Latvia supports Denmark and Freedom - PM

Latvian PM Kalvītis has stated in an interview on state radio that :

We are in solidarity with Denmark and the other countries of Europe, because Europe will not step back from freedom of expression and the press, regardless of the fact that other countries have expressed condemnation

Yehaa. Only took several weeks to take a moral stand, and a mere three days after our peacekeepers were besieged in Maymana. [sarcasm] My heart runs over at the bravery of the government [/sarcasm]. The Latvian newspapers are yet to run the offending cartoons (as opposed to Respublika in Lithuania, which has done so).

PRT Maymana

Of course the PRT that operates from Maymana has also Finns, Brits and Latvians. There is also some kind of Swedish prescence. Most of the MSM (hack, spit) is running stories along the lines of :

About 250 protesters armed with assault rifles and grenades attacked the NATO base in the northwestern town of Maymana, burning an armored vehicle, a U.N. car and guard posts, said a Maymana Hospital doctor.

Some in the crowd fired light weapons and threw stones and hand grenades, and the Norwegian troops responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and warning shots....

"Protestors" .... as if they were students at campus rally or pensioners protesting heating prices. OK, whatever. Some protests are more violent than others. But some fucking Canadian newspaper is covering the same story with the headline "Norwegian troops fire on Afghan cartoon protesters". Thats the sort of cheap and misleading sensationalist journalism we might expect from less than impartial muslim countries ..... but from Canada?

Islamic madness as an Iranian puppet

Its getting sillier and sillier - attack on the Danish battalion in Iraq, attacks on Danish embassies in Syria, Lebanon, Indonesia and Iran and now a crowd has attempted to storm the base for the Norwegian led Provincial Reconstruction Team in Maymana, Afghanistan. Considering that the PRT are very much in civil help mode, and only benefit local communities, that is a rather worrying incident.

I wonder how anyone can sanction Iran without causing a total conflagration, let alone attack (as William Lind is predicting)? Cui bono - is this Iran fomenting a brushfire, making for a smokescreen that will allow them to consumate their nuke program without intervention?

Arab-Persian relations have been iffy at times. How hard is it to see Iranian hands in at least the troubles in Afghanistan (teh trouble was at Maymana is in the north-west and NOT Kabul or the usually volatile pashtun South) and southern Iraq (shiitie, where the hand of Iran is well noted), or the knwon Iranian catpaws in Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Palestine (Hamas and Islamic Jihad). The current big Islamic ummah convention of muslim love and togetherness and hating the west would play directly in their hands come action against their nuclear facilities.

And if we are nervous, how is Israel? Rampaging muslims and nuclear Iran. A blog called The Officers' Club even provides interesting Tom Clancy-esque guesses as to the directions an Israeli intervention may take in Meanwhile Back in Iran . Personally it sounds a little far-fetched, the straight diplomatic nudge and wink and blinking duirng overflights is much much more likely.

And where is Al-Qaida? William Lind also warns that a big attack may be in the offing after Osama's peace offer.

May you live in interesting times. 2006 is getting rather interesting.

Islam and nazism

I can't believe the number of nazi - sypathetic references from the Islamists. Certain pro-Israeli articles claim the Islamists are direct descendents of the nazis (based on rather tenous links), while some Islamists appear to express pro-nazi sypathies on the strength of the enemy-of-my-enemy. Do they really understand much of any history?

If they ever really really hurt Europe (the nightmare scenario WMD attack, and economic chaos, mass uprisings), soft and fuzzy feel-good be-good euro policies will evaporate. It won't be openly revisionist, not sigrunen or hakenkreutz ressurected, nor bad mustaches nor skinheads (oooh white supremisists - the supreme liberal/marxist bugbear) - it would be something entirely new. New style then, but same old substance.

From the Kaiser to Kristalnacht took less than 20 years.The Islamists can either only lose now, but if they win now .... then they will bring the spirit of him back?

