Canadian Cincinnatus

The solution to flash mob violence

A disturbing new trend in the US is racist violence perpetrated by blacks on non-blacks using flash mob tactics (more details here, here and here). For a few years, flash mobs have been a harmless phenomenon: a bunch of bored teenagers in their twenties and thirties congregate in some public place to perform in unison some harmless activity. The joke is that while the whole things seems spontaneous to onlookers, it has been organized via the Internet, facebook, twitter and text messages. This summer, this trend has taken a violent twist with gangs of black ‘youth’s’ using flash mob tactics to violently attack non-white people. This phenomenon first surfaced at various beaches in Chicago this June. It made the big time when it occurred at the Wisconsin State Fair in early August. Ever since, the mainstream media has been doing its best to ignore the phenomenon.

Here are three possible solutions to this problem:

More policing. Hardly a solution. One of the hallmarks of the flash mob beatings is that they can happen anywhere and occur without warning. What makes it so frightening is that many of the attacks have occurred well within neighborhoods that were considered very safe. You would have to put a cop on every single street corner. Good luck with that. Even if you could afford to put a cop on every single street corner, who would want to live in a society like that?

Take control of the Internet, most particularly social media. I’m sure he People’s Republic of China could sell us some useful software in this regard.

Just let the beating continue. After all, the overall violent crime rate is still declining (at least in the US). I’m sure this is the answer favoured by white liberals, who love to wallow in white guilt inside their gated communities.

All of these solutions are either ineffective, promote police-state tendencies in the government or are a mixture of both. 

The only real solution? Enable the private citizen.

A good example is 9/11, when private initiative was the only effective force combating Islamic terrorism. The government should encourage the ‘let’s roll’ ethos. Concealed carry laws are a good start. Fortunately, many states already have such laws on the books. Second, the criminal law should be modified so that people are protected from legal action when they do exercise their right to self-defense, or for that matter their defense of other innocents. Third, the power of citizen’s arrest should be reaffirmed. And lastly, the authorities should not only encourage people to protect themselves but publicly and loudly exhort them to defend the public peace, telling them that doing so is part of their civic duty. Past a certain point, civic duty cannot be outsourced to professionals. 

In the US, the last step would be most effective, as progress have already been made with regard to the first three. In Canada, we have got to start working on all four steps – before this kind of violence comes up here.

 

Cool is dead

     

 

I have always thought that the term ‘cool’, bandied about endlessly, is a bogus concept. To the extent that the word has a legitimate meaning at all, it is used as a synonym for ‘good’. Basically, it is used by the media to control the spending habits of teenagers and to make aging baby boomers feel ‘hip’ (another bogus word). For this reason, it is my practice to never use the term in speech, except sarcastically.

I therefore very much appreciated Roger L Simon’s essay on the death of ‘cool’:

“In today’s pay-as-you-go world, being cool is a luxury few can afford. This accounts for the extreme discomfort we may be seeing in our media and, to a lesser extent — they still have more money — Hollywood. Our media, our journos, depend on being thought cool and, consequently and perhaps more importantly, thinking of themselves as cool. When they suspect they are not, they begin to behave like worker bees when the queen is killed. They tend to run around and act out. After a while, they seem lost. Their numbers dwindle.

This is just because cool depended on a hive mind in the first place. It was little more than fad. We are well rid of it.

And in part because cool is gone, the remaining liberals are the new reactionaries. They are the ones trapped in the past, the enemies of the future.”

I have long believed that the defining difference between conservatives and liberals today is that liberals are conservatives who want to be revolutionaries while conservatives are revolutionaries who want to be conservatives. I also believe that, deep down, people like Barack Obama and Toronto’s former mayor David Miller understand that: that they are now the establishment - The Man. Wearing torn, designer jeans to affect a faux-proletariat look while contemplating (80 year old) avant garde art only partially consoles them.

Unfortunately for them, no matter what they do or wear, they are no longer cool - and it eats them up.

Obama might pull out

Yesterday, Bill Clinton’s strategist, Dick Morris wrote an article speculating that President Obama’s name might not even be on the ballot in 2012 because he might withdraw it.

