafat and al-Fatah. America had no moral or legal obligations to Kuwait. Kuwaiti oil? Saddam didn’t want to use that oil for his swimming pool or to drink; he wanted to sell it just as former-Kuwait had done. After a decade of war, Iraq was near bankrupt, and wealthy Kuwait was one of its biggest creditors. From a Mid-Eastern perspective, mugging your creditor made perfect amoral sense. So I saw no reason to get involved. We could have noted our lack of obligations to the Emir of Kuwait, and said a sorrowful "inshallah", while privately reminding all interested parties that we did have treaties and obligations with the Saudis, so any threat to them would be handled entirely differently. It could have been presented as an object lesson that if you want Sam’s insurance, you should be making the premiums before there is a problem, and free-riders do not count as friends. And if there were to be one less member in the US General Assembly. the effect on New York City would be minimal but positive. I felt we didn’t have a dog in that fight. There were other reservations as well. Remember that in 1990, there had been no serious test of the American military since Viet Nam. Grenada and Panama were so small, and isolated, that they hardly counted. Could our military perform? Could our politicians and our public perform? Or would we see another replay of Viet Nam all over again? Despite the professional cheerleading (later proven fully justified) nobody knew for sure, ahead of the big test, how our forces would perform. In arguments with professors and other grad students, I championed the position that we certainly could win, and without suffering the 10,000 or 100,000 deaths being predicted by hysterical scholars and journalists. I pointed out that the Iraqi Army had fought well against Iranians, but had always proven helpless when encountering Israelis. Iraqi armored vehicles were seriously allergic to enemy aircraft, tending to explode and burn in their presence, and an open desert was an ideal place for that to happen. And I suggested that unless we did everything wrong, we should expect to win a lopsided victory. But would we do everything wrong? Or even anything right? That was still unproven. I was uncertain of the American people’s steadfastness, and I certainly did not trust the politicians. And then there was the question of what would follow if we did win? Might we find ourselves faced with new enemies on the borders of the newly conquered zone? Might we find ourselves dragged into the Middle East Fun House for another century? But then during the autumn, as soon as we first deployed an Airborne Brigade to Saudi Arabia, everything changed. Everything. Perhaps going to war was a bad idea. But losing that war damn sure was a hell of a lot worse idea. Following on the heels of Viet Nam and the Lebanon fiasco, I knew that defeat would mean the final, complete, and irreversible destruction of American prestige and influence. It would transform the United States into a super-rich, continental-sized, third world nation, tempting for plunder. It would be for us what the Russo-Japanese War had been for Tsarist Russia. And most important, it was my military being deployed. All of a sudden I had not one, but a few hundred thousand dogs in the fight. When you find your kid in a fight with the neighbors’ pit bull, you don’t bother about whether he had provoked it by teasing the dog or not; you take care of your own. So when the first green tracers shot into the Baghdad night, I threw a blanket and some pillows on the floor in front of the television, and watched round the clock, cat-napping during breaks for a couple of weeks. The only exceptions were the bathroom, a trip to the army recruiter to be told I was too old, and then a trip to the bloodbank as an alternative. And I came down with a case of Vicarious Traumatic Stress Disorder. Ultimately I relaxed a little after I saw that the campaign was progressing beyond my best hopes, and I shifted my efforts to agitating that we had to go all the way to Baghdad and had to secure the archives for the sake of establishing our side of the story. When the war was halted prematurely, I felt our forces had been cheated. And at that time I knew we’d have to go and do it again. That was reconfirmed the first time Saddam tried to stretch and evade the cease-fire terms, from the first attempt at a plot against Bush I. It was only a matter of time. To revisit that pit bull analogy, once you’ve got yourself into a fight with a pit bull, even if you know that your kid was the one who provoked it, you still have to finish off that pit bull, because its going to remember and hold a doggy grudge. And until you kill it, right or wrong, you’ll never enjoy another day of peace and safety. And that is why I supported this current war from the very beginning, and even before. George III may have done an asshat job of his marketing and public relations, but Operation Iraqi Freedom was nothing more or less than a continuation of Desert Storm. As much as anyone the mistakes in this war have been the legacy of George II and Colin Powell. And it is also why we must learn our lesson and finish the job this time. We do not want to have to go back and do this yet again in the year 2020. -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on January 11, 2007 at 09:59 PM in , , | | | |
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Michelle Again in the Crosshairs
Michelle Malkin, OWD's favorite poster girl, is under attack again from another old pest. Not the CAIR and Jihadist fanatics we expect. This one is a tenured
Go read the full story . I think Michelle is in a duel of wits with an unarmed opponent. I wonder whether Eric Muller thinks it is racist for neighboring district attorney Mike Nifong to in order to convict some White Duke lacrosse players of a rape that was never committed? -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on January 8, 2007 at 10:29 AM in , , , | | | |
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Making the Mullahs' Wishes come True?
I did not want to know this. At least not now. Not yet. But I desperately want this to be true. Good things should be kept as surprises. And of course you can always count on a reporter to spoil the fun. But now that everyone else knows, you might as well read it too.
The rest is . For the longest time I've been insisting that if Amadinnerjacket wants a nuke we should just give him a few. Is somebody finally paying attention? Of course its not an American. The Emperor Misha I has a thing about buying Pizza for the Israeli Defense Forces every time they snuff a terrorist. Wonder what he'll do if they pull off this deed? It'd deserve something more'n pizza. Mazel tov! -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on January 6, 2007 at 07:09 PM in , , , | | | |
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Another Good Man Tells the Truth About Another Bad Man.
One of the bravest and most intransigent of the Cold War Russian dissidents was Vladimir Bukovsky. Among his experiences he spent over a decade in prison or confined to the Serbsky Institute for the (Politically) Mentally Ill. His diagnosis was "Sluggish Schizophrenia", a mental disorder confirmed by the total lack of any symptoms other than disliking Soviet reality. In December 1976 he was ransomed in exchange for the Chilean communist Luis Corvalan. Settling in England he gained an advanced degree in Zoology while continuing as a teller of truth about the Soviet Union. He memoir To Build a Castle is one of the classic dissident works of the Twentieth Century, and a book which has strengthened Rurik's backbone in political bad times. Now Vladimir Bukovsky again tells the truth about Ted "The Swimmer" Kennedy.
But this is not an old story, of interest only to antiquarians; the results remain relevant even into the present. Remember that the Kennedy mob still runs Crassachusetts, and who are Ted's' political clients. The article is long, so go fetch yourself a beer and then read . A tip of the helmet to "Cap'n Fergie" -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 30, 2006 at 09:06 PM in , , , , | | | |
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Bad Eagle Speaks about a bad man
Bad Eagle, aka David Yeagley has no tears for Saddam, none at all.
Read the whole thing . And then prowl a bit around a website deserving much more attention. And remember, David Yeagley is a native, and he is an American, but he's not a Native American, he's an INDIAN, Search is site and he'll tell you why. -Rurik. |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 30, 2006 at 01:29 PM in , , , , | | | |
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Perhaps One Reason We Aren't Winning
We don't know who we are, or who the enemy is.
Read the whole thing Maybe we'll give veteran's benefits to members of Hezbollah? Beam me up Scotty and start warming up the photon torpedoes. Tip of the helmet to High Tory -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 29, 2006 at 07:57 PM in , , , | | | |
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Breath of the Beast - a New Blog
Let Old War Dogs be among the first to welcome to the blogosphere. His first post was only yesterday. True, one post does not a blog make, but Yaacov writes well
It clear that he is a friend, and he seems to be off to a promising start. Let's watch this guy and see what elsle he does. He may become someone significant. Mazel tov! -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 29, 2006 at 04:22 PM in , , , , | | | |
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The Faces Behind the War
Cassandra at writes about the attitudes of our wounded warriors, and about the attitudes of A tip of the helmet to TACAN -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 29, 2006 at 10:23 AM in , , , | | | |
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Further thoughts on Mercenaries
Thanks to a friend, I have been able to read the entire Boston Globe article linked in Zero Ponsdorf's Now I am even more disturbed. I see this development as an intersection of our military problem and also of the illegal immigration threat, the confluence of two threats to our national identity and existence. I should not have been surprised that this is being advocated by Thomas Donnelly of the (supposedly) Conservative, American Enterprise Institute, Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings, and Max Boot of the CFR. ( I find that none of them has any real military experience. Donnelly was a civilian editor of Armed Forces Journal, Boot a Wall Street Journal reporter, and O’Hanlon a Peace Corps member.) Though I have not taken any polls, I suspect that the idea is also wildly popular with the other self-styled "National Greatness Conservatives", such as Bill Kristol, Vin Weber, Jack Kemp, and perhaps even George Will. These are the same people who want an army which they can use to impose at bayonet-point their vision of Democracy across the globe, and their vision of the Globe on America. They also seem to be enthusiasts for the so-called SPP initiative, the North American Union and the abolition of border controls or limits on immigration. To these folks America is not a country; it is an idea. A very abstract idea. And if the actual people are hesitant to swallow this idea, then, in the words of the Stalinist playwright Berthod Brecht, maybe we should elect a different people. We are a "credal nation", defined not by our language, our culture, our history, holidays, or any thing else save an "idea". And they wish to proceed credal to the metal. Their idea is based on a fragment of the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, lifted out of context, though not an actual part of out Constitution or laws, cemented to the words of an immigrant poet Emma Lazarus, which were not given any official status either. For them America is a global boarding house, with as few social rules as possible, where the actions of the tenants are not to be judged, so long as they bend their knee to global equality, and personal interchangeability, and do not interfere with production. The people are valued not as individuals, or even as distinct groups - Vietnamese-Americans, or Hillbillies, or Scandie farmers, or Black Jazz singers, Cowboys, or anything else; just as economic production-consumption units. This is ominous. When Jack Kemp described the United States as the world’s first credal nation, he was dead wrong, as evidenced by the recurring fundamental disagreements culminating in a civil war, and the many years of reconstruction and continued disagreement afterward. We became (if at all) a credal nation only during the 1920s-1930s, under the influence of Carl Sandburg’s mythologized Lincoln, and FDR’s politicking. The first nation created explicitly on the basis of an abstract idea, a creed, was the Soviet Union, created at the beginning of the 1920s as the world’s First Proletarian Nation. And this suggests the fundamental problem with credal nations. A Frenchman or Italian may be a Communist or a Social Democrat, or a Conservative, a Christian or Atheist, and still remain a Frenchman or Italian. An individual may immigrate, and become a citizen of France, but to become a Frenchman requires maybe a generation or two of acculturation and assimilation. The same for other nations defined by ethnicity or culture. But in a credal nation, if you disavow the creed, you disavow the nation. Lenin solved this problem in Russia by