History Revised

Singapore

I thought the Vietnam War was a disaster from the get go, mostly because of the reports I heard about how the government of South Vietnam was corrupt, which sounded pretty believable. Now I come across this explanation from George Scott on Quora, which surprised the heck out of me.

About 30 years ago, Prime Minister Lee of Singapore, who is largely credited with the “Singapore Miracle” (turning a backwater nation into an economically prosperous nation) wrote an op ed in the New York Times in which he claimed the U.S. had largely won the Vietnam War.
His contention was that the U.S. wasn’t just fighting to protect South Vietnam from the Communist yoke, but that the U.S. was fighting to protect all of Southeast Asia (including his native Singapore). He wrote that although South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos fell to Communism, the U.S.’s fight delayed the Communist surge long enough for Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines to develop their nations economically enough to make the Communist lure undesirable.
Prime Minister Lee argued that had the U.S. not fought the Vietnam War, Communism would have taken over all of Southeast Asia. The U.S.’s participation in the Vietnam War allowed the much larger portion of the Southeast Asian population to escape the yoke of Communism. And in Prime Minister Lee’s eyes (as a significant insider), this meant the U.S. largely won the Vietnam War, even though Indochina fell to Communism.

The New York Times has an interesting column about Prime Minister Lee.

A Pinprick in the Scheme of Things

B-52 Busters - Vietnam War Communist Commando Raids
Mark Felton Productions

I've kind of been avoiding the Vietnam War. Emotions are still pretty raw from that disaster, so it's a little difficult to get any perspective on the subject. It's been fifty years, so maybe we can start to get a clearer view, if only because we aren't constantly having to wipe the mud off the windscreen.

World War Two is great. It almost qualifies as ancient history and I have heard enough about it to  satisfy my curiosity, so let's move on to more recent history.

I knew we were using B-52's to bomb Vietnam, but I wasn't quite sure whether we were bombing North Vietnam or just portions of South Vietnam where we suspected the Viet Cong were hiding. I didn't know they were based in Guam or in Thailand. And why was that? Didn't we have multiple, big fat, air bases in South Vietnam? Something doesn't add up here. I smell bean counter economics, or bullshit political wrangling.

I suspect Genghis Khan is the root cause of Asia being the way it is. We've been fighting the Communists all around the border of Asia. First there was Taiwan (I'm not sure just what happened there, but it must have been a pretty big deal). Then there was Korea, Vietnam and now there is Afghanistan. It's like the Forever War. And all we've got to show for it are South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. I suspect there might be something in Asian DNA that makes them more susceptible to authoritarian rule. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just the luck of the draw. Some Jackass manages to become the leader, boosts his security service and clamps down on the opposition. Or maybe that's the only way to keep a lid on things so it doesn't just boil over into perpetual civil war. Whatever.

B-52's are almost 70 years old. That's crazy. I wonder how much fuel the combined fleet has burned over their lifetime. A couple of zillion gallons at least. All this reminds me of the stories in Command and Control about the mishaps that occurred with B-52's carrying atomic bombs.

You need to be real careful when you ask the military to do something because they will find the most effective way to get the job done. It might not be efficient and it might result in a great deal of collateral damage, but that's not really a concern when your objective is to kill the other guys and not get kilt yourself.

B-52's in the Vietnam War
Hanoi is the top placemark, Guam is at the far right.

Jane Fonda versus LBJ

Mr Garibaldi posts about Los Angeles County declaring Jane Fonda Day to be April 30th, the same day Saigon fell back in 1975. Seems 'members of the Vietnamese community' there are not happy about it.

I was opposed to the war, mostly because I didn't want to get drafted. There wasn't a whole lot patriotic blather around my house. Mostly what I heard was that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt and the bureaucrats in Washington were micromanaging the war effort which was hamstringing our efforts to get the job done. LBJ was the president at the time and I haven't heard anything good about him since, so mostly I blame him for the disaster. Jane Fonda is an actress, so her actions should be regarded as a publicity stunt. Her visit to Vietnam earned her a boatload of vitriol. Well, live by celebrity, die by celebrity. But I got to wondering who is worse, so I asked ChapGPT: 

Is Jane Fonda worse than LBJ?

ChatGPT responds:

It's not particularly productive or fair to compare individuals in terms of being "worse" or "better" without specifying a context or criteria for comparison. Jane Fonda and Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) are two very different figures, each with their own complexities and contributions.

LBJ was the 36th President of the United States, serving during a tumultuous time in American history, particularly with regard to the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. His presidency is often evaluated based on his domestic policies, including the passage of significant civil rights legislation, as well as his handling of the Vietnam War, which remains a subject of intense debate and criticism.

Jane Fonda, on the other hand, is an actress and activist who became known for her opposition to the Vietnam War. She famously visited North Vietnam during the war, leading to controversy and criticism, especially among those who viewed her actions as unpatriotic or disrespectful to American soldiers.

Comparing the actions or impact of these two individuals requires careful consideration of the specific contexts in which they operated and the consequences of their actions. It's also worth noting that perspectives on historical figures can vary widely depending on individual beliefs, values, and interpretations of history.