“As bad news piles up for the Democrats, I asked a top Democratic strategist if it were possible that President Obama might ‘pull a Lyndon Johnson’ and soberly face the cameras, telling America that he has decided that the demands of partisan politics are interfering with his efforts to right our economy and that he has decided to withdraw to devote full time to our recovery. His answer: ‘Yes. It’s possible. If things continue as they are and have not turned around by January, it is certainly possible.’”

This echoes what I said in a Feb 2010 column on this blog:

“Interestingly enough, I think there is a fourth option that neither President Obama nor Charles Krauthammer have considered, that Obama might be a one-term president because his name will not be on the ballot again. It has struck me that besides his left-wing idealism, another core theme running through his personality is a delicate narcissism. When he ran for President, he was a blank slate and, as Chairman Mao once put it, “on a blank sheet of paper the most beautiful poems can be written.” And so it was. Everybody wrote their own beautiful poem on the bank slate called candidate Obama. In this way he became the Messiah, the One. If nothing else, the election campaign of 2008 was a great ego pump. But who will he be in 2012? Not a blank slate. No, instead of offering vague platitudes, he will have to defend the messy details of his record as President. Does Obama want that role? Or more to the point, is he any good at it? Bill Clinton could bob and weave and let the water run down his back like a duck, but can Obama do that? I don’t think so. He certainly hasn’t shown any skill at this. I think he might take the easy way out - declare victory as a good one-term President and ignominiously depart the scene.”

One of the things I based my assessment of was the possibility of a second recession coming up in 2012 caused by Obama’s anti-business policies and, even more importantly, by the stagflation induced by ‘Helicopter Ben’ Bernanke’s printing press.

Fortunately and unfortunately, respectively, I may be right on both counts.

 

The recent Stalinist conference in Toronto

According to the Economist, all you Torontonians out there in the blogosphere just missed this really coool event:

“For all the horrors of Stalinism, brutality, incompetence and other dreadfulness of the Soviet Union, a small fan club remains. Readers may well have missed it, but the grandiosely titled "Third World Congress of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with the Soviet People" met in Toronto on September 9th-11th.  The word “third” does not mean "third world" but indicates that there have been two such congresses after the “temporary demise of the Soviet Union”: the first was held in 2001 and the second in 2005, both of them also in Toronto.

This meeting was attended by around 30 delegates from different parts of the world. Most were from Canada and the United States, quite a few from Russia, and at least one was from the UK. 

On the first day, one of the speakers was Viktor V Bourenkov, chairperson of the Soviet Friendship Society for Friendship with the Peoples in Foreign countries. The stated objective of the society is the rebirth of the Soviet Union and socialism.”

“It is easy to raise a wry smile about the event. Perhaps the ghosts of the millions murdered in the Soviet system, and the tens of millions whose lives were blighted, might not see the funny side. Why is Soviet revivalism a joke, while similar efforts to rehabilitate Hitler are seen as disgusting or outright criminal?”

The reason Soviet revivalism is a joke (as well as remaining to be a perfectly respectable moral system in academia) while National Socialism is regarded as an obscenity, is because the 100 million victims of communism have not been explicitly and repeatedly tied to Marxism in the same way that the 20 million victims of Hitler have been tied to fascism. 

It should be the project of all people who have suffered through communism, and indeed all decent people around the world, to correct this omission. There is a movement by the Eastern European members of the EU to get the European Union to recognize communism as an ideology of hate. In Ottawa, a monument to the victims of communism is being built (after some initial resistance by unsympathetic government bureaucrats).

These efforts should be encouraged, supported and replicated until conferences like “The Third World Congress of the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with the Soviet People” become the moral equivalent of a monthly NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association) get-together.

The War on Terror: what has worked and what hasn’t 10 years on (Part III)

How could the War on Terror have been fought better? 

For what it’s worth, I think George W Bush’s greatest mistake was that he didn’t strike hard enough, fast enough and go far enough when he could. Obviously this view contradicts the conventional wisdom of Bush’s usual critics. The main piece of evidence for my hypothesis is that the biggest national sponsor of international terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is still standing (though suffering from significant internal dissention).

