Symbolic Targets

Life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering,
and it's all over too soon
--Woody Allen
_____________________

[Note:  Ranger will be returning to his military roots this week. While Lisa had a lot of presence in posts over the past several years, she will now pull back to the role of copy editor. Readers may note the lack of gussying up. (But if you liked Rangerette's frilly-Kevlar style, you will still see it in her posts.) The writer will always be identified in the vanishingly-light tagline at the article's end. -- the editrix.]

The key point of terrorist activity is that their targets are soft and symbolic. That is why the craven activity of running down pedestrians with a van should not be surprising.

This clearly indicates that terrorism is NOT warfare because softness and symbolism does not designate legitimate military targets. When applying a military yardstick to terrorism we lull ourselves into a false sense of security, i.e., we will be protected by a powerful military that knows how to fight it.

Simple logic dispels that notion. Ask yourself: "How many al Qaeda No. 2's has the United States killed since starting its Non-War of Terror? Did any of those drone kills produce security here in the States?

If we think symbolic targets are not cricket for the use of terrorists, then why does the U.S. use them? Assassinating Osama bin Laden in his bedroom is a good example.

If OBL had been killed at the Battle of Tora Bora, that would have been legitimate as he would not have been a symbolic target, just another hostile on the battlefield. However, escaping death he moved on to sanctuary in Pakistan. (Good jihadists don't really get 72 virgins, but rather safe haven in Pakistan, the original "Sanctuary City" state.)

In his safe house, the aging OBL was no longer a military threat (if he ever was), but just a man in his jammies. He was a non-combatant symbolic target.

In fact, OBL was largely beyond symbolism at the point of his murder, and the action looked like a paltry act of vengeance. (However, the much-lauded operation sure provided Academy grist for a military film-makin' woman in EOE Hollywood.)

We seem to not know that vengeance is not military. It is Old Testament dogma which does not have any place in liberal humanistic thought.

This is why we will not defeat terrorism. First, it cannot be approached by classic military action. Every time a terrorist is killed, his replacement is close behind. In celebrating that which has failed, we have become emotional and betray the essential logic of war-fighting.

We choose for military myths over our legal codes and traditions.

A War on Terror will not be won by killing people in their bedrooms. If symbolic targets are not legitimate for terrorists, then how can they be legitimate for the U.S.?

Is this what warriors and war-fighting have become?


ed. coda:

Terrorists strike soft targets, unsuspecting and in an inferior posture. When the U.S. military "takes out" soft targets like OBL -- a man well-past his "use-by" date -- it has joined in their project.

The huzzahs which followed his 2011 death were anticlimactic, the cheers sounding like a 45 record being played on 33 1/3. The "hunt" for OBL kept a war project going for a decade, but the resulting mayhem has so far surpassed the man that the outlay of accomplishing his demise has little justification.

Most cultures create a military mythos in the form of an iconography to buoy cultural spirits over an essentially death-dealing project. The new Instamatic or Super 8 is a Smartphone aided and abetted by Facebook or YouTube. It is easy, like taking holiday beach pictures -- anyone can do it.

For Hitler, Leni Reifenstahl filmed it. For Islamic State, the graphic du jour is 9th century beheadings in the desert on Instagram, victims in orange, executioner in black (orange is the new black?)

An eager, desperate, salacious and obedient press gloms on and feeds it back to us in a bright-shiny package. Just like Capt. Renault, we are all shocked.

For the U.S., it is plucky West Virginian Jessica Lynch who went down shooting (not), being sent back from the checkpoint to the hospital to allow for the filming of her heroic four-service rescue. Football hero Pat Tillman was to be interred as the casualty of enemy fire, until his family questioned the plot line.

In a time when we have lost our way, we must make meaning and justification by any means necessary.

Where are we now vis-à-vis Islamic terror?

Tit for Tat

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return 
 --September 1, 1939,
W. H. Auden
______________________

Everyone is in agreement that ISIS must be destroyed. Everyone except Ranger.

To be clear, this is no apologia for the Islamic State. Rather, it is a down-and-dirty perspective on why the United States should not set its sights on destroying the group. The reason for this lies in the group's genesis.

The origin can be traced to the Battle of Fallujah, an action which was more punitive than military. There, the U.S. wanted to prove a point to the Sunnis: U.S. forces can destroy the city anytime they want to.

