[Modern War Institute] Most of you reading this essay, I speculate, have a dim regard for failure. To you, failure is like that "friend of a friend" who showed up at your party, brought bad beer, made inappropriate jokes, and vomited in your bathroom. He’s not particularly welcome, but you did not have much choice in letting him in, and the extent of his exasperating conduct was not completely foreseeable.
Your dim regard is not surprising. That, of course, is what the military wants and expects from you. You have learned (or been indoctrinated) to expect success from yourselves. Failure is not listed among the Army’s doctrinally designated attributes or competencies of effective leadership. I will argue, however, in knowing distortion of Clausewitz’s famous theory: failure is the mere continuation of success by other means. Failure, thus respected, should be an open and explicit component to those same doctrinal ideals. Do not 'fail' to read on.
[Asharq al-Aswat] The quiet kingdom on the Arabian Gulf has experienced a tough crisis over six years of chaos, kabooms and sabotage. Bahrain has been shouting loud for six years: This is not a revolution nor a peaceful protest, but a riot supported by Iran.
The West, however, only sees what it wants to see. Even worse, the administration of former US President Barack Obama If you like your coverage you can keep it... abandoned its closest ally and the Fifth Fleet of the United States Navy ‐ it also blinded itself to the facts.
But the facts are finally being revealed to the western governments‐ they themselves are admitting, for the first time, that there are criminal acts by which Iran is endeavoring to form militias in Bahrain.
The Washington Post has published documents and interviews with former and current intelligence officials on a detailed training program by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to train its Bahraini members on building advanced bombs and waging guerrilla warfare.
European and American analysts now see a mounting threat since Iranian-funded and -armed cells are emerging. The Washington Post intelligence report also revealed that over the past three years, a huge quantity of modern weapons and military grade bombs have been discovered in Bahrain, all of which have most certainly been made by Iran.
At any rate, what the western intelligence considers as a newly-discovered major surprise has been known and backed with evidence since the eruption of the riots in February 2011. The Iranian exploitation of these acts to picture them as another form of the "Arab Spring" has also been known.
In fact, the Iranian regime had itself made this admission when in March 2016, Senior IRGC Saeed Qassimi openly declared "Bahrain an Iranian province that had broken away from our country due to colonization." He added that Iran is now a base to support "the revolution in Bahrain".
The belated western confession that the developments in Bahrain are neither a revolution nor an "Arab Spring" is a new western failure in analyzing, reading and taking decisions in the region.
It is true that the Trump administration is keen on setting things right through imposing sanctions on two Bahraini individuals who have been designated as Death Eaters on the US terrorism list. The US Department of State pointed out clearly that the designation came after the "escalation of rebel attacks in Bahrain, where Iran provided arms, funds and training for the rebels."
The Bahraini kingdom has however witnessed serious losses and has been suffering for six years from organizations, associations and western parliaments that depended on the wrong stances of their governments. This led to the acquittal of the criminals and the indictment of the victims and caused unjustified international pressure. This complicated the Bahraini crisis, which was not a revolution, but a riot backed by the Iranian regime’s money and arms.
The West’s confession, although very late, is an opportunity for Bahrain to face all these rights and humanitarian organizations that overlooked all the human rights When they're defined by the state or an NGO they don't mean much... violations in all the conflict zones around the world and focused only on Bahrain.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/07/2017 00:00 ||
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[Wash Times] Arnold Schwarzenegger said Wednesday that he "fell in love" with the Republican Party decades ago but couldn’t bring himself to support President Trump because of his support for the coal industry.
"I am a Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan Republican," the former California governor told Van Jones on the CNN town hall series "The Messy Truth."
"Those are the kinds of Republicans that I can identify with," he said. "I’m not a Trump Republican. That’s why I didn’t vote for him."
#2
Neither are 'Republicans'. Then again, after spending 6 years bitching and moaning (and showboating) about Obamacare and repeal, neither is the GOPe.
#6
Let the market decide the fate of coal. Not Arnold, Trump, Hillary or Obama...and least of all Al Gore. The market is smarter than any of them or all of them put together. Besides, if we don't burn it the Chinese will and we burn it cleaner.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/07/2017 12:15 Comments ||
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#7
Arnold would prefer tens of thousand be unemployed in exchange for an insignificant different in particulate matter in the air.
[The Hill] The U.S. intelligence community is in the midst of a severe crisis. It has been used, or perhaps allowed itself to be used, as a tool of political destruction, against some of the same U.S. citizens it was created to protect.