'intense debate and criticism'. Hmm, imagine that. 

Economic Confusion, Part 2

There's a lot of flack in the air about how the rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. People are quoting all kinds of numbers and blaming all sorts of people for all the troubles we are having.

I think we are looking at the situation all wrong.

Back in the early 20th Century we had the stock market crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War Two. During the great depression there were some make-work programs run by the government to try and put people back to work. The Civilian Conservation Corps was one of these programs and they built some marvelous structures, things that are still with us and still impressive. However, from what I hear it seems that all those make-work programs had no discernible effect on the economy. If continued to be stumble along as if nothing had changed.

It wasn't until World War Two came along that things started to improve, economically speaking. This does not make a great deal of sense. Here we have the government borrowing tons of money, more than they ever borrowed before, and spending it on stuff that was going to get used up and or destroyed. There were tremendous capital investments in the factories for making war machinery, but they were really only good for that one purpose, and only for the duration of the war.

However, after the war, the economy boomed for a good long time. What was the deal then? The government was in debt up their eyeballs. There was quite a bit of new technology available that was developed during the war. There was the thrill of victory. There was pent up demand from years of deprivation. There was a huge number of men entering the workforce. Why did the economy boom?

It kept booming up until about twenty years ago or so, when things started slowing down. We have many of the some things in play now that we had at the end of World War Two: lots of debt, lots of new technology, some men returning from war. We don't have the thrill of victory. The majority has not been suffering deprivation. But our economy is in the dumper.

What happened? What changed? Is it really due to some mystery numbers some pundits are throwing around? Or is there something else going on?

Maybe we are running into the limits of what we can do with our current model of civilized society.

Maybe our system needs a shock.

Could it just be that our attitude is different? We don't have an external enemy to fight, not one that is any kind of real threat anyway, so we start squabbling amongst ourselves. For all our mushy talk about peace, I wonder if we aren't really happier when we are fighting a war. Since World War Two we've had the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, two Gulf Wars, and the War in Afghanistan. But none of those was on the scale of World War Two, none involved the entire country down to the sugar and salt on your table.

I wonder if this wasn't what prompted the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt to build the pyramids, a massive project that consume the entire country, something everyone could focus on. Maybe that's what we need.

Maybe that's what we need if that's what we want. If we want a booming economy that tramples over everything that gets in it's way, then we need a single focus for the entire nation, and war may be the only thing we can get the majority to get behind.

Ah, if only there were a state religion, then the head of church and state could declare a holy mission to . . . to do something, pave the streets with gold or something. Then we would be all be busy. There might be some shortages here and there, but we would have a purpose, a glorious purpose, a god-given purpose. Something to do besides hang out down on the corner and complain about the way things are.

WW3?

Vladimir Zelensky and Joe Biden. ©  Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Brothers in Grifterism

Stolen entire from RT.

Here’s why the West has so far failed to start World War III by Tarik Cyril Amar

The New York Times “exposé” on the US-Ukraine partnership contains no surprises, but the underlying revelation is stunning.

Under the title 'The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine', The New York Times has published a long expose that has made a splash. It is a long article advertised – with a lumbering clunkiness that betrays cramping politics – as the “untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies.”

And it clearly aspires to be sensational: a revelation with a whiff of the famous Pentagon Papers that, when leaked to that same New York Times and the Washington Post in 1971, revealed what a mass-murderous fiasco America’s Vietnam War really was.

Yet, in reality, this time the New York Times is offering something less impressive by magnitudes. And the issue is not that the Pentagon Papers were longer. What really makes “The Partnership” so underwhelming are two features: It is embarrassingly conformist, reading like a long exercise in rooting for the home team, the US, by access journalism: Based on hundreds of interviews with movers and shakers, this is really the kind of “investigation” that boils down to giving everyone interviewed a platform for justifying themselves as good as they can and as much as they like.

With important exceptions. For the key strategy of exculpation is simple. Once you see through the rather silly group-therapy jargon of a tragic erosion of “trust” and sad misunderstandings, it is the Ukrainians that get the blame for the US not winning its war against Russia, in their country and over their dead bodies.

Because one fundamental conceit of “The Partnership” is that the war could have been won by the West, through Ukraine. What seems to never even have entered the author’s mind is the simple fact that this was always an absurd undertaking. Accordingly, the other thing that hardly makes it onto his radar screen is the crucial importance of Russia’s political and military actions and reactions.


This, hence, is an article that, in effect, explains losing a war against Russia without ever noticing that this may have happened because the Russians were winning it. In that sense, it stands in a long tradition: Regarding Napoleon’s failed campaign of 1812 and Hitler’s crash between 1941 and 1945, all too many contemporary and later Western observers have made the same mistake: For them it’s always the weather, the roads (or their absence), the timing, and the mistakes of Russia’s opponents. Yet it’s never – the Russians. This reflects old, persistent, and massive prejudices about Russia that the West cannot let go of. And, in the end, it is always the West which ends up suffering from them the most.

In the case of the Ukraine War, the main scapegoats, in the version of “The Partnership,” are now Vladimir Zelensky and his protégé and commander-in-chief General Aleksandr Syrsky, but there is room for devastating side swipes at Syrsky’s old rival Valery Zaluzhny and a few lesser lights as well.