Then the U.S. left the theatre.

Enter the new Iraqi leadership which alienated the Sunnis from influence in the Shia-dominated government. Add in the Iranian influence and the Kurds and the Sunnis were left with few options. The logical result? The disaffected Sunnis formed their own power structure, ISIS. When your back is against the wall, there is little to lose; possibly, there is gain.

The U.S. totally ignored its usual pretensions to being culturally sensitive and politically correct in almost all actions taken. Going in with no clear mandate other than retribution, we were left to fumble for one. Nation-building, American style, against which the disaffected said, "No thanks".

Not being stupid (if not atrocious), ISIS marshaled all resources at hand. NGO's swanning about the wreckage?  "News people" sniffing about to satisfy our need for salacious images? Contractors with a myriad of agendas and loyalties? All fair game for ISIS target practice, and their OWN shot at media platform fame.

You want gore (they correctly divine)? We got gore (they say). In fact, they say, we will out-gore you (a pretty tall order against The World's Biggest Military.) Orange is the new black, and Leni Riefenstahl could not have scripted ISIS's images any better.

ISIS may seem rusticated to our refined sensibilities, but they have television. They see our Guantanamo Bay prisoners (= "themselves") in orange jumpsuits, so they put their prisoners in the  same. As Wilde wrote, "The vilest deeds like poison weeds / Bloom well in prison-air."

They play the great Mohammedan warrior swathed in black, the ur-Outsider in our Bad Guy-Good Guy construction. They are the outsiders and the outlaws. It is Hollywood perfection, and George Lucas could not have done better.

In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, the black-clad Darth Vadar tells white-clad Luke, "I am your father." In a nutshell, that is this morality play, and the players may swap costumes. Destruction breeds destruction, ad infinitum.

Ask yourself: if you were a Sunni in Fallujah, what good options would you have? ISIS became a militia that became an army that everybody swore to destroy.

The U.S. has bombed them, assassinated their leadership and killed 26,000 of them. Then we wonder why they conduct operations in Europe.

Every action has a reaction. This is all perfectly understandable.

Yet every night before the news we pull a disingenuous Captain Renault."Shocked!", we collectively mumble, as we consume voraciously the snuff films before us. (No one even need risk jail time for watching these state-sanctioned violence porn grotesqueries presented to us on the evening news with the furrowed brow of the news person trying really hard to convey a personal sense of gravitas.)

Shocked, we are . . .

Really?


--Jim and Lisa

From Prussia, With Love

 --Emad Hajjaj (Jordan) 

We'll sign some trashy treaties
And protocols galore,
(They won't make any difference
If I decide for war)  
--Stuff and Nonsense: A Book of War Verses, 
Sir Ian Malcolm

If I listened long enough to you
I'd find a way to believe that it's all true 
--Reason to Believe,
Rod Stewart
_________________________

The first assumption of United States' nation-building protocol is to build up an army and a militarized police force as the basis for establishing the nation we wish to create. The idea is, the government will fall into place if backed by sufficient force.

As a recent New Yorker piece on the Sykes-Picot treaty observed: "[Iraq and Syria] trained plenty of men in uniform. But both had weak public institutions, teeny civil societies, shady and iniquitous economies, and meaningless laws. Both countries were wracked by coups and instability . . . (t)he glue that held both countries together was repressive rule and fear."

But the balled-up belief in democracy issuing from force is echoed all 'round. Lieutenant General (ret'd) James M. Dubik allowed in a recent BBC America interview that Iraq was terribly off-balance, but stated that the army would not hold if the government falls.

We need only look back 40+ years to Vietnam, the modern prototype for counterinsurgency warfare, to see the failure of  this approach. And since this model failed so spectacularly in the Republic of Vietnam, why do we think it would work in Iraq or Afghanistan today?

The U.S. operates in bad faith, as though armies buy freedom, but the shallowest tour of history debunks that theory. In the most charitable reading, we optimistically operate on that misbegotten template because the Continental Army was created by fiat to expulse the British army and create a new democratic union.

In contradiction, the armies the U.S. creates in Iraq and all of the other oil countries exist simply to quell internal threats. They subdue their citizens and don't even pretend to be democratic. When an army is habitually used to suppress its citizens, this defines a totalitarian regime. 