eliminating all those who would not, or could not, be proletarian Marxists. Though American dissenters are not yet shot (except Vickie Weaver and David Koresh), they are often harassed. A major reason is that the US Armed Forces still retain a tie to the American people, even if it is becoming attenuated. American soldiers may feel alienated from the assorted anti-military protesters and the civilians who do not serve, but they still recognize their brothers and cousins and neighbors. At the very least they can exchange understandable curses. They do not shoot fellow Americans; the brief exception at Kent State in 1970 occurred under exceptional circumstances where semi-trained National Guardsmen felt themselves threatened by a mob. Here is where the utility of a foreign-based military comes into play. Their loyalty is not to the people, or the flag, or to anybody but the officer who commands and feeds them, and to their fellow mercenary comrades. The old Soviet Union used to use ethnic minorities in the internal troops units of the MVD and KGB, always assigned to some other distant and not very congenial region. Resentful Uzbek boys from Central Asia would have no hesitation if ordered to crack some Russian heads in Moscow or Bryansk. Georgians might not mind shooting Latvians or Estonians, who might in turn be willing to suppress Central Asians and Far Easterners, etc.. What would happen if, some time in the future, President Obama were to order a battalion of Mexicans to search and disarm a Korean neighborhood in southern California using whatever force was necessary? Or maybe if he sent in a battalion of troops recruited from Pakistan to restore order in Chicago or St. Paul? There is no doubt the troops would perform enthusiastically, probably with all the vigor they would exercise back home. No fear of them restraining themselves out of community ties. At the same time, large numbers of linguistically diverse troops formed a different problem for the Soviet Army, and would for us as well. There were about a hundred different languages in the draft pool of the old Soviet Union, and even though many of these draftees ended up in the labor battalions, still many more found their way to the Ground Forces. I heard an American colonel once comment "I would not, as a company commander, be encouraged to learn that two thirds of my company could understand the language of command." This led to problems even during World War II, which became increasingly worse throughout the rest of Soviet postwar experience. Anyone who thinks this would be no problem for the United States is clearly beyond responsible thought. A language requirement to enlist? Don’t make me laugh. Certainly not if we’re going to raise the sort of large numbers these "experts" are talking about, nor if we’re going to raise them overseas. Do you really think you’re going to enlist a battalion’s worth of West European English-speakers to fight our wars? Get Serious. The overseas enlistees will come from Somalia, from Yemen, from Pakistan and Algeria, and many other hellholes of the Fourth World. And they will not be the healthy, educated, and intelligent recruits the Army thinks it will be getting. The educated elites from these countries will get to America on Student Visas and vanish into the unpoliced crowds of American cities; no need for them to enlist. The semi-literate campesinos from Central America will seem the pick of the catch. And why should many more of them volunteer to enlist in order to gain citizenship the hard way when they will be allowed to cross an open border and fade into the urban landscape. So long as there is no credible control on our borders or our immigration enforcement, there will be no motivation for foreigners to enlist. And just think what the ACLU will say once it discovers that the overseas recruiting offices are rejecting Somalis disproportionately for poor health and literacy. That will be discrimination. We will find ourselves enlisting the dregs of the Fourth World, healing them and educating them, maybe even teaching them to wear shoes, all on the time of their army contract, and giving them citizenship after discharging them, probably just about the time they complete their modernization training. Very quickly, we will find it necessary to attenuate the process, probably by abandoning attempts at language training, in favor of ethnic units. We will have Urdu battalions and Kikuyu battalions, and Arabic and Hmoob units, and God knows what else. And these units will not conform to American disciplinary and performance standards either. The Army will be transformed into a global social uplift program. Trying to recruit enlistees from other major powers runs a serious risk of causing diplomatic incidents or worse. After all countries such as Germany, Denmark, Poland and Russia probably would resent our syphoning off their potential military strength. Some countries, such as Russia might construe it as a "hostile act", and in other countries, such as Poland or Czechia, or South Korea, it would only diminish the strength of countries we are committed to defending. Further, what will happen if, and when we find ourselves engaged in a war against a country which has become a major source of our troops? Might that not test the loyalties of our mercenaries? Might it not impede the further supply of such mercenaries? Britain never sent its Gurkhas to invade Nepal. And in the case of some countries, significant numbers, or even any of their nationals in our armed forces could prove a deadly security risk. Do we want a battalion of Pasdaran in our army? Or maybe North Koreans? One of the most frequent arguments I have heard against reinstituting the draft is that our professional NCOs and officers do not have the time or desire to nurse and train reluctant American conscripts. The time spent on training and acculturating these foreign volunteers will be far, far worse. And they will be capable of only the meanest cannon-fodder sorts of assignment. Even (or especially) contemporary infantry duties may be beyond them. If and when these totally alien ethnic units are finally committed to action, the American public is likely to prove totally indifferent to whatever casualties they suffer. "The Kikuyu Battalion lost 90% strength last week? So what." This may be attractive to short-sighted policy makers, able to wage war on the political cheap. But it will have consequences. The mercenary units will prove totally indifferent to our interests in return. The survivors who eventually gain US citizenship are likely to be cynical and ungrateful. and hardly acculturated into American society, or able to adjust. But then, that is not really an issue is it? Not if you consider homo sapiens to be only fungible consumption-production units. And that seems to give away much of this game. It is not really about strengthening the US military, but about commandeering the US military as another way to end-run our own national sovereignty. Though the flag may be American, the Army will no longer be American in any meaningful sense. For a while the professional officers may be drawn from an elite class of Americans, though before long, we will find that these non-American American soldiers have risen through the ranks and are holding command positions. Milton Friedman commented on the incompatibility of open immigration with a modern welfare state. When the German immigrants evoked by Max Boot left the Union Armies after 1865, they either got productive civilian jobs, returned to Germany, or fell into failure. They did not swell a welfare empire. (We may also ponder whether the experience of being invaded and suppressed by foreign-speaking mercenaries may have added to the Southern embitterment of the post-civil war era. Mr. Boot may also want to consider the Irish troops in the context of the New York City draft riots and anti-Negro pogrom; I hope that is not among the precedents he would have us emulate because they are precedents.) Under the mercenary plan, any minimally trained survivor could go directly from the military to the dole, but with a knowledge of brute force and a sense of entitlement. Can anyone else see a problem? Mr. O’Hanlon invokes the ethnic participation of Germans and British fighting side-by-side with the colonists. Sorry, but those Germans were colonists, particularly from Pennsylvania, and maybe some Hessian mercenaries who deserted; and doesn't that raise questions about mercenaries? And the British?...well up to July 4, 1776, most of the other colonists were British, by definition. Except for the leaders like von Steuben, Kosciusko, Pulaski and such, the common soldiers were not brought over as Colonist mercenaries. Those leaders, particularly the Poles, and Hungarians, were professional soldiers who had ended on the losing side of rebellions against Russia or Austro-Hungary, and had to find employment far beyond the reach of retribution. And on occasion Washington is quoted has having given the order on several important occasions "Let none but Americans be placed on sentry duty tonight..." Nor were the many European immigrants who served in the American Army during the Indian Wars, were not brought over specifically for the purpose of enlisting, nor did they enlist in groups. Likewise, today’s Americans of Ukrainian or Honduran origin are not at issue either. Such people are the glory of our country and our military, serving out of pride and devotion to their new homeland, and a reproach to those native-born Americans too self-precious to serve. But they were not recruited as foreigners or overseas, nor do they serve as foreigners. The recruitment of foreign mercenaries overseas is something entirely different, and that is what alarms me. An ethnic battalion of Ukrainians is entirely different from 600 individual Ukrainians, all conversant in English, and dispersed throughout a 700,000 man army. The Filipino Scouts recruited by the United States were recruited only for service in the Philippines. At the time the Philippines was in a colonial relationship. None were sent to fight in Europe, or even anywhere else in the Pacific Theater. The Filipino mess staff serving with the US Navy are a special and traditional case. Likewise, the Swiss Guard, who may arrive from all over Europe, but also are armed with halberds and have not gone to war in memory. While we are on the subject of invoking prior experience of mercenary recruitment, we ought not forget the sad experience of the Western Roman Empire, who suffered greatly from their mistake in ceding their legionary duties to Germanic barbarians who opened the way for invading Goths. Nor should we forget the advice of Machiavelli who warned so strongly on the unreliability and risk of mercenary troops. They will flee in battle, or desert to an enemy who buys them with higher pay. or they may turn upon their supposed employer and wreak havoc on the employing state. If there is a problem with our military being overcommitted, and I agree this seems likely, there would be other, saner responses. First of all, we might reduce our commitments to less critical areas. Certainly ten years after Bill Clinton said we would be in Bosnia for only a single year, it is time to go home. Likewise, in both Germany and South Korea, our continuing presence is of debatable importance, seemingly of most importance to the local merchants who still despise us. Much more importantly, we might choose to discontinue all "peace-keeping" and "nation-building" operations and to affirm the doctrine that the US military is not for nation building but for nation destroying, and will be deployed accordingly. In conjunction with this latter perspective, we might reconsider our doctrine to include fighting with less concern for collateral enemy casualties, and more with concern for US operational effectiveness. If we replace the kid gloves with knuckle dusters, we might find we have enough troops to service our revised task list. -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 28, 2006 at 01:35 PM in , , , , , | | | |
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A Postmortem Stalin Gift
One of the Dogs sent me a private email - "I would think that the liberal far left has no problem equating Conservatives and Pres. Bush to Hitler. Perhaps they wouldn't mind if we equate Pelosi and far lefties to stalin. Naturally, we already know the answer to that." A tip of the helmet to Skul. This reminds me to mention one more of Stalin’s particular achievements, the development and use of Psychological Projection as a political strategy. Since his first days struggling against Trotsky for the Lenin succession, Stalin favored this tactic. Very early Stalin accused Trotsky of plotting to assassinate him. Throughout the rest of the purge years Stalin always projected his own malevolent designs onto his intended victims, not only in his domestic political struggles, but also internationally. Remember that in 1939 he worried that little Finland was planning to invade the Soviet Union. and he repeatedly accused France and Britain of seeking an alliance with Hitler for a joint conquest of the land of the Soviets. Throughout the Cold War years, containment was merely a mask for the planned conquest of the USSR. Even down to 1991 when the Emergency Committee, claimed their action was to head off a planned coup against Soviet power. Over the years, I’ve found this an excellent key to unlock the mysteries, not only of the Soviet Communists, but also of the American Left. Thus, I was truly alarmed when I heard Tom Hayden and the SDS warn of Nixon’s plans to set up a network of concentration camps in the American southwestern desert. Subsequently, I have found that DEMOcrat accusations are always a tip off to their own agenda, and the smokescreen they will use to hide their actions. It intimidates the Republicans and discredits their future complaints before the crimes are even committed. Most recent and notable have been the elections over the last several cycles, when the campaigns have featured ceremonial warnings of Republican plots to "suppress the vote" and steal the elections, immediately followed by the ritual stuffing of the ballot boxes with hanging chads, and the processional bussing of the green cards from poll to poll. What's the new Shrieker of the House warning of today? suppression of Muslim rights perhaps? -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 23, 2006 at 03:09 PM in , , | | | |
