It’s one of the paradoxes of military history; often the more aggressively one attacks one’s enemy initially, the less it costs in time and blood subdue your enemy.  Had we decided on an Obamaesque “small footprint” strategy, say, in Europe in 1942, World War II would still be dragging on (and yes, I know it’s an absurd comparison – a full-scale industrial war has as much in common with a counterinsurgency as football does with psychoanalysis).

Of course, counterinsurgency is a different cat to skin. 

Heritage discusses Obama’s long-delayed strategy:

1. If the President sends 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, does that count as a “surge?”

Simply put, no, because the use of that term implies an Iraq-like strategy of ramping up forces to the maximum of what the generals are requesting. It has been widely reported that General McChrystal’s assessment for additional troops to achieve maximum chance of success was between 60,000 and 80,000 troops.

Petraeus’ surge in Iraq had a clear goal; “flood the zone” as a show of decisive strength to erase doubt on the part of the “Iraqi street”, to push troops out into the field to safeguard Iraqi civilians from attack and separate the guerrilas from them while co-opting the tribal leaders to turn against the insurgents.  It was intended to win the war.

Obama’s strategy is…

…um…

…well, what is it, anyay?

We hope that the President’s far riskier strategy succeeds. If it does not, we must remember the options he had available to him before this decision. He had the chance to turn this war around; if he does not, the result will be his responsibility alone.

Not that the media would acknowledge it…

2. Is tonight’s announcement of a strategy the result of a thoughtful, deliberative process?

The delay in making a decision is inexcusable. Given that President Obama has been in office over 10 months; was privy to extensive briefings on the Afghan situation before that; the many months General McChrystal has been on the job; and the critical situation on the ground, the delay has put the mission and American soldiers in graver jeopardy. If McChrystal originally asked for 40,000 troops, as the White House would like you to believe, it is incomprehensible to believe that it took many months to simply lower that number by 5,000.

It’s comprehensible, all right – if you assume that the goal of the exercise was domestic and political rather than focused on winning the war.

I hope McChrystal pulls this off; way too many good men and women have died to make failure anything but abhorrent.

But Obama’s carrying out a half-measure.  Compromise works in budget negotiations – not war.

3. Even some Republicans are starting to question whether we should be in Afghanistan at all, if we’re not prepared to win by all means necessary. Is that the alternative choice?

No, this is a false choice. We must win. This is not an “optional” war in which a pull out will be cost free. A pull out will be exceedingly dangerous to the nation, possibly leading not only to another 9/11 but also to the destabilization and the possible fall of Pakistan. We should never forget that Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

Let’s not forget that, in counterinsurgency warfare, nothing succeeds like success; beyond that, nothing eggs your enemy on like failure (ask the Cambodians).

4. Isn’t any opposition to the President’s strategy simply partisan bickering, and more importantly, shouldn’t we rally around the Commander in Chief during this critical time?

We want President Obama and his strategy to succeed…There is absolutely no partisan element to the purely military calculation that success would be achieved with less risk if the President sent in the requested 60,000 to 80,000 new troops and fully committed to the strategy without engaging in a blueprint for defeat even if veiled as an “exit strategy.”

The notion of the “exit strategy” violates one of the key rules of fighting a war in a civilized society; if your “exit strategy” is anything but “win and go home”, then you run an unacceptable risk of sacrificing a lot of blood and treasure for no reason whatsoever.

5. How long does the President have before his strategy can be viewed as a success or failure?

It takes months to transfer the military personnel and resources to the theatre before any measurement of success can be taken. That’s what makes the President’s delayed decision-making all the more inexcusable. In the meantime, al-Qaeda and the Tailban will likely do everything in their power to match the U.S. buildup, drive up U.S. military casualties, attack civilian aid, kill innocents in Pakistan and attack the Pakistan government and military to create the impression that the war cannot be won. In particular, they will aim their actions to inflame the “anti-war” movement in the United States. We should remember this when any increase in violence in the months ahead prompts knee-jerk calls to withdraw.

There are times I wonder if Obama’s delay wasn’t intended to give the enemy time to build up for the battle.  Not the Taliban or Al Quaeda, mind you – the domestic anti-war movement.

6. President Obama has been criticized for focusing on an “exit strategy” win or lose, but isn’t an open ended commitment simply nation-building? Don’t we have to leave at some point, and won’t that be announced regardless?