The late, great Prussia serves as a cautionary example of a state which existed for the benefit of its army. This attitude is the opposite of democratic thought, and since the U.S. fought Prussia in two World Wars, it could be inferred that we opposed the construct.

Sadly, 21st century U.S. thought has devolved to the Prussian template: the U.S. invades, destroys, then nation-builds upon the assumption that out of strong armies and police will grow a democratic  nation. Not.

While this is the statehood pattern followed by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, et al., there is no reason to believe that the equation will endure when the state is placed under extreme stress. An army plus militarized police do not ensure statehood, and especially not when they are simply uniformed militias dedicated to a sect opposed to the concept of nation statehood.

The state does not exist for the army; the army exists to defend the state. When the U.S. builds strong armies and police in foreign ventures, it is creating the conditions for repression, not democracy.

Could somebody remind our leaders why we fought two world wars, and why conventional wisdom warns against secret and entangling alliances?

Naughty Boyz

 Bad bad, bad, bad boy,
you make me feel so good
You naughty, bad, bad, bad, bad boy 
--Bad Boy, Gloria Estefan

 A bad little kid
Moved into my neighborhood
He won't do nothing right
Just a sitting got to look so good 
--Bad Boy, the Beatles

 Bad guy (slang) n.:
a morally bad person or character. 
A villain
 --Merriam-Webster online  

Welcome to hell  
--Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
_______________________

Three bona fide terrorism subject matter experts speaking in a recent Charley Rose round table all referred to the Islamic State as the "Bad Guys", reflecting the general consensus of United State's government and military leaders. So this is what the Phony War on Terror (PWOT©) has devolved to -- getting bad guys.

You know what Ranger is going to say: in what code book, Hague Convention or United Nation guidelines is "bad guys" defined? When did being a Bad Guy earn you a death sentence?

"Since August, 2014, the United States has invested more than eleven million dollars a day in military operations, including almost nine thousand airstrikes on Iraq and more than five thousand on Syria" (How the Curse of Sykes-Picot Still Haunts the Middle East). The U.S. is dropping bombs faster than they can make 'em, hoping that we will hit a bad guy in the bursting radius.

The problem with "Bad Guys" is that the descriptor depends on which side of the fence you house your goats. To some people, President George W. Bush is a very Bad Guy -- war crime sort of bad. To others, he is a hero. Go figure.

How do you define Bad Guy? Is he a fundamentalist who likes terrorism? Is he a guy who will torture someone whom his government calls a Bad Guy, with nary a qualm of conscience? Do they trade in oil and deceit? Are they the arms dealers represented by U.S. interests?

Know this: the fundies and terrorists of ISIS would not exist without a U.S. foreign policy that affects oil and arms in the region. 

What color is your bad? 

When the objectives of war are the killing of bad guys, we have entered a vague moral ground and left a legal, political or military one. Bad guys is a concept a religious person can utter with certainty: "bad" or "evil" is something which is not them. Moreover, it must be destroyed. The problem is, only gods do battle with amorphous concepts like evil. 

When secular states like the U.S. kill on the basis of eradicating "badness" or "evil", we should recognize the futility of the mission. All of the evil in the world cannot be bombed into submission or non-existence. 

Know this, too: we are playing the devil's game, and there will be hell to pay.

In the Name of the Rose

I say father, and you say pater,
I saw mother and you say mater 
--Let's Call the Whole Thing Off,
George Gershwin

A rose by any other name  
would smell as sweet 
 --Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

 Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose 
--Sacred  Emily, Gertrude Stein 
 ______________________

Terrorism is like a tiger that changes it's stripes, and everyone is grasping for its tail, but he eludes capture. Like a game of musical chairs, each government agency must find a chair at the money feeding trough, and so must make a case that terrorism is something they can best confront.

Although terrorism is an observable fact, the way we interpret the facts leads to different theories regarding how to confront it.

Simply put: Terrorism is a CASH COW.

Many agencies share the task of defining and confronting terrorism, and so each must define it slightly differently in order to justify their viability qua agency. When the failed War on Terror began, the FBI had proponency under their counterintelligence functions. Terrorism was a legal concern under United States code and practices. Terrorists are civilians, and criminal law covers their actions.

Then there is the CIA, a civilian intelligence agency which has a paramilitary branch. Therefore, it is to their benefit to mold the subject into a military plus civilian concern.

