This article was first published in The eXile on November 5, 2007

FRESNO, CA — By the time you finish this column you will be able to destroy huge buildings, kill hundreds of people in a few minutes, and strike terror into your enemies. And all you need is stuff that I guarantee you already have around the house.

Sound too good to be true? Well, hold on to your hard-ons, because there’s more! This weapon is so impossible to trace that well-trained terrorists all over the world use it to clean up evidence after an operation.

When you realize its potential, you’ll wonder why more irregular armies aren’t using it already. If you’re me, you’ll wonder why you haven’t done it yourself.

You’ve probably figured out what I’m talking about by now. It’s our oldest weapon: fire.

I got the idea watching Malibu burn. Oh, man, that was the best day off I’ve had in years. Regular porn doesn’t do much for me, but those clips of “heartbroken house owners” sobbing—man, I was just about creaming in my expand-o-waist black slacks. And talk about guilt-free porn! There’s no downside to watching movie producers’ mansions turn into toxic smoke. Don’t tell me I’m the only Inland Californian who laughed his head off at those follow-up pictures of the Prez hugging teary-eyed billionaires. They all looked like my bank manager. I can’t think of anybody whose houses I’d like to see burned up more, and I wouldn’t mind if their precious purse dogs happened to get forgotten in the big BMW bug-out once the flames made it past those “This Property Protected by….oooh owww hot!” signs. Those properties were protected by zip, nada, a whole lotta nuthin’. You can’t scare a fire, you can’t shoot it. The Mongols and Wehrmacht combined would have to run from a good ol’ SoCal brushfire. That’s a weapon, baby.

And there’s Bush streaking cross-continent on Air Force One to hug the “victims,” with his aides hissing into the ear unit: “Psst! Do ‘compassion’! Squirt some tears, dammit!”

Some websites are already saying what went through my head the second I saw those flames: somebody got smart and stopped playing with bombs and went back to basics, back to what works. Mighta been al Quaeda, but might just as well have been some nut who got fired for not showering because God told him not to. Lotta what they call “agendas” out there. Lotta Bic lighters too. Which means about half the population of this nuthouse qualifies as a suspect.

That’s the beauty of fire: anybody can do it. Actually that’s just one of about a dozen advantages that arson has over bombs. Let’s run ‘em down, info-mercial style, Bomb vs. Arson:

Bomb: very tricky to make; easy to score an “own goal” (blow yourself up learning the trade); requires a detonator, very tightly controlled—”not sold at any store” as they say on those sad Oldies Compilation ads; requires electrical expertise, the one thing even most handyman types can’t handle; leaves traces on bomber’s hands, clothes and car; often fails to work; takes a truckload of fertilizer to bring down big buildings; can’t spread beyond immediate target area.

In an infomercial, this is where Christie Brinkley pops up to say, “Gosh Chuck, that sounds way too complicated for me! Isn’t there an easier way for me to lay waste to an enemy city with no risk or obligation?”

And the MC, some unemployed alkie who used to be on Days of Our Lives, says, “There sure is, Christie! Just look at all the advantages you get with our Arson package:

*So easy to make a little kid can do it. In fact, they do, all the time. Mommy’s Bic plus Daddy’s La-Z-boy equals no more house and BBQ baby. Oldest story in the world. Ever see a toddler make an effective pipe bomb? (Pipe bombs are the worst weapons in the world anyway. The only thing they’re good for is quick amputation of the pipe bomber’s hands and eyes—Nature’s way of saying, “thy genes ye shall not pass on!”)

*Unless you’re one of those toddlers, you won’t get killed by your own arson. Not that hard to walk away from a brushfire—when it’s just getting started. Later, not so easy. But that’s the whole point. In other words, very safe for the arsonist.

*No detonator needed. In fact, no tricky electronics whatsoever. So easy a caveman could do it, and did.

*No traceable chemicals. What are they gonna say if they ever get lucky enough to identify you, “Hey, the suspect has handled gasoline! And a lighter!” Until they start taking smokers off jury lists, and they might in this fucked-up state, no jury on the planet’s going to convict you for handling a 98 cent Bic lighter. And as for gasoline, imagine the interrogation: “We found gas all over your hands, firebug!” “Uh, I used the self-serve and it spilled.” Long awkward silence, ending with you walking out into the daylight, smiling in quiet pride at that big black smoke column over Malibu.

*Unlike bombs, a fire can’t fail to go off. It doesn’t take an Edison to make sure your fire is working. You could send the dumbest guy on the planet to carry out the mission—and according to Tommy Franks, the dumbest guy on the planet is ex-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith—and he’d get it right.

“Mr. Undersecretary, do you have ignition?”

Feith: “Uh…wha’?”

“Mr. Undersecretary, is the brush now burning?”

Feith: “Oh yeah, hee hee… Pretty fire!”

“Excellent, Mr. Undersecretary, now please vacate the area.”

Feith: “uh?”

“Get in the car and go, ya moron!”

It would in fact be Feith’s first successful mission. That’s fire for ya: a real morale-builder, a real resume-packer.*And I’ve saved the best for last: fire is what the pros call a “force multiplier.” Meaning it goes on and on an on, long after that Energizer bunny is fricasee’d in the ashes, a gourmet treat for any coyote willing to get its paws burnt.

Unlike bombs, the size of the fire you set has no relation to its effect. You take a Bic and apply it to some dry weeds upwind of Malibu at the end of the dry season, and that two-inch flame ends up forcing some producer to reschedule his next pool party and restock his cocaine stash. (I bet that “toxic smoke” they warned about in LA was more than toxic, bet it was a real freebase reek.)

A fire that takes one second to start can burn a city five miles away, down to the ground. That makes fire way more effective than most nukes. And a lot easier to make.

The real question is why it isn’t used more often. Of course we have fire weapons like napalm, flamethrowers, and incendiary bombs, but all of them require hi-tech conventional weapons. And for the foreseeable future, conventional warfare ain’t shit. Until otherwise notified, we’re talking irregular warfare, the only kind that matters.

The Japanese tried sending fire balloons over the Western US in WW II, but that was sheer stupidity. The vector for fire is humans. You use people to start fires. And people, like I keep telling you over and over, are the only essential weapon for an irregular force. In this case, that means one clean-cut Al Qaeda sympathizer who’s learned to smile all the time, keep a job, avoid talking about politics and drive a neutral-looking car (my pick would be a Honda, nothing more boring or invisible than an Accord). There he is standing on a hill inland of Malibu. He’s been mowing his lawn, watching the NBA, blending in like a fanatic, and now that the Santa Ana’s blowing toward the prime real estate on the ocean, he’s ready. He takes a casual glance up and down the road, tosses a little sterno stove into the brush, drives on. Three days later Tori Spelling collects ten million for her beachfront mansion.

Now, in the interests of disclosure and transparency and all that good shit, I should mention that I’m sort of an accused arsonist myself. You may remember that my old friend Victor “-y” Davis Hanson took a few minutes off from his usual dayjob—sucking Cheney’s dick—in order to accuse me of trying to burn down his vineyards. As if. As if I’d work up a sweat lugging gascans into some dusty farm. I’m more the morale-building, inspirational type. I encourage people to find the inner arsonist trapped inside themselves; I don’t go out and wobble my flab doing torch jobs personally.

But Vic must be in love with me or something, because he won’t drop the grape-torching business. He’s written about it at least twice since he first dropped that dime on me in the pages of National Review. And there’s a lesson in that. What it shows is how the neocon mind works. First, they never ever admit they’re wrong–but we all knew that already. The more interesting lesson is how, even though they talk big, they think so small. So lame.

Because if I was going to do a burn on my pal Vic—which I’m not planning to, but if I was—it wouldn’t be some ridiculous, pointless try at burning his grape vines, especially when the poor fool wrote a whole book proving vines don’t burn too well.

No, Vic, I don’t think like that. I think like a real irregular. If I wanted to introduce you to the possibilities of fire as a weapon I’d just attend one of those lectures you give to tell nervous old GOPers that Iraq is going swell, just swell. (Can’t believe the bastard gets paid to do that. Most of the people I know spend their lives lying for nothing.)

I wouldn’t even need a ticket in. Just a 55-gallon drum, a dolly to wheel it up to the entrance, an air conditioner repair guy’s overalls (size XXL, but then most air conditioner repair guys are XXL) and a couple of bike locks, with chains. I’d wait till all those gullible hicks had filed in to the hall, and I’d wait for the applause when VD took the podium. Then I’d tilt up the dolly and get to work, singing something in character—maybe “Ring of Fire”—you can’t go wrong with the Man in Black. First I’d padlock all the emergency exits, then I’d pour all 55 gallons into the lecture hall. The drum would be labeled “cleaning solution” and it’d be truth in advertising, because nothing cleans out a crowded lecture hall faster than burning gasoline. No sprinkler system in the world can handle that volume, and if the gas don’t kill ‘em, the stampede when they see the first flames will.

What I like to imagine is Victor up there passing the optimistic word to the very end. As the flames try to get his attention, he’ll be using all that mental discipline he used since the invasion to deny there’s even a problem, “…aside from some lingering embers in a few provinces of the lecture hall, this fire is completely contained.” By this time the hall will be totally black with smoke, but Vic is a gamer and he’ll drop his favorite history bomb on anybody still alive: “Things looked black in 1864, too, you know! And what about the Battle of the—cough, ack!—Bulge? Iwo Jima? The Pusan…the Pusan…” Just about that time Vic’s mighty voice would be silenced for good because his larynx would be even blacker than 1864 and Pusan put together, blacker than a forgotten In-N-Out burger that’s sat all day on the flame broiler while the rookie cooks got high in the employee toilet…

And please don’t tell me this kind of atrocity would “backfire” on the firebug. Hiroshima, Dresden, Tokyo—some pretty big BBQs, and they didn’t backfire on anyone. We’re just talking about the lo-tech irregular-warfare versions of that, and to a serious guerrilla, there are no illegitimate targets. Everything is up for burning. And don’t tell me this kind of “brutality” doesn’t work, either. Let me tell you about the Cinema Rex. Ever see a movie there? I bet you didn’t, because for one thing it was in Abadan, the big oil-refining island off Iran. And for another thing, some of Khomeini’s holy warriors burned down the Cinema Rex just before the Old Man himself came back to Iran and booted the Shah.

See, the Rex had a special feature for kiddies: every Friday after school was out, all the foreign oil-workers’ children would pile into the Rex to watch cartoons. Even a Muslim couldn’t object to that, right?

Wrong. There is very little that a real Khomeini-ite can’t object to, and for them the idea of kids watching movies on a Friday was so horrible that it just naturally called for one of the Faithful to walk around the Rex that Friday afternoon padlocking all the doors, then pouring a couple five-gallon cans of gasoline under the doors and in the windows, and then setting it on fire. Hundreds of children dead.

I’ve never forgotten that story. Made me so sick, as if Carter’s disgusting puss-out wasn’t already nearly killing me, young as I was.

But nobody else remembers it. Did you? Betcha didn’t. Betcha never heard of it. And the Iranians weren’t bothered at all. A few weeks later, hordes of the stupid fucks swarmed over Tehran to welcome the glorious Imam Khomeini. And a few years after that, hordes of kids not much older than the ones that got crisped in Abadan ran through machine gun fire or volunteered to be human mine detonators for Iranian human-wave attacks across the Shatt al-Arab a few miles from Abadan.

Don’t tell me terror doesn’t work. Only amateurs think that. And if the Cinema Rex didn’t hurt Khomeini’s popularity, if Dresden didn’t stop London putting up a statue to Bomber Harris, you honestly expect me to even pretend I’m not giggling, damn near jerking off, watching producers’ houses burn?

Wake up and smell the ashes.

This article was first published in The eXile on November 5, 2007

From today’s edition of NSFW Corp

FRESNO—Today’s the Big Anniversary, so what better day to size up Obama’s war record than the day that also launched my career as a professional War Nerd.

When you look back at Obama’s wars, you get a pretty clear idea what went wrong over the last four years. It wasn’t the way Obama’s team handled the wars. Truth is, they did damn well at that, better than I ever thought they would.

The real problem is that they don’t know what world they’re living in. These are people who’ve spent their lives getting straight A’s, collecting gold stars, avoiding mistakes. And they think war is just like all those other little hurdles you face in life.

That’s why they’ll never get credit for any of it. They have this delusion that sanity matters, and they’ve run their wars as sanely and boringly as an exterminator going after termites.
It’s sensible, it’s semi-effective, and it irritates the life out of the 99%. I don’t mean the Occupy 99%, all those “goodhearted ordinary Americans”; that’s a totally made-up imaginary species invented by people just as naive as Obama’s crew. I mean the real 99% of us living our rotten lives out there, mean and dumb and miserable, just waiting for some gore we can really get behind.

Obama just doesn’t understand his job as war chief of this big crazy tribe…(Continued)

To read the rest of this War Nerd article surveying the Obama wars, click here.

This article was published at Not Safe For Work Corp, where Gary Brecher has just signed on as a new regular columnist. To read The War Nerd columns and more NSFWCORP wretched wisdom (with jokes), subscribe for the monthly price of a bottle of Diet Coke: http://www.nsfwcorp.com/subscribe

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

Click the cover, buy the book!

In the wake of this week’s white supremacist massacre of unarmed Sikh worshippers in Wisconsin, The eXiled proudly reposts a War Nerd classic first published in The eXile in July 2007:

FRESNO, CA — I think I’ve finally found a religion I can convert to. I’m thinking of turning Sikh. And we’ll just slide right by all the puns popping into your little heads, if you don’t mind. The Sikhs are just the coolest warrior tribe around. Take their scripture.

My Bible goes on about beating swords into plowshares — I always hated that bit, because all you’d get was a wrecked sword and a lousy plow. But the Sikh scripture actually says that the sword predates the universe: “After the primal manifestation of the sword, the universe was created.”

See? That’s a god who’s got his priorities in order! No doubt about it, I’m letting my beard grow and practicing wrapping old socks around my head. Gary B. Singh, you can call me from now on.

It all started when I got a letter from a guy named Gill, a Sikh in the UK, whining about how I’d talked up all the other warrior tribes but never had a word to say for the Sikhs. “Give us some love, Gary,” Gill whined.

Well, the War Nerd makes war, not love, but after weeks of looking into this Sikh thing, I gotta give the bearded boys their due. The Sikhs have one of the most amazing military histories on the planet. And they’re still living through their Golden Age right now. One of the great last stands in Sikh history happened less than 25 years ago, when 200 Sikh militants holed up in their version of the Mormon Tabernacle, the “Golden Temple” in Amritsar, India. Anybody with sense knew those 200 Sikhs were going to fight like demons, because that’s what Sikhs have been doing for the past 400 years. Sikh military history is so packed with glorious last stands that George Armstrong Custer would be a smalltime footnote if he’d worn a big turban to go with that long hair and beard of his.

It was 1984, and the Indian Army must have known it was in for a big bloody mess to get the temple back, especially since its upper ranks are filled mostly with Sikh generals, Sikhs being the designated hitters of the Indian war game. But Indira Gandhi was PM, and she was a lady who didn’t like being disobeyed, so she ordered her Sikh Commanding General to overrun the temple.

Mistake. The Sikh CO inside the temple was a dude named Shahbeg Singh, who pretty much single-handedly engineered the collapse of the Pakistani Army in the 1971 Indo-Pak War. It was Shahbeg who organized the Mukhti Bahini, the Bangladeshi guerrillas who made history by being the first Bengali armed force in history not to pee in their dhotis and flee at the sound of gunfire. In fact, this Sikh must’ve given the Bengalis some kind of Sikh blood transfusion because they fought well enough to make the West Pak garrisons surrender en masse even before Indian troops crossed the Bengal border. After that it was the end of history for East Bengal, except for a bunch of whiney George Harrison begging chanteys, and a tidal wave or two.

Well, this same Shahbeg arranged the defense of the Golden Temple so well that at the end of a seven-day battle with the Indian Army’s best units, his 200-odd amateur militants had inflicted 83 KIA on the army and even managed to blast the first tank to enter the compound. They paid a price, naturally – at least 500 Sikh dead and the Temple blasted into gold dust. But Sikhs — well, if there’s one thing you can say about ‘em, it’s that they’re willing to pay any price.

And they make the enemy pay, too. Less than five months after Indira Gandhi ordered the attack on the Temple, she was strolling into her garden to be interviewed by that fat old Brit with the Russian name, Peter Ustinov, when the Sikhs got their revenge. It must have been a pretty scene, the fat man sweating in the Delhi heat, Indira swirling up in her best sari — when BOOM! Two of her bodyguards, who were Sikhs, naturally, opened fire on her with machine guns, turning her into human chutney. She died before the sweat dried on Ustinov’s chins. And then, just to add to Ustinov’s fun, her other non-Sikh bodyguards started blasting at the Sikh shooters, killing one and wounding another.

The Compassionate Guru: Founding Sikh, Nanak Sahib

Shortest — and loudest — interview the old battle-ax ever gave. Last, too.

That was the Sikh revenge for “Operation Bluestar,” the temple raid. By the way, that’s another of these lame ops titles they keep coming up with. Should’ve called it “Operation Blowback,” or “Operation Indira, Are You Sure?”

For the Sikhs, this was just like Chapter Two Million in a long and glorious series of battles, assassinations and massacres. The Sikhs were born in the Punjab, the coolest part of India. Every conqueror in history headed that way as soon as he got his learner’s license at 15. Punjab was the last, and the toughest place Alexander himself ever tried to take. He was so impressed with the army of Pontus, as they called it then, that he said every Punjabi deserved to be called Alexander. Which was high praise, since Alex was never known for modesty.

Before him even those lazy necrophiliac Egyptians had a stab at the Punjab. I couldn’t believe it when I read it, but apparently those Nile-side loungers had the energy to attack the Punjab. Everybody had a turn, though it was the Persians and the Afghans who turned invading the Punjab from a healthy, occasional fun evening into an unhealthy obsession.