Telegraphing our exit to al-Qaeda will only lead to further questioning US resolve. The strategy of building capacity for Afghans to govern themselves is not open-ended or “nation-building,” which implies some fruitless undertaking, but intended to help the Afghans to build the capacity to defend themselves (and to keep the Taliban and al-Qaeda from establishing safe havens) so that we can bring U.S. troops home. This is an achievable goal; after all, it was achieved in Iraq.

The difference between “Nation-building” and “defending American interests” got lost during the Clinton adminstration, where the administration sent the military around the world on many, many missions that, humanitarian value notwithstanding, had nothing to do with US interests.

7. General McChrystal is likely to say he can achieve some necessary goals with the President’s announcement; will President Obama’s strategy give him the resources to make this reality?

It remains to be seen whether the troop request will be sufficient. We hope it will be. In the meantime, the basic concept of McChrystal’s strategy is sound. The U.S. must reduce the space in Afghanistan for the Taliban to operate; and it must also build the capacity of the Afghan government to serve and secure the safety of the people.

I’m very, very unsure that Obama gets this.

8. Senior Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are saying that if we simply had captured Osama Bin Laden in 2001, this war could have been averted or successfully cut short – is this true?

Absolutely not, and the mere idea reflects a mindset that left us vulnerable to terrorism in the first place. Even if Osama Bin Laden had been captured or killed, there were thousands of al-Qaeda lieutenants willing to take his place.

The Democrats need to put down their VHS copies of Miami Vice. Bin Laden is not a “kingpin”.

9. Isn’t sending 30,000 troops to Afghanistan a continuation of the “small footprint” strategy that many criticized President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld for employing?

Yes. The same people who now support limiting our troop commitment to Afghanistan, or focusing on drone strikes were criticizing the last administration for not being forceful enough at the outset of the war, even before the war with Iraq had begun. Simply put, the small footprint strategy has been proven not to work, and does not lessen the view of terrorists that we are “occupying” their land.

Remember when people complained that Bush and Rumsfeld tried to fight Iraq on the cheap, with not enough men?

No?

Either do the Democrats.

10. Is cost an issue? Haven’t we spent enough on these wars, when people are losing jobs, the domestic economy is suffering and our debt is so high?

Preventing another 9-11 should be, by anyone’s definition, a top strategic objective of the United States, and thus should also be a top budgetary priority. How does one put a price on the lives lost on that tragic day? Winning the war in Afghanistan is part of the strategy of preventing a similar disaster from occurring again…With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates the annual interest to exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. An additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So in perspective, Afghanistan strategy sessions are not the meetings the OMB Director should be spending his time in.

For the benefit of the dim-witted left-wing hamsters who will try to deny it – I do hope this works.  But I have a bad feeling that McChrystal was right the first time around.

Chris Matthews:

West Point is “the enemy camp?

Wow.  Paranoid much, Mr. Tingly?

Our world today is just too hectic. Too pell-mell. People never stop and smell the roses.

Add to that the ethical and spiritual degradation that comes from expecting immediate gratification for your desires – which is one of the great spiritual cancers of our time.

So when people tell me Shot In The Dark is loading slowly for the past few days, I respond “You’re welcome”. I’m doing it for your own good.

Slow down. Smell the roses. Spend the time you wait for the site to load with your kids. Have a single malt and read a good book while the page loads.

I’m doing it for you.

(No, I think one of my ads is hanging up. I’ll try to figure it out this evening).

Michael Moore descends into madness in this open letter to the President re his Afganistan speech tonight:

Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point [at 8PM this evening] and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you.

In other words, “we elected you for the pork; forget about all that “defending the nation” BS, Mr. President.

Of course, Moore is being just as disingenuous and selective and context-challenged here as he’s been in every single one of his movies.  And who’s busted him on it?  That noted right-wing tool Crooks and Liars:

In an open letter to President Obama, Moore on Monday seems to have forgotten candidate Obama’s aggressive stance towards Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.

But at almost every turn in the 2008 campaign (for example, starting at about the 17:30 mark in the video above), it was Barack Obama who pledged to “finish the fight in Afghanistan.”