What I am talking about is the continuing "Wiretapgate" debacle. We are seeing the widespread abuse of intelligence by an incumbent administration to target political opposition. Long a technique in the developing world -- a tactic I often witnessed as a CIA station chief working abroad -- the Third World has come to roost in the United States. It is a tragedy of the first order.
The danger of politicization is widely accepted throughout the intelligence community as the greatest hazard, in theory, to the intelligence profession. If an intel service cannot be accepted as an unbiased arbiter, it loses the trust of its people, and risks becoming irrelevant and unheeded. History is littered with intel failures; one need only look to the invasion of Iraq to see how politicization can lead to costly failure and a "trust gap" that can take years to bridge and resolve.
Truth, despite the naysayers, is objective and absolute. The intelligence community has a responsibility to provide the most informed truth to the president. The truth, warts and all, will always be the soundest basis for any foreign policy. This is what our multibillion-dollar intel leviathan owes the American people and its government.
[DAWN] ISLAM, with about 1.6 billion followers all over the globe, is currently the second largest religion in the world. Despite its prominent presence on the world map, its followers are performing poorly on the global indices of education and literacy, scientific advancements and innovation, and social development.
The poor performance on these global indices highlights serious challenges for Moslems in coping with the modern world and moving along with progressive societies. While this needs immediate attention and a comprehensive evaluation of the causes for the poor performance as well as corrective action, Moslem masses in general do not take it as a serious matter. Poor performance on those indices appears to be of least concern to them.
This attitude seems to be rooted in a strong sense of belonging to religion; this is further augmented by the belief that questioning is forbidden in religion and one must accept whatever is conveyed. Consequently, any misery, humiliation or decline faced by Moslems, individually or collectively, is blamed on their lack of adherence to the framework conveyed by religion.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
04/07/2017 00:00 ||
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IMO, Sensing makes a lot of sense
The United States attacked Syria directly Thursday night with dozens of cruise missiles.
...As is the imperial habit of US presidents these days, there was no authority from the Congress asked for or received before initiating a new war with a country that has not attacked the United States, nor poses an imminent threat to US lives.
On TV news reporting, President Trump stated that the strikes were "in vital national interests" of the United States. I would very much like him to explain in full just how. After all, in 2013 when President Obama was leaning toward the same action, Trump tweeted:
...What, exactly, changed on the ground when Assad used chemical weapons this week? The casualty count hardly budged - hundreds of thousands of people have already been killed. Chemical weapons are indiscriminate and cruel, but are they more so than barrel bombs, area shelling and area bombing?
I find it hard to conclude other than this cruise-missile attack was mainly a signaling operation aimed mainly at Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose first face-to-face meeting with Trump was tonight and will continue tomorrow. Trump has said repeatedly that he wants China to rein in Kim Jong Un's nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programs. The signaling was also undoubtedly directed at Teheran as well.
These fok's have been slaughtering one another and 'skull piling' since the dawn of civilization. If Assad expired this morning, another thug was rise up to take his place. Where does it end. Please let these people exterminate each other and stay clear of it. Have we leaned absolutely nothing from the history of this region.
How do you keep these foks slaughtering contained to their own sandbox?
Remember that this s#it got started for us big time when they brought their murdering ways here. Will ignoring them be possible? Is it better to fight them here or there?
#4
Whack-a-mole and drone zapping does not work, far, far too many targets. Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima ...works/worked, the kak stopped! Migration of the problem (permitting them to come here or to Europe) only spreads and exacerbates the problem. If you are not prepared to eradicate them, at least contain them and whack the 'squirters' (those who escape the effected area and are intent on doing you harm).
We can talk it to death, but eradication or containment (or some combination of the two) certainly appear to be the options.
By the way, we've had troops working with the Kurds now for quite a while, we're already at war in Syria. The media just refused to cover the fact while Obean was prez.
...As is the imperial habit of US presidents these days
That was part of the original rationale against a large standing Army, reducing the Executive's hand in engaging in military adventures. Something the post-WWII best and brightest threw out the window.
#8
President Obama declared use of chemical weapons in Syria to be a red line. His response to that red line was to agree to a treaty under which the Government of Russia was to remove and destroy as such weapons in Syria. This action or lack of it caused most of the governments in the world to believe that guarantees made by our government can be ignored.
According to reports from our intelligence as well as Israeli intelligence and that of several European countries, a chemical attack was made a few days ago by Syrian planes. This was probably meant as a test of the Trump administration, aimed at determining whether that administration would roll over and play dead or respond to this violation of the previous treaty.