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The Worst Day of the Year
Monday will be a day for contemplating all that is best, most noble and perfect in our world. But today is the day to contemplate all that is ugly, criminal and thoroughly demonic. It behooves us to remember from time to time all the worst of which we are capable, and today is the most fitting day of all. On December 22, 1879, in the Georgian village of Gori was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin. Born into a seriously dysfunctional family, and preserved from conscription by a withered arm, Stalin cast his lot with Lenin’s Bolsheviks, but did little of significance beyond a few bank robberies for the cause in prewar Tbilisi. In 1917, he was metaphorically absent during the Bolshevik coup, being one of those Bolsheviks who initially argued against the coup and in favor of cooperating with the "bourgeois" Provisional Government. During the civil war he began to compensate for his slow beginning by exemplary cruelty to prisoners and class enemies. By the end of the civil war, Stalin was still a footnote and a piker at crimes against humanity, but already showed traits which led to Lenin including in his will a warning to the Communist Party Central Committee that they should "remove Comrade Stalin from positions of power". But since Lenin also warned that Comrade Trotsky should be removed too, Stalin and Trotsky cooperated for the first and last time in their lives to suppress Lenin’s Testament. Besides, all the other Bolsheviks thought Stalin thuggish but harmless. He did not ask for a position of prominence and importance. he took the seemingly unimportant post of Commissar of Nationalities (i.e. minority groups) and volunteered for the thankless and boring task of General Secretary. It would take only a few years to turn that unglamorous and insignificant job into a position of unprecedented power. He who controls the records controls the agenda; he who controls the agenda controls everything. Stalin leveraged this modest position to become the greatest mass murder probably of all time, at least of the last five hundred years. Yes, Mao Ze Dong killed more in terms of sheer numbers, but he had so much larger a potential victim base to work upon. And Pol Pot’s one third of Cambodians is a larger percentage, but of a very smaller group, and thus a lower total. And in any case, they were both conscious acolytes of Stalin, as were all the other Marxist tyrants following him. Even Hitler, who comes close, must yield place, and was also inspired in his methods by Stalin’s example. If Stalin is to be topped by anyone, it could only be by his mentor, Lenin. Lenin deserves recognition for having invented the concepts of mass extermination and the death camp. And late in his life, Molotov, himself another leading practitioner of pure evil, proclaimed that next to the tiger Lenin, Stalin was just a pussycat. But Lenin lived only briefly, and never had time to establish what sort of a peacetime murderer he might have become. Stalin has a dramatic record. Stalin slew for about 25 years. The total number of his victims is still under dispute, but still gradually growing. When Robert Conquest wrote his book "The Great Terror" in 1967, he estimated the death toll of the 1930s as probably about 20 million, and perhaps as high as thirty million. During the 1980s, when I referenced these figures in lecturing undergraduate classes, I marked myself as a fascist. Many of the tenured, popular revisionist historians asserted that not more than a few thousand, at most, were ever killed. In a classic example of kettle pleading, they argued that the killings were the fault of local officials, and were minimal in number and justified by their resistance to collectivization, and that Stalin had done it to strengthen the country. After 1990 the mass grave began to be discovered. Outside most of the major, and some minor cities. Mass graves containing the remains of several hundred thousand victims each. Each and every mass grave containing several times the number of victims the revisionists were willing to admit for the entire USSR. These "Soviet Holocaust" deniers continue to enjoy tenure and perks at American universities. Even today, people considering the losses need to consider the circumstances. Different authoritative sources give different figures for those executed. One figure I recall seeing quoted is 865 thousand tried by tribunals and executed. But that is only the beginning of the story. Such a figure does not include the numerous untabulated thousands (?) who died under interrogation. Nor those who committed suicide when they heard the early morning knock on the door. Yan Gamarnik, chief of the Red Army Main Political Administration was one of these; and Molotov has testified that he slept with a revolver under his pillow every night. Nor does the figure include those victims who were executed without even the pretense of a formal trial; that group would include anyone who would not confess. Nor does it include the millions who were sentenced only to terms in the labor camps which they failed to survive. Shot while escaping, or falling over into a snowbank during a forced march does not count as "execution". Nor do prisoners retried in the camps and sentenced to death by GULag officials. There was a an incident of surpassing evil which occurred in the late 1940s. The Communist Party decided the numerous disabled veterans littering Leningrad were most unsightly and a poor face for socialism. So these disabled, armless or legless veterans were all arrested on charges of "parasitism" and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. But upon arrival in camp, it was found that they were no more capable of productive work there than in a city, so they were all re-arrested, re-tried, and shot. Perhaps the largest category of GULag deaths may have been those who died of hunger, exhaustion, cold, or disease. Scholars such as Conquest have tired to calculate from the general size and population of the camps, from the volume of transports, to the number of prisoners and their annual turn-over. Some estimates are that there was a one third turn-over per year in the camps - and considering that the sort sentences were "fivers", that indicates a lot of deaths. A Soviet statisticial, Iosif Dyadkin, has tried to use seeming inconsistencies in census data to calculate the USSR's "missing population", and arrives at a figure of maybe 70 million, though that also included wartime losses as well, and is unsatisfying for other methodological questions. Then there were the other losses of the collectivization campaigns. In 1932 Stalin unleashed the campaign to collectivize Soviet agriculture. the peasants resisted across the Soviet Union, but particularly in Ukraine and in South Russia north of the Caucasus Mountains. School kids from the Komsomol (Young Communist League) and the army were called in to use force. Some peasants even killed their livestock and burned their farms rather than submit. Sometimes the resistance was so stout that the party used artillery, tanks and bombers to crush resistance. The next year there was a famine, and not only because of the devastation and disruption of collectivization. Stalin was also trying to fund his Five Year Plans, and confiscated the crops to support his efforts, partly to feed the new city workers, but mainly to sell abroad for credits for industrial machinery. And also, to punish the Ukrainians and break their spirit. Police patrols surrounded all pats in or out of Ukraine, and between eight to ten million Ukrainians died of starvation during the period of about two years. In many cases, entire villages died. While Ukraine suffered worst, many areas in south Russia, near Rostov on Don, Maikop, and the North Caucasus region suffered nearly as badly, losing more millions. This was the first occasion when the Western Progressive intelligentsia disgraced itself. George Bernard Shaw was given a trip through Ukraine sponsored by the Soviet government, and returned to report that since he had dined regularly on caviar and champagne, the famine must be a myth. Walter Duranty ace correspondent of the New York Times confided to friends that he knew better, but still lied to discredit reports of the famine, in order to help the Soviet cause. Seventy-five years later, the assholes still have not changed! During the 1930s there also continued a number of low-intensity "bandit campaigns" in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Many of these campaigns were against minority peoples, and are on of the roots of today’s Chechen problem. Some of these campaigns involved using airpower against the resistance. In 1939-1940 the USSR reclaimed chunks of Poland, Romania, and the Three Baltic Republics. In each case, the first Soviet order of business was to round up and shoot or send to the camps all "class enemies", followed by the "political enemies", in each country, this constituted about ten percent of the population. In the Baltic Republics, they arrested everyone listed in the phone books on the presumption that anyone with a telephone was a bourgeois. During the war there was yet another great wave of losses. Numerous ethnic nationalities in the southern USSR were accused of collective treason for collaborating with the Germans. In truth, some individuals from these groups did welcome the Germans as liberators from the plagues of atheism and collectivization and famine and mass murder. But many other member resisted. And many ethnic Russians also collaborated fro the same reasons. But certain nationalities were punished, even before the war ended. In 1944 the entire population of Crimean Tatars was rounded up and exiled to Central Asia. Men, women and children separated and loaded onto railroad boxcars and shipped off to the deserts of Kazakhstan with no provisions for food or anything else. Several hundreds of the luckiest were shot immediately. Of the others, about a third of the population died of bad conditions in about two to three months. Nor was it just the traditionally hated Tatars. other nationalities suffering the same exile and genocide included the Kalmyks, Karachai, Kabardians, Balkars, Ingush, and significantly, the Chechens, each of which suffered equivalent losses. Incidentally, this huge task engulfed vast numbers of troops and railroad resources which otherwise could have been used against the Germans at the front. The people of German descent brought by Catherine the Great in the 1760s, or the ancestors of Baltic Germans in Russia since the middle ages suffered most of all. Though population losses are not given, it must involve a couple more millions. Also during the war there were needless losses among returned prisoners. According to Soviet military law, being taken prisoner for any reason constituted treason and could be punished by death - and death or imprisonment of the surviving family. And while there were instances when prisoners escaped and returned and were cleared of blame and returned to their units, the great majority of such individuals either went to labor camps or to penal battalions (so lethal that one month’s service therein was officially equivalent to three years in the GULag.) At the end of the war prisoners returned by the western Allies were shipped directly to the camps - or shot. And civilians taken away by the Germans as slave labor were given no greater consideration - traitors too. After the war there was a further round of purges beginning in 1948. It is true that Jews had suffered less than other Soviet groups during the 1930s, but now it was to be their turn. Anti-Semitism ceased to be unfashionable. Also, many of the greatest wartime heroes were marked for take-down lest they outshine Stalin, the Great Coryphaeus, Greatest Genius of All Times, Father of Nations. the only saving grace was that Stalin died on March 5, 1953 just before the latest round of killings reached its stride. This is the way it was, a million here, a hundred thousand there, and another couple hundred thousand, a big ten million...eventually it adds up. Guessing the toll is difficult, but I figure between 30-40 million is approximate, mainly in the 1930s, but also including wartime purges and postwar murders. In recent years I have heard several Russians place the figure at 70 million. That may be a little excessive, but who am I to blame their bitterness? This short history also helps explain a lot of the bitterness and controversy remaining in the ex-Soviet republics, where some people can still remember personally the Stalin years. And it may help explain why some of us right-wingers do not think that Marxism is cute, trendy or fashionable, and have so little patience with its apologists. And also why some of us are alarmed when we see the Soviet apologists’ intellectual descendants making such similar excuses for the bloodthirsty Islamists of today, several of whom appear to have set their hopes to challenge Stalin’s record. -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 22, 2006 at 04:23 PM in , | | | |