And that was before Islam was added to the subcontinental mix. By the time Sikhism started, about 400 years ago, the Mughal emperors, basically a bunch of land pirates who swooped down out of Afghanistan to plunder the plains, had tried to convert India to Islam by using the time-honored method of appealing to the prospect’s common sense: “Convert or we’ll hack you into a million tiny pieces.” The Hindu majority, under the thumbs of hundreds of feudal kings, tried to weasel out of conversion so they could hang on to their own homegrown miseries, like the caste system. The Hindus’ ultimate weapon was simple inertia and birthrate. The Afghans’ sword arms just got tired after a while, hacking in that heat, and they said, “Aw, the Hell with it.” Northern India settled into a lazy routine with the occasional massacre, a lot of bribery, nasty little village snobs hating each other.

A brave Sikh martyr takes a Moghul bath

Then along comes the founder of Sikhism, Nanak, and says, “There is no Muslim, there is no Hindu.” Meaning the Hell with both of you. Sikhs were radicals from the start. All the little traditions people know about them started out as in-your-face rebel yells in the Punjab. Like those beards: only the Mughal were allowed to wear long hair and beards. So the Sikh all let theirs grow longer than John and Yoko’s. That name, “Singh,” every Sikh guy has? It means “Lion” but the real point is that it replaced all the caste names they had before. Like Malcolm making his last name “X.”

The Mughals didn’t like it. They said so pretty clearly. Take the early career of the sixth Sikh guru, an orphan named Gobind Rai. It was the Mughals who made him an orphan, by torturing his dad to death. See, in the old Punjab, death was nothing; death was what you got if the head man was in a good mood.

Most of the time they weren’t in a very good mood, so you got real slow, horrible deaths. At least somebody at the Mughal court was nice enough to FedEx Gobind a package with his dad’s head in it, Seven-style.

Gobind decided right about then to end the whole peacenik tradition of Sikhism. He had a sense of style, so to set the mood he called all the Sikhs together and came onstage with a big huge sword and said, “My sword wants blood. Who wants to supply it? I need a volunteer!” Well, he would’ve bombed as a stage magician because there was a looooooong silence, no hands raised, till an Untouchable convert came up. Gobind took him into a tent and came out alone, bloody as an apprentice butcher. Four more volunteers and the crowd was beginning to grumble. Then Gobind revealed the trick, which you’ve all probably guessed already especially if you remember Sunday school, Isaac and Abraham: the five dudes were alive! Heroes! All in new armor! Ready to kill!

These “Five Beloved” were the core of the Akala, the Immortals, an elite Sikh unit that wore these ridiculous Harry Potter turbans with metal rings on them. The rings, called “quoits,” were supposedly sharp and you can throw them as weapons. But I’m sorry, I’d be willing to stand all day in front of some dude in a wizard’s hat throwing sharpened frisbees at me.

The Sikhs’ real weapon was the flintlock. A grumbly Muslim Afghan wrote that “these dogs [the Sikhs] invented the musket, and nobody knows these weapons better. These bad-tempered people discharge hundreds of bullets on the enemy, on the left and right and back.” Aww, poor little Afghan! Those pesky bad-tempered Sikhs, shooting at you when all you want to do is massacre them for their unbelief and steal their stuff along the way! No-friggin’-fair!

The Sikhs were more than happy to fight hand-to-hand whenever it made sense, and even got praise from the Brits for hacking Brit soldiers to death with their swords even after being spitted on the redcoats’ bayonets. But the Sikhs were also sensible people: Why risk getting cut when you can lure the enemy into an ambush and knock him out of the saddle at long range?

The Sikhs evolved a theory of warfare called “the two-and-a-half strikes.” You got a full point for ambushes and hit-and-run attacks, but only a half point for pitched battles where you lost a lot of your own men. Nathan Bedford Forrest, Francis Marion and Patton himself would have agreed.

By 1810 the Sikhs had driven the Mughals out of the Punjab. They owned the place, literally: They had an independent Sikh kingdom running there, and by all accounts it was the one place in India where something sorta resembling law and order actually prevailed.

The only reason the Sikhs didn’t go on to run all of India and maybe the world is simple: They ran into the Brits. Same reason the Zulu didn’t get to own all of southern Africa. A lot of big, strong tribes were on the movie in Queen Victoria’s time, and the same thing happened to most of them: They met the Brits, and that was all she wrote.

Ranjit Singh, the ruler of the Punjab, was smart enough to sign a treaty with the Brits, keep a strong army to back it up, and avoid the sort of little faked “border incidents” the Raj loved to use to start a war. When he died in 1839, the Punjab fell into the usual bickering, and the Brits pounced.

I keep telling you, the Brits circa 1840 weren’t the cute little Monty Python guys you imagine. They were stone killers, the best since the Romans, totally ruthless, no more conscience than a drain contractor. They saw the Sikhs fighting among themselves and went for it.

Even then, even with Sikh traitors fighting for the Brits, the Sikhs had the best of the first Anglo-Sikh war. The Brits lost more than 2,000 men in the first battle, Ferozeshah, in 1845, and were on the verge of offering unconditional surrender when reinforcements arrived and overwhelmed the Khalsa, the Sikh army. The second war, in 1849, was easier, because the Brits, who knew more about occupation than our lame Bremer clones ever will, used the three years in between to bribe, assassinate and divide the Sikh elite. Even so, the Sikh cavalry, fighting basically without any leaders, slaughtered the British cavalry at the battle of Chillianwalla, smacking down the redcoats’ little ceremonial swords with their big scimitars. I’ve read Brit officers’ accounts of that battle, and they say something you get in all accounts of the Sikh: how big and strong the bastards are. The Brits said they felt like children beside the Sikh horsemen, and there’s really funny picture of a white officer surrounded by Sikh soldiers, looking like a pasty little midget with his bodyguards.

And you know the best thing about the Sikhs? They don’t waste time holding grudges. The Brits won; they accepted it, worked with it, and in a few years they were the core of the Raj’s army. That came in handy during the Great Mutiny; the Sikhs stayed loyal and that was what saved the Raj. In fact, the Sikhs stayed so loyal that the battle of Saraghari, one of their greatest-ever last stands, was fought in the service of the British.

In 1897, 21 Sikh soldiers in British service were occupying two tiny forts on the Afghan frontier. The Pushtun were getting bored, the way they do every few months, and decided to stop taking British gold and attack the Raj instead. So 15 or 20,000 Afghans whooped down to the frontier. And those 21 Sikhs were standing in their way.

Proudest of the Proud: Officers in the Punjab Cavalry

The Sikh garrison knew they were doomed, and if anything it kind of relaxed them. They went on to cover themselves with glory, killing hundreds of Afghans before they were overrun. The unit’s communications specialist, who used a helicograph, a kind of semaphore, sent his last message asking permission of his Brit officer to stop signaling and go down and die spitting Afghans on his bayonet. Permission was granted, and he carefully packed up his helicograph, charged into the fight and died gloriously.

The only objection you could make, and it’s kind of a quibble, is that politically this is a little weird, like a bunch of Mexicans dying in defense of the Alamo. I mean, it was the Brits who wrecked the Sikh’s homeland and all. But see, that kind of nitpicking is what ruins war-nerding. If you ask me, the Sikhs who died at Saraghari were just doing what they do best. I mean, what boy didn’t dream of dying at the Alamo, or Thermopylae, or on the Bonhomme Richard? Not many of us get a chance to actually do it, and if you do, you don’t nitpick about who pays your wages, you just soak up the gloriousness of it and imagine the songs they’ll write about you, how you’ll look as a statue.

And that’s the great thing about being a Sikh, which I’m gonna be soon unless the beard turns out too scratchy: It’s still happening! The Golden Age of Sikhism is still in session! When the rest of the world is a convalescent home, you can count on the Punjab – along with the Horn of Africa, and the Congo — to keep the old ways going. And you can count on the Sikh to be there, doing a Little Big Horn or Alamo every few years to keep life sweet, and give me hope that there’s something better outside of this office life I’m stuck in.

This article is a War Nerd Classic

Christians are stone killers. You put a Christian and a lion in an arena and I’ll bet Toyotas to Subarus the Christian’ll have the lion for lunch. Just look around you: lions are just about extinct, but the whole world is full of Christians singin’ about God’s love, ready to disembowel anybody who won’t join the chorus. (See my guide to Christian Missionary Martyrs as the front-line in Christian Jihads at the end of this article.)

This week I’m honoring some great Christian killers: the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda. These kids — and they are kids, mostly 13-16 years old — get my vote for funniest army on the planet. And that’s a pretty big award, when you consider that the Dutch armed forces are included in the competition.

Just kidding, Dutchies! By the way, congratulations on shooting that Fortuyn guy, the only interesting Dutchman in the past 200 years! Can’t have people like that running around!

Anyway — the Lord’s Resistance Army came out of one tough neighborhood: Uganda in the 1970′s. You say “Uganda” and people think “Idi Amin.” But he was way overhyped as a killer: a big teddy bear compared to the “moderate” leader who overthrew him. This “moderate” was a former altar boy named — get this — Apollo Milton Obote.

It’s always “ex-altar boys” who have like a dozen bodies under the concrete. And when the former altar boy is also a “moderate” according to the Western press, then damn, get ready for a serious bloodbath. Nobody can kill like a “Moderate.” Amin was a noisy killer, feeding people to the crocs, beating them to death, eating their flesh. Dictators like him and Bokassa never last. It’s the “moderates” who do the really large-scale, efficient slaughtering.

That’s the lesson of the 20th century: If you want to kill a few people and get bad press, then go ahead: dress in black, drink blood and talk about how you love torture like Amin, Bokassa and Hitler. But if you’re serious about wiping out whole populations, wear a dove of peace and talk about progress and love. That’s what Stalin and the US did, and between them they killed a dozen for every one Hitler got.

Obote was smart; he knew he needed that “moderate” label if he was going to wipe out all his enemies. So he smiled a lot and wore suits and talked progress…and then went to work. When a densely-populated Bantu zone called the Luwhero crescent gave him trouble, his soldiers went in and killed every goddamn human being in the place. Ever hear about it? No, you didn’t, because the respectable papers didn’t want to know. Amin was good copy; Obote was too “moderate.”

The survivors of Luwhero, mostly kids too young to be worth killing, formed up in a kind of bush army and kept fighting, even when their leader Museveni said “fuck it” and hightailed it to London. And to everybody’s surprise (including Museveni) they won. Obote’s soldiers fled north still picking people-meat from between their teeth. Museveni flew home in time to celebrate his victory and resume command. He is now the official ruler of the land. Ta-da!

A real Cinderella story, Central-Africa style.

But Obote wasn’t the only former altar boy in Uganda. There was another one, way crazier and more fun: Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Little Joseph came from a very devout Christian family: His aunt Alice founded the LRA and passed it on to him when she died. Aunt Alice started some of the great traditions of the LRA, like telling your troops that if they just wore her special amulets, bullets won’t hurt them. Aunt Alice had everybody in the LRA believing God hisself would be their kevlar vest. This turned out to be untrue, but there was a great escape clause: by the time the chumps found out the amulets didn’t work as advertised, they were DEAD! Now that’s the way to run a complaint department: Thousands of satisfied customers and dissatisfied but uncomplaining corpses.

The LRA gets backing from Sudan, which uses them to massacre other Christians like the Dinka, who are rebelling against the Arabs of the North. The North/South, Muslim/Christian war in Sudan is another of those meatgrinder wars that just doesn’t interest the Western press. It’s inland, and the reporters don’t like getting too far from the beach hotels; it’s hot and malarial country; the victims are nobody’s poster boys. I have a soft spot for them though, those Dinka, because I once saw a documentary on them featuring a yearly ritual where the young men compete to see who can get the fattest. You have to understand, these are the tallest and skinniest people on the planet. But every year, the cool guys of the tribe spend months doing nothing but sitting around drinking a mixture of blood and milk, trying to see how fat they can get. None of them get all that fat — not by my standards anyway — but it was nice just to see somebody appreciating fatness and all. There was a scene with the fattened-up contestants sitting in a little puddle pouring water over themselves, trying to cool off. God, I know the feeling! It’s June now in Fresno and it’s already unbearable. Summer is the bad time for fat people, like winter used to be when people were poor and skinny.

The Dinka are being wiped out, village by village. The LRA is helping the Sudanese Muslims do it — but that’s an old Christian game too, helping the heathens kill other Christians. Hell, it was the Crusaders who sacked Constantinople, broke its power and set it up for the Turks to rape. Religion’s nice, but rape and plunder are what it’s all about.

People won’t see this — won’t see how simple and practical the African style of warfare really is. The LRA is at war with the Ugandan Army, but it’s war Central-Africa style. We’re not talking Gettysburg or Verdun here. The idea isn’t to have big battles but to sneak up on an enemy village and kill all the civilians, take their livestock and steal their stuff. Reporters like to call this “insane,” which is crap. Which would you rather do, get sent off to another continent to fight heavily-armed opponents (war Western-style) or kill the neighbors who wake you every damn morning with their stupid lawnmower (war African-style)? Especially if you can see they’ve got a nice DVD player in there? Personally, I’d much rather kill the neighbors and steal their stuff. And if they’ve got a daughter just hitting puberty — well, that’s just gravy.

And if they’re Christians, so much the better. I’ll tell you about my boss sometime — this little shit from suburban Atlanta whose first question in a job interview is “Where do you worship?” If I was going to sack and pillage any house in Fresno, it’d be his. Believe me, God would be On My Side. I’d shoot his livestock — two cats and a dog he brings to the office sometimes — and decide on the spot if his wife was salable, African-style.

So I don’t see what’s so crazy about these African bush armies’ way of making war. Verdun, Blenheim, Gallipoli — those were “insane.” And if you still think tribal massacre is so weird, try remembering high-school PE. Now is it so hard to get? Life in an African bush army is just adolescent fantasy come to life. If only I were a bit younger and in better shape….

…

Christian Jihad, Stage One: Attack Of The Missionary Martyrs!

Christian armies like the LRA couldn’t exist without the other, and WAY scarier, kind of Christian soldier: the missionary. If missionaries hadn’t penetrated Central Africa, there’d be no “former altar boys” to work with — and the killing would be left to pagans, amateurs. The missionary is stage one of the Christian war plan. It’s a good, simple plan and they’ve stuck to it for round about 2,000 years:

1. Send in the missionaries to fuck with the locals. Tell ‘em their Gods are wimps, their clothes are porn, their food is shit. Keep it up till somebody gets pissed off enough to grab an AK (or blowgun or warclub or wok) and martyrize a missionary or two. It helps if at least one of the shot-up missionaries is a nice plain white lady, preferably from the midwest.

2. Splatter this “atrocity” over every TV and newspaper on the planet, then send in the Rangers (as “advisors,” of course) and wipe out every dirty pagan murderer in the place.

One dead missionary is worth a dozen live ones. You fax their picture around the parishes and everybody forks up more money in the name of the dear departed, now simmering in the bellies of the fuzzy-wuzzies.

You college types think that old-style missionary tearjerker story’s finished. It’s alive and well, lemme tell you. Take the two missionaries who just got shot up in Mindanao in the process of being “rescued” from this smalltime Muslim separatist group. I saw their pictures: classic horse-faced Kansas morons. (Fuck, white people get ugly fast! They’re cute when they’re little, but damn, by the time they’re 30 — ) The husband got killed, but his bucktoothed fatassed hymnsinging wife was only grazed.

Goddamn Muslims! Learn to shoot straight, you jerkoffs! Is there a single goddamn Muslim on the planet who can handle a rifle, for Christ’s sake?

Or Allah’s, for that matter.

This article was first published in The eXile on May 4, 2007. We are reprinting it to commemorate today’s alleged “last day of the Iraq war.”

FRESNO, CA — A funny thing happened on the floor of the Senate last week. Somebody asked a serious question: “If the war in Iraq is lost, then who won?”

Of course Sen. Lindsay Graham, the guy who asked the question, didn’t mean it to be serious. He was just scoring points off Harry Reid, the world’s only Democratic Mormon. Reid had made a “gaffe” by saying in public what everybody already knows: “The war in Iraq is lost.” When you say something obviously true in politics, it’s called a “gaffe.”

So Graham, McCain’s bitch, jumps in to embarrass Reid with his question.

But let’s take the question seriously for a second here: who won in Iraq? To answer it, you have to start with a close-up of the region, then change magnification to look at the world picture. At a regional level the big winner is obvious: Iran. In fact, Iran wins so big in this war that I’ve already said that Dick Cheney’s DNA should be checked out by a reputable lab, because he has to be a Persian mole. My theory is that they took a fiery young Revolutionary Guard from the slums of Tehran, dipped him in a vat of lye to get that pale, pasty Anglo skin, zapped his scalp for that authentic bald CEO look, squirted a quart of cholesterol into his arteries so he’d develop classic American cardiac disease, and parachuted him into the outskirts of some Wyoming town. And that’s how our VP was born again, a half-frozen zombie with sagebrush twigs in his jumpsuit, stumbling into the first all-night coffee shop in Casper talking American with a Persian accent: “Hello my friends! Er, I mean, hello my fellow Americans! Coffee? I will have coffee at once, indeed, and is not free enterprise a glorious thing? Say, O brethren of the frosty tundra, what do you say we finish our donuts and march on Baghdad now, this very moment, to remove the Baathist abomination Saddam?”

It took a couple years for Cheney-ajad to get his American accent right and chew his way into Bush Jr.’s head, but he made it like one of Khan’s earwigs, got us to do the Ayatollahs’ dirty work for them by taking out Iraq, their only rival for regional power. Iraq is destroyed, and Tehran hasn’t lost a single soldier in the process. Our invasion put their natural allies, the Shia, in power; gave their natural enemies, the Iraqi Sunni, a blood-draining feud that will never end; and provided them with a risk-free laboratory to spy on American forces in action. If they feel like trying out a new weapon or tactic to deal with U.S. armor, all they have to do is feed the supplies or diagrams to one of their puppet Shia groups, or even one of the Sunni suicide-commando clans.

Rare photo of Dick Cheney relaxing without his American disguise on

All these claims that Iran is helping the insurgents really make my head spin. Of course they’re helping. They’d be insane if they weren’t. If somebody invades the country next door, any state worth mentioning has to act. If Mexico got invaded by China, you better believe the U.S. would react. We’d lynch any president who didn’t.

What really amazes me is how patient Iran has been about it, how quiet and careful. They’ve covered their tracks carefully and kept their intervention to R&D level: just enough to keep Iraq burning, and patiently test out news IEDs.