Machiavelli taught that when you strike, you must strike as hard as possible. Half a heart digs the grave deeper. Conventional military wisdom concurs when it advises field commanders that it is not possible to apply too much force at the crucial point in a battle.

This strategic principle forms the basis for my own ideas on how the War on Terror should have been conducted. I developed my thoughts within the first several months after 9/11 so I can’t be accused of 20/20 hindsight. 

At the time, I envisioned using a much larger force – basically the entire US military – to crush not only Saddam Hussein but to use Iraq as a springboard to take out Iran and Syria, rounding up all terrorists that could be found there, providing as much help as possible to any pro-west elements and then getting out while the getting is good. Prior to coming home, and while there would still be about 10 divisions residing in the Middle East, I would have demanded from all the Middle Eastern regimes that hadn’t been invaded (such as, say, Saudi Arabia) that they turn over all the terrorists who live within their borders or kill them - or you’re next. Such a message, sent out at the very pinnacle of victory would result, I think, in maximum cooperation.

While I would have used much more force than George Bush, I would have counterbalanced this by setting a hard time limit (privately, of course) on the operations: about 2 to 3 years. I would not have engaged in counterinsurgency or nation building (but I would have left a small special forces presence to continue to hunt terrorists). As a result, the shooting war would have been more intense but would have ended much quicker - by the 2004 presidential election, at the latest.

I believe the more intense nature of the fighting would still have resulted in a decisive-battle-style moral victory that the much-longer Iraq insurgency struggle ended up providing. Where I think where my plan is superior is on the domestic front. The weakness of George Bush’s strategy was that, by pulling his punches when he didn’t have to, the hot wars dragged on for far too long. If you look at how America responds to wars - and indeed the history of how democracies in general respond to war - the populace tends to support full-scale wars but not the kind of low intensity conflicts that drag on seemingly forever. The people understand perfectly well the need for an occasional war. What they cannot stomach is perpetual war. This is the reason for the apparent paradox that intense conflicts like World War II enjoy popular support while relatively low intensity affairs like the Boer War, the Philippines’ insurgency and Vietnam become enormously unpopular over time.

P.S. Most of this series has been about Iraq. My take on the Afghan war, and the strategy that should have been employed in that country, has already been explained abundantly and can be found here, here, here and here.

 

The War on Terror: what has worked and what hasn’t 10 years on (part II)

It strikes me that when critics of George W Bush criticize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they do so with a static view of the world. They assume that a world without the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would look exactly like the world today minus those wars. If this were indeed the case then those wars would truly be unnecessary. But such a view is flawed because it doesn’t account for the effect of Al Qaeda’s losses in manpower and logistics, as well as the negative effect those wars have had on their morale. One of the Bush administration’s bragging points is that there has never been a comparable follow-on strike to 9/11. Pathetic attempts, like the crotch bomber, only underscore Al Qaeda’s decline.

The counterargument sometimes given here is that the cost of the War on Terror (the lives of 4,500 US servicemen, the wounding of 5 times that many, not to mention the casualties incurred by wartime allies like Canada) is greater than the cost in blood of  9/11: 3,000 dead. Cold calculation can lead one to the conclusion that the US would be better off with no War on Terror even if it had meant another 9/11-style attack. President Obama has himself has opined that the US is capable of “absorbing another 9/11.”

He is right, but again, the thinking is too static. After 9/11, the Islamic fundamentalist morale was sky high. If the only response to 9/11 were a few cruise missile strikes on aspirin factories and encampments, the jihadists would have concluded – quite reasonably – that they can get away with anything. Volunteers would have been lining up around the block to do another 9/11. As a result, the danger would not have been another 9/11 but a dozen more 9/11’s. And let us not forget the spectre of a nuclear attack. In 1998, Alexander Lebed – Boris Yeltsin’s former defence minister - testified at the US House Armed Services committee that between 100 and 400 backpack nukes were missing. Where are they? I don’t know, but on September 12, 2001 it would have been reasonable to assume that some of them may be terrorist hands.

