Mn Kurmudgeon

The blogosphere is abuzz with back-and-forth outraged commentary over the not-so-veiled threats to free speech in the US posed by an activist judge. This would not necessarily be a problem, since court rulings are not necessarily sacrosanct if there are other courts that actually respect the Constitution, but the (big-D) Democrat-bloc on the FEC has prevented an appeal of Judge Colleen Kottar-Kotelly’s made-up ruling that “campaign finance reform” (read: Incumbent Protection Act, AKA “shut-up, you inconvenient non-MSM pajamahadeen”) applies to blogs.

The K-K ruling is based on some breathlessly creative and specious “reasoning”. I suspect a convenient new emanation of a penumbra, or whatever that last one was (Harry Blackmun’s creative writing in 1973 regarding “privacy” showing up in the margins of the First Amendment and what that means about legislatures writing laws).

It is kind of amazing what the First Amendment says these days, and what it doesn’t say.

This makes old conservative me wonder what would happen if we operated here the way they do in other countries that are just coming out from under the yoke of totalitarianism. If the Orange Revolution can defy Putin, and the Cedar Revolution can defy Assad, why can’t the PJ Revolution tell the New Age censors in our midst, “Byte Me”? Could everyone who has ever posted an entry (whether or not a site that no one would ever read, such as mine, or Instapundit, which everyone reads) band together and simply refuse to comply with the planned gag orders from the hoped-for 21st century keepers of the Electronic Gulag?

Will those who claim to be libertarians (a couple of big ones come to mind)- who actually have readers- take the lead in organizing the rest of us to stick out our little smiley tongues at the decisive group of crypto-fascists in the FEC (Weintraub, this means you) and the Appeals Courts?

When Big Brother comes to restrict our rights of free expression, presumably in time for the 2006 mid-term elections, there will be court orders shutting down servers. Google, of course, would terminate any Blogspot bloggers, so there would need to be new available outlets. Who are the experts who can start planning the underground insurrectionist servers (offshore? Wherever the porn purveying autodialers, who face no threat whatsoever of censorship, originate out of the reach of all of us?) to which folks could migrate when Kotar-Kotelly mounts her broom to come after us all, with John and Russ, the virtuous censors of political speech, riding shotgun.

Who’s in charge here, in the event that this nonsense is not turned on its ear by a SCOTUS properly stricken with remorse over the BCFR decision?

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to periodically repeat the demonstrably true rebuttals to the standard litany about How Evil Is The Texas Cowboy And His Misguided Electorate Who Rejected Kyoto………

This story at Yahoo from Reuters “Science”, about an actually useful climate change agreement, prompts the need to remind everyone (again) (and again, given the fact that most MSM “journalists” don’t do any actual homework on scientific matters, instead relying on a limited rolodex of reliably radical sources to give the expected quotes supporting the story’s “green” theme) of what is true and what is myth.

The story casually repeats what is always said: “The United States, the world’s largest polluter, refused to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark U.N. plan to curb global warming by cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.”

By the logic implicit in that statement when made in conjunction with greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, every person alive gains several pounds every day from food and water intake. At the end of a year after eating one pound of food and drinking a quart of liquid, I should weigh at least a thousand pounds more than I did on January 1.

OK, here is reality- again- for those who tend to forget. What shows up on your bathroom scale is not food and water intake, it is food and water intake minus waste elimination and minus the food and water consumed and turned into energy (heat) through the body’s metabolic process. Got that? Good. Ready for the next step?

What counts in atmospheric greenhouse gases (GAG) is not what you emit, but what you emit minus what you consume. When Reuters “Science” tells you that the US is the “world’s largest polluter” they are giving one side of the equation, a good way to flunk math and science even in US public schools.

The fact is, the US is roughly a net zero emitter of GAG, possibly even a net absorber, while the Germans who lecture us on our Kyoto-rejecting sins are part of a land mass that regularly pumps those nasty GAG into the air at a net positive rate that confirms the USA as the environmentally greenest place on earth- because it is literally one of the greenest places on earth.

Iain Murray told us about this three years ago in a “Technopolitics” column:

“A scientific paper published in October 1998 (“A Large Terrestrial Carbon Sink in North America Implied by Atmospheric and Oceanic Carbon Dioxide Data and Models,” Fan et al, Science, Vol. 282, p. 442 ff.) concluded that the North American continent acted as a huge carbon sink, absorbing about 1.7 billion metric tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide per year. As North America is responsible for only about 1.6 billion tons of carbon emissions per year, the continent is actually a net consumer of carbon dioxide.

“The same paper, however, found that the Eurasian continent was in a much less healthy state, consuming an “uptake” of only about 100 million tons of carbon per year while at the same time being responsible for 3.6 billion tons of emission. Unlike North America, the majority of the plant life in Eurasia is outside the Temperate Zone. The temperate areas of Eurasia, which include the industrial nations of Western Europe, actually act as a net “source” of carbon. It seems likely, therefore, that all of Western Europe’s carbon emissions (about 1 billion metric tons in total) survive in the atmosphere, unlike North America’s. Europe is actually a net polluter, while North America cleans up its own mess.