Perhaps the only Ukrainian officer who looks consistently good in “The Partnership” is Mikhail Zabrodsky, that is, the one – surprise, surprise – who worked most closely with the Americans and even had a knack of flatteringly imitating their Civil War maneuvers. Another, less prominent recipient of condescending praise is General Yury Sodol. He is singled out as an “eager consumer” of American advice who, of course, ends up succeeding where less compliant pupils fail.

Zabrodsky and Sodol may very well be decent officers who do not deserve this offensively patronizing praise. Zelensky, Syrsky, and Zaluzhny certainly deserve plenty of very harsh criticism. Indeed, they deserve being tried. But constructing a stab-in-the-back legend around them, in which Ukrainians get blamed the most for making the US lose a war that the West provoked is perverse. As perverse as the latest attempts by Washington to turn Ukraine into a raw materials colony, as a reward for being such an obedient proxy.

With all its fundamental flaws, there are intriguing details in “The Partnership.” They include, for instance, a European intelligence chief openly acknowledging – as early as spring 2022 – that NATO officers had become “part of the kill chain,” that is, of killing Russians who they were not, actually, officially at war with.

Or that, contrary to what some believe, Westerners did not overestimate but underestimate Russian abilities from the beginning of the war: In the spring of 2022, Russia rapidly surged “additional forces east and south” in less than three weeks, while American officers had assumed they would need months. In a similar spirit of blinding arrogance, General Christopher Cavoli – in essence, Washington’s military viceroy in Europe and a key figure in boosting the war against Russia – felt that Ukrainian troops did not have to be as good as the British and Americans, just better than Russians. Those daft, self-damaging prejudices again.

The New York Times’s “untold story” is also extremely predictable. Despite all the detail, nothing in “The Partnership” is surprising, at least nothing important. What this sensationally unsensational investigation really does is confirm what everyone not fully sedated by Western information warfare already knew: In the Ukraine War, Russia has not merely – if that is the word – been fighting Ukraine supported by the West but Ukraine and the West.

Some may think the above is a distinction that doesn’t make a difference. But that would be a mistake. Indeed, it’s the kind of distinction that can make a to-be-or-not-to-be difference, even on a planetary scale.

That’s because Moscow fighting Ukraine, while the latter is receiving Western support, means Russia having to overcome a Western attempt to defeat it by proxy war. But fighting Ukraine and the West means Russia has been at war with an international coalition, whose members have all attacked it directly. And the logical and legitimate response to that would have been to attack them all in return. That scenario would have been called World War Three.

“The Partnership” shows in detail that the West did not merely support Ukraine indirectly. Instead, again and again, it helped not only with intelligence Ukraine could not have gathered on its own but with direct involvement in not only supplying arms but planning campaigns and firing weapons that produced massive Russian casualties. Again, Moscow has said this was the case for a long time. And Moscow was right.

This is why, by the way, the British Telegraph has definitely gotten one thing very wrong in its coverage of “The Partnership”: The details of American involvement now revealed are not, actually, “likely to anger the Kremlin.” At least, they are not going to make it angrier than before, because Russia is certain to have long known about just how much the US and others – first of all Britain, France, Poland, and the Baltics – have contributed, directly and hands-on, to killing Russians.

Indeed, if there is one most important take-away point from the New York Times proud expose of the extremely unsurprising, then it is that the term “proxy war” is both fundamentally correct and insufficient. On one side, it perfectly fits the relationship between Ukraine and its Western “supporters”: The Zelensky regime has sold the country as a whole and hundreds of thousands, if not more, Ukrainian lives to the West. The West has used them to wage war on Russia in pursuit of one overarching geopolitical aim of its own: to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia, that is, a permanent demotion to second-rate, de facto non-sovereign status.

The above is not news, except perhaps for the many brainwashed by Western information warriors from historian-turned-war-apostle Tim Snyder to lowlier X agitators with Ukrainian flags and sunflowers in their profiles.

What is also less than stunning but a little more interesting is that, on the other side, the term “proxy war” is still misleadingly benign. The key criterion for a war being by proxy – and not its opposite, which is, of course, direct – is, after all, that major powers using proxies limit themselves to indirect support. It is true that in theory and historical practice that does not entirely rule out adding some limited direct action as well.

And yet: In the case of the ongoing Ukraine War, the US and other Western nations – and don’t overlook that “The Partnership” hardly addresses all the black ops also conducted by them and their mercenaries – have clearly, blatantly gone beyond proxy war. In reality, the West has been waging war on Russia for years now.

That means that two things are true: The West has almost started World War III. And the reason it has not – not yet, at least – is Moscow’s unusual restraint, which, believe it or not, has actually saved the world.

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine the US fighting Canada and Mexico (and maybe Greenland) and learning that Russian officers are crucial in firing devastating mass-casualty strikes at its troops. What do you think would happen? Exactly. And that it has not happened during the Ukraine War is due to Moscow being the adult in the room. This should make you think.