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Moderation but Only Moderately
My friend John says he "believes or at least hopes" that he can find good moderate Muslims. I believe or hope the same thing, and also that some stranger will give me fifty million dollars with the taxes already paid, and that the lovely lady from across the hall, no more than a third my age, will knock on my door tonight and ask me to keep her warm through the incipient blizzard. I even believe and hope that my computer will never crash again, but I save my work and make back-ups. If wishes and reality were interchangeable, we wouldn’t have our current mess. The question of how many moderate Muslims can dance on the head of a pin (dervishes?) is more than scholastic. It implies questions of their nature and even of their very existence. And this should remind us that we need to consider "what is a Muslim?" The fact is that all the Muslim countries have native non-Muslim minorities. Lebanon, Syria, putative Palestine have significant numbers of Arabic Christians 0f the Assyrian Orthodox and Armenian Monophysite churches. Traditionally they have taken various sides in the conflicts, though usually siding with the dominant Muslims. Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz is an Assyrian Christian. George Habash, founder and boss of the PFLP-GC, formerly one of the major terrorist groups during the 1970s and 1980s was also Christian - though nominally, since he was really a Marxist. Still other Arab Christians may privately hope for deliverance. It is significant that there are no reports of Christians conducting suicide attacks. Probably best to treat them as allies or enemies as they behave. But as for the official Muslims themselves... There are also large, vast numbers of ordinary small men, peasants who care less about self-motivated religious fanaticism, than getting along in the world. Traditionally nationhood has been an alien Western concept in dar ul-Islam. Loyalties and interests are given to the global Ummah, or to the immediate family and clan. And in daily life the principle is to appease those who have power. The proverb "The strong do what they will, the little do what they must", is the wisdom of the ages throughout East Asia to the Middle East. As Osama put it, "You bet on the strong horse". What does that mean in practical terms? The Moderate Muslim, by definition one without strong personal commitments, will bend with the breeze. If you behave charitably and mercifully toward him, he will know that the risk in opposing you is moderate - while the danger in opposing the Jihadis is certain and horrible. If you want the Moderate Muslim to reveal himself, you must demonstrate that you are more implacable than your enemies. If you make it clear that you seek to hurt your foes as little as possible, and hope soon to depart, while the foe reminds that he is vengeful, with a memory of centuries, and will be remaining forever, then who will the small, uninterested farmer support? It is very sad for such small men, trapped, born, in the middle. But they will do what they must. How different was the situation in Germany? Only about a third of Germans voted to Hitler in the 1932 elections. But as he flexed his power, they accepted him, and after his great successes in the Rhineland, Austria, and elsewhere many more came to support him as a great leader. We found the "good Germans" only because we ignored their existence till we had blasted away all the bad Germans. Along the way, a few committed and courageous good Germans did side with the allies, and were not dissuaded by our bombing of Germany. It is a sad fact, but you will find moderation amongst the enemy only if you yourself are first immoderate to him. -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 21, 2006 at 02:16 PM in , , , , | | | |
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Choose Our Friends Carefully
We should be very careful in our desperate search for allies in our war with Islam. We need to remember recent history, and this time try to learn a lesson from our repeated mistakes. Our progressive friends in the DEMOcrat Party frequently like to blame us for this current extended crisis, reminding us that we supported the Afghani Mujahideen against their beloved Soviet Union during the 1980s. Unhhh yes, that omits the context that we were engaged in a bitter cold war against the Soviets, and that we seemed to be losing with the DEMOcrats doing all they could to hinder Reagan’s efforts, leaving him to find allies where he could. And that certain of the Muj leaders (like Masood & Rabbani) seem to have been better than others (Hekmatyar), and that we may have chosen the wrong ones under the influence of the CIA and the Pakistani ISI, and later we abandoned the good allies to the bad ones. But the overview does make a point; in desperation, we badly chose our allies, and that choice came back to cause our next problem. Occasionally they like to remind us too, that during the same period American policy tilted toward Saddam against Khomeini, thankfully without giving him full endorsement. In retrospect he still looks like the lesser of the two evils, even as he cautions against trusting our allies. But perhaps the best lesson of all, come from World War II, where we allied ourselves with the greatest murderer of the twentieth century against the second greatest, who happened to be the more immediate, if shorter term, threat. Churchill understood what he was doing from necessity, and behaved with due circumspection. Roosevelt, Hopkins and the other DEMOcrats practically wet their pants from excitement. Let’s also remember that Castro came to power with the backing of the New York Times, because the Sulzbergers were offended by Batista’s petty corruption. Diem was overthrown by Kennedy & Lodge because he was not democratic enough. We got Khomeini because Jimmie Carter found the Shah Reza Pahlavi not up to his exquisite democratic standards. Haiti? We’ve been trying to meddle our way out of that mess for almost a century, each choice proving a little worse than the one before. In contrast, Spain, Chile, and Taiwan all seem to have survived their dictators and recovered fairly well. The lesson is "Nations do not have friends, they have interests." And a corollary might be that the greatest danger comes not from your enemies but from your own well-meaning moralists. In choosing our next round of high-minded Middle Eastern democrats, please try to remember this lesson. And those of you who actually read your Machiavelli before putting him on the shelf, might remember his caution that allies stronger that yourself will tend to dominate you, while weaker allies are likely to prove a strategic burden. -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 21, 2006 at 01:37 PM in , , , | | | |
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Death of a Shark
About three years ago, I prepared an essay about the Russian air Force based on my translation of an article in a Russian aviation journal and my commentary upon it. Due to recent developments, I believe this essay has once again become timely. Though the Russians are have begun using the profits of their oil revenues to begin rebuilding their military after a decade and a half of neglect, in my opinion the rebuilding process cannot be accomplished overnight. The condition of their air force, the VVS, has not yet had time for significant change. "Death of a Shark" and VVS Operational Standards an Article by V. Markovskii, with translation and commentary by George Mellinger
There remains much speculation about the current state of the Russian Air Force, particularly regarding the capabilities and training of its pilots, and its implications for readiness. For reasons that are evident, there have been few, if any, Russian official pronouncements on this topic and virtually no hard statistics. Most of the information remains anecdotal. On my visits to Russia, when inquiring about pilot flying hours, I have generally heard the figures of an "average of 40 hours a year" and/or 20 hours a year quoted. This has been the case from the mid-1990s to the present. Reasons include a shortage of fuel, lack of funds for maintenance and operating expenses, lack of new equipment, and even lack of spare and regalement parts for older aircraft, in spite of the numerous examples which ought to be available for cannibalization. Of course this average figure needs interpretation, since it involves the entire VVS establishment. Ignoring a couple of special situations for a moment, let us reason out some distinctions. First, the transport pilots of the 61 Air Army, the former VTA (Military Transport Aviation), are known to fly far more than their share of the average. In contrast to the combat aircraft, their Ilyushins and Antonovs can provide considerable support to the civilian economy, and in doing so, bring in some revenue for the VVS. Also, by very nature, almost every and any flight is bound to consume multiple flying hours, times two pilots. Next come the pilots of Long Range Aviation in the 37 Air Army. While a small proportion of the VVS resources, they also receive a middling share of the flying hours, since their flights, too, tend to be long duration and also contribute flying hours for two pilots per flight. With these pilots tending to raise the averages, it is obvious that the pilots of the fighters and tactical aircraft must be getting less than the average. There are two exceptional situations. First, the pilots of the 237 Guards Regiment at Kubinka undoubtedly get a lot of flying time. They are the show and demonstration regiment, including the Russkie Vityazy (Su-27) and Strizhi (MiG-29) aerobatics teams. They perform at all the major air shows and serve as a facade of prestige for the VVS, Russia itself, and most important of all, the Russian aviation industry (along with the famous factory test and show pilots such as Pugachyov, Frolov, Menitskii, Kvotchur, etc., whose flying hours probably are logged to the factories rather than any VVS totals), which hopes to make money selling airplanes abroad. Second, we must presume that the units of the 4 Air Army taking part in combat operations over Chechnya and the other North Caucasus hot spots also do quite a bit of regular flying. So this must serve to reduce even further the average flying hours of the ordinary tactical units based in quiet zones like northern and central Russia, and Far East. Though precision is impossible, they must get very few flight hours a year. In such a situation we may also tentatively presume that within the regiments these flight hours are not communistically shared. Such flying as is done is almost certainly parceled out to a few selected senior pilots, those in positions of command or who had managed to obtain their Pilot 1st Class ratings before the implosion. (This is probably true to an extent for the North Caucasian combat units as well.) Therefore, we can guess that for the ordinary line pilot, his main opportunity to fly will come, briefly, whenever he falls off of a footstool. Complicating matters is the aging and worn condition of much of the VVS inventory. Though the earlier generations single-engine MiGs and Sukhois have all been retired, even the MiG-29s are now approaching or exceeding the twenty-year mark, and even with careful maintenance, must become increasingly prone to developing problems, and with serious budget problems, maintenance is almost certainly one of the first places for economizing. Thus this combination of old aircraft, and sporadic maintenance must be an even greater potential challenge for rusty pilots. I recently found circumstantial confirmation in the following article which I have translated The article reports an incident at the 120 IAP based in Domna in the Transbaikal Military District. The 120 IAP (sometimes identified as the 120 Guards IAP - Russians have become careless about the distinction) flew the MiG-23 in Afghanistan and claimed several aerial kills against infiltrating Iranian helicopters. They also became famous for painting sharkmouths and individual side art on their fighters, first the MiG-23 and after their return home and re-equipment, the MiG-29. At the time of the Soviet collapse, the 120 GIAP was probably amongst the best units, in the VVS, with some of the best morale. Markovskii, the author, served with the 120 GIAP in Afghanistan and has written before about this unit, and about Soviet air operations in Afghanistan. This translation was personally difficult due to the presence of numerous technical words unknown either to me or to my dictionaries. In truth, as a non-mechanic, I would have found some passages scarcely more clear even if in English. So the mechanical passages in the translation should be read with caution. Technical analysts will be justifiably disappointed, but I still believe that even with some inaccuracies, this document contains a number of indications