Dr. Michael Scheuer - Missing Zawahiri

Dr. Michael Scheuer - the CIA guy who wrote "Imperial Hubris" - has written a fine tract on the US should be playing realpolitik Missing Zawahiri - A Portent of America’s Defeat, in the US Cavalry site "On Point" :

In a rational, historically aware country, U.S. leaders would have told Americans that the attack on Zawahiri was facilitated by U.S. intelligence officers and Special Forces who risked their lives to gather intelligence that seemed to fix Zawahiri in a specific place at a specific time. Because Washington’s most important duty is to protect Americans, they would have said, we acted on the best information available and, so to speak, let 'er rip. Unfortunately, we missed Zawahiri, but we killed four of his fighters and will keep trying to get him and bin Laden. As for the dead Pakistanis, they are foreigners not Americans and we have no responsibility to protect them. And, in any event, they were about to serve up sautéed goat steaks and curry to one of America’s most dangerous enemies. The lesson all Pakistanis should take from the incident is that we are not concerned with the lives of Zawahiri’s abettors, that they were lucky the village was not hit by B-52s, and that next time they may not be so fortunate.

Of course the indiscriminate use of airpower in counterinsurgency inevitably backfires, but straight hard talk like suggested would be better than the squirming denials and excuses. But they can't, becuase that might be insensitive.

Support Denmark

Blogs, politics and feedbacks in OODA loops II

US politics from the cheap seats and Daily Pundit again.

US domestic politics - interesting how? Interesting as the avangard case of internet influence, and of course the US as the worlds only superpower, whose globe shaping foreign policy (implicit, as well as explicit - it can be observed in opposition sometimes) is the product of internal politics meaningless elsewhere. 5% of voters in Florida swing votes because of local issues (crime? social security? policy towards Haiti? whatever!), and we get to occupy Iraq, or not. US domestic politics is the tail that wags the dog as far as 200 other countries are concerned, including Latvia. So - interesting.

James Lileks in Jewish World Review writes

But the pestilential keyboard pounders had best realize they're just screaming to the choir. Persuading the middle means acknowledging that the opposition is not composed of subhuman Moorlocks who hope global warming drowns coastal-dwelling gay stem-cell researchers. People on the right may be wrong, but it's quite possible they don't actually want a fascistic corporate state where the elite tour the country in giant hovercraft, vaporizing Wal-Mart labor organizers with microwave rays.

humorous, but Daily Pundit responds with Middle Me This....

So tell me again: What is so admirable about this middle, and why should people who actually know what they are talking about, are not afraid to form, hold, and express opinions, are willing to act on them and who, in general, take the time and make the effort to become what the Founders would have considered good citizens take a back seat to the Brobdignagian mob of mopes, dopes, goofuses, doofuses, and rubes that make up "the middle?"

Why is smearing "Duh, I dunno" in crayon across your forehead considered a badge of honor?

So not only are the Left insane, but swing voters are a pack of losers. There is no point preaching to the unconverted, because they are obviously clueless (since they have not converted already). Heaven knows where that leaves actuallly considering opposing arguments based on their merit, or of objective viewpoints. So, a blogger in danger of dissapearing up his own OODA loop. But how important are bloggers?

The Washingtom Post writes Blogs Attack From Left as Democrats Reach for Center. Not immensely coherent, but the radicalising influence of the left wing blogs is laid out. Is this part of a wider trend, where the internet allow the radicals to direct party events (as opposed to the old days they were merely embarrassing minor speakers at rallies)? Couple this to the selective input potential of blogs to close political wing OODA loops and thereby drive those same wings into extremism.

If the democratic system works, extreme closed parties should be rejected by voters and collapse electorally. If not we get ... democratically elected governments with radical policies and closed OODA loops. Examples : Nazi Germany, Milosevic Serbia, Mugabe Zimbabwe and now Hamas Palestine.

Operation Iraqi Freedom team VI awards

The fine lads of 1st Company /2nd Infantry Battalion received their campaign medals today from the defence ministress. Bravo, well earned. Sadly, the sort of event that Latvian MSM completely ignores as a matter of routine.

Latvian muslim nazis on LGF ....

An unrelated google search made looking into the glorious history of Latvian peacekeeping in former Yugoslavia turned up a most unexpected find. This old (2003) post made on Little Green Footballs called Arab Nazism: Then and Now, which links to an frontpagemag article of the same name which states :

The SS indoctrinated these Muslim fighters, variously called Trawniki men, Hilfswillige, Hiwis, or Askaris, at training camps or "Ausbildungslager" in towns such as Trawniki, Poland. The Askaris, who generally hailed from the Ukraine and the Baltic states....

