War Tard

The Syrian Uprising: No foreign intervention when you've got no oil?

2012-02-20T04:06:00.001-08:00

Things are about to get really ugly in Syria.

Uprisings in the Middle East sure were ugly last year but if we're talking Syria, I prefer to use the term civil war. Especially after I watched video coming out of the Syrian city of Homs last week where a father was carrying his dead baby down the street and trying to push brain back into the infant's skull. That's when I knew it was time to turn off the TV and go have a shower or something. Shelling civilians in dense urban areas is pretty much as dirty as war gets these days outside of someone busting out a nuke. The Syrian Army have surrounded the city with heavy armor and are shelling the metropolitan area indiscriminately with the usual array of Soviet era artillery, rockets and air burst mortars. Homs is no minor town either like say, Dera'a, that small provincial southern outpost where this whole Syrian mass protest movement got started back in March last year. No, Homs is a major industrial center and Syria's third largest city with a population of 800,000. It's now considered the capital of the insurrection and mixed up with all those civilians are some elements of the Free Syrian Army (more on them later) holed up in scattered houses with a bunch of sniper rifles and RPGs.

The fun question is whether NATO or the Russians or even the Arab League will get involved to stop the shooting? And the short answer is no. For lots of reasons, not all of which are predicated on the fact that, unlike say Libya, Syria has no oil so there's nothing obvious for anyone to grab. That doesn't mean that Syria doesn't figure in to our global proxy resource war future. It's geography is pretty critical in Middle East strategic terms and that makes it important enough that Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Israel and the US all have a stake in how this mess plays out. That, paradoxically, means it's probably too risky for any foreign player to allow a rival power to get directly involved. That's really bad news if you're a Syrian protester dodging artillery fire. This war has long drawn out stalemate written all over it.

Dictators shelling their own cities is a pretty good indicator that they are not going to go away nicely with a Learjet full of cash to some beachfront condo in Saudi Arabia like Yemen's Salah or Tunisia's Abidine Ben Ali did last year. Syria's dictator, Bashar Al-Assad, is different. He is one of those other kinds of dictators like Kim-Jong-Il; which is to say he's the son of a more famous and hardcore dictator who ran the country for decades, died and passed on dad's pocket police state to their dip shit "Participation Award" winning son. By shelling Homs and massacring thousands, Assad Junior is trying to prove he can be just as ruthless as his asshole father who leveled the Syrian city of Hama back in 1982 when the Muslim Brotherhood tried an uprising against Alawite power. That resulted in a scorched earth policy by the Syrian Army and at least 20,000 deaths; most of them civilians. Right now, it looks like Bashar al-Assad is trying to beat his dad's high score.

    Who knew that some humble fruit seller who torched himself in a market square in Tunisia last year could kick start an Arab Spring and shake up the entire Middle East where the citizens of six Arab countries could trade-in their ruthless dictators and exchange them for a whole new variety of oppressive bastards? Especially considering the strategic and resource rich nature of the real estate those demonstrators happen to be living on. The problem for the West right now is that the entire power structure of the Middle East has changed in the last year and, especially when you consider Egypt, none of those changes are in the West's favor. Having dictators on pay roll was a nice deal and made Egypt a client state costing a mere $2 billion a year to buy off Mubarak who kept Suez running smoothly and promised not to mess with Israel. That's all gone now. Libya is a mess right now too but at least the oil is trickling out. You could view these protest movements, initially at least, as organic uprisings against repressive regimes but considering we're dealing with the Middle East here, selective foreign intervention from the West was inevitable.

    However, the Syrian rebels can expect no intervention from the West this time around. Sure, on the surface you might say that's because Syria has no significant oil worth declaring a no fly zone over. But the reason why there will be no NATO 'no fly zone' over Syria is more complex and plays into the wider global proxy resource wars that will characterize the 21st century. If we really want to know what's going on in Syria, we have to go all the way back to the Cold War. Sure, that's only two decades ago but that's practically ancient history in today's techno sci fi dystopia.

    Syria signed a pact with the Soviet Union in 1956 after the Suez crisis when Egypt decided that they might actually own their own canal so the French, British and the Israelis invaded to tell them they didn't. They were all forced to withdraw however after the US and Russia got pissed at the strategic land grab by the former old world powers and decided to remind those old farts who the new and real superpowers on the planet were. Syria, under martial law at the time and terrified of an Israeli invasion, signed a pact with the Soviet Union. This was a nice deal for both parties. The commies got a foothold in the Levant, a base on the Syrian coast in the Mediterranean and the Syrians got some cool new Warsaw Pact tanks and artillery. Thing is, Syria, like a lot of Arab states is strongman country which means right up until 1970, every guy with an AK tried a power grab and successive mini coups meant the Syrian government kept changing every year.

    It was in this environment that Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970 and organized Syria into a lock down security state mainly to make sure no more strongmen could come along to challenge his rule. Syria today has 57 different varieties of internal security forces making them the Heinz ketchup of desert police states. Like I mentioned earlier, the only serious challenge to his rule was from a bunch of Muslim Brotherhood who considered Assad and the Alawite sect he came from heretical to Islam. Assad surrounded the city of Hama and massacred everyone, to this day considered "the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East".

    Hafez al Assad died in 2000 after 30 years of strongman rule and the Syrian 'parliament' quickly rewrote the rule book so his 34 year old son could take over (previously you had to be 40 to become el presidente). Junior pulled one of those Saddam Hussein type Baath Party elections where no one runs against you and you amazingly wind up with 97.89% of the vote and call it unanimous victory. Which is democracy by desert standards I suppose. With a new guy in charge, a lot of Syrians were hoping for reform and an end to the "state of emergency" that had been in place since 1963. A bunch of small movements and political forums got started in private homes floating the idea of democratic elections. Bashar al-Assad thought about it for about a minute and then decided against it and instead went ahead with locking up everybody who dared voice a contrary opinion; a new desert strongman had arrived.

    Then came the Arab Spring last year and suddenly throwing out asshole dictators became fashionable in the Middle East. The protests started out as teenage graffiti on a wall in the southern farm town of Dera'a and as usual, just like Mubarak and Gaddafi in Egypt and Libya, the dictator gene kicked in and Assad sent in the army. That resulted in dead people which instead of serving as a warning like it might have done 20 years ago, this time it pissed off people right across the political and economic spectrum. The protests grew in size and quickly spread to other cities.

    And right now this fight is entering civil war territory which means it will get even more ugly. We're talking here Lebanon Civil War style ugly. All the ingredients are there especially when you consider the hodge podge ethnic make up of the country. Though 74% Sunni Arab, there a whole bunch of Alawites, Druze, Kurds, Armenians and Turks who could settle old scores if the traditional power structure falls apart. Even then, they'll probably be left to their own devices and no referee will come and break it all up. There are too many conflicting foreign parties involved for any of them to allow the other to scoop up the prize that is Damascus; the heart of pan Arab prestige and the oldest continuously inhabited city on the planet.

    Let's take a look at the complex web of foreign players with a stake in this mess.

    Russia

    The Russians have a naval base in Syria. A pretty important foreign base for them on the Mediterranean. With ties going back to the Cold War, Russia cannot allow their old ally to fall into the hands of the Western oligarchy. Down and out since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is a wounded superpower with designs on regaining her stature. Watching the US run riot across the planet for the last two decades, gobbling up desert real estate wholesale sure has pissed them off. But there is a silver lining. Russia has all that resource rich land mass and with oil only going to increase in price, they're well positioned for the proxy resource war future.

    It sure made me laugh when the Russians vetoed the Syrian resolution at the UN a couple of weeks back. The US media were so shocked while leaving out the fact that the US has vetoed every UN resolution aimed at Israel for the past thirty years. Protecting your client states via UN votes is par for the course in proxy warfare. What's really happening here is that we are entering Cold War Part II. As Russia's oil and gas reserves become more and more valuable, strategic containment of the West is key. Syria and Georgia are just the opening salvos.

    Iran

    Iran is a growing regional power and the West seeks to contain it. With Syria being it's main ally, destabilization in Syria is in the West's interest. A main conduit of Iranian arms to Shia proxy armies (Hizbollah, al-Qassam) in Southern Lebanon, Syria is the gateway for arms shipments to these groups. For this reason, Iran would like to keep Syria open for business and the current regime in power.

    China

    Along with Russia, they used their UN Security Council vote just to hamper the West's designs on the Middle East oilfields. In many ways, they did it for the lulz.

    Israel

     Obviously, Israel would like Syria destabilized but this is a risky game even for them. When Mubarak fell in Egypt, they lost a compliant dictator on their southern border. It remains to be seen if a new regime in Damascus would be compliant enough to settle the Golan Heights dispute. Strangely, you can throw Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Sunni Arab US allies in the region in with Israel as they all fear the growing power of Iran. A weakened Syria plays to this interest.

    The U.S.

    The US would like to see Assad fall because it would push Russia out of the Levant and make it easy to consolidate all their gains in the Mesopotamian oil fields. Syria as a compliant democracy would be vastly weakened insofar as its ability to resist Western encroachment. It would also have the side benefits of knocking out an Iranian ally and cutting arms shipments to Hizbollah in Southern Lebanon.  All in all, a win win on the global chess board. Sure, the country might be left a mess and fall into faction on faction religious warfare but even that kind of chaos is preferable to a hardcore dictator who hates your guts and refuses to play ball. With Syria gone, the only domino left to fall will be Iran for total control of Middle East energy.

    So how does all this play out?

    Most likely it will come down to the Syrians themselves. It is certainly true that foreign special forces have been running around inside Syria, fomenting this along. It is also true that Assad's regime has received weapons shipments from Russia and Chinese 'moral support. Ultimately though, this whole war comes down to whether or not the Syrians can do this for themselves. And as usual, when the shooting starts (as it has) you can brush away that quaint idea that nonviolent protest ever changed any power structure in human history. No need to quote me Gandhi or MLK either. Those peaceful movements only worked because there were far more violent guys waiting in the wings if the peace and love fest didn't work out. So apart from suicidal protesters getting gunned down by the Syrian army, does this protest movement have a little more bite?

The Free Syrian Army and their wide variety of small arms.

    It does and it's called the Free Syrian Army. This army is composed mainly of defecting Syrian Army troops and is under the command of a Syrian air force colonel, Riad Mousa al-Asaad. They claim to be 40,000 strong but this figure is most likely inflated and more realistically in the 15,000 range. Composed mainly of conscript soldiers who either didn't show up for duty or refused to shoot at protesters (risky considering Bashar al-Assad is executing men who fail to pull the trigger on unarmed civilians), they are lightly armed with AKs and RPGs. Most of their operations have been interdiction strikes on Syrian Army supply trucks, hit and run stuff which is the best you can do when you've got no air support or heavy weapons. Only time will tell if the defections continue or if the Syrian Army itself, at least the hardcore element, sees Assad as the lesser of two evils; the other evil being total chaos like in Egypt after Mubarak fell.

   Either way, The Syrian Civil War stays ugly for some time and how it plays out will tell us a lot about the future of the Middle East. And the world.

Phase II: Why the US wants to attack Iran

2012-01-26T06:59:00.000-08:00

Looks like the US is playing musical chairs with its carrier groups in the Gulf of Oman.

The USS Stennis Carrier Group moved to the Indian Ocean last week so the US could transit another carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, through the Straits of Hormuz just to remind the Iranians how screwed they'd be if the shooting starts. The carrier was escorted by the cruiser USS Cape St. George, two destroyers, the Royal Navy anti sub frigate HMS Argyll and even the French got an invite and sent along their own La Motte-Picquet anti sub frigate to fill out the international nature of the party. That's pretty interesting and those frigates show the West's concern at the Iranian submarine threat and the small chance that the Iranians might manage to land a torp in the nuke belly of a carrier. Sure, it's unlikely but the Chinese did manage to sneak a diesel powered sub into the middle of a carrier group during USN exercises off Taiwan in 2006. So nothing's impossible. Also, the USS Enterprise carrier group is on its way and due to arrive in the Gulf in March which is an interesting choice considering it's the oldest nuke carrier in the US fleet, secretly nicknamed the "Mobile Chernobyl" by sailors and due to be decommissioned later this year. Warships passing through the Strait are pretty typical moves but a combined US, UK and French flotilla is unusual and reeks of dick waving to show the pesky Persians what they might be dealing with if they try any 'funny stuff' like mining Hormuz and blocking world oil supply.

Grab popcorn but don't microwave it just yet.

I still say this war is way too scary to enter a shooting phase but that's only because I want to believe Western leaders are not insane. And I keep getting proved wrong on that point. This week's naval moves off the Iranian coast had me rummaging through my library for obligatory Sun Tzu quotes and the best I could come up with was "Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate." The Euros came up with an extraordinary moment of their own this week by way of an oil embargo on Iranian oil purchases that won't take effect till June and is actually a subtle attempt to stop this war from entering the shooting phase. It's a move designed to appease the trigger happy US and Israel so they don't go straight to the bombers and risk setting the world on fire. Of course, the Israelis are still not happy and don't believe it'll stop that theater parity Shia nuke.

Truth is, nothing is going to stop that nuke.

Even if the US and Israel do conduct air strikes on Iran's 15 nuke sites, they still can't physically damage an idea. The Iranian nuke program is diversified enough that even a concerted bombing campaign can at best only delay it a few years. Nobody can put the nuclear genie back in the bottle anymore. So this week I got to thinking of this war in wider global proxy resource war terms and that's when things started making more sense.

Iran is sitting on the fourth largest oil deposit on the planet and has huge reserves of natural gas and that's a sweet energy prize by any account. It's kind of like Inca gold and the Spanish Main in the 16th century... everybody wants a piece of the action. The fun thing about oil is that while it's in the ground, its value is theoretical but not actual. That's actually a plus. For example, when the West grabbed Iraqi oil, they didn't go in right away and start extracting spice like Hungry Hippos. That oil is fine where it is for now. It is control of the real estate above the deposit and a say in how and at what rate those reserves get extracted that really matters. And that's why the Green Zone in Baghdad houses the largest US embassy in the world even after the US pulled out combat troops. Sure, the US can let foreign competitors in to extract the spice and sub contract the work out to other nations, but so long as oil is a dollar based commodity, US economic hegemony of world energy remains intact.

The interesting player here in all this is China. Though a long way from being a military superpower, its economic power is rising fast, so fast that the US and Europe fear the loss of traditional Western dominance of the global economy. The gaping weakness of the Chinese rise is energy supply. And without a credible naval fleet to protect the flow of spice, the weakness of China gets exposed... Chinese dependence on sea borne oil delivery and their susceptibility to a blockade sometime in our proxy resource war future. What the West really fears here in the global energy game of Risk, is Iran having unfettered control of its own huge energy reserves, selling those reserves outside the dollar to geopolitical rivals (China) and facilitating the rise of a pan Pacific hegemon that could contest Western dominance at some point later this century.

That's why Iran is in the cross hairs.

Their whole nuke program is symbolic of their determination not to play nice in the petro dollar chessgame and the question remains, will they get Tomahawked this year because of it?

Let's get to the fun stuff.

How would this war play out if the US does attack Iran? In a nutshell, really badly for Iran. Initially at least. The problem for the Iranians is their dated air defence system based mainly around the Soviet S-200 system. For perspective, Gaddafi fielded this against the US when Reagan bombed Libya in 1986 and even pre stealth F-111s managed to do serious damage for the loss of only one plane. These days, with modern EW jamming in the mix, the US and Israel will dominate the skies above Iran unopposed. Also, the US already knows where all these S-200 sites are which makes them really easy to target. Every time those fixed SAM radar antenna get switched on for maintenance or calibration it's like painting a big fat bulls eye on your air defense network. That goes for the more mobile Soviet Tor (SA-15) system too even if it can drive around, stop, find a target and drive off again. Strangely, the Iranians do have a fighter wing of Shah era US F-14 Tomcats which is pretty funny when you imagine some flailing Persian Top Gun Maverick trying to get a lock on a US bogey. In any possible strike scenario, Iran is pretty much defenseless against 5th generation Western tech. Along with the usual rain of Tomahawk missiles, air delivered bunker busters and the Israelis ruthlessly following up behind, Iran is going to wake up the morning after the raid with a serious hangover. And, I suppose, this is where we get to the the really interesting question.

What will the Iranian response be?

There are so many options it's hard to keep track. One option not often discussed is the concept of Iranian restraint. I've thought about this lately and it does have merits if you're an Iranian general. What happens if they do nothing? Sure, it's a long shot. But what happens if the Iranians let the world see reactors on fire, spewing radiation across the Persian landscape, broadcast pictures of dead babies to the world and try to play this out in the gladiatorial arena of world opinion? You just got sucker punched for a nuclear weapon you don't even have. In a social media world, the idea that Iran could play the wounded stoic here is a viable option and could be worth a try to make it clear who the real 'bad guys' are. Another reason why I like the idea from the point of view of their crazy theocracy is that getting bombed usually results in the "London Blitz effect". Getting bombed by external enemies rallys populations around whatever power structure happens to be in place and sure would hurt CIA funded opposition groups operating in Iran. All those Green revolution kids on the streets of Tehran getting whipped and shot by Basij thugs would suddenly swing rogue if an external enemy bombed their mom's house.

Smart leaders in history like Churchill capitalized on stuff like that.

The problem with politicians and the religious freaks who run countries these days is that they are rarely that smart. The Iranian theocracy is no different. So the question remains, do the Iranians go loud and bust out their myriad asymmetrical options and retaliate against the bombers once Natanz is burning? Who knows? Let's examine the Iranian options:

Unleash a thousand speed boats and mine the Straits of Hormuz back to the Stone Age. Oil price hits $200 a barrel until US/Euro/Japanese minesweepers clear the Strait. It'll take two months to declare the all clear. Meanwhile, in the West, we cry like babies because feeding our car hurts, bread has doubled in price and nobody can afford a new flatscreen.

The Iranians launch their limited supply of Shahab IIIs against Israeli population centers. Tel Aviv gets hit and the Israelis launch a reciprocal strike on the civilian population of Tehran. The doomsday Iranian theocracy doesn't like it. Escalation possibilities ensue. A nuclear missile versus chemical missile war. Mass casualties happen on your TV. (Unlikely).

The Iranians launch Chinese Silkworm missiles (and Shahab IIIs) across the Persian Gulf, hit Saudi oil installations like Ras Tanura and set the world economy on fire. The world enters a new paradigm of what the fuck? Oil hits $300 a barrel, food prices double and you wish you were a farmer who could grow his own food.

The Iranians engage in proxy warfare and pressure Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon to bombard Tel Aviv with the thousands of missiles the Iranians have already supplied them with. The IDF responds with a massive attack on Southern Lebanon and attempts to rectify their 'defeat' in 2006. Thousands die but nobody cares in Western countries because food tastes nice.

Iran activates their foreign asymmetrical "terrorist" cells in the US and Europe, they blow up stuff in Western cities and make already unruly citizens decry another bullshit war that didn't have to be. Meanwhile, Western countries turn into police states because everybody could be a terrorist. Oh wait, that's already happened.

The Iranians do nothing, lament their dead babies and garner worldwide everyman support because they're just another victim of globalization and the ongoing corporate takeover of the world's real estate. Occupy Wall Street protesters finally start wrecking shit.

What's most disturbing is that Western leaders seem prepared to play this casino game of chance. How will the Chinese and Russians react if Iran is burning? That's the real question in this whole cluster fuck. China is a major buyer of Iranian oil. Russia has provided enriched uranium and scientists to run the Iranian reactor at Bushehr since 2009. If Russian nationals die in that attack and if that destroyed reactor is spewing Fukushima levels of radiation across the landscape, what's next? The Russians may be happy to issue stern protests at the UN while secretly laughing to themselves as oil, Russia's main export, pushes beyond the $150 dollar a barrel mark; the mark that crashed the world economy in 2008. Since the Russians rely on oil exports to keep their economy flowing ($110 a barrel oil is the estimated minimum price to keep that former superpower economically growing and appease their restless but dwindling population), the Russians will benefit from the US and Israel's stupid war against Iran.

China, on the other hand, will be pissed. With the just announced Euro embargo, the Chinese have already started demanding discounts on Iranian oil. If there's one thing you can say about the Chinese, they're smart as hell and playing the long game. 5000 years of contiguous history and Sun Tzu can't be wrong. They will see a Western attack on Iran as yet another chess move to block their economic growth and secretly take note of who their real enemy is. One billion people can't be wrong as they continue to conscript their cheap village labor into factories to supply American Wal Marts with cheap plastic goods. For now. Even if Iran is burning, China could be smart, like they've always been, and yet again play the waiting game. In the wake of a US/Israeli attack on Iran's nuke sites, China and Russia will supply the Iranians with military technology to prevent such an attack from ever happening again. It'll be a Rubicon moment in their eyes, the moment when the Western energy lust went a bridge too far. Hell, the Iranians might finally receive a shipment of the Russian S-300/400 SAM system that would make a repeat attack orders of magnitude more difficult for foreign air forces. But, of course, it'll take a year to train Iranian crews in the operation of that sophisticated 5th generation technology.

The Russian S-400 SAM system... The Iranian dream...

Meanwhile, we're all living in Blade Runner.

Let's face it, the US, the Euros, the Russians, the Chinese, India, Pakistan and the Israelis will eventually have to face the truth of what Oppenheimer unleashed in the New Mexican desert in 1945. This is what Oppenheimer said after the first nuke exploded on earth. It still gives me shivers... "We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." In the coming 21st century sci fi dystopia future world, every nation of consequence is going to have nukes. Does Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD philosophy) mean we upright apes get to escape our fate?

No nation wants World War III right now.

But then again, no nation ever wanted a World War ever and yet we dumb humans always manage to stumble into one. That's if 20th century history is anything to go by.

2012 is starting to feel like 1912 all over again.

The War on Iran: Phase I

2012-01-11T09:40:00.000-08:00

In case you didn't notice, the War on Iran has already begun.

You won't hear that said on TV yet though. At least not on US news networks. Those corporate shills need major fireworks before it becomes profitable to switch from diversions to 24hr news coverage of burning nuke sites and Iranian radiation warnings interspersed with commercial breaks for Viagra and Wal Mart. Right now, the biggest military operation of 2012 is still in Phase I. And the corporate media and all the sleazy oligarchy that stand to profit know it's probably best to instead run 24hr news coverage of the Republican primaries where the US gets to choose which corporate spokesman the Republicans are going to run against Democratic corporate spokesman Obama. That's democracy these days folks. You know, that thing the US brought to Iraq via heavy armor.

Next up, Iran. All for WMD nukes they don't even have yet. Reruns of bullshit wars like Iraq would be really boring if the Iran attack wasn't so goddam scary in the first place. But, no matter, 2012 is an election year and nothing gets presidents re elected and clears the streets of protesters like a brand spanking new war. This war is becoming viable to the US and only one Republican presidential candidate of nine is even against the idea.

Sure, I've written before of the possible repercussions of an Israeli strike on Iran's nuke sites and theorized why Israel wants this Iranian strike beyond preventing the Persians from achieving "theater parity" with the Israelis on the nuke front. I've said before the US have been trying to keep the Israelis reined in as far as launching the Iranian air strike solo goes but, it seems, with developments last month and with the way things are panning out in the region, it looks like the Israelis are going to be able to get the US to do the job for them. Or, at the very least, with them.

In the wider context of the whole region, it's not just the Israelis who fear a rising Iran. The Saudis too and Sunni Arabs in general fear the growing power and influence of the Shia. They're sitting on the fourth largest oil deposit on the planet and have an ocean of natural gas on tap too. Their support of the Bahrainis versus the Saudis last year (when the Saudis began to fear a homegrown Arab Spring in their shitty Orwellian police state petro kingdom) had crown Prince Abdullah begging the US to bomb Iran for them. Just last week, the Saudis inked a deal for another 30 billion of US military tech. Also, Iranian support and arms sales to Shia terrorist organisation Hizbollah in Southern Lebanon pisses off the Israelis and they want that whole region neutralized. A war with Iran will pull an IDF tank rush into Southern Lebanon under a perfectly legit umbrella when pulled under the context of a wider regional war. As a fun side note, you know things are heating up in the region when you have a potential war that makes the Saudis and Israelis allies against a common enemy.

Note the ring of US bases and total encirclement of Iran

   Phase I:

   Phase I of any war is the infiltration phase. The recon phase. The phase where you do precision strategic damage and eliminate those targets you can't hit from the air. Special forces stuff. Assassination squads and the like. That's why five Iranian scientists and physicists have died in mysterious explosions since November 2007. The latest death of a scientist came on January 11. Next up, you break out the cyber warfare and deploy the Stuxnet computer worm that delays Iran's centrifuges and disrupts their uranium enrichment at Natanz. This extended Phase I bought time last year to bulk up Western defensive assets in 'theater'. Also, Phase I involved the deployment of drones and ever present spy satellites over the target area and bought more time to gather more intel. The recent Iranian grounding of a classified US RQ-17 stealth drone sure had the CIA and Western military think tanks scratching their heads on the state of Iranian jamming technology.

   Hence the targeted killings of Iranian 'brainy' people. Holy shit, that sounds a lot like "terrorism". I'd sure be terrified if I were an Iranian scientist right now. Of course, you won't hear that in Western media. "Targeted assassination" these days has become a less terrifying euphemism for the media to report in the West. Is not language itself amazing? You can hide any intention in there. But let's face it, if a foreign entity blows up people on the streets of New York or Jerusalem, it's automatic terrorism as far as the media is concerned.

   The interesting thing about Phase I is that it is reaching its conclusion. The final stage began in October when Western countries began running psy-ops against their own public and preparing them for a shooting war in Iran by way of the corporate controlled media. It began with some elaborate media story about Iranian agents plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington but it didn't exactly fly with the public. Even the plebs are getting wise to the machinations of the plutocracy and the whole scheme just sounded like more WMD bullshit. The media then ran stories throughout November 2011 alluding to some amorphous fact that Iran has a bunch of ICBMs ready to rain down mega death on Western capitals. As if that is ever an option for Iran; launching nukes and inviting the West to glass 4000 years of Persian history back to the Stone Age.

   Of course, the Iranians are aware of Phase I and have indulged in some blustering sabre rattling of their own. This came to a crux over the holiday period when targeted Western sanctions against Iran's central bank caused a 10% drop in their currency in a single day. That kind of action hurts but the real question on the table is if the West is prepared to go through with its threat of an oil embargo on Iran. Since 70% of the Iranian economy is based on oil exports, that's the kind of action that would really hurt. Sure, Russia and China would veto any such action if it came to a vote at the UN but that might not matter. The USS Stennis carrier group offshore right now could easily enforce the blockade. The real question is if the West hates Iran enough to take their oil off the market thus causing a spike in oil prices and inhibiting the 'recovery' in fragile Western economies. Yes, the Saudis claim they could make up the shortfall but that is most likely bullshit considering the dirty little secret of the Middle East is that Saudi oil fields are past peak output and getting pumped full of seawater to keep the spice flowing to the top of their wells.

   What has been holding Phase II of this war back (the actual US/Israeli air strike on Iran's 15 nuke sites) so far has been the spider tree of Iranian response strategies. Sure, Iran has no air force capable of retaliating against the encircling US bases in the region or against Israeli population centers. Iran has so many options though, it makes Western war planners shit bricks. However, most of these are asymmetrical and involve proxy armies in Southern Lebanon or disruption of oil traffic in the narrow Straits of Hormuz. (I'll talk about those next week). More interesting right now is Iran's long and medium range missile technology (Shabab 3's and 4's) that are within range of Tel Aviv.

   Israel has always been pretty touchy about civilian casualties (given their small population and tight geography which makes targeting easier) so limiting the damage of an Iranian missile strike is key. Sure, the idea that bringing Tel Aviv under an impenetrable missile defence would be nice but, realistically, that's impossible. Even the latest advances in anti missile tech really only inhibit enemy war planners; that is, they force the enemy to put more missiles and decoys on any given target to assure destruction. They never bring you under a safety umbrella.

   Israel has not completed the formation of its four-echelon missile defense system yet. It will adopt counter-missiles of its (exo-atmospheric) echelon, which allow a second attempt to intercept a ballistic missile warhead, no sooner than 2013. The defense's third echelon - David's Sling - is still in the R&D phase. This reduces the efficacy of Israel's national missile defense, even if it is potentially strengthened by American ground-based THAAD and sea-based Aegis systems. But by 2013, Iran may have a viable war head and once that happens, theater parity is achieved on the nuke front and Iran becomes another North Korea.

   That is, non attackable.

   This is abhorrent to Western military planners and why Phase II, the actual air assault, could come this year. One interesting but quiet development was this week's deployment of US Air Force personnel to Israel ostensibly to run exercises that "simulate the interception of missile salvos against Israel. The American systems will work in conjunction with Israel’s missile defense systems – the Arrow, Patriot and Iron Dome." That right there is Phase II planning aimed at mitigating the possible Iranian response to a large scale joint US and Israeli strike against Iran.

   I've written about the Israeli strike before but next week I'll talk about Phase II and how that analysis changes with the US fully engaged. Stay tuned, deploy popcorn.

   2012 could get interesting fast.

Top Ten war movies on my hard drive.

2011-12-30T03:53:00.000-08:00

Time for some fun Holiday stuff.

I've gotten a lot of emails from readers of this blog over the past year (Holy Shit! This blog is a year old already!) requesting articles on 'this war' or 'that world event' which, I must say, I really do appreciate. People requesting articles makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside so thank you all for that. One of the most common questions I get asked is what kind of stuff I watch or read. So I thought I'd do movies since the 'holiday season' is here and there'll be good stuff on TV to sit down and feel fat and satiated over. Ain't First world problems grand?

Naturally, I'm talking war movies here.

The thing about war movies is that you can probably really only enjoy them if you've never actually been in a war. So long as it remains theoretical, war is entertainment. In many ways movies are the lingua franca of our time, the place where ideas get disseminated into the global culture and the Zeitgeist gets measured by box office tickets sold. Movies today are a lot like how the Romans amused themselves in the amphitheaters only today, nobody really dies, they don't give out free bread and instead charge you a day's salary for the popcorn and sugar water at the in house feeding station. Seven bucks for popcorn! What the fuck?

In writing this movie post, I was thinking of scanning my memory and coming up with some default list of war movies that "the critics" would agree with to make myself sound all erudite and intelligent. But then I'd be bullshitting you. So I came up with a novel strategy. You see, I moved house a while back and had no Internet or TV for a whole five days. To entertain myself, all I had were movies I'd stored on my external drives. And I said to myself, these must be the movies I really like and not the ones I should like since those on my drives were the ones I'd deemed worthy of digital storage. So I used that criteria to compile this list...

Sure, I'm probably leaving out a whole bunch of great movies and your favorite war movie but what the hell. Here, in no particular order, are the war movies I re watch when I find myself getting philosophical at 3AM and need to remind myself how fortunate I am not to have been born in the wrong place at the wrong time and conscripted as a foot soldier into some general or politician's pocket shooting war.