“Just how great the discrepancy is can be seen when we look at the effects per person. Under the Kyoto Protocol, America would have to reduce its emissions by about 2.3 tons per person. Europe, with a far bigger population but a far lower reduction target, would only have to reduce its emissions by about 0.4 tons per person. But if we take the carbon sink/ source effect into account, America actually absorbs 0.4 tons of carbon per person while the average European puts out about 2.5 tons each.

Somebody tell the Johns (McCain and Kerry). Of course, Arizona doesn’t have that many trees, and Massachusetts cut lots of theirs down……

More on the principles of carbon sinks and the way they are misapplied in the computer simulations (i.e., model results used by the scaremongers don’t match the real world empirical data) can be found here and here.

UPDATE: Thanks, Hatcher, for defending New England. We are committed to environmental truth, so you are encouraged to visit here and here to see the good news about reforestation of Massachusetts. I’ll have to confine my snarky comments about rich NIMBY environmentalists such as Mr. Kerry to his campaign agaisn the wind farm blocking his view at Martha’s Vineyard: story here.

In the last week, the intrepid journalists at Powerline (yes, I mean that- the three attorneys who majored in philosophy between participating in general left-wing shenanigans and antiwar protests back in college) broke yet another story, exposing how the laughable Bill Moyers (who, like Franken, Cole, and Ward-not-Winston Churchill, has turned into a parody of himself) lifted a quote from Grist magazine, which had in turn lifted the quote from a book by “former circus ringmaster” and defrocked Assemblies of God minister Austin Miles. The details are all at Powerline, as most details of most everything useful in life may be found (whatever you can’t get here, that is).

The story was essentially regarding Moyers’ allegation that Christian evangelicals (full disclosure: that category includes yours truly) are a bunch of apocalyptic nuts who are perfectly willing to despoil God’s creation (here I expect to be struck down by John Derbyshire for using the other “c” word; I will have more to say in another post about Derb’s disingenuous misstatements regarding intelligent design) because we all want the world to end next week and sweep us up to Glory. That exact point was the citation of Congressional testimony to that effect which has been alleged for the last 20 years to have been offered by Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James Watt, a member of the Assemblies of God denomination.

I’ve seen that alleged quote repeated in print for years as illustration of the idea that center-right conservatives are anti-conservation wackos, so that didn’t faze me at all. What I found interesting, rather, was the author of the book, Austin Miles. I wondered if he, widely cited as a former religious nut who had embraced the virtues of rational agnosticism, was a descendant of a Penn-trained pharmacist named C. Austin Miles. The latter gave up drugs (pun-type reference intended) for a new career as gospel hymn-writer and song publisher for Hall-Mack at the start of the 20th century. Miles’ most well-known song is “In The Garden”, which was my late father-in-law’s favorite song, and is on almost any Christian’s top ten “older hits” list (that would be George Beverly Shea, as opposed to Third Day).

In my searches, I located this bitter diatribe composed by the currently quoted Austin Miles, invective against everything Christian, and obviously reflective of his book Don’t Call Me Brother, which he followed up with Setting the Captives Free: Victims of the Church Tell Their Stories.



But there was also something else strange about the name- because the Google search turned up several links for pieces written by “Rev. Austin Miles” at places like the Bush Country blog, and various evangelical sites. Recent posts, not ten-year old re-hashed archival writings from the days of e-bulletin boards, for example, a post of concern over Islamic proselytizing in public schools. A little more review was in order, and the full story unfolded, here in Rev. Miles’ own words, “Burned out- a refining fire”:

I defiantly left the ministry with a vow never to return. The worst years of my life followed. My rebellion grew to the point that God found it necessary to send me to the pits where I could truly hear His voice……. In the midst of the chaos, God had a Divine plan and used three men and a poodle to get me back on track…… With God foremost in your life, in your work and focus, no man, thing, committee or hierarchy will ever manage to get between you and God again. This is the way it has worked for me.

I would try to impress this upon all Christians: Every soul you encounter, even those who observe you from a distance (such as the supermarket or on the street) has been entrusted to your care. You will be accountable for that soul and how your conduct affected it. A sobering thought and challenge indeed. You never know who may be struggling, even those who appear secure. Don’t let anyone down.

The boot camp required of me was tough but essential. It has proved to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I no longer have the need for man’s approval or acceptance. I am now serving Him on His terms. And the entire ministry today, for me, is joy unspeakable and full of Glory!

For the Republicans among us, he writes regularly at the Bush Country web site, which indicates his candidacy for sainthood, living as he does in Northern California where he is not in the majority, one might guess.

One thing we know for certain- he does not believe that James Watt is an anti-environmental nut. Thus, Moyers not only got the quote wrong, but both of his source’s original non-fact-checked sources have gone completely the other way in an easily verified fashion.

If that doesn’t tell you the difference between the work of “legitimate journalists” such as the felllow at Grist who hasn’t returned Big Trunk’s phone calls, and the corrective powers of the blogosphere, nothing does.

DISCLAIMER: The post below is intended as gentle and good-natured poking fun at Prof. Reynolds, whose blog is the first one I go to every day. This is post not a slam- it is, perhaps, a tribute of sorts, like TKS’ forthcoming inclusion in the American Heritage Dictionary as creator of “Pajamahadeen”.