Why haven’t any been used? Perhaps because the powers that be in terrorist circles (that would be the nation states that sponsor the terror groups) have made sure that the terrorists they sponsor don’t get their hands on them for fear of an overwhelming American nuclear retaliation. Absent an American demonstration of resolve in Iraq and Afghanistan, would they still fear a Made in the USA Armageddon? Perhaps, but perhaps not.

Above all, it must be kept in mind that war is a dynamic venture, with the relative strengths of the opponents are constantly changing, and that one of the prime movers in this regard is the morale of the participants. One indication of the level of morale among Islamic fundamentalists is their presence, or lack thereof, in the recent Arab spring. For the first time in recent memory, demonstrations occurred in the Arab world that were not dominated by calls to return to theocratic barbarism or wild threats hurled at the Great Satan or Israel. While it may be possible that the Islamists will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the chaos that has followed from the popular uprisings (this is unfortunately likely in Egypt), it is also undoubtedly true that they are no longer on the leading edge. On the Arab street, they are not leading public opinion any longer but following it, and that is a huge change.

For that, I believe, we have the George Bush’s War on Terror to thank.

Part III of this essay tomorrow.

 

The War on Terror: what has worked and what hasn’t 10 years on

Carl von Clausewitz, the 19^th century Prussian strategist composed his masterwork, On War, to distil the military wisdom he learned from the Napoleonic Wars, in which he participated. One of his key insights was that the purpose of war is not to occupy ground but to defeat enemy forces. This led him to the concept of a decisive battle. As he saw it, war consists of two armies manoeuvring for advantage and only engaging with the enemy when they think they can beat them. Therefore, in battles that are decisive, the battlefield itself and the land surrounding it is irrelevant, except as to how the lay of the land contributes to defence and movement. The only thing that is important is who wins and who loses – and by how much.

The classic example of a decisive battle is Gettysburg, fought over an insignificant town in Pennsylvania but where the Robert E Lee’s invasion of the north was stopped and the cause of the south doomed because the Confederacy could never make up the losses they suffered on those three days. Another example is Stalingrad. The town itself was an irrelevant place, in the middle of nowhere, of no strategic significance and reduced to rubble while the battle was being fought. It was only significant to the dictators of the opposing sides because the place was named after one of them. But still, the battle fought there was decisive because the loss of the Sixth Army forced the Wehrmaht to be on the defensive from that moment onwards. 

Conventional wisdom says that the doctrine of the decisive battle is irrelevant to counterinsurgency, guerrilla warfare and terror campaigns. In ‘asymmetrical warfare’, the battlefield is the hearts and minds of the local inhabitants. On Sept 12, 2001 I agreed with this view.

But in retrospect, I think it is not true, or rather, it isn’t necessarily true. Looking back at the Iraq campaign, I see that a decisive battle was fought there, one that has proven to be the Gotterdammerung of Al Qaeda. The conventional wisdom about Iraq is that because the nation building and counterinsurgency can never really be concluded decisively, the war will drag on forever unless America unilaterally withdraws, which would be a huge moral defeat. Therefore, Iraq must be a failure. One can counterargue that the success of General Petreaus’ surge bypassed both horns of the dilemma, but I think a more fundamental point can be made: that the war over the Iraq insurgency was a decisive battle, and Al Qaeda lost. 

I think the reason many people don’t see this is because of how we usually interpret the phrase ‘hearts and minds’. We usually think of the hearts and minds of the peasants, among whom terrorists and partisans can find sanctuary and operate. Our counterinsurgency boffins believe they can be won over with non-military efforts such as road building and school construction to demonstrate to them that we are ‘nicer guys’ than the enemy. Sometimes this approach is correct. But there is another sense to the phrase ‘hearts and minds’: it means the morale of the enemy. 

At the end of the day war is a destructive enterprise. You do not win over the enemy by appealing to him. World War II was not won in the public opinion polls of Imperial Japan or the Third Reich. You don’t win the enemy over - you destroy his will to fight. This is what decisive battles do. It can safely be said that on Sept 12, 2001, Islamic terrorists were the very opposite of demoralized. They were exultant, they were triumphalistic, they thought victory was in their grasp and that their enemy was weak and vacillating. They imagined that the only response the US was capable of was a Clintonian cruise missile strike. They thought that they had won a decisive battle.