WATERLOO

Seriously, they don't make them like this anymore. Made in 1970, before today's CGI (where today they hire fifty extras to run around in the foreground while bulking out the background with 50,000 pixelated enemy formations), this is a movie that truly 'spared no expense' and hired real actual men to act out the pew-pew. And it sure does show on screen. You get to see thousands of guys dressed in period costume run around that Belgian field re enacting one of the most decisive battles of all time. It really puts you there. Muskets, line formations, cavalry attacks, infantry squares, the whiff of grapeshot, cannon balls, it's all just brilliantly rendered by actual men. Wide shots reveal huge line infantry ranks while you can almost hear producer Dino De Laurentis shitting bricks in the background wondering if this production was going to pay off. Rod Steiger plays the titular little man with the emperor complex and Orson Welles shows up as "the unavoidable" Louis XVIII, the last French monarch to die without being king. Watch this if you want to see 50,000 extras in full period costume run around on screen for real!

A BRIDGE TOO FAR

This is classic stuff. Made by seventies era logic, a different time when WWII was still fresh in the Zeitgeist's memory. As a kid back then, all the comic books were still WWII based; Victor, Warlord and Commando. The WWII generation were entering their golden years (we survived the war but we're going to die anyway...argh!) So war movies as retrospective were popular. And it was a time when it was still possible to make an epic movie with a shitload of Hollywood stars who took a pay cut to make something huge possible. Check out that cast list! Directed by Richard Attenborough, it was all for a movie about a 'little' operation called Market Garden; Montgomery's 1944 dick waving attempt to end the war fast and prove he had balls and could be as unpredictable and foxy as the great man in the desert himself, Rommel. In the end, Montgomery's gambit failed. Maybe it should have been planned by my favourite British general of WWII, Richard O'Connor. The idea that you could para drop 30,000 men behind German lines, capture bridges and clear the way for an armor thrust into the heart of Nazi Germany to end the war quickly was pure hubris built on the Allied success at Normandy and the capture of Paris. Here, in 1944 on the Western Front, the Wehrmacht proved it still had teeth! The scene with Robert Redford rowing across a Dutch canal under enemy mortar fire stands out. "Holy Mary...mother of God..." Brilliant war movie stuff!

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN

Before you think I only watch '70s war movies, let me throw Spielberg's amazing movie into the mix. I remember watching this in a Santa Monica theater in the '90s and it was like all my stupid fascination with men killing each other got thrown against the fire of visceral reality. War is fucking horrible. And that's why it sells tickets. Because we humans love it. From the nail biting 20 minute Normandy opening sequence, on through the accurate representation of WWII equipment (that Tiger tank looked really real!), you cannot escape this movie if you want to get your war on. It's a total experience. It really does put to rest that movie trope where, after guns get fired, people handily die neatly so the main characters can move on with the rest of the plot. That's the shitty thing about war movies generally. They always leave out the awkward wounded, that sad fact that after an engagement you're left with say 20 dead but 60 more wounded screaming in pain and calling out for their mom. Fucking reality, how does it work? This movie doesn't flinch when it comes to examining the ugly truth of pulling the trigger on a live human. Men die and it's ugly. War is the worst thing about our species. And, worse still, sometimes it's justified.

APOCALYPSE NOW

'Nam. The jungle. Napalm. A soundtrack by The Doors. A script by John Milius based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. And directed by Coppola who remortgaged his house to get it finished after the studios pulled funding after the whole production turned into a cluster fuck in the Philippine jungle. This is the Vietnam war movie for me. Hell, they even made a movie about the war zone making the movie became! But how can you not like the end product? One of those rare auteur movies that don't get made anymore because everything that gets green lit in Hollywood these days has to pass through shitloads of corporate fucktards who run market analytics and get back to you on Thursday.

Marlon Brando showed up on set 100lbs overweight after cashing the million dollar check Coppola wrote him, so Coppola had to improvise on the fly, filming the final Col. Kurtz scenes in close ups and shadow. He made it work! It's an artistic vision, a philosophical journey and damn tour de force film making. The newly released Redux version adds a good fortyish minutes to the original and highlights French history of meddling in Indo China by way of a dinner conversation and a sensuous opium smoking lady. If you're partial to the 'herb', there's no better war movie to sink your mind into and become one with the screwed up violent nature of us upright apes.

THE LONGEST DAY

The definitive D-Day movie. Hands down the best. Based on Cornelius Ryan's book (again) with a slew of military consultants on hand who actually participated in the landings, this is the movie to see if you've got three hours to sink into epic war. Again, the cast list is a who's who of Hollywood at the time and all actors took a pay cut so it could get made. One of my favorite aspects of this movie is the accurate rendering of all participants (the Germans are not portrayed as mindless goose stepping Hitler lovers and speak actual German with subtitled English) and so too is the role of the French Resistance (not brain dead frog surrender monkeys with a penchant for wine and running away) like the American Right liked to portray when they came up with "Freedom Fries" in the cafeteria, this movie is detailed and accurate. Sure, there are some hokey bits with John Wayne showing up but we're talking early 60s here so we've got to forgive the iconophry and get with the program.

This is strict by the book narrative and it works. It's pure war movie goodness.

THE THIN RED LINE

Yeah sure, that choice is going to throw some of you. Sure, the hill assault scene is amazing. But you know what? This whole war movie sticks with you. Sure Terence Malick is the kind of director that gets accused of masturbating onto film but I "get it". It's art. It's war. Sometimes they meet like the WWI poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. Who doesn't realize the thin line between life and death more than a soldier in war? That's the question that gets asked here. The philosophical wonderings are sweet. In a way, they capture what soldiers really think (at least in the eyes of an artist). Plenty of people think it's not a great war movie but I re watched it recently, and, as I get older, I really can connect with the life and death philosophy of war that Malick here tries to explore. It's a superior war movie and you should like it.

SALVADOR

Not exactly a full on war movie I know. But I'm throwing it into the mix because I love it so much and fuck everything. James Woods as the gonzo journalist in an impossible war zone is my fantasy alter ego. If only I had the balls to sneak into Syria right now. Oliver Stone wrote the script, directed the movie and I suppose it should be mixed up with 'Platoon' and 'JFK' which means I'm tipping my hat to those movies too. But Salvador is my favorite Oliver Stone movie. Gringos meddling in South America has never led to anything good (just ask Cortez) but this gritty movie highlights that in spades. The harrowing scene at the end where border control seizes his newly acquired wife wrecks my head every time I watch it. It's as relevant today for all nationalities where 'small people' get caught up in global chessgame proxy resource wars. After we wreck your country because we don't like your government, don't show up on our border as a refugee. You'll get called an 'illegal alien'.

FULL METAL JACKET

Can you leave Stanley Kubrick out of any favorite movie list? Probably not possible. Sure, who doesn't love Dr Strangelove or Barry Lyndon? But Kubrick knocked it out of the park in this study of how ordinary men get mind fucked into being 'soldiers'. This movie is the ultimate meditation on war. Young kids plucked from adolescence and transported into a reality devised by old men. Old men that run countries and see war as a solution. The hierarchy of human affairs is on display here against the background of the Vietnam War. This movie is ugly, visceral and somehow quiet. It's kind of like war itself.

GALLIPOLI

I love Australia. And I love Peter Weir. This is probably the greatest 'anti war' movie ever made. Seriously. And it was all Churchill's fault when he was 'First Lord of the Admiralty". Chucking the ANZACs against the Turks, hoping to open up a new "Southern Front" versus German allies sounded like a good idea, but in practice, it turned out to be one of the worst ideas in military history. Those guys got bogged down into one of the worst impossible situations in military history. But the Aussies and New Zealanders were thrown against the problem nonetheless. The ANZACs have always been great fighters as far the the British Empire went but this was not their finest hour. Why? Because Churchill fucked up. He wasted divisions in an amphibious assault that got bogged down on a beach and a rocky coastline versus machine guns. This movie not only shows the futility of that operation but also the totality itself. Young men seek adventure. And old men equip them with weapons and point to an enemy and say that is where adventure is.

MASTER AND COMMANDER

Do you have an interest in the Age of Sail? Sure you do. This movie depicts it brilliantly. There was a time before our Facebooky, Twiterized world when shit was really real. That means you getting pressganged onto a Royal Navy ship in the 18th century. That sure was a scary time. (By that logic I suppose, when was there a time in human history that wasn't scary). Still, if you want to know how the British built their empire, this movie approaches it. Sea power. A dominant navy. The world got explored by wooden Euro ships and this movie captures that idea. Rival Euro powers killing each other for golden trinkets stolen from foreign shores? Sure. But this movie has more. It recognizes science too and how warfare and enemies propel us forward as a species. The British gave birth to a Darwin in the wake of conquest. In a way, the US landed on the moon to beat the Russians. We humans are propelled forward by conflict. It's ugly. We're sad. But it is.

Oh yeah, and there are great cannon battles on roiling sea. Do you aim at sail or hull? This movie puts you there and makes you realize how lucky you are not to be a crew member. Your life today is basically the dream of every sailor. Food, clothing and shelter are today things we take for granted. There was a time when your life now was the dream of the ages. Even if you're poor as fuck, these days the life of a poor man is so much better than a poor man's life in the past. These days, the poorest pleb has a better diet than the King of England in 1750. The modern world scares the shit out of me but you know what, the visceral reality of the past and this Royal Navy movie scares me even more. I got born in the perfect zone! A rare 1980s incarnation which will be seen by future historians as the perfect war free zone in comparison to the global proxy resource wars that will come later in the 21st century.

KELLY'S HEROES

I'm throwing this movie into the mix and yeah, I know it has no place here. But you know what, it's probably my favorite war movie. Yeah sure, that's horrible. Why? Because it's war as comedy. War as something other than tragedy. That's so wrong. And yet I love it. I remember watching it as a kid and crying buckets when it ended. The camaraderie. Soldiers in war. The idea that being shot at binds you together as men. Roman legions operated off this principle. All soldiers do. And as a kid, this movie made my child's brain realize that. Sure, there's something wrong with us as humans if we organize ourselves into armies and make it an industry and devise elaborate ways of killing each other. But in my child's brain, there was something in this movie that appealed to that dark side of my brain.

War as comedy. War as binding men together for a common goal. Sure, I'm bullshitting here but tell me you don't love this movie. Oddball coming out of the tunnel in a Sherman tank gunning down Nazis, Don Rickles weighing up the price of gold and that classic scene where Eastwood, Oddball and Telly Savalas confront a Tiger Tank with Sergio Leone music. War is terrible. But for some reason this movie turned war into fun. For whatever reason, my ten your old brain cried when it ended. WW II was probably the last 'good war'. War will never be so simple again. The bad guys will never be so easy to define in our proxy resource war future. This movie, for me, harks back to a time when war was worth it.

Anyway, that's my mind dump on war movies.

Kim Jong Il: Crazy like a Fox!

2011-12-20T12:01:00.000-08:00

2011 has been a pretty shitty year for dictators who like holding on to power and not dying.

Dictator expiration dates this year started in Ivory Coast and spread to Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya and Yemen. That left Laurent Gbagbo and Mubarak locked up awaiting war crimes trials, Abidine Ben Ali and Saleh looking for beach front property in Saudi Arabia and Gadaffi dead. Assad is barely holding on in Syria and that is probably why it's the only civil uprising I haven't written about this year. Probably because it's been the least likely to succeed.

The death of Kim Jong Il on Sunday at the age of 69 means he's the only dictator to lose power this year due to "natural causes". That's pretty funny when you think about it. But seeing all these tongue in cheek obituaries of the Korean leader on the likes of CNN or Fox News, hinting at the fact that he was a crazy mother fucker, mental or certifiably insane, well, that kind of bullshit wasn't so funny to me and did bother me a little more than watching any US news network usually bothers me.

Why? Because Kim Jong IL was crazy like a fox.

Sure, Kim Jong Il had a fucked up hairdo and got wasted on Hennessy XO and ate caviar while his country starved but that's not really how you judge a dictator these days. Most men have foibles and eccentricities, hell, I'm a walking nightmare myself and wouldn't stand up to too much scrutiny if some media outfit stuck cameras in my face but that's not how you judge dictators in our current sci-fi dystopia. No, these days, and probably always, at least going back as far as the Greek city-states and their occasional 'tyrant' rulers, the general rule is that bat shit insane rulers get judged on one thing and one thing only.

How long do they manage to stay in power?

Thing is, crazy people don't stay in power very long. Just like Roman emperor Caligula, it doesn't take more than a few years of crazy shit (making your horse a general, constantly banging your sister) before the army gets sick enough of your shit to stab you to death in your sleep. By this logic alone, the only thing that really matters when you talk about dictatorships is longevity and by this accounting we can say one thing about Kim Jong Il...

He was not fucking crazy.

In fact, from a maintaining power perspective, the guy was smart as hell.

From the moment his bigger and greater and much beloved daddy (the father of modern North Korea) Kim Il Sung died in 1994, people wondered if Kim Jong JR could pull off his father's job and fill daddy's shoes. That's never been an easy job for less gifted sons and in 1994 that job was getting even more difficult for North Korea and Kim Jong JR in particular.

A lot of people don't realize that North Korea wasn't always totally screwed up.

In fact, during the Cold War and in the years after the Korean War, the North was actually more prosperous than the South. Not because they were churning out cool stuff or selling anything on the world market but simply because they had a superpower friend in the Soviet Union who supplied them with mega tonnages of grain from the Ukrainian steppe and filled out the North's army with the latest Warsaw Pact military equipment. China too, with their baby brother commie neighbor next door still hadn't turned into the hyper capitalist police state it is today. They too had a policy of making sure that their commie Southern neighbor had enough food to feed everybody and nothing tarnished communism's "good name" around the world. Kim Jong's daddy presided over all this while experimenting with his very own little Orwellian pocket country and cast himself as the cult leader of his own totalitarian police state. Seems he read Nineteen-Eighty Four as an operational tech manual and missed the idea that it was supposed to be fiction.

Kim Il Sung: Still worshipped by everyone.

But this free ride was dying by the time Kim Jong Il got his chance to lead North Korea in 1994.

The Soviet Union was gone now along with all that free food and monetary aid. China was turning free market and their sickly neighbor to the south was being seen as more and more of an embarrassment and liability. China to this day views NK like some famous movie star might view an awkward retarded brother who has a habit of masturbating in public and ruining famous older brother's PR. Sure, you can slap him around for doing it but that'll just draw more attention and get you in trouble for child abuse. Your only choice is to sit there and enjoy your prosperity and fame while accepting the fact that your awkward brother occasionally jizzes on your leg.

And that's been Kim Jong JR's leadership plan since the day he took power.

Pretending he's crazy and jizzing on people.

Kim Jong Il took power with a pretty shitty hand and managed to play bluff poker with it for 17 years. He threatened the South Korean capital with thousands of artillery pieces and pretended everyday he was just crazy enough to use them. The South responded with a policy of "Sunshine Diplomacy" which was basically a policy of giving Kim Jong lots of cash in return for him keeping his dick in his pants.

To get his hands on some American dollars, Junior started work on a nuke and even played crazy enough to get the Americans, the Japanese and the South to help build him a $4.6 billion light water nuclear reactor in Kumho in 1994. This was seen by the West as a better deal than continuing to have the North operating its two existing gas-graphite reactors which were unstable but easier to breed plutonium from. Kim Jong IL played crazy and bagged the cash.

Every time Kim Jong felt the Japanese were getting too big for their britches, he'd rustle up a missile 'Test" over the Sea of Japan and pretend it was 'necessary' which invariably made the Japs go screaming to the Yanks looking for them to do something about the crazy person next door. Usually, this meant another few million tonnes of food aid, energy supplies and a wagging finger hoping the crazy guy doesn't do it again. If the West didn't have such corporate controlled media, this whole strategy would be labeled 'appeasement' by Fox News. But instead the likes of CNN and Fox called Kim Jong Il crazy and threw their hands in the air and accepted the politician's line that there were no better options.

Kim Jong Il played bluff and if he played crazy enough, there was always, from a Western point of view, the chance he might deliver in spades and press the big red button of win on Seoul. That'd be a lot of Star Craft games interrupted. For all his rich neighbors, it was easier to just pay the 'protection' money the 'crazy' guy demanded.

Where things got interesting was when North Korea went through with an actual nuke test in 2006. They finally broke into the fission club even though Kim Jong had signed the NPT. Sure, seismic readings indicated the underground test was a failure on the Richter Scale and the expected kilo tonnage was below yield and only a partial chain reaction. But it still made everyone in the region shudder and food and monetary aid finally dried up. It was a bridge too far. Carrots weren't worth it anymore for his neighbors. Kim Jong Il knew his country was dying and he needed more aid and cash if he wanted to pass off the goodies to his son. At home, he was forced now to rely on the cult of personality state he'd inherited from his father and total lock down of information from the outside was key. The huge Army and security apparatus meant that information on the State was in lock down even when the people starved.

Sure Kim Jong would up the stakes every now and again and sink a SK Destroyer, shell a disputed SK Island and threaten madness on Seoul but Kim Jong always had survival in mind and was never interested in an actual shooting war. An Apocalypse on the Korean Peninsula was never his goal. It was a war he knew he could never win.

Despite the mega casualties, he knew South Korea would always win a war with the North. The US and SK would lay waste the North in a month. And that's where China would come in. That's why they never wanted this war to happen either and preferred North Korea as some kind of metaphorical buffer zone against the West. After the initial flurry of steel rain on Seoul, the usual disruption and loss of life would ensue. There would be street battles in Seoul between SK troops and the North's special forces who might infiltrate the capital through tunnel networks under the DMZ. Still, without modern armor this force would always be a symbolic force so Kim Jong could feel good about being the mighty leader of his brainwashed zombie population in Pyongyang. The battle of 1970s Warsaw Pact equipment versus modern laser guided and night vision equipment would stand no chance and the counter attack would be merciless.

Kim Jong Il never had any illusions he could win this war.

The US and South Koreans would begin a co ordinated air campaign after the initial NK artillery barrage on Seoul, targeting North Korean radar sites initially and also going after as much of that arty North of Seoul as they could. I can see that being a turkey shoot of epic proportions for the US and South Korean pilots. That along with counter battery fire from the US and SK in the South would lay waste the North's artillery to a manageable level (mobile potshots from self propelled arty hiding under bridges and in tunnels excepted). Interestingly, this might be the time North Korea decides to break out the chemical or biological weaponry and lay down a plague on Seoul.

You see how the crazy never ends?

Any actual shooting war on the Korean peninsula would lead to regime change and if the current elite in Pyongyang are interested in anything, it is self preservation. That's why the political elite will probably go along with this power transition to Kim Jong -un. At least for the time being. They'll wait and see if he's their kind of crazy. The kind that can maintain the status quo and power structure in North Korea for another 30 years. In many ways, that's a special kind of calculated crazy that keeps the elite in power, the people starved, afraid, dependent and the state itself in control of all information.

Shit's so scary these days, the real crazy question in all of this is if North Korea is the past or the future of our crazy species.

Drone Warfare: How UAVs are changing the 'rules' of 21st century conflict.

2011-12-07T06:04:00.000-08:00

Warfare is taking a new turn in the 21st Century.

If there's one weapon that proves we're living today in some kind of dystopian future sci fi novel it must be the existence and increasing capabilities of unmanned attack drones. The deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers at the hands of NATO last week and the resulting diplomatic shitstorm shines a big fat xenon flashlight on how future proxy resource wars are going to play out.

The future will be war by remote control.

All those drones you read about hitting targets in Pakistan or Yemen or whatever other strategic desert the US gets interested in these days are piloted remotely by US Air Force personnel operating from air conditioned rooms on the far side of the planet from the target zone. How sci fi is that? The base of operations is Creech Air Force base just outside Las Vegas in the Nevadan desert. From here pilot commands get relayed around the globe by a network of military satellites and deliver precision death from the sky on the cheap. Drones can deliver a Hellfire missile for far less cost than a $350 million F-22 Raptor can. And target damage is the same no matter how that ordinance gets delivered. Pilot training is cheaper too with the added caveat of not risking a pilot's life in the process and, let's face it, with a whole generation of unsupervised 12 year old Xbox Live kids sitting home alone with an overworked mom and a dad who bailed to Reno with the babysitter, the US Air Force already has a built in supply of semi trained potential pilots on standby. That is, of course, if the Air Force brass don't mind their com channels filled with terms like homo, faggot and fuck this lag.

But the real question posed by unrestricted drone warfare is how drones change and re write the rulebook and ethics of modern warfare itself. Brookings Institution policy wonk PW Singer makes a chilling observation:

IF armed unmanned drones are used against legitimate military targets in, say, Pakistan
AND these drones are piloted out of the suburbs of Las Vegas, Nevada
THEN is a Pakistani 'radical' car bomb in the Walmart parking lot outside that Air Force base in Las Vegas an act of terrorism... or a legitimate act of military retaliation?

That right there my friends is one of the most interesting military questions of our time.

Is the 'War on Terror' justifiable if you can remotely deal death from the skies on the other side of the planet and call it 'military action'? By that very logic, a Pakistani or Yemeni national chucking a grenade into an American Mall food court during the Christmas shopping season is a military strike and not terrorism. The new paradigm of 21st century US drone warfare makes all civilians targets and covert operations 'outside theater' on US soil by Middle East nationals legitimate acts of war.

The other interesting thing about drone warfare is that it pits high tech versus low tech.

High tech industrial economies versus low tech desert strongmen sitting on the oil everybody wants. Those on desert sands who don't play ball in the global energy chess game get called 'terrorists'. Those who go along with the program get called 'allies'. It's a global petro dollar game of Risk and it sure is fun to watch if you're a fan of how 21st century proxy resource wars are going to play out.

Drone warfare offers high tech societies a future where they can minimize casualties by using machines. It's easy to see why Western war planners like the concept. In Western countries human casualties still matter. Volunteer armies are not easy to recruit. Sure, the current state of Western economies makes recruiting easier simply because there are a whole lot more people in search of a paycheck. But in the US right now the Army still buys air time on TV and runs commercials showing how cool it is to run around in foreign deserts dressed as a soldier and shoot 'enemies' while omitting the unfortunate fact that you might die while doing it. Not dying in a war has always been a key goal for every soldier. It's kind of important. Bodies coming home pine boxed from foreign shores always put a dent in the war aspirations of politicians. Kitchener's WWI "I Want You" posters were similar beguiling motifs back in 1914 but that was a different time, when throwing generations of young men onto the Somme didn't lose you street cred. Today, shit's different. Casualties matter more than ever in our corpo sci fi dystopia because everybody wants to live forever so they can continue buying cool new TVs.

Let's face it, we're living in Blade Runner.

The US is way ahead in drone technology but that doesn't mean there are not a whole bunch of other nations fast tracking their own remote machines to give their generals something new to play around with on their war planning desks. Drones are such a hot commodity right now and their worth so precious that the US won't sell them except to "trusted partners" (code speak for the UK and Israel). And even those sales are only previous generation stuff (unarmed Predator recon types) while the US keeps all the serious stuff (armed stealth drones) for themselves. When the US restricts arms sales, you know they're pretty serious about drone warfare and future tech.

The standard vanilla US drone is the Predator MQ-1.

    Designed in the early nineties as an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, it didn't take the Air Force brass or the CIA long to figure out that fitting some AGM-114 Hellfire's on that baby could make it a pretty potent interdiction craft. The Predator family soon expanded into four variants, all rear prop driven and they've been used all over Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and Iran though the US government refuses to acknowledge their attack role even though you can read about it in every newspaper every day.

    The fun part of this story is that the US just lost one of their top secret RQ-170 Stealth Drones over Iran this week. That sure must have pissed the CIA off and earned some X-Box kid at Creech AFB a sizable pay cut. I mean, that wreckage is liable to wind up in some Chinese science lab pretty soon just like the wreckage of the F-117 Stealth fighter that was shot down during the Kosovo War did, downed by the Serbs with a shitty Soviet SA-3 system that proved awesome back in 1999. The US responded by "accidentally" dropping five 2000lb JDAMS on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade two months later but it still wasn't enough to prevent the wreckage boarding the fast train to China. The RQ-170 'wreckage' in Iran is probably bound for the same fate. [UPDATE] Iran just displayed the captured drone and it looks perfectly intact!

    The Iranians are claiming they jammed it and hacked the controls by way of a 'cyber attack' and I, like everyone else, thought that a bit of a stretch considering their whole nuke program got grounded last summer by a computer virus. But that intact drone footage sure seems like a 'controlled' landing to me. I'm sure the CIA are having a shit fit behind the scenes. They barely even acknowledge the existence of the RQ-170 Stealth Drone in the first place. To have one on display in Tehran and picked over by Iranian tech crews has fail written all over it from a US point of view.

An RQ-170 was spotted in 2009 at a remote airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan which is funny when you consider the Taliban have no radar to track it in the first place and rely on good old goat panic as an enemy early warning system. The RQ-170 was stationed in Afghanistan but obviously had bigger prey in mind. That Stealth Drone is the system that kept an eye in the sky on Bin Laden's house in next door Pakistan while the SEAL Team raided it and, incidently, where the US lost that 'Stealth Helicopter' that nobody even knew existed.

Iran's new perfectly intact wreckage!

These latest developments in classified robotic warfare, projects like the RQ-170, are developed at the famed Skunk Works facility in the Californian desert. That top secret tech development center and the experimental aircraft rolling out of there bring up another fun question in all of this and that is the very nature of Air Power itself. The US Air Force branched out of the Army in 1947 after the strategic bombing program over the Reich proved so successful if you didn't give a shit about civilians. Hell, Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved that in spades when civilians were the actual target.

However, in our current logic, this does tend to cause problems. Especially when you're fighting the smaller proxy resource wars the US finds itself engaged in on multiple fronts today. There was even one fun report by way of Wikileaks a while back, that revealed that British forces in Afghanistan had actually put in a request for the US to stop bombing by drone because they were missing their targets too often and killing civilians; acts which made the whole ground war over there more difficult since landing a bomb on a goat herder's mud shack and wiping out his whole family is likely to turn that goat herder into a fully committed IED laying enemy combatant pretty fast.

    But the truth is, there is no stopping the robot future. No US politician and no sleazy defense contractor is going to sit back and let the Chinese or Russians catch up. We're on the fast track to robotic war. The scope and theater of this war is unlimited when you consider the retaliatory strike options on US soil from low tech guys with no access to RQ-170 stealth aircraft of their own but plenty of access to U-Haul trucks and fertilizer. No one knows what UAVs will unleash in the future.

    Only one thing is for sure about the future when it comes to us humans.

    There will be warfare there.

Doomsday Scenario: A nuke in a major world city.

2011-11-22T08:26:00.000-08:00

I got to thinking the other day of global doomsday scenarios.

Yeah, I'm that miserable.

And I'm not talking ancient Mayan calender 2012 galactic alignment bullshit either. If this world goes belly up, it'll be entirely our own doing. Asteroid impacts and super volcanoes have a habit of taking too long. And let's face it, doomsday forecasting is a pretty common hobby these days. Especially in Western economies where we're all looking around and wondering what the fuck happened? Europe and the US are going through an existential crisis right now. With 50 million people on food stamps in the US and the Euro currency on the brink of implosion, it's logical that there are a whole lot more plebs willing to wander outside their comfort zones and don a figurative and funky hand drawn cardboard "The End is Nigh" sign on the doorstep of their local supermarket. The global elite stole all the cash. Tragic and criminal, but not exactly a full on Domesday Book. At least not yet.

    I've got a Doomsday scenario which I'm pretty much convinced is written into the DNA of the 21st century. It just has to happen. From the moment Oppenheimer marvelled at his 'destroyer of worlds' fireworks in the Nevadan desert in 1945 and us upright apes stumbled across fission, a Fat Man going off in a world city sometime in the future was pretty much written into the narrative. It's a simple numbers game. In the long run, the probability of nuclear disaster goes to 100%. The fewer people who have the bomb, the longer that event will take to occur. That's the whole philosophy behind the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    Postponing D-Day.

    But really, it's just a matter of where and when. That's just how we humans roll. What good is inventing a super weapon anyway if it never gets used? The time interval between Hiroshima and a rogue nuke blast in a major world city will be seen by future historians as a mere blip because once it happens, you'll be able to skip all the mediocre history in between.

It will be the event that will change everything.

And yeah, I'm aware that I'm sounding like the guy with the cardboard sign outside the supermarket. Doomsday forecasting is a pretty shitty enterprise because you are always wrong up until the time you are right. And by the time you are right, nobody gives a shit anymore because they're too busy looting the local 7-11 for canned goods.

How will it happen?

For one thing, it won't be a nation state affair. The Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) paradigm has worked out pretty well for the last sixty years and I don't see that changing anytime soon. When the event comes, it won't be the major powers trading ICBMs. At least not at the beginning. No, when the big one goes off in New York, Los Angeles or London (or, just as likely, a smaller but significant world city near you) it won't be because China or Russia sanctioned it. That'd just be insane on every body's part and invoke a "take us back to the Stone Age" war. No, when the fireworks come, the nuke will be 'rogue', some low yield, low tech piece of shit lifted from an arms depot in Pakistan, traded on the black market in some Albanian dive bar and detonated by a bunch of whack job religious freaks with some beef against your version of what god you'll meet after you die. (If any).

Sure, the 'War on Terror' is bullshit designed to stake a claim on Mesopotamia's oil reserves but that doesn't mean there are not a whole bunch of people out there who hate the West's guts and very willing to press the red button. In fact, there's easily enough seething animosity at current Western Mid East policy that enlists no shortage of reactionaries willing to let loose the Unforgettable Fire for whatever eschatological reason you want to choose from. The 21st century corpo techno dystopia we're all living in means it's only a matter of time before nukes fall out of the hands of nation states and into the hands of a genuine Bond villain.

Source number one?

Pakistan.

That's right, America's ally from hell.

Pakistan is the country in the world right now that gets zero media attention versus its time bomb weight in international affairs. Sure, US military doctrine is all about surrounding Iran and engaging in proxy resource wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the true energy wars are still a decade away. There's an old saying in military generalship circles when embarking on any campaign that goes "always plan for the unexpected." That sure holds true today. Especially for Western intel outfits who are scared shitless behind the scenes of the real 'event' that would make 9/11 seem minor. These days, the War on Terror is like a trench coated flasher showing up at your eight year old's birthday party. Sure it's fucked up but it isn't actual physical contact. It's only a view that results in psychological damage. Nobody actually got raped. World media right now adheres to the same consolatory 'it could be worse' paradigm. Shit's bad, we're broke and global resource wars are about to get kickstarted but so what, the supermarkets are still full and there's still gas in your car. Accept the inappropriate view of flasher dick.

A 'rogue' nuke will shatter all that.

Here's how.

In the US right now, you can't get on an aeroplane without having some mouth breather feel up your nut sack for an underwear bomb. Meanwhile, uninspected cargo ships roll in and out of the world's ports everyday. Millions of steel containers get unloaded and any of them could contain the rogue nuke from hell. And the politicians don't give a shit. They're so busy fighting the last decade's "terrorism war" that they miss the point every time in favor of the ease of global commerce. Free flow of capital trumps everything. Bagging cash defeats logic. Future generations in the post apocalyptic wasteland will hate us and yeah, Mad Max II is an awesome movie but who wants to live there?