about the general state of the VVS and its pilots. "On the Trail of Aviation Incidents: Death of a Shark" by Viktor Markovskii, Aviamaster 5-2001 The share of aviation incidents which are the fault of equipment construction defects appears very small, accounting for about 10-15% of aviation accidents and catastrophes. (According to Russian definition an avariya is a non-fatal accident, while a katastrofa involves fatalities-GMM). The great mass are attributed to pilot error and violations of flight parameters - the notorious human factor which remains the weakest link, accounting for up to 70% of all incidents. The very same advanced aviation technology which provides the most technically advanced features, redundant systems and advanced controls, also minimizes the possibility of sudden failures. And still sometimes even aircraft of the latest generation present dangerous surprises, previously undiscovered defects which reveal themselves at the most inopportune time. To this last category belongs a MiG-29 catastrophe which occurred in the fall of 1998 in the Transbaikal. In the 23 VA (Air Army-GMM) of the Transbaikal Military District, during the preceding five years eight aircraft and helicopters have been destroyed in accidents and catastrophes. This quantity appears quite moderate against the background of the previous period. But now, in connection with a decrease to 15-20 flying hours pe year, the figure becomes entirely more notable. Even more, three of the eight losses fell to the lot of a single regiment, the 120 IAP at Domna, equipped with the MiG-29 and providing air defense for a wide segment of the Russian-Chinese border. By September 1998 the regiment had already been operating the MiG-29 for five years, and was on operational duty on the rolls of the 50 Guards Independent Corps VVS i PVO. The aircraft were MiG-29 izdelie 9-12 and 9-13 (Fulcrum-A & Fulcrum-C, "fatback"-GMM), most of which had been received from other units, having already served successfully, and the flying personnel were well accustomed to them. During the entire period of service not one MiG-29 had been written off on account of damage or irremediable defects. One such machine was Aircraft No.36, which a half year before this incident had been transferred from the Far Eastern airbase of Orlovka. The aircraft was not new. MAPO (the Moscow MiG factory-GMM) had built it 17 years before, in September 1983. (If this incident is placed to 1998, then an aircraft built in 1983 would have been only 15 and not 17 years old. Which of Markovskii’s figures is wrong, I do not know.-GMM) The aircraft had flown 585 hours and undergone midterm overhaul at the Kubinka ARP. Taken off the register of its regiment, for a long time the aircraft sat in storage, and after three years was delivered to Domna. On September 25, the regiment was conducting planned flights. After a long interval fuel finally appeared and after three months in a row of inactivity, the pilots were using any opportunity to take to the sky. Military Pilot 3rd Class, Captain Vladimir Egorov was scheduled to execute the exercise "Flight to accelerate to supersonic speed and ceiling of the aircraft". the assignment was of short duration and not complicated, even considering the little experience of the pilot in controlling the MiG-29. The well-known poverty degrading our aviation in the 1990s (absence of fuel, money, and spare parts), led to the situation that during the last five and a half years Egorov had only flown a total of 74 hours, averaging out to a little more than an hour a month in the cabin. During the first months of 1998 he had managed to "grab" only 20 minutes of flying time. The pilot clearly was unable to train, even on the KTS-4 simulator which was standing, as the inspection report discovered "in inoperable condition due to lack of funding to call for a manufacturer’s representative". Aircraft No.36 was prepared without anything notable. The engine was tested and all preflight procedures were completed, and the pilot took to the air at 19 hours 13 minutes. The air was clear, the sun was only beginning to set in the west, and the aircraft had not managed to vanish from view, when there was a change to the smokey trail characteristic of the RD-33 working to maximum. At that very moment neither the mechanics of the newly launched aircraft nor the flight operations officer paid this any attention (if they had noticed, they could have decided that the pilot should simply turn back). During the second minute of flight the pilot noticed that the machine began to gain altitude less energetically and speed began to fall. The aircraft lowered its nose, but speed continued to fall. The reason turned out to be the turbine revolutions of the left engine, and the controls for it were switched to the reserve system, although the temperature, according to the instruments, remained normal. None the less, the eight tons of thrust remained sufficient to gain another 600 m of altitude. Acting according to the instructions and commands of the flight operations officer, Egorov reduced the turbine revolutions of the misbehaving engine and began to turn back in the direction of the aerodrome. But the problems grew. The turbine speed of the left RD-33 not responding to the thrust lever, continued to fall. A possible reason might have been either a failure of the electronic engine controls, or a rupture of the fuel supply. Neither the pilot nor the flight operations officer surmised that the situation had developed according to the second scenario, leading to an even worse situation. Already at take-off the fuel pipe had begun to rupture near the combustion chamber and then began to spray around a powerful stream of kerosene directly into the red hot engine. In just seconds a fire broke out, fanned by the rushing air and the spray of highly inflammable fuel. The Duralumin blazed, the control cable burned through, and even the fire resistant steel body of the engine combustion chamber burned. But the pilot still remained unaware - the right engine worked normally and the temperature gauge showed "normal", and the fire alarm was silent. On early series MiG-29s the fire alarm was not distinguished for its reliability, and on this occasion it simply did not work. The pilot did not know until the very last moment what was going on behind his back - in his transmissions there was heard not one word about fire! And if the fire alarm remained silent, so too, the fire extinguisher system failed to work. None the less it would not have been within its power to cope with the volcano erupting in the engine bay. Only a few seconds were necessary for the flames to burn through the electrical cables and pipes including the steel armatures of the hydraulic system. At 3 minutes 24 seconds of flight, the hydraulic pipes under pressure ruptured, leading to the ruin of the main hydraulic system, about which the pilot, unaware of the fire situation reported "Main hydraulics system failed". Losing speed and altitude the airplane continued to struggle toward the airfield. It had managed to turn around and was already on a course for the runway. The flight operations officer gave it the shortest maneuvers onto the return course, not wasting a precious second with standard procedures. The pilot managed to report the falling pressure in the main hydraulic system, after which there was no further communication as he fought to control his machine. The control rods began to melt in the fire and soon the linkage to the left stabilizer burned through completely. The aircraft turned over on its left wing and fell into a spin. It began to fall out of control. The MiG-29 lost more than a thousand meters of altitude, but the pilot continued to try to control his machine. It was already beyond hope. The machine tossed from side to side from the uncoordinated movements of the stabilizer surfaces (While the right stabilizer continued to function, the left was unresponsive, flapping like laundry in the wind. The remaining seconds and hundreds of meters of altitude were still sufficient to eject, but the strong lateral g-load deprived Egorov of his last chance of salvation. (Such g-loads are extremely dangerous, they negatively effect an organism and often lead to loss of consciousness.) At 19 hours, 17 minutes the fighter disappeared from the radar screen. The entire flight of aircraft No.36 lasted barely more than four minutes. It did not take long to find the place of impact; the aircraft fell 9 km from the aerodrome. At impact the motors were driven into the earth and the pilot in the cabin was killed instantaneously. The steppe around the burning fighter was scattered with fragments and cannon shells. After an accident, every effort is made to restore the data preserved on the aircraft’s "Tester-UZL" data recorder. From its recordings , in addition to flight parameters, it was possible to determine the meaning of the pressure on engine manifolds., and from this it was possible to establish the moment of the fatal rupture of the fuel line. The commission which investigated the catastrophe had the services of the engineers and the NII operational and maintenance flight laboratory at Lyubertsy. The specialists gave particular attention to the fact that the cause of the catastrophe was an engine defect. Yet one more serious defect was concealed in the fire warning system, which in the opinion of the commission did not meet the requirements of reliability for operating under high temperatures. Not rarely through investigation of the causes of catastrophes, the blame rests on the deceased, but this time, again and again when evaluating the actions of the pilot during the short minutes of his flight, the commission found that there were no deficiencies or omissions. To the very end, Captain V. V. Egorov attempted to save his aircraft. He crashed with his field already in sight. -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 20, 2006 at 04:38 PM in , | | | |
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The Kofi Carol
A couple years back I loaned this offering to another blog which has sadly gone to that great blogroll in the sky, so I shall post it again here in honor of the holiday season and of the momentous changes at the United (sic) Nations. Kwanzaa has not really caught on as a significant holiday, not having any central figure to celebrate, but since it is a made-up holiday anyhow, perhaps we can mix it with observations in behalf of Kofi Annan. If we can squeeze him into Kwanzaa, perhaps both the man and the holiday may be remembered. The Twelve Days of Annanzaa On the first day of Annanzaa the UN gave to me A sniper in a palm tree. On the second day of Annanzaa the UN gave to me Two pseudo-doves And a sniper in a palm tree. <.....> Twelve Countries bumming Eleven gripers griping Ten spies a-peeping Nine peace-keepers sleeping Eight agencies milking Seven inspectors skimming Six commissioners preying Five bribery rings Four brawling Kurds Three false friends Two pseudo-doves And a sniper in a palm tree. -Rurik The Poet Lariat If you think this is a lynching, it only gets verse. |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 15, 2006 at 03:13 PM in , , | | | |
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Sending More Troops
Now the cry seems to be all over both sides of the aisle. Send more troops! Yeah, that’s it. That’ll show our yokels back home how patriotic we are, how much we care. Send more more troops and show we really really care. Just like we do with healthcare and hurricanes and education and poverty. Show our commitment by makign our constituents sacrifice a bit more. If you can’t spend money, spending troops is almost the same thing. Works with social programs don’t it? (And of course the DEMOcrats like the idea because for over a century they know that a disastrous foreign war, with lots of unhappy troops sent off is the biggest part of a successful Socialist revolution, and bankrupting the country with new spending is the other ingredient. And masses of conscripted troops paid at career wages would do that trick. And another try at Socialist revolution is why they’re really in Washington, after all.) Okay, I’ll be reasonable and suspend the sarcasm for as long as I'm capable. I’ll admit there are some people who truly are convinced that sending more troops will give us the edge we need to win. After all, you do remember those basic principles of war, right? Overwhelming numbers, mass, concentration of force, outnumbering the enemy ? Yeeeesss. That’s a good argument. But tell me, what kind of troops? And how many? And where do you want to deploy them? And what are you going to have them do? This may come as a surprise to all the congressheros, but troops are not interchangeable widgets, except, perhaps, at funding time. Oh wait! That’s what our lords in Washington do and care about, the most of them who’ve never served, or had a three month cameo tour in some staff headquarters. So again let me ask, what kind of troops? Should we send more infantry battalions? Mechanized or straight leg? Or do we need tanks? Or more engineers? What kind of engineers -, combat engineers or road construction, or pontoon bridge companies? Or do you want Signal or Quartermaster, or some other logistics troops? Do we need more mechanics? I know!! Let’s send them a bunch of Army and Marine marching bands, and a lot of JAGs. Those count as troops, right? And how many more troops on top of the troops we send will we need to send to supply and support the troops