I've linked to several other stories by Tarik Cyril Amar. Today I thought I'd just steal the whole thing.

Convergence Calling by James Howard Kunstler is another well written post that talks about The New York Times story.

Biden and Bolton, War Mongers of the First Water

I've got a new theory about why Joe Biden is such a mad dog. To me, the war in the Ukraine doesn't make any sense. The story the Russians tell is that eastern Ukraine is mostly populated by Russians, Ukraine was picking on them and so they wanted to break with Ukraine and when Russia kindly offered to take them in they accepted. Okay, that's what the Russians say. The Ukrainians scream about evil Vlad picking on them and maybe he is. I tend to think they deserve it. But none of this explains why the Joe Biden faction cares.

My theory is that by continually waging war, the USA is ensuring that the dollar is the supreme currency in the world. Not sure how that works. Maybe if you dare to think about conducting any foreign trade using a different currency, you will bring down the wrath of the USA and we will fuck you over. 

It's kind of weird because can't all currencies be traded on the open market? If you have rubles and you want to trade them for dollars, or yen, or a bag of African talking sticks, you can. The only thing I can think of is that by somehow being the top dog of the currency pile, we can skim a little something off the top and maybe that's enough to keep the war mongers enthusiastic about war mongering.

War mongering is the one thing we seem to do really well. Korea was like our last big success. The Vietnam war seems to have been a disaster, though maybe it kept the communists from taking over all of southeast Asia. Since then it seems to have been just one disaster after another. Sure, we took down some despots, but look at those countries now. I don't know if Iraq is any worse, but Libya and Syria are definitely much worse off now than they were before the glorious 'color revolution'. I am beginning to think that hot, desert climates go hand-in-hand with Islam and tyrannical despots. There just isn't any other way to keep those places from spontaneously exploding.

Then there's my other, more basic theory, and that is that the war mongers have big investments in the armaments business, so more war just means more money for them. Any talk about principles and freedom are just window dressing to convince the taxpayers that they are doing the right thing while they are getting fleeced.

Oil Exploration & The Vietnam War

Conspiracy theories 'R' us. The other day at Thursday lunch, Don told us a good, nay, a great one. Dennis, slacker that he is, hasn't uploaded the recording yet, so I guess it falls to me to tell the tale.

It's a story about the Vietnam War and why it ended when it did. Oil companies were looking for oil under the continental shelf off the coast of South Vietnam. They couldn't go in and do regular seismic exploring because, well, there was a war going on. But they could use the seismic waves generated by the bombing to map the structure of the ground underneath the continental shelf, and they did. When they had completed their mapping, they had no further need of any more seismic wave generators, so the bombing was called off. Shortly thereafter the war ended.

Like any good conspiracy theory there is just enough truth in it to make you wonder if this could possibly be what really happened. It might make you wonder for a minute anyway. People were definitely looking for oil, although it is only recently that they seem to be making any real progress in producing oil.

Gulf of Tonkin Incident

Gulf of Tonkin Incident - August 2, 1964 - E. J. Fitzgerald

Who in tarnation is running this show? Did you know that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the one on August 4th, the one that was used as an excuse to get us into war with Vietnam, was bullshit? There had always been rumors that there was something funny about it, but there are always those kinds of rumors about anything. I mean, no matter what happens, like the sun coming up this morning, there are going to be people who are going cast doubt on that event. 

But now I'm reading The Media is the Number One Cause of War Since 1898 by Simon Black on Sovereign Man and I find this:

The United States joined the Vietnam War based on a Gulf of Tonkin skirmish with the North Vietnamese which never actually occurred. But the Johnson administration and intelligence sources said it happened, so the media reported it as fact.

Well, no doubt in his mind, which kind of surprised me. So I go check and according to Wikipedia and History, Simon is correct, the incident was totally made up. There was an incident on August 2 (subject of the painting at top), but it wasn't a war starting event. The incident used as an excuse to start the war supposedly happened on August 4th, except it didn't happen at all.

All of which makes me wonder who is actually calling the shots? Could it be the heads of the big media corporations, people like Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates and George Soros? That makes as much sense as anything.

Via ZeroHedge

Ukraine

Everyday there is a tsunami of news about Ukraine, most of it is drivel - one side or the other claiming some kind of success in combat, big shots calling for peace, or more war. Nothing really substantial, mostly it just goes on, day after day, money flows from the US into Ukraine and more bodies go into the ground. It does seem that we (the US) are getting tired of this disaster, but with Biden in charge, who knows when things will actually change.

Keretsk

Meanwhile, we have this disturbing report from RT. Seem some dude walked into a town council meeting in western Ukraine, that would be the part of the country that isn't overrun with tanks and artillery. He walks into this meeting and drops a couple of grenades that blow up and cause massive injuries. Seems he wasn't happy about council members stuffing their pockets with cash when the rest of the people suffering.

What makes this unusual is that the dude isn't just some terrorist shouting Allah Akbar, he's an MP (Minister of Parliament?) and a member of the same party as Zelenskyy. Of course, given that normal people don't normally try to kill themselves, maybe he's just nuts. But I remember hearing about monks who set themselves on fire during the Vietnam war. I think the rationale then was that the country was so corrupt they just couldn't stand living there anymore.