I'm not saying enhance the police state already created for citizens since 9/11. I'm saying ditch the TSA and put all those guys to work in the world's ports. That's where the real threat lies if you really give a shit about "terrorism". In fact, getting your nutsack felt up before you board a plane is pretty much proof that the "terrorists" have already won. If you buy the idea that they "hated us for our freedom", then today's lockdown dystopia is proof that the metaphoric bad guys are already high fiving like crazy and snorting lines off hooker tits. We today have created a lockdown sci fi dystopia that would make Orwell shit bricks. The "good" cop's house got raided. The whistleblower is 'illegal'. A public assembly to redress grievances needs a 'protest permit'. Cops pepper spray your face for pitching a tent on the sidewalk because you occupy some space and wonder what the fuck is going on.

Nukes. In the 50s, they were a spectator sport. Go figure that shit.

Let's get to the serious stuff, the rogue doomsday nuke itself.

    Pakistan sure is a fun zone if you like studying nations on the precipice of failure. But you know what the CIA, Mossad, Russia's intel services (former KGB) and the hodge podge UN (IAEA) really care about? Pakistan's nukes. So let's examine those for a minute. Pakistan is critical to Western interests because they are so scary. You remember that drooling guy on the playground when you were a kid? You know, the one who stole your lunch money? The one that was dangerous when you were nine but is now forty and living in a trailer park addicted to meth. Pakistan is that guy. Only today he's still the bully in his prime and stealing US lunch money because no Pentagon intel report knows how far the crazy will go. Obama's drone strikes on those Pashtun fucktards inside Pakistan are not exactly helping to cool shit down either. Hell, that's probably why they had no problem letting Bin Laden kick back and watch himself on TV in a compound a mile from a major military base.

    Let's face it, the West's bad guy number one was a hero over there.

    That says everything you need to know.

    Pakistan hates the US right now. And the sleazy Pakistani politicians who have a tenuous hold on the seething time bomb over there like the pay off money the US provides. The US dumps $2 billion a year into the Pakistani military and even that extortion cash buys them nothing. The Pakistani political system is barely functional. The Pakistani secret service (ISI) sponsers jihadi groups who attack US troops in Afghanistan. Those same Jihadis have infiltrated the Paki military and nobody knows how many generals are symapathetic to the fundamentalists or are fundies themselves and, for a small donation, might pull a sick day for a whole regiment while a bunch of loons drive off base with a kiloton yield sky god bomb stashed in the back of a U-Haul truck.

      Let's face it, the more Pakistan destabilizes, the more the chances of my doomsday scenario happening sky rocket. Next up, it's a simple matter of loading the bomb onto some rusty Panamanian freighter with dodgy paperwork and then it's time to set sail for a port city near you. Meanwhile, some sleazy ISI guy calls up the whack jobs on board and releases the launch codes and signs off with a friendly 'Allah Ackbar'. A week later, the vessel approaches a Western City, let's say San Francisco, and rolls into the harbor unchecked. Meanwhile, the TSA are searching your WWII vet grand dad to see if he's a closet terrorist. What kind of defense plan is that? It's so shit it's the reason I know the War on Terror is a media event and not real. If it were real, intelligent guys would be fighting it and ditching the hyperbole.

    So, D-Day happens and a square mile of San Francisco is ashes.

    What next?

    For one thing, we've just entered a Brave New World.

    Every human on the planet is shitting themselves wondering what the Pentagon's next move will be and the world's nuke arsenals are on high alert. Meanwhile, Western countries have turned overnight into police states. Only kidding, they're already police states but I'm talking full on no holes barred shit like checkpoints every where, the National Guard roaming around in military trucks doing random searches of your grandma's bra. The TSA will quadruple in size and be everywhere. X-Ray scanner vans will drive around city streets, laughing at your naked fat ass and checking what kind of merch you bought at Home Depot.

    The interesting thing is that every nuke blast is traceable to the source uranium. So within hours, the US will know it came from Pakistan. So does the US nuke Pakistan back to the Stone Age for the actions of a small bunch of organized religous freaks? That's the most interesting question in modern warfare right now. Do you punish 170 million people (most of them illiterate peasants) for the actions of a small group of Islamic crazies? How do you respond? Millions in Afghanistan and Iraq got killed or displaced because of the actions of nineteen Saudi Arabian terrorists. Hell, Bin Laden family relatives got a free flight out of the country after 9/11 when the air space was in lock down.

    At some point, you've got to admit, we today are living in a dystopian sci fi novel and nobody realizes it because there are so many ways to escape reality. It's a scary world and as the energy depletes and the population passes 7 billion, you have to switch off the TV and face some scary truths.

That guy with the sign outside the supermarket might not be a whack job.

Why Israel wants to attack Iran.

2011-11-09T15:12:00.000-08:00

If Israel attacks Iran, it won't just be because they fear a Shia nuke.

Sure, a big red button of win on the Ayatollah's desk would be a credible check on Israeli power and would certainly start an arms race in the Middle East (the Saudi's too would race to centrifuge some yellow cake into something blowable) but this is not what Israel really fears. Besides, Israel has 200+ nukes of its own and is not a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They know an Iranian nuke would be merely 'theater balancing'. If the Iranians ever used it, Israel would glass them back to the stone age. That's the fun thing about nukes. They're really only useful when they never get used. In fact, nukes are the greatest peace keeping weapons ever invented.

And that's a problem for Israeli expansionist right wingers.

The real reason Israel wants a war with Iran has little to do with nukes and a whole lot more to do with the current political and military situation in Israel's own back yard. The recent Palestinian UNESCO vote at the UN was pretty much a slap across the face to Israel. Israel knows the rest of the world hates their guts for not making a peace deal with the Palestinians. And the UNESCO vote was no empty gesture either. Since UNESCO was a general assembly vote it could not be vetoed by Israel via AIPAC via the US. Sure, you might think UNESCO is just an educational, scientific and cultural organization but the fun part mixed up in all the fine print is that the vote allows the Palestinians to join the International Criminal Court. So soon, you could have international arrest warrants out for Israeli leaders who like to bust out the white phosphorous after some fucktard Gazan goat herder launches a home made rocket at a school bus.

In truth, Israeli right wingers are getting extra twitchy.

The Palestinians have finally realized they cannot win their war with Israel militarily. So they've gotten smart and changed tactics. They're now aiming for a political and moral victory. And that's a war right wing politicians in Israel can't send the mighty IDF to win. In fact, it's a war the Israelis think they might lose. Especially when they themselves score major PR failures like the raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmera which seriously pissed off the rest of the world and especially Turkey, a major NATO power in the region. In truth, the Israeli right cannot get what it wants (more land and settlements) through peace and negotiation.

So it might soon be time to grab the popcorn folks.

If Israel attacks Iran's nuke sites it'll be because they want to provoke an Iranian response in their own backyard that'll allow them to finally settle their Lebensraum and 'illegal' settlement problem once and for all. Since the pesky Persians have no air force capable of conducting a reciprocal strike, they'll have to rely on their asymmetrical forces. And Iran sure has plenty of these. The Iranians basically have a proxy army right next door to Israel in Southern Lebanon and as soon as this war goes live (if it ever does and hopefully not), you can expect Hezbollah, the al-Aqsa martyr brigades, al-Qassam and all the other Iranian funded proxies to launch everything they've got at Tel Aviv.

This will be the open invitation Israel needs to finally take the gloves off and do what they've been itching to do since the IDF got its nose bloodied by Shia heavy infantry in Lebanon in 2006. The forces there are no joke either. Entrenched and well equipped with rocket artillery, mainly consisting of 122mm Katyushas (range 30km), they also have Syrian made BM-21s, Iranian Arash and maybe 100 Fajr-5 (range Tel Aviv) and also a nice spectrum of modern anti tank weapons including the RPG-32, (the Israelis lost 30 of their supposedly invincible Merkeva tanks to them in 2006). This pesky Iranian proxy army next door is not going to be defeated unless the Israeli military goes total war on their asses. And a war with Iran will be all the justification they need to get the ball rolling.

The Israeli right wants more territory and they are not going to get it by entering peaceful negotiations with the Palestinians. That strategy is for wimps. All that more peace talks will buy is some good Israeli PR in the minds of a foreign public with the collective memory of a goldfish. And that's worth jack shit in the regional power play and won't deliver the needed real estate. A walled in Palestinian state will only be desirable to the Israelis after they've chopped it all up into small manageable chunks linked by roads and water supplies they control. That annexation isn't complete yet. And with the way the Palestinian question is playing on the world stage right now, the Israelis are seeing problems brewing with their ongoing annexation policy. They're also nervous about fighting a growing demographic time bomb at home where Israeli Arabs and Palestinians are fucking like jack rabbits creating a voting bloc which could skew things away from the distinctly Jewish state they've been expanding since 1948.

So is total war the solution?

Of course it fucking is. It always is for us upright apes. Total war will solve a whole bunch of Israeli problems but start a whole set of new ones for the wider world. By attacking Iran and provoking an Iranian proxy response against Israel, the IDF will finally get to settle the Southern Lebanon, Gaza, Golan Heights and illegal settlement problem once and for all. All with the added bonus of setting back Iran's shitty nuke program a few years. Sure, the Iranian's will launch some of their semi accurate Shahab 3s back at Israel, maybe even aiming for the Israeli nuke facility at Dimona in the hopes of whipping up some Geiger counter juice of their own.

Will Israel need US support? Sure. But they won't get that by simply asking. Even if the answer is "no", Netanyahu knows he can just act and drag the Americans in by default. He knows the Iranian response to an attack will be to use every tactic in the playbook once the pew-pew starts and Natanz is burning. One tactic will be mining the shallow waters of the Gulf and, quite possibly, firing Chinese Silkworm missiles at all those fat oil tankers lumbering off the Iranian coast with 40% of seaborne world oil supply in their bellies. Oil prices will shoot through the roof overnight, the brittle American and Euro economies will crash dive and the US will be forced into this thing in a big way.

Sure, the Chinese and Russians will be pissed but will they get involved in the shooting and kick start WWIII? Probably not. It'll be more fun for them to just sit back and watch the death spasms of American superpower. I'll admit that I've said before that WWIII is on the table but the Russkis and Chinese will probably just play the waiting game and supply Iran with fucktons of weaponry while issuing angry protests at the UN and secretly laughing their asses off. That's the smart move. They can win this thing just by sitting back and watching the fireworks. Sure, the world economy will tank but Russian and Chinese populations are better suited to austerity than all the spoiled assholes in Western countries who'll shit a brick when they can't afford a new flatscreen.

Thing is, the Iranian threat to Gulf shipping will be very hard to counter without filling the skies over Iran with drones and aircraft and even then, how do you stop hundreds of Iranian speedboats dropping mines into the Straits of Hormuz? And, more interestingly, how do you pay for it all? Just the theoretical threat of mines in the Gulf is enough to push insurance rates on tankers through the roof. There goes your cheap commute from suburbia! Limited ground invasion? Western boots on the ground in Iran (if it played out like that) could be considered a proxy resource war too far by the Russkis and Chinese, especially since Iran is sitting on the 4th largest oil deposit on the planet.

Let's face it, this war is scary as hell.

In fact, it's so scary, I can't believe it will actually happen. I'm sure the US is pressuring Israel behind the scenes not to go ahead with their dream strike. Sure, the air waves in the US and Europe are getting flooded right now with Iranian nuke bullshit, preparing the public for the possibility of war by making it seem like Iran will soon have a multiple stage ICBM capable of raining down mega tonnage on New York City. And the average Fox News viewer probably believes it too. After all, the dumb fuck public are still scared by a bunch of idiots doing that monkey bar training thing, footage the media roll out every time they want you to be scared of bad guys in some foreign desert somewhere.

But the scariest caveat in all of this is the shaky financial status of Western economies.

Major powers going broke is historically a war creating environment.

With Occupy Wall Street protests everywhere, small but worrying to the Western oligarchy, and Europe and the US teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, the scariest part is that total wars are handy ways to wipe financial slates clean, clear the streets of 'unpatriotic' long hairs and grab the resources you need to fund the extravagant life styles people in the West have grown used to. If this war does happen, that'll be pretty much confirmation that the Western oligarchy has run out of ideas on how to solve its insolvency and bankruptcy problem.

Stockpile popcorn. Stay tuned. I still believe this war can't happen but of course, that's assuming we're living in a world run by rational men and I'm not so sure anymore, if we live in that world.

Libya: The Dictator is dead! Next up: "Democracy"?

2011-10-22T13:23:00.000-07:00

It was only a matter of time before Gaddafi ended up like Saddam Hussein.

Let's face it, it's risky business being a Mid East dictator these days. Unless of course you're a Saudi Royal and willing to do business with the global corporate oligarchy and play ball by petro dollar rules. Failure to comply means you get put on the bad guy list. And Gaddafi sure was a 'bad guy'. But then again, show me a leader in the Middle East that isn't. To climb your way to the top of the action in desert cultures, you've got to be a strongman. That means a sleazy history and high body counts the Western media can use against you when they decide they want your shit. No Mid East ruler since the time of Mohammad ever got to power on a peace and love manifesto. It's a hard dry land out there, forbidding, fruitless and it wasn't until the combustion engine got invented in the late 1800s that Western oligarchy's got interested in what was buried under all that desert sand.

Sure, Gaddafi had it coming.

He died by the sword just like in the old maxim.

I was never a fan but I will admit a certain schadenfreude at Gaddafi's power to piss off oil hungry Western interests. Just when he was playing nice again and making friends with the US via Condoleeza Rice, he suddenly found himself cast as the lead villain in a NATO funded war movie called "Odyssey Dawn". He sure looked the part. Villains are always more memorable if they have a signature look and Gaddafi sure did fit the bill. He dressed in flamboyant carpets and habitually wore something that looked like the curtains from a 1970's porno flick. He had odd habits too like bringing his tent with him when travelling abroad and pitching it on the lawns of rented multi million dollar mansions while leaving the mansion itself unoccupied. My favorite bit was the hot Ukrainian nurses he had on payroll that "monitored his blood pressure" while he shelled his own cities. In hindsight, the city of Misrata turned out to be Gaddafi's mini Stalingrad and the place where his forces were broken.

Gaddafi trying to play ball in 2006.

Gaddafi grabbed power in Libya as a 27 year old captain in a bloodless coup in 1969 while the former King was jetsetting around Europe. Fancying himself as the Arab Che Guevara, Gadaffi was the strongman material the disparate Libyan tribes could understand and he set up the new Libya as a late sixties counter cultural anti imperialist mecca where anyone looking to do bad shit to Western interests could get supplies, weapons and explosives.

Obviously, that put him on the Western shit list.

Libya took part in the 1973 oil embargo against the US and its support for Arab unity and opposition to western interests in Islamic states painted a big fat target on Gaddafi in the western world. In 1982, Reagan imposed sanctions and the CIA tried to off him in 1984. Two years later, a squadron of F-111s bombed his compound and killed his 15 month old adopted daughter. This was in response to the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing that killed and injured a bunch of US servicemen. The Libyan's retaliated in 1988 with the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The evidence that Gaddafi funded it was remarkably flimsy but it's gone down in history as his doing and conspiracy theories are not my forte. Truth is, everything is a conspiracy these days and whatever line of bullshit you choose to believe is a personal affair. There is no real truth anymore in the age of the Internet.

Let's face it, we're living in Bladerunner.

So what now for Libya after the national strongman has ended up on display in a freezer at the local supermarket?

Can these rebels, now styled the National Transitional Council, keep a lid on things or are 42 year old internecine scores about to get settled? Who really knows? That's probably why the NATO pencil pushers nicknamed this mission "Odyssey Dawn"; they had no clue either what the outcome of intervening in another oil rich Mid East dictatorship would be. I bet all those people dying in the popular revolt going on in Syria right now are kicking themselves that their geography doesn't sit on top of some proven oil reserves. The world we're living in demands energy and a fortunate geography buys you air support as the 21st century enters the proxy war stage. Libya was just the preliminary low hanging fruit.

There will be a lot of factors at work in Libya once the post revolution high wears off.

The Transnational Council are the ones sitting on the oil reserves and the ones the oligarchy is willing to do business with. All of those reserves are in Eastern Libya. And the TNC have already proved they can do business, filling a number of tankers even during the war that bagged them $200 million per load that sure helped fuel the rebel war effort. Ironically, it was Reagan's sanctions and the inability of Gaddafi to sell his oil during the 80s and 90s, (when oil was astoundingly cheap), that preserved Libya's supply. Estimates say Libya had about 55 giga barrels of which they've gone through about half. This leaves them with significant reserves of around the 30 Gb mark and an export capacity of 1.9 million barrels per day which is why the western oligarchy got interested in this little war in the first place.

Eastern Libya and its capital Benghazi have always been Libyan redneck country and the part sophisticates in Tripoli liked to look down on while sipping their fancy coffees in upscale cafes. Benghazi is the city where the supporters of the former king that Gaddafi deposed in the '60s got to lay low while watching as Gaddafi funneled the oil wealth out from under their feet. They've been itching for a shot at revenge for decades. It's also home to the Islamists and the wilder desert tribes and proved fervent recruiting ground for volunteers for Iraq and Afghanistan to fight the Yankee imperialists. Those are the contradictory people NATO sided with when they got involved in this war. Truth is, oil makes everyone a consumer, loyalties cheap and alliances tend to shift like desert sands all so long as us proles get to fill up our vehicles as cheaply as possible to make that commute from surburbia to the job site affordable.

Libya, under Gaddafi, supplied 10% of the Euros oil (the reason why the French and British got concerned for [sic] humanitarian reasons) and one thing about Libyan oil is that it is especially 'sweet'. That means it only costs a dollar to refine a barrel as opposed to most other oils out there (barring Brent North Sea crude) with high sulphur content. Those Canadian tar sands the US is in love with right now are dirty and the pipeline they want to run to Texas means the US is really starting to get jittery about the future of suburban voters. If shit gets too expensive that voting block might finally go 'off reservation' and elect a guy the corporate fucks have not already bought.

Yeah, Libya sure was a fun war to watch, if you're like me with an eye on the bigger picture. The bigger picture is nasty and Libya and Gaddafi will be merely a footnote in the ongoing global chess game. The energy chess game that pits established powers against rising powers all of them sucking at the tit of black gold. Sure, there are conflicting reports on how much spice is left. But that doesn't really matter in the end anyway.

As always in war, what really matters for nobodies like you and me, is what other men in positions of power are prepared to do to deliver what the rest of us secretly want. Cash money. That's how power structures work. You stay in power playing a subtle strategic game of pleb delivery and filling your own pockets for retirement on beachfront property somewhere sunny. And killing your opponents if they become too pesky. Machiavelli layed down the rules for this whole paradigm centuries ago. And nothing has changed for us sad upright apes.

And by Machiavelli's own measure, it seems Gaddafi screwed up royally and finally ran up against more powerful foreign men.

Occupy Wall Street: Can peaceful protests work anymore?

2011-10-12T03:54:00.000-07:00

    I'm munching popcorn watching the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

   Truth is though, I'm pretty skeptical on the efficacy of protest movements in our current sci fi dystopia. I'm talking protest movements that actually achieve their aims. For instance, according to Guinness and their world record book, the largest protests in human history were against the Iraq war when 36 million people took to the world's streets. Still, the corporate oligarchy went ahead with their proxy resource war anyway even when a sizable portion of the global public called bullshit on the reasons behind it. Let's face it, entrenched power structures just don't give a shit what the plebs think anymore.

   Back in 2003, we were living in a world where the corporate oligarchy still at least felt a need to come up with a WMD cover story so they could stake a claim in the heart of Mesopotamia's energy reserves. China and Russia hated it but couldn't do anything to oppose that resource grab. Fast forward to Libya in 2011 and the plutocracy didn't even feel the need to bother with costly machinations in popular media and conducted that proxy resource war unmolested by popular dissent.

Since when did asking the ruling elite nicely by peaceful protest ever work in human history? When you look at it, human history is just one long narrative of who killed who to take their shit. It is certainly not a story of who asked nicely for some shit and was given it because the enlightened rulers gave up power and control because they suddenly developed a new found respect for people with no shit. Us upright apes really only understand violence. When there's blood on the streets the Roman nobility bought property; these days the corporate oligarchy invade some desert shit hole and corner some new energy reserves. Nothing like a good war to clean out the streets of protesters anyway. Being a lazy hipster is unpatriotic in a time of national emergency.

   The oligarchy rolled out al-Qaeda, a bunch of desert idiots on monkey bars and made them out to be the new Reds; and carted off thousands to foreign deserts to go fight them. People are getting wise to the proxy wars designed to tell Russia and China to keep their filthy hands off America's desert. Then came the financial crisis and the masses were getting restless so they tossed the plebs Obama, a handsome black guy who got the suit job where you live in a nice house in Washington DC and get to read the oligarchy's script while the corporate media snap pictures. "Hope and change". Yeah, right. Being a voter these days is like being some teenage punk kid shopping at Hot Topic, buying the corporate made 'rebel' T-shirt and missing the irony completely. Truth is, there are no voter choices that haven't already been pre approved by the entities that run our 'democracy'.

   Sure, you're going to quote me Gandhi or Martin Luther King and say peaceful protest can work. Thing is, those movements had a little more bite than just a bunch of longhairs with conflicting ideas as to what's wrong with our sci fi dystopia. Sure, Gandhi shaved his head, spun his own cloth and never whipped out an AK, but his movement had an arsenal of weaponry that the Occupy Wall Street protesters simply don't have. At least not yet.

   First off, the Indian Independence movement had numbers. Gandhi could pass some gas and have a million people out on the street looking for a whiff of last night's vegetarian curry. The OWS crowd can only manage 30,000 on a good day. That could change but I won't be holding my breath. Another factor is that the Indians had a charismatic leader in Gandhi himself, a little bald brown guy dressed in a towel but a graduate of University College London and smart as hell. He knew how to hurt entrenched power structures in a way that could avoid high body counts. You hit them where it hurts, namely, their wallets. You order your followers not to do business with the oligarchy. For Indians, that meant weaving their own cloth and not importing British textiles. Next up, Gandhi led the Salt March where he encouraged his countrymen to stop paying taxes to the British on salt. Salt is a useful commodity in a country where you sweat a lot and soon the British were feeling some pain. They still locked up Gandhi but that just made him more of a symbol of resistance.

   Truth is, it's hard to see Occupy Wall Street managing to make similar inroads. One major problem with going up against the corporate oligarchy is that in many ways, you're biting the hand that feeds you. Sure, the bastards have bought the political system, attained person hood and own the Supreme Court but they also run the food system, provide Internet access and employ the masses. The "99%" can agitate for better terms but the "system" is so intertwined with every man's needs that it's impossible to affect change without destroying the whole thing. There is no Bastille to storm anymore because violent revolution just gives birth to Napoleons. There is no better system than capitalism because we're all greedy, self interested fucks and the commies lost. There are a lot of working stiffs out there fully invested in the status quo and the oligarchy will have no problems filling jobs in the national guard if a bunch of protesters start rocking the ship.

   I can agree with the spirit of the protests but then you've got the amorphous demands of every guy with a sign:

   No complaint with any of those demands right?

   Thing is, to get the masses on board, you're going to need something simpler. Something you can fit into a soundbite. Trouble is, the problems of the 21st century are so myriad they don't fit on a postage stamp. This leads to disintegration. Gandhi had a simple idea, Indian Independence. MLK, had an even simpler one, equality for all. Today, shit's more complicated.

   The problems run deep. There's this palpable sense that the world can't continue on its present track. This rock just crossed the seven billion population mark and there's a feeling out there that this cannot go on. Energy, food, farmland, water, minerals, all are becoming strategic materials rather than just things we take for granted. The polar ice is melting and already there's bickering between Russia, the US, Canada and the Scandinavian nations about who owns what bit of sea floor in the Arctic. We're in that time just before full on resource shortages and the rich, wise to this, are cashing their chips out of the global casino financial system. We're in the bumpy plateau at the top of the bell curve of peak everything. Every time there's a slight recovery this is matched by a rise in oil and food prices which kills that recovery.

    Rising commodity prices sparked revolutions across the Middle East this year, tossing out dictators and replacing them with democracy. The Egyptians ditched Mubarak and got for their efforts a military/police state and a whole set of new guys with tanks banking cash and unwilling to give up power. That's the problem with revolutions succeeding. You're liable to end up with a new boss just the same as the old boss only meaner. Syrians are getting gunned down on the streets but the global oligarchy couldn't give a shit because Syria has no oil or anything they want. Gaddafi was unlucky enough to be sitting on 10% of EU oil supply and so he got tomahawked.

   Western nations are still years away from Children of Men style chaos. It takes food shortages before the masses finally take up arms against those harvesting them for fun and profit but by then it'll be way too late. The plutocracy by that stage will be safely entrenched in their privately secured armed enclaves and eating cake funded on middle class despair.

   Don't get me wrong, there's nothing I'd like more than to see the Wall Street protests spread and gather strength. Hell, they might even achieve some of their aims. Even then, they'd just be buying a bit more time on the doomsday clock. Meanwhile, the oligarchy are casting hungry eyes around the Middle East and wondering what new war they can get going to clean the streets of filthy protesting hippies.

   I see the media floating the idea of "Iran" and their 'assassination' plot against some Saudi ambassador and I shudder.

   Are they really considering that move? The world's fourth largest oil reserve sitting there with 78 million pesky Persians making the geographical error of living on the top of it. China and Russia are not going to like that resource grab. If the US and Israel get any fancy ideas about bombing Natanz, I'll take that as confirmation that the oligarchy have run out of ideas on how to fix the global financial mess they've created.

   Unfortunately for the rest of us, war wipes slates clean, makes rich men richer and puts protesters in uniform.

The ME 262: The Luftwaffe's last dice roll.

2011-09-28T06:53:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of 21st century proxy resource wars. Foreign deserts are pretty damn sleazy these days. So time for a history post. Something from the last "good war", WW II. The other night I was watching TV and stumbled upon the Biography Channel and learned that Tom Cruise owns and flys his very own P-51 Mustang. That sure pissed me off. Obviously, I got that pang of hopelessness that poor guys feel when they compare themselves to the super rich and I was stuck with coming to terms with my total lack of a legendary WWII fighter in my personal hangar. To offset this, I indulged in a little fantasy and started imagining what I'd buy if I won the lottery. Sure, buying lottery tickets is just a tax on stupid people but let's indulge in fantasy here, assume I hit the mother load and stumbled into some serious funny money.

I just bought myself an ME- 262.

(You know, at the local Messerschmitt dealership just down the street. This is my fantasy world after all, where you can buy anything with imaginary money. To use a suitable analogy, its like Western economics since 1980)

Anyway, I'm laughing manically in my cockpit now, sweeping through cloud, twin Junkers Juno 004 turbojets hissing like cobras and looking to challenge that 'Maverick' pussy to a proper dogfight. The fun thing about the ME 262, despite the fact that it was the world's first operational jet fighter, is the fact that the airframe was designed before the war even got started.

The Versailles restrictions on Germany were in many ways a boon for German innovation. Glider design became a widespread hobby among the German public and was the proving ground where the likes of Kurt Tank and Willy Messerschmitt cut their teeth. Designated Projekt 1065 in April 1939, the 262's swept wing 'swallow' airframe was pretty close to the one that actually entered service in 1943 but the whole enterprise was held back by the technical challenge of getting the jet engines up to speed. And besides, in late 1939, the Nazi's were still in Ubermensch mode after rolling over Poland in just a month, still high on hubris pipe smoke and thinking they wouldn't need fancy jet technology to roll into France or give the RAF a chance at their finest hour.

Still, pride always comes just before things take a nosedive. But it sure is a fun diversion to speculate how the Battle of Britain would have played out if Goering hadn't say, plowed a whole load of cash into a bad idea like the ME-110 and in so doing drastically cut the number of engineers working on jet engines for the 262. The Germans figured they could beat the English by spamming ME 109s and Goering championed the addition of the 110 as a heavy, twin engined 'fighter' he figured could take on the RAF Hurricane. That plan was bad. A rear facing MG 42 just wasn't enough to overcome the 110's heavy unresponsive throttle and dough like handling. In a dogfight, it was like a seagoing destroyer fighting nimbler PT boats. RAF pilots even in much maligned Hurricanes (those solid warhorses that actually won the Battle of Britain and not press grabbing Spitfires) made mincemeat of the heavy 110s. The good old wood and fabric Hurricane could chip away at the 110 with impunity until it nosedived into the Channel. The 110 did work out as an effective night fighter later on but by then the Germans were on the back foot and RAF Lancaster night raids were the least of their worries until Dresden in '44 The fun 'what if' scenario in all this is what if the German's had ditched the whole Me 110 program and gotten the ME 262 into the fight earlier in the war?

The Me 110. Not a fighter, or a bomber...

Sure, the kind of speculation I'm indulging in here is a bit of a stretch, especially in 1940 or '41, but for the sake of argument lets play a game where the Germans managed to spam a decent number of ME 262s by say mid '43 to go up against the American daylight B-17 strategic bombing raids. We're talking those early raids before P-51 fighter escorts when USAAF bomber philosophy had this notion that flying in mass formation sporting 10 machine gun emplacements per bomber would be enough to keep German fighters at bay. By '43, Focke Wulf 190s were already displacing ME 109s as the default bomber interceptor (twin 20mm cannon firing through the nose propeller hurt bomber engines bad) but the prospect of the earlier introduction of the ME 262, jetting at 500mph through B-17 formations and sporting quad 30mm cannon firing unobstructed sure makes it interesting to speculate at what point Roosevelt or Eisenhower would have deemed daylight bombing too costly. That, in turn, would have meant more ball bearing production in the Ruhr (the reason why German tanks post '43 were 'squeaky'), more oil from the Ploiești oil fields and opens us up to more what ifs like if the Germans could have churned out more fantastically beautiful Tiger and Panther tanks, awesome machines that cost 5 times more than Allied tanks and were over reactions to the Russian T-34. German production would have had a better time if the Americans had to abandon daylight bombing due to heavy losses.

Yeah sure, everyone who is a WWII junkie likes to speculate on the 'what ifs' of the German uber weapons. And let's face it, those Nazis came up with some cool shit. Quite apart from Werner Von Braun, rocketry and the flying wing, the first operational jet fighter 262 was a nice addition to the distinguished pantheon of WW II German engineering. But let's not get carried away here admiring the bad guys. Awesome engineering got married with shitty philosophy and the result was worldwide devastation. Let's face it, the Nazi's were far from mainstream rationality even with their cool toys.