Next is the Department of State, which can trump the CIA because they can get the Department of Defense  (DoD) to do their bidding. The DoD speaks of bringing freedom and liberty to countries, while breaking and destroying the same countries. But the DoD also has some intelligence agencies at the strategic level, so why not employ them for terrorism counteraction?

It behooves certain agencies to define the symbolic violence of terrorism as "warfare" for funding purposes. But the criminals acts of 9-11-01 were different in scope and nature than the activities of ISIS, which are warfare. Further, as ISIS does not abide by the accepted rules of war this confounds the issue, making them look like terrorists.

This inter-agency one-upmanship creates a dynamic tension which seldom facilitates good long-term results.

The problem facing us is to define terrorism and decide the correct approach to confronting it. Each agency is disingenuousness in the name of defending their corner of the pie.

The DoD has the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) and use them they must, even when there is no foreign government to target in their collection cycle. In such a pickle, they can also turn their alphabet monitoring apparatuses on U.S. citizens and sell that function as a security concern. DoD will target anything in their need to find a niche in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©).

The CIA doesn't even bother with such cover stories to mask their dirty work, and the Homeland Security Agency (HSA) is rife with political appointees coordinating with courts composed of political appointees.

So, the DoD, Department of State, HSA, CIA, Special Operation, the President, the Attorney General and the Pope all have conflicting theories on what the term "terrorism" actually means. 

After 14 years of war we still cannot define the problem because it remains theoretical.

Everybody Knows

--Pour féliciter 2016  
Marian Kemnsky (Slovakia)

If you make people think they're thinking,
they'll love you,
but if you really make them think,
they'll hate you
--Don Marquis

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich 
--Everybody Knows,
Leonard Cohen

If life seems jolly rotten
There's something you've forgotten
And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing
--Look on the Bright Side of Life,
Monty Python
 ___________________________

Whether mass murders are committed by criminals, crazies or crusaders, all activities that can be conducted by terrorists can be predicted and countered; they all throw off indicators. Adequate Human Intelligence (HUMINT) should be keen to these tells, and it seems they are by the speed with which suspects are identified.

The above descriptive categories are not necessarily discrete and do not negate the humanity of the perpetrator, who has merely amplified his innate human qualities and tendencies to pathological levels. They are simply helpful labels to distinguish a potential "them" from an "us".

And yet, though the pathology and criminality can be predicted, detected and monitored, this failed to occur in Boston, Aurora, Newtown, Ft. Hood, University of West Virginia, San Bernadino or any of the other recent spree shootings that occur with sickening regularity. Why?

Why do our authorities not develop a protocol for response, as though each incident is de novo? We are no longer shocked -- only in the disingenuous sense of Casablanca's Captain Renault. What is shocking is our response to these hideous events.

Why didn’t the police barricade and contain the final scenario? Why no effort to capture the killers? If this was an example of terrorism, then capturing the suspects should have been a primary goal, as live intelligence sources are of vital importance.

Why are the identities of attackers with a tie-in to extremist Islam instantly released, yet they were not on anyone’s radar prior to the attacks? Suggestions of police racial profiling are avoided at all costs, yet immediately following these much-too-many attacks, racial profiling is the order of the day. If we know who the murderers are, why do we close the barn door after the horse is out?

Beyond this event, we should be mindful of what our responses hath wrought. Last year the U.S. movie-going public rose in admiration of Clint Eastwood's Hollywood fairy tale, "American Sniper", but to the people on the other side of the fence, neither he nor the country he represents are heroic. In fact, the response to such "heroism" has created the void into which Islamic State was birthed.

James Meek had a good piece recently on the bombing of Syria, in which he outlines the obvious, inevitable failures. As in all recent bombing campaigns, "[First] bombing, then ISIS franchise."

Bombing fails because it is reminiscent of any colonial approach:

"The country is present, but doesn’t have a voice. ... [A]ir attacks on Syria, before they are an attack on Islamic State, are an attack on Syria, a foreign country, whose citizens have no say in our affairs, and which has not attacked us, or our allies."