we send? And how many more support troops to support the additional support troops? And where do we station them? On the Iranian and Syrian borders, where they’ll have more casualties, or at Tikrit. Or maybe at Basrah and the Kurdish districts where casualties may be lower? Or maybe around Baghdad, where they’ll be highly visible to the visiting politicians and media pukes? And what will they be doing? Actively hunting Hajjis? Or searching suspect houses and pissing off Senator Kerry? Or just clusterfucking around and providing additional targets for Mohammed? (Here’s a hint, since some of you might not be able to figure this out on your own during your lunch in the Senate messhall - sending Supply & Transport Companies to hunt Mr. Hajj is not a war-winning idea, nor is using Special Forces to direct traffic and distribute candy and school supplies.) See how complicated it all is, Mister Congress-creature? Oh, there’s one more important question. Will all those new troops we’re going to dispatch be allowed to operate under rules of engagement which allow them to bring the fight to the enemy without having to worry about the political consequences from JAG and their own headquarters? Or are they going to operate under the same constrictive rules of (non-)engagement now in place, intended to wage war without overly offending the sensibilities of the foe? Here’s a suggestion. If we allow our troops really to fight without having to worry about stumbling into a JAG ambush, and to pursue the enemy without regard to privileged sanctuaries, or the sensitive opinions of the New Dork Times, we might find the combat units already in theater might show some inspiring results. If we keep on pretend-fighting, while marching to a kumbaya cadence, then no imaginable number of troops, not the entire Army and Marine Corps with the Boy Scouts as round-out will be sufficient to achieve what we do not really wish to accomplish. Give me some reasonable answer to my questions and I’ll cease hooting at your calls for more troops. If you give me a good use for them, I'll actively support you. Our own Bill Faith has at a for the new troops, so I won’t mock him. For the rest of you who just want some more bodies inconvenienced so you can look patriotic without learning the first thing about the military, let me teach you your first words of warrior talk - SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM. -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 11, 2006 at 11:58 AM in , , , | | | |
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The End is Near?
Jonathan McClendon at thinks our civilization is in a state of collapse. He's mostly right. my 91 year-old mother and I both say something very similar. But when he says
it shows that he is not old enough to remember "Viet Nam" and "The Movement". Or maybe he was young and opinionated and believes that that time we really were evil. Or the misgovernance of Jimmie the Peanut. What I find most troubling is that we have been down this same road before, and it seems that nobody recognizes it or has learned from the errors of the past. I have believed ever since the 1960s that our civilization is on its last legs. Even Rome had a few "Reaganite" good emperors who temporarily slowed the decay. I will quibble with Mr. McClendon's analogy of Rome and Carthage. Rome's greatest centuries came after their destruction of Carthage. I prefer an analogy of The West versus Soviet Union, with Rome & Byzantium against the Sassanian Persian Empire. They fought for centuries till the Sassanians were defeated in the 660s. Even as they fell, the Western Roman Empire of Europe was absorbing the shock of being overrun by immigrant Germanic barbarians. And almost immediately after the Sassanians fell, their remnants were overrun by new barbarians arriving out of southern Arabia. And right after that the new Arab barbarians defeated the Byzantine Empire, though it took another seven centuries to to completely finish them off. But things moved much slower in those days, at the speed of a horse, not a jet aircraft, or instantaneous email. Mr. McClendon's five year time table may be a little off. That was what I gave us back in 1977, when I did not see Reagan in our future, and was certain we could not survive a second Carter administration, or the Mondale administration which I feared would follow were my schedule wrong. But this time I'm watching the political horizons more carefully, and I still do not see any potential Reagan substitute. But if MR. McClendon's schedule is off, it is probably not by much. What to do? I am preparing, trying to secure some small part of our civilization and wisdom, trying to create some small understanding of what is really happening, which may be discovered by some new civilization which will surely arise out of the ashes in the future. And when the time comes, I will pick up my sword and shield and hurry to the walls of the city. I'm sure I will meet the rest of the Old War Dogs there. As a way to go, that will sure beat drooling to death in a nursing home. -Rurik A tip of the helmet to TACAN |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 9, 2006 at 10:45 AM in , , | | | |
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Putin and Poison
Elsewhere I have written about Russia’s grievances and its plight. And how does Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin fit in here? and what about poisons? Yes, Putin was a career KGB man. And I have heard some Western pseudo-sophisticates solemnly proclaim "Once KGB, always KGB." Case closed end of the issue. That is nonsense. Were it true, how to explain poor Litvinenko? He was KGB. And so was Peter Deriabin, Stanislav Levchenko, Vasilii Mitrokhin, Oleg Kalugin, etc. etc. etc., the scores or even hundreds of KGB who changed sides or broke with The Organs. Some KGB keep their loyalties in retirement to the grave. Others change and evolve with new situations and responsibilities. I do believe that even after leaving, they retain their general personal attitudes and ways of looking at the world, just as does the member of any other profession, be he an engineer, a historian, a physician, policeman, or anything else. This is the matter of basic personality. It is said that even as a little boy little Vladka wanted to be KGB. So far, no problem. Every little boy at some point has dreams of a heroic profession, soldier, policeman, spy, fighter pilot. And during the 1950s and 1960s, that is the way KGB was presented to Russian boys. And some boys actually go all the way, like Putka did. KGB was always a multi-faceted organization with multiple responsibilities - in the USSR even including the firemen and travel agents. Putin was never one of the internal security leg-breakers enforcing conformity on domestic dissidents. Not even one of the domestic counter intelligence types. No. With an aggressive disposition and rare intelligence, he went to the First Chief Directorate, the real spies. He worked in East Germany where he supposedly ran several agents in the West; but not much is publicly known about this (no surprise). It seems that he had nothing to do with the "Active Measures" directorate, the ones who sponsored and trained terrorists. But he certainly had to be aware of them and what they were doing, even if only to avoid crossing up each other’s operations. It seems safe to presume that Putin never did it but knew about it. Putin is known to be near-native fluent in German, and since 1999 has been studying English. He is also genuinely a tough guy. Bush may have the swagger, but Putin does not need to swagger. He was interested in Judo, and Sambo (the Russian form of Judo) from an early age, and has continued to develop his proficiency as his form of exercise. It is notable that the poplar form of unarmed combat in America today seems to be Karate or one of its similarly named variants, a fighting sport based on delivering powerful kicks and punches. Judo is based on the different principle of avoiding the opponent’s blows and redirecting his force against him. This implies a strong element of trickery and indirection. This, too, relates to Putin’s intelligence. Putin is probably not an ideological Communist. He was able to see both East Germany and almost certainly West Germany (though again, we know little of this, and should believe even less.), and he certainly had better information than his masters back at the Politburo. Plus, like so many others, he has seen Communism make a mess of his own country. He is a nationalist, and if nationalism can be best served by Marxism-Leninism, so be it; if it can better be served by some other system, so be that instead. Besides, too many of his supporters and friends have gained capitalist wealth, and would be expropriating themselves. Putin is reliably reported to have become a believing Christian. The account is that during the early 1990s, when he was an official in Sankt Petersburg, there was a fire at his dacha, and his young daughter was miraculously rescued from the flames; Putin taking the known as a miracle and a revelation to convert. I first heard that account from a personal friend who was friendly with Putin at that time. But whether the story is a convenient political myth or true, Putin’s Christianity would not hinder him from taking the most extreme political measures. Renaissance Italy was Catholic, and still notorious for its politics by assassination. Russian history is equally rich in "unfortunate accidents, such as the young Grand Prince Dmitrii, who "cut his own throat with a knife with which he was playing when he had a seizure", making way for Boris Godunov. Or Tsar Paul, who was strangled in 1801 by his own bodyguards (the official account said he died of "hemorrhoidal colic") Or all the hundreds of rival princes who were assassinated during the centuries before the Mongols arrived, and afterward in the struggle to unify Russia; all done by good Christians. For evaluating Russia’s future, perhaps we should begin to give a bit more attention to Russia’s fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their first age of "gathering in the Russian lands". But as for Putin today, though he began his term as president relatively mildly, it seems that there has been a growing number of assassinations. some of these murders might be blamed on rival criminal factions, but increasingly they seem to serve the interests of Putin and his supporters. It is also significant that many of Putin’s appointments have backgrounds in the KGB. Let us allow, for a moment, the benefit of the doubt. Any of us would be inclined to appoint not strangers, but friends, men whom we know and trust. And we would be inclined to appoint those who are known to be competent, and efficient. And in general, competence and efficiency tend to have concentrated in the KGB. Unfortunately, ruthlessness is the third member of that triad. And again that seems to fit too well with Putin’s personal inclinations. The KGB has a history of using poison. During the 1950s they carried out assassinations in Western Europe using a pistol which sprayed sodium cyanide into the face of the victim; by the time the body would be discovered, the remaining poison would have evaporated, an death would appear to be heart attack. This technique was revealed when an assassin defected together with his weapon. Then during the 1980s, the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was killed with a small pellet of ricin, injected into his leg by a specially rigged umbrella. Even during the 1930s the then, NKVD liked poisons for disposing of prominent people, including perhaps maxim Gorky. It has even been suggested, probably falsely, that Stalin himself could have been done in by KGB poison. The latest poisoning of Litvinenko is unique only in the unprecedented use of polonium 210 as the means. This is also a tip-off that the murder must trace back to the Federal Security Service, only a governmental agency of a major power such as Russia would have had the resources to prepare and administer the poison. And here is the demonic beauty of the whole operation. Everyone knows and understands, but nobody can prove anything. The particularly clever part is that everyone knows, because this enhances the intimidation effect, particularly if nobody dares say it. It proclaims to all, "We can get you, and nobody can stop us, or even pin it on us afterward". As the Chinese say, "Kill the chicken to frighten the monkey". I expect that a lot of people in Russia, and even far abroad are going to become much more discrete. There remains one question. Did Putin himself give the order or did one of his subordinates take the initiative for him? We hear that Putin had previously complained to Britain about Litvinenko, so it suggests high level interest. Regardless of the answer though, we can be certain that Putin was at least aware, almost certainly before the plot progressed to actual delivery. And as other innocent bystanders are also contaminated, this assassination has reached an alarming new low. Can Western leaders even afford to meet with Russian officials under such hazardous circumstances? Dare they even engage in a diplomatic formal toast? At one time it appeared that Putin had a number of attractive qualities. Putin had promise. Now he is a threat and that's a promise. -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 3, 2006 at 10:24 PM in , , | | | |
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Who is to blame? What is to be Done?
