I love it when a strategy comes together...

Bashar al-Assad, President of rump Syria, thinks that the Americans don't know what they're doing in the region. That's not explicitly what he said, but that's what this amounts to:

Asked whether coalition airstrikes are helping him, Assad said that the bombardments -- the Obama administration's preferred military tactic in the fight against the Islamic State -- aren't enough. "Troops on the ground that know the land and can react are essential," Assad told journalist Régis Le Sommier. "That is why there haven't been any tangible results in the two months of strikes led by the coalition. It isn't true that the strikes are helpful. They would of course have helped had they been serious and efficient."

Despite the wishful thinking of some in the West when he came on the scene to replace his father, Hafez al-Assad of "Hama rules" fame, Bashar (Opthamologist by training) is a chip off the old despotic block. I suspect that's more nurture than nature, but he has in any event survived in an environment which would have exposed and destroyed him for any weakness. In fact, the entire region is like that.

The Baath regime in Syria as in Iraq is bad news, but it was (pretty much) equal-opportunity bad news. Christians, Alawis and other non-Sunni minority groups survived as well as anyone could in Syria until things came apart in 2011. Being an enemy of the State was what would get you tortured and killed, and as brutal as that is it's something you could avoid, i.e. you weren't born into it.

Enter Da'esh/IS/ISIL/Al Queda/etc. The decendants of the Moslem Brotherhood old Hafez decimated in Hama, they are rabidly intolerant Sunni militias, so intolerant that most Sunnis don't want to live under them either. The non-Sunnis who remain have been forced to side with Assad in sheer self-preservation. In that case the "enemy of their enemy" is their only hope.

Does that mean that we should work with him? Well, that depends. In an ideal world where we all love each other and some rare zombie virus makes people turn nasty, no. In the real world where things are a lot greyer than that you don't work with a murderous sadistc regime unless of course they are less distasteful than the alternatives.The question: is Assad sufficiently less off-putting than Da'esh/Al-Queda/Nusra to be worth propping up?

I won't pretend that this is a simple decision, but I'll zoom out enough to try to put it in perspective. Until 2003, Iraq and Syria were "stable". Not Parliamentary-Rule-of-Law stable, but most people could go about their daily lives with little chance of violence which counts as stability in most parts of the world. Once the Americans broke Iraq (that is neither ideological nor debatable at this point) the whole region began to creak. The eventual result was the so-called "Arab Spring" which succeeded only in the place it began, in Tunisia. Egypt got the government it thought it wanted in the Muslim Brotherhood, but quickly realized that having the military run things was not so bad after all. Syria tried to reform but that only exposed how brittle the power structure was and of course it shattered.

Shit gets tribal pretty quickly in situations like that (civil war) and the surviving enclaves are the Alawis (Assad's "tribe") and the Kurds. The Syrian Kurds' only chance of survival is to amalgamate with the Iraqi Kurds and I have said before this is where I think we should put our efforts. Erdrogan and the Turkish government; in his/their effots to re-create the Ottoman empire has/have placed themselves in opposition to NATO's interests and should be booted out of the alliance. I mention this because the Turks are the single biggest impediment to carving out a stable safe-haven for people fleeing Da'esh.

The Iranians also have Kurdish issues, but they are a bit more pragmatic and are actively supporting their militias fighting Da'esh. Should we co-operate with them? How I work it out is that worst-case scenario, Iran spreads its' (Shia) "Islamic Republic" to parts of Iraq; that is still less miserable than Daesh/Al Queda. This would defacto split off Iraqi Kurdistan to join up with Rojava. In case you wonder why I think we should support that, go read this.

Are the Kurds perfect? Not by a long shot, but as far as I can tell they are better than all regional alternatives. My information is not based on personal experience, but by all accounts their internal tribal issues don't turn into oppressing other people which is all that I can ask of a group. The real litmus test is "would I take a trip there [Iraqi Kudistan]?". The answer in this case is "yes" because even as in infidel Westerner I would be as safe there anywhere other than home. Their proposed constitution looks pretty Socialist (not surprising, Kurdish Workers' Party and all) but Disestablishmentarianism is the law of the land making it unique in the region since Turkey has purged Ataturk.

Coming back to Assad, the Social Contract of the Rojava Cantons (linked above) recognises the "territorial integrity of Syria" which brings it in line with the rump Baath state. This is potential common ground, but there is no way the Cantons would let Assad back in control. What I don't know is what the Iranians would think about cutting loose their link to Hezbollah, inevitable if the current power structure is dissolved.

That could be grounds for some old-school "sphere of influence" talks between the US, Saudis and Iranians. The tradeoff could be recognition of defacto Iranian expansion into Iraq, sans "Sunni Triangle" in exchange for cutting the Levant loose. The Saudis would have cause to dislike this, but it wouldn't change much on the groud so it might not be a deal breaker. Hezbollah has bled a great deal for the Assad regime (really for Iran) so it's unlikely Iran would cut ties, but they would gain more Shia in Iraq than they'd lose in Lebanon so who knows?

The region (and many others) has a preference for backing "the Strong Horse". Assad's Syria was that in the immediate area for many years; it is so no longer, but it can still do a lot of damage. The Alawis are a fairly despised minority in the ME, but so are the Kurds, Christians, Yazidis, etc. I see common cause there, but there are a lot of Great and Regional Power interests to overcome before the underdogs can band together. Get rid of Assad and the Baath Party and we could work with non IS Syria against Da'esh and in spite of Erdrogan. I deduce Iran as the lynchpin of this, with Russia having some say, maybe just as an extraction plan for the Baath ruling elite.

There's your angle Obama; you still have a chance to actually earn that Nobel Peace Prize. Fat chance the USA does anything this coherently thought-out with an understanding of the region and history, but the regional players understand these things. Somebody will do something but it probably won't be us.

A lot of drops will fill a bucket

At time of writing the Canadian government has voted to undertake the combat missions against Da'esh which we were at least partially doing already. Where this goes I don't know, but past practice from Afghanistan coupled with our current fiscal restraint suggests that this will remain at the level of low-rate airstrikes against painfully "safe" targets and some undisclosed Special Ops activity. Better than nothing, but unlikely to make a difference in the grand scheme.