They wanted Lebensraum and had eyes on gobbling up mainland Europe. Island Britain has always been a problem when any of the mainland Euro powers entertained plans of acquiring new real estate. Napoleon tried to isolate them with his Continental System. The Germans figured they could try a similar but improved version in 1940 based on air superiority and an invasion fleet gathering at Dunkirk in a little operation called 'Sealion'. Goering and Messerschmitt himself agreed with the plan; so did the rest of the Nazi brass. Piston engined fighters it was to be. But that's always a weakness of governments getting into bed with the companies who manufacture the war material. You're liable to take the word of guys riding cash cows to the bank and miss something truly revolutionary. The 262 got placed on the back burner in favor of spamming more piston engined toys.

The first test flights of the ME 262 didn't go so well either.

Problem was, in April 1941, the jet engines weren't ready for prime time so flight engineers strapped a prop engine into the nose of a 262 to at least test the swept wing airframe. Initial results were good. Next up, the designers bolted two (still dodgy at this stage) prototype BMW 003 jets onto the wings and narrowly avoided disaster when the prop wash from the still installed nose propeller messed up the airflow to the jet intakes and caused the BMWs to fail catastrophically. The test the pilot dodged a bullet and limped home on the nose prop alone.

However, by July 1942, the Me 262 became a true jet when it flew by jet power alone using the semi reliable Junkers Jumo 004 engines which went on to become the standard engines. Remember, this was still a year before any of the other major powers had a working jet aircraft. It's main competitor, the British Gloucester Meteor never truly looked like a dog fighter in its own right and certainly didn't have the cool aerodynamic lines of the beautiful Me 262.

The Gloster Meteor. A little heavy, and let's face it, not very pretty

In truth though, none of the early jets were designed to be dogfighters per se. This was especially so for the 262. It was, first and foremost, a bomber killer. Something the Germans hoped could put a dent in the allies daylight bombing campaign on German industry. But let's face it, by 1944, that was a tall order. The first concerted Me 262 raid against USAAF B-17s came on March 18, 1945 (already too late) when 37 262s went up against a formation of 1,221 bombers and 632 escort fighters. You read that right. Odds like that meant the war was already lost. Still, the 262s made a good account of themselves, taking down twelve bombers for the loss of three aircraft. This was the 4:1 ratio the Luftwaffe needed to make the plane viable, but it was a ratio they'd needed since early 1943.

By 1944, the Germans truly had a ready game changer in the ME 262. It would still never be enough to reverse the tide of war but its still interesting to play with the idea of a functioning 262 from 1943 on. That may have been possible if they'd ditched the 110 and stayed focused on jet engine technology. Despite a shortage of strategic materials and the exotic metals required to handle the extreme heat jet engines produce and, not to mention, the strategic bombing of the industrial Ruhr valley, the Germans still managed to churn out ~100 262s in 1944. Sure it was too little too late but it's fun to wonder what might have been.

Above, a 262 takes off at an airshow in 2010. You can really see here why they nicknamed her "The Swallow'. She's like a flying Porsche but with cannons!

So now we come to the fun part.

Fucking Hitler.

Sure, he had oratory skills but when it came to military strategy the Reich would have done better if they could've found a way to leave him out of important military decisions. Especially on the design front. And that's when the classic decision was made by the increasingly methamphetamine dependent Fuhrer when he first saw the ME 262 sweep by at an airshow in late 43. Rather than see it as the 500mph heavy bomber interceptor that it was, Adolf in one of his 48hr tweaker binges somehow saw it as a fighter bomber. You see, at this late stage of the war, post Stalingrad, Hitler was still in 1940 mode. Every new plane he saw was a bomber that could "bring it" to the enemy. He was still thinking offense when reality begged for a cogent defensive strategy. He couldn't entertain the idea of a static point by point retreating defense (you know the kind that inflicts maximum damage on the attacking force). Such practicality would be to admit that the Reich was already losing.

Stomping around in that rail carriage in Versailles when the French surrendered in 1940 was, for Hitler, a high point that paid back all that Weimar Republic hyperinflation. All the meth in the world wasn't going to release enough dopamine to relive that high. As the dream of a a thousand year Reich started to die, he saw every new weapon development as a means to fix a hole, a hole that couldn't really be fixed, and Hitler became like some demented toddler relentlessly bashing a square block into a triangle shaped hole in the play set; trying to make the wrong shapes fit.

Those 262s that did manage to fly did finally get put to use against allied bombers in 1944.

There's one other thing I should mention before we get to attacking bombers. The guns. The ME 262 had 4 MK 108 30mm cannon in its nose. Specifically designed by Rheinmetall Borsig in 1943 for the 262, these bitches spat out huge exploding shells that did massive damage. Testing showed it took just 4 to take down a four engined B-17 and a single shell was usually enough to take down a Mustang or Thunderbolt. That's serious firepower if you can get your guns on target.

The 30mm cannon. The ultimate way to say 'I don't like you'. (I can't read the fineprint either)

Attacking bomber formations was rather tricky even for the new jet and new tactics had to be devised. The usual Focke Wulf -190 head on type attack was not possible simply due to the insane closing speed. Even attacking from the rear didn't give pilots much time to train the 262s 30mm cannon on target. In fact the accuracy of the cannon was an issue. Not because it didn't shoot straight. It was a range issue for the heavy shells. Those quad cannons, though spitting out a lot of damage, were only accurate to about 600 metres. And since pilots had to break off an attack at 200 metres to avoid collision due to 'target fixation', that meant a 400m 'attack run' that lasted less than two seconds at 500mph+.

A typical attack pattern started 3 miles behind and 6000ft above the bomber formation. The 262s would throttle up to 500mph and descend through the Mustang bomber escort (leaving them for dust), dive to about 1500ft below the trailing bomber, then pull up (to bleed off speed) and put as much cannon fire on a B-17 as it could in the two second firing window that speed and gun range allowed. Usually, the B-17 turrets had difficulty tracking the 262s. Another attack pattern, although this was used just a few times before the war ended, involved a bunch of 262s using R4M Hurricane rockets and firing at the B-17 formation from a ninety degree angle where the bombers presented the fattest silhouette. Fired from beyond the range of the B-17's guns, one rocket was enough to take down a bomber and this method showed promise but again, it came too late in the war to affect the outcome.

How did the Me 262 fair as a dog fighter?

The leading 262 ace had 17 kills, 10 of them P-51s. That'd lead you to believe that the 262 was an amazing dog fighter but it wasn't invincible. Sure, it could come out of nowhere and a quick burst of cannon fire would blow a Mustang in half but in a typical turning and maneuver type battle (the classic dogfight), the 262 had problems. For one thing, it had a high wing loading which meant that it's turning radius at low speed was very wide for a 'fighter'. In a turning battle, any Mustang pilot worth his salt would be able to get the 262 in his sights. Another problem was the sheer speed of the 262. With no air brake, you didn't get much time to line up a kill before you either overshot or bled off too much speed, making you vulnerable to piston engined fighters.

So who wins in a dogfight, the P-51 or the ME 262?

The answer to that is of course up for debate.

It sure helps who spots who first. Let's suppose, I'm cruising at 20,000 ft in my fantasy lottery funded 262 and I spot Jerry Maguire and Cuba Gooding Jr below in P-51s. I immediately ease into a dive to take them from behind, coming out of the sun if I can manage it. Nice hiss of jet engines. I've got to be careful with the 262's throttle though, sudden changes in thrust can result in flame out of the engines and they're almost impossible to get started again while in flight. Gentle finesse on the throttle is key.

At 600 metres I open up on Cuba Gooding Jr's Mustang and it just explodes. No fancy nosedive trailing smoke. The thing is just gone in a hail of exploding 30mm cannon shells. Nobody will be 'showing him the money' anymore. Of course, my dive and insane jet speed means I overshoot Cruise who opens up with his Brownings, peppering me with hurt. I pull an Immelman maneuver to try to bleed off speed and gain height. Cruise follows, wrestling with his joystick. He'd like to get into a low speed turning battle with me where his tight turning radius would mean he'd get the heavy wing load 262 in his sights before long. At this point, the 262, depending on fuel, can always break off and use superior speed to get some distance on the Mustang before coming back around for another squabble on better terms.

Let's face it, I'm dog fighting the cast of Jerry Maguire here and have drifted way off baseline consensus. But this is still my fantasy right, a tax on me by the lottery as a poor guy juggling an alternate reality?

Still, a lot of 262s did die while landing, the only time they were truly vulnerable to piston engined fighters. Enterprising Allied pilots could loiter around the bases they operated from (total air superiority over the Reich by '44 sure had its advantages), drop fuel tanks when they spotted low on fuel 262s and ambush them on final approach. Sure it was a sleazy tactic but this was 1944/45 and any pretence of chivalry in this war had died in North Africa in '41.

And that's the trouble with dogfights these days. $350 million a piece stealth F-22 Raptors launching missiles at the enemy at 50k is boring as hell. Sure, it's effective. But these days the enemy is more likely to be some illiterate stooge with Semtex underwear that costs two grand at your local Jihad-R-Us. Wars these days are all asymmetrical manufactured bullshit. Oil grabs are just a prelude to the main event when the resource wars go live. But they're still a decade away if you don't already include Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

They sure make me miss the 'good old days' of the Messerschmitt 262 when the bad guys were so much easier to define in this whole human mess.

The Libyan Rebels and their amazing variety of small arms.

2011-08-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

I was watching the "news" networks last night and found myself throwing up in my mouth a little every time some talking head mentioned the triumph of democracy in Libya over tyrant dictators. Sure, that kind of bullshit probably sells peanut butter and dick hard pills during commercial breaks and probably gives the 50 million plebs on food stamps in the US something to feel good about. Who needs government subsidized food anyway when your government just air dropped a few hundred million in ordinance on yet another desert oil producer? 'We' just 'won' another war! Fuck yeah!? Makes poor people feel part of something cool as they scour the 99c store for a good deal.

Watching footage of the rebels driving past strategically placed cameras in Tripoli's Green Square the other night, I suddenly had some kind of fucked up epiphany that made the whole NATO "Odyssey Dawn" mission make some retarded sense. I saw a bunch of Libyan freedom fighters hitting a live fire zone in a god damned Toyota Prius. I shit you not! A hybrid vehicle in a fucking war zone. Now there's a first. Toyota should run ads for that shit. It seems some Libyan rebels are pretty savvy when it comes to gas mileage.

One thing the rebels don't seem too savvy about though is conserving ammo.

I swear, every vid I see of one of those happy exuberant guys has them firing off mag after mag of 7.62mm at the sky and not giving a single fuck. For hours. Everyday. And that got me thinking. How cheap is ammo in North Africa these days anyway? I mean, in a proper war, isn't ammo gold? Last time I checked, I can't remember seeing other 'freedom fighters' in other conflicts blasting the sky after victory. I don't recall the VietCong shooting down clouds when they finally captured Saigon in '75. Chechnyan rebels sure weren't gunning down the sun after they held back the mighty Russians for a while in the mid '90s . Maybe it's just an Arab thing to piss away ammo. One thing it does say is that the Libyan rebels sure don't seem to have supply or money worries when it comes to procuring more lead. Either that or they're a bunch of idiots with nothing left to shoot once the news cameras get turned off. Of course, they're now begging the US and UN to release some of Gaddafi's impounded billions. Wanna bet that cash will only be going to the strongman who can prove he can get the oil flowing again?

Watching those celebrating in Tripoli or in any Libyan city in this whole messy excuse for a proper war is something I like to do these days, beer in hand, popcorn in the microwave and getting a free front row seat (if it's possible to have a front row seat in front of your own TV) and witnessing yet another proxy resource war. Anyway, all that sweet Libyan crude has a low sulphur content and it only costs a dollar a barrel to refine. A lot like the Brent North Sea crude that's running out. The Euros sure love that spice. 10% of their supply may be back online in the near future.

The fun thing is, once the oil deals get renegotiated, every fucktard who fired an AK at the sky during this war is going to want a piece of that oil action. Revolutions always lead to a post high ugly period where old scores get settled. And usually not with a concerted letter writing campaign to a local politician. Forty two years of Gaddafi means there are a lot of tribal feuds to sort out. That's even if the rednecks in Benghazi don't decide all the oil in the eastern fields belongs to them. You know, historically. They're big on who owned what a bazillion years ago in the Middle East.

Still, watching all that ammo getting fired needlessly into the air got me looking closely at the small arms that were actually firing it. And once my eyes got focused on that, I was met with one of those dizzying cornucopia's of choice that rivals eateries at a state fair. What an international cast! I mean, every guy with a beef against Gaddafi seems like he had a host of world gun suppliers on speed dial. The sheer variety of small arms available to the rebels might be sinister as far as foreign intervention is concerned but probably not. After all, Africa is a wash in weaponry the way it isn't in food. Or maybe a container load of sweet foreign pew pew just happened to wash up on a beach in Benghazi last February before this whole "revolution" got started. Who knows? Let's face it, foreign special forces have been operating on the ground in Libya since this mess got started. Would you trust a Libyan rebel to laser paint a Gaddafi tank with a sweet piece of $250k technology? Ahem, no. That shit's liable to be sold to Hezbollah for pennies on the dollar once the smoke clears and cause more problems on the global chessboard.

In order of sightings (and this is by no means a scientific study), what kind of small arms where the rebels brandishing?

The AK-47: Okay, no particular surprise here. I mean, let's face it, it's the most ubiquitous weapon ever produced on the planet. Hardy, distinctive, this gun is everywhere and all over Africa. We often get footage of starving people in Africa and that sure sucks but you can be sure every journalist with a camera on his way to a starvation zone to post photos of skinny kids in the New York Times first passed a bunch of guys wielding AK-47s at the airstrip. Seems like food is getting expensive these days and that's bad for Africa where people tend to fuck for entertainment and that just results in more mouths to feed. Sure, condoms and contraceptives would be nice but distributing those never works out does it? Bono sure missed the boat on that one.

And, let's face it, the result of all that rampant sport fucking usually gets resolved by an AK-47. It's like the AK is Africa's post birth abortion kit. From heroin addicted child soldiers in Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the Republic of Congo to the current famine in Somalia and Darfur, the AK-47 is the number one means of African population control that is both cheap and effective. The market in Africa is flooded with this Russian banger. Hell, in Yemen, you can buy a third hand AK-47 from your uncle's cousin's brother-in-law for the price of a Big Mac. That is of course, if you can find a quality eatery like McDonalds in a desert shithole with no significant oil. No surprise then that Libya would be full of Kalashnikov's babies. And 7.62mm ammo is probably more common than ham sandwiches in Africa. So yeah, I suppose that explains a lot of rebel sky shooting. Still doesn't make me feel like quitting alcohol anytime soon though.

The AK-74: Yeah, it might seem like superfluous not to bunch the '74 in with the '47 but we're talking a totally different animal here. The '74 was developed in the 1970s when the Soviets wanted to improve on Kalashnikov's original design and ditched the heavy, penetrating, barrel shaking long range inaccuracy of the 7.62 round. It fires the smaller 5.45x39mm round and was a response to the American M-16 in Vietnam. The Russians had caught on to the effectiveness of the smaller 5.56 NATO ammo after they'd seen it tumbling through Gook flesh in 'Nam. The smaller round with an air pocket in the nose makes it dance around in the body when it hits bone and makes a kill extra messy. Aren't we humans awesome when it comes to killing each other? Porn is obscene yet action movies with a fifty+ body count are PG entertainment you go see with the kids. Fuck yeah! Anyway, the 5.45mm ammo can't be that cheap over there. Somewhat pocket hurting when you're firing rounds at the sky and warbling like an ape every time someone says Gaddafi is dead again.

The G3 (and variants): Probably the next most ubiquitous gun I've seen in Libya outside of the AK family. Designed by good old German arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch after World War II when every iron foundry in Germany was wondering where the next contract was going to come from after the Wehrmacht went belly up. The G3 comes in a dizzying variety of variants and it's no surprise that it should show up in Libya. Heavy and stable and firing the same 7.62x51mm NATO round (see FN below), the G3 uses a "delayed action blowback" mechanism, which is gun speak for "I can put a heavy round on target at 400 meters and fuck you". If I weren't such an armchair pussy and somehow got teleported into a war zone and could chose a fat gun, I'd go with a G3. Accuracy and stopping power trumps the bitch ass hassle of having to lug that heavy 7.62 ammo around. But I'm a stickler for an assault rifle than can be used for long range sniping. Of course, the only long range sniping I've done lately is screaming for a cab from a bar stool on Santa Monica Boulevard.

The FN-FAL: Probably the only good thing ever to come out of Belgium apart from chocolate is the FN. These fuckers are all over Africa having made their debut in Rhodesia in the 1960s. In Rwanda in the 90s, they were widely available but those savages found it cheaper to chalk up a decent kill streak with machetes. No firing in the sky for those animals. These Belgian shooters are in the arsenal of just about every sleazy African war lord especially those from the former Belgian colony of Congo. So yeah, these fucks are everywhere. Probably the leading cause of death of the mountain gorilla too, this gatt fires the NATO 7.62x51mm round. That round was agreed upon by NATO in the '50s during the good old post WWII period when Western countries needed a decent bullet after the Reds decided to hold on to all that Eastern Euro real estate they'd chalked up on the backside of Barbarossa.

Let's face it, it's a very nice gun. It's got a nice gas operated design (for recoil) and can be adjusted according to environmental conditions (code speak for you're dead when I pull the trigger in the desert or the Arctic tundra). The recoil is low in single shot but once you go full auto we're talking painting Banksy modern art all over the target zone. Still, as with most assault rifles, three shot bursts are your friend. Except, of course, if you're a Libyan rebel. Then it's full auto at the sky bitches!

The AK-103 (100 series): Okay, you think I'm cheating here by introducing another AK variant into the mix. But I'm not. The 100 series AK was designed by the Russians in 1994 after they caught on to fact that Kalashnikov and his fancy assault rifle had become an international celebrity. Good old capitalism after the fall of the Soviet Union meant there was money to be made on the international 'free' market so the Russians compromised their principles for cash money and made a gun that could chamber the standard 5.56x45 NATO round. Pricey, and made with composite materials and plastics that the US introduced into the mix in the 60s with the M-16, this gun capitalizes on the Kalashnikov name and was made for the export market. Again, the NATO round is yet another type of ammo fired at the sun by Libyan rebels. That ammo is not exactly hard to come by on the world stage, but still, you'd think beyond the pay grade of the average Benghazi shop keeper with a beef against Gaddafi.

The RPG-7: In my opinion, not exactly a "small arm". But I suppose it must be included since everyone and their mother in the Middle East and Africa seems to have access to one. Again, we can thank the Russians for this limb separator. Used against armored vehicles (some pretty good foils have been developed by the US to stop that shaped warhead frying everyone inside a Hummer) but equally effective against infantry bunched behind a wall, this cheap mass produced fucker is like some modern day equalizer versus professional armies. 60% of British and American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are due to this gatt with IEDs claiming the rest of the human toll. Yeah, calling in an A-10 strike and laying down a spread of depleted uranium hurts more, but let's face it, it's the default gun of every 'terrorist' who has a problem with foreigners stomping around his bit of desert.

So yeah, that's pretty much it for me as far as Libya is concerned. I've mind dumped all I've got on this shitty war, unless of course Gaddafi shows up heading a Market Garden type XXX Corps tank rush on Tripoli. I won't be holding my breath. Fortunately for this blog, that in no way means there's a shortage of resource wars in the near future or any kind of shortage of stuff to write about.

On the proxy resource war front, the 21st Century is just getting started.

Libya: Epic rebel party in Tripoli

2011-08-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting beer in hand on a Sunday afternoon watching footage of the celebrations in Tripoli.

NATO can finally take a sigh of relief. Odyssey Dawn just ended. Sure it took longer than expected but this outcome was always coming. In the end, the rebels basically just drove into Tripoli in their Toyota Tundra pick up trucks, parked in Green Square and declared victory. Seems Gaddafi's army had had enough. The fun thing about being in the Libyan Army is that you can just toss your uniform, grab your AK and run out on the street and celebrate the end of Gaddafi along with all the other idiots.

The BBC are reporting that Gaddafi has bailed to Algeria, a country like the US that hasn't yet ratified the International Criminal Court treaty. So that beachfront condo still might be in Gaddafi's future but probably not. They'll probably keep him in quarantine there (if that's where he is) until things settle in Libya. You never know, he might still be needed if Libya goes belly up and the rebels start massacring each other for a cut of the oil money that's going to start rolling in over the next few weeks.

Foreign power players in all this will be watching closely to see how this pans out. There are a bunch of old scores that need to be settled and the rebels aren't exactly a unified force with a unified ideology. The murder of rebel leader Younis two weeks ago hinted at the fact that there is a lot of simmering tension under the surface.

As I watch the crowds celebrate, there's a lot of 'democracy' talk on TV right now which is pretty funny.

Democracy is always liable to end up with unpredictable results. Especially in the Middle East.

When you give the average fucktard on the street a say in how countries get run, bad shit happens for rich people. That's pretty much why there are no real democracies left on the planet anymore. The only time true democracy showed up it was Athens in 461 BC and good old Pericles was initiating a golden age. US style democracy is all about providing the plebs with the illusion that their vote matters whilst the corporate oligarchy feeds them the information on who to vote for whilst also controlling the candidate list. Pretty fucking genius really.

Once an idea like that takes hold and becomes viral it's hard to suppress. That's why you've got protests still going on right now in Syria and Bahrain, places where protests are 'illegal'. Still, you've gotta love the idea that protesting is illegal. It's like saying the storming of the Bastille in 1789 was illegal. Of course it was. When you're at the top of the food chain everything is illegal for those lower down on the pyramid when they start rocking the boat. I wonder if Louis XVI tried to funnel the French revolution into designated 'free speech zones' a few miles from the epicenter of the Estates-General.

All hail the 'Arab Spring' right? Problem is, Egypt, despite all the hype and democracy talk is under defacto military lockdown... not exactly what all those wide eyed protesters imagined when they dumped Mubarak. So what happens next for Libya? Nothing good. Sure they get a bunch of global corporations moving in and the benefits of a McDonalds in Tripoli, but even if the country doesn't devolve into messy internecine war for resource control (NATO will back whoever has the muscle to keep the oil flowing), one wonders, say ten years out, how many Libyans will be better off than they were under Gaddafi. Sure that guy was an asshole but free healthcare, free education and the highest living standards in Africa were something a lot of Libyans had gotten used to despite the bad guy in charge.

Rebel leaders of the 'National Transition Council' boasted yesterday just before they parked in Green Square that they will have 1.6 million barrels of Libyan oil back on the market next week. Seems way exaggerated but I'm sure it makes the Euros breathe a sigh of relief. 10% of their supply is back online so it's mission accomplished for NATO even if they emerge from this thing looking not exactly convincing as a fighting force. War by commitee is always bad and taking six months to dislodge a third rate army without a modern air defense system is worse. In the end, NATO comes out of this looking weak which sure makes the Chinese and Russians take note.

One wonders now what 'democracy' will bring.

Every rebel who picked up an AK in this uprising is going to believe he deserves a piece of the oil pie. There are some real faultlines there. The Eastern rebels, those centered in Benghazi and currently sitting on all the oil refineries in Brega and Ras Lanuf are not going to let go of those without a big slice of the profits. Those eastern rebels which include all kinds of NATO undesireables like the Islamists and wild desert tribes who fought the US in Iraq and Afghanistan won't be moving anytime soon.

The Western rebels are the ones who actually drove into Tripoli and shed blood in the real battle of this war, the Stalingrad style battle of Misrata; all while the Eastern guys sat polishing the nozzles on the captured oil pipelines in Brega. They won't be so happy if the Benghazi rednecks try to hold on to those terminals for themselves. Each oil tanker that leaves port is ~$150 million in raw cash and every rebel who ever shot an AK in the air is going to want a taste of that action. It's the kind of shit people kill each other for. No real surprise there. So foreign corporate fucks and their economic hitmen will have to wait until the smoke clears in Tripoli to see if things get ugly in the post Gaddafi clusterfuck. With much of Libya's infrastructure destroyed, everyone is going to wake up in the morning with a massive hangover and hungry for a proper breakfast. With food shortages in Tripoli, NATO better hope the situation doesn't devolve into some kind of humanitarian crisis. That'd be pretty ironic wouldn't it? Bombing people to prevent death by starvation is always a little confusing so right now NATO officials must be wondering how much food can be distributed once the revenge killings get started. Or everything could go better than expected and I could just be a miserable cynical fuck. Who knows what this ugly mess will deliver? Not me.

Still, looking at brown people celebrating victory in some foreign desert seems to be popular in 2011 so I'll smile and have another beer.

One hopes there's something still worth celebrating a few years from now.

Benghazi: Postcards from the edge of civilization.

2011-08-08T11:26:00.000-07:00

    Benghazi sure is a 'fun' zone these days if you enjoy a front row seat for how 21st century resource wars are going to play out. I think it's pretty obvious right now that proxy resource wars are in our future. Hell, they're here right now. Proxy bullshit wars are the new 'Domino theory' but with no Kissinger or McNamara to sell the idea to the plebs. And, let's face it, things are easier these days if governments bypass the idiots who elect them and keep their intentions on the down low. All you really need today is some semi plausible story about a bad guy in some foreign desert where there's oil and people will believe he's a bad guy so long as a compliant media rolls out that stock footage of the 'terrorists' on monkey bars.

But the NATO mission in Libya is getting harder to explain.

   Libya is just another place, along with Detroit, Baghdad and Fukishima, where we all get a front row seat to preview all the shit that's going to make the 21st century the worst century in human history. We humans are screwed. And yeah, I'm a major pessimist on long term human survival. Military history will do that to you I guess. But the sad truth is that there are no 'good' wars like WWII left to fight anymore. The future of war is just lots of pesky details. Details that won't make for good TV. There are no more obviously evil Nazis to rail against. Just lots of sleazy guys on all sides whose sleaziness is proportional to the energy reserves sleazy guys happen to be sitting on that other sleazy guys want.

   The West needs energy but so do the Chinese and the other BRIC economies. The market for cool stuff is getting crowded now. The future is lots of land grabs that are getting harder and harder to explain to the public. Especially in Western 'democracies'. It's going to be shady resource squabbles up until the point when China or Russia or the US get sick of proxy wars and finally need that oil or freshwater or farmland more than they are prepared to allow rival powers to grab it. That's when shit will get real interesting. Ultimately, our Facebooky, Twitterized post modern feel good consumerist utopia runs up against the hard wall of finite resources and depleting energy. And that's when the fun starts and the 'real' wars get greenlit.

Benghazi today is ground zero for this new proxy war paradigm

   Right now it's a latter day 70s Saigon, full of the usual free for all characters and rapine that makes any big city in a warzone really shitty for the local population but exciting as hell if you're an insurgent, rebel, CIA operative, Islamic religious freak, Bedouin heroin addict, foreign economic hitman, arms dealer, renegade journalist or just some guy trying to make a quick buck off the fall of yet another desert oil producer. It's like Casablanca in 1941 but with no Bogart to make it all sensible to a foreign public who don't give a shit anymore because they're too busy applying for foodstamps.

   The NATO air campaign is not following the script, you know, the script some pencil pusher in the Pentagon or Whitehall scribbled together just as Gaddafi was about to punish Benghazi for its 40 year history of hating his guts. The NATO script hoped Gaddafi would die quickly by Tomahawk (the British bombed his compound on night one of Odyssey Dawn but missed) and all the evils of the pesky Middle East dictator would go away after the Western corpotocracy stepped into the rubble and rewrote the oil deals and dumped 'democracy' on the unwitting citizen victims of Libya who were supposed to be happy with all the benefits of globalization via a McDonald's dollar menu in Tripoli.

   The problem with wars these days is that they have a nasty habit of not following the pleb fed script.

In the future dystopian corpo sci fi novel that we're all living in, food is still relatively cheap, oil is still available and there are no ration tickets yet. We're living in that time just before things start to get real ugly, where the contents of the plastic Coca Cola bottle are still worth more than the wondrous plastic container itself; the dream of every ancient warrior, a capable, durable, refillable water carrier that you'd pass down to your son but which we toss idly in the trash because it looks ugly on the floor of our 'Prius'.  Our throwaway dystopia relegates foreign wars that any rich country gets engaged in to just one more event on TV, competing for viewers along with shitty reality shows, singing competitions, home improvement bullshit and that show about some guy who can tell you what your dog really meant when he took a shit on your Blu Ray collection.

   Benghazi is the dirty underbelly of all our lives right now. Sure, the Libyan debacle is a sideshow when compared to big global chessmoves like Iraq or Afghanistan but it's got a certain naked land grab feel about it that works as the perfect metaphor for how big powers are going to gobble up all the low hanging fruit in the increasingly shitty 21st century. And eventually they'll come into conflict over some Arctic oil puddle the melting ice makes extractable. That's where this is all headed. All the world's capitals will soon know the free for all global squabble that Benghazi is right now.

Eastern Libya and its capital Benghazi have always been redneck country and the part of Libya that sophisticates in Tripoli like to look down on while sipping their fancy coffees in upscale cafes. Benghazi is the city where the supporters of the former king that Gaddafi deposed in the '60s got to lay low while watching helplessly as Gaddafi funneled the oil wealth out from under their feet. They've been itching for a shot at revenge for decades. It's also home to the Islamists and the wilder desert tribes and proved fervent recruiting ground for volunteers for Iraq and Afghanistan to fight the "Yankee imperialists". Those are the rebels best fighters and also the last guys you'd expect NATO to be assisting but such is the complex web of forces that guide geopolitics these days. In truth, oil makes everyone a bitch, loyalties cheap and alliances tend to shift like desert sands all so long as the proles in the US and Europe get to fill up their tanks on the cheap to make that commute from surburbia to their cubicle in Wageslavistan affordable.

   In the revolutionary 60s, Gaddafi rode to power on the idea of crumbling aristocracies in the 'Age of Aquarius' and set up Libya as a one stop shop for anyone with a beef against Western governments. In the 80s, he'd sell anyone with a business plan for mayhem some semtex or an AK and giggle as the pasty white men imperialists in the US and Europe recoiled in horror as a 747 crumbled over Scotland or the IRA blew up an office building in London. Gaddafi is an asshole. But he's the kind of asshole you'd like if he were a bad guy in a movie. Like a Darth Vader but in sunglasses and dressed in 70s porno curtains.

   Benghazi right now is the Mos Eisley in our Star Wars universe. A 'hive of scum and villainy' if you will. An international cast is waiting to feed off the flesh of Gaddafi's fallen regieme. It's the awesome new template for war towns where the global corporate oligarchy, with special forces and intelligence agencies sent in as vanguard are followed soon after by corporate journalists, money men, dealmakers and various shady fucks. The rebels in Toyota Tundra trucks are too dumb to know when they're being used. And they're not even good enough fighters to close the war they were scripted to win. Sure it's only a matter of time before the oil changes hands and the rebels stomp into Tripoli but using a bunch of malcontents as a cheap ground army smacks of discount war.

  The thing is, as the world gets increasingly deranged, because of failing financial systems, energy and food price spikes and all kinds of growing religious and ethnic tensions on an overcrowded planet, Benghazi is the new template for a frontier town at the edge of civilization. Wars started and unfinished because everyones too broke to fight on borrowed capital. Sleazy wars with hard to define goals (because the public is getting wise to bullshit). The problem for the corpo oligarchy is that unless we go to 'total war' and Clauswitz' ghost gets to witness the 21st century's end by way of his 19th century paradigm; 'total war' where the generals finally get to press the 'big red button of win' on their Strangelove desks. But then nobody wins. Nations are still toying with the idea that there's a victory to be had somewhere. Right now, total war is still bad for business.