Further:

It doesn’t make sense for Cameron to argue that air attacks on Raqqa will help prevent IS attacks on London, when the recent attacks in Paris happened 14 months into an intensive series of air raids on and around IS-held areas, led by the world’s leading military power, which has spared no airborne military resources or technology to try to wipe IS from the earth. Russia’s recent experience, losing a passenger jet to an explosive device soon after it began bombing Syria, seems to confirm the intuitive assumption that bombing is more likely to provoke terrorism than to thwart it.

We have been here before, with al-Qaida and then with the Taliban: Western governments have mistaken a super-decentralised network, somewhere between a franchise and an ethos, for an agency with a postal address. The attacks in Paris certainly had IS links – some of the attackers had been to Syria or tried to get there – but most, if not all, were French or Belgian, who sought out IS because they had been radicalised at home, and who did most of their killing with Kalashnikovs from the former Yugoslavia.

It is useful for an IS aspirant to have a Raqqa to go to for training, for battle experience, for validation by a set of jihadi peers. But for a mobile terrorist franchise like IS or al-Qaida, Raqqa is a concept, not a place. Once Osama bin Laden’s Raqqa was in Sudan. Then it was in southern Afghanistan. It could be in Pakistan, in Somalia, in Yemen, in northern Nigeria, in the Russian Caucasus, or all these places at once.

On the bright side, San Bernadino does show that gun control laws are working, as the shooters had to obtain their weapons via an intermediary (a "straw purchase", which is a federal crime.)

The San Bernadino attack forefronts the fact that Islamic State lacks the ability to attack hard targets in the U.S., even when the attackers are willing to die during the execution phase, thus emphasizing their minimal and haphazard capabilities.

[cross-posted @ milpub.]

War Criminals

 He didn't belong in the Army
or in civilian life either
--George Kaufman (on Harold Ross) 

Don't come a-hangin' around my door
Don't wanna see your face no more
I don't need your war machines
I don't need your ghetto scenes 
--American Woman, 
The Guess Who 

Oh I was born six-gun in my hand
Behind a gun I'll make my final stand 
--Bad Company,
Bad Company

____________________________ 

War criminals and terrorists are different creatures and the terms are not interchangeable. So why has everything that obstructs United State's foreign ventures been labelled, "terrorism"?

Surely the Army's  Chief of Staff, the senior Army adviser to the President, should have a firm handle on this topic, yet he goes along to get along with the collective, simplistic delusion. The taxpayers do not know to ask for clarification.

Islamic State presents more than meets the eye. They are fighting Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian and Kurdish forces on the ground, to include the militias arrayed against them. They are enduring U.S. air strikes. This is not what terrorists do.

Simply, their organization has evolved along the spectrum of conflict. Maoist theory predicts this morphology beginning with a group's small actions all the way to Army status.

As we waffle on the topic of confronting IS, what we never do confront is the simple question: 

"What would we do, as the forces of freedom and democracy, IF we should defeat or capture the entire force structure of IS? Is there an answer? Why do we continue to partake in a losing scenario? Does the U.S. taxpayer benefit from any warfare with IS?

The answer does not lie in fighting IS, but determining that for which we fight.

IS has clearly defined its goals and priorities; it is time that the U.S. does the same.

A Pocketful of Mumbles

 I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles,
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest 
--The Boxer, 
Simon and Garfunkel

 See, in my line of work you
got to keep repeating things over and over
and over again for the truth to sink in,
to kind of catapult the propaganda
--President George W. Bush

Why do we never get an answer
When we're knocking at the door
With a thousand million questions
About hate and death and war 
--Question, 
The Moody Blues   
_________________________

The OCT 2015 -  JAN 2016 Army Echoes, the quarterly newsletter sent to over a million retired soldiers and families, has set for itself the modest proposal of keeping its readers in thrall to Them Terrorists, 24/7 ("Sustaining Antiterrorism awareness -- always ready, always alert," p.5.) Just in case you fail to subject yourself to the ample media sources which should have already brought you to this paralyzed state.

Ranger will deconstruct the money graph, to wit:

"Terrorists can attack anywhere, anytime – the threat is real. Over the recent months the continued threats on social media from the Islamic State of Iraq and The Levant (ISIL; also commonly referred to as ISIS) and their influence on domestic extremists demonstrates the lengths that terrorist groups take to threaten our nation and our military communities. ISIL has also expanded their tactics to include cyber-attacks and attempts to exploit private and sensitive information of our military personnel and their families. These risks pertain directly to Retired Soldiers, just as they do the entire Army community."