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The Super Bowl was yesterday, and the field was full of self-absorbed professional athletes who like to refer to themselves in the third person-

“If TO catches the ball, we win; if they don’t throw to TO, we don’t.” (made-up quote, to illustrate the point)

After the self-aggrandizing third person talk, and then the “royal “we”, we come to the newest phenomenon- the “Blog Prefix Identifier”! This is the newest rage in Brand Identity. For example, an emergent star of the last election campaign was Jim Geraghty of the National Review “Kerry Spot”; he is now fixing to move to Turkey, as reward for his labors, with, of course, “Mrs. Kerry Spot”.

But the king of all is also the originator of the practice, the High Lord of the Blogosphere- of course, Professor Reynolds, the one and only InstaPundit. His household is rounded out by the InstaWife, the InstaDaughter, and so on.

The question: is this new blog-based naming convention a clever branding technique, or the work of the InstaPompous? Do we have here, with the InstaPreponderance of Insta-this and Insta-that the perfect example of the InstaProtoNarcissist? Or just a happy InstaPapa who tells bad jokes as the InstaPunster, and InstaPrattles about a wide variety of topics, for example, blogging recipes (thereafter needing to do some jogging, er, that would be InstaPlodding, in order to avoid becoming an InstaPorker after trying out all the food).

Of course, we get a lot of photography blogging as well, as the InstaPundit morphs onto one of the InstaPaparazzi, taking care who and what he “shoots” around Knoxville- take too much interest in the wrong lovely (just for observational purposes, of course, sort of like Powerline’s Rocketman’s academic interest in reporting on beauty contests), and you may find your self the object of InstaPursuit by a large irate and unjustifiably jealous guy wanting to beat the perfessor to an InstaPulp, after which his carrion would transition into InstaPutrefaction.

One area we don’t generally expect to see covered on the blog, though, is housecleaning. We anticipate that from Lileks, but last weekend Mr. Reynolds became the InstaPurifier as he waxed rhapsodic over an addictive cleaning product (BTW, are we sure that that was happenstance blogging as opposed to the latest clever runs of product placement? First blogads, then product placement? Does Hewitt know about this?)

The most ubiquitous swipe taken daily by the denizens of the Left at The Evil Liar BuSh, is the standard “He lied about WMD!”. The number two line is the obligatory reference to Cheney saying, in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, that we would be “greeted as liberators” by the Iraqi people. The reference is always followed by a mournful recitation of the sins of the occupiers and why we are therefore hated for invading the beloved homeland.

I wonder if anyone else noticed, in NYT reporter John Burns’ story on the historic election, the casual Gray Lady reference acknowledging that Cheney had been very much correct in that assertion:

Burns says, “There had been no day like it since the first American units arrived to the cheers of crowds and the tossing of flowers in April 2003, and that lasted barely 24 hours, as unchallenged looting began to devastate the city.” (emphasis added)

Seems to me that the VP should be out there making a few characteristically amused and understated comments about his finally-recognized vindication.

I think that there needs to be some sensible strategic reality in the Iraq exit discussions. The real keys are progress and time. No one wants to remain there any longer than necessary- but the goal is not tactical; therefore, “necessary” is likely to be a bit longer than a lot of us wish were the case in our utopian dreams.

Responding to the phrase: “by leaving sizable bases in Iraq after they are no longer needed”- what is the definition of “needed”?

We went into Iraq, in reality (as George Friedman noted in “America’s Secret War”), not because of imminent WMD concerns (as Bush pointed out over and over again from the beginning- WMD was the UN focus), but because it is the single most strategic country in the most problematic part of the Middle East. It is right in the middle of the bubbling cauldron that has Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia as the troubled periphery, and Jordan and Turkey as the other two neighbors. In other words, all the troublemakers are right there within arms’ reach.

Thus “needed” is going to be- by consensus of the Iraqi government AND the US – not when that government APPEARS to the NYT and Howard Dean to be stable, but when it really IS stable- which can only occur when at least two of the primary remaining troublemakers are neutralized.

That means when Iran is opened up, Syria has become “Libyanized” by whatever means are necessary, and the Saudis have pulled their heads out of the sand and recognized that their stability requires ending the pact with the Wahhabi radicals to keep the public “quiet”. (some “quiet”)

If you think about it, those really are the conditions that permit Iraq to be stable and progress.

But the military presence won’t look anything like it does now- instead, there will most likely be division-sized tripwires, a la the Korean DMZ, on the Western and Iranian borders, far away from the cities and very discreet, like the German bases have been for 60 years. Those numbers run in the range of 30,000 troops or so, which roughly matches the best guesses of the likely increased size of the Army.

If I wrote an essay in which I referred to all persons practicing Islam as “terrorists” because of the few international fascist murderers who use that religion as their rationale for their evil deeds, articulate and responsible mainstream journalists such as Jonathan Rauch would properly criticize me for painting with such a broad brush. Yet, it seems that every time such a writer mentions evangelical Christians, the primary reference gets around to those who use Christianity as their excuse to bomb abortion clinics.