By taking the battle directly to them in Afghanistan, George W Bush disrupted Al Qaeda’s command and control, crippling their ability to launch a follow-on strike. But I don’t believe that the initial victory really demoralized them. It was too quick and bloodless to do that. What truly demoralized them was the protracted 6 year (2004 to 2009) insurgency they launched in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was overthrown and which they ultimately lost when the Surge succeeded. While the US lost about 3,000 men there, the US military killed hundreds of thousands of insurgents. Unfortunately for the Islamists, the US proved more resilient than they had expected, and the US soldier an order of magnitude better fighter than they are. It is easy to find men willing to die for a winning cause; it is much harder to find somebody to die for a hopeless cause. Even the most committed warrior doesn’t want to die for nothing. After 10 years in Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda’s best and brightest are now dead and the ultimate victory of the Caliphate is further than ever.

On September 12, 2001, Al Qaeda was moralized. Today, they are demoralized.

Part II of this essay tomorrow.

The White House: how to properly commemorate 9/11

As can be expected, the tone of the White House’s instructions is condescending, lecturing, focused on President Obama and concerned that Americans are appropriately even-handed.

Who is so pompous as to feel the need to issue instructions on how to commemorate a day of national mourning? Just lead the damn commemoration ceremony and be properly solemn, modest and reverent while doing it!

 

Dick Morris and Byron York caution the GOP: don’t commit suicide by attacking Medicare

The most pressing problem the US is currently facing - besides sky-high unemployment - is out-of-control federal spending. To see how to get that under control one must first understand the reasons why the federal deficit ballooned as much as it did under the Obama administration. In this Washington Examiner piece, Byron York examines this question:

“It's conventional wisdom in Washington to blame the federal government's dire financial outlook on runaway entitlement spending. Unless we rein in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the conventional wisdom goes, the federal government is headed for disaster.

That's true in the long run. But what is causing massive deficits now? Is it the same entitlements that threaten the future?”

“There's no doubt federal spending has exploded in recent years.... That's an increase of $901 billion in spending and a decrease of $338 billion in revenue in a very short time [2007 to 2011]. Put them together, and that's how you go from a $160 billion deficit to a $1.399 trillion deficit.

But how, precisely, did that happen? Was there a steep rise in entitlement spending? Did everyone suddenly turn 65 and begin collecting Social Security and using Medicare? No: The deficits are largely the result not of entitlements but of an explosion in spending related to the economic downturn and the rise of Democrats to power in Washington. While entitlements must be controlled in the long run, Washington's current spending problem lies elsewhere.

A lot of the higher spending has stemmed directly from the downturn. There is, for example, spending on what is called "income security" -- that is, for unemployment compensation, food stamps and related programs. In 2007, the government spent $365 billion on income security. In 2011, it's estimated to spend $622 billion. That's an increase of $257 billion. 

Then there is Medicaid, the health care program for lower-income Americans. A lot of people had lower incomes due to the economic downturn, and federal expenditures on Medicaid -- its costs are shared with the states -- went from $190 billion in 2007 to an estimated $276 billion in 2011, an increase of $86 billion. Put that together with the $257 billion increase in income security spending, and you have $343 billion.

Add to that the $338 billion in decreased revenues, and you get $681 billion -- which means nearly half of the current deficit can be clearly attributed to the downturn.

That's a deficit increase that would have happened in an economic crisis whether Republicans or Democrats controlled Washington. But it was the specific spending excesses of President Obama and the Democrats that shot the deficit into the stratosphere.”

York then goes on to describe the major Obama administration big spending initiatives, excesses too familiar to the readers of this blog to bother quoting. But then he gets to the interesting part:

“Spending for Social Security and Medicare did go up in this period -- $162 billion and $119 billion, respectively -- but by incremental and predictable amounts that weren't big problems in previous years. ‘We're getting older one year at a time, and health care costs grow at 7 or 8 percent a year,’ says Holtz-Eakin. If Social Security and Medicare were the sole source of the current deficit, it would be a lot smaller than it is.