   Soon, if not already, Washington DC, London, Rome, Madrid, Athens, Paris, Moscow and maybe even Beijing are going to start to look like war towns, places turned into siege enclaves by debt, riots and diminishing energy reserves. We've still got a decade left before things get really ugly. But we will get a front row seat to the growing 21st century sleaziness and Benghazi is the fringe model for how the world plays out. It's always ugly watching vultures stick their hairless necks into dead flesh.

   The one constant in human military history is that war is always a way to burn the mistakes of the past and wipe slates clean. War is catharsis. And it's always really ugly. But war has a habit of bringing people back to some baseline reality, a reality where those trashed plastic bottles are worth something again. New generations are doomed to keep on relearning how much of a failure war is because we upright apes are too dumb to learn from our own history books. But war is written into our DNA. Fuck the other guy, I need his shit. The world right now reminds me of the situation exactly one hundred years ago. The heady Edwardian days of the gilded age before the Great War cleansed all that animosity out of the old system. 1911 was a year when major powers were entrenching and everyone was getting pissed off.  There was a lot of positioning by nation states then who were gearing themselves up to test how conflict would work out in an industrial age. It took two World Wars to wipe that slate clean and hundreds of millions died. And that was without nukes in the equation. We're in a similar age, the final squabble for what's left after the 20th century boom, this time with 7 billion people to throw into trenches both metaphorical and real.

   The problem today for Western economies is that there is no room for anymore 'growth'. The whole financial casino is based on the idea that we keep expanding into new territory, shitting out more babies and building new markets for iPads. The new reality is that can't happen anymore and that's going to piss off a lot of people. It's the hard wall all our consumerist dreams must crash into on a finite planet. Moon Base Alpha is not going to happen anytime soon because we can't afford it anymore. We spent all the cash importing Italian marble for our countertops. So we're stuck on this rock. Caged apes tend to bash skulls for extra rations. That's us on planet earth right now.

   Stockpile popcorn. It's still cheap.

   And yeah, I'm a depressing fuck. I'd hang outside a supermarket with one of those "The End is Nigh" signs if I wasn't such a pussy.

Norway: It's not terrorism if you're a photogenic white guy who hates the government?

2011-07-24T20:17:00.000-07:00

Like most people, when I first heard of the bombing in Oslo, I started group-thinking along with everybody else that al-Qaeda were behind it and had chalked up some opportunistic infidel deaths to buy some longevity in global media now that their dear leader got air dumped in the Indian Ocean. I presumed headlines and a media frenzy were the motivation for the bombing. You're nobody these days without column inches. Al-Qaeda, being mainly a media phenomena anyhow, with no command and control structure, no real logistics operation and no more chips to play on the global stage except media infamy for 9/11 and some amorphous rallying call to angry Muslim youth to use 'terror' against the Western oligarchy; I figured this was just a cheap way to blast a soft target and remind us all that al-Qaeda are still here. Muslim populations in the Middle East sure have a legitimate beef with us Westerners for meddling in their desert shitholes just so we can keep the petro dollar Christmas tree lights on.

Still, I grabbed popcorn. Nothing starts a whole new war like dead white people.

But then I started thinking about it. Norway? Why the hell would, and I'm using the terminology of Western countries here, why would the "terrorists" strike Norway of all places? I mean, they aren't exactly enemy number one or close to first on the list of "countries a young pissed off Muslim extremist with no girlfriend" is likely to want to murder children in. Sure, it's a NATO member and a soft target with no TSA and Patriot Act keeping them all safe. But when you're a young Muslim donning a suicide vest to make a point by chalking up a respectable civilian body count, Norway is by no means the first place you'd choose to make that point. Then I thought of Gaddafi and that threat he made two weeks ago about bombing the Euros and NATO capitals. If some young Libyan pulled this shit, then the much derided NATO ground assault on Tripoli that I fantasized about last week was suddenly in play.

Hell, if the whole "war on terror" is really real I thought, as I switched from popcorn to beer, then why didn't some sexually repressed but horny young Muslim or Gaddafi 'Manchurian Candidate' plant a bomb in say, Times Square, or blow up an airliner with a Calvin Klein underwear bomb? Oh shit, yeah, 'they' already tried that and I've already been duly 'terrified' by what the desert brown people want to do to me. Okay, I thought, maybe Norway is a legitimate target, what with their fancy socialist democracy, high taxes and top rating on 'best countries in the world to live in' index. Perhaps one of those young Muslims living in a segregated Muslim district in Oslo wanted to draw attention to the fact that they're highly pissed off with their living situation. And, let's face it, no letter writing campaign is ever going to change public awareness like a bunch of dead people.

That's when breaking news told me that a "suspect had been apprehended by Norwegian police". And right then I knew this guy wasn't al-Qaeda. Any decent fundamentalist would have saved the last bullet in the mag for himself. And not for that 72 virgin bullshit they like to promulgate on CNN or Fox. Proper religious fundamentalists die by their sword along with their victims and let god sort out the moral dilemma of heaven and hell allocation. It's how you prove you truly believe in an afterlife right? By dying and going to a better place? It's why I wonder why all these religious fundamentalists on all sides don't just kill themselves by default and board the short train to paradise. Why waste time dealing with the nuance of the human world when you can take the fast track to everlasting bliss?

Turned out, by my third beer, the shooter had been identified. Pictures of him surfaced.

Holy shit, I thought, he might be the best looking Muslim 'terrorist' I'd ever seen!

Brad Pitt could play that guy in a movie. He's the most photogenic blonde Euro terrorist since the baddies in 'Die Hard'. Aren't terrorists supposed to be bearded brown desert people with funny headgear? And that's when I noticed that the "Terror Attack in Oslo" headlines started shifting editorially to "Extremist Attacks in Oslo". Suddenly, terrorism was off the table now that a blond photogenic white Norwegian guy did it.

This subtle editorial shift sums up the whole "War on Terror" thing in one neat little pistachio shell. Terrorism since 9/11 has been purely the domain of brown people in foreign deserts where the oil is. It's the kind of subtle editorial shift that goes unnoticed but it's there, full on and in your face, that is if you've got the time or inclination to pay attention to the conglomerated bullshit excuse for news reporting we get these days. Chances are, most people in Western countries are too busy holding down their jobs or looking for a decent paying one in the economic crisis to pay too much attention to what goes down in Norway. Especially if it's not an al-Qaeda operation with any likelihood of bombing them while they ride public transport to get to that job. Truth is, the lone crusade of an extremist with some beef with his government isn't really a priority except for a quick empathetic fear of what it might be like to be hunted like game for twenty minutes in a forest/lake setting in Norway. World events these days are supposed to fit a narrative. When they don't, the story must shift to something far more confusing and people are left to figure out our crazy times and the madness of fellow humans all by themselves.

The reality is that Anders Behring Breivik is a terrorist. Pure and simple. He used 'terror' to make a point to the Norwegian government for what he saw as its Marxist Socialist agenda leading Norway down the wrong path and letting in too many desert people who have no interest in assimilating into Norwegian culture. Or something. It's an argument you can make. And, I suppose, a fair point to put on the discussion table if you believe in democracy. Let the people decide in the proper forum right? After all, isn't democracy the sneaking suspicion that more than 50% of the people are right more than 50% of the time? But I suppose, if we are to learn anything from history, it's that war and mass murder are the fast track to making your point heard. So break out the automatic weaponry, head to the local mosque at prayer time and start hosing all those evil Muslim children with 7.62mm hollow points to make that point, right?

Wait, what?

Scratch that. No, instead, this guy headed to a Norwegian Youth Camp and mowed down 85 white teenagers to prove a point about how bad Muslims are. Okay, let me check my notes. Maybe I skipped the chapter in world military history where murdering your own racial group makes you a hero among them because you wanted to prove to them and the government how 'bad' the enemy racial group are. That's when I stopped trying to piece together the psychology of this guy. He doesn't even deserve the mental energy. Call me radical, but I like my terrorists to at least have a proper point. You know, something like freeing oppressed people from tyranny or blowing up a hotel full of enemy personnel because they're occupying your country or something. At the very least, a cogent ideology you can disagree with on a human level but understand if you were to put yourself in the shooter's shoes and experience his shitty life from childhood.

But this fucking millionaire?

Growing up in one of the richest countries on the planet with all kinds of social services and free education and healthcare and unemployment insurance, this fuck up started two businesses that tanked so at 32, he went to live on a farm outside Oslo. Yeah, it was all part of his plan. It's a hard life being a fuck up but a lot easier if you own a farm. How can you hate people if you live on a farm in Norway anyway? You've already scored huge in the life lottery and got incarnated in the first world in the 21st century where life is golden. It made me think of that scene in 12 Monkey's when Bruce Willis time travels back from the post apocalyptic virus future and stumbles across a shitty stream in a nondescript forest and cries with joy, raving that this is all anyone ever needs, fresh water, sky, clean air, a wood supply with fish and wild game to hunt.

But that's me being all idealistic.

We humans are pretty simple when it comes down to it. But in the celebrity fap zone sci fi dystopia that we've created for ourselves, where you're nobody if you're not on TV or on some shitty reality show, there are plenty of sick fucks out there who can't see the wood from the trees in the '12 Monkey' forest. This fame whore just wanted headlines and the inevitable media frenzy that makes mass murder an instant ticket to fame. Blame whoever. The media business itself or the insatiable human nature that consumes it. But Anders Behring Breivik is on the front page of every media outlet on the planet today. And that's mission accomplished for him. And yeah, I'm aware of the meta post modern irony of me writing about it.

We're going to hear a lot of of bullshit in the media over the next week about this guy and the reasons why he did what he did. It'll probably lead to debates about multiculturalism, Muslim integration in free societies, curbs on civil liberties to prevent it from happening again and mountains of other things. But at the end of the day, this fame whore succeeded, just like 'al-Qaeda' did, in making fools of us all. Violence works as do body counts and war. War is the only thing that ever changed anything in human history. Sad fact. And don't quote me Gandhi, that was just war by peaceful means.

What a waste of a good farm.

Libya: Does NATO have the balls for a ground assault on Tripoli?

2011-07-13T22:48:00.000-07:00

There's no doubt that NATO needs Operation "Odyssey Dawn" to just go away now. Shuffle off into the pages of some history book that nobody will read. That's a pretty good bet these days too. With the collective memory of the public in our dystopian sci fi future bordering on goldfish territory, it's safe to assume that the sleazy corporations and oligarchies that run Western foreign policy could hide behind the curtain and watch this mess go away just by the inexorable force of inertia alone. Or at least until the X Factor comes on TV.

For one thing, this war is making everyone involved look bad. The French and British are just looking ineffectual with their hamfisted air strikes and with the US Congress voting to censure Obama for going to war in Libya without Congressional approval (laugh out loud funny when you consider Bush era foreign policy), everyone involved here is looking like the proverbial 8th grader school trippers at the local zoo who come across the chimpanzee enclosure. Those apes are so cute on the monkey bars until they get bored and start flinging freshly minted shit at the children behind the Plexiglas.

The NATO mission in Libya is a lot like that. The trip sure seemed like a good idea if you didn't stop and think about it. And NATO didn't. Making sure that the supplier of 10% of the EU's oil didn't self destruct and flood the Euros with Muslim refugees in the process sure seemed like a good idea when NATO first started dropping precision ordinance on Gaddafi's tanks outside Benghazi. And barring some lucky Tomahawk strike on Gaddafi's tent (and that's always a possibility given the right intel), the NATO mission in Libya went wrong fast. That's not to say there was ever a definition of what the mission going "right" meant either. Like Gaddafi predicted, it's already gone on longer than NATO bargained for and now they're left without a convincing exit strategy. That's always been the problem with starting small wars when you're the big guy on the block. Once you start them, you can't walk away without a win. Otherwise you just look weak. That's playground logic that every bully who preys on lunch money knows. With Gaddafi's lunch money proving harder to grab than anticipated and him entrenched in fortress Tripoli that no air campaign is ever going to break, it looks like NATO get to be the kids stuck behind the Plexiglas watching incoming turds.

And this is where it's fun to entertain the possibility of a ground assault.

Sure, it's never going to happen right? But let's engage in fantasy here for a few minutes, grab some popcorn and play around with the idea that the Euros have balls and how a ''boots on the ground strategy" might play out. This war was never supposed to go the distance. In the minds of politicians in Western countries, they've got this awesome military at their disposal with the latest multi million dollar combat aircraft to push around on the global chess board and anything that doesn't equal an automatic military win means there must be a glitch in the Matrix.

Gaddafi, for his part, engaged in some high level trolling of the Euros last week. Just the other day, he threatened them with the prospect of hundreds of fools willing to martyr themselves on the streets of Paris and London if NATO didn't stop the bombing. Threats like that tend to piss people off and make the media jizz at the prospect of all the advertising revenue they'll bag while reporting it. If there's one thing the IRA proved when they started bombing economic targets in London, like say Canary Wharf in 1996, is that 'terrorism' tends to bring the politicians to the negotiating table. The dirty little secret of modern warfare despite the hype is that 'terrorism' works. Hell, it has always worked. It just comes down to what you define as terrorism. Carpet bombing cities sure counts. The London blitz, Dresden and Hiroshima were all pretty damn terrifying. If you're gonna bomb Tripoli with Rafales and Tornados, no matter how you dress it up with fancy talk about 'strategic aims' and formal apologies, when that GBU blows up in the wrong place and kills a bunch of fruitsellers it's media time and the chimpanzee shit goes airborne. Truth is, intent doesn't really matter as the smoke clears. Dead bodies are dead bodies. That's war. And it's pretty damn terrifying.

The Libyan rebels: Cool as fuck, yes. But not someone you're going to trust with artillery.

So the real question, in our little fantasy war, is how does NATO conduct this ground campaign that'll have us grabbing the popcorn and that'll probably never happen. First off, let's take it for granted that the US, the Brits and the Frogs already have ground forces in theater. You think they could trust a bunch of those illiterate rebels in Toyota Tundras to target paint Gaddafi's tanks all by themselves? Foreign special forces have been running around Benghazi since this thing started.

Could the French and British pull off a balls to the wall amphibious assault on Tripoli? Truth is, they probably wouldn't need to. The British would have HMS Ocean to throw at the job and the French have three Mistral class amphibious assault ships already linked up in the Mediterranean. But it'd be far easier to just unload the armor from cargo ships in Benghazi and push across the desert Eight Army style, rolling up strategic oil towns like Brega and Ras Lanuf along the way. That'd be a bit of a buzzkill on the amphibious landing front though. We haven't had a cool one in war since Inchon back in 1950.

Still, the armor drive would be fun. 1941 all over again with British armor pushing across Libya and no Rommel to contend with. Just Gaddafi dressed in his 70s porno curtains. Of course, there's no public support for any of this right now, but let's say for the sake of argument that Gaddafi pulls off that threat of martyr bombs in Paris and London. All it'd take is a stack of bodies in your capital and an external enemy to blame it on to have the public crying for blood.

For more wargasm, let's assume the British break out some Challengers IIs to do the job. You know I've always wondered how that classified ceramic "Chobham" armor of theirs would stand up to relentless RPG fire. Sure Iraq was a test case but Basra was no Fallujah. The French too have their own Main Battle Tank to throw at Gaddafi, the 'Leclerc', which unfortunately for the Frogs, sounds as threatening as some guy who works in a bank. When was the last time the French were involved in proper tank battle anyway? Oh yeah, summer 1940. Ooops.

Once the NATO armored column got to Tripoli they'd probably head straight to the airport and set up a FOB right there and resupply themselves by air. That strategy worked out pretty well for the US marines when they took Baghdad in 2003. Occupying some real estate in the heart of the enemy camp is a pretty good bet when you're up against a teetering dictator with wavering support and an army who could ditch their uniforms and walk away when things get difficult. Occupying enemy real estate is also a handy way of testing what kind of fight the natives want to bring to the table. And with total air superiority, it'd be hard to see this working out bad for NATO. Of course, it's not the kind of strategy you'd employ anywhere else but in a fading dictators desert capital. But winning might still be tricky, especially if Gaddafi's forces were to prove resilient and everyone and their mother started grabbing an AK from the local armory. Unlikely, but then again, there's always the unexpected in war. My guess is Tripoli would fold in a week with a few small enclaves of die hards holding out a while longer.

The question is, do the Euros have the balls to put their military on the world stage? Or the cash? The Russians and Chinese would sure like to know. This Libyan mission, like all small wars greater powers get mixed up in, always work out as test cases for bigger 'proper' wars. When the Russians handed the Georgians their ass in the NATO proxy war in South Ossetia in 2008 we all learned that the Warsaw Pact tank divisions hadn't really gone away. The Libyan debacle, no matter who says what, is an interesting test case for NATO as an effective fighting force. Right now a barely passing grade doesn't inspire much confidence.

   But this war still comes down to economics. With all kinds of embargoes, Gaddafi is running out of money and the situation in Tripoli is worsening. Tripoli has always been the place Libyan sophisticates hang out drinking lattes, sucking sweet smoke from fragrant hookahs and discussing how bad the western imperialists are. Truth is, a lot of them had it pretty good under Gaddafi. Free health care and free education right on up through university. Once those illiterate rebels from Benghazi take over who knows what'll be left for the coffee drinkers. Half those fools are Islamic hardliners from the desert who signed up to fight the Yankee imperialists in Iraq and Afghanistan. They don't do Starbucks culture very well. That's why the sophisticates sided with Gaddafi in the first place. Now coffee supplies are getting leaner and bread is being baked by female volunteers. Stuff like that tends to make cafe dwellers reassess their priorities.

   Paradoxically, NATO broke a cardinal rule and bombed the oil facilities at Brega last week. That's like the bully spitting in his victim's lunch before actually taking it and smacks of NATO desperation to get this thing over with. They claimed Gaddafi was using it to fuel his army. But the useless rebels held it a month before and managed to fill a tanker and collect $100 million before they passed "Go". That at least proved to the western corporatocracy that these fucktard rebels can at least play ball on the oil front.

   Gaddafi himself sees the writing on the wall. There's no win for him here long term and like all old men, he doesn't want to die penniless and locked up in some Euro jail. He's shrewd enough to see NATO's predicament and can give them the "victory" they need in exchange for a transfer of power to his son Saif, some kind of immunity from a war crimes trial in The Hague and, most critical of all, getting to keep some of that money he's stashed away in myriad offshore bank accounts. Beachfront property and a comfortable retirement sure seems like a good deal now and he's softening on the 'fight to the death' bullshit he was spouting when this war got started. If he's to cut a deal, he'd better do it quick before the rest of his generals defect and his troops chuck their uniforms, go home and act like they know nothing about rape and pillage.

   In respect to that NATO ground assault fantasy of mine, it looks like my popcorn supply is safe.

Iran's New Toys: Missile Silos!

2011-06-30T17:40:00.000-07:00

The Middle East sure is a fun zone these days. At least for those of us who derive a certain schadenfreude from watching the world burn. "The best laid plans of mice and men..." and all that jazz. But apart from the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Syria which are all Sunni Arab based, we tend to forget about that old faultline in Islam that Iran represents; the Shia. Iran, as the champion of this particular branch of skygod worship, wants to become a regional force in the Middle East and why wouldn't they? They're sitting on an ocean of oil and natural gas and have a population of 72 million. Tehran has tree lined boulevards and it's an hours drive to ski resorts from downtown. Mobile phone ownership per capita is higher than some euro countries. Problem is, the country is a theocracy run by a doomsday religious cult. And they're losing a war against their own young people which makes them extra twitchy.

There's nothing this Iranian theocracy likes more, other than attempting to attain regional theater parity with the Israelis on the nuke front, than trolling the same Israelis and the US with the possibility that they might have some new toys to play around with in their sandbox. Sure, the toys they'd really like to have would be some actual nukes or, barring those, a few batteries of the Russian S-300 missile system that would make any US/Israeli air campaign against Natanz orders of magnitude more difficult. But the Iranians already did have a bunch of S-300s bought and paid for until the Israelis found out about the deal last year and shat all over it before the system was delivered, scuttling the Iranian's defense gasm with some diplomatic pressure and a snarly phone call to the Russians from Hillary Clinton. The Russians just shrugged and kept the money which sure pissed the Iranians off mightily. But that's par for the course in the sleazy world of international arms deals these days. I still wonder what kind of pressure the Israelis put on the Russians not to sell the Iranians that SAM system but then again, Israel has a sizable Russian population, so I'm sure there were plenty of phone numbers to speed dial in Mossad's little black book.

The first Iranian nuke underground test is still years away. The US and Israel made sure of that when they deployed the Stuxnet computer worm against Iran's shitty computer system earlier this year. That sure was a kick in the nuts to Iran's nuclear ambitions and has delayed them by at least an extra year and barring a North Korean document dump, it'll be at least 2015 before there's a Shia nuke and the "big red button of win" ends up on the Ayatollah's desk. As I've said before, an Israeli air strike on Iran's nuke facilities would be the ultimate popcorn war but the Israelis found a cheaper way to delay that program. They basically hacked the Matrix and 'uploaded a virus' into the Iranian's 'Pentium II" that blue screened them hard and now they have to go and buy a whole new computer non Windows based system. This plan sure worked out a lot cheaper for everyone than a bombing mission.

But the Iranians are still pissed.

And looking for ways to piss off the West.

It looks like they found a new way this week. The State News Agency just reported on 10 days of Iranian war games called ''Great Prophet 6" (apparently the first 5 prophets were just mediocre) and splashed some dick waving pics of their brand new 'missile silos', large holes in the desert that can withstand an airburst and chuck a Shahab 3 (range 1200 miles) back at Israel or US bases in the Gulf in the event of an air strike on Iran. Thing is, missile silos, while nice and all, are primarily defensive weapons that hark back to the '80s and the heady days of the Cold War and Defcon 5. Obsolete in some ways, a lot of silos in the US have been converted into post apocalyptic survival shelters where rich Wall Street types can buy a berth and sit back after civilization implodes (any day now surely) while the rest of us plebs massacre each other for the last can of chicken soup in the looted Seven Eleven. Some Iranian colonel went on Iranian State TV and stated that the silos "function as a swift reaction unit" meaning the missiles are always in a vertical position with the co-ordinates of Tel Aviv locked in. That is, of course, if Stuxnet hasn't fucked with them too and makes the Kebab 3s U turn back to Tehran soon after launch.

But that right there is the purpose of these missile silos. To show the US and Israel that if Iran gets bombed, no matter what, we Iranians are going to get to launch at least one reciprocal strike and you don't know where those missiles will go. Could be Tel Aviv. Could be Saudi Oil terminals. Could be US bases. The point is they can make an attack on Iran costly and the outcomes unpredictable. Not least for the global economy which is basically the "oil" economy.

Right now, the location of these silos is obviously secret (Abriz and Khorramabad in northwest Iran) but I'm sure any prospective US air attack on Iran will first involve a quick Pentagon scan of Google Earth to find them. In a world where you've got satellites that can read your golf ball from space, hiding stuff these days is tricky. Still, this is an advance from an Iranian point of view. Previous iterations of the Shahab 3, a liquid fueled piece of Iranian tech that can hit Tel Aviv, were all mounted atop dodgy looking mobile platforms with dozens of wheels that looked like something from Gerry Anderson's '60s era kids TV series "Thunderbirds". Another unidentified Iranian officer told state television that “only a few countries in the world possess the technology to construct underground missile silos. The technology required for that is no less complicated than building the missile itself.” That's a bit of a fucking stretch. I mean any country with a decent subway system is already half way there and that just leaves a few technical issues like venting the propellant gasses, rolling open the blast doors and on which floor to stash Dr Strangelove's wheelchair.

May or may not be a pic of Iran's silo loaded with a Shish Kebab 3

The Iranians really would like to up the ante as a regional player in the Middle East. It really pissed them off in April when the Saudis marched into Bahrain with tanks and started slapping around the Shia protestors there because they make up 60% of the population and suddenly wondered why they can't vote. That's a legitimate beef but went largely unreported in Western countries where it pays to keep your mouth shut about the Saudi's incase they tighten the nozzle on the oil wells to remind everyone whose boss. That would hamper the "economic recovery". Those Sunni Arabs sure do suck up to the Zionists and the US from an Iranian point of view. The nut job theocracy in Iran wishes for the days when Babylon had Hanging Gardens and streetlighting and everyone feared their elite unit, the Immortals. The only way the Iranians feel they are gonna get some respect these days is if they can slap a nuke together, nukes being the modern elite unit. It's pretty funny the way they keep denying they want one, conducting numerous "talks" to stall the Euros and Turks and Russians with bullshit while sending a bunch of dipshit diplomats to act innocent in front of the world's TV cameras and swear on their momma's burka that they have absolutely no interest in the 'big one' but instead just want a little taste of nuclear fission for electricity generation and 'medical purposes'.

Still, you could forgive Iran for wanting a nuke.

The Iranians have noticed that when you get named a member country of the "Axis of Evil" possibly the best way to maintain sovereignty is to fast track some uranium into something blowable. It worked for North Korea. Iran figures, since it's surrounded on all sides by Americans, maybe the only route to autonomy and stopping the Americans grabbing your oil is a nuke. Another thing a Persian big one will do, is stop the Sunni's acting against Iranian proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria (assuming Assad manages to massacre enough people to stay in power). Pulling those under an Iranian nuke umbrella would sure tip the balance of power in the Mid East to the Shia and have the Saudi's racing to get their own centrifuges churning.

Iran: For some reason, being surrounded by US "democracy" doesn't make them feel good.

The IAEA said a few weeks back they had evidence that the Iranians were working on 'nuclear triggers', you know, those complex devices that fit in suitcases and usually make an appearance as McGuffins, important plot points in Bond and Bourne type spy movies. The report said it had asked Iran about evidence of “experiments involving the explosive compression of uranium deuteride to produce a short burst of neutrons” — the speeding particles that split atoms in two in a surge of nuclear energy. The Iranians apparently just nodded sheepishly and promised to get back to them on that one.

The I.A.E.A.’s last comprehensive report, issued in February, listed seven outstanding questions about work Iran had conducted on warhead design. The documents in the hands of the agency raise questions about work on how to turn uranium into bomb fuel, how to cast conventional explosives in a shape that can trigger a nuclear blast, how to make detonators, generate neutrons to spur a chain reaction, measure detonation waves and make nose-cones for missiles. Obviously, Iranian scientists have been googling this shit like crazy for ages but so far the jury is out on how much they do know and how long it'll take before they can translate that shit from the North Korean. It seems the blue screen of death Stuxnet worm has run its course with reports out of Iran's main facility at Natanz saying it's enriching uranium at a slightly faster rate than before Israel forced them to buy a whole new computer.

Of course, if all this doesn't work out, the Iranians are busy working on their next dastardly plan sure to piss off the US and Israel next month. Tehran just announced its intention to fire into space in early July a Kavoshgar 5 rocket piloted by a monkey. I shit you not.

The first Iranian monkey in space is sure to piss off the capitalist pigs.

Lucky little bastard.

Yemen and History: Middle East civil war by the usual rules?

2011-06-14T20:18:00.000-07:00

There's about to be another civil war in the Middle East.

This time in Yemen.

Don't expect 24/7 news coverage of this war either. I mean, who really gives a shit about Yemen anyway? Nobody. Yemen has no significant oil, gold or diamonds which means they're safe from anybody caring what goes down in their tribal desert shit hole at the ass end of Arabia. Yemen doesn't even benefit from a useful bit of strategic geography where someone might want to park an aircraft carrier or stash a secret rendition site. And after Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, Western nations and their media are pretty much burned out on the Middle East by this stage of 2011. Even the Chinese, who are busy recycling their US treasury notes on an African buying spree, don't seem much interested in this desolate chunk of Middle East real estate.

Desolate places are still no guarantee that foreign governments won't take an interest in your little corner of the world. But the tiny puddle of oil that Yemen's economy is currently running on is expected to be sucked dry by 2017. They do have significant natural gas deposits but so do a lot of other places less knee deep in shit and there's currently a glut of methane on the world market right now, which, unlike global oil production, hasn't already peaked. Yemen's gas just isn't worth the hassle for the global corporate elite since outside the capital, Sana'a, the country is a medieval feudal hellhole where the idea of law and order is some shitty Islamic Sharia version of justice where it's cool to bang twelve year olds and stealing an apple is worth a left hand.

Yemen is really just a wayward chunk of Africa but the strategic energy chess game being played out worldwide right now means that global power players lump Yemen into the wider narrative of the Middle East. Energy and resource wars are gonna be big this century. That'd normally mean Yemen would get ignored. But Yemen just happens to make up the southern border of the real energy prize a few hundred miles north. The Saudi oil state is what makes Yemen's civil war interesting. Their shitty little war might actually matter in the grand scheme of things if it manages to spill over into the Saudi oil prize. Of course, the Saudi monarchs will do everything to make sure this doesn't happen just like they did in Bahrain; nobody gave a shit there when they sent tanks to slap around the Shia majority in that country just to warn their own Shia not to get any fancy ideas about 'democracy'. Truth is, the Saudis see democratic contagion everywhere and fear its spread into their medieval petro kingdom.

The reason the US cares about Yemen and bothers to deploy CIA, special forces and Predator drones and toss some cash at the Yemeni authorities is yet again the threat of 'terror'. All that barren wasteland combined with illiterate Islamic tribesmen scares the shit out of politicians in the US who see every empty bit of desert in the Middle East as a haven for al-Qaeda. The current Yemeni leader, President Ali Abdullah Saleh (more on him later), likes to play the 'al-Qaeda card' whenever things are going bad for him politically so he can extort some extra cash and weaponry out of a jittery US. The 21st century has truly marked the death of 'American badassery'. At least the WWII McAuliffe kind of badass that scribbled "nuts" on a note to the Wehrmacht at Bastogne. That type of Yank badass is long dead when you consider the pussies who run the US today get scared shitless by a group of Iron Age tribal desert dwellers who shit in outhouses and do that monkey bar training thing the news networks play everytime they want you to be scared of bad guys in some foreign desert. When was the last time fools like that got to challenge an empire anyway? Probably not since a bunch of testicle waving Germanic forest men sacked Rome in 410.

   For a desolate place, Yemen sure has some interesting history.

   This is mainly due to the fact that Yemen wasn't always such a desolate place. It was once home to a whole bunch of ancient civilisations that controlled lucrative trade and spice routes. Yemen's history stretches back to the 12th century BCE when it was a wealthy place, so much so that Roman historian Ptolemy referred to it as "Arabia Felix" (Happy Arabia) in the second century AD. The kingdom made a fortune exporting spices and aromatics to the Mediterranean, India and Mesopotamia when sweet smelling stuff like that could make bad food taste good and dead bodies smell less rank, qualities greatly prized by just about every culture in antiquity. Unlike today, agriculture flourished in Yemen due to an advanced irrigation system that included water tunnels through mountains and the impressive 'dam of Ma'rib', built 700 years before the Romans nailed Christ to a bunch of two by fours.