The reality, of course, is that the vast majority of not only evangelicals, but of abortion clinic protestors have always vehemently condemned such reprehensible tactics; for example, David Lackey, leader of a group that regularly protested outside the Birmingham Alabama clinic where the first US bombing fatality occurred, called the 1998 bombing a “heinous act.” And the pro-life movement is actually dominated by persons such as Carolyn Gargaro (http://www.gargaro.com/bomb.html) who combine fervent pro-life feminism with fervent opposition to all types of violence. Yet, bombing suspect Eric Rudolph is the favored representative of Christians when the topic is opposition to abortion, just as, say, the “reverend” Fred Phelps is the official spokesperson selected, as opposed to Joe Dallas, when the subject is gay rights.

Mr. Rauch, reflecting his seriousness of thought and reflection, has noted that he used the reference in haste (http://www.hughhewitt.com)/, and we laud him for his openness in admitting such. But core the issue remains, and while Jonathan is the kind of person who won’t repeat that thoughtlessness, we see Nicholas Kristof and the rest of the MSM expanding daily on the theme. This is the same reflex that has Jerry Falwell repeatedly sought out as the official spokesperson for all evangelicals whenever there is a need to address those quaintly strange people in our midst who somehow survive and prosper as a plurality in the US despite holding such archaic views as we do; “Hugh is such a nice guy, how can he really believe that stuff?”

You can miss a lot if you only eat dinner with people who didn’t vote for Nixon in 1972, or who have never talked with USC philosophy Professor Dallas Willard, or Ravi Zacharias, or Dr. Greg Boyd, or Rev. Floyd Flake, or Dr. William Lane Craig….. the list goes on, and I haven’t started on the scientists. I tend to believe that the lack of reflection over such matters before tossing out casual insults and condemnations is that they are afraid to do the kind of introspection where we look at ourselves and recognize our flaws; classic “intellectuals” tend to see themselves at the center of the universe, and not appreciate the idea that their minds can’t figure it all out, or to have any kinds of moral constraints on their own living (I specifically except Jonathan Rauch from the latter characterization- he has always been one of the most approachable and honest of the center-left writers, which is why this off-hand reference was so disheartening).

Rauch belatedly recognizes the problem as he draws a very good parallel approaching stereotype from the opposite side:

What seemed obvious to me–so obvious that I was careless about it–was that religious conservatives are not bombers. The article, after all, is about how most Americans, right and left and “red” and “blue,” are not as extreme as the stereotypes make out. I assumed that most people, reading in context, would understand me as saying not that most activists are hard-core extremists, but that we’d have more hard-core extremists if politics didn’t make room for activism.



That is not a reflection on religious conservatives or any other political grouping. It is a reflection on the political system. I could have written, for example, “Better left-wing environmentalists should write anti-biotech planks into the Democratic Party platform than bomb genetics labs.” That would have made the same point, and I could very well have written it, and it would have been just as clumsy, and I’d be making the same explanation now to environmentalists that I’m making to you.



There is some validity to his “let him who is without sin cast the first stone” position, since I heard conservatives make similar statements to sympathetic brethren regarding the war protesting bombers back in the Vietnam days. But there is clearly both a conscious decision on the parts of so many MSM people to caricature those who actually believe that Jesus was and is the Son of God as ignorant fools, and a reflexive unawareness and ignorance of what they criticize. I would challenge these folks to actually do a little research some time- read the writings of the intellectual evangelicals, be the writer Dr. Roberts or from the list above. Go visit one of those urban churches like Sanctuary Covenant in Minneapolis who are doing the hard work in the inner city because of nothing other than the love of Christ and spend some time with them.

Then tell me about the abortion clinic-bombing naïve fools. And God bless you, by the way- seriously. The basis of Christianity is grace- we get mercy, not the justice we deserve.

Now that the freshness and novelty have worn off the story of the latest assault on SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, with the multi-pronged campaign to get him tossed out having failed at least temporarily (though that appears to be John Kerry’s great hope to remain in the public eye- see this- http://www.johnkerry.com/petition/rumsfeld2.php), it is time to step back and look at the subject with a bit more perspective. To this observer the recent war against Rumsfeld was about winners and losers in the military transformation process, not whether troops in Iraq are adequately supported or even large enough in number.

With that one reporter-planted question about HMMWV armor, Rumsfeld returned to the bulls-eye of the stabilized infrared sights of everyone in Washington- a “perfect storm” combination of several groups, each with its own agenda:

a) the US Senate- egos plus money, enough said (Truman’s Secy of State, the patrician Dean Acheson, famously said that he had been criticized because “I don’t “suffer fools gladly; I respond that those who say this fail to give me credit for the amount of time I spend with the US Senate”)

b) the Fourth Estate, for reasons that are obvious, ranging from near-universal knee-jerk anti-war views to Rumsfeld’s own unwillingness to suffer fools (most of the Washington press corps writing about military affairs) gladly; besides, with the election over and Scott Peterson’s trial finished, the news is a bit slow….

c) high level uniformed personnel, essentially the Army, but certain elements of each Service, with a dual stake in preventing reform of the military establishment and getting revenge for prior perceived indignities

d) the paleocons, the standard group of anti-Israel isolationist anti-immigrationists led by Pat Buchanan; Robert Novak weighed in, accusing “the neocons” of going after Rumsfeld to shift blame away from themselves for their primary role promoting The Disastrous War In Iraq.

e) the rest of the anti-Bush opportunists

What makes the story notable is not that the various MSM outlets and leftist groups have piled on, but that so many on the right- traditional supporters of the military- joined the attack, and on the purported basis that they are nobly protecting the military. The Usual Suspects were led this time by Senators McCain and Hagel (is just so disillusioning to see US Senators actually posturing for cameras; it would almost seem like they are look for favorable publicity to promote future ambitions).