For 160 years Russian affairs have been summarized by two questions "Who is to Blame?" and "What is to be Done".In that sense, nothing has changed. Even as this week ends, we are again asking those same questions. Trying to make sense of the most recent poisonings, points us to look at history. The easy answer is to proclaim "Commies, they’re all still commies! Nothing is different!" Sorry but this is misleadingly wrong, and suggests both a misunderstanding of what is going on, and a misunderstanding of communism. Communism was/is evil, but it never was the sole manifestation of evil. And like a physician, the good political pathologist should try to identify the disease correctly. And poor Russia seems to be God’s petri dish for experimenting with bad governance. The collapse of Soviet Communism and the Soviet Union surprised the Russians as much as us, or even more so. Already discredited by military humiliation and a host of domestic failures, by 1990 it was obvious to all but a few of the senior bosses that the Soviet government was terminal, and the August coup discredited the Communist Party and its bosses in the eyes of almost everyone else. Except in the West, where the true believers still enjoy tenured teaching appointments. Even before the coup daring souls were quitting the party, and afterward, there was a rush for the exits. When the first small Baltic republics declared their sovereignty and got away with it, all the other "Soviet Socialist Republics also split away, and by the end of 1991, the USSR was dumped on Trotsky’s "ashheap of history". Similar processes had bee happening in Eastern Europe for a couple of years previous. The failed Gorbachev was replaced by the soon to fail Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin, a fairly successful governor in Siberia had been one of the energetic leaders of the opposition before the coup, and was the soul of the resistance to the Emergency Committee that August. Without Yeltsin, the coup would have succeeded, leaving the Soviet Union to continue sinking ever deeper into chaos and "centralized anarchy". But once in power he was a disaster as a leader. Let me compare him to his American contemporary, Bill Clinton, who was widely appreciated abroad as an amusing, fun-lovin’, good-ol’-boy, a Bubba with polish. Of course Clinton was surrounded by many corrupt and sleazy friends and associates, and became a very polarizing figure at home. Yeltsin was the Russian equivalent; a fun-loving, populist drunk, who defied decorum and might well act the clown at public ceremonies. It was Clinton’s good fortune that he got to misbehave in a country enjoying unprecedented economic and political success; Yeltisn’s misfortune was that he did it in a country in collapse. It is also true that during the 1990s Russia was flooded by Western Experts, many of them Americans. Graham Allison, Jeffrey Sachs, Anders Aslund, Anatole Lieven, among the best known, and many others. Few of these men had any prior expertise on Russia or the Soviet Union, either politics or history. They were political scientists or economists, and their economic orientation tended to span the gamut from Keynesian to Social Democrat. The advice was bad, and there have been recurring accusations of genuine corruption against some of them. Very large, very low interest rate loans were made to connected individuals who bought up Russia’s industries and resources as they were privatized, and then during the ensuing economic collapse, they paid back their loans at kopeks on the ruble. This is the summarized version of how Russia’s new class made their fortunes, rising from almost nowhere to become billionaires, names like Gusinskii, Berezovskii, Khodarkovskii, and others, who became known as the Oligarchs. The truth is, many of the Russian magnates Putin is pursuing are indeed, true robber barons. While Marxism never accurately described the original American and British "capitalists", it seems that Russia’s new class is indeed living down to their Marxian (mis-)understanding of how kapitalisty are supposed to act. And of course they expropriate the cause of freedom in their war with Putin. During the 1990s, as the new Oligarchs sped around in their limousine motorcades, scattering lowly pedestrians like Politburo members of old, a number of times I heard Russians the muzhiks curse them as "demokraty", and sometimes as "dermokraty" (Dermo is one of the many Russian words meaning shit.). And for all this, the West, and America in particular, is blamed by many Russians. This is a major reason why Putin was so popular at the start of his presidency, and has remained popular. There are other reasons as well. Like it or not, Russia, in the form of the Soviet Union, was one of the world’s greatest powers, and they took great pride in that fact. The attitude was something along the line of "We may not have reliable tap water, and we have to sand on line to buy soap, but at least we are so powerful that everyone must pay us heed." And during the 1990s they lost their last shreds of self-regard. The fact that they should take pride in their near-bloodless, self liberation in August 1990 seems lost on them because of what followed. And that the cities have become more prosperous and cleaner, seems taken for granted with the passage of time. Their ruling elite aspires to regain that self pride. In this, they are evocative of the French, still longing for Bonaparte. And like any country which has lost power, and perceives itself as defeated, it wishes to even up the score. Again we may remember France after Bonaparte. or Weimar Germany. Or Imperial Russia after the Crimean and Russo-Japanese wars. Perhaps there may be a bit of this spirit seeping to the top in the new Germany today. There was certainly an element of this in the United States among Conservatives after Vietnam. And the Soviet Union was far more defeated than were we; America never broke apart nor lost large homeland territories. With the departure of the new republics, Russia lost almost half its population, though land loss was considerably smaller, due to the vastness of Siberia. Like France longing for Alsace and Lorraine, or Germany for the Sudeten or any of the world’s other revanchisms. the Russian leaders dream of restoration. And the Russian rulers are very concerned about America in this regard because we have played such an active role encouraging several of the new republics to distance themselves, particularly in the Baltic, in Ukraine’s "Orange Revolution" and our support for the Republic of Georgia. or our military presence in several of the Central Asian republics. All of this can very reasonably appear threatening to a Russian, even to one who did not grow up imbibing fears of "capitalist encirclement" with his mother’s milk. I do not consider such fears legitimate, but they are understandable. The fact that America has been preaching to Russia about the shortcomings of its internal democracy and sometimes advocating more active measures to bring the desired reforms can only deepen Russian suspicions. Might a Russian with some justice respond, "Why make us become the first perfect democracy before everyone else? Are there not irregularities elsewhere among your closer allies, even amongst yourselves?" In an era of charges of stolen elections, of massive illegal voting by the unentitled, of ballot stuffing, of hanging chads, and all the other problems we have heard over the last decade, who would blame them? In fact, a Russian might well point to the antics of Elliot Spitzer, and of the other miscarriages of both criminal and civil justice to ask what gives us the right to preach to them about legal matters? And here, I must admit to a certain bitter sympathy with such a retort. So Russia seeks both to recover its former size and "glory", to prevent American meddling in its domestic affairs, and to reverse its humiliation by seeing us humiliated in turn. And what is the role of "Communism"? In my opinion, not much and that, mainly sentimental. As stated above, the Communist Party discredited itself by bringing defeat on Russia both in the Cold War in general, and in Afghanistan in particular. And this is particularly true for the military and the ex-KGB. During the Cold War Western experts never tired of telling us that the USSR did not take Communism seriously, that it was only a slogan to justify National Interest. Now, all of a sudden, they tell us communist ideology is at the bottom of it all. This is not the stopped clock which is correct twice a day, but a working clock which is misset by nine hours and is always out of whack. Now nationalism has arrived as the cause of Russia. And it is the Russian Church which has become the new legitimizer. Holy Russia, Moscow as the "Third Rome and a fourth there cannot be". The new universalism is a much older universal Faith returned and Arisen. Christ the Savior Cathedra in Moscow has been rebuilt, after having been demolished during the 1930s. In Moscow and everywhere else churches are being rebuilt and refurbished and restored to service. Totally new churches are being built. Near the giant statue of Mother Russia atop Mamaev Kurgan in Volgograd (Stalingrad) there is being built a new Church of All Saints. Just inside the gates of the Kubinka Armored Forces Museum and proving ground there is a small chapel to Saint Georgii Pobedonosets. The body of General Denikin, most effective of the White generals of the civil war, has been returned to Russia for burial with honors. The remains of Tsar Nikolai II and his family have been brought to the Sankt Peterburg Peter and Paul Cathedral for proper burial along with the other Romanov Tsars and Tsaritsas, his sarcophagus now sits in a special chapel of the cathedral. In the cities you may find monks begging alms on the streets. Orthodox chaplains are being introduced into Russian military units. There has been report, as yet unfulfilled, that the red stars are to be removed from the spires of the Kremlin and from Red Square. And though the Russian air force retains its traditional red star, this is, after all, at least in part a tradition, and many of the aircraft I have seen, bear also a doble-headed eagle and a blue, red, white Russian tricolor. No, this is not to dispute that Russia may be a rival, even dangerous. Revanchist nationalism has often led to very unpleasant results. And yes, Russia may well become an enemy, though it need not be. I would welcome a responsible and sensible Russian nationalism, were it directed toward true Russian greatness and pursuit of its true national interests instead of pursuing false dreams of revenge. In my opinion, those most important interests are four. Measures to develop the rest of Russia beyond the borders of maybe four metropolitan areas. Reversing the demographic catastrophe which is reducing Russia to the size, eventually, of Estonia. Recognizing the genuine and near threats from Islam and China - in that order. And establishing a stable domestic political system, whether democratic or not, which offers security and legal guarantees for ordinary Russians. Whether this will happen or not, we can only wait and see. Sadly, History teaches us that "In Russia all roads lead to ruin". -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 3, 2006 at 10:13 PM in , , | | | |
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Understanding Restored, a Review of Triumph Forsaken