Ah, how could we miss that the Trawnikis and Hiwis of WWII were mainly Latvian and Ukrainian muslims! Utterly laughable to anyone with even a passing clue of course (could the article be a parody???? LGF presents it straight faced)

But the LGF comments bear reading as well. The horror, the horror. Crass and aggressive ignorance at its finest. Baltics and Balkans, Lithuanians or Bosniacs whats the difference anyway? :D.

Just a flesh wound.....

The milnet version

A Latvian soldier and Iraqi civilians were injured in Iraq in separate incidents and Iraqi security forces found a bomb in Fallujah, U.S. military officials reported.

The Latvian guard was injured by small-arms fire today in al Kut when unidentified gunmen fired at an observation post in the Multinational Division Central South area of responsibility. The guards returned fire.

The wounded soldier was transported to a military medical facility, where his condition is stable.

Stable? Just a flesh wound to the upper arm, a clean puncture apparently.

Interesting trivia : he is the first Latvian soldier to be injured by actual gunshot during 10 years of peace support operations. There have been many various injuries, several much more serious, but this is the first actual operational bullet wound.

Media watch : for reasons I do not understand, this relatively trivial incident has been widely mentioned in the international news, and overreported in the Latvian news. Maybe it was a slow day for bad news from the front (MSM! hack! spit!), but then again MoD also made an overly large song and dance of the whole business to begin with.

Blogging and incestuous feedback in OODA loops

Daily Pundit has an interesting bit on blogs and polarization following on from BELTWAY BLOGROLL - The Rise Of Blogs. Daily pundit fastens onto a most interesting statement

Blogs, she added, tend to attract like-minded people -- and ones who are "slightly more ideologically extreme than the general population." The end result: "The Internet is exacerbating political polarization."

While Daily Pundit sees this polarization as true, but the reation as (well) reactionary, and concludes

Was this polarization a bad thing? I think not. Of course, I'm considered something of a polarizing force myself. I don't mind. In fact, I'm proud of it.

It has a different perspective from the OODA loop angle. If blogs allow people to selectively filter the news according to the own personal prejudices, and the virtual nature of the internet insulates those same indivisuals from personal reality checks, isn't it inevitable they will get inside their own OODA loops by incestuos amplification misdirecting orientation?

The existence of Incestuous Amplification shapes one's Orientation by naturally distorting the Observations feeding that Orientation. (The observer sees what he wants to see rather than what is.) When this happens, the Decisions and Actions flowing from that Orientation become progressively disconnected from reality. This process pumps dysfunctional behavior into the OODA loop which then becomes magnified as the effects of the disconnected actions are fed back into the Incestuously Amplified Orientation. As any student of nonlinear dynamics or evolution knows, this kind of positive feedback loop can produce confusion and disorder and ultimately degenerate into chaos or extinction, if the organism becomes disconnected from its environment. Any hint of Incestuous Amplification is therefore a bright red flag." - The View From Mount Olympus Seen from the Cheap Seats

Applied to politics via selective blog reading this would of course inevitably lead to polarization, and more extreme responses and irrational behaviour as opposed to reasoned debate. Regularly reading US liberal vs conservative blogs, I am always struck by the conviction of both sides that the other are not merely wrong in their beliefs, but actually insane. Come to think of it the Gore/Bush political cirus was most of the way there already. Its reminiscent of Israel-Palestine politics, where both accuse CNN of being stooges for the other side. It suggest that at least part of the divided US political camps are already well inside their own OODA loops. So it IS already happening ... one wonders where this increased polarization will lead. It suggests collapse of one or the other political party (if the democratic system works properly), but what if the symptoms are more widespread in the population than just the hard core political activists?

The new electronic media allows fragmentation of popular belief as opposed to the norming effects of the traditional media (and moreso outside the US where the state media is important). More traditionally the boundaries between communities and seperate information spaces have been made by language, geography and religion, but in the virtual world people can easily compartment themselves. Will such a e-seperation leak into the real world, is blogging part of a slippery slide to balkanization?