But that’s the Persian way: behind all the yelling, they’re sly, clever people. If Iranian intelligence really wanted to flood Iraq with weaponry that would turn our APCs into well-insulated BBQs, they could have done it long ago. It’s clear they’re not doing that. They’re smart enough to follow Napoleon’s advice not to interfere with an enemy in the process of destroying himself – and stockpiling the new IED designs on their side of the border in case we’re stupid enough to invade.

The situation in Iraq right now is optimum for Iran. Iraq is like a nuclear reactor that they can control by inserting and removing control rods. If Shia/Sunni violence looks like cooling off, Tehran’s agents, who’ve penetrated both sides of the fight, play the hothead in their assigned Sunni or Shia gangs and lobby for a spectacular attack on enemy civvies or shrines – whatever gets the locals’ blood up. Then, if things get too hot, which would mean the U.S. getting fed up and leaving, they drop a control rod into the reactor core by telling Sadr to call off his militia or letting the Maliki regime stage some ceremony for the TV crews, the kind that keeps the Bushies back in Ohio convinced it’s all going to come out fine.

They need to keep us there, because – makes me sick to say it but it’s true – our troops are now the biggest, strongest control rod the Persians are using to set the temperature of this war. They want us there as long as possible, stoking the feuds and making sure nobody wins. That’s what we just did under Petraeus: switched sides, Shia to Sunni, because the Shia were getting too strong. Yeah, God forbid we should be unfair to the Sunnis, God forbid we should do anything to let somebody win. Let’s just make Tehran happy by keeping the feud going another few centuries.

One thing Iran is pretty clearly not scared of is every American amateur’s dream: A punitive U.S. invasion of Iran. In fact, like North Korea, their partner in the Axis of Evil, Iran is all but begging us to invade. Guys in junior high used to hold their chins out, tap them with a finger and say, “Come on, fucker, come on, hit me!” That’s Iran now, chin out and begging for a right hook. Because with all the anti-armor know-how they’ve gained by now, they have traps waiting for us that would make Lara Croft’s cave expeditions look like a backyard tea party. Even Cheney’s team knows that, which is why they’re talking about air raids on Iran these days, not invasion.

Another way countries can win in a regional war like this is from the money flooding in. The big winners of the Vietnam War were Thailand, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Thailand went from a failed state with a half-dozen insurgencies everywhere outside its central valley to a rich, happy tourist paradise during Nam. Modern Thailand is a country built on the backs and, uh, other body parts of its bar girls. Every time a GI spent his pay at the ping-pong shows in Bangkok, Thailand gained foreign exchange. The neon got brighter, the huts went split-level, and the Commie rebels swatting mosquitoes out there in the elephant grass started to feel a little foolish. Finally they said the Hell with it, bought suits and went Yuppie.

That’s one way to beat an insurgency: bribe it. Unfortunately, the two neighboring states likely to benefit from the Iraq war are…yup, those twin towers of evil, Syria and Iran. Just imagine how much money is flowing into their border provinces right now. Need any U.S.-issue supplies, weapons, toilet paper, or GPS units cheap? Just ask at any bazaar in Damascus or Tehran. Uncle Sam’s guarantee of quality – fell off the back of a two-and-a-half ton truck.

See, this is why I keep thinking Cheney’s got to be an Iranian mole. How could he not see that a war in Iraq benefits noncombatant neighboring states? He had to know. He can’t be that stup — Wait, I withdraw the comment.

Some paranoids want to list Israel among the winners, but I don’t see it. Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz thought invading Iraq would help Israel, or rather Likud, but like everything else these geniuses predicted, it didn’t happen. Iraq was never a threat to Israel. Iran is. And Iran is much stronger now. Last summer’s war with Hezbollah was one the Israelis didn’t really want to fight, but Cheney insisted. That was the deal, I guess: the U.S. takes out Saddam, then you take out Hezbollah. Instead, the IDF looked scared and weak in South Lebanon, so now Hezbollah and Iran are the poster-boys of every red-blooded Muslim kid on the planet.

Turkey, America’s one real ally in the Middle East, is a huge loser in this war. We slapped them in the face, gave the Kurds a base to destabilize southeastern Turkey, and helped elect the first Islamist president in what used to be a proudly secular country. Happy now, Cheney, you Khomeini-loving, anti-American mole?

When you zoom farther out to look at the global picture, the question “Who won Iraq?” doesn’t have such an obvious answer. It’s much easier to see who lost: Us, and anybody who backed us. We looked invincible after taking out the Taliban. Not no more. If you use armored columns as stationary cops in enemy neighborhoods, you give the locals plenty of time to figure out their weak spots. That’s what we did: gave the Arabs a trillion-dollar, multi-year seminar in how to defeat U.S. forces. Another lesson in the Brecher Doctrine: Nuke ‘em, bribe ‘em or leave ‘em alone.

To find a winner in this war means looking outside the box, like they say — or rather outside the theater of war. Because the winners are the countries smart enough to stay out of it.

A little historical perspective first. Who won the Thirty Years War? France and England, the European powers that stayed out or just dabbled. France played that war a lot like Iran has played this one: tinkered around, tampered, spied and whispered to all the contenders, but never risked a big chunk of money or force. Every country that took part lost, and the Germans, who had what you might call the home field disadvantage, lost most of all, up to a third of their population. So if you cared about the Iraqis, which I don’t and neither do you, then they’d win the Oscar for biggest losers here. But then they had that one locked up already.

So the likely winner of a war like this is an up-n-coming world economic power that has been investing in its own economy while we blow a trillion — yep, a trillion — dollars on nothing. Not hard to figure out who the likely suspects are here.

The answer to “Who won Iraq?” is Iran in the short run, and in the long run, China and India.

Taking their “Iraq War Victory” laps

While we flounder around in the Dust Bowl, they’ve been running up their reserves, putting the money into infrastructure and bullion. The moment you wait for in a setup like this is the inevitable alliance between the regional winner and the global winners. And voila, it’s already happened: In February Iran and India signed a pipeline deal sending Iranian oil to the exploding Indian market, bypassing Bush’s Saudi/U.S. petro-outpost. If it weren’t for Pakistan, the pipeline would already be in place. And as you might have guessed, Iran and India are talking about how easily the pipeline can be looped over the Himalayas to China — an overland route invulnerable to U.S. sea power.

Luckily Pakistan lies right across the route and Pakistan is so hopelessly messed up that the CIA and ISI between them should be able to keep the black smoke pouring out of any section of line the Asiatics manage to finish.

But even that’s bad news: we’re reduced to a spoiler role, conspiring with the nastiest creeps in the world, the ISI, to keep our blood enemy Iran from forming a natural, inevitable market relationship with the two rising powers that have spent their money smart while we pissed it down the Tigris. A country as big and resilient as America can afford to lose a war now and then, especially when it’s in a place like Nam, way off the trade routes. But a war like this… I don’t know.

What’s worst is that the war’s made us dumber. When Sen. Graham asked his question, “Who won Iraq?” he thought he was being clever. He thought we’re too dumb and soft to face that question and its answers. Because there are answers, pretty grim ones. I just hope people are tough enough to start thinking about them.

Anyway, for those of you collecting War Nerd guidelines, here’s what I think are some general rules for “Who wins wars?”

1) In a big bloodbath like the Thirty Years War or WWI, the winner is usually the powers that don’t fight, but dabble in spycraft and wet ops, meanwhile consolidating their own economic power.

2) The biggest loser is almost always the country on whose territory the war is fought. (Note: You could argue that America entered WWII fairly early and still came out ahead, but on the European Front up to D-Day our role was supplying materiel to the Russians and letting them do all the bleeding for us. On both fronts we were far away from the action and that allowed us to pick where and when to commit money and troops, so the generalization still holds: the further away you are, the better.)

3) In a regional war, the big winner will be any neighboring states that can stay out of the war and work out supply contracts with the richer combatant (Thailand during Nam, Argentina in WWI, Switzerland in every war since Ur took on Ur South).

4) However, if there’s an ethnic spillover, like Turkey has with the Kurds, this relationship can backfire.

5) The worst thing a major power can do is go to war alone for “moral” reasons. This is how medieval France wasted its huge advantages on pointless Middle Eastern crusades that did nothing but revitalize the Muslims and drive down the price of white slaves in the Cairo market.

Damn, another unbelievably infuriating deja vu deal: we end up wasting our armies in the deserts of the Middle East, just like the French. Except even the French were too smart to fall for it this time around.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

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There are actual American heroes. Not a lot, and you don’t hear much about them, but there are a few.

I don’t mean working moms who spend their Saturdays spooning soup into winos. I mean classic citizen-soldiers who get it right every time, in battle and in everything else.  My favorite at the moment is Benjamin Grierson, because he not only led the finest cavalry raid of the Civil War (according to James MacPherson hisself) but managed to be right about everything, all his life—one of the few who look as good now as they did then.

The last straw for me, the thing that made me put “Grierson Column” on the topside of my hand (if I really mean to do something I write it on top of my hand; if I’m lying to myself I put it on the palm where nobody’ll see it) was when I went to what’s left of the library here and found a book actually called Heroes of the Civil War. Grierson wasn’t in it. Not even the index. I can’t forgive that. There’s an old song called something like, “If I ran the world,” and if I actually did a lot of writers would be standing against the nearest pockmarked wall.

If Grierson’s not a hero, nobody is. He looks as good today, maybe even better, than he did back then. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Heroes age pretty fast; a new issue comes up every few years, and these dead guys get vetted like they were running for office. That’s when the embarrassing parts come out: Forrest has Fort Pillow and the whole KKK thing, Grant had to go and ruin it by being President, and Sherman blew his chance to change the life of the freedmen.

But Grierson…I can’t find a bad thing about him. Even on the racial stuff, which is usually fatal to heroes from back then, Grierson comes off more heroic now than ever. I’d never believe that anybody could be that perfect, if it was somebody from these days. But those Victorians were all crazy, so when one of them was good—and there weren’t many who were—the good ones are crazy-good, a perfect mix of Dudley Doright and Subotai.

Even Grierson’s back-story is too perfect, movie-perfect. He was a music teacher in Ohio, a tall skinny Jimmy Stewart guy with the perfect comedy touch: He was scared to death of horses. What makes that perfect is that Grierson went on to lead what James MacPherson called the greatest cavalry raid of the whole war, riding from Tennessee 600 miles almost due south through enemy territory to land safe in Baton Rouge, LA, inflicting ten times the casualties he had himself—and then going on to be the one white officer who stood up for the black freedmen “Buffalo Soldiers” in the far West, at a time when America was using white-vs-black to heal up the raw North-vs-South scars.

It’s a script touch you’d drop if you were doing a movie, because it’s too much to believe.

But he had the scar to prove he came by this horse-o-phobia honestly. As a kid Grierson was kicked in the face by a horse, and carried the hoofprint on his face for the rest of his life, along with a good healthy fear of horses.

If you grew up in church, you get that story in a hot second: He was one of the Elect, horse-wise. God got him kicked, marked with the hoofprint to tell him he’d have to crawl to the ol’ rugged hoss, like it or not, and added the horse-phobia to make it more interesting. Although I’m not sure being scared of horses is even a phobia. It’s just common sense. Any animal with a tiny brain and an iron-tipped back leg cocked like a bear trap is a good thing to be scared of. I had some horsey relatives and every time they wanted to show us Gypsy or Joker, I’d be edging around trying to stay out of range of that twitchy back leg. I’d already read enough military history to know that horses killed and crippled a whole lot of soldiers. One thing I’ll say for cars: they may kill you but at least it won’t be personal. A horse can nurse a little grudge for weeks, then kick your brain out the back of your head.

Or the horse can stop short and send a rider flying into a log. That happened to Sherman in his early career, nearly crippled him. In fact there are still Civil War dudes getting hurt by horses, like these two poor guys, probably UPS drivers in real life, who were just trying to reenact the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, where Frank James got his start shooting people—except their horses weren’t as thrilled about making military history come to life as their riders were:

One man playing a Confederate cavalryman got pinned under his horse, while a Union cavalryman got injured when his horse stepped on his groin. Exactly how he got into a position where his horse could do that is unclear.

Yes, there it is, the tragedy of Civil War, brothers divided, one in gray and one in blue,  but both cursing their dumb drooling dinosaur-brained animals while they waited for the paramedics, with the groin-injury Union man groaning, “I regret that I have but two gonads to give to my reenactment society.”

Ridiculous as it sounds, they probably did a better job of reenacting the real battle than most, because real Civil War cavalrymen (and officers, who rode most of the time) got kicked, stepped on, thrown, rolled on, trampled and bit by their horses all the time. Having your horse step on your balls has to be the worst, because you know everyone’s going to make a joke of it when they’re with their friends. Even the reporter here can’t resist, with that chuckly last line about “Exactly how he got into a position where his horse could do that is unclear.” When something like that happened in a real war—and it did, all the time—they probably didn’t even bother to hide the laughs.

Grierson, growing up with a reminder on his face of what horses could do, just wanted to play his trumpet, make a little extra teaching music, and keep out of trouble. He was Southern and when the war started he said he couldn’t imagine fighting against his family. Besides, he was broke, deep in debt, with a wife to support.

Interesting thing about the best men in the Civil War: Most of them were lousy businessmen. It took the war to show what they could do. That backs up something I’ve been thinking lately, now that we’re all supposed to worship business: I don’t like business. Business is good for some people and bad for others, and the ones who are bad at it generally turn out to be the best soldiers.

Grierson finally faced the fact that he was going to have to go to war and started studying from scratch, recruiting a company, the 10^th Illinois Infantry. The way he backed into command was typical of a lot of Union officers, especially the ones from the West. In the newer states like Ohio, it all came down to local politics. That’s one big change between their time and ours. These days local politics is nothing, but in 1861 it made way more difference in your life who was the local postmaster or mayor than it did who was in the White House. And the bitchy fights over influence carried right over to the command of all the units that formed up in the early days of the war.

Grierson got caught up in the fight between Grant and Ben Prentiss. Grant took quick and hard dislikes to some people and Prentiss was one of them.  A good soldier—proved it at Shiloh—but Grant was elbowing for influence in the Western theatre and Prentiss was in his way. Since Grant was a natural power forward, he got the rebound and Prentiss ended up retiring mid-war, bitter about the whole thing.

Grierson was one of the extras in their fight and got bounced into the cavalry. Now this had to be one of the funniest moments in the whole war, this geeky, skinny music teacher with a hoofprint on his face and a huge fear of horses finding out he was transferred fro the 10^th Illinois Infantry to the 6^th Cavalry.

Grierson went from horse-hater to regimental commander because he lucked into another of those classic early-Civil War situations: The commander of the regiment, Col. Cavanaugh, was one of those hopeless drunks (Irish too, from the name) who from what I can tell made up about half the male population of the country back in 1861. Cavanaugh didn’t make much of an impression on the men, what with being gone most of the time and bombed out of his mind the rest, so they petitione the governor of Ohio to get rid of him and put the new guy, Grierson in his place.

He took to it in a second. God knows, maybe they found a horse he could relate to, or maybe he just had that insane duty-bound attitude that made battlefields like Franklin and Cold Harbor such unhealthy places for a few hours at a time. One way or another, he got back on the horse–like literally. And in a few months he turned into one of the few Federal cavalry commanders who stood out at a time when the Union cavalry was considered a joke by the rebels.

Grierson’s first assignment was chasing guerrillas in Tennessee, where his kin came from, under  Gen. Lew Wallace. The one thing everybody knows about him is he wrote Ben Hur, which I had to watch as a child because it was supposedly “Christian,” but Wallace was a pretty good officer, and he set Grierson to work hunting fellow Tennesseans. Here again Grierson is like this ridiculously perfect officer-and-gentleman type; he crushed the local bushwhackers but the Tennessee ladies loved him for his perfect manners. You don’t get that a lot from ladies you meet while hunting down their kin, but that was Grierson, Mister Ridiculously Perfect.

And he hadn’t even started the raid that won him the real glory. That came in the spring of 1863, one of the distractions Grant used to cover his cross-river move south of the city. Grant wanted Pemberton to look anywhere but downstream toward Grand Gulf and Bruinsburg, where the surviving riverboats from the big gun-running gauntlet ferried his men across to the Vicksburg side. So he sent Sherman to Snyder’s Bluff—and “bluff” was a good name for it because Sherman’s job was to pretend he was going to try his big failed Chickasaw attack again. To make sure Pemberton wouldn’t know where to send his reinforcements, Grant sent out cavalry expeditions in different directions.

The unlucky raid was commanded by Abel Streight, and the unlucky part of it was that he was tracked by Nathan Bedford Forrest. Streight started from Nashville with a brigade of about 1600 cavalry, tiptoed downstate to the Mississippi-Alabama line, and staggered east/southeast across ‘Bama. Streight’s diversion ended at Cedar Bluff, almost at the Georgia border, where Forrest bluffed Streight into surrendering by marching his few dragoons back and forth to make them look like a whole corps. Weird how these old tricks work sometimes, but you’ll notice they usually work better when they’re played by somebody like Forrest who inspired sheer terror in their opponents.

Misdirection was going to turn out to be crucial in the whole Vicksburg campaign, at tactical and strategic level. Grant’s strategy was to make Pemberton, commanding the defense of the city, fling units around against feint attacks while Grant landed the real force far to the south, on the east bank. Tactically, units operating in the West, where there was a huge territory to be covered by mostly small units, were fighting a more mobile force than the slow gyro-carving in Northern Virginia and had much more opportunity to use false moves, and old-school deceptions like Forrest’s in Cedar Bluff, to fool the enemy.

But capturing Streight took Forrest out of the Vicksburg campaign and left the second brigade under Grierson free and clear. Streight was set up to lose; his men got the nags, Grierson’s got prime horseflesh. You have to figure the choice of commanders went the same way: Streight wasn’t a bad officer, but he wasn’t a star either. Grierson already had a reputation.

And with Forrest busy chasing Streight, Grierson was up against some real C-League Confederate commanders, like Robert Richardson, whose only contributions to Civil War lore are a whiny letter home begging for more skillets and the fact that he survived the war just to get himself shot in the back outside a tavern, proving that even back then the most dangerous thing you can do is win a fight in a bar.