Still, it's important to do something and we are at least doing that. What I draw more encouragement from is stories like this:

Dillon Hillier was working construction in Alberta when ISIS gunmen began their brutal push into Kurdish territory. A veteran of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, he decided he couldn’t just watch it happen.

Last weekend, the 26-year-old infantryman left Calgary and flew to northeastern Iraq to help Kurdish fighters fend off the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham. “I just felt it was the right thing to do since they’re facing some pretty tough times,” he said in an interview.

Unlike the radicalized youths who have flocked to Syria and Iraq, Mr. Hillier is a military veteran and he is siding with ISIS’s most formidable enemy, the Peshmerga. Mr. Hillier said he expected to be joined over the coming weeks by volunteers from Canada, the United States and Sweden.

To help Canadians eager to fight ISIS, an Ottawa military veteran recently formed the 1st North American Expeditionary Force. Ian Bradbury said former Canadian Forces members had launched the non-profit group to provide financial and logistical support to friends who felt compelled to volunteer.

The Kurds are the only group over there who both have ability to resist Da'esh (and equivalents) and a tolerant and reasonably progressive mindset as a culture. In short, they are worth supporting against the alternatives, and not merely as the lesser of available evils. They also appreciate the help, a rare trait in that part of the world.

Experience has shown that supporting most Arab groups is a waste of time as they're never happy whatever you do or don't do. Largely anecdotal, but we don't need peer-reviewed studies to tell us that if Iraq was a tar baby Syria would be the same.

It's not just the Arabs of course, there are a lot of other groups just as opportunistic (Afghans leap to mind) but we have proven Nation-Building to be a failed model, expensive in blood and treasure. The Kurds have built their own; it's still under construction but they'll do it themselves with some support from us, as it should be. They have a chance to be the beacon of "democracy" tolerance and freedom in the Middle East that Bush II and the NeoCons thought they could fashion post-Saddam Iraq into.

Young men have been trickling in from Western countries to bolster the Kurds, and by extension the displaced Christians, Yazidis and civilized Sunni Muslims of northern (nominal) Iraq. I wonder if anyone has thought of approaching the Saudis to grubstake these guys.  Infidels of course, but along with that they are a pretty safe bet to not boomerang on the House of Saud like the Sunni proxies they usually use. The cost effectiveness of supporting Western volunteers in Kurdistan could be very high. Here's the pitch:

End State: Kurdish autonomous area secured and displaced persons returned to their homes in contiguous areas.

How: Support to Kurdish forces and creation of a support system for volunteer replacements from other countries.

Salient features:

• Hub created in theatre with money from Gulf and Western governments
• Ground organization consisting of recruitment, supply and medical facilities
• Employs mostly locals
• Tickets home are part of the supply arrangements

I envision a small staff to liaise with applicants, pick them up from the airport, issue them with weapons, body armour, ammo, first aid kit and a local cell phone. From there link them up with the Peshmerga for employment and hope that the field hospital you've set up doesn't see them for anything worse than top-up inoculations.

An actual International Brigade is a bad idea, but a dedicated support organization for the individuals, especially the supply and medical resources, will encourage more guys to go. As mentioned in the linked National Post article, ad hoc support groups have been forming in home countries, but things remain sketchy on the receiving end.  With "allies" like this, the Kurds and the people they're sheltering need all the help we can give them.

Draw the correct lessons from Ottawa

Last week in Canada generated world-wide headlines for the dramatic attack on an honour guard soldier at our national war memorial and subsequent armed attack on our House of Parliament (seat of the Federal government in Canada).  Twenty-four-year-old Corporal Nathan Cirillo of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (Hamilton ON) was shot from behind and killed as he stood with an unloaded rifle at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a security guard (again unarmed) at the doors of the Centre Block was wounded trying to deflect the gunman as he charged into the building.

This was pretty crazy for Ottawa, but it was in fact the second attack on a member of Canada’s Armed Forces by a Canadian Muslim convert in that one week; see my previous post. This was another act of terrorism, and we have Sgt-at-Arms Kevin Vickers (head of Parliamentary security) to thank for putting the Ottawa shooter out of our misery.  We also still have PM Stephen Harper to thank for calling it the Islamist terrorism that it is.  There seems to be some opportunistic bill jamming-through, but I’ll leave that out of this.

Can we expect more of this sort of thing?  I would say “yes”, and it’s good that a lone-wolf (who could easily have done much more damage) was the first attack, to shake up security arrangements.  The vehicular attack on Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent earlier that week is the sort of thing you can’t really prepare for, except by paying more attention to your surroundings. I stayed away from this until the dust settled a bit, and now I have some observations.

Firstly, more preventative detention of people who express an interest in “jihad” is in order.  It’s all very nice to make lists of potential bad apples, but when they start killing people that practice is obviously deficient.  You “like” Islamic State on Facebook?  Go to jail for 10+ years for terrorism/sedition.  Yes, sure it might “drive them underground” (too many quotes in this paragraph already) but if you’re not going to stop them when they are operating out in the open that hardly makes a difference. 

Secondly, our security needs some tweaking but mostly on the enforcement side.  Canada is not completely clueless (at the pointy end at least) about the threats we face, but there must be political will to do something about it, and I must say from a domestic political standpoint, the current party/leader combination is the only one which looks like it might have the stones for that.   The Guards at Buckingham Palace carry loaded weapons and there has been talk of arming our sentries, but that won’t happen here due to jurisdictional issues. I have thought about this a bit over that last several days, and on balance it’s better it stays that way provided that the local police will guard them, as is happening now. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Now we know.  If I were running things I would give the sentries a loaded mag so that they are not helpless, but still leave the cops as the first line of response.

Thirdly, media and public reactions.  This implies no conspiracy, but I am going to very cynically say that these attacks are timed very well for the Canadian Armed Forces.  The years in Afghanistan are behind us and the military was largely losing relevance to the public, dissipating the high regard in which they were held.  Defence funding was slashed back to levels not seen since the “peace dividend” Decade of Darkness of the 1990s and it was obvious that even the supposedly CAF-friendly Conservative government had lost sight of the necessity to maintain what you have.  The Canadian public has rallied around Cpl Cirillo in particular, (WO Vincents’s murder was far less telegenic) and two attacks in short order have brought the home-grown jihadi problem into focus a bit more.  I have no illusions that forceful direct action will result from this, but it’s better than nothing.

