If This Is Not Irony

Condoleeza Rice "sticks up" for India on charges of slavery.

U.S. officials told CNN the question of India's ranking caused a heated debate between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte.

Negroponte wanted India listed as a Tier 3 country, or worst offender. Rice overruled him out of concern about alienating the Indian government. India is on the Tier 2 watch list.

Rice agreed to undertake a special evaluation of India in six months, and then take action if India does not make improvements.

Good Lord. What's next? A Connecticut Yankee posing as a Southern good ol' boy?

New blog

I've been asked to relay a new addition.

Odin's own. Victory Through Airpower - Today. Odin may be more familiar to some from A9 as Blackbird.

I truly hope the title of the blog is a bit of sarcasm. But who knows?

Come on, you can do it

It appears I've made a friend. Mountainrunner is moving away from "motivations" and towards "goals". Of course the dear lad doesn't even realize the difference, but his drollery is still entertaining to a degree. The scribe writes:

It is fascinating, and more a little disappointing, to continue to hear comments like this that accept enemy attempts to attack our will but cannot comprehend the reverse. How very ironic, especially when it comes from those who support "4GW" and supposedly understand the changing nature of warfare.

I'd like to start out by saying I admire the shear brain power this Mountainrunner writes with. She or he is no fool. BUT,

tisk tisk. I never said I supported "4GW" nor did I ever say I "understand the changing nature of warfare." For me, this discussion of fourth generation warfare and an eventual fifth generation warfare is baseless poppycock!

War is a condition of the human soul. We fight every bit as much as we live. The more of us there are, the more likely we are to turn those fights into battles, battles into wars. This is just the human condition. Why do guerrillas fight the way they do? Because that is what they do. Why do we fight the way we do, because we are not guerrillas.

Understanding the "motivation" for the schoolyard bully doesn't change that he'll bloody the nose of any child who stands in his way. It does no good to understand "motivations", other than to say what is blatantly obvious to even a small child: those with power seek to destroy, and those without seek to avenge.

So what of Robb? What of "tactics" and "strategy"? What of "grand strategy"? These are all quaint terms and quaint thoughts. They do more to obscure and confuse than enlighten and refine.

It matters not whether or not the enemy is having a bad day. What matters is how do we find the enemy unprepared to engage?

Mountainrunner is correct that "goals" matter, for goals tell us where the enemy is going to be. I wonder if Mountainrunner would be so kind as to concede that "goals" and motivations are entirely separate, distinct, and altogether different things?

In fact, motivations are but a lazy mind's substitute for dealing with the hard facts on the ground. One of those facts, most acute and painful to all of us residing in the West in this current fateful epoch, is the fiction that there is but one "enemy". That there is but one motivation. Some predefined goal in their DNA perhaps. We could eradicate them as a species. This is Hitler dreaming. "Those evils Jews." Or "those cowardly Arabs."

Motivations, wills, these are all difficult things to pin down. Trying to abstract some sort of global "jihadi movement" out of all these individual actors is playing into the guerrilla's trap.

If Mountainrunner could answer this, then I suppose I would concede his point:

Did the motivations of the Apache tell us anything valuable in the war for the American West, and would such knowledge help America vanquish them any sooner?

I doubt it. But I'm listening now.

Blathering nonesense

Whats all this fuss about John Robb and his failure to describe "motivations" of guerrilla warriors? Robb's book (full disclosure: haven't read it and unlikely to for the next three months) discusses guerrilla warfare in the global age. His blog does the same. I believe Federalist X was quite fond of Robb's blog. I enjoy it as well, but I'm no military doctrinal theorist. Just an average bloke trying to make sense of things.

It seems the critique leveled against Robb is unfair and misplaced. I care more about that latter as fairness in critiquing works has never been a strong suit of mine. The criticism to date, if I can generalize, is thus: John Robb doesn't explain the motivation of his guerrillas, he doesn't go into what makes them tick, so therefore his theory of how to deal with them and where they are taking history is unhelpful. A few tastes of this here, here, and here.

This is sad. An entire generation of Americans seems devoted to nothing but Freudian apologetics. Why do these "thinkers" care so much about the "motivations" of guerrilla warriors? Because Freud said thats important. And what Freud says is the Gospel truth, never mind the evidence to the contrary.

Its true! These neo-conservative, neo-liberal, grand world visionaries are so used to sucking off the milky tit of Freud and the thoroughly discredited academics who espouse Freud's doctrine in the quiet confines of literature departments across the US that they no longer realize Freud has infected all parts of their thought.

We care about the guerrilla's motivations less than we do Billy Budd's. Or is it more? I can't remember. You see my mommy didn't love me enough when I was a boy and so ever since then I've been attracted to the smell of ivory tower feces and a dog's ass.

Robb's writings (cannot speak for his book) are unconcerned with motivations because motivations are spiritual. They aren't really important in a historical context. What are important are the consequences of their actions.

What were the motivations for the US Civil War? The list goes on. I'm sure Sigmund would relate it all to the Lincoln's sexual attraction to negro males. Just as I'm sure Dan, Mountainrunner, and the rest of these "thinkers" would opine endlessly on the sexual aggression of suicide bombers, their orgasmic climax of climaxes, and their aspirations to make love to multiple virgins. But what of the consequences? What of the real world?

Whilst the "thinkers" opine their grandiose notions, those of us living in the material world will be left picking up dead bodies. Our motivations have less to do with psychotherapy, and more to do with revenge. Hmm... that WAS simple, eh Sigmund?

Update

Clearly I'm not the regular poster once imagined. Pity. But I will keep posting when I can. Since others cannot, or will not, that should be good enough.

Speaking of posters, here are some pictures from one of our own. Looks cold!