But the larger Washington firestorm broke when “The Weekly Standard” joined the fray (Et tu, Brute?), leading off with a Washington Post op-ed written by William Kristol, which bluntly called for Rumsfeld’s scalp, followed up by two more hit pieces (see below) in the magazine as part of an entire issue largely devoted to pointing fingers elsewhere for any possible long term negative fallout flowing to “neocons” from Iraq (if the bad guys don’t give up fast enough; so much for patience to prosecute a multi-year war on terror; and so much for conservative loyalties.)

As usual, the Right doesn’t lose as much to MSM bias as it does to friendly fire.

The Weekly Standard followed Kristol’s op-ed with a hit piece in the 12/27/04 issue written by national security and history writer Frederick Kagan, entitled “The Army We Have”. The article was a poster exhibit of how to mount a left wing (!) assault using half quotes and misconstruction to hide the real objective. To this was added a 12/16/04 “Daily Standard” article from military affairs contributor Tom Donnelly (www.weeklystandard.com), about “Rumsfeld’s War- Imagination, transformation, and reality in Iraq”. Finally, even the estimable Cap’n Ed Morrissey, here (http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/003326.php#comments ) suggested that the Capitol Hill revolt over the “up-armor HMMWV ‘shortage’” might, at last, be a means to get rid of the SecDef, in favor of one whom his enemies might find a bit more malleable.

I see. Bravely do the necessary and unpopular, and you will be thrown overboard as a means of rewarding those who lie about you. The logic approximates that of rewarding Zarqawi by delaying Iraqi elections.

As perceptive observers (e.g., Powerlineblog- http://powerlineblog.com/archives/008949.php ) note, the current HMMWV armor protection issue is a dust-up that hit the headlines after the problem had been quietly solved using the standard wartime processes of the DoD. For the previous example of the military taking care of a problem before the press noticed that it existed despite months of press releases, review the time line of Abu Ghraib, which hit the WaPo daily front page well after US CENTCOM had held a press conference, announced their discovery of the problem, the on-going high level investigation, and the plan to address it (all of which were ignored by bored reporters until Seymour Hersh completed his New Yorker screed).

I believe that one can make a very strong case that the core of this undercover war against Rumsfeld is nothing new- though the latest round was initiated by an ambitious reporter, the larger flack comes primarily from category “c” above- those in the military establishment, led by traditionalist general officers in the Army, who are intractably opposed to military transformation. The rest of the people in the various groups are merely opportunists piling on.

Before I go on, let me vehemently assert that these comments are in no way directed at the incredibly brave, selfless, and capable men and women of our military, all branches and ranks, fighting out in the field. This is about the bureaucratic wars of military mission transformation and top management military and civilian careerists, active and retired, who are extremely loyal to the Army or Navy as institutions- in ways that may cloud their perspectives about the defense of the USA in the 21st century. It is not about the warfighters.

This Army-opposed-to-military-transformation issue actually has its roots in the National Security act of 1947 that formed the Defense Department, in part by creating the US Air Force by splitting the Air Corps off from the Army. This was the equivalent, in the view of the Army at the time, of a business executive designating a favored protégé and then being stabbed in the back by the ungrateful little whelp.

The Army has always had a general view that it is the Service that regularly gets the shaft, and opines to that effect regularly. The publications of the Association of the United States Army (AUSA), the Service trade association, are constantly leavened with gripes over comparative budgets, roles and missions, budgets, differences between Service budgets, responsibilities, size of budgets, and budgets. They also complain a lot about how much money they get compared with the Air Force and the Navy. Oh, and did I say that the Army is unhappy with its budget? Every year? (this is not unique in Washington, by the way, so don’t pile on the Army just because of that, pile on instead because of the substance of the resistance to change).

In the post-Cold War downsizing, it is unquestionable that the Army took major hits in personnel. People cost a lot of money, and the Army had a lot of people set up for central European land warfare. The so-called “peace dividend” was able to harvest nice chunks of cash from cutting the Army and its central anti-Soviet ground mission. The universal sense in the Army was that the reduction from 16 active divisions down to ten, with several of the remaining battle entities designated as smaller “light” divisions, was wildly unfair in the Army’s view. Also unwise, and in retrospect they are probably right. They have never stopped lobbying earnestly to restore some portion of what had been lost.

The “Build the Army!” lobby now believes that Bush (Rumsfeld) has had four years to fix the egregious problem of an undersized land force. However, instead of fixing the broken Army we are in a war, equivalent to military malpractice. The idea suggested is not that “you go to war with the army you have”, it is that you should never go to war at all until everything is perfectly up to snuff. The Japanese and North Koreans forgot that rule, if I recall.

Donnelly and Kagan adopted that exact same theme, and it is not a new message- it comes right out of the talking points and press releases of the AUSA as they have been issued weekly almost since the end of the Vietnam War. I heard it constantly in the Army wing of the Pentagon when I was around there starting in the mid-1980’s (“Once again, we’re the #@**&# billpayer for the Air Force’s fancy new airplane…” I can’t identify the precise source and date to say that this is an identifiably direct quote, but it is far more accurate than those CBS memos).

