What’s Ukrainian For Motti?

History is full of parallels.

Trying to use them to predict the future is a fool’s errand. It almost never works. .

Almost.

But huimans instinctively seek out patterns; it’s evolved into our brain; it’s a survival mechanism. We see things that belong together. We find Waldo.

And the historically parallels with Finland’s 1940 “Winter War” (Talvesota) against the USSR are hard to ignore.

One Finnish historian runs down the comparisons in this long, but utterly worth-reading, Twitter thread:

John Fund:

No one disputes that Russia dwarfs Ukraine’s military — just as the Soviet forces dwarfed Finland’s in 1939. In 2020, Russia spent ten times more on its military than Ukraine did.

Nonetheless, historian William Farley recently wrote, “the Winter War offers a hopeful lesson for Ukraine, in that it is possible for a smaller country to badly bloody Russia’s nose.”

Robert Service, a veteran historian of Russia at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, told the Wall Street Journal’s Tunku Varadarajan that he thinks the Ukrainians could well lose the war eventually. But he finds it inconceivable that they will accept subjugation. “The Ukrainians have become more nationally conscious over the 20th century, and they’re a proud people who’ve seen what happened to them when they were subjugated by the U.S.S.R.,” he noted. “They had it in the early 1930s, when millions died under Stalin’s famines. They had it again in the late 1940s, after the war ended. I don’t think they’re going to let history repeat itself.”

Finland had one advantage the Ukrainians don’t – most of its frontier with Russia was dense, wooded Taiga, broken up by swampty motti that made movement of any kind difficult.

Ukraine? It’s got distance – some, anyway – and cities, which favor the defender in other ways – ways that Russia isn’t above solving with high explosives, which have their own political and military disadvantages.

Solidarity

On Sunday, Governor Walz declared “solidarity day“ with a population whose home was invaded, looted, pillaged and burned.

No, not Lake Street or University Avenue.

I know, I was confused, too.

Anything to deflect away from the unrolling disaster that is the Metro…

SIDE NOTE: Have you never noticed how the correlation between “People who use the phrase ‘stand in solidarity with…'” unironically and “irreparable douchebags” is just shy of 100%?

Obvious + Impossible

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This author suggests Ukraine should have adopted the Finland model: every citizen a citizen-soldier. Makes sense to me, and also aligns with the “well-regulated militia” concept of the Second Amendment.

Point of order: the Finnish (And the very similar Swiss and Israeli) models presume that service in the military is part of a citizens duty to the stage, like paying taxes and serving on juries.

For millions of Americans, you wouldn’t even need to issue weapons. We have them already. Just give us a couple of weeks’ training in small unit movement, ambush basics, sniping, asymmetrical warfare, guerilla tactics. Conquest by invasion would be impossible. The Wolverines would prevent it.

Of course, giving people military training assumes the government trusts its own citizens and vice versa. Can we say that with confidence in America today?

Joe Doakes

We can, of course, assume those such thing; in fact, the Government/Media-Industrial complex has spent the last 40 years demonizing the concept of “the militia“ to a fine sheen – One might assume, to protect itself from any organized opposition. At the moment, the social cost of supporting, much less belonging to, a “militia“, are just too high, whatever the finer points of constitutional ideals, for the average schmuck.

Polite Invasion

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Russia invades Ukraine, a massive war on par with WW II. Photos don’t look like it. Looks pretty quiet to me. Cleanest war since January 6th.

One wrecked bus shelter. A traffic jam of cars leaving town. People talking on cell phones, waiting to catch public transportation. This could be Minneapolis any day of the week.

There’s one radar antenna damaged and one apartment building on fire (I wonder if it was accidentally hit by rounds intended for the military installation which fell short, or if it was set on fire by mostly peaceful protesters?) Nobody pushing a wheelbarrow with all their belongings. No mile-long columns of marching soldiers. No piles of bodies in the streets.

Ukraine has had weeks to fortify the area but apparently did not. I see no reason the US should do it now.

Oh wait, scroll down a bit to the blonde wearing pink. Now I understand why Lesko Brandon wants the United States involved. I’ll bet her hair smells terrific.

Joe Doakes

Events have perhaps left some of the events in this email behind in recent days…

Safety

I don’t even qualify as an armchair private, much less an armchair general.

But watching the Russian army‘s performance in Ukraine, I cooked up a theory.