P. S. I just came across a story where Russia claimed that 400,000 Ukrainians have died in this war. Zelenskyy claims more like 40,000 casualties. That's the fog of war for you - number of deaths? Somewhere between one and a zillion. Ukraine has just over 40 million people, if we take the 400,000 figure, that's one percent of the population, and since most of the war dead are going to be men, which are only half of the population, and they are adults, which means roughly half of that, it means that 4% of the men have been killed. Maybe that's enough for people to start thinking that's enough. Maybe that was the goal of this war in the first place, just smack the shit out of Ukraine.

Vietnam War

US Navy Command and Communications Boat

There's a new series about the Vietnam War on PBS that promises to be worth watching. Coincidentally, the U.S. Navy has just released the ninth and last book in their series on their role in the war. Maybe we'll learn something.

Via Indy Tom.

Glorious Days of Yesteryear

Woodstock was 50 years ago, I was 18, the Vietnam war was in full swing, we had landed on the moon. I had just graduated from high school and was working my first job away from home. I thought the Vietnam war was really stupid, I mean, everyone said so. If the chief-jerks-whats-in-charge had a good reason for it, I didn't hear it. Whether that was because they weren't talking or I wasn't listening, I can't tell you. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I became aware of an endorsement for the war.

This pops up on YouTube, probably because I've been listening to Sweet Lorraine, and I listened to what he says.


1960s Rebels: Country Joe McDonald - Musician, Country Joe and the Fish
I remember the Fixin To Die Rag, and here we have the scene Country Joe is talking about.


Country Joe & The Fish Live @ Woodstock 1969 Fish Cheer_I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixing-To-Die-Rag.mpg

Somalia may be Kenya's Afghanistan, but its army doesn't get it

This is from January of last year, but it is still relevant. I mean we're still spending a million dollars a minute in Afghanistan, aren't we? From South Africa's Daily Maverick, by Simon Allison.

Kenya just doesn’t seem to get it. Lost in the minutiae of military detail, a Kenyan army colonel claimed they were at the halfway point of their mission to rid Somalia of Al Shabaab. Have they learnt nothing from Afghanistan? Iraq? Vietnam? Weapons don’t win wars any more, and until Kenya and its African allies figure out a political solution, Al Shabaab isn’t going anywhere. By SIMON ALLISON.
Colonel Cyrus Oguna was in a confident mood as he spoke to the media outside the headquarters of the Kenyan department of defence, a building conspicuously far from the frontlines of Kenya’s war against Al Shabaab, the Islamist militant group that controls much of southern Somalia; this might explain Oguna’s hopelessly misplaced faith in what his military has achieved: “As we are speaking now, Al Shabaab is halfway in the pit. The targeting has been on logistics bases and command centres, and (these) are crucial in any operation. And if you cripple a logistics base and command centre, the war is halfway won.”
Colonel Oguna’s confidence was born of a successful few days of action as far as the Kenyan military was concerned. An air strike destroyed an important Al Shabaab base in the town of Bibi, while another took out six Al Shabaab commanders and a number of foot soldiers. Among the bodies was that of Bilal El Berjawi, considered one of the group’s most senior figures. And also in the last week, a new offensive from the African Union troops in Mogadishu consolidated even more of the capital under the control of the African Union Mission to Somalia (Amisom).
But Colonel Oguna’s confidence is mistaken. Even just militarily, the task ahead of Kenya and Amison remains daunting. Kenya’s troops, invading southern Somalia from the west, have made little progress in the four months they’ve been there. And Amisom’s gains reveal its weakness: not even Somalia’s capital is completely secure, despite the presence of Amisom’s 9,000-plus soldiers. Meanwhile, Al Shabaab has not been quiet. It launched a little invasion of its own when around 100 Al Shabaab fighters overran a police post in Kenya itself, destroying it and kidnapping three men. And it’s been fighting hard to overturn Amisom’s gains in Mogadishu, although so far Amisom has been able to retain its position.
More importantly, Al Shabaab continues to control most of southern Somalia, including the vital port city of Kismayo, its de facto capital, and the transit town of Afmadow, which is reported to be littered with hastily dug trenches and bunkers in preparation for a major showdown. The group is also bolstering its ranks by press-ganging young men into military service. One report claimed 200 “young boys” had been abducted from a town near Mogadishu and commanded to participate in Al Shabaab’s “jihad” against Kenya, Amisom and the internationally recognised government of Somalia. Clearly, there’s plenty of fight left in Al Shabaab, making Oguna’s “halfway” estimate look nearly as silly as George W Bush’s infamous “Mission accomplished” speech.
But this war is not just about military might. Iraq is a rather instructive example. War has changed in the last century and possession of the biggest guns is no longer sufficient to guarantee victory. America went into Iraq in 2003 with the most fearsome military this world has ever seen, effortlessly swatting away Saddam Hussein’s ill-equipped and poorly motivated army. But, as Bush was to discover, this conventional dominance couldn’t win the war and certainly couldn’t keep the peace. Instead, opponents of US involvement in Iraq, which included a broad range of dissatisfied players from Shia Muslim clerics to al Qaeda’s Iraqi offshoot, waged a modern guerrilla war which made Iraq almost impossible to govern and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices and routine abductions were the weapons of the new conflict, and they proved almost impossible to defend against. Similar tactics were used in Afghanistan by the Taliban, and much earlier in Vietnam.
What ties these three contexts together is each has been characterised by a foreign invading army seeking to destroy an ideology that it finds threatening. In Iraq and Afghanistan, this was the US trying to eliminate Islamic fundamentalism as practised by the Taliban and al Qaeda, in Vietnam it was trying to stop the spread of communism. And in Somalia, it’s Kenya and Amisom (with some rumours of tacit US support) seeking to wipe out the radical beliefs of Al Shabaab.
But history has shown us that foreign military intervention is a notoriously poor tool at eliminating a strong ideology. Men with principles will fight on, even when battle after battle is lost. Even if Kenya and Amisom advance swiftly through southern Somalia, marching all the way to Kismayo, the threat from Al Shabaab –already trained in suicide bombings, IEDs and abductions – will continue. While Al Shabaab is not universally loved, it does command some strong support, and will be able to easily disappear into local communities, to plan its next assault. And all the while, Somalia will remain in chaos, unable to develop its economy or build lasting institutions of governance.
The solution lies not in guns and bombs, but in politics and negotiations. Al Shabaab, for all its sins, cannot be completely demonised because like it or not it represents a significant chunk of the Somali population. And remember, its radical and violent streak was an almost direct result of a previous foreign intervention in Somalia which dismantled the government of the Islamic Courts Union. For Kenya’s involvement in Somalia to really be halfway over, it would need to be sitting across a negotiating table from Al Shabaab and the other main actors in Somalia’s fragmented political space, thrashing out the details of a functioning state and government that represents all Somalis.
Perhaps Kenya will be able to use its military prowess to force Al Shabaab into such an arrangement. This is the only outcome that could provide immediate peace and order in the country. It’s unlikely to even be an option, however; Kenya appears determined to destroy Al Shabaab completely, an almost impossible goal, and has bought into the dangerous international narrative the notion that groups like Al Shabaab cannot be negotiated with or included in unity governments. If it intends to see this goal through, Kenya’s military should expect to be occupied in Somalia for many years to come and, eventually, Colonel Oguna will look back on his claim that “the war is halfway won” as a moment when Kenya’s pride and ambition exceeded its grasp of political reality. DM