Of course, Bush is quite popular with the fighting active duty military, the alternative candidates are all a lot worse (imagine how happy John Kerry would have been to fund Crusader, a bunch of new tanks, a few new heavy divisions, and so on), and you don’t throw rocks at the president whose re-election you had just strongly championed. So you stone the surrogate (Rumsfeld) instead.

The current dust-up is partly a combination of ego-versus-ego (how does a Boy Scout start a fire without matches? He puts a general officer, a Senator, and an arrogant civilian executive in a room together and holds the tinder up to catch all the sparks) (I made that up; but I stand behind the science), and post-Iraq occupation grandstanding and scapegoating.

In the larger sense the core of the controversy has little to do with any of those matters. It is better understood as simply one more chapter in the long “uniformed Army versus the Pentagon Whiz Kids” saga that began in earnest with the Kennedy’s administration in 1961, though it has roots going back in the Korean War with the firing of MacArthur by Truman. It is about who runs the Defense Department- the uniformed bureaucrats or the civilian political appointees. One could think of the two sides as future-thinking analysts arrayed against the traditionalists among the uniformed brass who are following in the best tradition of fighting the last war, based on very real experiences.

The “old soldiers” group is reminiscent of the “never let traditions die” attitude that had horse cavalry units operational in World War II (The 1st Cavalry Division, the 112th and 124th Cavalry all were sent to the Pacific, where they fought dismounted as infantry). The analysts think that the traditionalists have feet set in concrete, and the traditionalists think that the analysts are unrealistic and dreamy about things that are real. Both sides have lots of civilians and military officers in their numbers, and both are partly wrong and partly right about the other.

But Rumsfeld is somewhat unique in this long saga. He is the first proactively “reform-minded” SecDef whose first objective is improving the warfighting capability of the military- not saving money by controlling those bloodthirsty money hogs, gradually disarming, or diverting budget to political and social crusades. He knows that a bureaucracy, especially a large one, is not going to be perfectly efficient. As one who has no particular other personal ambitions, he can, and does, burn bridges when necessary to at least get everyone focused on urgently needed reprioritizations, which means that he refuses to play The Money Game with them.

And anyone who has actually spent any time in the Pentagon knows that it is a game. I remember walking through the Army wing one day in 1985 and seeing a sign on a door- “Army Space Office”. In equal parts bemused and curious, I went in and asked the sharp young Major, seated by himself inside with a very clean desk and air of boredom, to explain to me what prompted the establishment of the office, and what the expected mission was to be. After a thirty minute conversation, neither of us knew the answer to the question beyond the idea that it was important to establish a beachhead so that the Air Force didn’t get all the space-based SDI money. Or something. I never did notice a Navy Space Office- I suspect that they realized that they needed to wait on that until water could be discovered on Mars.

US war plans for the last 40 years or so have been built around the large scale and sophisticated opposing capabilities of the USSR, directed toward stopping a land invasion of Central Europe. There have been certain military cadres that have consistently been ascendant and run the Services- based on the importance of their particular branches to classical anti-Soviet war planning. This is described very well by Professor Owens (http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens071703.asp)

and John Hillen (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/hillen200412230823.asp). In one way, this is not much different from the determination of the Sunni Baathist minority to maintain their power and control in Iraq- they’ve always had the upper hand, so it can’t change. It is almost a divine right when that is all you’ve known.

Every change in any organization has its winners and its losers. Military transformation is several steps beyond a mere reorganization. In the corporate world, the losers go on to other jobs in other firms. In the DoD, they stay right there and keep fighting to restore things back to the way they have always been (only with more money….) and the way the war, in their career spans, have always been approached. Since the 1970’s, opponents of military reform have known that they could outlast the evil reformers and they always have.

It is very easy to undercut a Congressman Aspin or a showpiece caretaker William Cohen. It is less easy to fool Rumsfeld. He’s been there before.

US wars are run in the theater of operations by the “maneuver commander”, the Army ground commander. Every other element, no matter how strategically important to the battle, is there to support the ground commander. What this means in terms of career prestige in the military is that the route to the top for ambitious Army officers, with one slight exception noted below, is to be in a “maneuver” branch. Conversely, prestige and glamour in the Air Force and Navy is tied to leading the missions where those Services are the boss- most emphatically not the elements that are designated primarily to support the Army-led ground operation.

In practice, this means that for decades, the top levels of the Army have been run by men who came from the Armor Branch, the Infantry, or, (and here is the slight anomaly to classic front-line “maneuver”) Field Artillery. For example, if you look at the Army chiefs-of-staff for the last 25 years prior to the current Rumsfeld selection, you find two armor officers, two artillerymen, and two infantrymen. These Branch identities and loyalties are pounded into the soldiers from the time they start basic training, as an essential element of the team spirit and morale-building necessary to prepare them to go to war together, and endure the risks and terror involved, in a way that optimizes the collective opportunity for mission success. It is totally natural for them to cling to these identities as they rise to the top, and when they get into power, to determine that this is the opportunity to “take care of the armor” (or artillery, whatever).