Media response was well handled overall, but I feel that the hand-wringing about 22 October being “the day that changed everything in Ottawa” was overdone.  That day was in fact September 11^th 2001, and it changed everywhere else in the Western world that day too; a sense of perspective is in order here.  It’s now the week after and things are going back to modified normal just as they should be.  It’s time to stop reacting and start acting against the threats within our borders.  If these fucks want to go to Syria to get killed, let them go and cancel their passports as soon as they clear a European airport.  Pressure on them will push some in that direction, and if they don’t leave they go to jail.  I don’t give a shit if you were born here or not; if Canada isn’t good enough for you get out and don’t come back.

If it squawks like a duck, and kills like a duck…

First of all, my condolences go out to the family of the Canadian Armed Forces member killed yesterday, as do my hopes for the speedy recovery of the one who was injured.  

On Monday 20 October 2014 (yesterday as I write this) two CAF members were intentionally stuck by a car in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu QC, home to a military training facility.  One, as mentioned above, has now died of wounds suffered in this attack.  The driver then sped off, but fortunately there was a police cruiser on the scene (how stupid was this guy?) which gave chase.  After the offender (suspect my ass) rolled his car into a ditch he (apparently) came out with a knife and (fact) was shot dead by police. 

Good riddance to bad rubbish I say, but the most significant part of this whole affair was how the Canadian government handled it.  Immediately after the events, the Prime Minister (himself) called this a probable terrorist attack.  Turns out he wasn’t pulling it out of his ass, as he had been briefed by our National Security organizations about the perp’s background. This guy was a local convert, and had been gobbing off on Facebook or whatever about “going on jihad”.  Since Daesh put out their fatwa on everyone in the Western world, this guy must have felt he was doing his bit.   

It will be interesting to see how the CAF handles this, as I would argue that the member was killed in action.  The Americans by contrast bent themselves into pretzels to call Nidal Hassan’s jihadi killing spree at Fort Hood in 2009 “workplace violence” despite him yelling “Allah Akbar” when he started it.  This refusal to face and admit reality is a leadership failure. 

There will be more of this sort of thing, and in many cases (like this one) they will be essentially unpreventable since we don’t live in a police state.  I will accept that risk, and it’s made easier knowing that PM Harper, whatever his other faults, “gets it” and won’t pretend the problem away.  So, thumbs up to the police officer who settled this guy’s hash, and to our PM for not soft-pedalling the event or the general threat.  

Singularity-minded

What is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain is that there are far more people in this world than any plausibly functional model of our “economy” has a use for.  There are only so many “McJobs” and robots, as the linked article re-hashes, will take most of those. 

The question from there is what to do about that.  I do try in these posts to propose solutions, not merely rail against the myriad of “wrong” in the world, but this one poses a problem to even come up with something which would work, regardless of how unlikely it is to be implemented due to standard human failing and venality.  Here we go anyway.

The population problem is the biggest one.  Back when everything we ate came from family farms and c.80% of the population was occupied doing this, there were c. 1 billion people on Earth.  Now (in developed countries) significantly less than 10%  of the population is engaged in producing our food.

This doesn’t cover all “productive” forms of work, but it does bring the productivity gains of modern technology and organization into focus.  During the early stages of the Industrial Revolution everything was done by hand in a very inefficient but manpower-intensive fashion, resulting in rural depopulation as people rushed to the factories for work.  As time went on and clever people designed labour-saving machines to do unskilled work, those least talented were thrown out of work.  This process began in the 18^th Century and continues today.  Remember that women weren’t part of the workforce at that time (although children were); now we have twice as many people we need to find jobs for.

This frames the problem, but the only two solutions I see popping out of this are:

·         Remove the surplus population, or;

·         Smash our technological base and get us all back making buggy whips or subsistence farming.

It is to be noted that the second option will bring about the first, but without the productivity to make things work; in other words, complete civilizational breakdown.

Nature may soon do something about there being so many of us; Ebola is making its’ way out of Africa for the first time.  The ability of mass international rapid transit to vector diseases worldwide first really got attention during the SARS breakout in 2003, and that had nothing like Ebola’s death rate, albeit it spread even more easily.  Ebola comes in different variants with differing lethality, symptoms and incubation periods so we’ll be dealing with this for a while.  Just imagine if SARS came back too…

Getting back on track, we are in what I’ll call a “luxury-scarcity period”.  It is conceivable to feed everyone, and with very local and temporary exceptions this happens.  If you live in a warm climate (Africa, for example) that is most of what you need to survive; good thing too, given the limited to non-existent social and community housing expenditure there. While there are many people in Western societies who struggle to make ends meet, the number of actually homeless are statistically barely significant and are mostly people with serious mental problems who are essentially un-employable. 

The real question if things don’t completely collapse is: what do we do with the jobless?  I do not believe that there is any “self-evident right’ to anything produced by someone else, although many disagree.  My test of these ideals is how much effort it takes to achieve these “natural” rights.  In this case, it takes the coercive power of a government to make people pay taxes, and it has been always thus.  Breathing is about the only thing that I’d call free, everything else requires somebody to do some work.

“Tax the rich” comes out a lot, usually from people who can’t count past 100 but occasionally from hypocrites like Warren Buffet.  That will not work for the fairly obvious reasons that taxing something makes less of it, and that there isn’t that much money held by “the 1%” compared to what a country spends in a year.   Next year that money won’t be there as the (formerly) rich are confiscated from and those smart enough to see it coming (most of them or they wouldn’t be rich in the first place) will relocate.

There goes the Marxist-Anarchist solution, what next?  Expansion of the current welfare state would seem to be out as that “Scandinavian” model has proven itself unsustainable in the last 20 years.  Shorter work week?  The thing that this glosses over is that there is only so much money in a business to pay people.  If there are 40 person-hours per position and you cut that into 2 chunks, each of them will only be getting paid for 20 hours. 