Modern dictators know they can’t trust their armies; They have to find some way to counterbalance them. That is usually some combination of a smaller, fanatically loyal, better equipped force to serve as a backstop against potential disloyalty from the regular army.

Hitler had the SS (and even then, kept the SS divided against itself, including a special force within the SS that was even more loyal to Hitler). Hussein had the Republican guards. In addition to infiltrating the entire army with the KGB, the Soviets actually built two parallel armies (KGB “border forces “and MVD “internal security troops”) to protect the regime against perfidy by the Red Army,

Even the modern British Army has some vestigial remnants of that same practice; the Guards regiments are technically separate from the rest of the army (hence they are still called “Household Troops”), A throwback to a time when the monarch had a private army to guard itself. The practice is more a nod to the tradition and esprit de corps that is such a huge part of British military practice – nobody thinks the Coldstream Guard will need to beat back a coup by the Rifle Regiment – but that’s basically where i tall started.

Under the Soviet system, the army was kept at a lower state of readiness than the KGB and MVD. And of course they were informants everywhere. Whenever the army bate became too “good “, or a general two popular, the KGB and the party would unite to get rid of them, and cut the army down to size. Frequent purges, with the commensurate loss in combat effectiveness (to the Soviets immense grief in the Winter War with Finland, and the first year of the war against Germany – were deemed acceptable, at least initially, compared to the risk of a coup.

And then the Soviet Union fell.and then the Soviet Union fell.

I am speculating, here – but I suspect modern Russia’s diminished circumstances, and the need to line a lot of oligarchs pockets (including his own), means, I suspect, that Putin may not be able to afford as elaborate a set of redundant military precautions, and may have to keep his army even less capable than before, for his own safety‘s sake.

That’s the only theory I can think of, after 10 years of the Russian military supposedly evolving into a force capable of competing with the first world.

(Want an actual expert? Try this guy).

Vlad All Over, Or The Fog of War

The Soviet Union, as formidable as it once appeared, has been a dead letter for over 30 years. While Vladimir Putin may have one reliable client state in Belarus, the rest of the former Soviet republics and the entirety of the Eastern Bloc have little interest in getting the band back together, so while the endgame remains in doubt, it’s highly unlikely Putin’s latest gambit will redound to his benefit. 

If your day is gone, and you want to ride on, Ukraine
Don’t forget this fact, you can’t get it back, Ukraine

Apologies to J. J. Cale. But have you noticed the near lockstep unanimity on social media about Ukraine? Something about it seems, I dunno, off. Victor Davis Hanson offers a few thoughts about the narrative:

On cue, an embarrassed Left now offers some surreal takes on why Putin went into Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 and again into all of Ukraine in 2022—while mysteriously bookending the four invasion-free Trump years. We are told that hiatus was because Putin got all he wanted from Trump and rewarded him by not invading any of his neighbors.

Really?

And Hanson is just getting started:

Were Vladimir Putin and his advisors more or less delighted that their poodle Trump thankfully flooded the world with price-crashing oil? They were thankful Trump at least had killed Russian mercenaries in Syria?

Putin himself was content that the United States got out of his own advantageous missile deal? Was he thrilled that Trump sold once-taboo U.S. offensive weapons to Ukraine? Did the Kremlin grow ecstatic when Trump upped the U.S. defense budget? And was Russia especially thankful that Trump jawboned NATO into spending another $100 billion on defense? Did Putin clap when Trump killed Soleimani and Baghdadi, and bombed ISIS out of existence?

About that oil. . . 

It’s not a coincidence that Russia, an oil-producing country, was pretty flush in 2014, which made Putin’s adventurism at that time cost-effective. Things changed after the Light Bringer left office; while the price of oil fluctuated in the first two years of the Bad Orange Man administration, prices dropped thereafter, before the huge drop in 2020 which was entirely related to the world economy grinding to a halt. Since 2021, the trajectory has been back toward the price levels of the Obama years. We all see the impact at the pump and energy costs are a huge factor in inflation generally, even beyond the Fed making the money printers go brrrrrr. So if the money is flowing into Russia and the current administration has shut down the pipelines and the frackers, are we particularly surprised that ol’ Putin has gauged this moment as the time to make a move?