In the other Services, the glamour spots, as was mentioned, have been the special missions of each Service, those strategic aspects not ruled by the ground commander. For the Air Force, it is “air superiority” that rules (for vital strategic reasons), and for the Navy, anti-submarine warfare has trumped much else (again for vital strategic reasons). If you own the skies and have taken out the enemy air forces and anti-aircraft defenses, you are then free to provide effective close air support to the ground commander. If you own the oceans and have taken out the enemy’s submarines, your aircraft carriers and sealift forces are free to operate in support of the ground commander.

While the primary enemy was the USSR, which had highly sophisticated air and undersea capabilities and strong anti-aircraft defenses, the path to position and promotion was clear. But in this world where we face new kinds of war, the power inside the military shifts just as the threats and methods of warfare have shifted, and all of a sudden you see the entire Army ranks of Armor and Field Artillery general officers passed over in favor of an Airborne Special Operations commander- Gen Schoomaker- who was, worse yet, pulled back out of retirement.

Now we have a totally different world imposed on people who have devoted their lives, and in most cases, their blood, to certain parts of a cause for thirty years, and they are being told that their way of viewing the world may be obsolete. Look at some likely winners and losers in the world of military transformation:

Army winners- Airborne(e.g., Rangers), Special Ops, Infantry, Combat Aviation, Military Police, Civil Affairs; Army losers- Armor, Field Artillery. Probably little significant change for Engineers and Quartermasters, though some shift in focus and conditions.

Air Force winners- Close Air Support, Military Airlift, very long-range conventional air-to-ground assault using strategic bombers; Air Force losers- Air Superiority (air-to-air “Top Gun” dogfighters), Strategic Air Command.

Navy winners- Carrier Operations, Seals, USMC, Military Sealift; losers- Anti-Submarine Warfare, nuclear submarine forces, classic battleship warfare.

Winners across the board: public affairs, and anything to do with RSTA (recon, surveillance, target acquisition) and intelligence.

Note that the “losers” don’t go away or have their missions eliminated- there are still very real threats out there of all types. But- they no longer rule as #1 in the way they have, and give something up to support the newly rising missions. Whe you’ve been frustrated about budget for decades, taking another hit for transformation is like waving an extra cheese pizza in front of a football team.

The winners are primarily non-traditional areas, the losers are the former power brokers, their contractors, and Congressmen. For example, consider the non-military stakeholders in the transformation process. Throughout the Cold War, there was a certain set of military-industrial players who worked with their counterparts in the Services and Congress to keep procurement money flowing. Much conventional (“dumb” ballistic) ammunition was used in high volume to make up for its lack of accuracy, and it was manufactured in whole or in part in government-owned plants. The weapons were made by more industrial firms with unionized employees and stored and maintained in Southern depots near those ubiquitous bases throughout the South. The large Army had lots of people to train and house in the US, Air Force bases dotted the landscape, and East and West coast docks and shipyards took care of building, maintaining, and loading the many large ships.

The Congressmen for the districts in which these facilities were located fought to keep them “workloaded” long after their efficient usefulness was a thing of the past. This has been such a thorny problem that Congress established the Base Closing Commission (BRAC) and vested it with authority to act without positive approval from Congress to avoid the horrific specter of having to vote on the closings (then, as each list of facilities to be excessed was released, the Congressional staffs of course did their best to undercut the process).

Transformation warfare uses a fraction of the conventional arms and ammunition as was required in the old days. In the hyper-public-relations world of 24 hour cable war coverage, you simply do not engage in “carpet bombing” or artillery mass fire-for-effect. There are too many innocent people who can be injured, so all weapons must now be highly precise. When you make a mistake and kill innocents, it is generally because you had bad information, not because your aim was lousy. The shift from thousands of dumb bombs to a few JDAMS takes the bulk of the budget money from a unionized government arsenal and hands it to Martin Marietta in Florida. Cancellation of the Crusader shut down plants in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and lots of other places with companies and Senators; but we simply don’t have a need for advanced “scoot-and-shoot” big ballistic guns when it is more flexible and precise to send an aircraft to shoot a missile.

Rumsfeld correctly killed the Crusader self-propelled howitzer, and that was the public symbol of the fact that the historic practice of log-rolling and mutual back-scratching by generals and Senators bringing home bacon steadily and reliably is finished. This has absolutely nothing to do with political affiliations, either, as anyone who has ever seen Ted Kennedy at a Senate Armed Services Committee Bill “mark-up” can attest. He may crow about his anti-war principles, but check out what committee assignments he has demanded for 30 years (can anyone spell “SASC”?) and how the “made in Massachusetts” programs have fared in the budget. Teddy was a fine friend to Raytheon and GE, thank you very much, just as the California delegation’s Feinstein and Waxman, etc. just loved and preserved Fort Ord long after it was surplus to mission. Rummy is also correct in ordering the review of intr-Service roles and personnel placements. Back when I worked in the Army’s procurement shop, we had a lot of captains and majors wandering around doing paperwork. The O-6 commander needed to be there, but they could have shifted a lot of other people out of the bureaucracy and into the military world.

Check out how much action there is in Mississippi after the totally money-wasting and unnecessary construction of the Mississippi Army Ammunition Plant ended up with no significant workloading (at the time it was built, the Army was shutting down plants all over the country) and you know why Trent Lott wants a new SecDef. My own Minnesota appropriators, Martin Sabo on the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, and James Oberstar, have been anything but hostile to such pork through the years, providing appropriations for projects urged by Minnesota defense companies such as Honeywell, Rosemount Engineering, and Control Data.