I'd much rather be watching this fascinating process (both unprecedented and unpredicted, and unpredictable) unfold in a country that wasn't so damn important.

Iraq as tar-baby

Stars and Stripes has published a letter expressing a most excellent grunt's eye appreciation of the situation (noticed first on the HNN blog).

The BLUF in Iraq

The bottom line up front (BLUF) is this: If the United States leaves Iraq before the job is at least 90 percent done, it would be catastrophic on a biblical scale (“War based on a lie,” letter, Nov. 28). First, you would have civil war and ethnic strife. Then would come the genocide — if I offended anyone, I apologize; I meant “ethnic cleansing.” After all that, another Taliban-style regime would take hold. Then another “coalition of the willing” would have to be assembled and we would be right back in Iraq.

Sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture. What would have happened if the U.S. had prematurely come home during World War II? This is no easy task. It takes time to force change on people.

Personally, I hate this country. I hated it the first time I was here. I will despise it and most of its ungrateful people until the day I die. Regardless of the reason we are here — weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to al-Qaida, or whatever — the BLUF is that we are here and have a job to do.

Staff Sgt. David J. Wallach
Forward Operating Base Summerall, Iraq

Some awake but others still sleep

The Latvian print media has awoken and noticed the OIF rotation (barely) - a day after the local Russian and Chinese medias.

Speaking of awaking, Military.com has still not published any of Lind's commentaries since On War #139 - C'est la Guerre. Guess it was too hot for them, even a milporn site like military.com has its political correctness tolerance limit.* Their loss.

*Of course the U.S. Marine Corp’s Liman von Sanders failing to heap adulation on the US military at every opportunity may have contributed.

Latvia rotates infantry company in Iraq

The Latvian infantry company has successfully finished its tour in Iraq with the Polish (in Al-Hillah with the Polish Multinational Division Central-South). Many plaudits and no casualties, despite working outside the wire daily.

One of the local Russian language newspapers of course made it front page news, complete with the dodgy headline "Raid on Iraq" and a rather out of date picture of agressive looking Latvian soldiers waving M-16s. While actual Latvian news sources have virtually ignored this event, it was picked up by a Chinese news outlet. Strange, no?

Another righteous (non)bust

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/11/26/D8E46S1O0.html

Two junior officer face reprimands for burning bodies of killed Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

Note that militarily unjustified burning of bodies is a contravention of the Geneva convention, and that a reprimand is something you collect, for instance, turning up to work late.


BUSTED. PUBLICLY. But not really. The woes of political corectness. The need to be seen taking action without actually taking action. Piss-weak really, the generals should have stood up and said "So what?".

Burning muslim bodies is a trifle. We should be feeding every dead mujahideen to the pigs.

Zarqawi : His ass is grass?

Jerusalem post reports that Zarqawi has been killed

The Elaph Arab media website reported on Sunday that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of the al-Qaida in Iraq terror group, may have been killed in Iraq on Sunday afternoon when eight terrorists blew themselves up in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The unconfirmed report claimed that the explosions occurred while coalition forces surrounded the house in which al-Zarqawi was hiding. American and Iraqi forces are looking into the report.

We can only hope so, and *unchristian lack of charity* hope it hurt. Of course, dismemberment by explosives is far too easy, Zarqawi deserved to be fed to the pigs.

Update : doubts are expressed (charred corpses and DNA tests?), but he has yet to appear alive either. Speculation that his own tribe may have informed on him after the Jordan wedding bombing. Interesting. $10 says that he's still alive (such a bet makes for a win/win situation :D )

Generation Gap

Blog Them Out of the Stone Age carries a series more than a little derisive of William Lind's 4th generation warfare theories.

In purely academic terms, Fourth Generation Warfare is laughable. The master metaphor--"generations"--is incoherent, since it implies that one form of war eventually generates the next. In the sense of operational or tactical response this might be correct, but as proponents of 4GW themselves point out, the factors that transform war invariably come from outside; e.g., political, technological, and cultural change. Even if you jettison "generation" for "age," "era," or "phase," the taxonomy of the earlier history of warfare is crude. Take my word for it, or read the articles for yourself.