There’s more, of course. Back to Hanson:

Joe threatened the toughest sanctions in history that on Wednesday would deter an invasion and by Saturday were never meant to at all. But Biden promises someday a “conversation” to decide whether at some time he still will issue the toughest sanctions in history. Until then, he invites Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy safe passage out of Kyiv—the quickest way to destroy the dogged Ukrainian resistance.

Left unsaid are the years of rapacious Biden family profiteering in Ukraine, a decade of leftist passive-aggressive love and hate of Russia, from obsequious reset to greedy Uranium One to pathetic “tell Vladimir . . .” to unhinged vetoing of sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Oh, there’s more to be said, a lot more. But for this moment one thing seems to be clear — the fog of war is less from the battlefield and more from the fog machines all around us.

Armchair Private Speaks

I have no military experience, other than a lifetime of reading military history and an obsessive’s facility for identifying World War II planes, tanks and ships.

Take everything I say with a grain – what the heck, a block – of salt.

But I’m going to indulge in a little pointless speculation about the war in Ukraine.

When discussing a war where both sides are experts at propaganda and warping public perception, trying to comment on anything in “the news” with any certitude is a fool’s errand.

Noted. I am that fool, and for right now it is my errand.

He Who Forgets: The thought of being able to win an easy – or at least easier – victory by taking out a key objective – the enemty’s leadership, capitol, or a key defense – is one of those things that keeps millitary planners busy dreaming.

In some cases – the US drives to Baghdad in 2003, or the German airborne assault on Fort Eben Emaël, in Belgium in June of 1940 – it works.

But not always.

In April, 1940, as part of Germany’s invasion of Norway, a Navy task force raced up Oslo Fjord; it’s mission was to land an invasion force on the Oslo waterfront to seize the. Storting (Parliament) and capture King Håkon and his administration, giving him a choice of capitulation and serving as a puppet (as his cousin, Christian X of Denmark, in effect did) or something much less pleasant.

On the final approach to Oslo, 15-20 miles south of the capital, in one old coastal fort (Oscarsborg, armed with three antique 1890s cannon (only two of them manned, and even those with rookie draftee crews) and a couple of equally ancient torpedoes launched from a James Bond via Rube Goldberg-style secret underwater cave, the commander, Colonel Birger Eriksen, disobeyed a “Stand Down” order, and opened fire at the leading German ship (reportedly telling the gun crew “Damn right we’re firing live ammunition” as he gave the order to fire), the heavy cruiser Blücher, blowing off a turret and sinking it in the channel, blocking the rest of the invasion (I told the story here, 12 years ago), and allowing Håkon to escape Oslo, and eventually get to the UK to continue the war.

The German attempt to “decapitate” Norway, with all its elaborate planning, failed because of one guy disobeying orders.

Similarly, the German airborne attempt to decapitate the Dutch military command, two months later, ended up a nearly Pyrrhic victory, as the paratroopers ran into a prepared defense, and were gunned down in droves by alerted and angry Dutch defenders.

Not Nearly Far Enough: Similarly, in September, Field Marshal Montgomery hatched a plan to end the war by Christmas; launch a lightning (by 1944 standards) strike to vault across the Rhine River (and a few lesser rivers and canals on the way), which was Germany’s only real natural defense from invasion from the west, across terrain that isn’t a whole lot more naturally defensible than the road from Fargo to Winnipeg.

To do it, airborne forces would simultaneously capture bridges across the Maas, Waal and lower Rhein rivers, as well as three canals. Once over the Rhein, there was literally nothing but German towns and troops blocking the road to Berlin.

The crossings of the Maas, and two fo the three canals were captured smoothly. The Waal, at Nijjmegen? Not smoothly at all. And the final crossing of the Rhine at Arnhem failed completely. Only one of the 12 British and Polish airborne battalions reached the bridge; all were mauled, and the Germans held the crossing.

Because of that bloody scrap along the banks of the Rhein, Germany retained its barrier until the bridge at Remagen fell, nearly six bloody months later.

Like The TSA Line, Only With Live Ammo: Again – we don’t know yet how to separate truth from fiction in Ukraine – and forces on both sides, and no side, are doing their darnedest to obscure whatever truth does leak out.

But assuming some of the news is accurate?

As this is written the hot war in Ukraine is five years old; Russian forces are on the northern outskirts of an alerted, angry, heavily armed Kiev.