Foreign Policy

I am in favor of the war we started with Iraq. From all accounts Saddam Hussein is an evil man. I think we will be doing the Iraqi people a great service by removing him from power. Removing him will not be enough. To prevent someone of similar nature from coming to power, it will be necessary to establish a new government, and to see that it is firmly established. Constitutional democracy seems to be the preferred form of government these days so that might be the form to pursue. So we can look at an extended stay in Iraq, probably five years or so.

Back in 1970 I turned nineteen years of age, and my lottery number was 30, which almost guaranteed that I would be drafted. I wasn't having any of it. I didn't have any particular objection to the war in Vietnam, but I didn't like people telling me what to do. Fortunately I lived in Ohio and Ohio State University had a policy of admitting anyone who graduated from a High School in Ohio. So I signed up for school. Didn't really want to go to school, I'd been bored out of my mind in High School, and I couldn't see that college would be any better. But given the choice of going to school or going to Vietnam, I chose school. Call me a draft dodger if you will. I was young and ornery, and probably wouldn't have made a very good soldier anyway.

I stayed in school for a year and a half and then I heard a rumor that if you dropped out of school in December, you would be eligible for the draft till the end of the year. If you made it to the end of the year without getting drafted, your period of eligibility was over and you were no longer subject to the draft. The kicker was that nobody ever got drafted in December. So I dropped out, waited out the month, and I was deferred.

John F. Kennedy was supposed to be one of greatest presidents. I'm not so sure. He got us into Vietnam, and he backed out of supporting the Cuban exiles in their attack at the Bay Of Pigs. Richard Nixon is supposed to one our worst presidents, but I'm not so sure. He got us out of Vietnam. I really didn't like his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. I can't really say why, except perhaps that there was too much news about him.

Until this war on Iraq, I was very much opposed to US foreign policy. Our single minded support of any regime that declared itself to be anti-communist seemed to be causing more trouble and grief in the world than the communists were. El Salvador, Iran, Vietnam, the Philippines and Mexico are my favorite examples.

Some people will wonder why I include Mexico. Mexico is pretty much poverty stricken, a third world disaster like any other. It is right next door to the United States. The most powerful nation on Earth. Although I cannot say exactly how or why, I suspect Mexico's current situation can be directly traced to US policy.

F-105 Thunderchief

Republic F-105 Thunderchief

Where are the air intakes? This is a jet powered aircraft, it's not rocket powered, so how does it breath?

Republic F-105 Thunderchief

Oh, there they are. Just couldn't see them in the first photo because of the angle.

Another jet fighter I am not familiar with. This one made a name for itself by flying at over Mach 2 way back in 1957. Until the advent of the F-35 it was the largest and heaviest single seat fighter in the world.