What all of these ideas have in common is a lowering of living standards. Less money means less stuff, full-stop.  I’ve worked part-time, and it’s great for students or stay-at-home parents who want to generate some more household income while the kids are in school. It was a a time in my life when I had no responsibilities beyond myself and I most certainly could not have supported a familiy on that income. Time is traded for money in pretty-much any type of transaction you can name; the value of that time is highly variable, but however you slice it, ΔTime = Δ$.

Any kind of post-scarcity geek (or other) utopia is based on cheap and abundant energy.  With enough cheap (clean) energy you can do almost anything you want, and paying the heat and light bills of non-productive members of society becomes plausible then..  I am partial to the Culture books of Ian M. Banks as far as post-scarcity sci-fi is concerned, but that construct only works because nearly omniscient AIs are running everything.  The suspension of my disbelief for that is far less of a strain than to assume that people with no profit motive (Star Trek Next Gen) could create and sustain such a thing.

In case you somehow missed it, I am a small-r realist, and I do NOT believe in the perfectibility of Man.  “Pretend to pay them, they pretend to work” didn’t work for Communism so any version of confiscatory taxes intended to level the playing field will have a similar effect.  It takes money (or equivalent) to get stuff done, so I remain at a loss as to how to deal with computers taking our jobs.  It happened to me once already, but the consolations were another job and the fact that the program did a far worse job than I had.  These consolations will be in increasingly short supply.

The irony is that developed countries are just that, developed, and their decreasing birthrates are in step with increases in productivity with Japan leading the way in both.  These countries will not remain prosperous if they have to take in millions of unemployable (because there are no jobs) immigrants (Japan again, but an exception to this).  That is another issue, and panicky diseased epidemic migrants could scupper us all even before the robots do. 

Katie, bar the door.

There has been so much happening and all of it at a fair rate of change that I have had a hard time coming up with a coherent idea for a post here, but I’ll take a stab at it today.
Right now Da’esh is on the cusp of taking Kobani (spelling varies), a Kurdish village on the border with Turkey. Turkey has voted to take military action against Da’esh, bur are sitting on the border watching Da’esh overrun the town while preventing Kurds on their side of the border from getting through with reinforcements and resupply.

Turkey of course has a long violent history with the Kurds, but by their present actions they are ensuring that this continues. There are no simple solutions in that (and many other) part of the world, but if you want to move forward you have to change. Keeping the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” even under these circumstances is a sign of almost pathological hatred, and no good will come of it.
What I would do in Erdrogan’s place is push Da’esh out of a sizable chunk of the area contiguous with Iraqi Kurdistan and encourage as many Kurds as possible to move into it. This would give the Kurds what they want, rid Turkey of its’ more restive Kurdish population (non-violently) and put a stick in Assad’s spokes which Turkey is anxious to do. Looks win-win to me, certainly in relation to what they’re doing now.

The last seismic shift in boundaries in the region was WW1, this is the next one. There is no more “Syria” nor for that matter really any “Iraq”. The resulting vacuum (from failed revolution in the former and failed nation-building in the latter) will be filled by something, as Da’esh is doing right now. The one place where nation-building has a chance (few sure-things in this life) is with a self-identifying group, and the Kurds are one such. This sort of chaos doesn't have to benefit only the bad apples, but force will be required and eggs will be cracked for any such omelette. Mixed food metaphors, but you get the idea. I don’t see a good outcome to this as the will to take the action required is lacking in those who have the power and resources to make it happen.

Speaking of political will, we also have Ebola to deal with. Liberia is on the verge of total collapse, although with its’ recent history that was never too far off at the best of times. These local tragedies would be of scant concern for any other than humanitarian reasons were it not for a confluence of two features of modern life: air travel and Political Correctness.

It is abundantly clear that this is a deadly disease with a c. 40% mortality rate even if you get proper care, worse if you don’t. It’s no SARS in terms of transmission, but in the later stages of incubation all body fluids are vectors, and with fever, nausea and diarrhoea the main symptoms, there are many opportunities if you aren’t quarantined.

This is precisely what needs to be done: quarantine the region. That will be impossible to 100% enforce of course, but without an attempt it will spread everywhere. It has shown up so far in the USA, Spain and now Macedonia, and that’s just what I can remember with certainty right now. Screening measures are going into place but are easily spoofed by people taking standard anti-inflammatory meds or by people lying about their point of origin.

Some airlines have stopped going to these countries, but unless all of them do it won’t stop it. This is frightening enough, but it gets worse. Think panicked mass migration. "Katie, bar the door" indeed, but you won’t like what it would entail to do so. Positive enforcement of borders while ensuring zero entry of desperate and possibly sick people cannot end well and WOULD necessitate lethal force. The only thing which might dissuade someone facing something like Ebola from going where they think they’ll get better medical care is them knowing that they’ll be killed if they try it. What (Western) politician is willing to make THAT call?

Yeah, we’re screwed, but no change there. I may be laying in more emergency food supplies, but if I’m going to do so I’d best do it soon. Likely it won’t come to that here, but even if not I’d best lay in some ammo in case these Da’esh fanboys try to take a crack at us in our “bedrooms”.

Beware the Ennui of the Legions

As the tide of war rises again in the Middle East, the military’s rank and file are mostly opposed to expanding the new mission in Iraq and Syria to include sending a large number of U.S. ground troops into combat, according to a Military Times survey of active-duty members.
On the surface, troops appear to support President Obama’s repeated vows not to let the U.S. military get “dragged into another ground war” in Iraq. Yet at the same time, the views of many service members are shaped by a deep ambivalence about this commander in chief and questions about his ability to lead the nation through a major war, according to the survey and interviews.
The reader survey asked more than 2,200 active-duty troops this question: “In your opinion, do you think the U.S. military should send a substantial number of combat troops to Iraq to support the Iraqi security forces?” Slightly more than 70 percent responded: “No.”
“It’s their country, it’s their business. I don’t think major ‘boots on the ground’ is the right answer,” said one Army infantry officer and prior-enlisted soldier who deployed to Iraq three times. He responded to the survey and an interview request but, like several other service members in this story, asked not to be named because he is not authorized to discuss high-level military policy.

Of course soldiers (usually) go where they're told to go, but when a large majority of veteran combat troops don't want to do something it's worth looking closely at what you have planned and why.