But around the end of the first day, reporters filtered out that a Russian Airborne assault on two of Kiev’s airports had stalled, and then failed; both airfields remained, apparently, in Ukrainian hands.

Speculation – possibly informed, possibly not – held that the assault was an attempt to get Russian troops into Kiev fast and on the relative cheap, taking the airfields and suppressing the air defenses in order to fly troops in from Russia, debouching them almost directly into the Ukrainian capitol – a move that Russian Airborne has speculated about doing for nearly fifty years, since well back in Soviet times.

Did the Ukrainians read the same operations manual (a rhetorical question – the Ukrainian and Russian Armies both have roots in the Soviet army)? Were the Russians counting on their airborne/air transport assault to knock Ukrainian leadership so off-kilter that they’d have a much harder time resisting the conventional, armored ground attack, which woujld then have an easier time getting into Kiev?

We won’t know until the fall of Putin’s Russia opens up all the secrets that have gotten covered over since the fall of the USSR, of course.

But it’s interesting, if armchair, speculation.

(NOTE: If your response to this post is “the war in Ukraine doesn’t affect us, so I don’t care” – that’s fine, duly noted, and save it for a different thread. Thanks.

Ukraine

Established upfront: conventional warfare, especially one where the news media is working down stream from a regime that is among the most effective manipulators of information in the past 80 years, is phenomenally subject to the vicissitudes of Berg‘s 18th law.

But at the end of the first day, it appeared that the Ukrainians were holding back most of the Russian advances (other than the attack north out of Crimea), had held off or perhaps defeated at least one of the airborne assaults on air fields around Kiev, and had managed to disperse their Air Force and decentralized enough of their command and control that Russian attempts at a decapitation attack weren’t nearly successful enough to leave the Ukrainians floundering and rudderless.

Other, highly unconfirmed reports indicated that at least one Ukrainian Air Force pilot had become an ace, with 3-6 kills in one day of fighting. So far, the story has all the hallmarks of an urban legend, and probably war time underdog propaganda.

We’re In The Best Of Hands

On Saturday, I was listening to NPR News.

Betty McCollum was apparently part of Vice President Harris’s dlegation of elite foreign policy experts that President Biden dispatched to Munich to try to avert disaster…

…and I know what you’re saying; that’s gotta be the punch line, right there. Right?

Under normal circumstances, you betcha.

There was an interview with McCollum in which she said (paraphrasing very closely here, since I was in my car, not recording anything) “there will be severe sanctions if Putin invades Russia”.

Good job, Mr. President.

Good job.

Getcher ice cream.

Like Munich

Am I the only one with a sneaking hunch that Putin knows he’s up against the Western B-team, and is going to operate unconcerned about any western response?

In an outspoken interview yesterday, Viktor Tatarintsev told the country’s Aftonbladet newspaper that ‘the more the West pushes Russia, the stronger the Russian response will be’. 

He claimed Russia had become more ‘self-sufficient’ amid the threat of sanctions and accused the West of not understanding his country. 

‘We are more self-sufficient and have been able to increase our exports. We have no Italian or Swiss cheeses, but we’ve learned to make just as good Russian cheeses using Italian and Swiss recipes’, he said.

This is something the smart people have been warning about for half a century; “globalization” in and of itself only when all parties involved are more or less completely “globalized”.

International sanctions can have an effect on Spain, by Spain’s choice, or on Saudi Arabia because of the markets they chose to enter.

Countries that can make themselves self-sufficient on at least the level of necessities? Like (in theory) Russia, or China?

I suspect Putin knows he’s dealing with a whole cabinet full of Neville Chamberlains (which is a bit of a gratuitous slam against Chamberlain, who at least realized he’d been had, albeit too late).

Rumor Of War

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Ukraine and Kazakhstan border on Russia. They are all mobilizing troops along the borders.


Secretary of State Blinken says NATO never promised not to admit new members, and that the United States is fully committed to defending the principles NATO stands for. The US has moved an aircraft carrier group into position in preparation to defend those principles.


China and Taiwan both agree there is only one China; they disagree whether the mainland or the island is the wayward province which should be ruled by the other. Lesko Brandon said the United States will defend Taiwan if China moves against it.


Defense experts argue over whether Brandon should get the US involved in a two-front war, or only one land war in Asia.