Subtract Forrest and the Confederate talent pool in the West is as shallow as the L. A. River. Pillow, Van Dorn, Price—it’s a hall of shame. Of course it didn’t help that some of their best, like Col. Rogers of the 2^nd Texas, were slaughtered early on or blocked for promotion by that fool Jeff Davis (Rogers had both those handicaps) but that waste of talent happened on both sides, so you have to go with the survivors.

Forrest, who made it through the war and had enough energy left to start the Klan and make a fortune, made some of his best military decisions when he disobeyed these fools’ orders, like when he carried 4000 troopers out of the wreck of Fort Donelson by himself, or near the finish of his career as a cooperative subordinate, when he told Braxton Bragg that if they ever met again, one of them would die and it wouldn’t be the guy who looked like Chuck Liddell in a bad mood. (Although Bragg was a looker himself–living proof that great-grandma Bragg had a thing for Neanderthals.)

Forrest, Definitely Not Gump

Chuck Liddell Looking Forrest-al

Grierson left Tennessee in mid-April 1863 with a brigade of about 1700 men from two Illinois and one Iowa regiments. From the beginning he was in enemy territory, which like MacPherson says is one handicap Forrest never had to face. Grierson used diversion to confuse the local snitches who tried to report his location and destination along the raid route. When he crossed a river, he did it at three or more different points; when he was

planning to move in force, he sent fake recon units galloping in all kinds of fake directions, knowing the locals would exaggerate the numbers and assume the worst, which locals always do when they spot enemy movements.

Grierson had a real genius for misdirection plays. Like Sherman did when he moved out of Atlanta, he culled all the weak or sick men from his force—but unlike Sherman, Grierson used the cull to fool the enemy. Instead of culling the force before he started out, he waited until he was well inside Mississippi and had already captured a major town before he sent his weakest 200 men back to base, along with all prisoners and surplus captured horses, giving the local spies the impression he was leading a standard short-range patrol. Grierson also pioneered the tactic of having picked men plant rumors, “disinformation” as the Soviets would have called it, in every town he passed about where the column was going. It must have been a great time for all the frustrated actors in uniform—staggering around drunk or weeping about a made-up relative who was in harm’s way, then adding a tearful beg to “tell Granma the Yankees is comin’ and she needs to git”—and then leaving the Confederate forces waiting all jilted outside granma’s house while Grierson’s troopers zigged the other way.

Grierson’s wildest, most effective juke was a false-flag operation worthy of the North Korean People’s Army. He dressed his best scouts in drab gray-brown outfits that could pass for standard Confederate irregular-cavalry uniforms and sending them ahead. If the locals happened to think these guys were fighting for Dixie, well, that wasn’t Grierson’s fault. A whole lot of useful info came to Grierson thanks to these spies, I mean scouts.

These misdirection plays let Grierson come close to doing the impossible: Conducting successful conventional warfare without atrocity in enemy civilian areas. And these weren’t the scared peasants you get in a lot of wars; this was the South back when it expected to win the war and took all Yankees but especially Yankee cavalry for hopeless cowards. Most commanders would solve this “problem of perception” the obvious way by burning villages and hanging all male civilians without a good alibi. Grierson never did.

Grierson, a softie (in some ways)  who hated making the local women cry and never let his men get rough or even search private houses, actually USED the fact that the civilians were agin’ him against them, by sending so many vanguards in so many false directions that any enemy force would be swamped with useless intelligence. An under-used tactic in low-impact CI warfare. Anybody know where else it’s been used and how well it worked? The obvious flaw is that you’d expect to lose a lot of men on these misdirection missions to casual sniping, but the level of gore around 1863 probably made that a non-worry. At that point they were worrying about losing whole units, not little individual lives.

Grierson headed straight south into Mississippi, scattering militia as he rolled into Pontotac, the first big town on the route. From 1862 on, any veteran unit—on either side—could crush pretty much any force scraped up from local militia, no matter how big it was. Grierson sent Hatch’s Iowa regiment east to threaten the Mobile and Ohio, which paralleled his line-of-march near the Alabama border. The few real Confederate regulars in the area fell for it and massed to the east, assuming this was just a standard cavalry raid with no aim besides brief tactical rail disruption (Grant on the subject: “Any damage inflicted on a railroad by cavalry is soon repaired.”)

Nobody got the bigger purpose, freeing up the territory around Vicksburg for Grant’s infantry. Nobody understood Grierson’s nerf-war CI tactics, either. But there was a bigger, maybe the biggest, strategic gain that was another year showing up in Sherman’s raid: Grierson was showing, by pushing right through the heart of Mississippi, what Sherman figured out a year later: “The South is hollow, all hollow inside”—over-mobilized and helpless once the outer defenses were beaten, classic defenseless-villager stuff that in any other country, any other era, would have meant rape’n’pillage galore. All that was holding the Union back from winning the war Mongol-style was a notion that white Americans weren’t fair game for the classic cavalry campaign, the kind that explains why Genghis Khan’s personal genes can still be found in some huge percentage of Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Me, I’d’ve gone for it, mounting all Federal troops and giving them sabers, torches and compasses that pointe south—but then you wouldn’t pick Jimmy Stewart to play me.

Grierson was such a Jimmy Stewart softie—and such a damn genius at it—that when he actually wanted to stop locals from sending info to the enemy (instead of encouraging them the way he usually did) he managed that without hanging or shooting anybody. That happened when he reached Louisville, more than halfway down Mississippi. The fact that his men were in Louisville, on a line for the rail line running west to Vicksburg, was worth keeping as quiet as long as possible. So, taking advantage of the fact that most towns in Mississippi didn’t have working telegraphs, he sent small, disciplined cavalry pickets to the edge of town to make sure no public-spirited Rebs got the idea of playing Paul Revere. And, because he was one of these insanely fair officers you get in the Civil War, he kept other pickets along his men’s route through town to stop any pilfering. Again, it was me I’d be annoyed: We’re in their territory, and we don’t get so much as a gold watch? I mean c’mon, sir, you think we signed the enlistment papers for the generous wages or the medical plan? It’s like you don’t even want to kill people or something, all these
violence-prevention strategies.

But there you go—the Jimmy Stewart thing. Wannabe Bummers like me need not apply when Grierson was in command.

Grierson’s men hit the east-west railroad at Newton Station, where his “scouts” jumped a train just coming in full of supplies, commandeered it, and did the same to another right behind it. Then, for once, there was work for the guys like me in his command, a few hours to pay the locals back for all those saddle sores. The whole depot went up in flames along with all the rolling stock, and with only a few hours to enjoy the show—the ammo cars made some great fireworks, by all accounts—Grierson headed on south.

But the fun has to end sometime, and the Confederates were scared enough by this time to send troops south after Grierson. Here’s a classic moment between your standard tactically effective officer and a real genius like Grierson. A good officer with no imagination would go out with a bang, accept that he’d done his job in the big picture—drawing troops away from Vicksburg—and surrender on cue. Grierson had other ideas, and his nerf-Mongol style really came into its own as he faked and juked the Confederates right in their heartland.

With Pemberton’s forces slogging south after him, and another Southern force under Wirt Adams waiting for him to the south, at Union Church, Grierson did something Subotai would have loved, jumping into Wirt’s defenses as if he was going to plow through to the south, then sagging to the east, right out of Adams’ range.

Adams’ cavalry shadowed them south, so they couldn’t join up with the main Union forces pushing north to Vicksburg, so Grierson kept on south, burning rails and munition depots as he went. The most incredible thing about the whole raid is that he didn’t have to do a full-on frontal attack, thanks to all those feints, until he was at the Tickfaw River on the road to Baton Rouge, which was in Union hands. At the crossing he finally had to face what every commander hated most: A river crossing under fire from an enemy entrenched on the opposite bank.

Grierson crossing Tickfaw under fire–I love dioramas, ain’t ashamed to say it.

Grierson tried one attack which failed, then redeployed his men according to what Rommel discovered fighting in Rumania in WW I: “Two men in support-fire to one man on the attack.” That was enough to drive the enemy away from the crossing, since they were too stingy or stupid to burn Wall’s Bridge in the first place, which would actually have delayed Grierson a while.

Grierson’s brigade reaches Baton Rouge

When Grierson’s men rode into Baton Rouge, half of them were zombies, since they’d been going on about three hours’ sleep a day for way too long. But they were heroes in the North, with an illustration in Harper’s Weekly and everything, and at a time when most of the opinion-makers in NYC were as on-top-of-it as they usually are, moaning about Grant being “bogged down in the mud before Vicksburg, no good to themselves or anybody else.”

As MacPherson said in Battle Cry of Freedom, Grierson’s raid outshines anything Forrest did (except maybe capturing steamboats with cavalry, but that’s more of a Buster Keaton novelty act than a strategic victory). Imagine Forrest riding 600 miles through New England with minimal casualties and ending up safe in Confederate lines, and you’ll have an idea of what a phenomenal accomplishment it really was.

It was a tactical victory, with far more casualties inflicted than suffered and huge amounts of materiel destroyed; it was a mid-range strategic victory, and a great one, preventing the reinforcement of Vicksburg at a key moment; and it was a long-term decisive demonstration that the South was over-mobilized, “all hollow,” as Sherman said. Most historians credit Grant’s return march after that earlier failed Vicksburg campaign with showing Sherman that a mobile force could live off the land, but Grierson’s raid showed something even more important: the fact that there was no defense worth mentioning inside the walls of Festung Dixie.

Grierson survived the war and fought Forrest twice, coming out of it with a 1-1 record, which was about the best anyone ever did against Forrest. But the rest of his wartime service was a letdown after the Raid, and it deserves the capital letter.

Grierson took a drop in rank when the war ended, like most Union officers. (Well, you could say Confederate officers took a bigger one.) Grierson was a brevet Major General in 1865, dropped back to Colonel after Appomatox. But it was while he commanded a regiment in the Indian Wars that Grierson proved he was more than a raider. He was one of the few Union officers who got the point that it wasn’t enough to free the blacks and leave them to hang with the surviving relatives of the people who used to own them down South. He volunteered as Colonel of the 10^th Cavalry Regiment, which Sherman had ordered formed from black Union vets. It was the usual Civil-War setup: White officers with black troops. The 10^th was posted to Kansas in 1866, assigned to protect the Kansas Pacific RR from Injun attacks, then Oklahoma (“Indian Territory” at the time) and finally the Dakota Territory.

10th Cavalry troopers

You didn’t get sent to Dakota if you were the brass’s pet unit. Once the Civil War was over, the race issue was done as far as most of America was concerned. Col. Hoffman, the commander of Fort Leavenworth, the 10^th’s first assignment, made it real clear to Grierson and his troops that they weren’t wanted by ordering them to camp in a swamp a mile from the fort. Just in case the blacks hadn’t got the message, Hoffman ordered them not to line up within 15 yards of the white units at Leavenworth. Grierson stood up for his troops and had a yelling match right in front of the assembled troops. Since Hoffman was base commander—and more important, Hoffman had the whole place behind him, nobody in the mood to let the blacks into their little club—Grierson pushed to get the 10^th transferred to another base, Fort Riley, as soon as he could.

There were gunfights between white and black troops—just like Nam almost exactly 100 years later, after Tet broke morale. The theatre commander was Phil Sheridan, who wasn’t exactly a racist—when he was in charge of reconstructing Texas, a job which would be right up there with reconstructing Afghanistan, he was disgusted by the white mobs who killed three dozen blacks and said, “If I owned Texas and Hell I would rent Texas and live in Hell.” But Sheridan was a total-war man; he’d proved that in the Shenandoah and he kept the same policy on the plains. If the Sioux were the enemy, starve ’em out, kill the last buffalo—no mercy. Sheridan gets called a racist and blamed for that “only good Indian” remark, but it’s not all that clear he really said it and my take is, if he’d been in any other war in history, he’d have said the same thing about the planter families of Dixie. He was just a natural war-of-extermination man.

Grierson leading 10th Cavalry

Grierson wasn’t. In fact, Grierson’s position on the plains makes Job’s troubles look like a casual Friday afternoon in a cushy civil service job. In the first place Grierson was trying to prove that black Americans could make good troopers, but he also sympathized hard with the Indians—who were the only enemy those black troopers had to prove their worth
as soldiers against. Dudley Doright would’ve shot himself, but Grierson stayed on the horse like he always did, did his best in a rotten world. He fought the other white officers who wanted his troops out of sight, out of the army, just plain out; but he fought for the Indians too, as much as he could.

There were a few decent people out there, and Grierson worked with them, especially this Quaker Indian agent. It’s kind of a constant: Over and over, in the worst place, you can count on the Quakers. Too bad they’ve disappeared. On second thought, that’s probably WHY they disappeared.

Grierson kept trying, picking the best spots he could to put the reservations, get respect for his buffalo soldiers, make the land-grabs that were bound to come a little less brutal. Sheridan thought he was a wuss, and his brother officers thought he was crazy for refusing a transfer away from the black regiment and the plains winters. He stayed on the job until 1890, which is not bad when you consider it was one of those situations where there’s no good solution. It’s got nothing much to do with that Wounded-Knee/bleeding-heart dumbed-down story of bad whities and good Injuns. When the power difference is as big as it was between the US and the Sioux, it’s going to end the same way if both sides are purple with green spots. But it’s not something you can feel good about.

Maybe that’s why it’s so much easier to think about The Raid than Grierson’s way longer time on the plains afterward. The Indian Wars could only end one way: Extinction of the Plains Tribes. The Civil War was one of the real few other kinds of war—the only other one I can think of is the English Civil War—when people who see themselves as being the same blood, the same language, the same everything, fight each other hard but clean, at least by normal standards—one of those rare wars where most encounters are actual battles, not massacres. Grierson, who doesn’t seem to have had either a weak or a mean bone in his body, was made for a war like that. The Plains wars brought out what you might call a more standard kind of warrior, people as messed-up as me.

The other Americans, the Griersons, are hard to believe in sometimes. There don’t seem to be a lot around right now, and they went away pretty fast after 1865 too, turned fast to a generation of bankers, like now—scum of the earth. Weird process, that quick turn, but we seem to do it over and over. The only Grierson I ever met was this big kindly Swede from Minnesota who taught my Social Studies class. He actually believed in democracy and debate, which in Bakersfield, believe me, put him in the world’s tiniest minority.

We laughed at him; he retired for psych stuff after his wife left him for another woman and it got around. We thought that was the funniest thing in the world. He told us on the last day, “I thought I was a teacher, but you have shown me otherwise.” That was his style, full-sentence with no contractions—raw meat for class-clown types.

Maybe there has to be what a bio teacher would call a habitat for people like that. Imagine a Grierson born in 1860, in time for the Robber Barons. He’d be ground up and sold to Purina, like Grant would—like both of them would if they were around now.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

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Some of the weirdest, longest wars around have been on the other side of the Big River, but for some reason most American war nerds would rather read about Eurasian battles. Not sure why, except I remember when I was growing up, Mexico just seemed like a depressing place. That was because us gringos don’t go much past the border towns, which are as scummy as border towns anywhere. Once you get past the zebra-striped burro zone, it gets a lot more interesting—still depressing, but a lot more interesting.

I’ve written about a few of the bigger Mexican battles like Celaya, and Black Jack Pershing’s Elmer-Fudd hunt for Pancho Villa, but there was (still is, in fact) a longer, weirder war down in the Yucatan.

The Yucatan is where the Maya had their wacky world. The Mayans are the leading candidate for  alien-bred humans, and you can see why when you look into them. They were weird even by local standards, little big-nosed people who had lots of interesting habits including building uninhabitable mini-pyramids, mutilating themselves to celebrate every holiday—you know it’s Arbor Day if the local Mayans are sticking sharp thorns into their dicks. An interesting set of people, with a kind of depth you don’t get from the Aztecs. Those Aztecs were pretty straightforward: We’ll kill ya, period. In that way the Aztecs were a good match for the Spanish, another bunch of shoot-firsters. The difference came down to weapons and the fact that the Spanish, who were a new brand in Mexico, hadn’t had time to piss off all potential allies like the Aztec had. By the time the Tlaxcalans and other tribes got their buyers’ remorse, they were already enslaved and the Aztecs were gone, another top-heavy over-centralized empire that fell fast.

The Maya were always a deeper, stronger people. By the time the Spanish arrived, their glory days were over,  but they still had a sense of themselves as being worth something, empire or no empire, and they held on a lot longer than the Aztecs. It helped that the Spanish didn’t like the hot Mayan lowlands as much as the Aztecs’ central highlands, so the Mayans kept the numbers advantage. Not by much, though; fifty years after the Spanish arrived, the Mayan population was down to 150,000, maybe a tenth of what they had been.  They died of European imports like smallpox, but the Spanish overlords died of good old tropical favorites like yellow fever and malaria, so they kept pace—in numbers, anyway: three Mayans for every Spaniard on the semi-healthy west side of the Yucatan, five Mayans for every Spaniard in the hotter east-side lowlands.

Disease discriminates, always has. The whites were able to settle North America because they came from a bigger gene pool than the Injuns; the Africans were able to hold on to Africa in spite of losing damn near every battle against the Euros for the simple reason that the white folks (red folks, if you asked the Africans—Euro skin turns red fast when it’s sweating in 110-degree heat yelling at slaves) came from a middling-big gene pool, compared to the Africans—they say there’s more genetic diversity in some African villages than in a lot of whole European countries.

So if Africa was a clear win for the local genes, and North America overall a clear win for the Euro imports, the Yucatan was a sort of a draw: the Europeans were able to kill off a lot of Mayans with new imported diseases, but the Mayans could count on their friends the mosquitoes and a whole bunch of parasites and gut worms to stand up for the home team.

I’m not even talking about intent here. War isn’t a law court; I don’t know how much the Euros wanted to donate smallpox to the Injuns, although we’ve all heard those stories about the Anglos generously contributing blankets crawling with the virus to the Algonquin. Intent doesn’t mean much; it’s a matter of death rate vs. death rate, and whether the other team cries or cheers at your funeral doesn’t make much difference.