Obama has authorized more action (e.g. airstrikes) but still has nothing approximating a realistic plan. Hitting the oil refineries was part of a plan/strategy, but you will never manage to kill all of the jihadis so you'd better have an end-state in mind.

I have one of course, but it involves carving out enclaves and like-minded people who will defend themselves, and then giving them the means to do so themselves.

A Kurdish/Christian/Yazidi/Assyrian/etc. enclave in northern Iraq and NE Syria is do-able and a solid and largely self-supporting nucleus is in place, so there's where I'd start. This needs to be consolidated and expanded to its' natural limits i.e. what can be held with the consent of the population.

This is NOT empire building, it's closer to ethnic self-determination with the wrinkle that the "ethnicity" in common is being an oppressed minority. Underdogs unite! These are the people we should be protecting, and although no-one's perfect they are the best of the neighborhood as far as we're concerned.

I've seen some other commentary about the current activity uniting the previously estranged jihadi factions against us, and to that I give a resounding "so what?" and not in the determine-all-likely-outcomes sense. If they get upset with us, well, they already want us to convert or die, so BFD. Keeping them divided is useful tactically but not a big-picture problem since it doesn't change the net effect. Besides, radical Islam (or anything else) is a race to the bottom as they fractionate into more-and-more volatile groups, Daesh being the ne plus ultra of violent misanthropy at present.

So, in bullet points, the broad strokes of what I would do if given control of the coalition a la Ferdianand Foch during the Germans' last throw of the dice in March 1918:

• Bring in two US Heavy brigades (of volunteers), one each for Iraq and Syria, coordinate these with the Peshmerga etc. in each Kurdish area
• Reach out to all non-Salafist elements in the contiguous or nearly-contiguous areas;
• Develop a plan for how much territory needs to be secured to make a self-sufficient state, and;
• As soon as this end-state is achieved, all non-local troops are shifted home.

No notice is to be taken of the internal Iraq/Syria border when making these plans. Iran can be told to stuff it as can Assad, but I'd leave it to the locals to replace him if they can. Border establishing yes, but NO MORE NATION BUILDING.

Support your friends, thwart (or worse) your enemies, and keep the troops motivated. Professional soldiers like to fight, at least enough to say they've done so, and a quick decisive gloves-off war is just what most of them are looking for. "In-and-out clever" is how to do it, and doing it right will help a lot of people. Not least of all, your soldiers who are relying on their government to not put them in harm's way without a damned good reason.

   

We'll hold 'em, you hit 'em

I've said for some time that the Saudis should be directly involved in the mess they helped create with Daesh in Syria/Iraq, and their planes are a good start. So far there has been no official commitment to sending the Royal Saudi Army in to get dirty, but it's apparently not completely off the table. They certainly have the resources to make an impact regionally, and I imagine getting some more combat experience for their troops would be a plan also.

The concern comes from various quarters about the incursion of Saudi troops to hit Daesh and Assad (as they would want to) on the basis of Iran and the Shia in general getting bent out of shape. If there was in fact some June 1914-syle delicate balance of power in the region this would have some merit, but as things stand the Saudis don't give a flying about Iran as long as America has the House of Saud's back, nor are "we" too fussed about keeping Tehran happy.

The feared Sunni-Shia "civil war" is already happening so the Saudis doing the dirty work of removing Assad would cut the Gordian knot of disturbing the power balance which most seem to fear messing with. Reports also have airstrikes on al-Nusra, another slightly-less bloodthirsty Salafist outfit and no more a friend to us than Daesh is.

There is always the problem of the power vacuum, and hitting all of the players might seem a good idea. The only problem I see with hitting Assad is that he represents the only remaining protection (besides the Kurdish areas) for religious minorities in Syria. The Alawi sect that the Assads hail from is adjudged heretical by "proper" Muslims and they won't last a week if the Baath party goes down completely, likewise the remaining Christians and garden-variety Shia.

In the meantime the squeeze is being put on the money-making and administrative soft underbelly of Daesh, which has them scrambling to adjust. Strikes on Daesh forces besieging Kurdish etc. villages in Syria have taken some pressure off, and a further degrading of the materiel Daesh scored from the Iraqi and Syrian armies will degrade their advantage. The tanks, APCs and artillery they took from Mosul are hard to hide and useless to you if you do manage it. That is a lesson the Germans on the Normandy front in WW2 learned the hard way, and that was without smart bombs.

A random though along that track; A-10s have been deployed to theatre, but what is ideal for killing vehicles and even easier to base are AH-64D (or better) Apaches, especially "Longbow" ones. Base a few of those close behind the friendly lines and you'll be able to break up any vehicular attack in minutes.

That's tactics, but also public relations. Already the US is making some more friends as it saves them from Daesh, and confidence that the lines will hold will take the humanitarian pressure off as people stay put or return to their homes. Putting hardware where the locals can see it, making them feel like it's "theirs" has an intangible but very real morale effect.

I'm not holding my breath to see Saudi M1A2s sweeping to Damascus, but you never know. Latest I've heard of the Iraqi Army is that it's as useless as it was in Mosul so SOMEBODY has to pick up the slack.

What would Nixon do?

Obama has come out and said that the USA will go after Daesh (formerly ISIL; this name pisses them off so I'll use it) on either side of the now nominal Iraq/Syria border. That this would ever have been an issue would be mind-boggling if I actually had any faith in those in power displaying any kind of common sense, but alas it was expected.

As the US and allied Arab states launch air strikes on Islamic State (IS) positions in Syria and Iraq, questions arise as to the basis of such military action according to international law.

The legal evaluation differs where operations against IS in Iraq on the one hand and in Syria on the other are concerned.

No questions in my mind. A border is an arbitrary line on a map which only means something if it's enforced. In this context "enforced" means one state controls the actions of parties within their boundaries to the extent that they don't affect parties outside those boundaries. The rump Syrian state doesn't control most of the country at this point, and Daesh roams at will accross the borders Sykes and Picot drew up in the aftermath of the Ottoman empire's collapse in 1918.