I ask why the United States is promising to go to war against Russia and China at all? What is our vital national interest in Ukraine? How many Americans should die for Kazakhstan? We already have hyperinflation caused by dumping Covid money into the economy – how will we pay for a war against China?


The United States played World Policeman for a century. It’s time to end the farce. We should solve our problems at home before attempting to solve problems elsewhere.


Joe Doakes

I don’t know about you, but I’m half expecting a whole lot of government push on the patriotism of supporting the war effort. Just like our victorious vaccination drive.

Wag The Dog

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club asks whether the Lesko Brandon administration is strolling into our next quagmire.

We canceled pipelines and oil leases at home, to signal our virtue on climate change. The price of gas at the pump, and natural gas for home heating, is going up. We’ve called on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil for us but we’ve also removed sanctions on Iran, which is funding Houthis in Yemen, who are attacking Saudi oilfields. The US could back the Saudis with arms sales or troops so they could keep pumping the oil we want, except Progressives insist the Saudis are repressing the Yemenis so we must not help them. Can “no blood for oil” be far behind?

We’ve caused a world-wide oil shortage and are about to stumble into another war in the Middle East with conflicting policy goals and no clear mission. But all the Left wants to talk about is Kyle.

Joe Doakes

If it weren’t for gullible, low information voters, the Democrats will be pulling somewhere below the libertarians.

Slouching Toward Armageddon

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club asks whether the Lesko Brandon administration is strolling into our next quagmire.

We canceled pipelines and oil leases at home, to signal our virtue on climate change.  The price of gas at the pump, and natural gas for home heating, is going up.  We’ve called on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil for us but we’ve also  removed sanctions on Iran, which is funding Houthis in Yemen, who are attacking Saudi oilfields.  The US could back the Saudis with arms sales or troops so they could keep pumping the oil we want, except Progressives insist the Saudis are repressing the Yemenis so we must not help them.  Can “no blood for oil” be far behind?

We’ve caused a world-wide oil shortage and are about to stumble into another war in the Middle East with conflicting policy goals and no clear mission.  But all the Left wants to talk about is Kyle.

Joe Doakes

Well, and Orange Hitler.

Who is hiding under youer bed.

Ooogabooga!

It’s Veterans Day

I’ve said it in the past; I’ve always found the practice of thanking veterans for their service to be a little…off.

Nothing against those that do say it – but it’s always felt a little strange to me.

“Thanks for taking a couple years out of your life, in many cases going around the world and undergoing a lot of unimaginable stress, danger and horror. Thanks so much!”.

So for my part – to all you veterans out there: I’m glad you made it home.

Let’s make this nation worth your time, and the sacrifice of those who didn’t come back.

Nominal

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

“Nominal” is Latin for “in name only.” William S. Lind, author of books on 4th Generation Warfare, knows a thing or two about armies. He says the Afghan Army was a ‘nominal’ army – an army in name, only. In reality, it was a bunch of guys who needed a job but didn’t much care about fighting and dying for their country. The Afghan Army collapsed overnight because it never really existed outside the minds of bureaucrats who believed in it. An army that won’t fight isn’t a military force, it’s a social work project.

That brings us to the United States military with its woke generals and high-heel wearing cadets and purging the ranks for fear of white supremacists. If the US military isn’t a fighting force, what is it? It’s a stepping stone. For young people, it’s free college. For lower ranks, it’s a place to belong until you retire. But for top ranks – admirals and generals – it’s the finishing school for a job in the military-industrial complex, all those Beltway Bandits living off the Pentagon. Manufacturers of military equipment need customers. If insurgents don’t have military grade weapons, national governments won’t buy more. Their eternal quandary is: How do we get military grade weapons into the hands of terrorists so that national governments will buy more of our product, without getting caught selling to proscribed people?

The top brass of the US military ordered the bug-out from Afghanistan leaving behind billions (with a b) billions of dollars worth of military grade weapons and equipment knowing it would fall into the hands of the Taliban and from there would find its way to insurgent groups worldwide, causing national governments everywhere to need more and better military grade weapons and hardware. Our top brass are well on the way to becoming Salesmen of the Year.

Joe Doakes

There will be so much for a new conservative administration to fix…

… if we ever get one.

The First Domino

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

So the US got tossed out of Afghanistan, so what? How does our retreat-in-disgrace affect the rest of the world?