   After centuries of prosperity, around 600 AD, a serial bigamist and itinerant sheep herder started a religion that spread across Arabia and soon Yemen became one more province in the growing Islamic empire. Hardcore religion brought with it all the usual strife and soon the once proud kingdom became the tribal desert shithole of battling local Imams that it still is today. All those irrigation tunnels and dams were reduced to dust as the locals killed each other over whose version of 'what happens after you're dead' was the correct one. Religion tends to have that effect on people. It justifies war and makes killing profitable. Not least because those who die in battle get hoodwinked into believing that they don't really die. They go to a 'better place'. Yemen proved no less susceptible to this mind virus as anywhere else on this sad planet.

   The Ottomans swept into this divided land in the 1500s and conquered it easily. But for the next 400 years the Ottomans didn't seem much interested in the place, it being a constant war zone of unruly battling tribes and power hungry holy men. The Turks just couldn't figure out what to do with their bit of desert so they elected to retain control of a few coastal territories they thought might be useful to park some ships in if shit ever hit the fan on the southern flank of their empire.

   Next came the British.

   We're talking mid 19th century British here, you know, the ones who were pretty damn good at playing the empire game. To them, Yemen's geography had become strategically interesting, especially for the British East India Company, the prototype of the modern corpo war outfit, a Victorian Halliburton if you will; so the British nabbed the port of Aden just so it could provide a coaling station for ships on route to the jewel in their crown, India. The British around this time had perfected the semi private model of empire building where you invade with the minimum number of state supplied Redcoats to kill enough natives to first establish the colony and then let the East India company and the money men handle the administration and the technical details of dividing and conquering the locals. Once the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the British expanded their Arabian colony further into Yemen as easy access to the Red Sea made them jizz their pants at Aden's new strategic importance.

   In 1904, the colonials drew one of those maps in Yemen that made no sense outside the smoke filled halls of a British officer's club. An arbitrary line drawn across the shifting desert, it divided Yemen into North and South with the Ottomans taking the North and the British gobbling up the South. Lax administration in the border region allowed the mountain tribes room to plunder the desert valleys for gold and pussy. These tribes weren't farmers or sheep herders or merchants yet have always played a big part in the Yemeni economy. They thrive best in chaos and make a living stealing shit, plundering farms and running protection rackets; exploits which basically made administration a nightmare for the British. Facing this administrative nightmare, the sedulous British signed a whole bunch of treaties with these local bandits to try to keep a lid on the cauldron. This resulted in numerous new sheikdoms, emirates and local strongmen that became collectively known as the 'Aden Protecterate', nominally under control of the British. Don't you just love the monikers the colonial pencil pushers come up with to hide the fact that they just stole all the land in some foreign desert? Same shit, different century.

   When the Ottoman empire fell apart in 1918, Northern Yemen fell into the control of a local Imam named Muhammed. Big surprise there. He died in 1962 and his son got deposed after the Egyptians helped finance a revolution that created the Yemen Arab Republic in the north with Sana'a as the capital. The Saudis chucked some cash at royalist forces that opposed the revolutionaries and that started yet another fucking civil war in Yemen and more people died in the desert.

   The British held on to Aden and Southern Yemen until 1967. This had a lot to do with the discovery of oil on the Arabian peninsula in the 1930s. That suddenly made Britain's hodge podge tribal 'Protectorate' a whole lot more valuable. Aden became a 'crown protectorate' (imperial speak for we own the oil) and flourished while the tribal hinterland saw no piece of the action. By the 1960's pan Arab nationalism was pressuring the British to leave. As a counter to Egypt's creation of the United Arab Republic, (a union with Syria and North Yemen aimed at stopping the commies), the British countered by attempting to unite all those divided and conquered sheikdoms and emirates into some kind of shitty confederation called the 'Federation of South Arabia'. Aden was incorporated despite the fact that the people there were quite happy with their oil money and had no interest in sharing it with a bunch of camel jockeys from the desert.

   The temporary closure of the Suez Canal in 1967, rioting in Aden, hundreds of guerrilla attacks, killings of off duty British personnel (what we would today call 'terrorism'  as if 'terror' is some illegitimate  war tactic just because conventional forces find it hard to counter). Let's face it, the dirty little secret of modern war is that 'terrorism' works. It sure helped to finally 'convince' the British to fuck off home with the office furniture and a "congratulations, you're independent" note pinned to the wall of some administration building. The factions in this newly independent "People's Republic of South Yemen" did what most former colonial provinces do once the pasty white men fly home and promptly started massacring each other for a piece of the action.

   Both North and South Yemen spent the next twenty years trying to get their shit together towards unification. The British drawn border was badly defined and militarized and there was oil underneath it. To bag the cash, North and South would have to agree on peace. The current leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh of the then Northern United Arab Republic and Ali Salim al-Baidh (leader of the mess the British left) came to a deal in May 1990 that was ratified by the populace and for the first time in hundreds of years of broken and fractured tribal history, Greater Yemen was politically united.

   Almost.

   There were still the tribal factions unhappy with the deal who, as always, needed chaos to make a living. There was still political infighting and distrust between politicians from both north and south of the old colonial border. In 1994 all this culminated in, you guessed it, yet another fucking civil war in Yemen. Highlights included a pretty awesome tank battle in Amran near Sana'a and South Yemen bombing Sana'a with a bunch of Soviet era Migs and the North responding by bombing Aden. The South tried to secede but the international community weren't buying it because war is bad for business when foreign oligarchies don't have fingers in the pie. The Saudis gave billions in cash and weapons to the South, as always, fearing a united Yemen and what that might inspire in their own subjects. The North made a push toward Aden, captured the oilfields and that's when the UN tried to call a winner and demanded a ceasefire. That failed and the North marched into Aden while the leaders in the South fled.

A North Yemeni soldier whips out his large weapon in 1994's civil war.

   This victory further consolidated Ali Abdullah Saleh's power.

   This guy is your typical sleazy Middle East 'democratically elected' dictator. Yemen has been paying lip service to the idea that it is a democracy since unification in 1990. But in a place where people vote on tribal, ethnic and religious fault lines, this isn't exactly the place where you are going to run an election campaign to change minds. Like Mubarak, Saleh's been in power so long he doesn't know how to step down. It took an RPG attack on his presidential compound on June 3rd to finally get him medivaced to a Saudi hospital. He's currently down but not out.

    Saleh is a member of the Hashid tribe, the second largest in Yemen, mountain men from the North going back to the first century AD and part of that power block in Yemeni politics that have always thrived on chaos. But even they want him gone now. He's grown too fat on power for too long. As with a lot of these sleazy Mid East leaders, he can be shrewd when it comes to playing his chips in the wider casino of global power politics and also pretty stupid. Just like Mubarak, he collected a paycheck from the US albeit for different reasons. Where Mubarak got tossed two billion a year to keep Suez running smoothly and not fuck with Israel, Saleh likes to play the al-Qaeda card whenever he's short on cash. On the other hand, Yemen under Saleh was the only Arab country to continue to support Saddam Hussein after he annexed Kuwait in 1990. That pissed off a whole bunch of his Arab neighbors not least the Saudis who expelled a million Yemenis and built a border fence to prevent them coming back. He's also pretty friendly with Iran and has supported their nuke program which really pisses off the US. And despite all this, fear of the 'terrorists' on monkey bars in the desert trumps all.

   Saleh is not exactly book smart or a student of history. He became a corporal in the army as a school kid and slowly worked his way up to colonel using political connections. He became a member of parliament and took a strongman governorship of a small province. Like a lot of these leaders in the Middle East, he knows how to play and manipulate people in the internecine warfare of Arab social structures. That's how you get to the top in desert cultures. They respect strongmen. Money helps but if shit hits the fan there's always intimidation and violence to fall back on if shit doesn't go your way.

Saleh playing the al-Qaeda card on Bush for spare cash.

    So why civil war now?

   Tunisia and Egypt are why. The Arab Spring. 65% unemployment among the youth. A satellite dish poking out of every mud hut and apartment block balcony that picks up hundreds of TV stations that collectively depict a better life elsewhere. This civil war is going to be different from all the previous ones. Because this time it's street based and not some politicians pocket war. It started as a genuine protest movement in cities like Taiz, Sana'a and Aden in February. The opposition movement is fractured though and includes students, enterprising tribes like the Houthis who see a chance for profit in chaos, a spectrum of political parties and even some young Hashid who want the tribe to take back power and make some decent bank before the oil runs out.

On the other hand, soldiers, government officials and the civil service and anybody receiving a steady paycheck held counter demonstrations in support of the government. Saleh appeared on TV promising to leave when the 'time was right' and assured the populace that he'd sign some piece of paper meeting the protesters demands but then failed to show up at the signing three times. This all came to a head on March 18 when Saleh saw that bullshitting his way out of the problem wasn't going to work so he fell back on those tribal desert instincts of his that say there is no problem that can't be solved in Yemen by killing people. Army snipers shot dead 52 protesters in Sana'a.

   This even pissed off his own Hashid tribe who quickly declared their support for the opposition. Street fighting broke out in the northern suburbs of Sana'a that included arty and mortar fire. Tribesmen attacked power lines resulting in blackouts in the capital. The price of water tripled in Sana'a because there's none left running in the pipes. Not all that surprising for a desert. The capital is a pressure cooker ready to blow.  It's now a lack of water and power that are helping to fuel the protests not just people pissed off because satellite TV showed them they'll never bang Miley Cyrus.

   Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, the recuperating Saleh believes he can ride this out. Seeing Mubarak getting tried for war crimes in Egypt after being tossed out of power doesn't make stepping down look like a fun option. A promise of immunity in the Arab world is about as comforting as a slice of cake from Robespierre. And besides, after 32 years of power politics and with violence spreading across Yemen, he believes that gives him a better seat at the negotiating table. And it probably does. Especially if Yemen becomes a failed state like next door Somalia. Then all those square miles of desert really do become the place for the bad guys to pitch their monkey bars. The US have been conducting drone attacks on these wannabee al-Qaeda groups but they need a stable government in Yemen to continue operations or else it's Black Hawk down all over again. The current US drone attacks serve to piss off the average Yemeni who see the Islamic fundies in the desert as just small local gangs of whack jobs that no one cares about. In fact, with the situation rapidly deteriorating into yet another fucking civil war in Yemen, the average Yemeni views al-Qaeda exactly how the rest of the world views Yemen...

   A bunch of crazy people in some backward desert nobody gives a shit about.

Libya: In search of a NATO victory.

2011-05-26T08:48:00.000-07:00

With nothing decisive happening in Libya, it's understandable that in today's instant gratification crack whore media environment, the news people would move on to the next "big thing", which in the US at the moment is a masturbatory fascination with tornadoes. Don't get me wrong, I love tornadoes. All those human interest stories of grandma getting whipped into the air by cyclonic atmosphere action get me breaking out the popcorn and laughing my ass off. Sure it's fucking terrible and people die but what I love most about tornadoes is the fact that no politician can go on TV and declare a war against them. It's pretty much accepted among us humans that nature is off limits as far as retaliation goes. Apart from chopping down more rain forest or watching 200 species of planetary whatever go extinct every day, there's not much we can do to 'combat the threat' of an existential enemy called 'the biosphere'.

Human instigated shit is a whole different story though.

If some sad sack Middle Eastern dude had planted a bomb that killed a few hundred people in Middle America where the tornadoes hit there'd be someone to blame which would make people feel a whole lot better. Just spend a few billion and blow up the the fucker's family and friends and neighbors and call it all square. 'Justice' gets done human style. But with nature the perpetrator every one of us has to admit that dying 'unfairly' is pretty much one of the hazards of being alive in the first place. A CNN reporter on scene as I write just reported that there is the upcoming threat of more 'weather'. Holy shit, is that guy serious? I mean, weather is a real bitch isn't it? It has this sneaky habit of following you everywhere you go!

Weather talk means that the media have pretty much moved on when there's nothing sexy happening in war zones. For Libya that means Geraldo is back in his river side mansion on the Hudson after ~~dodging bullets~~ paying a visit to the 'Libyan rebels' to give Fox News viewers a heads up when nature isn't the one pulling the trigger. But that focus means you might miss some interesting shit going down in the Middle East. And I'm not even bothered with Syria. That's just a boring internal struggle where the citizenry are up against 57 different varieties of internal security forces. Kind of like the Heinz ketchup of torture and disappearance. The guy on the street doesn't stand a chance and no foreign power is going to get involved because last time I checked, Syria wasn't a major oil exporter.

   One fun bit of news out of Libya this week was that NATO destroyed Gaddafi's 'navy'. That story managed to break into the headlines because it has a positive spin and sounds like victory. But those coastal defense boats were a bunch of sitting ducks with nowhere to hide and I doubt Gaddafi cares too much. He's got bigger problems like dodging Tomahawks. Besides, they were a '"a navy in theory only", kind of like when the Kaiser rolled out his fleet at Jutland in 1916... that fleet was more useful doing nothing in port and being a 'threat' than actually doing any fighting. The problem with that strategy for Gaddafi is that he has no counter to NATO air strikes. No modern radar air defense network and nothing to stop them blowing up his shitty frigates and maritime patrol boats. What he wouldn't do for a few batteries of the Russian S-300 system eh? A few of those would have made this into a true popcorn war.

   One fun thing to emerge from Libya this week was the fact that the Royal Navy are going to launch Apache helos off the deck of the Amphibious Assault Ship HMS Ocean to provide close air support to the rebels. That really shows the weakness of NATO once the US took a 'support role'. You really miss those A-10s. Tornados (not the atmospheric kind) and French Rafales just can't loiter over the battlefield providing close air support. So the British had to come up with a stop gap measure. With the UK's last aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal decommissioned, that's revealed a glaring hole for NATO war planners. Launching ground based Apaches off a ship smacks of desperation but what can you do when you're stuck with a war you can't walk away from and Gaddafi won't die already. The term "mission creep" doesn't get anymore textbook than this.

   The French too are throwing some choppers at the problem. Thing is, choppers suck. They're pretty good 'fast tanks' and give you a high attack value put they're paper defensively. Hell, in 2003, a bunch of Iraqi farmers brought down an Apache with AK fire. The British will probably use all four Apaches (damn military budgets are tight these days outside the US) at high altitude and use their 30mm Gatling guns to fuck up small bunches of Gaddafi's infantry. Like the US were seen doing in the Wikileaks "collateral murder" vid. One wonders if Gaddafi still has a few SA-6 launchers lying around for a sitting duck like a mile high hovering chopper.

   One funny thing I saw used was a French "concrete bomb". I shit you not. I thought it was a joke at first but sure enough the French were dropping laser guided lumps of stone on Gaddafi's tanks. The more I thought about it the more sense it made. No explosive means no collateral damage. A direct hit on a tank is gonna flatten it like in some Loony Tunes cartoon and get sanctimoniously reported in Le Monde so the Frogs can feel how noble they are not killing civilians.

The Loony Toons inspired French 'concrete bomb'.

   NATO has long since put to rest any pretence that murdering a foreign head of state is uncool. When "Odyssey Dawn" got started that was the official position of the US even as the British nailed Gadaffi's compound on the first night. Looks like they had the right idea if they wanted to win this thing quickly. Still, you gotta admire wily old Gaddafi. That guy is a survivor type. Reports are that he's moving constantly and trusting nobody. And his Ukranian nurse has bailed so there's nobody to 'monitor his blood pressure' which sucks for him.

   Like I said before this war will probably come down to economics.

   The rebels, in control of the oilfields and some key refineries on the coast, have proved they can play ball. A number of oil tankers have successfully filled up and bagged the rebels $100 million per load. It's a demonstration like this, not speeding around the desert in junky pick up trucks that truly wins you support in the Western oligarchy. All the humanitarian crises in the world don't warrant intervention unless somewhere along the line there's a chance to turn a profit. The rebels have shown that they can.

   The other question now is how much cash does Gaddafi have to keep Tripoli afloat? It's a pretty big city, full of Gaddafi loyalists. At least so long as the money rolls in. So far, Gaddafi has doubled public sector and army pay. NATO has stepped up attacks on the city and bombed the fuck out of every building that ever housed more than ten soldiers. Still, blitzes like that usually just harden those being bombed London 1940 style. But NATO doesn't have any other good options. Unless they can land a bomb on Gaddafi things are just going to drag on according to the depth of his bank account. He is trying reach out to the international community in an attempt to end this shit. He's feeling the heat. His prime minister Al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmoudi is understood to have sent a letter to a number of foreign governments proposing a ceasefire that would be monitored by the African Union and United Nations, unconditional talks with the opposition, the drafting of a new constitution and amnesty for both sides in the fighting. I'm sure a beach side condo somewhere sunny and access to his offshore bank accounts for Gaddafi and the in-laws seems like a pretty good deal right now but I doubt he'll get it. NATO are too pissed off now and anything less than a dead Gaddafi is going to smack of a French and British failure in front of the Americans. That'll sting hard especially after the US successfully iced Bin Laden.

   Of course, things are going to get nastier the longer this goes on. Misurata was ugly. But that would be nothing compared to a sustained siege of Tripoli. I seriously doubt the rebels could mount such an attack on their own but that's probably what the British Apache and 12 French Tiger helos are for. Close air support for an advance into Tripoli. Probably quite a few UK and French "Special Forces" on the ground to direct the attack. You never know how strong the castle is or how resilient its inhabitant are going to be until you try some sort of ''probing attack. Right now, it's not clear if the city would capitulate at the sight of rebels in Green Square. Baghdad fell rather easily despite the hype once the marines made it to the airport. Perhaps NATO are banking on a similar capitulation.

   I wonder if the Euros have the balls to go for it.

   At the very least it'd sure knock tornadoes off the front page.

Osama Bin Laden: Requiem for a NeoCon Dream.

2011-05-13T18:57:00.000-07:00

Osama Bin Laden is finally dead.

I wasn't really impressed to tell you the truth. Sure, it was some kind of cultural rite of passage when I first heard the news but all the people screaming "USA! USA!" in the bar where I happened to be at the time got me thinking. Was some guy on dialysis in Pakistan really America's worst enemy? For me, since 9/11, America has always been America's own worst enemy. Bin Laden was the Orwellian 'Emmanuel Goldstein' that provided a nation a bogeyman that the corporate oligarchy could rally the plebs around and point to and say - 'that is your enemy, that is the architect of your fear, focus your Twin Tower anger there'. All the fun stuff that made the newly dawned 21st century shit you can trace back to that moment. 'Orange terror alerts', 'anthrax letters', Nigerian 'yellow cake' were all part of a general uncertainty that ramped up the fear. The Madrid and London bombings mid decade heightened the sense that there was an existential enemy of Western civilization out there and ready to blow us up if our vigilance ever slipped. The 21st century took a sudden nosedive just as it dawned. The new century was not going to be the idyllic postmodern 'war free zone' the brochure promised a new century could be just because the Cold War had ended.

   That's not to say that Bin Laden and al-Qaeda weren't a threat. Neither is it to say 9/11 wouldn't have happened without him. But his support for that attack was at best spiritual and certainly not material. That he was clearly an enemy of the United States is true. But the big guy on the playground always spawns haters. I mean, that's basic schoolyard logic. It was America's overblown reaction, or premeditated reaction if you consider the Iraq WMD debacle, that set the tone for the 21st century. Bin Laden helped out with that. He embraced the media attention. 9/11 made him a 'terrorist celebrity' and he seemed eager to play the role of international villain. In a world where you can be whirled into fame on some shitty reality show, he embraced the ultimate show. He accepted worldwide fame and found himself the figurehead of a terrorist franchise called al-Qaeda. That he can be linked to the suicide speedboat attack on the USS Cole in 2000 and the African embassy bombings in 1998 seems clear but arbitrary. Those attacks were small fry in the grand scheme of things and before 9/11 were minor inconveniences on the back of a superpower, like mosquito bites at a garden party.

   Bin Laden was the rogue son of a royal family of Saudi oil providers that have for decades had successive US administrations sucking at the tit of Middle East energy dependence. The wayward son of royalty thing always hinted at something a little more sinister. But the flow of spice always kept the media at bay and the hard questions were never asked. His involvement with the CIA during Soviet Afghanistan in the 1980s is certainly interesting. He was once a 'US man' when Stinger missile launchers were being dished out to the Mujahadeen to bring down Russian Hinds in that Soviet wasteland the US are knee deep in now. But a SEAL bullet in the eye has a tendency to end awkward questions. And a burial at sea cancels debate. A little too neat for me and somewhat unconvincing outside Western media.

   I think the famed military-industrial-complex learned their lesson when they dug Saddam Hussein out of his hole in Tikrit, dressed him up in a suit and put him on trial in an Iraqi court with the world media present. The question of who provided Hussein with the chemical weapons he used against the Kurds, a crime he was ostensibly on trial for, became ancillary and somehow immaterial to the issue at hand and the question was duly struck down by the 'judge'. That was when the trial was revealed to me as a farce. It was pretty funny really. It made me think of that old Judge Roy Bean quote from the Wild West. "First we'll give him a fair trial, then we'll hang him!" And they sure did.

   The people who run this world weren't going to make the same mistake again.

   Osama Bin Laden needed to die. And properly this time.

   In one sense, he had served his purpose and outlived his usefulness in the West's post Cold War need for a new bogeyman after the Soviet Union went belly up. As the ice melted, there was no longer a need for an astronomical military budget and America's war economy was faced with collapse. The corporate oligarchy scrambled for a new enemy but there were no other superpowers left on the block. So the enemy became fear itself and the American people, with a nominal say in how their taxes get spent (that is if you subscribe to the theory that the US is a functioning democracy) became the fertile ground for NeoCon bullshit. Clinton in the 90s was passed off as a blowjob addict while the real power players behind the scenes planned and waited for their time to grab the last untapped oil field in the Middle East.

   But they still needed a patsy.

   Saddam Hussein fit the 'evil dictator' profile and got caught up in the post 9/11 tumult. Over 60% of Americans thought he had something to do with 9/11 at the time of the invasion. Thank's corporate media!

The timing of Bin Laden's death turns out to be quite fortuitous. The war in Afghanistan is a clusterfuck and everyone knows it cannot be won; whatever winning was ever meant to mean in the graveyard of empires. Even the hardcore zealots that run the military industrial complex know this now and they need an exit strategy that involves calling the figurative and military desert they created 'victory'. General Pyrrhus' old line is as relevant as ever it seems.

Of course, the exit strategy cannot involve negotiating with "terrorists". Even the numbskulls that watch Fox News know that much. But an opportunity has arisen from Bin Laden's death. The arch Bond villain is gone and now things get suddenly a whole lot easier for those who could have stemmed the bleeding a long time ago. Negotiations with the Taliban now become possible and not just for the US but also for Mohammad Omar, leader of the largest Taliban faction, who can now break his ties with al-Qaeda without losing the support of his own followers. After all, he only promised Bin Laden protection and not the entirety of al-Qaeda.

This is, of course, assuming that al-Qaeda ever really existed outside of international media and the Pentagon. Sure they existed as a brand and got shitloads of free advertising (I'm still smiling sardonically at the image they released the other day of Bin Laden watching himself on Al-Jazeera remote control in hand... how meta) but al-Qaeda never had any true structure or physical shape; being more like some kind of terrorist McDonalds franchise but without any restaurants or drive thrus. True, ideas run the world today on our media driven dystopian sci fi planet and that is the genius of the corporate oligarchy who run things now. The enemies they create, existential in nature, are without physical shape or location. That's why I always found the idea of al-Qaeda a little too expedient. Non existent in men or material, their power came tailor made for a superpower to wage an ideological turf war, a battle of ideas against the collective mind of its own people. Easy when a few corportions own all the TV channels. Out of the natural rage that followed 9/11, the authorities said the enemy were in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that was good enough for a 'democracy' and a gullible citizenry to wage war.

It was a winning idea from the start.

That the 'war on terror' is really a war against the citizens of Western nations by their own governments is certainly an interesting idea. One wonders if it is an idea meant to die with Bin Laden's death. Certainly China never seemed to care about this 'war' beyond the cover it provided when killing a few protesting monks in Tibet. They soon got with the global program and called their enemy 'terrorists' when they saw how effective it could be. A new way of handling the media had emerged. Throw the word 'terrorist' at people you don't like and buy legitamacy. Torture even got a new name, a subtle redefinition and 'enhanced interrogation' was allowed to slide except for token grumbles from the 'far left'.

The new 21st century paradigm was clear. Fear itself was the enemy and it struck from desert sands where the oil happened to be. Roosevelt warned a shaky nation after Pearl of the real enemy but things have shifted in ways Orwell or Huxley of even Eisenhower's sign off speech couldn't have imagined. There are no nation states anymore and there are no clashes of cultural ideas because we, no matter what country we happen to be in, are subject to the same forces, commodity prices, oil prices, stock market upticks, wayward bankers... a brave new world of international elites and globalized commerce.

The new paradigm became the promotion of fear itself as a motive force by world governments, something that would sicken Roosevelt but how could he have known the global dystopia that would ensue after America sold its manufacturing base to transnational elites in the decades after WWII? The rise of global communications and corporate power centers united oligarchys across the world and made fools of those who believed in the quaint 20th century idea of nation states. "Good wars" between cultural ideologies like WWII won't exist in the 21st century because we're all bound together through mutual dependencies. Total war as Clauswitz defined it has become unprofitable and obsolete as part of this brave new world. In a post nuclear world, regional war is unthinkable and unprofitable. It's easier to pick up squares on the global chessboard and make quiet moves where you can pick up territorys on the cheap. Economic hitmen are key.

    9/11 was a turning point in the post modern land grab.

    Bin Laden's rag-tag rebel alliance were elevated to celebrity status after the attack. Three thousand people died which is peanuts really when you place it in world military history. 70,000 were flash fried at Hiroshima, the Russians bled 30 million in WWII and even in US history, 23,000 casualties were notched up in a day on American soil at Antietam. Has modern society made us so soft to human suffering? Did we ever think we could escape the history? Apparently so in the public imagination because that imagination was easily hijacked by those who told us who the enemy was after the towers fell. The enemy were towel heads in a foreign desert where the oil is.

    That's probably going to be Bin Laden's legacy in military history, showing that superpowers are not invincible, that empires are never monolithic and set in stone but are malleable and have soft underbellies. Bin Laden showed that civilians in empires, as TE Lawrence described the British in 1915, are "fat" and softened to the 'good life' and therefore easily swayed to a cause against an external enemy when their leaders say 'they did it'. Hell, Göring of all people said it best in this exchange at the Nuremburg trials:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Interviewer: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

It's easy for me to say now but I was never scared of al-Qaeda. That I never even took them seriously. But I do admire the Brits on that front. After the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, I liked the fact that the next day the British were back on the Tube and buses with an attitude of fuck you. But that's true of a lot of people in many countries... they're smarter than their own governments. Somehow that didn't translate so well in the USA. A corn farmer in rural Iowa, an oil engineer in Texas, all were convinced by corporate spokesman Bush when he went on TV and announced the danger from a shadowy group of international 'terrorists' who wanted to kill them.

Let's face it, terrorism worked.

According to Wikipedia, the goals of al-Qaeda were as follows.

Provoke the United States into invading a Muslim country.
Incite local resistance to occupying forces.
Expand the conflict to neighboring countries, and engage the U.S. in a long war of attrition.
Convert Al-Qaeda into an ideology and set of operating principles that can be loosely franchised in other countries without requiring direct command and control, and via these franchises incite attacks against countries allied with the U.S. until they withdraw from the conflict, as happened with the 2004 Madrid train bombings, but which did not have the same effect with the 2005 London bombings
The U.S. economy will finally collapse under the strain of too many engagements in too many places, similarly to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Arab regimes supported by the U.S. will collapse, and a Wahhabi Caliphate will be installed across the region.

Four out of five ain't bad for a terrorist franchise. With the collapse of Egypt to "democracy" and all not perfect in the Wahhabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it looks like the west is running out pet of dictators on payroll. Number five on that list sure has the potential to backfire horribly for the US and for al-Qaeda and give the two biggest and strategic Sunni Arab countries something they haven't tasted since before the oil age; self determination. That kind of thing makes the corporate and royal families on all sides shit bricks.

Whoever is responsible for unleashing the "War on Terror", it doesn't seem to matter anymore. Surely the mission has been accomplished in Western nations and in the US. They have become a voluntary surveillance society beyond INGSOC's dreams. The US has the stake in Iraq's oil it wanted on the global chessboard but neither it nor Bin Laden could have bargained for the fall of Middle East power structures and the for-hire Western employed dictators that were toppled by Arab youth.

It seems the result of this war was equally unpredictable on the Arab side. Bin Laden could never have imagined himself obsolete, but a new wave of protest suggests that he is, in Tunisia, in Egypt, Yemen and Syria, perhaps even in Saudi Arabia, the jewel in the crown of Western oil policy. The Arab youth of today want a piece of the action they see on Facebook and Twitter. To them, that's freedom. And maybe it is. At least in comparison to the Wahhabi 'Muslim paradise' Bin Laden was selling. It certainly is a better deal. 21st century Arab kids don't want his brand of international pariah speaking for them. Perhaps he really was just an old man with a TV remote control in his hand hoping for a glimpse of himself in the 'reality show' the world has become.

For Bin Laden, growing old and unnecessary was far more painful then the headshot.

The 'Taiwan Liberator' Shi Lang: China's new aircraft carrier.

2011-04-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

Seems like China has its first aircraft carrier ready for sea trials.

You can't really call it a 'new' carrier though. A Chinese businessman bought the hull with no engines, steering or fittings from Ukraine in 1998 for a mere $20 million and towed the rusty pile of metal around Africa's Cape of Good Hope in a pretty desperate attempt to get it back to China. Ostensibly, the Soviet "Varyag" was destined to be an "entertainment center" which is code speak these days for casino. Somewhere along the line though, the People's Liberation Army snapped it up and the Chinese have been refitting it for military service ever since.

Probably the most fun thing about this ship is what the Chinese are calling it, the "Shi Lang". Yeah, that meant nothing to me either. But a quick googling reveals Shi Lang was a Chinese admiral in the 17th century who conquered Taiwan in 1681. And that right there is a pretty clear broadside aimed squarely at the US Navy. It's pretty funny really. The Chinese just can't seem to let Taiwan go. The island has been independent since 1949, the refuge of the Nationalists and followers of Chiang Kai-shek who fled the mainland after losing power to Mao and the Communists. Why the Chinese think they might need a carrier to attack an island that's a mere 100 miles off the coast is any body's guess but as with most things concerning China, they're playing the 'long game' here. 5000 years of Chinese history affords them a lot of patience as they climb inexorably to superpower status.

Still, I doubt the US Navy is too worried.