Whether you choose to treat Daesh as a rogue state or transnational terrorist group (Iran for example fits both models), if you want to defeat them you have to defeat ALL of them. First rule of fighting any insurgency, or anyone for that matter, is don't leave them a sanctuary. Taking Vietnam as an example, the political constraints against hitting NVA and Viet Cong bases in Cambodia and Laos hobbled the American military. It was only when Nixon took the gloves off in 1970 that these sanctuaries were attacked and disrupted. Even Nixon only gave North Vietnam a taste of what the US could do if it wanted to (even leaving nukes out of the equation), but it was enough to bring the Communists to the bargaining table.

It's an imperfect comparison of course, but the essential lesson of ignoring borders if people are hiding behind them to kill you remains. This brings me back to Nixon.

Looking at it as objectively as I can, I don't think that Nixon was the terrible president he is made out to be. His stepped up attacks on North Vietnam were long overdue, and were designed to get the US out of the war, preferably by winning it. Nixon also thawed things out with China, and as it was said at the time, he was (probably) the only US leader who could do that.

That opinion wasn't the result of Nixon being a nice guy, it was because he had impeccable credentials as an anti-communist, and being ready to smash them if need be is the way you get a reputation like that. It was in fact a conscious "policy" decision, the "madman theory". Putin is running a variant of this right now, and you'll notice that we are reacting to him.

Whether you want to talk about credibility, deterrence, initiative, momentum, the OpFor has most of that and Obama (by extension the USA and the "West") none. That "red lines” fiasco in Syria over chemical weapons (where, again, Putin ate Obama's lunch) was the last straw for any anyone to take Obama seriously, and even his response to this Daesh situation right now is halting, half-assed and indecisive.

Madman theory only really works against parties who have something to lose and is essentially deterrence. Nuking Raqqa (in Syria, self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State) right now would set the tone and establish your "street cred" as truly balls-to-the-wall crazy, but it would cause a lot of other problems. Short of that, I hear that Arab airforces are involved in hiting Daesh now, and have already (Egypt and UAE) been hitting Salafists in Libya. The weak link in all of this is ground troops.

And now this:

Turkey is bracing itself for an unprecedented refugee crisis after as many as 200,000 ethnic Kurds fled across the frontier from Syria in just two days to escape a fresh advance by Islamist extremists.

The influx came after the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) captured dozens of Kurdish villages in northern Syria and threatened the border city of Kobane, which was left deserted after most of its inhabitants evacuated in panic.

I've said it before and I'll say it again here: the only answer to this situation is to push back, secure areas of "friendly" populations while arming the able-bodied among them to defend themselves. This is what's sort-of happening in Iraqi Kurdistan, and it's time for Turkey to get off the fence and start throwing their weight around. I understand that there are Kurdish "issues' in Turkey, but Daesh is a bigger problem which will come for Turkey (and Jordan, and Lebanon, etc.) if they are not smashed into the ground. You'll never get them all, but individual wasps only hurt, while a swarm can kill.

I don't know who the USA needs in charge to handle this effectively, but we've got what we've got so fingers crossed that they take some sensible (and sufficiently kinetic) action.

 

There's a 'nac for that

Environment Canada this spring predicted a really hot summer. Living in the area predicted to be affected by this, I can say that they were right out to lunch, it being cool and wet, but mostly cool. They have now predicted a mild winter; I am sceptical to say the least. The Farmer's Almanac has come out with this prediction, which on past performance and personal observation I am more inclined to believe:

“It’s going to be colder, it’s going to be snowier … it’s not pretty.”

According to the almanac, central Canada, in particular, is expected to experience winter’s nasty bite.

“From Calgary to Quebec, we’re going to be up to our neck,” Burnett said.

One of the few exceptions will be southwestern Ontario, which will be cold, but with below-normal snowfall.

Burnett said forecasts show that while Toronto and the surrounding region will experience a deep-freeze, it’s going to be drier this winter, with “fluffier snow.”

Atlantic Canada, meanwhile, is set for a milder, but wet winter season, according to the almanac.

‘Baby lamb’ of summers next year

It may seem far in the future, but warmer temperatures will return – eventually.

Summer in Canada is expected to be milder and wet, with hotter and drier temperatures concentrated in Western Canada.

“Nothing really spectacular in the summer,” Burnett said

 

I don't of course know their exact method of generating these, but I do know that sunspot activity plays a significant part. Let's take a look at things we know to be true:

• We had a long, cold winter last year with the ice not melting completely on Lake Superior well into June
• During that winter, solar activity was at "the most anemic in 100 years,"

The sun is what keeps us alive, but there is a narrow range of variability in which we will be able to survive, and an even slimmer one in which we will thrive. Cold long winters mean a lot of things, foremost is shorter growing seasons, but they are also the way that ice ages start. The current "Climate Change" shibboleth permeates government agencies and the media, even though it's increasingly obvious to the impartial observer that they have no idea what they are talking about. This I feel explains the unsubstantiated wishful thinking which produces a relentless series of erroneous predictions.

Yes' I'm contrasting this with the Old Farmer's Almanac, another set of predictions, but the Almanac has a much better success rate than any of the expensive computer climate models the Climate Change crowd keep relying on. Really though, as soon as it changed from Global Warming (which we could all understand) to Climate Change, it ceased to have any linkage to what it was all about (CO2) in the first place.

If CO2 has the impact Al Gore etc. claimed, the constant upward march of the CO2 concentration over the years would have been linked to an increase in global temperatures as less of the sun's energy escaped back to space. That has not happened, nor have all of the icecaps and glaciers melted away with attendant catastrophic (to our costal cities) rise in sea level. What has happened is that data and media have been manipulated to make it look like at least some of that has happened, but it simply has not been getting appreciably (if at all) warmer out here in the real world.

So what? Forced to make a choice, I'll put my money on the Almanac's model, since it makes sense and because they don't have an agenda (that I can see or think of). In the end we'll see what we get and the computers have no hope of keeping up with reality. Be ready to bundle up, and get that snow blower tuned. I won't cry if I'm wrong on this one, but I'll be prepared.

District 9 by Osmosis

I've had a hard time writing about immigration policy. It's not because I don't have opinions on it (you should all be that lucky) but more because I see a reasonable policy as a forlorn hope.