The Mayans are harder to put out than a tire fire, and slower than a peat fire in the Delta. I remember those fires–we used to go up to fish Frank’s Tract every fall and you could smell the peat burning under your feet. Good way to think about guerrilla war: a peat fire in wet delta dirt.

The first encounters between Conquistadores and Mayans happened around 1512, and the last armed conflict between them was…lessee, what’s the date today? Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration but you can definitely call the neo-Zapatista uprisings in the 1990s another chapter in the Mayan pushback. Of course they had coffee-house urban Mestizos like what’s his name, “Comamandante Marcos,” some kind of professor, in command, but the troops were pure Mayan villager. Which makes damn near 500 years of fighting. Not at a steady pace, but then guerrilla war, ethnic war, never happens at a steady pace. If the Eastern Front in WW II is at one end of the spectrum, total war every day until one side is all dead, then this is close to the other end of the scale, slow misery year after year with occasional bursts of crazy chop-fests.

Even the first conquest took a long time, from the 1520s to the late 1540s. The Maya were hopelessly divided into local village groups—and although that hurt them tactically, I get the impression that in the long run it helped them. This is an interesting thing about guerrilla war: It can actually be much harder to stomp a divided irregular force than a totally organized one.

When the weaker tribe joins in a conventional army, it may win a lot of heroic battles but it won’t ever win the war. The Empire—Roman, Persian, British—can afford bad commanders, bad troops, lost battles, because it’s got a system already in place. The rebels lose one battle and then—zzap!—the enemy’s scum-of-the-earth conscripts are loose in your heartland and you’re lucky if half your village survives that little spree.

Or, to take a more what-they-call-topical example,  Iraq—remember the ridiculous search for a Mister Big who could be grabbed and neutralized, ending the whole mess? That was all based on the idea there had to be an HQ, a single center to the insurgency. First it was going to be Saddam, then Zarqawi the Invisible, then, I don’t know, Gollum or something, but it never happened. They just divided by neighborhood and went into another long sulk, which’ll end with a bang one of these years.

So the Aztecs and Incas, overcentralized to the point of God-king crazy, fell like a Lego penthouse, but the Maya, all spread around the selva in sullen little villages, held out for 20 years.

“Peace” post-conquest: Mayan puppet (Hidalgo) strangling brother on Spanish command

Then something that you could call “peace” broke out. Funny thing about “peace”: that’s what the books written by the winners call what happens when the losers give up. It was peace if you were one of the Spanish overlords in your hacienda, with your pick of the fruit, meat and girls of all your peons; but it wasn’t exactly peace if you were one of those peons. There’ve been lots of  comparisons of Dixie slavery and Maya peonage, usually to let some jerk off the hook, either a Spaniard vampire or plantation slave-breeder, but it’s closer to truth to say that they were both about as close to Hell on this earth as you can get without just killing the victim. Always makes me laugh when some smug bastards says the nasty rebels started the violence. There was plenty of violence before that, ya dummy. It was just all one way and didn’t make the news. “Violence” to these geniuses is what starts when the losing side starts fighting back.

Well this white-man’s-hacienda/red-man’s-Hell thing was not as Jimmuh Cartuh might say, the basis of a true an’ lastin’ peace. When you’ve  truly crushed the slaves, like the Dixie planters did their Africans—forbidden them to use their tribal languages, mixed up tribe and tribe til you’ve got nothing but Alex Haley sad-sack Roots stories–then you really can have “peace”–if you wanna call it that. But when the slaves still remember who they are, like the Haitians and the Mayans did, you only get a generation or so of “peace” until the old dreams flare up after some ex-lord’s daughter gets taken up to the big house to be raped or some kid of noble blood gets beaten to death for not cutting enough henquen in his 14-hour shift. That’s how it was for the Mayans: They groveled when they had to, and fought back when they could.

The really bad times for the Maya—as compared to the bad times before—came after 1833, when the Spaniard Yucatecos realized the agave plants (henequen) that grew like weeds could be made into rope and other saleable stuff. They grabbed all the Mayans’ communal lands (ejidos) and made them into plantations, with the villagers as field slaves. People will do all kinds of sleazy stuff for a 700 percent profit, which is what you could make in the 1830s planting henequen. The whole discovery of henequen was a lot  like the cotton gin: A clever little dealie that messed up the lives of a whole lot of people.

You’ll notice I’m calling the white overlords of the Yucatan Spaniards, not Mexicans. That’s cuz that’s what they were. When Mexico threw the Spanish out in 1821, los Peninsulares (the Spaniards) cleared out of the Highlands, but stuck around in the Yucatan, well out of reach of the new “Mexican” elite. So in every fight between whites and Mayans up to the 20^th century, it was Spanish vs. Mayan, not Mexican vs. Mayan.

The biggest pushback by the Mayans was the Caste War, which ran longer than a Qadafi speech: something like 50 years, or up to 80, depending on how you keep score. The first shots were fired in 1847 and the last casualties among Mexican gov’t troops attacking a Mayan village to bring it under Federal control were recorded in 1933. Yup, 1933. Up in the snowy heartland of the hairy barbarians, us Alemani, FDR was having fireside chats; down there in the Maya lowlands, the very last village was taking KIA (five villagers vs two gov’t troops) to stay independent of Mexico—more than 80 years after the Maya started fighting back.

If you know your US military history you can guess why this biggest push started in 1847. Yup, we were having a little scuffle with our Mexi-friends, called (in these parts) the Mexican War. And when the news of the Anglo invasion hit Yucatan, the local Spaniards were so offended at the thought of Yanqui domination that they did the one thing slave-owners should never do. And what is that? All you prospective slave-owners better memorize this one: Never, never arm your slaves. The Confederates knew it, which is why Pat Cleburne, one of the finest Dixie officers around, never rose past division command: Bein’ a mere immigrant, he dared to suggest the obvious: “The slaves will fight for the Union if we don’t get them to fight for us.” The Rebel brass heard that and stuck Pat in division-level command long enough for him to get killed leading a suicidal (or like FoxNews would say, “homicidal”) charge at Franklin  under Hood, a man not smart enough to shine Cleburne’s boots.

And they were right, the wackos: Slaveowners shouldn’t arm their slaves. It gives them ideas. The Spaniards armed their Maya peons, but the Yanquis never went as far south as the Yucatan. So…you’re a Maya,descendant of Cloud Jaguar 13 or some other offspring of the Hero Twins, and suddenly you’re holding this musket that used to be the symbol of Spanish rule. It’s going to occur to you sooner or later that you can point it in any direction you want, such as: At the forehead of the fat Spanish prick who beat your uncle to death, stole the communal lands and raped your little sister.

And they did. It wasn’t a pretty war; it won’t get made into any game (although it’d be great if somebody’d finally figure out how to game real irregular war). There weren’t a lot of set-piece battles. And that’s one reason the Maya lasted so long: Because victory in conventional battle is a trap to an ethnic guerrilla army, what architects call “an attractive nuisance.” Last thing you want is to control territory and parade in uniform. Mao tried to tell y’all that. Beats me why nobody listens to Mao; I don’t give a damn about his politics, the man was a military genius and the sooner we admit that the sooner we stop running around like fools.

The Maya, splintered into local forces, fought most of the war by bushwhacking any white who  wandered into the selva, avoiding battles,cringing and groveling when soldiers came around, not worrying about anything beyond the village and the ejido. The one time they got together and fought as a single army is a good lesson in why instant peasant armies (“jacqueries” is the military-history word) don’t work so good.

The Spanish hit first, massacring a lot of villages after hearing that the Maya were getting together and holding on to their muskets. The Mayans retaliated by chopping up 80 Spaniards in Villadolid, which had a rep as a particularly nasty Spanish-only gated community. And so the dance began, the way it does in real wars: Massacre followed by massacre, not as “atrocity” but simple, sensible tactics, based on the fact that the land has to belong to one tribe or the other.

The Spanish, with better organization and weapons, were winning the massacre war. The Mayans were scared into a temporary—real temporary—unity push, so their united army marched on Merida, the big Spanish city on the north side of the peninsula, and had it completely surrounded in 1848. The story goes—I don’t know if it’s true, because it sounds too good to be—the story goes that the Spanish commander was ready to order the evacuation of Merida but there wasn’t enough paper in town to print up the notices. The few Spanish troops and militiamen he had under command were stretched along the road from Merida to the coast, guarding the civvies’ escape route. Everything was ready—but this guy, who must’ve been a bureaucrat’s dream man, couldn’t order the evacuation because there was no damn paper.

And so the big Spanish bug-out was delayed a day or so…and then, ta-da! The actual bugs arrived. One of those insect miracles, like the Mormon locusts: All of a sudden the sky around Merida was full of flying ants. It was the signal to the Maya peasants waiting outside the walls with their muskets and machetes to go home and plant their maiz (“You call it corn,” as the snotty fake Injun lady used to say in the commercial). That was the signal their fathers and father’s fathers, etc. had always used: Ants fly, plant corn. So, like a bunch of plain old walking ants, they went home. But they held on to their muskets.

That’s the weakness of peasant armies with no discipline: They’ll never win a decisive conventional battle. But when you see what happened in the long term, it’s the strength of those armies too. The Mayans didn’t surrender, then or ever. They dispersed, but held on to the eastern lowlands and as much of the west side as they could claim. There was no Mayan Mister Big to capture and kill, no head vampire to stake.

The Spanish had used up their miracle on the flying ants, and the Mayans, like a nerd turning in a set in Risk, decided to use theirs in 1850, after the Spaniards had pushed back and taken the west side—or at least the cleared parts. They managed to capture and kill the closest thing the Mayans had to a leader, Cecilio Chi. The Maya needed a miracle of their own.

And when the Mayan miracle popped up, it was classic Maya weirdness: A Talking Cross. The Mayans had a thing about trees—well, they had a lot of “things,” like you know how the Hero Twins insulted the Lords of Death in the big Maya epic poem? They call them “Users of Owls.” Oooh, that’s gotta hurt! “Mom, he called me a user a’ owls!

Their God-stories said the world came out of a tree, and the hero twins—I dunno, something else about a tree—so it was natural they’d tree up when it was time for a cause-saving miracle. The story went that lightning hit a bunch of trees on a hilltop and they burnt into the shape of a cross. Which was a pretty cool way to hit the perfect demographic mix, actually. The Cat’lics had already been around a while, and the Mayans had gone for that Muthah-Mary stuff in a big way, so some Mayan rebel Karl Rove type realized whoa, we’ve got the perfect story here, it’s got the Catholic cross thing and the Mayan tree thing all in one—and so the Croozoob, the “Cross People,” were launched.

Some people—probably Spanish sympathizers—say there actually was a local Mayan Karl Rove type who knew ventriloquism and made the tree “talk,” but ventriloquism to me is one of those things you believe in when you’re 11 and find out doesn’t work nearly as well as the movies tell you (like silencers). And more to the point, there are plenty of miracles in history that can’t be put down to somebody throwing their voice. What happens seems a lot simpler than that: When people are desperate, they’ll believe all kinds of crap. And after their leader Chi was killed, the Mayans were pretty desperate. They needed some sign God or gods or whoever was on their side, so they made one up.

The place where the tree started chatting was a village on the east side of the Yucatan Peninsula that the Mayans called Chan Santa Cruz, which is another classic Cat’lic/Pagan name, because “Chan” apparently means “Great” in Mayan and “Santa Cruz” means no letter grades—no, actually it means “Holy Cross.” So even the name has that mix of language and gods you’d want if you were that grubby peasant Karl Rove running the show.

Chan Santa Cruz: Where Trees Talk without Shrooms

The cross kept it simple: It told the Mayans to keep fighting. They did, but they were too weak to stage another advance on the big Spanish city. They settled for holding an arc of malaria swamp around the village with the jabbery cross in it, which just happened to be in the center of the area where no Spaniards really wanted to live, and where the Maya outnumbered the whites 5:1. Miracles are wonderful the way they take demographics into account like that.

Like a lot of tribal wars, this one didn’t have a neat Appomatox ending. There was a treaty signed in 1855, but when you start to look at Mexican history—Hell, any history—your eyes start to glaze over when you see the word “treaty,” because you know it’ll mean about as much as the average UN- brokered African agreement. Nothing really changed. The Croozoob held that arc of land around Chan Santa Cruz, and machete’d any white dumb enough to wander around the selva; the Spanish still had all the money and connections, and treated the Mayans like crap the way they always had; and nobody in the Mestizo elite in Mexico City cared either way. For that matter, not many cared even in Merida; there was no profit to be got out of those eastern coastal lowlands anyway, so let the crazy cruzeros have them.

What finally made a difference was crop changes. Just like the henequen boom started the worst times for the Maya, the chewing-gum boom in the early 20^th-c. broke their ethnic monopoly on the peninsula. Those trees that the Mayans loved so much didn’t just talk, they oozed a sap called “chicle,” which may sound familiar if you know anybody who chews “Chiclets.” That sap could be made to double yer flavor, double yer profits, and suddenly Mestizo peasants from the Highlands were pouring into the Yucatan to draw it. The pure Mayan feel of the place was diluted a little bit, which if you ask me is a good reason not to trust trees any more. Trees’ll turn on you as easily as a cat will, they’re just slower.

The whole war was a classic slow-cook crock-pot classic. Like I said, the last Mayan village fell to Mexican Army troops in 1933, but that doesn’t mean the others were already wearing suits and saluting the Snake’n’Eagle. They still believed in an underworld in those limestone caves under their feet and dropped offerings in the sinkholes (cenotes) that led the way down to where the “Users of Owls” lived. They still died of stuff that respectable people up No’th didn’t get any more. And they were still more than ready to march when the latest round of coffee-house Guevaras called them out a few years ago.

Which kind of raises the question: Who won?

When we lived in Long Beach, my dad used to say the same thing every time we saw the sign to the yacht club: “You know what a boat is?”

He’d ask the car that, then wait for somebody to answer him—he was a master of timing, except  nobody ever answered him no matter how long he waited, because my mom and sisters were always mad at him about something and I was too busy remembering that the Yacht Club was on some subdivision street that had the balls to call itself “Appian Way,” and I’d be furious in the back seat thinking no goddamn Roman legion ever marched down that stupid street, just those selfish Hot Wheels Merc sports models with seats for two people, selfish rich bastards. “Appian Way”! The nerve of those developers.

So while the car was enjoying a nice long sullen silence, he’d have to answer himself: “A boat is a hole in the water that you throw money in.”

It cracked him up every time, and probably made him feel better about the fact that we were as likely to be buying a boat anytime soon as we were to be running the Long Beach Marathon—I can just see us doing that, one of those funny “family run projects” where the whole fit bunch gets into a 20 ft caterpillar costume and trots along for 26 miles thinking they’re cute, the kind of local-news story that makes you wish you could see what an AK would do to a giant caterpillar.

Precious mem’ries, how they linger. I was remembering those drives down Highway 1 after reading the stories that China’s starting sea trials for its first aircraft carrier.

The weird thing about that story is that I grew up in California, so I have this prejudice that Chinese people are smart. And why would smart people build an aircraft carrier? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—I’ll say it as many times as my dad told that hole-in-the-water joke if I have to: Aircraft carriers are the worst weapons around, giant holes in the water that you throw hundreds of billions of dollars into.

Being the Chinese, they did it the smart way: Got the basic platform on the cheap, did some smart bargaining against their ex-rivals the Russians. When the Soviet paper tiger shredded, there were bargains galore, including all the military hardware any rising power could buy. The Soviet Black Sea fleet rusted at anchor in what was now the independent country of Ukraine. (They dropped the “The” along with the Soviet alliegance; it’s just “Ukraine” now, like those bands that get mad if you add “The” to their names.)

People were starving in Ukraine—the honest ones. The not-so-honest ones were getting rich selling off all the Soviet guns, tanks, missiles, ships and secrets they could to the highest bidder. Soviet ships were rusting in every harbor in the world. Not just military ones; every port in every country had one or two rusting Soviet fishing ships sinking a foot or two a year, sometimes with their crews stuck on board, drinking themselves to death and stabbing each other to relieve the boredom.

Most of the Black Sea fleet ended up as scrap steel. In fact there’s probably some of a Soviet missile cruiser in that Hyundai you drive to work. A certain Chinese scrap-metal company strolled over to have a look at one hulk in particular—a Soviet carrier started in the 1980s, the Varyag. Judging by the way Chinese housewives look for veggies, I’d imagine the scrap dealer did a lot of shaking his head and sniffing and grumbling in Mandarin about how spotty it looked, and wasn’t that a worm poking out of the hull, and it smelled funny (all of it probably true, too). In the end, this dealer said he had a buyer in Macau who wanted to turn the hulk of the Varyag into a floating casino. Whoever was selling the ship—some local politico’s son, I’d imagine—bought that story and sold it cheap. Sad to say—because I have a lot of respect for Russian forces, though not so much for the way they treat the poor bastards in the ranks—that story pretty much sums up relations between Communist Russia and China. The Chinese won that century hands down. (Imagine Russia without Stalin; no way it could’ve turned out worse. Now imagine China without Mao; no way it could’ve turned out this good.)

Well, it turned out there was no casino deal in Macau. Instead the scrap dealer was a patriotic associate of the PLA, and he towed the ship straight to Dalian harbor, where they started taking it apart and remaking it into China’s first carrier.

By the way, I’m not kidding when I say that double-dealing ship buyer was a real patriot. That’s the difference between the Chinese defense establishment and the DoD: They’re at the stage we were in about 1942, where sure, there was some profiteering from the contractors, but at least it wasn’t something to brag about, and when people got caught they had the decency to be ashamed. So maybe this ship  buyer made a profit on the deal, but I bet he got a good deal for his country. Compare that with the disgusting crap that US defense contractors do now and you’ll see why we are so totally screwed. A month ago the Secretary of the Navy admitted to “systemic failure” when he admitted there were “multimillion dollar” scams in a procurement contract.

The Chinese are still dead serious about building up their navy. You read the stories about their excitement over this new carrier and it’s like being back in 1942, when everybody believed in this stuff—before Navy heroes turned into turds like Duke Cunningham.

In the first place, everybody knows there ain’t nobody can online war-nerd it like the Chinese. Just imagine 100 million sunken-chested or baby-fat Chinese war nerds hyperventilating garlic breath onto their monitors at the thought of their resurgent homeland breaking into the Carrier-owners club, the ultimate frat for countries with any military snobbery at all.