A sophomore creative writing undergrad would recognize the weakness presented here as fact, courtesy the United States Army. The breakdown begins with opening statement: "Terrorists can attack anywhere, anytime."

Is that true? Can you think of somewhere they could not? How about a nuclear (surety) weapons storage area, the protection of which is the job of the Army, after all. So, no -- not anywhere; check one.

Next: "(T)he continued threats on social media from the Islamic State of Iraq and The Levant (ISIL; also commonly referred to as ISIS) . . . demonstrates the lengths that terrorist groups take to threaten our nation and our military communities." OK -- "social media threats" -- certainly is not a nice thing to do. We call such people "trolls", and what they do is BULLYING. When they act on their threats, they become criminals. 

Bullying certainly has its own corrosive quality, but do WE need to be "always ready, always alert"? Maybe we could just farm out that set of feelings over to the people paid to monitor such transmissions on a daily basis. That IS what they are paid for, after all, and it would cut down on our psychotherapy bills and Unisom consumption, something that would be good for an overworked, over-stressed population, no? 

Aren't Terrorists a Level One threat? If they are out "to exploit private and sensitive information of our military personnel and their families," and "(T)hese risks pertain directly to Retired Soldiers, just as they do the entire Army community," tell us what these tactics entail so that we might be proactive about it. Instead we are fed a vague miasma of fear, riding on the tails of the aura created around terror groups.

Further: the piece is predicated on a falsehood: ISIL is not a terror organization. IS has a military chain of command, their members wear uniforms, carry weapons and attack military targets. They do not conform to the international laws of war.

The last fact does not render them terrorists, but rather War Criminals. Possibly they could be convicted under "crimes against humanity", but the evidence favors war criminal prosecution. A paragraph full of lies and half-truths, courtesy your U.S. Army.

You can sleep well, tonight, despite the fact that rough men stand ready to scare you witless.

[Cross-posted @ milpub.]

The Destroyer

You can kill a man,
but you can't detsroy an idea
--Medgar Evans

Load up on guns, bring your friends
It's fun to lose and to pretend 
--Smells Like Teen Spirit, 
Nirvana

Beneath this mask there is an idea,
Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof 
--V for Vendetta (2005)
________________________

 The Big Stick talk on the United States' Executive, State and Department of Defense street is about destroying Islamic State (IS) / ISIL / ISIS/ Daesh, forever and ever, amen. President Obama has stated this objective clearly on the White House web page ("We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL.")

But this idea should be examined in a realistic manner, devoid of the feminine dithering of our leaders.

Fact: the destruction of IS is not going to happen anytime soon. Following 12+ years of hostilities , Al Qaeda (the original Bad Boys on the block) has not been destroyed, so what makes us think IS can be destroyed? The best that we have achieved with Al Qaeda is to have killed numbers one through three in their hierarchy; wash - rinse - repeat.

However, these attempts to disorder the group did not destroy the organization. It seems they have the military idea of "slotting" down better than we could imagine. We can kill people with explosives, but we cannot destroy their ideas as handily.

The Islamic State is not the problem in the ME. IS did not destabilize the region. IS simply exploited the now existing power vacuums. IS is not an aberration but rather the apotheosis of a prevailing Middle Easernt mindset. This is why their iteration has been so successful.

Through our efforts at destabilization, we handed the thugs a present. The force that animates and populates IS was already there, simmering and roiling beneath the surface. We simply unleashed it.

To focus on the destruction of IS would simply be to remove a symptom, not to address the disease. 

News flash: The United States military forces have never destroyed an enemy army. We may have defeated them, but the vanquished forces may live to fight another day, or to morph into something new and try again.

Moreover, calling for the destruction of any entity is philosophically as barbaric as the destructive actions of IS. If destruction is the best the U.S. can conjure as a realistic course of action, then we have lost the finesse that makes democracy unique among governmental systems.

How does destroying an entire army (IS) express the values of a civilized Western  military tradition? Are we deserting our laws of land warfare and reverting to Old Testament standards of conduct?

Daeshing

--Gangster State,
Arend Van Dam 

Everybody talks about a new world in the morning
A new world in the morning so they say
I myself don't talk about a new world in the morning
A new world in the morning that's today
--New World in the Morning,
Roger Whitttaker 

Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation 
--The Garden of the Prophet,
Kahlil Gibran

______________________

The commentariat is full of banter about the nature the Islamic State (IS), its structure, motivations and use of terror tactics, the latter of which violates the Rule of Land Warfare.