If Santayana is right that "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it", it is even more true for those who remember the past wrongly. And this goes far to explain both why we have gotten ourselves in so much trouble in Iraq, and also why so many veterans of the Iraqi war are so dismissive of attempts to compare or even equate Iraq and Vietnam. The comparisons are often flawed because they are based on a completely erroneous legend of what actually happened in Vietnam. Now Mark Moyar, a professor of History specializing in the Viet Nam War has come to the rescue with Triumph Forsaken; The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). This book is the first of two volumes intended to provide a revised account of the Vietnam War till 1975, based on not only American sources but Vietnamese, Chinese, and other foreign sources as well. It is intended to be the first of two volumes, and ends with the introduction of US troops into ground combat. The second volume will complete the story, though if Dr. Moyar’s analysis and documentation are as thorough as in this first volume, I suspect the sequel will have to be split into two volumes. I certainly hope so. Though I served in Vietnam in later years, Triumph Forsaken seems far more believable than the standard "Anti-Imperialism For Dummies" version I have heard for so many years. It demolishes many mendacious myths and corrects many errors, some the results of subsequent propaganda. but others the result of information restricted at the time. Nor will this revision be to the comfort of only one political faction. I have had to revise personal opinions of some of the American actors. The Dr. Moyar’s hero clearly is Ngo Dinh Diem, who led Vietnam until his assassination in 1963. Certainly he was no democrat in the Western sense, but he had the confidence of the great majority of his people, who were accustomed to rule by a strong and wise leader. His alleged favoritism toward his family anc close associates was not only a cultural tradition, but also a reasonable measure in a society riven by factionalism and subversion. It was Diem who held the Vietnamese government together, and was gradually making it perform, and appeared to be gradually defeating the communist insurrection. The chapters dealing with Vietnam after his overthrow in November 1963 establish that everything was worse after he was gone. There are plenty of villains and inept buffoons. The first troublemaker was Elbridge Durbrow, the US Ambassador under Eisenhower. It was he who began poisoning relations, denouncing Diem for his failure to act like an American politician. He seems to have been the first of a string of unhelpful State Department officials, none of whom ever seem to have had a beneficial influence. perhaps the worst was Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge, what we would now call a "liberal Republican" was the presumptive Republican challenger to Jack Kennedy in 1964, and Kennedy appointed him ambassador to Vietnam in order to preempt Lodge from attacking his policies. But once Kennedy found that Lodge was creating new problems, and even defying direct instructions, he still felt politically unable to dismiss him. And so American foreign policy was shaped for domestic political advantage. And it was Lodge, not Kennedy who was responsible for the Diem coup, which made it impossible to stabilize the situation without introducing American troops. Sharing responsibility were many of the American reporters in Saigon. Some of the older hands reported a more objective story during the 1950s and early 1960s, but several young Turks, particularly David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, made it their personal crusade to destroy the Diem government, all in the name of democratization. And they did so by habitually biased reporting. As is now known, some of their favorite "independent" sources, were secret Viet Cong agents. There were a number of other heroes at this early stage, particularly including the senior American advisors who tried to compensate for State Department disruption, and tried to give good military advice to both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. General Westmoreland has risen in my estimation, and even Robert McNamara seems to have given good and honest counsel at this early period. To me it sounds like a too familiar tale, the good work of the military being undone by the bungling of ideologically blinkered State Department officials and ignorant crusading press novices out to make a name for themselves regardless of the cost to their country or its allies. On the other side, Dr. Moyar examines the reality of North Vietnam, including the blood purges which accompanied and followed their independence, and their early campaign against the South. It turns out that the North Vietnamese army was infiltrating troops into the South from mid-1959, and dispatched its first divisional sized unit well before American ground forces entered combat. He also reminds us of the numerous atrocities and crimes committed in the south by the Communists. One of my few criticisms is that he could have better explained how the systematic murder of competent local officials was a major factor in the ineptitude of the southern government. Another myth badly in need of refuting is the claim that Ho Chi Minh was mainly a simple nationalist. Nobody who reads this book will ever buy that nonsense again. Ho throughout his life was a dedicated Communist internationalist. If anything, he was drawn even more to the Chinese than to the Soviets. So much for "traditional Sino-Vietnamese hatred"; one more myth down the toilet. Ho switched his preferences to the Soviets only after finding that the Chinese not willing to back up their bellicose promises with actions. Yet another myth debunked - the threat of Chinese intervention. Indeed, for me, one of the most interesting and impressive parts of this book was the first chapters giving the background of early Vietnamese history, laying the background of their own history of internal strife. It is also in this first chapter that I found my main problems, a couple of jarring anacronicities. There is a reference to threatening in 1954, to use "plaster China with nuclear bombs and missiles" - some years before we had such missiles. And there is another spot where he refers to Madame Nhu as a feminist; years before the term was even used in the west. Madame Nhu was certainly emancipated by traditional Vietnamese standards, was outspoken, and given to making impolitic comments. Btu she certainly was not a real feminist, as evidenced by many of her pro-morality, pro-family stances; some of us actually liked her. Dr. Moyar makes an interesting point, but he could have explained it better. Still, these are minor nits to pick with what is certainly one of the most important books of the last several years. This book is a must for anyone interested in either the Vietnam War, or in American security policy in general. -Rurik *** Bill Faith adds: I've posted information about this book , , and but still learned from George's review. I'm still in the process of digesting the book in manageable pieces as my health permits. (My lower back likes sitting in front of a PC much better than sitting in a chair with a book.) If George has succeeded where I failed in persuading you to buy a copy both my first two posts contain links to the appropriate Amazon.com page. |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on December 1, 2006 at 10:32 PM in , , | | | |
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More on Tor
Former Spook at has an excellent analysis of the importance of the arrival of the Tor M-1/SA-15 air defense missile system in Iran.
This anaylsis by a real professional seems to agree with what I've said earlier, while deepening my . See also But that still doesn't mean we're safe for long. The Iranians are trying to catch up, and eventually will, particularly if we and the Israelis both continue policies of self-impairment. Don't put off till tomorrow what can be bombed today -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on November 25, 2006 at 11:51 AM in , , , | | | |
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Russia selling advanced SAMs to Iran
OWD's resident expert on Russian aviation sent me quite a bit of information on the Tor-M1 system when rumors of this sale first leaked several months ago. To save you an extra jump to a site I need to do some repairs on, I'm reproducing below the jump. []: Iran's Main SAM Threat (Updated & Bumped) *** Update 2: Don't miss Rurik's and Eric's additional thoughts at the end of this post. ***
I originally everything from here down [Update: Insert "with the exception of Rurik's and Eric's comments" here] on Jan 15, 2006. Since the matter's back in the news I think it makes sense to move it up where some new people can see it. With the whole world wondering if we're going to have to end up using military force to end Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's delusions of grandeur, it's about time I posted some information I set aside earlier about the one of the main threats our pilots will encounter if we launch an aerial attack on Iran.
Thanks go to friend, fellow 'Nam vet, student of Russian history and published aviation author George "Rurik" Mellinger for the following pictures, which he took at a Russian air show last summer:
(I've moved the picture that was here in my original post to the top of this one.) George sends the following information with the photos:
Click for a little more information on the Tor-M1/SA-15 system and here for a demo video of the system. Let's all hope our interest in the system turns out to be purely academic, but personally I'm not optimistic. *** Don't miss Mudville's latest . *** Update 2: Two promotions from the comments: George "Rurik" Mellinger, the source for most of my original information, comments:
Eric B., who and has, naturally, a keen interest in the current situation, comments:
Eric, I hope you're wrong but I'll concede that you and George are both much more qualified than I am to predict where this is headed. It all has the potential to be very interesting. |
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Contributed by Bill Faith on November 24, 2006 at 01:05 PM in , , , , | | | |
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October Surprise.
Down to the wire, the October Surprise was unleashed upon the Democrats yesterday. Surprisingly it wasn’t launched by the Republicans, but instead the liberal’s very own “useful idiot” John Kerry. "You know, education - if you make the most of it - you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq," With that comment the Old War Dogs are pleased to make known their own 11th hour October surprise: The Old War Dogs Forum is now open for membership at This site was to be announced next week, but in light of Kerry’s comment and the importance of next week’s elections we hope you will visit what promises to be an exciting place for discourse on the issues of the day. Participation does require registration, so don’t be shy. |
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Contributed by The Gray Dog on October 31, 2006 at 07:57 PM in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | | | |
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Rules of Ridicule
Remember , and how Dimsdale's brutality was less feared than Doug's sarcasm. Sometimes evidence, logic, reason, and 7.62mm can take you only so far. Then you have to resort to It is true, wit is a serious weapon. Also be sure to see the original essay by But I still think any essay by The Gray Dog is worth more than any dozen chosen cartoons. -Rurik |
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Contributed by George Mellinger on October 24, 2006 at 09:22 PM in , , | | | |