Well, that’s what’s happening right now in China.

There’s been this huge online survey to see what the new carrier should be named. See, this is the difference between a good healthy war-nerd country and a bunch of degenerates like Europe. In Europe they have these contests to name the baby polar bear at the Berlin Zoo (and then the damn thing dies anyway—sums it all up); in China every guy who can’t make the varsity is whacking the keyboard to chime in on what to call the new carrier:

“Recently, the aircraft carrier has become one of the hottest topics on Internet forums [in China]. About 80 percent of netizens say they would like to donate money to build the first Chinese aircraft carrier.

According to a survey conducted by Chinese portal Sina, 45 percent of respondents are in favour of naming the aircraft carriers after historical Chinese figures such as Mao Zedong and Zheng He; only 12 percent think they should be named after major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. And 30 percent of respondents think the names of aircraft carriers should reflect the growing national strength of China.”

Read that, and hang yer heads in shame, fellow war nerds. Been a long time since “80 percent of netizens” in these parts cared about anything but how Chaz Bono’s gonna dance now that he’s got some weird ersatz dick tucked under his fat belly.

Four out of five of those poor 80-hour a week wage slaves in some filthy anthill city in China can’t wait to donate their own hard-earned money to build the carrier. We wouldn’t do that here, because we know goddamn well where the money would go: to buy Duke Cunningham another night on the yacht with some contractor-paid call girl. That’s right: Duke Cunningham lived on a yacht owned by his DoD contractor pimp buddy, Mitchell Wade. Wade named the boat the S.S. Duke Stir. And Duke wanted Wade to buy him girls and send them to the boat.

We’re supposed to think entrepreneurs outrank Alexander the Great now, supposed to consider the business dude just the crown of creation.  But from what I see looking at DoD contractors, they’re scumbags, modern sutlers trailing after the army for a quick nickel. Sutlers and pimps. Sherman quarantined them, one to a corps; Grant would’ve had them shot if he could’ve. Those were the days.

These Chinese war nerds don’t buy all this crap about the glorious businessman (even though they’re the best businessmen in the world); you can see that from the way they appreciate Mao. To them, he’s not some commie bogeyman, he’s George frickin’ Washington. Which he was, like it or not. Mao unified a seriously messed-up country all split into gang turfs, gave the most cynical people in the world a new sense of patriotism, turned Chinese who didn’t care about anyone who wasn’t a blood relative into suicide commandos who marched into North Korea in midwinter with nothing but quilted-cloth pants, a bag of rice and ammo, and jumped up out of the snow to give the US Army the biggest surprise of its life.

Zheng He: That’s one big eunuch–good name for a carrier

Zheng’s another interesting choice, a little weird for my tastes but good solid patriotic stuff anyway. He (the pronoun, not the guy’s name) was this 7 ft tall eunuch who led the 15^th-c. Chinese fleet that sailed around the world. There was some book about it a couple years ago.

I don’t take too much stock in these books. When ten books come out all at once with titles like “How the Irish Saved the World” or “How Indian Civilization Turned Us from Apes into Geniuses” or “How the Chinese Actually Taught the Italians to Make Pasta” what it really seems to mean is: The ethnic group in the title is finally getting some cash. Once they move up the demographic rankings, they generate all these third-generation kiddie profs who start diving into the shelves to prove that granddaddy’s granddaddy actually was the first hominid to do this or that. Soon they’ll prove that whatever tribe comes into money in 2020 or so (the Persians—my guess) actually invented money while developing the wheel while performing brain surgery while discovering compassion and picnics, and looked good doing it too.

And that’s the point about this Chinese carrier: It’s about national pride, not military usefulness. The Chinese are after both those things, and it’s actually incredibly cool the way they’ve managed to get both. First, since they’re smart, they came up with a real weapon that totally neutralizes the US carrier fleet, a weapon that could sink all 11 of the US carriers in a few minutes, without even having to  bother with all the screening vessels and air cover and other useless “defenses” we’ve stacked around them. It’s not a glamorous weapon, it just works.

DF-21 Incoming

It’s a long-range ballistic missile specifically designed to kill carriers and other oversized surface targets. This missile, the DF-21, has a 900 mile range and drops down on the carrier from directly above.

“Equally intriguing has been the depiction of this capability in the Chinese media. A lengthy November 2009 program about anti-ship ballistic missiles broadcast on China Central Television Channel 7 (China’s official military channel) featured an unexplained — and rather badly animated — cartoon sequence. This curious ‘toon features a sailor who falsely assumes that his carrier’s Aegis defense systems can destroy a incoming ASBM as effectively as a cruise missile, with disastrous results.”

Read that and weep all over again. That’s our big consolation prize, the fact that the Chinese weapons video is “rather badly animated”—as in, “Ha ha, well at least they still can’t make good cartoons!”?

Never mind the animation, what about the plot? Cuz if you don’t see that that sailor who goes skipping along thinking that that phony-ass Aegis system is going to stop a warhead coming directly down at meteor speed is based on solid reality, you’re crazy. We have nothing, NO-thing, that will stop those missiles. Here’s a nice little quote on the reentry speed of an ICBM warhead. I’m not a physicist but I’d guess a warhead with a 900-mile range goes up enough to come down at roughly the same speed as this:

“The reentry speed of an ICBM is so great that the reentry vehicle can be filled with concrete for a fixed target, or metal rods for an area target; the kinetic energy of the warhead is so great that a conventional explosive filling would add no appreciable energy.”

We’re talking about man-made asteroids here. Remember the dinosaurs? You can add Carrier-o-saurus ex-Rex to your kid’s dino list. So if you’re into military maps, you can now put a red zone for 900 miles out from the coast of China and mark it off “US Carrier No-Go Zone.”

DF-21 (land-based) range: Carrier-free zone

I haven’t been able to see if this DF-21 can be fired from subs yet—I don’t think it can be at the moment—but nearly every missile can be adapted to sub use. If you can fire a Trident from a sub, this can go underwater too, sooner or later.

And when it does, well…that carrier that used to rule the waves will be exactly what those RMS This-or-That battleships were in WW II: Expensive statuary sitting in the harbor. The battleship got a fake “new lease on life” in the later stages of the Pacific War, thanks to total US air superiority, but if you want to see what happens to a WW II-era battleship in real combat, check out what happened to the pride of the British fleet, the battleship Prince of Wales and its teammate in Task Force Z (“Z”–good name, maybe they saw what was coming) Repulse. They ran into primitive Japanese dive bombers, stone-age tech with human pilots, flying low at a few hundred miles an hour, and yet they still hit the bottom in a few minutes.

Last above-water seconds of the P of W

Strange how not many naval warfare nerds want to talk much about that disaster. Might be because the Brits put on such a lousy performance in the Pacific War in general, so lousy they hushed the whole thing up and insisted on hanging a lot of Japanese naval officers in revenge, maybe just so they wouldn’t publish any memoirs with titles like “What was up with you losers skedaddling out of Singapore without even putting up a fight?”

Kinda sad: Brit diver flags P of W

They tagged along with what turned out to be the winning team and turned a lousy military record into a whole lotta braggin’. And in the meantime, nobody noticed that the rest of the battleships, theirs and everybody else’s battleships stayed in harbor until the admirals were absolutely certain of total, absolute air superiority—like, until the last coffee-grinder noise of an Me-109’s machine guns went all quiet on the Western Front.

And that’s where the carriers will spend their time if there’s anything like an all-out conventional war in the near future: In port.

Which brings us back to the big question: Why would smart military planners like the PLA spend so much money on a useless weapon like a carrier?

There are two possible reasons and I think we’ve got both, working together:

1. Decoy. This is a classic, and it lets the Chinese military tease the USN into wasting huge, unbelievably huge, money on a useless fleet of almost a dozen carriers and the incredibly expensive, over-engineered planes that fly from them. The US carrier fleet is a boondoggle at best, and one that costs a thousand times more than all the welfare cheats that your Congress-idiot loves to rant about put together. Even the USN, dumbest and sleaziest of all the services, knows that, but Congress just plain will not stop funding for carriers.

It’s easy and fun, if you’re Chinese—to tap into stupidity like that, especially when it’s mixed up with paranoid crap from the right and entrepreneurial sleaze from the sutlers. “China got carrier! Duh, we need more carrier!” Yeah, more cowbell, that’s the solution. You can’t fix stupid, but if you’re a potential enemy, why would you want to?

Aegis cruiser firing: Pure potlatch

The Chinese are polite most of the time, but they can’t help gloating about how they can use their undervalued Yuan to buy the makings of a carrier cheap off the dying Western economies:

“With a view to both marine security and economic factors, now is the right time for China to built [sic] its first aircraft carrier,” said Song Xiaojun, a military expert. “Current low prices of raw materials at home and abroad will offer the prospect of economies in procurement.”

Look at the cost comparisons to see how it works for China: They buy a platform for next to nothing from the dying Soviet empire; they refit it into a 300 meter carrier purposely designed to imitate US carrier design; they leak the info to the sleazoids who report on “Pentagon affairs” for the tame news services and committees; those committees pour another hundred billion dollars into a fleet arm that basically consists of floating monuments to the Battle of Midway. Cost comparison: For every yuan the Chinese spend, we spend thousands of dollars building gold-plated carriers from scratch, with huge profits sucked out by parasites at every stage. And when the war comes, neither side actually fields a surface navy because they know it’d be suicide.

2. Pride. Does anybody buy a yacht because they expect to make money on the resale? Or to put it in strictly naval-warfare terms, Why did the Germans and the Soviets invest in a surface navy when the USN had already overbuilt and overcommitted to dominating the surface? Maybe the Soviets did it as a decoy (see #1 above); there was a lot of speculation that way back in the 1970s. But probably not. Probably out of stupidity, or local sleaze, or pride–simple national pride. “We can build battleships as good as yours, you Brits”—that’s what the Nazis said in the 1930s. And in the 1970s, the Russians did the same with their ski-ramp carriers. Those never made sense, militarily; they were the same as buying a boat to sit in Long Beach Marina: A hole in the water that they threw money into—and then sold off cheap to the Chinese when it was their turn to play the nationalist pride game.

China can afford to build a carrier or two as display items, even aside from their decoy value. China is sitting pretty, on top of the world economy, right now—with a national currency undervalued by 40% against the poor old dollar.

China is also sitting on a huge chunk of the US national debt, which means that we’re actually funding that Chinese carrier, thanks to the miracle called compound interest.

Yuan vs. Euro (red); Yuan vs USD (blue, bluer, blown)

When you hit the point that your national biz is coasting like that, you start visiting boatyards, looking around for a 32-foot Bayliner with a parasail roll bar for some conspicuous consumption. Put that in the driveway and listen to the neighbor’s wife give him Hell: Sweet, sweet music to a nationalist’s ears.

And it’s good military strategy as well as a Gold Card Reward. I read the Injuns in Oregon and Washington used to have this custom they called “Potlatch,” which was about pure conspicuous consumption without even pretending it was for usefulness. They’d buy the most expensive things around, like copper plates with beads on them (don’t ask me, I ain’t Chief’s cuz) and throw them into a bonfire in front of their neighbors, just to show they could afford to.

Well, look, the Chinese are doing their carrier potlatch with a used chassis they got cheap off a Ukraine pawnbroker, and they’re only building one of them. If they can scare us into pouring more money into the carrier hole-inna-wadda with that one Quaker Gun of a carrier, they realize something like 100:1 force multiplier, to use DoD blabber. Not bad for conspicuous consumption.

It’s not hard to come up with quotes from the Chinese showing how much this carrier has to do with national pride instead of military usefulness:

“Building aircraft carriers is a symbol of an important nation. It is very necessary,” the China Daily paper quoted Admiral Hu Yanlin as saying earlier this month. “China has the capability to build aircraft carriers and should do so,” he said.

If you’re used to reading through DoD propaganda, no matter what country it’s coming from, you see what the admiral is saying here. Here’s my loose translation of what Admiral Hu is getting at: “We don’t actually need a carrier, but it’s part of being one of the big boys so we have to do it, like paying for your kid’s wedding. So we’ll turn out a few of them, but we’re only going to do it when it’s cheap and doesn’t interfere with production of real weapons like the DF-21.”

I’m telling you, they’re playing with us. Polite as they’re trying to be, the contempt seeps out from time to time—and I can’t blame them. With enemies like us, they literally cannot lose.

Would you like to know more? Read “This Is How Carriers Will Die”.

Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

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Well, it’s ten years and a couple of days since 9/11. The reason I’m two days late doing a look back is that 9/11 is boring. I’m sick of it. And the ten years since are just depressing, at least if you’re an American.

So I spent the 9/11 anniversary reading Jack Weatherford’s book on the Mongol Queens because I didn’t want to see New Yorkers hamming it up the way they’ve been doing for ten long years.

It reminds me of the stupid group hug’n’cry when that worthless limey slut Princess Di died. While she was alive she was just a punchline for dirty jokes, but as soon as she hit the wall in Paris, every sobby fool in the world was her best friend.

There was one difference between the Di thing and 9/11: Crying over Di was for girls. Well, girls and Elton John, but you know. 9/11 is way worse because it’s a weepfest for men in suits, big loud scotch-drinking jerks who want to prove “Real men aren’t afraid to cry.” Maybe not, but maybe they should be. Or at least embarrassed to do it on TV.

Dinka Fighter: Cooler than a bond trader. Taller, too.

When somebody cries for the two million Dinka, Nuer, Zaghawa, and Fur who were machinegunned from Mi-24s in Sudan, I might squirt a few in memory of Manute Bol maybe. But nobody will ever do that. They don’t matter to anybody but me. I rate the dead on height and warrior quality, so to me a dead Nuer or Dinka is worth, oh I don’t know, something like three dozen NYC office workers. Maybe more.

But there’s no money in a dead Dinka, and money decides how much tv time a corpse gets. That’s why the 9/11 dead hit the bigtime: The return on investment was huge. It funded the dumbest spending binge since Rollie Fingers put his money in.

In fact, it’s not much of a stretch between what happens when a hick or ghetto kid gets a pro sports contract and what happened after 9/11. Bush and Cheney were both wannabe jocks—I reviewed a Cheney bio that said he hung around with other failed jocks at Yale—and they were about as smart with the blank check they got on 9/12 as Deuce McAlister was with his millions. That’s when dreams come true, and no matter what Disney told you, it’s bad news when you can make your dreams come true, cuz most of the time your dreams are just stupid.

These two had a dream, as the saying goes. Oh yeah, they had a dream: Get everybody into the bus screaming for revenge, take the interstate for Afghanistan—and then fake’em all out by screeching off at the Baghdad exit. “It’s a shortcut!”

When I look back at those years, what still floors me is how long they got away with it. Bush got the sane response out of the way fast, starting the attack on Afghanistan, the real Al Qaeda HQ, about a month after 9/11. Everybody was for it; it made sense, even if all those Pearl Harbor links didn’t. Pearl Harbor was a massive conventional attack on a US military base by planes flying from carriers; 9/11 was a coordinated hijacking by a team of about 20 men. It was a brilliant plan and it worked even better than Osama had planned (he admitted that later); but it didn’t mean there were endless millions of other hijackers out there ready to shave every highrise off the Manhattan skyline like some Book of Revelations LectricShave commercial.

One of the lessons of 9/11—the actual lessons, not the ones they talk about—is that countries are more powerful than Man from U.N.C.L.E. conspiracies. If you’re attacked by an actual country, like Imperial Japan, you’ve got a problem; if you’re attacked by a nutters’ club like Al Qaeda, you’d be better off taking a Xanax and getting back to business. We’d have saved a lot of lives and money if we’d just ignored 9/11.

None of the intellectuals really like countries, “nation-states” to use the fancy term, and for a hundred years everbody’s been predicting they’ll fall apart. The Marxists always hated them because to them a country is a delusion, a fake family that keeps the workers from seeing who their real friends are. The Islamic nuts hate them for the same reason. So did the Pan-Arabs in Nasser’s day. So does every racist ever born, because they keep whites/blacks/pinks/whatever from joining up with their blood kin. Libertarians hate them because they interfere with the market. Every freak out there has some little dream that countries get in the way of.

But they last. Africa was supposed to fall apart long ago, because the country borders didn’t match the tribal ones. Didn’t happen. Won’t, either. Take Eritrea; There’s no such thing, ethnically, as an Eritrean. It’s a ridiculous colonial border the Italians set up. But once Eritrea incorporated as country, the brand took, and took hard. The Eritreans fought the Ethiopians, much bigger and stronger country, to a stalemate and they’re prouder of their totally imaginary Eritrean identity than a lot of countries are of the real thing.

So what country attacked us on 9/11? You can’t say Afghanistan, because most of them don’t know or care about anything beyond the next valley, never mind Manhattan. Like most everybody on this planet, they’re too busy hating the people one valley over to hate NYC much, though I’m sure they do in a vague way, when they’ve got the energy.

Not Saudi Arabia either, although a lot of Muzzie-haters would like it to be that way. SA is about the money, and 9/11 wasn’t good biz for them.

And not Bush, either. Please, let’s just skip the “inside job” crap.  9/11 was the best thing that ever happened to the Bush administration, but that doesn’t mean they did it. Start thinking that way and pretty soon you have to say farmers make it rain because rain’s “good fer the crops,” or  accept the Japanese version of why the Mongol invasion failed: The Gods sent a kamikaze, a divine wind, to protect their little cousin the Emperor. Things happen that help one party or another but that doesn’t mean those parties did it.