To do nothing would have renewed the irrelevance of the United States in international affairs previously propagated by the Obama administration under the direction of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kerry.
It would have encouraged North Korea, and Iran and their allies to continue their efforts toward nuclear and rocket proliferation which represent threats to the entire world.
The Syrian and Iranian governments will now attempt to convince Putin to escalate his reaction to their current mortification; his verbal comments so far seem appropriate to mollifying their chagrin without such escalation. One hopes that Putin has no intention of starting a world war.
The reaction of North Korea to this unexpected willingness by the United States to take military action will be the most significant.
#9
If you are not prepared to eradicate them, at least contain them and whack the 'squirters' (those who escape the effected area and are intent on doing you harm).
Yep. Isolate and disengage. Check back in a thousand years to see if they have become a bit more reasonable.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/07/2017 12:34 Comments ||
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#10
I find it hard to conclude other than this cruise-missile attack was mainly a signaling operation aimed mainly at Chinese President Xi Jinping...
Yes and I've heard the theory that Truman nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki to send a message to Stalin.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/07/2017 12:36 Comments ||
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#11
..and those running Japan, who till after the second bomb were the military (who knew they probably would 'swing' if and when they capitulated).
h/t Instapundit
Of course I loathe Assad. And of course I despise the Obamans for that phony red line and the subsequent retreat-and-bogus-Russian-deal. But just carrying out vengeance against Assad isn’t good enough. It fails to address the central problem of our time: the global anti-American alliance.
There is no Syria any more, and the enemy forces on the Middle Eastern battlefield come from various jihadi groups, and three regimes: Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus. We have to defeat them all, and other members of the enemy alliance, including Cuba and North Korea. Nikki Haley has it right: "The truth is that Assad, Russia and Iran have no interest in peace."
Indeed, they are waging war, and the principal force driving that war is not Assad, but Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Khamenei’s killers have been alongside Assad’s from the very beginning, as the survival of the Syrian dictator is crucial to Iranian ambitions and quite likely also the survival of the Islamic Republic itself.
Listen to Defense Secretary James Mattis a few days ago (from Reuters): Asked about comments Mattis made in 2012 that the three primary threats the United States faced were "Iran, Iran, Iran," Mattis told reporters that Iran’s behavior had not changed in the years since.
"At the time when I spoke about Iran I was a commander of US central command and that (Iran) was the primary exporter of terrorism, frankly, it was the primary state sponsor of terrorism and it continues that kind of behavior today," Mattis said.
True, and Mattis’ characteristically strong language points the way to the best American action in the region, namely bringing down the Tehran regime. Lashing out at Assad isn’t nearly good enough. After all, what strategic objective would we accomplish by smashing, even removing, Assad? The Iranian and Russian fighters would still be there, as would the Islamist forces. The demands on our military would dramatically expand. We do not want to occupy a significant land mass in what used to be called Syria, nor do we seem to have sorted out what we want to do with the Turks and the Kurds.
Regime change in Iran would be devastating to Assad and Putin, and its positive effects would be felt in North Africa and our own hemisphere, striking at the Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah in Latin America. And it would remind the tyrants that America’s greatest weapon is political. We are the most revolutionary country in the world, and we should act like it.
#4
Of course Mattis was correct that Iran was the major threat in 2012 and the years immediately prior. We just finished fighting a proxy war against Iranian trained, equipped, and directed forces in southern Iraq...where we suffered serious loss. Iran did not. That was then.
Now. All of this is moot at this point since the Caliphate established itself in 2013 and all above are united in their focus on confronting this clear and present danger. A danger that is supported by the Wahhabist Sunni Saud regime.
Leave the Iranians alone to check the Saudis...let them grind it out and fight their proxy wars in Yemen or wherever and focus on eliminating the Caliphate please. That is one strategic interest that the Iranians, Russians, Americans, Syrians, and Iraqis share. Lets focus on finishing one thing in a row.
#5
Iran ay be the number one threat but you can't just go after them without provocation. Like it or not currently tea are at peace with them thanks to Obama. If Trump just dumps that without provocation the world will freak.
h/t Instapundit
[WSJ] Benjamin Netanyahu will never be popular in America’s major newsrooms. Or among most of the think-tankers who set the tone and parameters of foreign-policy debate. His name is a curse on college campuses. So it’s worth asking whose vision of the Middle East has held up better under the press of recent events.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