Be that as it may, how have their actions differed from those of Lawrence of Arabia in World War I? As the differences are minimal, why is IS so exasperating to our Western sensitivities? No one cared about the atrocities under Lawrence because they were killing for us.

One obvious difference is the destruction of antiquities being conducted by IS. To them, however, it is not a desecration. Instead, it is a destruction of blasphemous relics, and by way of the destruction an eradication of the blasphemer, and isn't that the Roman way of war?

Mainly, the atrocities matter to us when they are conducted against us.

That is the difference between an ally and a terrorist.

Asymmetrical Numbers

Welcome to the jungle we've got fun and games
We got everything you want honey, we know the names
We are the people that can find whatever you may need
If you got the money honey we got your disease 
--Welcome to the Jungle, 
Guns 'N Roses    

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly,
I gotta love one man till I die 
--Can't Help Lovin' That Man of Mine, 
Porgy and Bess     

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine? 
Could you be mine? 
--Would You Be My Neighbor, 
Fred Rogers
 _______________________

While the topic of the Islamic State (IS) is perversely fascinating, we will instead look just at our reaction to the group, a reaction which violates the principles of war, diplomacy and logical thought. A reaction not equal in reason to the actions of IS, which are clear, evident and understandable, if not grotesque.

The United States has killed both the No. 1 and No. 2 leaders of IS to much fanfare, but to what end? No military or political objective was accomplished in the execution of this very costly project; the U.S. Homeland is no safer. As such, our effort is wasted, and our violence just as criminal as theirs.

Reports indicate that 15,000 IS troopers have been dispatched to the next life, hurried along by ~5,500 U.S. airstrikes. This equates to a success rate of 2.73 kills per strikes. Parsing the cost of each airstrike, are they cost-effective if they do not achieve a military objective?

Are these casualties worth the expenditure, or could our dollars be better spent on social programs here in the U.S.?

Further, the U.S. has trained and equipped only 54 moderate Syrian rebels thus far at a cost of $36 million USD. The goal is to recruit 3,000 fighters by the end of 2015; 4,500 in 12 months. That amounts to a cost of $666,666.67 per recruit. [For that outlay one could buy a bona fide (somewhat) Hollywood sniper and reap a higher entertainment value, at that.]

Aside from the crack 54 -- each earning a cool $400 per month-- one must wonder whose pockets are being lined by the overflow. Someone is benefiting from this egregious expenditure, and it is not the average U.S. taxpayer.

The U.S. pays big bucks for questionable proxy-quasi-allies to fight against people who pay nothing for theirs. So who is winning this asymmetrical war?

Choose any field you wish on which to apply your metrics.

[cross-posted @ Milpub.]

On and On

 Some will win, some will lose,
some are born to sing the blues
While the movie never ends,
it goes on and on and on and on 
--Don't Stop Believin', 
Journey 

I know nothing stays the same
But if you're willing to play the game
It's coming around again 
--Coming Around Again,
Carly Simon

If they can get you asking the wrong questions,
they don’t have to worry about answers 
--Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
________________

What a delicate madness.

For the folks who now think arming the Sunnis in some pastiche of "elite Iraqi units" might be a good idea (as does NYT editorial board), RAW would kindly point you in the direction of  Mr. Saddam Hussein (1937-2006), he of blessed memory, who led what passed for an "elite bunch of Sunnis" back in the day.

This is not to knock The Times editorial board, as that would be a sucker punch, and we do not do ad hominem's at Ranger, anyway. No, this is simply to recognize the idiocy and irrationality of the much too many who believe this would be a good idea.

Welcome to the Mobius strip world. Whatever you just saw go by will be coming around again, if you just stay wired for a little bit. And this endless loop will not present a good thing, but something made to sow discord and distress in the viewer.

For those who check into the evening news broadcasts, they will see a revolving cast of characters who gain and lose favor with an appalling speed. An eternal return, that is, until you get bored, begin asking the right questions, and decide to check out of the net:

 "The best chance of quickly responding to the Islamic State would be to get weapons and training directly into the hands of Sunni tribal fighters in Anbar.  ... Given the urgent threat, the Americans should consider working more directly with the Sunni tribes if Baghdad continues to refuse."