You know who revived the old “Bush did it” theory on the tenth anniversary? None other than the ex-PM of Malaysia, that godsend to comedy, Mahathir Muhammed. He has a new, brilliant proof that it was Bush all the time: It had to be, according to Dr. M, because Arabs aren’t smart enough to pull off a smooth operation like that. Brilliant. That’s the way to win Muslim hearts’n’minds. It’s not even sensible; there are (well, there used to be) some reasonably intelligent people at the top of Al Qaeda. And the idea of using a plane to hit a tower, though it’s a very good plan, isn’t all that complicated. Michael Caine, for God’s sake, is going around saying he was writing a thriller with the same plot when 9/11 happened, and if Michael Caine can think of it, so can your neighbor’s Labrador. In fact I remember a thriller from way back, Black Sunday, where the idea is to float the Goodyear blimp, with a gondola full of plastique studded with roofing nails, over the Super Bowl stadium, give’em a halftime show they’ll never forget. (There was a great scene with Bruce Dern the psycho Nam vet just lovingly putting the roofing nails into the C-4 one by one. Man, that spoke to me: “Homecoming float, you bastards? I’ll show you a homecoming float…”)

Or the Israelis, either. They were glad when it happened, sure; I even remember an Israeli interviewed in NYC gloating about it, “Now you know how we feel!” But same thing as Bush: Just because they benefited doesn’t mean they did it. It’s possible Israeli security knew something about the plot and let it slide; that’s old CI tactics, stepping back or even helping your enemy when he plans to attack a wavering ally of yours. But Osama wasn’t that interested in the Palestinians or Israel; it was US troops on the sacred Peninsula that set him off. He was from the East part of the Middle East, and not much of a threat to Israel. In a cold-blooded way, he was probably just as happy as the Israelis to keep the Palestinians in their camps. Good propaganda—and besides, those Pals aren’t even all Muslims. (Imagine a meeting between George Habash and Osama—pure skit material.)

What really attacked us was a demographic: Rich, not-that-bright Muslim sons who didn’t have much going for them besides a religion. A handful of jealous losers, industrial waste from the population bulge of the 20^th c. in the Middle East.

It’s easy to see that now, and frankly it was pretty easy to see it then too. It just wasn’t much fun seeing it that way. Didn’t make for good tv. Those guys had a lot to be jealous of, when you remember America in 2000. Getting our way everywhere, and playing the good guy while we did it. Sleazy on the inside, but who isn’t? 9/11 was a lot like the attacks North Korea launches from time to time when South Korea gets too rich and distracted, like a “forget-me-not” bouquet full of jet fuel. I know the feeling myself: Maybe you can’t knock these people down once and for all, but you can wipe the smug smile off their faces for a while.

That’s the biggest surprise of all: It did knock us down, maybe permanently. I don’t think even Osama planned that, although maybe I’m underestimating him. Most jihadis think more in terms of gestures, doing something big and going out with a bang, than making a lasting change in the balance of power. Mohammed Atta having a last drink at a strip club—classic spoiled martyr crap. Make the kaffirs sorry, go out with the biggest bang yet. That’s not strategy, that’s psychotherapy for rich mamma’s boys who know they don’t matter in the world.

But it turned into strategy, and brilliant strategy. And all because Bush and Cheney had a dream. A bunch of dreams, all stupid, all disasters for America.

What happened wasn’t complicated—just expensive. One month after the twin towers go down, the US invades Afghanistan in “Operation Enduring Freedom.” (God I hate those “Operation” names. Can’t they just pick something random, something that doesn’t sound like Flag Day in Houston?) It went slowly at first, we looked tentative, then something odd happened up north in Mazar-i-Sharif that turned the whole campaign around. I’ve always suspected it was a huge bribe to some Taliban commander up there, because that’s what usually turns the tide in an Afghan battle. After Mazar fell, we rolled into Kabul. So far, so good. Then Bush and Cheney decided they’d done enough to satisfy the suckers back home and got down to their real agenda, Iraq. Since that time a bunch of bitter special forces guys have said they were closing in on Osama in the mountains of SE Afghanistan when all the money and weapons were diverted to Iraq, or as it ought to be called, “Field of Dreams.”

Top Gun Bush: Worst. Sequel. Ever.

It was a strange time. You couldn’t be too loud or too dumb. I know it scared me. Kind of a sci-fi scenario, with everybody around you turned into an insect. I remember talking to a woman in the office where I worked in 2002, smart lady, way richer than me, one spoiled brat of a kid and a scientist husband. She heard I knew something about war stuff but she didn’t like it when I started spluttering at the idea that Saddam could hit Manhattan in 40 minutes with chemical warheads. I got sort of excited which come to think of it might have something to do with the fact I never got anywhere in that job and they seemed very happy on my last day—and tried to remind her of the first Gulf War, how Saddam tried to activate his imaginary terror cells in Europe and America, tried to scare everyone with Scuds, tried everything he could to bluff us—and nothing, absolutely nothing, happened. She just stared at me for a second—I’ve seen this a lot from Americans who outrank me; they never argue with you, they don’t do arguments, they just wait for you to finish and then repeat what they said in the beginning—she said, “I believe there are WMDs.” I thought I was back at church again.

Another thing about good Americans—I mean the ones who are good at being Americans, not “good” like Lincoln: They never remember their mistakes. I read that good NFL cornerbacks are the same way: They never remember the TDs caught over them. It’s adaptive, I guess, but I’m old-fashioned; I say it’s cheap, it’s spoiled. It’s your duty to admit it when you get things wrong, and do it loud and often.

But she never talked about it. Creeped me out. I’ve always wondered about those well-groomed people with self-esteem: Do they just outright forget their boo-boos or do they just have a policy of not mentioning them?

I was too scared to bring it up to her either. “Hey Pam, remember what you said about WMDs?” Yeah, sure: “Hey Gary, remember your evaluation I have to write?” Except she wouldn’t even say that—they never say anything that could be used against them; she’d just change the subject and torpedo me in the evals.

The same amnesia she got happened in the press: no apologies, not even an admission. I tried once and someone told me, “There’s no point playing the blame game.” Blame game! If only McClellan had had the PR agency that made that one up. “There’s no point playing the blame game, Mr. Lincoln, just give me another two million troops and I’ll try again.” There’s plenty of goddamn point in playing the blame game when you’re talking about the people who cheerled you into a disastrous invasion. Me, I’m for blood purges where you line up every editorial writer in front of a mass grave, read them what they wrote back in 2003, and then mow them down, but I’m willing to settle for hard labor for life. Cheney on the Chain Gang. Has a ring to it.

The invasion of Iraq happened slowly, with plenty of advance notice and months of all-out bullshit in the press. It was a bad time for anyone who knew anything about military history, which judging by the way the debate went meant damn near nobody. All the so-called experts were doing idiotic “How many tanks has Iraq got?” metrics that had nothing to do with anything. It was obvious the tanks weren’t the problem. The difference was that Cheney wanted to occupy the whole country this time. Funny, cuz he came up with the best reason NOT to do that back in 1994. Somebody dug up a video from back then where Cheney, not the smartest guy as a rule, comes up with a just plain brilliant summary of why occupying Iraq is a bad idea:

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families — it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

So what happened, Dick? One of those mini-strokes? More likely, the same thing that happened to his whole administration on September 12, 2001: They got high. And stayed high. Blank checks will do that for you. They couldn’t lose. No matter how cowardly and shameful they acted, they got a pass. Bush read a kid’s book and then bugged out for his bunker when he heard about the attack, but somehow he was a hero. And this isn’t hindsight, damn it; I said so at the time, but nobody wanted to hear it.

Notice what Cheney says at the end there: “How many dead Americans is Saddam worth?”

He thinks the whole thing about occupying Iraq will be getting Saddam. Once we got Saddam, game over. And they really thought that. Remember when every Republican mouthpiece was screeching that the insurgency was over as soon as Saddam was captured? Of course it made no difference whatsoever, because these idiots don’t know a thing about guerrilla warfare.

Or maybe they’d had such an easy ride on top of the backs of American suckers, I mean voters, that they thought everybody was as docile as us and the Iraqis would stop when their leader went down. Wrong again.

Their whole dream got the OK from America, and it’s still hurting us every day. Stateside, all the contracts for the Iraq War were no-bid scams, just outright scams. Nobody minded. They put in every wacko friend they’d made, guys like the FEMA horse breeder who did such a great job in Katrina; nobody minded. They stripped taxes on their rich friends while they were spending a trillion dollars on their pet Iraq war; everybody cheered. I was there, I remember. I’m a big fan of the blame game myself, and I blame every single one of you suckers who bought into it.

The war went the obvious way: Saddam’s tanks were hot scrap in a few days. It was a classic firepower demonstration, and that pretty much guaranteed a bad aftermath, because it’s hard to turn off that kind of firepower when you’re switching to reconstruction. We’ve done some good reconstructions—most of them in 1945—and some bad ones, like 1865-1876. This was one of the worst.

There were no interpreters you could trust, none of the troops spoke Arabic, most of them had swallowed two years of Muzzie-hating from the US press. They didn’t know anything about the place and didn’t want to. They rolled into Fallujah, shot a bunch of demonstrators, and it was on. Took two more all-out invasions to kill everybody in Fallujah who might be trouble. The Marines didn’t even impress the locals, because they hunkered down under fire and called for air or artillery. That might be good tactics, but it yields a lot of shock and no awe whatsoever.

I don’t even have time to list the fatal mistakes in Iraq. Remember Paul Bremer? General Sanchez? Sanchez in particular shocked me because it was clear he had total contempt for CI warfare and just plain wouldn’t admit it was happening, even when the casualty count hit four figures. That was the strategy down the line: It’s not happening.

Every reason for the invasion was disproved. No WMDs. No Al Qaeda links. And it damn sure wasn’t a “cakewalk.”

The 2004 Election

But Bush’s support held. That’s when I lost my country, when he was reelected. I used to be an unhappy American nationalist, like a passenger in the back seat wondering how many drinks the driver’s had. But when we invaded Iraq, the car hit a tree—and all the passengers got out and voted to reelect the driver.

That’s the legacy of 9/11: Two dozen spoiled unemployable dimwits managed to lobotomize my country, bankrupt it, make it such a nasty alien place I didn’t even feel part of it any more. I can’t give Osama much of the credit for that, I just don’t see him as that smart—but you know, he did say his goal was to destroy America. And with a lot of help from all you guys who used to be my fellow Americans, he could die content, because he actually managed it.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

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Green March on Golan

While everybody was distracted with Libya, something interesting happened on the Golan Heights. The Palestinians, with a lot of pushing from the Assad people, staged their own version of the Green March. And it failed.

I’ve written about the Green March before,but if you want the short version, The Green March (green for Islam, not recycling) was an unarmed invasion of what used to be the Spanish Sahara on Morocco’s southern border. It was a classic lebensraum push, but without weapons. The Moroccan government, facing the pretty obvious fact that it couldn’t take a coffee break by force of arms, thought up a brilliant new strategy: They sent a huge crowd of unarmed citizens across the border and dared the few demoralized Spanish soldiers in their way to open fire. The Spaniards held their fire, no doubt causing Cortez and Pizarro to revolve in their graves at lathe speed, but these aren’t those Spaniards, these are sad Euros with no birthrate. Whereas the Moroccans had a healthy birthrate and wanted everyone to know it: They sent exactly the number of people over the border as there were born in Morocco the year of the march. That’s the way to elbow yourself some lebensraum.

I called it the most important battle of the late 20^thcentury, and I still think it’s the model for most future conquests. But not all. What happened on the Golan Heights this May and June was a demonstration of the limits of Green-March strategy. To put it bluntly, if the occupier has enough morale and international backing to open fire, you’re screwed–at least in the short run. But that’s not as simple as it sounds. What a lot of war buffs have been real slow to figure out is how hard it is to pull the trigger now, unless you’re in Papua New Guinea where the parasites and mosquitoes keep the reporters at bay. In a place like the Golan Heights, where reporters outnumber bunkers, it’s not easy to  open fire on unarmed crowds.

This is a very strange thing in military history, but it’s time we faced up to it. Firearms have been developing nonstop, but so has video, and they run counter to each other most of the time. You need decades of morale-building, alliance-mending and effective propaganda to make soldiers who’ll open fire in front of the video cameras. That’s where the effort has to go, not all this gun-love crap you see in the cheapo magazines on the rack. “HK vs. M4 Showdown”—my ass. HK or M4, either one works fine. That’s not the problem. Any fool can pull a trigger—that’s an old saying—but what we have to deal with now is something more complicated, like, “Yeah, any fool can pull a trigger but what about any city kid who’s been raised nice, never even been hit by his folks, popped out of some social-democratic kindergarten?” That dude is going to have a problem opening fire on unarmed crowds.

And even if you’re more than ready to shoot into that crowd, and most Americans are, your officers might not let you. It’s not as easy as that. A whole lot of successful rebellions have started out with suicide missions, either unarmed or armed so crummily that they had no hope of winning on the field. They won by the whole martyr strategy, and no matter what Patton said (“No son of a bitch ever won a war by dying for his country…”) martyr stuff can work. Not overnight, but over ten, 20, 50 years. When you consider if the Israelis won this one, you have to think of what Chou en-Lai said about whether the 1789 revolution in France was a success: “It’s too early to tell.”

Take Qaddafi. He didn’t go down because he was squeamish about firing at unarmed demonstrators. In fact, a reader sent a great link to an interview with one of the Tuareg mercs who were fighting for Qaddafi, who explained the traditional method of dealing with “peaceful demonstrators”: “We would kill three or four in the front of the crowd and the rest would run away. It was very easy.”

But that’s Libya, where what you might call the background level of violence is pretty low. In other places, especially after a few generations of facing troops, shooting a few won’t do it. You can see that in this BBC video of the Palestinians’ try at a Green March on the Golan Heights– the second try the Pals made at crossing the border. This time the IDF fired early and steadily. The official count was 20 demonstrators dead, 300 hurt. Even allowing for inflation, which you have to do with any casualty claim, you can hear the BBC reporter talking about people falling after “live fire, aimed fire” and being carried off on stretchers.

The interesting thing here is that it wasn’t the bullets that drove them off. It was the tear gas, which according to the BBC, the IDF only started using once reporters asked why they used live fire instead of tear gas. My guess is that the IDF was pissed off at the way they let the same crowd push over the border in the first Golan Heights Green March, three weeks earlier, on the anniversary of the “Nabka” (Big Disaster) of 1948.

Golan Barricade

Here’s a home video of that one. You can see that in this first march, the Pals broke through the double fences along the valley floor. That’s the border. The guy filming is standing on what looks like a construction site on the Israeli side (I think). There’s a pretty big crowd up there, too many by far to shoot in front of cameras—and like I said, in the Golan you can pretty much assume there’s going to be cameras.

I want to say again: It’s not just a matter of getting troops who’re willing to shoot into a crowd, though that’s part of it. Even if the troops were willing up there in the Golan, and I’d bet that most of them were, it just wouldn’t be a good move. Israel survives because of a US support base—used to be Jews but now it’s more the Evangelicals—who need to believe that Israel is the besieged good guy, a modern Constantinople circa 1453. It’s not a good move shooting unarmed idiots too openly, in big numbers. I’d bet nine out of 10 of the Israeli troops you see in this second video—the line of guys in olive drab along the valley floor—would have been more than ready to fire. For every squeamish Euro descendant of socialist kibbutzim in those ranks, I’d bet there are ten Sephardim or Falasha with lots of juicy family stories about what it was like living in Muslim countries who’d be willing to empty their magazines into the crowd coming down the hill. But then, I’d bet there are plenty of Pals in that crowd more than willing to get shot and martyred. If enough people want you to martyr them, it’s not that easy, not as easy as Patton makes it out to be, to decide to oblige’em. Especially not with the cameras rolling.

Who's Ducking and Who's Dead?

I’m sure a lot of gun buffs are going to say this isn’t a real battle, because only one side is armed and it’s slow, with lots of posing and rock-chucking. I’m not sure about that. Not only is this the wave’o’the fuchuh, but it was the wave of the past too. I’ve seen pictures of primitive warfare in the New Guinea highlands before the missionaries made those people as boring as Ohioans, and their battles involve something a whole lot like this one: one tribe on one side of a valley, yelling stuff about the other tribe’s momma and throwing spears that fall way short of the opposition. There’s a lot of flat-out boy stuff, seeing who’s willing to get the furthest into spear range to show how well he can dodge. And if he doesn’t dodge that good, gets one in the leg, it’s probably all the better; he’s a hero in the village, and that limp reminds all the girls how he strutted when it counted.

Casualties in a battle like that are kind of incidental; the point is to show yourself, walk onto the other tribe’s property, remind them you’re there, and that you’re not scared of them. In a way what the Pals did here was the ultimate strutting: Not only are we gonna walk onto your side of the valley, we’re gonna do it UNARMED. And they had to know the IDF isn’t those poor Spanish dregs who let the Moroccan crowds through. The IDF is gonna fire; they know that on both sides.

But they’re not going to empty their magazines into the crowd, and they’re not going to use the .50 cals on the armored cars you see in the video. This is a new ritual we’re seeing here, except it’s probably the oldest one in the world. There was just this weird interval for a couple of centuries with uniformed armies facing off against each other and supposedly not killing unarmed civilians. It never really came down to that, and it was just a blip in a long line of tribe vs. tribe, one side of the valley vs. another. The only new touch is the camera. When they talk about a global village, it only makes sense we’re going back to village wars. The cameras put you right there on the hill with Tribe A.

In fact, this second video, shot by a Pal demonstrator, is so raw you can almost feel the sweat in the crowd on the Israeli construction site. Those are the best strutters, the men who can do the most boasting when they get home. They’re on enemy turf, and legitimate targets by the laws of war if not the laws of TV news. I’d love to know what they’re talking about on the video; maybe some Arabic-speaking reader can tell me.

Some of it’s clear enough that even I can figure it out. They do a chant-along to something like “Filistiniya Arabiya, [some word for the Golan] Syriya” which I gather means “Palestine is Arab, the Golan is Syrian.” You can see the work of their sponsors in the Assad junta in that little slogan; Palestinian refugees don’t usually have a lot of reason to be sentimental Syrian nationalists, but in this case, since they couldn’t get near the border without the green light from Syrian security, a little “thank you” is in order, and that slogan is it. In fact, one thing about these two Green March tries is that for Bashar & Friends, they were a pretty obvious attempt to distract the hotheads’ attention from the fight against the regime. Nothing distracts Sunni like the ones throwing rocks at Syrian cops in the hinterland cities like seeing Palestinians get shot at the Israeli border. It didn’t seem to work, though, that part of the plan. The pressure is still on Assad. And it doesn’t explain why these Pals were willing to walk into live fire. Nobody would ever do that for the Assads, as the Syrian Army has proven every time it went into what it calls “combat.” Hell, the Syrian Army actually TOOK the Golan in the Yom Kippur War, but got so spooked at not seeing any IDF in the vicinity they decided it was some sly Jewish plot to lure them to the slaughter, and bugged out without a fight. These unarmed Pals are a million times braver than the Assads’ soldiers ever were. For them it’s almost like a field trip, one with the chance you’ll get maimed or killed. I think that’s how most battles have been, those New Guinea style battles: laughs and strutting and showing how many of you there are, how un-scared you are. There’s time to laugh between volleys; these Pals laugh like crazy when the IDF makes a dumb mistake, firing tear gas too short and driving an advance of their own men running up the valley (that’s around the 1:05 point). I’m guessing that they’re saying something like, “Nyah nyah, stupid IDF gassed itself!” on that one.