Maybe not so good. If the US isn’t willing or able to exercise competent military actions, the nations which have been relying on us for defense, begin to look vulnerable. They might need to arm themselves to defend themselves, or risk be conquered by rivals.

Domino theory is back and I’m wondering how many weapons and how much ammunition will be required to survive the fall of the final domino.

Joe Doakes

Japan has got to be seriously rethinking its post World War II agreements on military posture.

Success Is Not An Option

It would appear the only real option in Afghanistan at the moment is picking the type of failure we want to shoot for…

…while remembering that many Afghans who worked for us and are in mortal danger are hiding out (and nationwide), and many Americans – read “potential hostages” – are “sheltering in place” as well, in Kabul.

It would appear our options are:

  • Dunkirk, if we’re very lucky
  • Stalingrad – the German version – if we’re not
  • Mogadishu, to one degree or another – potentially leading to “Teheran, 1979” in the bargain.

Securing an urban corridor through a hostile semi-guerrilla army to try to evacuate not only thousands of civilians, but themselves, from a single-strip airport that can potentially be rocketed out of business at the drop of a hat?

Which would subject the US to a choice between:

  • A humiiliating extended hostage crisis that’d make Iran in 1980 look like an episode of The Waltons, at the very best.
  • Bringing in a whooooole lot of air power to blast the paratroopers out of the jam, and hope they can save anyone at all.

“Build Back Better” indeed.

Trying To Put The Best Face Possible On This. And Failing

Looking at the collapse of Afghanistan, and the likely re-emergence of Al Quaeda and ISIS, as well as the inevitable surge of Chinese, North Korean, Iranian and Russian aggression that will attend the adminstration’s show of not just weakness but pathetic senility, one looks for some bright spot.

“But it’s not actually Saigon…”

So – a bright spot to the most dismal day of American foreign policy since I watched that Huey take off from the roof of the embassy in fifth grade?

Maybe it’s this: some of the top “minds” in DC Democrat messaging are going to have to spend so much more time thinking of ways to convince people that “conservative white supremacist terror” is the greatest threat facing this nation, they won’t have time to think of anything new.

I said I was “looking” for a bright spot. I didn’t say I found one. But then, what the heck, we can’t even find the ^$#@ President:

Site note: as I watch thousands of Afghans trying and failing to flee for their lives because American bureaucracy is more concerned about Covid testing than mass murder…

…I have to wonder if Michelle Obama is still proud to be an American .

Because I’m have a touch of “not”, at the moment.

More tomorrow.

Nationwrecking

There’s a case to be made that we fought the wrong war in Afghanistan; that we should have gone in, rooted out the Taliban, and installed the best awful people have given them three steps toward the door and left in 2003.

There’s an even better case to be made that nation-building, especially in a place like Afghanistan, just can’t work.

I’m all ears.

It was America’s longest war by a fair turn, and it needed to end, somehow, someday.

But the idea that burning ithrough hundreds of billions of dollars of “investment” and just plain pouring money on the ground, and the lives of 2,372 American servicepeople, and it all ends with a Saigon moment? One our administration practically begged for, and seems unable to comprehend?

That is a little hard to swallow.

It should be, shouldn’t it?

Memorial Day

The image I’ve posted is an American cemetery in France, near Verdun. These graves are for soldiers killed in World War I. There are nearly 15,000 graves at the site. Over 53,000 Americans died in combat in World War I and 116,000 Americans in total died as a result of the war. My grandfather fought in World War I and was able to survive the carnage and come home. He was one of the lucky ones. And because he was lucky, so am I.

My grandfather died in 1959, before I was born. I never did get a chance to know him, or to thank him for his service. He did get 40 more years, time enough to marry and raise a family that included my father. I don’t doubt that each of these crosses represents a man who would have loved to have 40 more years to live, to do the things my grandfather was able to do.

We remember those who gave their all on this day precisely because of the enormity of the sacrifice they made. Every one of these crosses represents a human life that was cut short, a dream unrealized. We owe these individuals our gratitude in ways that we cannot adequately express.

Messaging

Last week, the Administration posted this photo – of Vice President Pence, looking across the DMZ at the Norks.

You know the old saying, “Never, Ever Read the Commennts?” It’s even more true on Twitter. “Progressives” romped and cavorted with the image. One -well, probably a lot more than one – snaked “I’m sure this made all the infantry on both sides of the DMZ crap their pants”.