In lieu of better terms I will stay with Lind's terminology (i.e. 3rd generation warfare = 3GW etc).

The term generation is misleading*, since generation implies both descent and progress from previous generations. 3GW is not descended from 2GW, 2GW and 3GW arose at the same time from 1GW during WWI, and 3GW is an alternative not a development or improvement.

2GW is an outgrowth of 1GW in its essential human aspects - it is still the the culture of order. 2GW is the older culture of order adapted to the industrial age. The culture of order was however present earlier, much earlier, epitomized by the Roman legions.

Lind has not written of the other* - let us call it the 0 generation warfare (0GW). This then, the prime demographic of warfare for millennia, where individual honor, chivalry, bravery are more important than discipline or even collective victory. It is essentially chaotic, direction being imposed by vague common purpose or value (crusades, chivalrous codes) or individual loyalties (to ruler, clan, tribe).

4GW is not an outgrowth of 1GW/2GW, or 3GW. It appears to be good old 0GW, loose direction (Islam! .... but which Islam?), fractured (many groups) with clan / tribal / sect / splintergroups abounding , featuring individual heroics (martyrs).

0GW, the basic chaotic condition of human warfare, has throughout history been crushed by entities with unified purposes (primarily imposed by despots, less often but more importantly by shared values - like the spread of Islam). Tribes and sects are isolated, split, finally destroyed or suppressed. The key word is isolated.

4GW is 0GW with a twist, the ability for essentially laughable non-state forces to coordinate, to develop consensus, to share experience. Would the Roman empire have lasted long if the Barbarian margins were linked by the www? Would the European colonial powers have carved up Africa or the Americas with such ease? But ... the warfare culture underlying has not changed. 4GW is the 0GW mindset with modern tools, the same relation as 2GW to 1GW. Divide and conquer becomes difficult when division is nigh impossible.

There needs to be new terminology developed to describe 4GW. Lind himself refers to the cultures of 2GW, 3GW etc, and this is the most important point. How about removing "Generation", the simplest concept being "Culture"?

* Or On War #53 - Fifth Generation Warfare?

One reason for the confusion may be a misapprehension of what “generation” means. In the context of the Four Generations of Modern War, “generation” is shorthand for a dialectically qualitative shift. As the originator of the framework, I adopted the word “generation” because I was speaking to and writing for Marines, and “dialectically qualitative shift” has more syllables than the Marine mind can readily grasp (think of the Emperor Joseph II’s response when he first heard Mozart’s music: “Too many notes.”). Most Marines vaguely remember that Hegel pitched for the Yankees in the late 1940’s.

**Actually he did just that in On War # 76 - 4GW In The Sudan

Eternal peace is a dream --and not even a beautiful one. War is part of God's world-order. Within it unfold the noblest virtues of men, courage and renunciation, loyalty to duty and readiness for sacrifice--at the hazzard of one's life. Without war the world would sink into a swamp of materialism.

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder,
"On the Nature of War",
December 11, 1880

Still missing

On war #139 finally appears on SFTT. Military.com appears not to be interested .... and the article is virtually uncommented by the wider world, in direct contrast to the reception of commet #138 (concerning exit strategies for iraq)

Lind's On War #139 - Missing in Action?

William Lind's latest comment On War #139 - C'est la Guerre has yet to appear in any of the usual pages - neither Military.com or DefenceWatch have chosen to post it as of yet. Lind's opinions are seldom less than controversial, and in the past even his less relevant musings have been published without delay.

At a guess it's simply too controversial for them, even Defence and the National Interest put a hand-wringing, cringing disclaimer in front of this one.

Now, although Lind sometimes goes off half-cocked, on the balance his predictive power is second-to-none. Some of his "On War" columns on Iraq were little short of prescient at a time when he was one of the very few to sound serious warnings, long before the events occurred.

Furthermore, the column in question is not that controversial, or maybe should not be controversial, the observation that France appears to be in the opening statges of 4th generation warfare, and that France is worth saving, and that France should fight should be no-brainers.

And yet this comment, of all Linds many controversial opinions, is the one they choose NOT to publish. Not good, not good at all.