Republic made a little over 800 of these airplanes and almost half were lost in combat in the Vietnam war. Funny, but no one mentions how many of those pilots survived. I suspect it wasn't many. Over 5,000 helicopter pilots were killed in Vietnam, and those guys were Army, not Air Force.

Like the B-52s, the Thunderchief was used to bomb North Vietnam, and like the B-52s they operated out of Thailand, though at different air bases.

Vietnam Air War
including Thud Ridge

Links to more F-105 stuff:

• Wikipedia
• History.Net
• Flying Heritage
• Flight Journal

Praise the Lord

The Sacrifice of 155 Battery, Sidi Nsir 1943
In North Africa during WW2, there was a significant battle fought between the British and the Germans at a wide spot in the road called Sidi Nsir. The small force of Brits was wiped out by the much larger and more powerful German force. However, the defense put up by the British gun battery at Sidi Nsir delayed the German advance long enough that the main British force was able to prepare for the German attack. So prepared, they were able to repulse the German attack which put an end to Operation Ox Head. This was the beginning of the end of the German campaign in North Africa.

This video is longer than what I usually post, but Lindybeige is pretty great and it was Sunday afternoon and I was feeling relaxed so I was able to watch the whole thing. Okay, I had to pause once or twice to check out some things, but I did watch it all the way to the end. He does an advertisement (about three minutes long at the 26:45 mark) and it is a hilarious interlude in an otherwise very serious story.

If you want to get a feel for the terrain, Google Maps 3D view of the area shows the hills in the area very well.


Praise The Lord & Pass The Ammunition - Kay Kyser
Lindybeige mentions that the guys manning the guns were singing this song (Praise The Lord & Pass The Ammunition). I've heard it mentioned before, but I never knew the origins. Seems it was an offhand remark made by a chaplain on board the USS New Orleans during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a number one hit back in 1943.

I just recently figured out that one of the reasons people join the army is because they might get to kill some people. I, and I suspect most people, are brought up to believe that killing people is wrong, so the opportunity to kill other people shouldn't be any kind of attraction. However, people are basically animals and we got to be the top of the food chain by killing. In the beginning it was animals, either for food or to avoid being food. But after we killed off enough of the other predatory animals and our population got large enough, we started killing other people. That probably started 100,000 years ago, give or take a zillion years, and we've been doing it ever since. 

So killing is in our blood. It is something we can enjoy, especially if social circumstances justify it. It is only because of extensive training and social conditioning that the streets are not constantly running with blood. The only time killing people is permitted is when you are killing an enemy.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I just want to reiterate what I've said before about the large number of people being shot every week in Chicago (the same situation probably exists in most other major cities, it's just that Chicago gets all the press). I suspect some areas of Chicago are essentially war zones where the combatants are competing drug distribution gangs. Members of other gangs are the enemy, so killing them is permitted and sometimes ordered. Some people are making a boat load of money off of the drugs being sold, they have armies of soldiers fighting over the best areas for sales. 

On the other hand, people are protesting about the police killing people, and other people are pointing out that the number of people killed by police pales in comparison to the number of people being killed by other people people who are not the police. But we are talking about two different worlds. It's like comparing the number of people killed in Los Angeles to the number of people killed in the Vietnam war.

So, some parts of Chicago are a war zone. How is that possible, here is this great country? Simply because some people are making a boat load of money, and that is made possible by our draconian drug laws.

Basically, this country has a bad case of schizophrenia. On one hand we are striving for truth, justice and the American way, and on the other we are engaged in animal-level jungle combat.

Peace Thru Victory

Peace Signs

I gave my son a ride to his friend's house this morning, just a couple of blocks away. Saved him five minutes. Boy, I tell you what, kids these days. Sheesh. We won't talk about their parents. When he gets out of the car, by way of saying good bye, he says "peace, man", which got me thinking.

When I was his age, the Vietnam war was in full swing as was the Peace Movement, and we had all the long haired pinko hippies flashing the peace sign.

Not too long before that the "peace sign" meant "V for Victory", and during WWII that meant to keep killing the enemy until they gave up, or they were all dead. So Victory eventually meant peace, but to get there we had war, big time. So I'm wondering how did the sign for war become the sign for peace?

Then there was the song Woodstock with

"And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes
Riding shotgun in the sky
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation"

I think that was the only song I ever heard that ever talked about just what the military industrial complex was doing for our country. Kind of like the swordsmen in Vatel.

Update January 2017 replaced missing image.

Girls with Cameras

Dickey Chapelle, New York, New York, 1940. Wisconsin Historical Society/Courtesy Everett Collection.

Dickey Chapelle, born Georgette Louise Meyer (March 14, 1919–November 4, 1965), was an American photojournalist known for her work as a war correspondent from World War II through the Vietnam War. - Wikipedia

Never heard of her before Comrade Misfit mentioned her this morning. Yes, I know there is no camera in the photo. I just thought it was a cool picture.