In August 2007, as you’ll recall, Senator Obama received a hellstorm of criticism for his statements regarding attacking Al Qaeda bases in Pakistan. As part of a broad – and forceful – foreign policy speech on August 1, Obama rightly took the Bush administration to task for the failure of its “no safe havens” doctrine in Pakistan. Regarding the Al Qaeda sanctuary safely nestled along the Afghan border, Obama declared:

“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

In other words, Obama has always – at least, in front of politically-mixed crowds – parroted the lefty conventional wisdom that while Iraq was wrong wrong wrong, Afghanistan, the “Real War”, was right right right.

But facts have always been stupid things to Michael Moore.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That’s the way General Washington insisted it must be. That’s what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. “You’re fired!,” said Truman, and that was that. And you should have fired Gen. McChrystal when he went to the press to preempt you, telling the press what YOU had to do.

Put another way, Moore would have Obama fire the guy who he hired to replace the first guy he fired. 

Which may be is the way the prima-donna Moore runs his production company, but it’s really not good leadership.

Of course, everything Moore doesn’t know about leadership is matched by his ignorance of history:

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea — “Let’s invade Afghanistan!” Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.

It wasn’t “the Soviet generals’ idea”, and it wasn’t anywhere close to a dispositive nail in the USSR’s coffin; they absorbed 25 million dead in World War Two, and murdered at least 40 million of their own on top of that, and that led them to the peak, not nadir, of their power.  It wasn’t Afghanistan that led to the USSR’s fall; it was contemporaneous political changes the regime had to adopt to try, and eventually fail, to survive in the face of Reagan’s aggressive containment.

Afghanistan’s nickname is the “Graveyard of Empires.” If you don’t believe it, give the British a call. I’d have you call Genghis Khan but I lost his number.

[MOORE’S LEGIONS OF FORMER EMPLOYEES:  “Then you must have his Yahoo IM Chat handle, you tyrannical jagoff”]

But the Soviet reference is fully appropriate – because although this fisking has gone on a bit already, it’s really just a tangent.  The real meat – or, given the subject matter, suet – of this post follows. 

Moore:

Your potential decision to expand the war (while saying that you’re doing it so you can “end the war”) will do more to set your legacy in stone than any of the great things you’ve said and done in your first year. One more throwing a bone from you to the Republicans and the coalition of the hopeful and the hopeless may be gone — and this nation will be back in the hands of the haters quicker than you can shout “tea bag!”

“The haters”.

My high school history teacher, a Vietnam-era veteran, noted that one of the most important things he learned in basic and infantry training was that the enemy was not, in fact, human.  He was a “Gook”, a “Slope”, or whatever it took to believe that you weren’t really shooting, bayonetting, grenading or shelling a human, but a not-quite-human caricature embodying everything you were trying to fight.

In the thirties, when Stalin wanted to soften society up for a purge, his PR minions – sort of the 1930’s versions of “Media Matters” and the “Center for “Independent” Media” – would popularize a simple, 1-2 syllable, endlessly-repeatable terms to refer to those to be purged.  Not specifically, as a very general rule, although Stalin did purge plenty of specific people and groups. 

But during the purges of the ’30s, when Stalin’s paranoid imagination told him that his economic plans were being sabotaged, he sent his minions far and wide denouncing “wreckers” – people who were ostensibly sabotaging the Soviet economy in ways big and small.  The idea, of course, wasn’t to actually find people who were throwing monkey-wrenches into turbine assemblies or pouring sugar into diesel tanks.  The idea was to have an instant, memorable, chantable term to use as a cover for every abuse they were ready to inflict.  And so Stalin and his minions denounced as “wreckers” everyone who got in his way; it wasn’t that he needed help dehumanizing his opponents – but it certainly made it easier for the rest of society to go along with it.

Moore is onto the same thing, here (emphasis added):

Don’t be deceived into thinking that sending a few more troops into Afghanistan will make a difference, or earn you the respect of the haters. They will not stop until this country is torn asunder and every last dollar is extracted from the poor and soon-to-be poor. You could send a million troops over there and the crazy Right still wouldn’t be happy. You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can’t change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.

The haters were not the ones who elected you, and they can’t be won over by abandoning the rest of us.

Leaving aside that the independents – who were the ones that elected him – will be re-hristened as “haters” for commiting the apostasy of forsaking “The One”, do you see what Moore is doing here?

One facile, hate-enabling, defamatory catch phrase after another.  Those of us who dissent from Obama aren’t people who disagree; we “hate” him. 

So overwrought with hatred for “haters” is Jabba The Mike that he forgets exactly who he, himself, is:

All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights,

Really, Jabba?  You endured this?  Your “rights” were “suspended?”