The bottom line is that with baby boomers aging, entitlements will one day be a major budget problem. But today's deficit crisis is not one of entitlements. It was created by out-of-control spending on everything other than entitlements.”

So what does all this mean?

First, the annual US federal deficit increased by $1.24 trillion from 2007 to 2011. Dividing this up, we can say that $681 billion of this can be attributed directly to the recession, $277 billion to Obama’s spending binge and $281 billion to natural increases in middle class entitlements (old age pensions and old age medical care). The first cause can be fixed through increased revenues created by pro-growth policies (deregulation and tax cuts on job creators), the second can be fixed by killing all the new Obama initiatives and the third can be fixed by trimming middle class entitlements. This gets the deficit back down to $160 billion - a very stable number, and one well below the growth rate of the GDP.

The first two initiatives are red meat for the Republican base: white middle and work class people. The third is toxic to many of them and will be (and already has been) demagoged gleefully by Democrats. Don’t be fooled here, this is a real threat to the GOP and a serious obstacle to replacing Obama. Remember that one of the issues that propelled the Tea Party to the forefront were the Medicare cuts mandated by Obamacare.

The logical solution here is to work on the first two solutions and shelve middle-class entitlement reforms for the time being. You can make up most of the $281 billion Medicare and Social Security increases with discretionary budget cuts. Cutting federal spending is always unpopular but not nearly as much as cutting Medicare.

The Machiavelli-of-the-Potomac, Dick Morris, essentially made the same argument a while back in this video, where he criticized the Paul Ryan plan for Medicare cuts. As Morris put it, the Medicare cuts Ryan promises don’t even go into effect until 2022, but the political gift these cuts give the Democrats will manifest themselves in every Presidential election and mid-term from now until them. 

Yes, yes, I know. Medicare and Social Security are fundamentally unsustainable and have to be tackled at some point. But that point is not now, at least in the US (Western Europe is another matter). Eliminating a $1.4 trillion deficit, slashing the unemployment rate in half while getting the US GDP growing again at 4-5% per year, that is enough work for today.

If the next President can do all that, he will be the next coming of Ronald Reagan.

Where Barack Obama is going after he loses in 2012

David Solway makes an interesting prediction about a possibility I hadn’t even considered before:

He probably has his sights set on what passes in his mind for a higher calling.

And that higher calling is not especially hard to discern. If the timing is right, when the insipid Ban Ki-moon vacates his seat as secretary general of the United Nations, Barack Obama will almost certainly be acclaimed to succeed him. As Limbaugh said about liberals, “Failure is a resume enhancement.” The post is tailor made for a charismatic but reprobate ex-president with Third World credentials. The UN is plainly the most corrupt institution on the face of the planet, is massively anti-Israel, and is dominated by the Organization of the Islamic Conference. It seeks to extend its influence into the sphere of transnational and perhaps even post-national governance, working in particular to supersede the purview and enactment of American law. It is flush with privilege and cash. Obama’s “reset” friends are Security Council heavyweights. And the UN secretary general commands the prestige that comes with the numinous accoutrements of supposedly beneficial authority.

This is obviously where Obama belongs, an office in which he can exercise his talent for mischief unencumbered by a restive Congress, fiscal constraints, and an increasingly fractious electorate. He would be in a position to facilitate legislation that redefines the nature of human rights, more in accordance with Islamic assumptions. He would not need to worry about having to veto Security Council resolutions against Israel so as not to alienate Middle America and Jewish campaign donors. The power he would wield might be indirect; nevertheless, with his wealthy and oligarchic friends, his (unearned) Peace Prize, his pectoral sense of self, his ideological convictions, and his gift for legerdemain and bewitchment, this caster of spells could do enormous damage. It would also permit him to exact retribution upon an ungrateful electorate — as of this writing, his approval rating languishes at 39%. He would, in short, be free to practice his specific brand of thaumaturgy.

 Barack Obama: Secretary General of the United Nations. Yep. The job he was made for.