For one thing, carriers are pretty useless on their own and need large support fleets to operate with any degree of effectiveness. They're also big fat targets for every kind of anti-ship missile on the planet. The Chinese themselves have just developed their own new Anti Ship Ballistic Missile, the Dong Feng-21D. Yeah, that's D for Dong right up a USN carrier's tailpipe. If this system works, and preliminary testing hints that it does, then it's a pretty serious threat to the US Navy. Launched from land based launchers and travelling at Mach 5 or more (high hypersonic) and with a range of 2000 miles, the DF-21D will be aimed and guided to blue water targets by Chinese satellites. Even the USN War College has admitted that when this system is fully operational it pretty much takes US naval dominance off the table for the first time since World War II.

The fun thing is though, in any prospective US war with China, target number one is going to be each other's spy satellites. The US is still way ahead in space war technology and the first day of this war will involve some pretty fireworks in the night sky. China would lose. Rendered blind they'd be unable to guide the Dong Feng to blue water carrier groups offshore using space tech alone. That'd mean they'd have to sneak a sub up to a carrier group for targetting intel and that's never easy. Still, the Chinese did manage to surface an old diesel powered sub in the midst of a USN war exercise off Taiwan a few years back that had the Navy brass scratching their heads.

Still, even if carriers are rendered pretty obsolete by today's missile technology, it's still interesting to speculate why China thinks she needs one. China is pretty touchy about her shipping lanes and her dependence on oil imports from the Middle East and Africa. You can see how throwing a few carriers at the problem would make her feel a little better about this. The British are currently bankrupting themselves building the new Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales carriers which just this week may increase in price, from $8.7 to $11.7 billion all because of a minor design tweak so they can accommodate the new F-35C Lightning IIs; aircraft which themselves cost $156 million each!

Another reason why you might want a floating airport with a big fat bulls eye painted on the flight deck is for prestige. Good old, my dick is bigger than your dick bullshit; demented human reasoning probably around since the first caveman crafted his first spear and the other guys around the campfire got jealous. Power projection is something they can do and carriers have made the NATO job off the Libyan coast easier I suppose. But all that only works when you go after a pushover military with no advanced missile technology.

Shipping oil is a pain in the ass. Better be able to defend your imports as that resource dries up!

   In 2002, the Pentagon tried to suppress the findings of a huge US war game called "Millennium Challenge" where the US Navy (Blue Force) was pitted against a "hypothetical rogue state" (Red Force) in the Persian Gulf region. Red Force was led by Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, a total bad ass, whose job was basically to play the role of the butt raped lesser nation at the hands of the mighty technology of the all powerful US Navy. Instead of following the script, this Van Riper guy went off reservation and went all asymmetrical on Blue Force's ass, an ass which consisted of a full US Navy carrier group.

   Though the rules stated both commanders could use any rule in the book, the brass didn't expect the shit Van Riper pulled. Once the war game was up and running Van Riper's force disappeared off radar. He relied on couriers instead of radio to stay in touch with his field officers. The US navy cryptographers were rendered useless in a single blow. He employed novel tactics such as coded signals broadcast from the minarets of mosques during the Muslim call to prayer, a tactic weirdly reminiscent of Paul Revere and the shot heard round the world. He even used carrier pigeons to deliver messages to some of his commanders. God I love this guy! He then launched a daring attack against the US Blue Force carrier group by hundreds of kamikaze speedboats some of which were armed with Chinese Silkworm anti ship missiles. I shit you not. The result was a carrier and two helo carriers sunk along with 13 other assorted ships, the worst defeat of the US Navy since Pearl. The Pentagon had a shit fit and scrubbed the whole exercise, dismissed Van Riper and replayed the whole thing this time making Blue Force 'win'. Basically, the navy brass pretended it never happened. Lunatics in speedboats apparently don't count and are considered 'cheats'.

   The US Navy brass like carriers because of the sleazy defense contracting business and the way the US military budget works. You've got to gobble up all the cash you can in a given year and not save anything otherwise you end up losing those savings in next year's allocation. The Navy and Air Force do this with fat expensive carriers and the F-22 Raptor, projects sure to soak up billions and have juicy cost over runs that keep tax payer money flooding Congressional Districts with campaign cash.

The ramp suggests V/STOL aircraft will be in order.

Another thing the Chinese don't have yet are aircraft that can serve on a carrier. Beijing recently 'leaked' info on their J-15 Flying Shark which has the folding wings and bulked up landing gear needed for carrier operations. They are still at the testing stage and again, I doubt if the US Navy is too worried. It'll be years before a Chinese carrier group is operational. In fact, there's probably nothing more the US Navy brass would like to see than China sink a few hundred billion into carrier fleets. With 11 active carriers of their own costing billions a year to operate, they more than anybody know what a dubious return on investment carriers can be.

Operation Compass: Think today's war in Libya is a mess? In 1940's Libya, the Italian North African Campaign was a total disaster.

2011-04-21T22:13:00.000-07:00

Paying attention to the Libyan mess over the last few months got me thinking of a far 'better war' that once played out on that highway the Italians built between Tripoli and Benghazi back when Libya was an Italian colony in the early 20th century. Of course back in 1912, after snatching the territory from the fading Ottomans, the Italians were a bit too late to the colonial table as far as the European habit of carving up pieces of Africa for fun and profit went. But turn of the century Italians had this hard on for their own ancient history and the memory of Rome, a time when Italy was 'somebody' on the world stage and not just a bunch of recently unified city states, freshly unfragmented and beat up on by foreigners for 1500 years.

Let's face it, modern Italians don't do imperialism very well.

That gene went recessive on the peninsula's chromosome somewhere in the 2000 years it took to get from Caesar to Mussolini. By the time Mussolini took charge in 1921 and adopted good old Fascismo, a philosophy he based on an ancient bundle of Roman sticks which symbolized authority, it was an idea in political science whose time seemed to have come tailor made for the 20th century. Hell, today's corporate oligarchical sci fi novel that we're all living in is just the latest version with 'bread and circuses' swapped out for 'McDonalds and advertising' to keep the plebs in check. For Italians in the 1920s under Mussolini, Libya became Italy's "Fourth Shore" and the 'New America' with 110,000 Italians emigrating there and making up 12% of the population by 1939.

That highway between Tripoli and Benghazi that we've all been watching Gadaffi's tanks burning on and which connects strategic oil towns like Brega and Ras Lanuf was built as part of Mussolini's public works program in '20s and '30s Libya. Of course this didn't go down so well with the natives, especially the nomadic Bedouin tribes who preferred camel power. So the Italians did what all the Euro colonial powers have done when faced with native opposition in Africa; they wiped out half the Bedouin population either through direct action like hanging or starvation in camps. Of course, this was a time before the term 'concentration' became fashionable when describing 'camps'. The British under Kitchener had done the same to the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the century and nobody had seemed to give a shit. Except, ironically, the Germans.

   When the shooting started in 1939, Mussolini saw his chance to expand that 'Fourth Shore' of his into British held Egypt. Egypt has always been a sweet prize for foreign powers going back to Roman times. The Caesars used Egypt as a kind of ancient Wal Mart for growing grain on the cheap which they dished out to the plebs back home to keep the mob pacified. Napoleon wanted to use it as a base of operations to steam roll through the Levant until Nelson destroyed his fleet off the coast at Aboukir Bay. When the canal was completed in the 19th century Egypt suddenly became the 'Highway to India' and vital to British interests. Even to just last February, the West was paying 2 billion a year to their pet Egyptian dictator Mubarak just to keep Suez open and not mess with Israel. That's 2000 years of strategic Egyptian history not including the 3000 years before that of Pharaohs and pyramids. It's the sort of time span that makes you feel insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

And let's face it, we are.

   Mussolini wanted to launch his offensive from Libya in August 1940 under the idea that the British would be tied down defending against Operation Sealion, the German invasion of England that never happened. Right from the start the Italians royally fucked things up. Remember that missing Italian imperialist gene I mentioned earlier? Add to that the gene for being good at warfare. I mean, apart from a Venetian coalition that defeated the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571, the Italians hadn't done anything to write home about warfare wise since Marcus Aurelius mopped up the German tribes in the second century AD.

   Mussolini sent his friend and heir apparent Italo Balbo to Libya to do the job. He was a hardcore Blackshirt and the former governor of Libya who, among other things, had built up the Italian air force from scratch in the 1920s and '30s and made transatlantic flights that gained him hero status among Italians but didn't make the news in Anglo countries because everyone was crying over Lindbergh and his kidnapped baby. Balbo had even dined with Roosevelt and portrayed fascism as cool at a time when the New Deal was struggling to offset the Depression. Balbo was seen as the man who could pull off the attack, though he himself had doubts about the whole enterprise. He noted that the Italian forces in Libya were heavy on infantry but lacked modern armor (the Italians fielded shitty L3/35 tanks which were basically two man machine gun carriers with paper thin armor), had obsolete artillery with shells that sometimes exploded and sometimes didn't, dodgy anti tank guns good against everything except armored plate and, worst of all, they suffered from a shortage of transport for all that infantry. Still, thanks to Balbo, the Italians had significant air power on hand (300 aircraft of various types including 4 bomber wings) and if anyone could pull off this attack, it was going to be Balbo.

The Italian L3/35 tankette. More suitable for duty as farm machinery?

   Everything about this plan was awesome up until the moment when Balbo tried to hook up with his own forces in Tobruk. This was the moment when some dumb fuck trigger happy Italian AA gunner shot down Balbo's plane while it was trying to land at the Italian airfield in Tobruk. Seriously. Balbo hadn't even arrived in theater and he was already KIA at the hands of the mighty Italian military. Scratch the whole plan right there and chalk up a kill for the Italians, right? A raving Mussolini quickly put a new guy in charge, Rodolfo Graziani, and ordered him to launch his attack against the British in Egypt immediately. Graziani had similar doubts about how an infantry heavy but largely unmechanized force such as the one the Italians were fielding could pull off this attack even if against the numerically inferior British, who fielded only 36,000 troops against a theoretical force of 250,000 Italians. The British game plan of course was to defend the canal at all costs. That sea route was as vital to the British then as it is to the US today though for different reasons. Instead of salt tax cash and tea profits, today it's oil flow and US Navy rapid access to the Persian Gulf.

Though well supplied thanks to Royal Navy control of the Eastern Mediterranean, the British only fielded the 4th Indian Infantry Division and the understrength 7th Armored Division (the famed Desert Rats) to hold the canal and fortified the bulk of these forces at the town of Mersa Matruh; a town just west of the canal and through which any Italian canal grab must pass. The British planned to use light mobile screening forces to harass the Italian advance and seem numerically superior by dredging up sand, firing the odd bit of arty here and there and making lots of noise, hopefully causing the inexperienced Italians to panic a bit.

   The Italians began the attack in early September with an air campaign after Mussolini threatened Graziani with demotion if he didn't get the ball rolling. Anxious to show Hitler that the Italian military wasn't as shitty as everyone suspected and flush with amazement at the Wehrmacht's humiliation of the French, Mussolini needed a win. Both sides dropped some bombs with obsolete bombers protected by obsolete fighters; the Italians hoping to soften up the main choke points on the coastal route into Egypt while the British used a bunch of Blenheim bombers to mess with the Italian staging area at Tobruk.

   The Italian plan was to advance along the coast with their main infantry force and use their two Libyan divisions, good native desert fighters but mainly infantry and using camel power (kind of like the Islamic rebel Shabab in Libya right now only with camels instead of Toyota pickup trucks) as screeners. Further south, the bulk of the Italian tanks and mechanized infantry (meaning they had a bunch of dodgy Italian trucks) had been rolled into the "Maletti Group" which planned to swing around in a pincer attack from the south if the infantry in the north got bogged down by opposition. The British defensive plan was pretty similar with light screening brigades in the north messing with the Italian infantry advance and elements of the 7th armored in the south waiting to pincer around from the south if the opportunity presented itself.

   The Italian ground assault on Egypt began on the 9th of September 1940.

   Right from the start, the Italians made a complete and utter balls of it. I mean, quite apart from von Moltke's old military maxim of no plan surviving contact with the enemy, the Italians didn't even get that far. No, the night before the ground assault some dumb fuck Italian radio operator broadcast the whole plan for all the world to hear over the wireless uncoded. The British, who knew the attack was coming anyway got a heads up on where to place their harassing force and laughed their asses off. Next up, the "Maletti Group" which contained the bulk of the Italian "armor" got lost in the Libyan desert before it even reached the Egyptian border and fell behind the main force. Because of this and other fuck ups, it took another four days for the Italian invasion of Egypt to actually reach Egypt.

   Once "in country", the Italians made slow progress. Slowed by embarrassingly small amounts of British forces, the Italians were liable to stop, unmount their artillery and shell a ridge where some guy with binoculars thought he saw some British guy acting suspiciously like an enemy soldier. Wasting ammo, moving painfully slow and always attempting overzealous 'pincer movements' with their tankettes, the Italians failed to successfully engage the British screening forces who invariably retreated laughing their asses off and dropping mines as they went.

   The Italians managed to capture a few inconsequential British airfields and advance 65 miles into Egypt before the invasion ground to a halt. Graziani cited supply problems and the fact that most of his divisions were on foot in full kit in the middle of a boiling desert. Mussolini went apeshit. There was nothing left now but to dig in and pretend that that 65 miles of barren desert was all the Italians really wanted in the first place while letting the answering machine deal with Hitler. The Italians created a bunch of fortified strong points beyond the town of Sidi Barrani and awaited reinforcements, resupply and an authority figure with a clue what to do next. None of which were forthcoming. The Italian positions proved weak. They were too dispersed to provide mutual support and do much of anything except act as big fat targets for the inevitable British counter attack.

   That attack, Operation Compass, came on the night of December 7th 1940, exactly a year before Pearl. It was led by Major General Richard O' Connor, maybe my favourite British general of the entire war. This guy was a total bad ass. Born in India, and son of a major in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, he'd seen action in World War I at Arras and Bullecourt and fought with the Italians at the River Piave in November 1917. Serving with the Italians sure gave him a certain edge when it came to knowing how the Italians fought. Or didn't fight for that matter. He come out of that war medal heavy including a DSO but then peace came and like all badass soldiers in 1918, he had to make up the inter war years doing office work and teaching at military academies while waiting for the unfinished business of the Great War to boot back up again. Assigned to Egypt as commander of the 7th Division in 1939, he was given command of the Western Desert Force in November 1940 by General Wavell and tasked with pushing the Italians out of the 65 miles of Egypt which they held on a broad but scattered front.

General Richard Nugent O' Connor KT, GCB, DSO & Bar, MC, ADC. And badass.

The British were interested in a limited counter attack, one that probed the Italians without risking too much. Holding the canal was sacrosanct. Wavell, commander of British forces in the Middle East, gave O'Connor about 30,000 men, 275 tanks (including the newer British Matilda IIs which were probably the best British made and designed tanks of the war) and around 100 artillery pieces including some of the new at the time '25 pounders' that were to serve the British well into the 1960s. There was also a contingent of Royal Navy gunboats off the coast which were to provide valuable indirect fire on the Italian strong points once the ball got rolling.

  O'Connor began the attack with a diversionary artillery barrage at '0 five hundred' on the Nibeiwa camp where the "mechanized" Maletti Group were holed up. They'd dug in at a fortified position using their armor as basically static pillboxes. (Never a good use of armor). O'Connor's forces exploited a hole in the Maletti defense ring and came barging through at dawn with 48 Matilda IIs and totally wasted the whole division, even killing Maletti himself in the fray. The Italians were screwed and began retreating en masse into Libya. The British pursued as the retreating Italians, bunched onto the coast road from Sidi Barrani made easy targets for the RN gunboats. The "Battle of the Camps" was a total victory for the British who killed or captured 38,000 Italians in five days for the loss of 133 men.

  O'Connor wanted to continue his attack into Libya at least as far as Benghazi. Wavell however withdrew the Indian 4th Infantry Division to take part in an offensive against the Italians in Ethiopia and replaced them with a green Australian Division who were missing their tanks. O'Connor, after a brief pause for Christmas pressed on anyway. The Italians were now holed up in the port of Bardia, licking their wounds and fighting amongst themselves. The port had good natural defenses including an 18 mile anti-tank ditch and concrete pill boxes. Mussolini sent a message to the 40,000 men holed up there and let them know of his confidence that they would "defend Bardia to the last man". Obviously, the troops had other ideas because on January 3rd 1941, O'Connor's sappers blew the pillboxes and filled in a section of the anti-tank ditch allowing 23 Matildas to break into the fortress, capture the whole deal and take 8000 prisoners. Tobruk and Derna fell next and pretty soon the whole Italian colony of Libya looked like it was going down to O'Connors thirty thousand men.

   By February 1941, the Allied forces had captured 130,000 Libyan and Italian prisoners for the loss of 500 men. Probably the most badass campaign of WWII that nobody ever talks about. That's probably because it was merely the prelude to the main act which was the arrival of Rommel and the Afrika Korps; in to bail out an Italian clusterfuck and not the first time in the war. Months later, Barbarossa had to be postponed six weeks so the Germans could rescue the Italians yet again; this time from the a bunch of barefoot Greeks in the mountains after Mussolini's abortive attack on Greece.

    Still, the Axis threat to Suez wouldn't be over until Tripoli fell. O'Connor wanted to continue the attack but Churchill ordered a halt. O'Connor was given a knighthood and posted back in Cairo. By mid February, Rommel and the Afrika Korps had arrived in theater and the real war was about to begin. O'Connor himself was captured by the Germans in April and spent the next two and a half years as a POW at a castle in Italy. He escaped in true badass fashion and went on to command the VIII Corps at Normandy and Market Garden.

   What careers there were for military men in centuries past! Now there are just a bunch of shitty asymmetrical proxy wars and nothing for a real general to sink his teeth into. I suppose that's the way it has to be in a post nuclear world. It's all subtle geopolitics with quiet moves on the grand chessboard with small oil grabs here and there these days. Today, global corporations link the big countries in ways that make wars between nation states unprofitable. Far better to feed the plebs bullshit adverts on TV to make them buy stuff they don't need with money they don't have. It's far easier to keep the cash rolling in that way.

   It is certainly a safer game.

   Weimar Republics and economic crashes have a time worn habit of just delivering new Hitlers.

   My fear today is that I remain unconvinced humanity is beyond such games.

Libya: Did Gaddafi school NATO in the power of professional infantry?

2011-04-13T14:03:00.000-07:00

Gaddafi is quickly turning into my favorite international 'bad guy'.

It's not like I'm a big fan or anything but his power to piss off the western corporatocracy makes me smile. When you get cast as the lead villain in a fictional war movie called "Odyssey Dawn", it's always good if you can bring a little something extra to the role that makes you stand out. Villains are always more memorable if they wear distinctive clothing (Gadaffi dresses in flamboyant carpets and curtains from '70s porno), have odd habits and strange quirks (Gadaffi brings his tent with him when travelling abroad and pitches it in the gardens of rented multi million dollar mansions while leaving the mansion itself empty) and, as everyone knows, every decent movie villain should have a trademark look; for Gaddafi it's his monster sunglasses fashionable nowhere outside a Florida retirement home. Your authenticity as media hyped evil dude is considerably enhanced if you also happen to have a hot Ukrainian nurse that "monitors your blood pressure" on a constant basis while you shell your own cities to eliminate a pesky 'rebel alliance', dodge incoming Tomahawks and, most painful of all to the pathological foreign corporatocracy trying to bump you off for your sweet Libyan crude, you also find time to school NATO war planners in the timeless value of professional infantry over a bunch of green part timers in pick up trucks. And pull all this off despite the 'best' air strikes foreign money can throw at you.

Seriously, you couldn't make this shit up if you had to write your own war movie from scratch.

Odyssey Dawn was a sketchy piece of fiction from the start. The trailers were crap and any savvy viewer could tell the ending was going to be shitty. It started half way into the story when Gaddafi was a day away from over running the final rebel stronghold of Benghazi. It was the threat of the villain's revenge play that forced the Euros to act with or without US cover and not because the Euros gave a shit about the 'humanitarian crisis' that might ensue after the war. Lets face it, war itself is a humanitarian crisis. Casualties are always fine so long as they are in Africa. Sure, some French liberal crybaby's might wail into their coffee on the Left Bank. But the call to action for Sarkozy, the French Right and his own re election campaign was really the nightmare scenario of boatloads of Muslim refugees flooding into France and adding foot soldiers to those that rioted and torched cars in Paris in 2005. This week, refugee crisis averted, the French passed a law banning women from wearing the ~~suicide bomber suit~~ burqa, a full body black garbage bag that stops horny Frogs eying up chaste Muslim women.

The French were going to waste Gaddafi's armor and arty and save Benghazi with or without US approval. The fact that Libya stands on 2% of world oil reserves – and supplies 10% of the EU’s oil was another deal sweetener. Not only that, but Libyan oil is exceptionally sweet and pure. It only costs ~$1 to refine a barrel, currently trading at ~$110. The Euros need those fields back online ASAP. When I think about it, the British had the right idea from the start when they Tomahawked Gaddafi's compound on day one. That was probably the only 'easy win' scenario on the table and had to be tried despite Obama's bullshit that Gaddafi was never a target.

You know things are screwed on NATO's end and they've run out of ideas when they shrugged their shoulders this week and signed off on a prospective peace deal the African Union tried to make for a ceasefire and talks... talks that leave Gaddafi and his sons in power. It's pretty funny that the rebels themselves are against this deal. Those bunch of idiots still think they have a say in this mess. And with the US quietly skulking out of the theater like the guy who just shat his pants and is trying to get to the exit before the smell hits, that leaves the Euros in charge. There are signs now of a rift growing within NATO with Britain and France wanting to double down on air strike intensity and others getting jittery about the whole thing. But unless they are prepared to land troops, there won't be much chance of a military victory by either side.

Gaddafi must be laughing his ass off.

As far as the fighting goes, you've got to respect Gadaffi's forces. After the initial retreat from Benghazi, they regrouped and wisely adjusted their tactics. Tanks were obviously major targets of NATO air power so it was best to park them in urban areas where they're harder to spot and target (due to NATO's RoE which involve not wasting civilians although you'd have to be a pretty retarded civilian to stay in your house watching TV with a T-72 parked in you backyard). Gadaffi is using his tanks in Misurata quite wisely it seems because they're proving difficult for air strikes to kill. And urban areas are not somewhere you'd usually deploy tanks but the Libyan army seems pretty shrewd and is adapting to NATO on the fly. Of course this means Misurata is a pretty ugly mess, with thousands of civilians trapped inside and no discernable front line. I see the New York Times wailing that the bad guys are using 'illegal cluster bombs' which is rich considering Gaddafi bought them somewhere and there aren't many munition manufacturers in Africa last time I checked. Footage of the fighting in Misurata seems to reveal a mini Stalingrad with opposing forces occupying random buildings and snipers having a field day. One clever tactic by Gaddafi's forces that made me spew beer on my keyboard was their use of pick up trucks, pretty much the one thing NATO can't bomb since everyone and their mother in the rebel army uses one. When the rebels had a similar idea to adopt the enemy's tactics they booted up a tank of their own which NATO promptly bombed killing five. They admitted to a 'targeting error' but refused to say 'sorry' which was pretty funny.

Gaddafi must have laughed his ass off.

Speaking of pickup trucks, I see the rebels operating two types, the ones with the DShk 12.7mm Russian machine guns or the ones with the homemade multiple rocket launchers, both weapons mounted on the truck bed. Either way, I always see them firing determinedly off camera but it pisses me off that I never get to see what they are firing at. The enemy? It's pretty risky engaging professional soldiers from the exposed position of an elevated truck bed with a loud banger like the 12.7mm. Seems to me, unless it's some kind of co ordinated attack by the rebels (which I seriously doubt) then that gunner is a sniper magnet advertising his position to every Libyan with a scoped rifle. Or it's all just posturing for the cameras.

Can't hit shit? No worries, ask the skygod to improve your aim.

The more the world gets to watch the rebels in action, the more chimpanzee shit gets flung at the NATO pencil pushers who got involved in this zoo. It's getting embarrassing at this stage. After Gaddafi booted their asses out of the key oil town of Brega last week, there were reports of groups of rebels firing on each other in a dispute over whose fault it was that they are all a bunch of useless idiots. This whole thing was advertised as a war movie but it's quickly turning into an '80s frat house comedy.

Gaddafi, in true evil villain style, called it when he characterized the rebels over a month ago as a bunch of malcontents and drug addicts... maybe he was really talking about their fighting style. For further hilarity, NATO and Western media were considering last week whether it would be a good idea to arm and train the rebels with some proper anti tank and anti air shoulder mounted weaponry. This is something I thought they might have done a month ago but the CIA guys that have been on the ground since ~~before~~ this shit started probably reported back that that was about as good an idea as placing an Afghan in the cockpit of a stealth bomber. Again, you gotta love Gadaffi's response when he got wind of this plan. He quickly floated the idea that the rebel 'army' included Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah elements which sent Western media into a shit fit. Funny thing is, it's probably true at least to the point where it's possible to be a card carrying member of an organization invented in the media. As far as Hezbollah goes, what self respecting young Arab doesn't have a serious beef with Israel?

Gadaffi again must have laughed his ass off.

Eastern Libya and its capital Benghazi have always been redneck country and the part sophisticates in Tripoli like to look down on while sipping their fancy coffees in upscale cafes. Benghazi is the city where the supporters of the former king that Gaddafi deposed in the '60s got to lay low while watching as Gaddafi funneled the oil wealth out from under their feet. They've been itching for a shot at revenge for decades. It's also home to the Islamists and the wilder desert tribes and proved fervent recruiting ground for volunteers for Iraq and Afghanistan to fight the Yankee imperialists. Those are the rebels best fighters and also the last guys you'd expect NATO to be assisting but such is the complex web of forces that guide geopolitics these days. In truth, oil makes everyone a bitch, loyalties cheap and alliances tend to shift like desert sands all so long as the proles get to fill up their SUVs on the cheap to make that commute from surburbia to their cubicle in Wageslavistan affordable.

All this does point out though, in case anyone didn't already know, the serious value of professional infantry. Guys in uniform are a good thing. Some ancient general in antiquity came up with the idea that having all the guys on your team wear the same outfit was a pretty cool idea. And not just to prevent accidental bludgeoning and friendly stabbing but more so to instill an Esprit de Corps amongst the troops. Part of the cost of raising an army has always been the uniform and having a uniform gave the average soldier confidence that his general had enough bank to pay up when the fighting was done. Gadaffi's hold on his army has a similar dimension. With sanctions beginning to take hold Gaddafi has doubled public sector and army pay and increased interest rates to try to coax money out from under mattresses, where millions have gone since fighting started and coax it back to the Libyan central bank.

In fact, with neither side looking like it'll be able to pull off a decisive military victory, this war seems (as Gaddafi predicted) to be entering the post season and the long war phase. Here, economics comes into play and it's harder to see how Gadaffi can win this phase. He's already burning through his cash stash and one wonders how many dollars he has buried in the desert. The rebels too are running low on cash but they managed to fill a tanker over the weekend that made off with $100 million worth of sweet crude that sure helped rebel coffers. That's probably why Gaddafi wanted Brega and its oil refinery so bad, denying it to the enemy is at least as good as owning it yourself, broken though it is.

The problem with the inevitable economic victory for NATO is that it is liable to take time and not look very convincing. Waiting for Gadaffi to run out of money or for sanctions to cause food shortages in Tripoli is liable to create the type of 'humanitarian crisis' Operation Odyssey Dawn was designed to prevent. That kind of messy victory is going to leave more chimpanzee shit on NATO's doorstep.

Still, the situation is not by any means good for our villain. A bunch of his cabinet ministers abandoned ship last week which didn't look good for Gadaffi and the morale in his camp. The most high profile defector, former foreign minister Moussa Koussa seems to be trying to play the role of 'honest broker' on the international stage and seems to think a deal can be made. Anything he can do to make himself useful is a good idea because he's facing questioning for the Lockerbie bombing and needs a favorable phone call from the MoD to get the dogs called off.

One idea that I saw floated was the partition of the country which seems pretty ugly but would probably suit sleazy western oil companies since all the oil fields are in the east and the rebels hold most of them. They've already proved they can play ball and be compliant on the oil front, having filled three tankers over the past month and that's something Western governments need to know. With oil prices hovering around the $110 mark and jittery news in America of $5 a gallon gas by summer, that's the kind of shit that crashed the economy two years ago and makes the corporatocracy shudder. And with the US consumer already broke, pricey oil will cause all kinds of commodity and food price spikes that's going to eat up every disposable dollar in circulation, leaving a whole bunch of iPhones and plastic pumpkins gathering dust on store shelves.

This is still Gaddafi's best play right now. Keep the uncertainty flowing for as long as possible and see if you can parlay that into a sweet deal for yourself and the in-laws. Something involving stepping down in favor of a son and getting to keep the money in your offshore bank accounts. Meanwhile, churn out brutal urban warfare in Misurata while conducting hit and run raids in pickup trucks against the rebels who are sure to run like fuck and scream at the sky, demanding the magical appearance of A-10s. Oh wait, the US has scaled down air operations. Guess they'll have to rely on French Mirages or British Tornados, neither aircraft being ideal for loitering over the battlefield providing close air support to idiots who wouldn't know to take advantage of it anyway.

What a mess.

One thing is for sure, no matter how this ends, there won't be many Libyans smiling or laughing.

Not even the 'arch villain' himself.

Ivory Coast: Gbagbo's army goes AWOL.

2011-04-03T05:08:00.000-07:00

In the vintage year for war that 2011 is turning out to be, Ivory Coast's is turning out to be a minor dust up. Like I've been saying for a while now, it was just a matter of time before this shit went live. With news today that 800 civilian bodies were found in the western town of Duekoue, shot and hacked up with machetes, seems this war has finally got its shit together. Of course, both sides are blaming each other for the body count. But that's pretty much par for the course when genocide is in play in Africa; both sides are willing to play the game but no side wants to be caught standing with blood on their hands when any particular round of media musical chairs ends.

You can't really call this a proper war though. Not when one side, in this case that of former president Laurent Gbagbo, the president who refuses to step down after losing last November's election, doesn't seem like he has the stomach for a proper fight. Gbagbo's army put up almost no resistance to the UN and IMF's man, Alassane Ouattara, whose forces seem to have marched right in over the last few days and taken 80% of the country with almost no resistance.

That sure had me scratching my head.

Seems a lot of them saw the writing on the wall and stayed at home. Even Gbagbo's chief general and head of the army, Phillippe Mangou, took refuge in the South African embassy with his five children. By mid afternoon on Friday 50,000 soldiers and cops had abandoned Gbagbo. Although there has been constant gunfire in the capital Abidjan and fierce fighting, Ouattarra's men have already taken the presidential palace and a bunch of them slept in Gbagbos bed. When you lose your bed, you know the war is pretty much over for you. Still, there's no sign of Gbagbo.

Ouattara's forces preparing to enjoy Gbagbo's bed in his palace.

This Gbagbo guy sucks majorly.