As bad as things were for the GOP from 2004 through Obama’s election, I could always give thanks for one thing; Michael Moore was not on my side.

Professors, ironically, claim that all their notes on man-made global warming got lost when their moms inadvertenty tossed ’em.  Really:

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss [of, like, all the raw data “supporting” their “thesis”] following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

Which must have been when the dogs got it.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

I’ve long held that the biggest problem with the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, other than the very presence of Algore,  is that the entire approach has been fundamentally political rather than scientific; not just in the way that all evidence that would seem to support the theory is taken as proof, but that all evidence that would seem to undercut the theory is considered proof as well, of course, but in the way that “scientists” and their p0litical benefactors declared the debate irrevocably settled even as skepticism grew rather than shrank.

And this was before it transpired that the leading proponents are, it would seem, scientific frauds.

It took almost thirty years for the last Japanese soldiers to believe that Hirohito had surrendered.  There are still Nazis, Communists and Independence Party “members” around and about.   I don’t think Kathleen Soliah and her supporters around California and Highland Park have sworn off their violent pasts even today.  And with those as behavioral models, it would seem we’re going to be stuck with the detritus of the AGW cult for quite some time.

But perhaps we’ve turned the corner, and with the bullying and hectoring of the fake-science lobby terminally discredited, perhaps we can actually deal with the problems that do exist.  Whatever they are.

After promising the most open, accessible Administration ever, Obama is strictly cutting his media face time:

The president, whose job-approval ratings have been on a steady slide, hasn’t held a formal news conference in 19 weeks, since July 22. That one ended badly, when Mr. Obama waded into a racial controversy by saying a white police officer “acted stupidly” when he arrested a black Harvard professor.

“It can’t be a total coincidence that the last time he faced the press corps, we ended with beers in the Rose Garden with Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley, when the focus was supposed to be health care,” said Julie Mason, a White House reporter for the Washington Examiner who also covered the Bush administration for the Houston Chronicle.

“It does seem like they are responding to the overexposure argument and trying to exert more control over his appearances,” she said.

I could see that backfiring; there is nobody in the world more petulant than a reporter who has, and then is denied, access to something.

Today is the eightieth birthday of “Billy” Waugh.

“Who?”

Billy Waugh, born today in 1929 in Texas, tried to run away to enlist in the Marines in World War 2 at age 15.  He failed – but came back when he was of age (after going back to school and earning straight A’s to avoid confusion) in 1947.  He served as a paratrooper in Korea, and then became a Green Beret…

…which, in the sixties, took him to Vietnam, where he became a Special Forces legend.  He retired from the Army after a 25 year career as a Sergeant Major in 1972…

…to make time to go to work for the CIA’s “Special Activities Division”, the Agency’s “black ops” wing.  He spied on Libya, worked with anti-communist forces all over the world, worked on the plot to off Carlos The Jackal and other terrorists and narcotraficantes…

…and, in 2001, at age 71, was in the first team of CIA paramilitaries parachuted into Afghanistan.  Ahead of the Green Berets that quickly topped the Taliban.

Did we mention how old he was when he went – via parachute – to Afghanistan?

At the age of 71, Waugh participated in Operation Enduring Freedom as a member of the CIA team led by Gary Schroen that went into Afghanistan to work with the Northern Alliance [the guerrilla group, not the radio show – Ed.] to topple the Taliban regime and Al Qaeda at the Battle of Tora Bora. Waugh was in-country from October to December 2001. Waugh spent many years being both a “Blue Badger” (employee) and a “Green Badger” (contractor). He continues to work as a “Green Badger”. It is unknown how many missions Waugh was involved in during his career.

Somewhere, John Wayne is smiling.

Happy Birthday, Billy Waugh.

…after nine people are killed in your cesspool of a city over the Thanksgiving weekend, for the love of all that is Holy, by all means make sure you keep guns out of the hands of the law-abiding! 

Because heaven only knows what’d happen if the scum that pervade Chicago (I’m talking about the ones that haven’t been elected to office yet, just to be clear) had to worry about the law-abiding citizen lighting them up.

And by all means, spend millions defending your deeply authoritarian (and hypocritical) gun ban against the NRA and its associated phalanx of real Americans, as your children are being massacred in the streets with impunity.

Good to know you’ve got your priorities straight.

How many of those nine funerals will you be attending, Sauron Mayor Daley?