G’huck g’huck.

“Progrssives” never get tyranny. They never do.

The photo is not aimed at the soldiers on the DMZ.

It’s aimed at the people in the “Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea” (DPRK) that will, inevitably, see it one day.

And think “Someone over the wall is taking our plight seriouslyl”.

Remember – this is the same crowd that giggled like eighth-graders telling “Fart” jokes when Reagan gave his Brandenburg Gate speech, which kept the Jimmy Kimmels and Conan O’Briens of the day chuckling for a news cycle or two. “Mr. Gorbachev declined to come out with a pickaxe”, indeed.

But the speech wasn’t aimed at Michael Gorbachev. It was aimed at his subjects – who took it to heart. And in four years, the Berlin Wal did, indeed, fall – an effectual relationship the left only acknowledged backhandedly, the way they usually do, by trying to take credit for it themselves.

The Peace Filter

Scott Adams on the situation in Iran:

It’s a thread, and I urge you to read the whole thing. 

Putting an Obama-era template – or even a Bush or Reagan-era template – on the situation might be a huge mistake for everyone. 

“Western ‘Progressives’ Mourn Otto Skorzeny”

Listening to the garment-rending among western “progressives” over the death of Otto Skorzeny, the head of Nazi special operations…

…sorry. I got my historical eras mixed up. Otto Skorzeny was Germany’s top commando – sort of the David Stirling of the World War 2 Wehrmacht, Germany’s top commando, in charge of creating terror and disorder behind allied lines.

Of course, I’m referring to the death of Iranian General Soleimani – “Austere Religious Scholar”…

…no, wait. That was the NYTimes’ obit for Al-Baghdadi, the former Caliph of ISIS.

What I meant was that he was some person who did some stuff…

Dammit. I’m sorry, that was Ilhan Omar’s characterization of the 9/11 terrorists, who’d done us the favor of killing themselves before a drone or SOF team had to do it.

The media stuck with “Iran’s most revered general” (or, occasionally, as a combination of Lady Gaga and James Bond – and no, this is not one of my “Avery Librelle” spoofs), which probably was what brought up my erroneous Skorzeny reference.

No, Soleimani was the head of the “Quds Force”, which as been referred to as the most accomplished intelligence, unconventional warfare and special operations organization, besides (and and alongside of, and often against) Mossad in the Middle East. It was, among other things, responsible for the deaths of about 600 Americans in Iraq over the past fifteen years.

“But not between 2012 and 2018!”, “progressives” bleat. “Quds helped us defeat ISIS! He was an ally!”

Right – in the same sense that Stalin was Hitler’s “ally” in dismembering Poland in 1939. They, like Iran and the US, had mutual interests in delaying or displacing their fighting for a while – in Quds’ case, keeping up weapons supplies to Hezbollah (which wound up as craters and Iron-Dome-chaff all over southern Israel) and keeping the bloodletting in Syria at a steady simmer (including its support for whatever remains of the Assad regime, longtime Iranian clients and the worst among a cast of bad actors in that whole sorry nation), and blowing up a Saudi Oil refinery and a couple of tankers in the Gulf, just to keep things interesting.

It’s just been interesting watching the Democrats exercising their 50-year-long penchants for not only betting on America’s enemies, but for exercising, shall we say, flexible ethics when it comes to assassinating “some people who do some things”.

This Iranian Situation Will Take Intelligence And Critical Thought

None of which will come from our idiot “elite”.

Rose MacGowan – who, I’m told, is something of a movie star – twote:

Ms. McGowan – I suggest going to Teheran to work this out personally.

Wearing the outfit in your Twitter profile photo.

Get back to us. If you can.

The assassination of Soleimani does present some gnarly questions: he was a fair target under current international agreements about terrorism – but one could raise questions about whether it was a great idea. Also whether it was an act of war.

On the other hand, we’re treated to the spectacle of watching politicians, deep-staters, media drones and celebs who batted not an eyelash over Obama’s constant, intense campaign of drone, air and special ops “hits”, complaining about Orange LIterally Hitler Man doing it to a target that actually matters, but up to whom The LIghtworker sucked…

…and having to choose, in public, during an election year, with whom to side in public.

Troublling?

Brilliant?

Why choose? It’s both.