That however will not stop me, any more than it stops me on all of my other Quixotic railing against stupidity and ignorance. Here is, imo, the crux of the problem for Western countries and the proximate cause of our eventual disappearance.

Bibi speaks no English and has been working at a small Saskatoon restaurant for the last six months. Her boss and friend, Sahana Yeasmin, told CTV that Bibi’s "situation back home is very bad."

Amnesty International is also urging the Canadian government to reconsider the deportation, saying the work of the UN body should be completed before the Canadian government makes any final decisions.

"There’s no way that Canada would want to be responsible for returning a woman back to a country where her rights could be violated," Gloria Nafziger, an Amnesty International refugee co-ordinator, told CTV.

 Emphasis mine. I do not dispute that Pakistan is a horrible place to live if you're a woman, and I can say the same thing for a lot of other places in the world. The problem is, if being a a woman means that your rights could be violated in Pakistan, by this logic we should accept all c. 90 million Pakistani women to protect them from this fate.

Don't be ridiculous, you say? That is the logical extension of this thinking, and it would take a lot less than that to destroy Canada as Canada. We can help some people, but we need to do that in such a way that they help us too. The harsh market truth is that a woman in her 60s with no money, no skills and who doesn't even speak one of our official languages is a liability to Canada, not an asset.

This is the sort of thinking which keeps the wheels turning and the lights on; mushy bleeding-heart talk about trampled "rights" in places we can't control does not help Canada (or the UK, France, Italy, Australia, the USA, etc. ) retain its' character as a place people would want to live in preference to their 3rd-World shithole.

You see what happens when I start in on this stuff? Obnoxious but unassailable truth is what happens. Sure you can tell me I'm a big meanie or a racist or whatever the fuck else you want to tar me with, but WE CAN'T TAKE EVERYBODY WHO WANTS TO COME HERE. I wish I could find the link to it again, but I saw an excellent lecture on immigration which involved jars full of marbles representing the various populations of the world. It very graphically represented what would happen if we were to open the borders, and that if we do so we'll all be living in Nairobi, and most of us not in the nice parts.

"We" are vastly outnumbered, and we should act like it, or there won't be a "we" left. Be very clear that this isn't some "White Power" shtick, I'm talking about culture, which can be adopted. Multiculturalism has failed. It works, for a while, as part of an empire, but a functioning democracy is a delicate flower which can be crowded out by weeds. Iffy analogy, but I think you get the point.

Going back to Nigeria again, contrast the governance of that country with that of Canada. It's a good comparison, as both have rich resource-based economies and educated, English-speaking ruling classes. Canada has internal divisions, but not the sort who raid each others' villages; the same cannot be said for the diverse parties in Nigeria. Nigeria is not poor, and Nigerians are no stupider on an individual basis than Canadians are (I'll steer clear of "Race IQ" stuff) so I would have to say the difference between their volatile and ineffective governance and ours is mostly a cultural one.

Now, if you like the way they do things, good for you. I don't, and I suspect the majority of people who grew up in (or gravitated to) the Western system would like to keep living in it. That means we can take some immigrants from wherever, but in digestible increments, and not just anyone. Sticking to this sort of policy is not for the meek, but if you like how things are where you are, it must be done so that the fortunate and productive few who we do take in have a nice place to live.

Kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will collapse.

(It will be noted that the phrase I have used for the title didn't work out too well for the guy who originally said it, but I have more confidence in my prescriptions here.  We do this time know exactly who and what we're fighting.)

As the USA gears up at a glacial pace to do something about ISIL, Boko Haram has taken inspiration from ISIL's success of late and declared a caliphate of their own in northern Nigeria. This at first glance is alarming, (and certainly it is at the pointy end) but a closer examination of the circumstances of each shows much vulnerability for each group.

The irony of their success is that they have by acquiring property and infrastructure tied themselves down and made them easier to find and kill. Looking at the origin of these two caliphates, the essential ingredients in the constitution (making of, not document) of each is instability, diversity and incompetence.

Instability pretty much speaks for itself, as power of some sort will always fill a vacuum. Diversity was a factor as they both play on differences, mostly in religion to sow discord and divide to conquer. Incompetence is related to instability, but a competent military force can hold things together against insurgents even against a background of political instability, NATO forces in Afghanistan and French forces in Mali as recent examples.

Of possible options to salvage Nigeria, the only plausible one I see right now is a military coup. Ideal would be some sort of replacement of the current corrupt government with something else, but that's called colonialism and it's apparently a bad idea. The Nigerian Army has been starved for resources by a government (not unrealistically) afraid of letting it get too powerful. The irony of an armed takeover of much of a country which weakens its' army to prevent a military coup is not lost on me, but they may not be seeing it in that light right now.

So, the real challenge with either of these situations is not crippling the respective caliphates; that is tactically dangerous for the operators and troops, but we know how to break things. The trap is the nation-building that was tried in Afghanistan and Iraq. Northern Iraq gives us the Kurds, who are this iteration's "Northern Alliance" and if we stay in long enough to remove the existential threat to them we'll have done enough, barring some residual SOF presence to help them with flare-ups.

Nigeria is another matter. They have all of the resources (natural, financial and human) to sort this themselves so I don't see a pressing need to put our guys on the line there. It occurs to me that this is an ideal situation for mercenaries. As stated, the Nigerians have a problem which requires a military solution, but are loathe to give the military the resources necessary, thus threatening the state. Executive Outcomes isn't around anymore, but I'm sure there's someone(s) else to fill that role for the government in Abuja if the latter are willing to pay.

By Christmas the Islamic State will be a thing of the past [update 14 Oct 14: maybe not], but of course the residue will remain troublesome. Boko Haram is more complex for the simple reason that less influential (powerful) parties care enough to get involved, leaving out the attitude of the Nigerian government and Armed Forces to foreigners doing the dirty work in their country. Regardless, three weeks of professional military operations with air support and intel could bring that caliphate crashing down too. It's just a question of "who" and "when".