"Now, under the new threat of ISIS, the politically dysfunctional state is under more strain, and may be in greater danger than ever of splitting apart into Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni sectors. That would make defeating Islamic State forces even harder."

"That would make defeating Islamic State forces even harder."  Are we "tarded", as the film Idiocracy might say? To quote the late Freddie Prinze's character Chico, "Ees not my job, man!" It is not the United State's job to reinforce the created state of Iraq, after so foolishly deposing its leader. 

Iraq might split into three (or multiple) regions? Welcome to 2003. Anyway, as we say in the South, "That dog won't hunt for you," so let it split, baby.

We have our own country to maintain, and this extends beyond the interests of the military and its contractors.

We should let the war gravy train dry up.

We're Surrounded!

 If you have one bucket that contains 2 gallons
and another bucket that contains 7 gallons,
how many buckets do you have?
--Idiocracy (2007)

 We know where they are.
They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad
and east, west, south and north somewhat
--Donald Rumsfeld (on Iraqi WMD) 

It's not the voting that's democracy;
it's the counting
--Tom Stoppard
 ______________________

Some Ranger geometry:

The newscasters crowed recently that Iraqi forces had the city of Ramadi "surrounded on three sides".

Surround, tr. v.

• 1. To extend on all sides of simultaneously; encircle. 

• 2. To enclose or confine on all sides so as to bar escape or outside communication. 

If the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad were surrounded on only three sides, they would not have been defeated and captured. Ditto the Confederate Army at Petersburg, Virginia, in the United State's Civil War.

So ....

If a force is surrounded on only three sides, then they are not surrounded, duh! They may break out from an encirclement by reading how Lee and Gordon did it 140 years ago. If one is surrounded on all four sides, or 360 degrees, the one may cash in one's chips, but three out of four is not all.

Please lord protect us from ignorance, which is a bigger threat than ISIS.

That's All Folks

 The blundering history of the human race
is always given coherence by power elites
and their courtiers in the press and academia
who endow it with a meaning and coherence it lacks.
They need to manufacture national myths
to hide the greed, violence and stupidity
that characterize the march of most human societies. 
--Our Mania for Hope is a Curse, 
 Chris Hedges 

I shouted out,
"Who killed the Kennedy's?"
When after all
It was you and me 
--Sympathy for the Devil,
 The Rolling Stones 

The people who burned witches at the stake
never for one moment thought of their act as violence;
rather they thought of it as an act
of divinely mandated righteousness.
The same can be said of most of the violence 
humans have ever committed 
--Violence Unveiled, Gil Bailie
 _____________________

For the Ralph Peter's crowd, the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) is a legitimate given, not to be questioned or deconstructed. As he said with the manly swagger of the armchair FOX warrior in a recent NY Post piece, "Sorry folks, but that's war (it's not dainty)." His view complements that of people like Mr. Rumsfeld who saw democracy in the rubble (war smells like democracy in the morning?)

But the United State's actions in Afghanistan and Iraq defy the logic of war. The actions of ISIS in the region make more military and political sense than anything exhibited by U.S. policy to date.

The purpose of war is to achieve a peace. The PWOT © has not in any instance led to peace. Military violence -- whether theirs or ours -- is not war, but simply violence unrestrained, unjustified and lacking an achievable strategic military goal. This violence is merely criminal activity.

The media shovels us the "Good News" when the Iraqi forces (or some semblance of them) "regain territory previously held by ISIS," as though the conflict was about terrain. What it is about is a millennial struggle within Islam for hegemony of the combatants, the different stripes of Islam.

The violence in Iraq and Afghanistan is not about terrain or body counts [though body counts are de rigueur again, thank you Mr. McNamara.] It is about which side is the true and divine representatives of their god here on earth. 

That is pretty simple and, if true, U.S. participation in the rodeo violates our core belief in separation of church and state for as members of Western society we are not supposed to kill for religious reasons. That behavior is so Middle and Dark Ages.

So why is the U.S. funding and conducting military violence to support sectarian violence?

If we fail to confront this basic reality, we are doomed to live our military and political lives as if they were violent video games, which is but a poor simulacrum of real life.

[cross-posted @ milpub.]