Garden Party

Garden Party | Oscar Nominated CG Animation | Short of the Week
Short of the Week
Shades of Tony Montana. The animation is very realistic, almost perfect, but there are a couple of  instances where the frogs exhibit some human behavior. It's not much, it's just a subtle motion of the head or body, but it rings false, which is all I needed to convince me that it was an animation, not some the work of a crazed naturalist camped out in a former drug lord's oasis of death.

Okay, that's one take on it, but you say 'Garden Party' and I remember Ricky Nelson's song:

Garden Party by Ricky Nelson 1972 Official | Stone Canyon Band | Original Lyrics in Description
Our Nostalgic Memories

It wasn't a big hit, and it didn't really connect with me, you know, not like a Beatles or a Led Zeppelin hit did, but the lyrics were kind of interesting and eventually, like a thousand years later, I looked it up and found out about what happened. When this song came out (1972) the culture war between the straights and the hippies was going strong. The Vietnam war and the associated protests were in full song. And I was kind of on the side of the hippies.

You go to school and you study all this stuff and you learn all these things, and what's your reward? You get to go to more school and learn more things. Or you can go to war and get yourself kilt dead, or worse. What the fuck kind of deal is that? Where's the new Chevy convertible? Where's the job that pays $5 an hour? (If you were making $5 an hour back then you could certainly afford a car, maybe not a new one, but a decent car could be had for a few hundred dollars. Yeah, Madison Avenue was painting a rosy picture, but you're eighteen and you step out of the house and you find it's a long way to the ground. No wonder people were pissed off and protesting.

There was something wrong with the straight world. I didn't know just what was wrong, but I knew it was stupid. They had all these rules and bullshit, and a lot of stupid, useless classes (anything that involved reading and writing). Math, the only subject that counted, was super easy. Entertaining even. (I think it might be genetic. None of my kids seems to have it, at least not to the extent that I do.)

But given that most people seem to have difficulty with math, I don't think we can say that freakish genetic mathematical ability was pervasive enough to lead to zillions of people protesting. I think there were other things wrong with the straight world, and other people, ordinary people, saw there was something wrong as well.

Fifty years later, I am thoroughly embedded in the straight world. And there are still things wrong. I think my biggest problem was I thought everyone else in the world was stupid. That's probably a common affliction amongst 19 year olds. I would have benefited from some real life lessons that I suspect I was protected from simply by my place in society. No soldiers in the streets, no bombs going off down the block, no bums on the sidewalk.

There's still something I am not connecting here. Or maybe it's because it's all so far away that it's all a little jumbled.

Update July 2022 replaced missing Ricky Nelson video.

Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association

Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association Membership Directory

How many helicopter pilots were there in Vietnam? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? How about 40,000? 

Iaman stopped by the VA and found a 1"+ inch thick directory of Veteran Vietnam War Helicopter Pilots,  close to 600 pages. 2,000 pilots and 2,700 crew were killed in action.

What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?

Blood Sweat & Tears - And when I die
whatiship73

Variety has a review of What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?, a documentary about the band's 1970 tour of eastern Europe. Owen Gleiberman fills us in: 

As the documentary explains, David Clayton-Thomas [BS&T lead singer] was from Canada, where he had grown up as a delinquent troublemaker. As a star, he still had traces of his wild ways; when he was arrested for allegedly threatening a girlfriend with a gun, the U.S. officials decided to deny him his green card. He was going to be kicked out of the country — which meant, in a pop-music landscape even more America-centric than it is now, that the band, in effect, would be finished.

Rather than accept this fate, Blood, Sweat & Tears cut a deal. In an arrangement brokered by the lawyer Larry Greenblatt, they agreed to become the first rock band to play in countries behind the Iron Curtain, in a cultural-exchange tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Why would a government headed by Richard Nixon make this offer, even as it was threatening to deny Clayton-Thomas his green card? It was a form of blackmail. The reason that the State Department felt like it needed Blood, Sweat & Tears — maybe more than the band needed them — relates to the special place the group occupied.

In 1970, the revolution was still officially on. (All those middle-class kids hadn’t quite realized yet that they were just…middle-class kids. That would take until about 1971.) Rock ‘n’ roll was still the voice of the revolution, and the counterculture, enraged by the atrocities of Vietnam, despised anything to do with the Nixon establishment. To play ball with the State Department was to make a deal with the devil.

Yet the success of a band like Blood, Sweat & Tears was already knocking down those kinds of perceptions. The band’s members were against the war, but except for the guitarist Steve Katz (who we see in one clip sounding like Dustin Hoffman playing Tom Hayden), they weren’t really political. Offered the chance to salvage their success by spending June and July of 1970 touring Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland, they thought, “Why not?”

The footage we see makes the case that there was actually a powerful moral reason to do the tour. The State Department, in its blunderbuss way, wanted to open up a kind of détente with the citizens of Communist Eastern Europe. This sort of exchange had actually begun in 1954, but with classical and jazz musicians. So why not rock ‘n’ roll — or more to the point, a rock band that straddled categories in a way that could bridge the free West and the oppressed Eastern Bloc?

I graduated from high school in 1969, so I was aware of Nixon, the Vietnam war and Blood, Sweat and Tears, but I don't remember hearing anything about this tour.

Update April 2024 replaced missing video.