The delicate dance and balance of “you vote for my earmark and I’ll vote for yours” has thrived among all for fifty years. Everyone recognizes that some pork-driven inefficiency in the defense budget has always been the price of maintaining a good capability, and as long as the stakes were not visible in peacetime, we happily paid it. The key for any particular project was just to make sure that your system production team had the right geographic balance, the right companies with nice unionized factories located in the right places (districts of powerful Congressional members). This has worked until now- with Crusader. That program was painstakingly put together politically, and its cancellation was a shot across the bow, providing unequivocal notice that the old rules no longer apply, and Rumsfeld is the man pulling the lanyard.

The key point is that when Rumsfeld took his position, there was some hope among the uniformed military that they would re-gain some of the past glories, because he had a history of serving and supporting military effectiveness, not of playing caretaker for a president who merely wanted to keep costs under control. But Rumsfeld is actually temperamentally more of the McNamara or Brown/Perry type, with the one important difference that he also truly cares about field troops and building US defense capability at a time of major threat change.

The other fact that everyone knows is that the invective about starving the war and the need for “more troops” is patently disingenuous. If Congress wants more troops available, Senator Clinton and Senator McCain can sponsor a Bill any time they desire to authorize the levels, and they can also volunteer to cut their states’ federal support to pay for them. Even then, it would take years, not months, before they were fully trained, equipped, and deployable. Much of the “more troops” meme is part of a strategy to force Bush, not Rumsfeld, to give up on extending the tax cuts (note all the recent commentary drivel about “asking the American public to make Sacrifices”- translated, that means volunteer tax increases for support of domestic programs).

Funny thing, you actually DO “go to war with the Army you have.”

I wonder if Paul Wolfowitz feels any better (or Douglas Feith, for that matter), after being bashed non-stop for all of 2004 over the constant drumbeat from the MSM, CIA leaks, and vario0us talking heads that there have never been any ties between Saddam and al Qaeda. The most careful critics (the 9-11 Commission) admitted to “links”, but disavowed “cooperation”. The most blatant anti-Bush politicos (er, CBS, the NYT, the LAT, PBS, BBC, Reuters, Kos, Daschle’s caucus, Michael Moore, you get the idea) were a lot less cautious, and simply printed the Kerry campaign and 527 talking points about the Iraq war having been entered into based on lies.

Chief among those politicos was Associated Press. Now that the election is over and they lost, they can afford to cover the story a bit more fully, even as they hype every daily car bomb and urge delay i n the elections (AKA “defeat”, or “Dean’s Dream”).

Schereherezade Faramarzi writes that Hussein invited the Sunni Islamists, including Zarqawi, into Iraq after Operaiton Desert Storm in 1991 because he feared that he would need allies to hold on in the face of rising Shi’a discontent:

Internationally isolated and fearful of losing power, Saddam Hussein (news – web sites) made an astonishing move in the last years of his secular rule: He invited into Iraq (news – web sites) clerics who preached an austere form of Islam that’s prevalent in Saudi Arabia.He also let extremely religious Iraqis join his ruling Baath Socialist Party. Saddam’s bid to win over devout Muslims planted the seeds of the insurgency behind some of the deadliest attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces today, say Saudi dissidents and U.S. officials.

Read the entire story; it is a model of how the issue should have been covered for the last year, incorporating verified quotes from all sides, including radical Sunnis, but keeping those statements in context.

Better late than never, I guess.

Yahoo News has an AFP wire service story titled “Brainy women face handicap in marriage stakes: British survey” that , as one so often finds, is totally self-contradictory. In two consecutive paragraphs they push exactly opposite theses:

First, the background on what the study found; no great shock-

“The study found the likelihood of marriage increased by 35 percent for boys for each 16-point increase in IQ.

“But for girls, there is a 40-percent drop for each 16-point rise, according to the survey by the universities of Aberdeen, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow.”

But then they get to the quotes on why this is the case. Turns out that it is all the fault of men, for two contradictory reasons:

“Women in their late 30s who have gone for careers after the first flush of university and who are among the brightest of their generation are finding that men are just not interesting enough,” said psychologist and professor at Nottingham University Paul Brown.

OK, we knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who are only interested in beer, ball, and bimbos are boring to the bright, educated New Women who want to keep company with intellectual equals. As one who has always been outnumbered at home by a very bright and accomplished wife and two brilliant daughters, I can understand where that might be the case, though I personally find smart women about sixty times sexier than I find beach bunnies. If you are into blondes, who would you rather spend time with, Laura Ingraham or Pamela Anderson? So far, they haven’t made the case on why the data show what they do. Next quote:

Claire Rayner, writer and broadcaster, said in the article that intelligent men often prefered a less brainy partner.

“A chap with a high IQ is going to get a demanding job that is going to take up a lot of his energy and time. In many ways he wants a woman who is an old-fashioned wife and looks after the home, a copy of his mum in a way.”

Gotcha. Women don’t find men interesting enough to marry, and men want barefoot and pregnant airheads. Totally consistent.

In every case it’s because we males are wrong.