Seriously, he should win some prize for the worst defence of a country ever. Was he really that clueless that he didn't realise a large chunk of his army would surrender at the first sign of trouble? Actually, probably yes. That was why he was running a little mini Hitler Youth recruiting drive over the past few weeks and handing out AKs to angry teenagers with tribal grievances and calling them the 'Young Patriots'. Nothing like tapping into the old colonial divisions and ethnic fault lines when you need a fog of ultra violence to hide behind. He also has about 2,500 troops of the 'Republican Guard' (think hometown tribe who you've been funnelling chocolate profits to for the last ten years, much like Saddam's Ba'ath buddies in Tikrit) and it looks like they are putting up decent resistance in the capital Abidjan; prolonging shit to at least save some face. Gbagbo's forces have also managed, after conflicting reports, to retain control of state broadcaster RTI where they've been playing tape on a loop of last November's election 'victory'. There are also reports of a dishevelled Gbagbo news guy showing up impromptu and claiming the station had been attacked by the UN "assisted by Guinean, Malian, Senegalese, Beninese and Burkinabe mercenaries", which seems to me to be an attempt to stir up tribal tensions and get the wider genocide ball rolling.

The problem right now for the international community is they are not giving Gbagbo a way out. With resistance in the capital proving more stubborn then they expected (understandable after you've captured 80% of the country so easily in a matter of days), the longer this goes on the more destabilizing it can get. Just like in Libya, you need to float a decent escape plan for the designated 'bad guy'. But with the International Community floating the idea of indicting Gbagbo for 'crimes against humanity', that pretty much rules out the villa in the south of France and access to his inevitable offshore bank account.

What I don't get is if Gbagbo had some inkling that his guys were going to surrender so miserably? If so, then why not make a deal while he still had a decent amount of chips left on the table? My guess is the guy's a retard surrounded by yes men who were trolling the fuck out of him. Did Gbagbo really know his chief general, Mangou, was such a pussy or was he just that clueless? Of course, I have no idea but it makes for a comedy sketch that goes something like this:

INT - President Gbagbo's HQ - Evening, a week prior to Ouattarra's attack.

President Gbagbo is reclining in his armchair, smoking a cigar while a hooker smokes his 'other cigar' under his sprawling mahogany desk. He has requested an audience with his chief general, Phillippe Mangou, in order to assess the readiness of his army for the upcoming war.

       Gbagbo: So how are the troops, General Mangou?
     Mangou: They are fabulous el presidente.
       Gbagbo: And how do they feel about that $20 a month raise I gave them.
      Mangou: They are really pleased with it sir. Most of them bought another six pack with it.
      Gbagbo: SIX PACK!?
     Mangou: Yes sir...it's an erm... extension for the magazine cartridge on their AKs.
     Gbagbo: Ah that's the spirit! I like dedication like that. For a second there I thought you meant the men were drinking!
      (Nervous laughter)
      Mangou: Drinking? Why would they do that? Granted, with the UN, the IMF, the African Union, ECOWAS, the World Bank and the International Community breathing down their necks, the men might need to steady their nerves a little.
       Gbagbo: True. That's true. (Gbagbo begins signing papers on his desk)
       Mangou: What are you doing el presidente?
       Gbagbo: I'm increasing the army's chocolate ration. Nothing makes men want to fight like Hershey and Snickers bars!
       Mangou: Good plan... good plan! (muttering to himself) That'll work retard!

Laurent Gbagbo: Not the sharpest tool in the shed.

This war is pretty much over already. Gbagbo has failed to get the genocide ball rolling and his forces will soon be running out of ammo. Still, Ouaterra has a lot to lose here if he doesn't play his hand carefully. He's been offering Gbagbo multiple chances to surrender. This is presumably to try to avoid a high body count which tends to put a dampner on your swearing in ceremony. It also makes all that foreign money that's bankrolling you nervous. These foreign interests just want business to settle down nicely and the economic rape of Africa to continue on the down low as it has done for centuries. Ouattara knows the game since he was an inside man at the IMF for much of the '90s.

So everything should work out better than expected for the economic hitmen.

The M2 Browning .50 cal: A ghost gun from another era.

2011-04-01T05:30:00.000-07:00

   Go ahead and name some piece of machinery originally designed and made in the 1920s that is still in use in pretty much its original form today. You'd be hard pressed to find anything as ubiquitous as the M2 Browning machine gun. The .50 cal or 'Ma Deuce' is like some dinosaur walking amongst us today, like the gator that chewed your leg off when you innocently went swimming in your Floridian urban sprawl condo pool that happened to extend into the Everglades; a hazard your sleazy real estate agent allowed to get lost in the fine print when you signed the lease. Sure, you miss your leg but you find yourself respecting the ancient intelligence that chewed it off.

   The M2 Browning is a little like that.

   Its design is just so damn perfect that nobody has dared mess with it much and even today many of the newer modifications would be compatible with the original 1920s model. In today's shitty dystopian sci fi novel that we're all living in, it seems everything from washing machines to automobiles get manufactured with a built in fail date so you'll have to buy a whole new one from 'MegaCorp' in a few years; and toss the old one in the ocean somewhere where it'll kill five dolphins. Not so the .50 cal. Of course, this was a time before the Bladerunner corporations that make everything today owned the government. There was a time once when a government design contract meant the best possible design and was not the best possible way to spread corporation cash to the most Congressional Districts to get re elected.

The designer himself, John Browning, was a pretty fun gun nut.

   He was born into it. His father, a Mormon pioneer and gun designer himself, was part of the mass exodus that followed Brigham Young from Illinois to Utah in 1847 in search of an American Jesus. Or something.  I love how religious folk like Browning are always drawn to weaponry. I just have a little trouble finding the part in scripture where Jesus liked to break out his peacemaker when things got sketchy. Sure, firepower is always handy but Jesus was not the type of guy with a backup plan in case the peace and love message didn't work out for him. It's pretty funny how his followers today tend to eschew that philosophy in favor of something with a little more stopping power.

   And the M2 Browning sure has a lot of stopping power.

   If you get clipped by a .50 cal round it's pretty much a death sentence. The hole in you is large and bleeding out from artery leakage is a bitch. And that's if you're 'lucky' enough to just get whacked in a limb. Anything in the torso gives you a few seconds to remember how Mom made Christmas fun by lying to you about the existence of Santa Claus and the origin of the presents under the Christmas Tree. Then it all just goes the way of nothingness. Browning himself, of course, would beg to differ and say a nine inch hole in your chest is just a flesh wound in comparison to the paradise to come.

The young Browning designed his first gun in his father's workshop in Ogden, Utah when he was just thirteen years old. That certainly casts today's teenagers as a bunch of underachievers. But then again, that's what lack of instant access to Lady Gaga's ass on YouTube once did to you; makes a horny teenager channel all that masturbatory energy into something productive like guns.

Browning's first design was a single shot rifle which the Winchester company soon bought the rights to and, before long, the young Browning was fully employed by Winchester and producing a slew of single shot rifle designs; probably the most famous being the Winchester .30-30 that you've seen in just about every cowboy movie ever made. Interestingly, Browning himself was responsible for WWI. Well, not really. But he did design the FN Model 1910 automatic pistol that offed Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 that sparked the whole clusterfuck. Not Browning's fault, but still a mishap you are going to have to explain to Jesus at the pearly gates.

But Browning's greatest legacy is probably the M2 .50 cal. Still a mainstay not just in the US military but in the militaries of over a hundred other countries, the reliable old .50 cal is still increasing the body count in multiple war zones today. The original design order was placed by venerable old war dog John J. Pershing when he was faced with the task of whipping up a US army to chuck onto the Western Front in 1917 to prove to the Euros that splendid isolation wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Pershing needed something heavy that could shoot down aircraft (those Fokkers were still bothersome in 1917) and a gun that could punch through the thin armor of the Kaiser's armored cars.

Browning set about the task.

The original M2 started out water cooled with a heavy water jacket, like the British Maxim gun that was proving so effective in the trench stalemate. It wasn't until after the war ended though and in the early 1920s that Browning's gun started to mature into something serious. The water jacket was obviously cumbersome and wasn't much use if you wanted to mount the gun in aircraft wings; aircraft being seen in the 1920s as the new 'stalemate busters' in any future war. That's why the Versailles Treaty allowed the defeated Germans no aircraft and how their glider program got started; ironically educating the likes of Kurt Tank and Willy Messerschmitt in the fundamentals of flight. Isn't it funny how the best laid plans of mice and men tend to backfire? Those early glider guys went on to design the Me 109 and the FW 190.

Browning's .50 cal with water jacket and top hat.

With about 140,000 machine guns lying around and gathering dust after the Great War, the US felt no immediate need for new gun development. But then, as time went on, all these guns started becoming obsolete, Vickers, Lewis, Marlin... but not good old Browning's M19171A. It still had merits and just needed an upgrade for the 1930s. One of these was standardization. The brass were onto something when they issued a requirement for a heavy machine gun that could be used in a universal role across all branches of the services. A heavier barrel was introduced, designated the M2HB, that increased heat dissipation but sucked for infantry teams that had to carry the thing. But infantry fire teams were never where the .50cal's destiny lay. Its true home was as the standard gun on almost every tank, APC and WWII era fighter that the brass could spread it to. Unlike today, cost used to be a factor in the American military budget. And with the M2HB mounted on every vehicle and in every aircraft wing possible, saving taxpayer money was something that once made sense to law makers unguilty of taking 'Tyrell Corporation' cash.

Lego likes the .50 cal. You see the smile on that guys face?

The M2HB (heavy barrel) is the variant we all know and love today. Today, it's mounted atop the M1 Abrams and standard on Humvees in Afghanistan and Iraq. That's pretty much confirmation of the success and ubiquity of a hundred year old design. It comes in very handy when you've got a bunch of 'insurgents' holed up in some structure but isn't worth an HE round from your main barrel. Thanks to Pershing and that heavy .50 cal round design order, you just spray the structure, knowing that rounds eat concrete like cookie monster and anyone inside who gets clipped loses his ability to run like fuck.

But what good is a major gun like the .50 cal today without a personal interest piece?

In today's bullshit media environment the only way to present something that the plebs will find interesting is to wrap it up in some story that makes sense to today's "gas your vehicle, work like fuck and watch the History Channel" ~~for ancient aliens~~ to know how better off they are than anyone in human history because they have TV and Internet and didn't get their ass conscripted into a war.

So I present to you, American badass and volunteer, himself a ghost from another era, Audie Murphy.

Sure he became a 'star' and banked some cash after his exploits in WWII but he was always the reluctant star and spent the first bundle he made on a home for his extended family. Always modest and the uneasy hero (as any true bona fide hero must be), he's always struck me as the ideal American military archetype. He harks back to a time in American history when you could admire a guy for his courage and stands in contrast to today when the media manufactures heroes by sheer control of the airwaves; like that dim blond Jessica Lynch that got 'rescued' from an Iraqi hospital in 2003 by Special Forces even though the Iraqi doctor that treated her was begging for her to get heloed out of there days before the media-industrial-complex decided they could latch onto the event and feed the plebs a feel good story.

Murphy earned his Medal of Honor on a .50 cal in 1945.

Audie Murphy. A true American badass even before the media decided he was a 'hero'.

I'm not going to try to bullshit my way through his actions. I'll just let his MOH citation speak for itself.

"Second Lt. Murphy commanded Company B, which was attacked by six tanks and waves of infantry. 2d Lt. Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to a prepared position in a woods, while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him, to his right, one of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. 2d Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire, which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50 caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from three sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back. For an hour the Germans tried every available weapon to eliminate 2d Lt. Murphy, but he continued to hold his position and wiped out a squad that was trying to creep up unnoticed on his right flank. Germans reached as close as 10 yards, only to be mowed down by his fire. He received a leg wound, but ignored it and continued his single-handed fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way back to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack, which forced the Germans to withdraw. His directing of artillery fire wiped out many of the enemy; he killed or wounded about 50. 2d Lt. Murphy's indomitable courage and his refusal to give an inch of ground saved his company from possible encirclement and destruction, and enabled it to hold the woods which had been the enemy's objective."

In reality, the guy suffered from PTSD for the rest of his life. And this was a time when psychological casualties of war didn't exist officially. He did it from the exposed position of the mounted .50 cal on Sherman tanks at the time that made you sniper fodder. That's badass.

Just like Browning's century old gun.

It makes me wonder what humans will be firing at each other 100 years from now.

Einstein's sticks and stones or George Lucas laser guns?

Libya: The cavalry arrives!

2011-03-21T06:27:00.000-07:00

So NATO finally weighed up all the options and decided to act. After the Saudi "Day of Rage" fizzled, the point was made that the West would not intervene in Arab civil wars or support any rebels in the Saudi oil prize vassal state. They even stood by and offered no condemnation when the Saudi's steamrolled armor into Bahrain and started slapping the Shia around for daring to suggest that the 60% 'minority' Shia in that country should have a say in government. With the point made that the West won't always help rebels, it was time this weekend to swoop in on Libya and save those rebels making a last stand in Benghazi.

Intervening in a civil war is serious business. That's why NATO only does it on a selective basis; like in Libya but not Bahrain; like in Kosovo but not South Ossetia. I feel sorry for all those citizens in places like Bahrain, Darfur, Burma, Congo and Rwanda who must be kicking themselves right now that their shitty piece of global geography contains no oil. With the Libyan rebels making a last stand against Gadaffi's forces in the eastern city of Benghazi, the cavalry arrived just in time to rescue the garrison like John Wayne in some 50s Western. With a UN resolution to protect "civilian life" safely in hand, it was time to launch operation "Odyssey Dawn", a typical NATO moniker dreamed up by some pencil pushing general in the Pentagon. It does seem to suggest though that the West is embarking on a journey here and is unsure of the outcome. Seems about right. NATO are being purposefully vague about the objectives and even stated on Sunday that Gaddafi himself was not the target of British missiles when they levelled his compound in Tripoli. It's pretty funny when they resort to obvious bullshit like that but more interesting when you consider the wider Middle East context. This operation is supposed to look like part of the wider Sunni narrative of Arab uprisings against dictatorial regimes and is absolutely not a Western enforced regime change.

So how did these attacks go down?

Late Saturday evening the French flew some sorties out of Istres air base outside Marseilles and dangled some Mirages and Rafales over Gaddafi's arty and heavy armor sieging Benghazi. This was supposed to scare his army shitless but that never works in war. You need explosions and bodies to make a point and the French proved that in spades by coming back later that night in force and ripping Gaddafi's forces a new asshole. Where the US and Britain focused their attacks mainly against airbases and Gaddafi's compound mostly with standoff sub and cruiser launched Tomahawks (British Tornados, US F-15s, F-16s and B2s were also employed), the French seem to have gone straight for the jugular by going after Gaddafi's heavy armor and arty directly with their air force. That was pretty impressive for the French. I always get the feeling that the frogs are perpetually trying to overcome that 'surrender monkey' rap they got after WWII. We can safely presume Sarkozy will be running for re election.

They caught Libyan armor napping in a field about ten miles outside Benghazi. Sitting ducks for the French, Gaddafi lost all his heavy armor sieging the city with a lot of the crews dying in their sleeping bags near their tanks without a mark on their bodies. Those pressure waves have a nasty effect of turning your insides to jelly while you sleep. Of course, this kind of rape doesn't come without its reasons and not all of them are about the French proving they have decent sized balls. A 2009 wikileaks cable revealed that Gadaffi was attempting to renegotiate the terms of French oil company Total's deal and give Libya a greater share of crude oil production. Ain't payback a bitch? Also, the Euros are pretty freaked out right now about the possibility of hundreds of thousands of hungry Libyan refugees winding up on their shores if Gadaffi gets to take his revenge on Benghazi. That might have been the final straw that set this NATO operation in motion.

Still, it seems like Gadaffi's scorched earth threat to blow the Libyan oilfields might be back on.

Death by pressure wave is 'clean'. There are even pockets left to pick.

Big ass explosions are fun... from a safe distance. Thankfully, civilians don't drive cars in Libya.

In fact, going by the sheer destruction and rapid turnaround in Gadaffi's fortunes, these initial strikes could be seen by many as a little 'excessive'. Not only were Gadaffi's heavy weapons around Benghazi destroyed but also those retreating to Tripoli have been subject to a free for all turkey shoot on the main highway. So much so that the Russians, Chinese and Arab League are starting to grumble about the US led coalition with Putin complaining that NATO overstepped the 'mandate to protect civilians' and was engaging in the' indiscriminate use of force'. Typical geopolitical stuff from the Russians who get pissed when the West pulls shit like this with the longterm view of oil price stability.

Of course, that doesn't mean that they're wrong either. It's just means that no one has clean hands. The Russians are probably just pissed that $4 billion in arms contracts with Gadaffi went up in smoke, $2 billion of which were still pending when NATO swooped in and cancelled the contract with Tomahawks. Shit like that tends to make Putin suddenly care about civilian casualties. Let's face it, we're living in a dystopian future sci-fi novel where every nation state is dirty.

That said, there's been pretty much a media blackout on the civilian casualties of these air strikes. As usual, the West is killing people in poorer countries to save their lives. US Navy vice-admiral Bill Gortney gave a press conference at the Pentagon on Sunday and showed a bunch of reporters a series of slides of the attacks and insisted there were no civilian casualties. Not even on the main highway to Tripoli. None of those cars contained civilians of any kind. You've gotta love that kind of bullshit. Your population will only swallow it when it doesn't give a shit and that's a safe bet right now in Western countries where people are getting jittery about the price of oil.

The main Libyan East West highway is not ideal terrain for retreating armor.

Gadaffi himself is understandably lying low.

No more TV interviews for him. Now his bullshit comes only in audio format recorded over the phone. That's to aid him in his ongoing mission to dodge a Tomahawk. He has declared a ceasefire with the rebels (to try to buy some time) and threatened to open his arsenals to the civilian population to aid in the defence of the Libyan nation. It's unclear how many people would take him up on the offer of a free AK after he bombed them. He's still got a very healthy bank account though and even without air superiority and much diminished armor, his forces will still present a significant force. Gaddafi has vowed to fight a "long war" and it's still hard to see how a bunch of guys in pick up trucks with no training can defeat Gaddafi's professional infantry. NATO has been quick to point out that it won't be landing ground forces so it will up these 'rebels' to take the fight to Gaddafi.

That's going to be an interesting fight. Urban warfare is tricky. And it can never be won by air power alone. If Gaddafi can avoid dying it's hard to see the rebels pulling this off in the absence of a proper command and control structure. Gaddafi's prediction of a "long war" doesn't seem too wide of the mark. He now has the West engaged in a third 'imperialist' war which is going to play in his favor on the streets of the wider Arab world. No matter what, if Gadaffi can stay alive, he is at least putting himself in position to make a deal with the West should things go south for him militarily; like a beachfront condo somewhere sunny and him getting to keep the billions in his offshore bank accounts.

The coalition too will suffer from command structure problems. Who exactly is in charge of this op? Sure, it's the US right now but they are eager to wash their hands of the whole thing as soon as possible lest it disrupt other interests in the Middle East. For one thing, they don't want the Muslim Brotherhood in nextdoor Egypt getting elected on US imperialist populism fueled by refugees and ugly reports coming out of Libya. The nightmare here for the US and part of Gadaffi's "long war" strategy is the US losing control of Suez, central to US strategic planning in the Gulf. Defense Secretary Gates wants to hand over control of the mission later this week to someone but he doesn't know who yet. War by global commitee is a special type of clusterfuck and can get nasty if conflicting generals start slapping each other around in the press when things don't go the way they're supposed to. Odyssey Dawn indeed.

Ideally for the West this ends with Gaddafi dead and a new compliant Libyan government installed which will go along with a new set of oil deals written by Western oil companies. Either way, this ends up pretty shitty for Libya. The thing is, although Gaddafi is an asshole, he has taken Libya a long way since the 1970s. The country ~~has~~ had the highest living standards in Africa. Various subsidized or free services in health, education, housing, and basic foodstuffs have ensured basic necessities for most people. In fact, quite a lot of Libyans were pretty satisfied with their lot and is why, a few weeks back when this 'war' began, Gadaffi was quick to portray the rebels as a bunch of 'drug addicts' and malcontents. Of course, he jumped the shark when he used his air force to bomb his own people and indiscriminately shelled his own cities. That likely lost him a lot of home grown support he might otherwise have had and caused mass desertions in his military. A lot of guys came back after he started winning and it'll be interesting to see if they stay now that he is 'losing' again.

Right now, he'll likely portray this as a typical Western oil grab in another Arab country and try to churn out brutal urban infantry battles for as long as he can and play to a wider narrative. That narrative is that the West only gets involved in shooting wars in the Arab world when there is oil at stake.

And he won't be totally wrong.

Libya: Gaddafi strikes back!

2011-03-08T17:29:00.000-08:00

While the West adjusts its knickers and tries to figure out how best to play its hand, Muammar Gaddafi has staged a successful attack on the city of Zawiyah 30 miles east of Tripoli with up to 50 tanks and a shitload of Toyota Tundra pick up trucks from the 'elite' Khamis brigade led by his son. Zawiyah, a city of about 200,000 and right in Gaddafi's back yard, was a thorn in his side and it's pretty logical that he would aim to 'cleanse' that first. The shelling has been pretty indiscriminate (as shelling always is) and it seems his forces have taken out power to the town. Cellular and land line phone communications have been cut which I'm sure is making the rebels jittery. There are reports of them using bullhorns to try to rally men to the main square where they seem to have some makeshift HQ. The town has been surrounded and cordoned off by loyalist forces and anyone attempting to escape is getting sniped on the highway.

If and when Zawiyeh falls things are going to get interesting because the country will fall into an almost perfect east-west divide. With NATO offshore fanning their pussies and still wondering if the imposition of a 'no fly zone' will harm or help the rebels, Gaddafi's forces seem to be strengthening. The 5000 troops he's paying to stay loyal seem to have been bolstered by a few hundred Tuareg warriors from Mali and Niger. These 'blue warriors' are Saharan tribesmen Gaddafi helped out when they rebelled in '07 in Mali and now seem to be repaying the favor at the price of a mere grand a day per warrior.

Don't you love this shit?

In the east, Gaddafi's air force has been messing with the oil refinery in Ras Lanuf and dropping the odd bomb to mess with the rebel's heads. It also makes sure no more oil tankers make off with any more loads like the two that managed it last week. Gaddafi's forces also repelled a balls to the wall rebel attack on Sunday when a bunch of fools in pick up trucks attempted to advance on Gaddafi's hometown of Sirte only to get pawned by arty and heavy weapons. They returned to base with heavy casualties and Gadaffi loyalists were seen celebrating in Tripoli on news of the victory. The momentum shift now is interesting as suddenly both sides believe they can win.

Enemy jets! They suck! Also note the guy's initials on his AK. He doesn't want his shit stolen while he sleeps!

Without some NATO weaponry or fire support it's difficult to see how the rebels in pick ups can bring it to Gaddafi. And with Gaddafi seemingly gaining the initiative, a push to the east with armor toward Benghazi seems inevitable if Ras Lanuf falls. There are reports that the rebels in Ras Lanuf are running low on fuel and ammo, not suprising when you consider every time a jet swoops overhead everyone and their mother opens up with their AK. Let's face it these guys are not professional soldiers by any means just a motley bunch of guys who've been cut out of Libya's economic pie all their lives. Born into the wrong tribe or social group this is their chance for a better shot. Problem is, heart and enthusiasm can only get you so far in war. And with no heavy weapons and under arty and rocket fire guys like that tend to buckle when enough of them end up on stretchers in the hospital ward that has no electricity or doctors. They've got no command structure. Or discipline. There are reports of disparate groups of them arriving in pick ups in Ras Lanuf, driving west to wherever they believe the 'front is', firing a few shots in the general direction of Gadaffi's forces and going for a cigarette break. If Gaddafi can capture Ras Lanuf you could see the rebel forces crumbling and making a break for the Egyptian border with all the mess that would entail, last and not least of which would be Libya's oil off the world market for the next ten years with Gadaffi back in charge and the 'terrorist state' the West always claims it is so terrified of becoming a reality in the heart of North Africa.

Of course, if NATO does intervene, and with Gadaffi's gains it needs to make up its collective mind, that'll have wider implications all across the Arab world. There will be clamoring voices in next door Egypt saying it is an imperialist oil grab which will push that new 'democracy' into the hands of hardliners and risks handing the country over to the Muslim Brotherhood. Having them in control of Suez is a nightmare for the US Navy who needs that waterway as part of its Persian Gulf strategy. Interestingly, the crushing of the rebellion in Libya would be seen in Saudi Arabia as a bonus and might put a dampener on Friday's upcoming "Day of Rage". When one side has all the heavy weapons, maybe Facebook and Twitter aren't enough to win a war after all.

Interestingly, there were reports yesterday of Gaddafi floating an exit strategy for him and his money. Although later denied (you always deny it until you're safely aboard the plane to your beach front condo), it seems Gadaffi would bail if he and his family could get immunity with no pesky war crime trials and get to keep their money. That hole is pretty deep now and it's hard to see the West being cool with this especially since all those shiny oil investments are now dust.

Probably the best bet right now for the West is to slip in some covert 'military advisors' Vietnam style and train some rebels to use the Javelin Anti Armor system and FIM-92 Stingers to take down Gadaffi's aircraft. But even then, it's hard seeing that motley bunch having the command structure to put them to good use. Sure any move by NATO like this would be obvious but certainly a quieter move than imposing a no-fly zone that'll have the rest of the Arab world screaming oil grab or Zionist plot.

The thing is, with Gadaffi gaining the initiative, the West will have to make up its mind very soon if it wants to act, because if the rebels start losing ground a "no fly zone" is not gonna cut it (Gadaffi's airforce not being the rebels main problem anyway and NATO will be forced to take out Gadaffi's arty and armor just so the rebels can hold real estate.

And that is not going to viewed favorably in the wider Arab world.

Ivory Coast 2: Trickle down economics West African style.

2011-03-07T05:01:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd take a quick break from the North African situation and comment on a post I wrote a while back on the situation in Ivory Coast. The whole impending civil war thing was not happening quick enough for some readers and I was getting emails saying everything was cool and Fonzy and nothing bad is going to happen. Well this is not so. Stay tuned because the price of your Hershey bar is about to increase (Ivory Coast being the worlds leading cocoa producer) and there are a number of signs that this war is about to go live although how exactly is still anybody's guess.

If you've read my previous post on the situation or happen to be one of the few that gives a shit what goes down in West Africa, you'll know the winner of November's election according to the UN, the IMF and most foreign governments was Alassane Ouattara. He and his cabinet have been holed up for the last few months in the "Golf Hotel" just outside the commercial capital, Abidjan, protected by a bunch of UN troops from the current slimey President/General Laurent Gbagbo and his army who have refused to accept the result of the election for the obvious reason that Gbagbo seems to have lost. Of course, losing to a guy like Ouattera who was also a bankster who acted as Deputy Managing Director at the IMF from '94-'99 presents an easy conspiracy theory to feed to your loyal troops. And those loyalists include most of Ivory Coast's army who Gbagbo is feeding a healthy share of the country's profits to, Caesar conquest of Gaul style.

The international power elites are pissed because the only real 'successful' West African country (success equalling exploitable profit) is undergoing a bout of instability because of a power hungry general Gbagbo. They see Ouattara as the man easier to do business with. The fact that he's holed up at the "Golf Hotel" smacks of irony. I mean, how many golf courses are there in West Africa anyway? Golf is the sport of rich corporate fucks and it just so happens that their guy ends up at the only resort in West Africa where you can take a swing at your handicap. Sure, Gbagbo himself is pure sleaze so there is no good guy in this situation, just an easier guy for foreign interests to buy more chocolate and bananas from.

So what are the latest developments?

Ouattara and his 'cabinet-in-waiting' are still holed up at the luxury Golf Hotel presumably sipping cocktails at the 'nineteenth hole' and still under the protection of about 9000 UN troops. In the meantime, Gbagbo has been looting their homes with his 'elite paramilitary police force' (Cecos) with reports of cop trucks leaving the homes of prominent cabinet members with fridges and big screen TVs. Gbagbo also seems to have given free reign to groups of unruly teenagers who have been seen leaving the same homes with slimmer pickings like bags of rice and canisters of cooking gas; that's trickle down economics West African style... you get to loot the cheap shit when you're poor.

Meanwhile, 200,000 people have already bailed from the country on the threat of violence, 70,000 of those to the neighboring shithole of Liberia next door. It's pretty sad when people from the most successful country in West Africa need to escape to the beach shitters in Liberia. But with the tribal insignias being painted on doors and gates (so you don't get massacred by the wrong death squad) you know word on the ground is that this shit still has the potential to get ugly. Maybe not quite Rwanda ugly, but up there in terms of machete slashing.

One of the more ugly incidents in recent weeks was the shooting dead of six women protesters by Gbagbo's troops. The women's demonstration became a scene of terror when security forces rolled up and opened fire with machine guns in Abobo, a sprawling, impoverished suburb of Abidjan. That was pretty shocking up until last week when Gadaffi went and jumped the shark in African terms and ordered his air force to bomb protesters in Benghazi.

Who knew 2011 would offer up so much war and it's still only March?

The whole regional civil war thing seems to be getting well and truly out of hand for those that care in Western capitals. And yet it is still only happening in countries nobody gives a shit about or those that don't have an impact on the world economy. The only real fear now is contagion to Saudi Arabia and commodity price. We in the West can live with a few cents increase in Hershey Bars and Iran floating destroyers through Suez but oil cresting the hundred dollar a barrel mark and beyond is something that makes Washington and Brussels shit brix.

Massacred women: An outrageous image if it'd happened outside West Africa

Probably my favourite scenario for Ivory Coast is if the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) decide to get involved. They have no love for Gbagbo and the idea that they could invade would be a fun move for pan African independence (Ouattera was ECOWAS first president from 1977-85). Restoring order 'in house' and not forcing Western nations to get involved in the bongo party would truly be seen as some kind of maturity by the Western economic hitmen. It's not something ECOWAS couldn't do in house (well equipped as they are with Soviet and NATO armor) versus Gbagbo's AK and RPG wielding Ivorian Army (vehicle deficient) but such action could precipitate all kinds of nasty tribe on tribe genocide as the cornered Gbagbo forces go down fighting and whipping up genocide for shits and giggles.

It seems right now that all sides in Ivory Coast would prefer to hold out for some future 'peaceful' resolution then have ECOWAS invade and force the issue. The UN seem content to protect Ouattara in the Golf Hotel for the time being in lieu of knowing what the fuck else to do. Gbagbo, for his part, seems content looting TVs and refrigerators and relocating them to the homes of his senior officers. There is a lot of hate brewing under the surface, much of it running on old colonial lines between the southern coastal elites who did business with the French (Gbagbo's men) and the impoverished north plantation workers and their disenfranchised immigrant kin who voted for Ouaterra and would love a share of the country's profits. For those of us amazed by the swiftness of 2011's developments but impatient for a grab the popcorn war, right now I think it's best we stock up and watch North Africa and the possible contagion to the grand oil producer.

The only thing for sure right now in Ivory Coast is that it's not going away.

But at the end of the day, let's face it, chocolate is not as tasty as oil.