Franklin ship found

After all this time I thought they'd never find either the Erebus or the Terror, but I'm happy to have been proved wrong.  This for a great change is the latest of breaking-news and not what you'll usually see here, but I wanted to mark it.

http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/lost-franklin-expedition-ship-found-in-the-arctic

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says one of Canada's greatest mysteries now has been solved, with the discovery of one of the lost ships from Sir John Franklin's doomed Arctic expedition.

"This is a great historic event," Harper said.

"For more than a century this has been a great Canadian story.… It's been the subject of scientists and historians and writers and singers. And so I think we have a really important day in mapping together the history of our country," the prime minister said.

At this point, the searchers aren't sure if they've found HMS Erebus or HMS Terror. But sonar images from the waters of Victoria Strait, just off King William Island, clearly show wreckage of a ship on the ocean floor.

The wreckage was found on Sept. 7 using a remotely operated underwater vehicle recently acquired by Parks Canada. When Harper revealed the team's success at Parks Canada's laboratories in Ottawa Tuesday, the room burst into applause and hollering.

 This is a big deal, as the search for the lost Franklin expedition of 1845 (his third expedition, his first very nearly as calamitous his last) greatly exercised the imagination of Victorian Britain and beyond.  The original search was looking for survivors and obviously found none, but did end up doing a very thorough job of charting the Arctic.  This in turn is the basis for Canada's (as the successor to British North America) claim to what we call our northernmost territory today. Anyway, I will be watching this for whatever info comes from this discovery.  It's not every day that I'm actually excited about something in the news, but you can mark this one down.

Symptoms of the Diseased Body Politic

With the Global Whack-a-Mole on Terror sputtering along again in Iraq, the issue of "foreign fighters” is at the fore once more. The UK has announced an intention to do something half-assed about non-citizen passport holders who go off on jihad. While some may take this as "finally someone's doing something", I personally see it as a sign of the rot and weakness which will be the end of Western Civilization.

Western Civilization has had a rough go for sure and is far from perfect, but it has produced most of what makes modern life comfortable and reasonably long. Scientific Method, germ theory of disease, immunization and advances in horticulture and chemistry have all come from "us", immeasurably improving lives the world over and the only things which make our current population remotely sustainable. This doesn't even include the advances in materials sciences and computers which keep everything moving.

It's not about colour or race, it's about culture. Anybody can be "western" if they want to, and there was a time when it was the thing to aspire to. Two World Wars accelerated the collapse of the British Empire as well as that of the French, but not before both had left their modernizing and linguistic impressions across the globe. The ideas were loose but so were some others, specifically Communism and Islamism. It could of course be argued that Communism is a Western development, but despite its' geographical origin it fails the "keep moving forward" test. There was a time when that was about unrestrained development, but it moved past that (for most people) to be about doing things better than before, not just bigger.

That still exists, but it is increasingly opposed by limiting philosophies. Foremost in my estimation is the "Climate Change" lobby. If you actually look at who is doing what you'll notice two distinct groups. First are the profiteers, the ones pushing carbon trading scams schemes, the Solyndras and wind farm subsidy-seekers, and of course the "scientists" who have sold out for the grants. They are bad and dangerous, but their motivations are venal and easily understood. The real menace are the Luddite (watermelon) Greens.

EVERY proposal to limit greenhouse gases (they could start, simply by ceasing to breathe) would destroy advanced technological societies by wrecking their economies. The partial success they've had in North America has driven up electricity rates and decreased reliability of supply, a mere shadow of what they would like to do. See the UK for the next step from where we are.

All of this is to say that the seeds of the downfall of Western Civilization are sown from within, and we are proving ourselves "unfit" in the evolutionary biological sense by the death-wish we have as a society. Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory are the key tools to take us down from within. When Moral Relativism is your guiding philosophy the outcome seems to be that everything else is judged superior to your own culture.

I like Rule of Law and having a decent chance of surviving walking the streets at night; it may surprise you but the two things are not actually related. They are in fact a historically exceptionally (vanishingly) rare combination even in the imperfect form we find them today in our First World countries. The harsh truth is that if you hate your heritage so much that you'd deluge your country with "Diversity" the basic institutions created in that First World will be replaced by the Third World which you have imported. Think of India, but where it's too cold to live in a shack, but that's the best case going down that road.

Which brings us back to the intro paragraph. Thousands of Saudis flocking to al Qaeda and now ISIS is no surprise. What is more of surprise on the face of it is recent Muslim converts of European extraction doing the same. Scratch the surface a bit and it starts to make sense. If you think of these Salafist groups as both "a Cause" and as gangs, you will see the appeal to overlapping personality types.

The simplest type is the adventurer. Young men have been from time immemorial headed out on raids and general mayhem, and these find expression in gangs, pirates, drug cartels, etc. I'm sure you would find that many in ISIS' current ranks aren't "true believers" but more opportunistic criminals and psychopaths with a gloss of religion to make it look good to the group. The next group need to belong to something, and jihad is the most dynamic something going today. A sub-set of them are the types who hate Western society as decadent and overly permissive and find the intolerance and rigidity of Wahhabi-style Islam the perfect antidote.

If the Arabs hate us, big deal, we've been fighting them since Roman times at least. When our own people turn against us to join them we really need to think about root causes. The simplest way to look at this is as osmosis or as Nature abhorring a vacuum.

Our confidence in the way we do things has declined, and with it our confidence and assertiveness as a culture. People in most parts of the world like to be on the winning side, and right now that doesn't look like us. We need something to believe in, but the common culture we once had (even between British and French in Canada it wasn't fundamentally different) has been systematically dismantled and blackballed as the worst thing ever.

There's your vacuum. Something needs to take the place of the Iliad and Odyssey, Horatius at the Bridge, Charles Martel, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Vimy Ridge, the flag raising on Iwo Jima, etc. If you don't have passing familiarity with at least 5 of the above, well, you're not alone these days.

The past is treacherous territory, but at some point you have to choose something to believe in. It could be where you come from (dangerous to outsiders) religion (ditto) or whatever else, but if you don't stake out something as the Line Which Shall Not Be Crossed you'll have no anchor and no standards for how things should be. We can do better than the old days, but we need something for people of diverse backgrounds to rally to. The current Canadian government is bucking the trend and trying to bring our history back, but they won't last forever. As long as we can't give our people something worth dying for, radical Islam will be ready to fill that void.