The comedy goes right on with some dead-scary moves, just like it does in New Guinea. One guy stands right in the way when an IDF squad comes marching up to the construction site—and they march around him. That’s a victory, in village terms.

So in the short term (tactically) this was a failure; they didn’t take the disputed territory like the Moroccans did in the Green March. But they never meant to. Nobody thought the IDF would skulk away like the Spaniards did down there. This was meant to show that the Pals are still around, in big numbers, and willing to die. And no matter what Patton said, that can work. When I was researching that last article on the IRA vs. Al Qaeda, what works and what doesn’t, I found out the first move in the Irish independence war was a suicidal occupation of downtown Dublin in 1916 by a bunch of artsy amateurs, poets and painters who barely knew how to aim a rifle. They were wiped out and the survivors shot at dawn; total failure. But in a culture that’s got the martyr thing going strong, that first defeat can kindle a big war, a winning war. Second wave was Michael Collins, going for the kill, and it worked.

So martyr-type defeat is tricky. If it works at all, it’s going to work slow. But with birthrate and morale, it can work over time.

But you better depend on those cameras sticking around. If the world got really seriously distracted, say by a big war…well, you wouldn’t want to try this shit in Golan right then.

Dude on the right look local?

A sharp-eyed reader named Pete S. sent me a picture off an Al Jazeera blog on Libya with what Pete thinks might be an SAS operator taking in the parade. This is the guy on the right in this photo, the one holding the rifle with the scope. The one with the badass fingerless leather gloves.

He does look a little pale for a Libyan, but then a whole lot of people have wandered along the North African coast at one time or another and passed some time with the local ladies, so I’d imagine there’s quite a lively gene pool in those parts.

But this guy does look better equipped, older and more professional than most of the insurgents. And he’s holding that scoped rifle in proper rest position, like he’s been trained. Of course he could just be ex-Libyan army. What really makes me think he’s a European is that turban. Something about these Euros, once they hit the desert they just can’t wait to get into local costume.

So maybe Pete’s right, and we’ve got live pix of Lawrence of Libya. Although if he is a foreign ringer, his name’s more likely to be Pierre of Libya, because it’s the French who are really taking the lead in this one.

So what do Libyan readers make of this shot?

Is this guy a fellow Libyan, entitled to wear an “I Survived Big Q” t-shirt? Or is he what us Americans like to call an “advisor,” as in advising people to lie down and die when he puts one in their heads with that fancy gun of his?

You tell me.

UPDATE: Pete just informed me that the picture has been taken down from Al Jazeera’s blog.

The most obvious question about Libya is: Why?

The reason you have to ask that is a little secret you won’t hear much about: Libya under Qaddafi wasn’t that bad for most people. And that’s according to the CIA. Take a look at the CIA factbook on Libya under Qaddafi and you’re in for a shock.

Subsidized medical care, subsidized education, one of the highest average incomes in Africa, a life expectancy of 77 point something, and rankings in the 90s, pretty low, on most of the bad stuff like infant mortality.

It’s easy to say that they had oil, but not every country with oil seems to benefit. At one end of the spectrum you’ve got Norway, which pampers every single Norwegian with an equal share (and raises psycho killers who can’t stand all that equality tree-hugging stuff)…and at the other there’s places like Nigeria, where the notion that the oil money should benefit everyone would get big belly laughs from the big-bellied generals.

Now if you were going to add that Libya had a small population, about six million, along with big oil revenues, you’d be closer to the truth. But even then, not every small country with oil spreads the wealth around. Kuwait, sitting on way bigger tar pits than Libya, has a population of less than four million, but no way on earth they’d consider sharing the oil money with the two-thirds of that number who are dirty foreign workers. The Indians, Egyptians, and Iranians who do all the actual work never see more than the minimum wage, and get the boot as soon as their contracts are over.

Libya was actually more generous with foreign workers, unless you happened to be unlucky—like the Palestinian doctor and Bulgarian nurses who happened to be working in Benghazi when kids started dying of AIDS. They got tortured into confessing to a doctors’ plot, Libyan version, although it was pretty obvious the kids were infected before they even arrived in Libya.

But then people go a little crazy when their kids get hurt, or even when they start thinking they might. A whole lot of people are rotting in stateside prisons because their kids had some schizo episode and decided to tell teacher that mommy and daddy belong to a big Satan cult where babies are the entrée at every Thanksgiving dinner, and there was a time when judges and juries believed every word of this crap even though it was dumber than a Bewitched rerun.

If you were unlucky like those guys, Libya was a very bad place to be. If you pissed off Qaddafi, if you were a Berber, if your family was from an eastern tribe that had a history of fighting with Qaddafi’s, you were in for a hard time. But if you went about your business, you could live a pretty decent life there, as far as I can find out. Maybe that’s naïve; if it is, somebody who’s lived there can tell me about it. But from what I can tell, nobody starved in Libya, kids had the chance to see a doctor, go to school, eat OK, all that stuff. All the usual UNICEF indicators were on the rise. So why the revolution?

There’s always that “revolution of rising expectations” cliché that “revolutions don’t happen when things are bad, they happen when things are improving but not fast enough.” There’s some truth to that one, partly because when things are really bad, people are too busy to make a revolution. Starving people don’t usually revolt. They’re too tired. Starving people don’t feel like doing anything except crawling into the shade and maybe waving away the flies around their eyes.

Still, that doesn’t cut it for Libya. I guess we’re supposed to believe that a longing for freedom started the revolution. “Freedom.” I just wish I knew who started that one. Where on this planet does anybody see any longing for freedom? I’m not talking about Libya now, I’m talking about California. Where have you ever seen anybody who wanted freedom? Go down the block where you grew up, house by house, in your head and tell me where there was a family that wanted freedom. I can’t think of one, in the whole Bakersfield tract where I grew up, that wanted that.

Ed Jagels: Freedom’s Face

The most popular elected official in Bakersfield for most of my lifetime was the District Attorney, Ed Jagels. Look him up yourself; I won’t even give you a link, because you’d think I picked it on purpose to make him look bad. He was in charge of one of the worst of those Satanic child-abuse cases and never backed down even when it was obvious to everybody in town the whole thing was a fantasy. Two dozen people rotted in prison because of Ed, and he retired after about a lifetime in office. Everybody loved him. Never saw a prison he didn’t like, never saw a citizen he didn’t think would look better in an orange jumpsuit. Don’t tell me about freedom.

Damn, if Americans would actually look at America, the one outside the windows instead of the one you got from Civics class, we’d get somewhere, because we could start from a few facts, not this lame fantasy that we’re all Thomas Jefferson at heart.

The people I grew up with—and the ones you grew up with too, unless you were rich and on the coast somewhere–were all pissed off about something, but it wasn’t freedom. It was the Blacks at first, the riots and the muggings and all that Civil Rights noise. Then it was the Mexicans driving wages down and not picking up their trash. Then it was the Liberals, even though nobody’d ever spotted a live one in the city limits. They didn’t want freedom, they wanted the people they hated bashed, the harder the better.

So I really doubt “freedom” is what set them off in Libya. That is, if by “freedom” you mean all the Thomas Jefferson crap you learned in Social Studies. If by “freedom” you mean something like “being like the cool kids,” then maybe it was a longing for freedom.

When you really look at the CIA Factbook stats on Libya, the one thing that stands out is age.

Lotta Kids in That Minaret

Almost a third of the population is under 16, more than half are under 30. Only 4 percent is over 65. That’s what you get when a tiny desert country gets mass medical care: Birthrate zooms and just keeps zooming.

What that means is a huge chunk of the population that isn’t that interested in having security and food and schooling—did you, when you were 18? Well, maybe you did, if you’re one of these nambs and pambs I see around now who worry about their resumes when they wake up in the morning, and spend the day ticking off points on their college application profile…but I don’t think Libyans are quite that disgusting yet. Their yout’ want normal yout’ wants: sex, money, fast cars, and war. It’s no accident that the population profile of Libya says in two-foot neon, “Males of Military Age Surplus!” One of the reasons they wanted a war is that it was a war. At 18, especially in a culture where they keep the girls locked up, any war is better than no war. And when it’s a war against an old man who’s been in power for 42 years, about three times as long as you’ve been alive, you’re just in favor of it on principle. All those slogans like “Better the devil you know”—they’re for old, worried people. The young slogan is more like, “Blow it up, as long as something happens for once in this boring dump.”

And in this case, nobody can accuse the kids of being stupid. It’s never easy to guess how a revolution is going to shake out, but this time around the kids were right. What they did is good—for the kids. For a while.

What’s going to happen in Libya is most likely to be a lot like what happens everywhere else that one of these old-school “regimes” gets booted by a multinational “alliance.” There’s a script, and it’s pretty familiar by now. First the cheering and the statue-demolition stage, then the foreign experts reorganizing the currency, then the corporations coming in.

The biggest recent example is Russia. When the USSR crumbled, the experts came in and reorganized the economy, revalued the currency, changed everything from the faces on the money to the national anthem. If you were old, you were in serious trouble. Your pension was suddenly worthless, because they’d added a few zeros to the ruble and what used to pay your rent wouldn’t buy a pound of beets any more. You could still get bread, from what I’ve read, for an interesting reason: Ever since the French Revolution, turns out, European countries have subsidized the price of bread because the masses gotta have their bread. Typical nervous-poor Euro families, the dad’d always be saying, “Eat yer bread!” or “The one that eats the most bread gets the most pudding!” So the oldies could still get bread at Socialist prices in Yeltsin’s IMF version of Russia, but they couldn’t pay their rent and they couldn’t buy medicines. So if they got sick, they died. If they lost their apartments, they died.

All the wealth that was tied up in those pensions was instantly worthless. All the money went in a fairy-godmother flash to the kids who were still young enough to reinvent themselves as bankers. Now Russia’s a normal country, run by bankers under 40. Look at a picture of bitter commies demonstrating in any Russian city and you’ll notice most of them are old. Spry, most of them, but old. The ones who weren’t spry, who needed those blood pressure or diabetes meds, you won’t see them at the demo because they’re dead.

Libya was a lot like Russia, a smaller, warmer Russia. Life wasn’t bad for the average Arab (the average Berber had a harder time). The basics were guaranteed, you weren’t going to be thrown in prison unless you mouthed off. Russia in the 70s and 80s, I mean, not Stalin’s Russia. And although you’re not supposed to admit it, a lot of Russians liked it better back then, when you could take a day off and not lose your job. The ones who liked it were the old, the ordinary, the ones with no ambition.

When you’re 20 years old, you want more. You don’t know what, just more. And in Qaddafi’s world there wasn’t any way to be all you can be, like the Army used to say. You couldn’t be the hero of the story, going off to seek your fortune and start a frozen yogurt empire. You could shuffle along and get a job, squirm your way up to senior teacher or mid-level figurehead in an office with a ceiling fan, but that was about all.

So when all these 20-year olds see kids in the street in Cairo—Egyptian kids, and Egypt has always been the cool big kid next door for Libya—and their neighbors in Tunisia booting the same sort of old fool who’s been sitting on the country longer than their parents have been alive—they thought they couldn’t lose.

Try remembering being actually young. It’s not as easy as you’d think. Remember when you just instantly substituted for the hero of every story. How could you not take up the gun when the time came? In that way I understand these kids way better than I do the actual American kids I see around now. Those poor babies seem to do whatever their parents tell them every hour of the day. In this last job I had, I worked in one of those open offices with two guys half my age (which is a horrible story in itself, but I’ll skip it). They were both so clean-cut that I swear to God I thought it had to be fake and they’d take me out for drinks after a few days and try to get me to join their Satan cult or Fight Club. But it wasn’t fake. I wish to God it was. They were the new breed of mommy’n’daddy’s boys. Even grandparents’ boys—one of them said one day he hadn’t been able to skype his grandparents for a week and he really missed talking to them. His GRANDparents! A WEEK!

That’s a pervert, if you ask me. Even if he never does anything indictable there’s something horribly wrong with a 20-something like that. The kids in Libya are way easier to sympathize with.

And like I said: In the short run, they’re right. Things will start to happen in Libya now, and most of the good stuff will happen to the young people. Young men, in this case, because most of the girls will stay at home for the first generation or so. So the under-30 demographic that was out there trying to find the trigger on those AA guns will actually be the ones to benefit from the war they fought, for once. Impressive when you think of it that way.

It won’t last, the boom time. Never does in these places. Oil doesn’t produce a lot of jobs at the point where it leaves the ground.

For a few years, the multinationals will need local collaborators, and there’ll be payoffs to the new breed of “democratic” politicians. And you know the funny thing? Those payoffs will be totally legal and every Western reporter will love the guys who get them because they’ll look good in suits, talk English and have good accountants.

Then the system will “normalize” and they won’t need those local auxiliaries as much. The jobs will dry up.

Libyan Coastline: Freedom Schmeedom, That’s Real Estate!

The most aggressive Libyan youth will have gone into coastal condos by then—whole lotta Mediterranean coast to be sold off in Libya, whole lotta Euro retirees to buy it–and the million or so families who sold their fishing shack for the price of dad’s dialysis will be wondering what the Hell went wrong, because they could swear they’re poorer than they used to be because now the doctor takes half their income from sweeping the floors at Club Med down the beach. But they’ll know they’re just crazy or something, and there’ll be experts to back them up on that.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

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Younes: Not So Cheery Now

One of the talking-head questions on Libya is whether there’ll be a big bloodbath when the rebels take over. I doubt it. They’ve never been the most warlike people on earth. The last few really ferocious tribes like the Pashtun fight because they don’t know much else or want much else, least of all the malls’n’jobs life. But the Libyans, as far as I can do, do want more malls, more Sinatra hats and ipods, and the sooner the better.

There’ll be a few scores evened up here and there. We’ve seen that already with one of the most interesting little twists in this slo-mo revolution: the killing of Abdel Fattah Younes.

The truth is, it was no surprise Younes got shot. He was an old Qaddafi enforcer who’d made a lot of enemies, and he did one of the most dangerous things a general can do: Change sides in the middle of a civil war.

I found one of the few—real few—decent versions of what happened to Younes on Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera has been a little weird about NATO in Libya, but when it’s Libyan-on-Libyan stuff, they’re still the best news source. Their story has one of the funniest lines I’ve ever seen: “The chief of the NTC blamed Younes’s killing on gunmen…” Considering Younes was shot multiple times, that’s a pretty solid theory. The question is more which bunch of gunmen did it. At the moment, every redblooded male in Libya is a gunman, so although the Sherlock Holmes of the NTC may be right as far as he went, it still, like reporters loves to say, “leaves many questions unanswered.”

After that, Al J gets down to more serious business and gives you a multiple choice on whodunit.

It Was General Hifter! In the Conservatory! With A Candlestick!

Theory #1: Younes was killed by his main rival for military power in the rebel forces, Hifter. (God, don’t misspell that name.) Hifter was in exile for more than 20 years, which gives him street cred with the rebels. Younes only switched sides during the big battle for Benghazi, and there were rumors that he let important Qaddafi aides escape before he came over.

Hifter was way more popular with the insurgents on the front lines, but Younes seemed to be winning the battle for command. It’s possible Hifter decided to deal with Younes the ol’ Stalin way: “No man, no problem.”

Theory #2: Some freelancer killed Younes for the million-dollar bounty Qaddafi’d put on his head. This one I just plain doubt. If all the men Qaddafi had put a bounty on the heads of were stretched end to end, they’d probably stand up and say, “Why do you have to keep lying down? I’ve got sand in my shoes,” because Qaddafi was long on promises but very short on paying up when it came to death threats, so his wanted list is mostly going to die of old age. Nobody liked Qaddafi much, so nobody was going to kill on command for him out of loyalty; and as for the money, he was less likely than ever to pay up in the middle of an uprising.

Theory #3: Younes was killed in the middle of an argument in the rebels’ ruling council. This one’s possible. Room full of angry people yelling, every single one packing, easy to imagine that yo’mama stuff started flying around and somebody’d seen too many Samuel L. Jackson movies. Or maybe it was more cold-blooded, somebody who wanted Younes out of the way decided the safest time was at the meeting, with Younes’s most loyal bodyguards maybe locked out of the room. It’s happened before. That’s how Beria died. They were so scared of him they just decided to shoot him in his big Politburo chair before he could put everybody who was even thinking bad thoughts about him down in the cellars on Lubyanka for a little Q&A.

Theory #4: He actually was killed during an interrogation, after being called back to HQ when the rebels’ assault west from Benghazi stalled out. Or after the interrogation, when he confessed to being a double agent. I kind of doubt this one too. The NTC has been real obedient to the French, British and Qatar liaison officers who’ve been running the show behind the scenes and they just don’t seem like the kind of people to do an un-telegenic killing like this, right when it’d feed into the worst neocon scary hints about “Islamic militants” taking over.

Theory #5: Islamic militants killed Younes because he wasn’t fanatical enough for them. This one makes me laugh. First of all, if the neocons told us that water flows downhill, I’d expect to see Yosemite Falls doing a U-turn and zooming back up the cliff. They do dead wrong better than a compulsive roulette addict. Besides, nobody talked more Islamic shit than Qaddafi. He only turned anti-jihad because he was slutting around in his usual desperate way, this time looking for Western help, or at least a way to stop NATO from helping the rebels.

The only problem with this Al Jazeera story is that it leaves out what looks to me like the most obvious set of suspects: The surviving relatives of some guy or guys Younes had “liquidated” (Qaddafi liked that word, some retro-Bolshevik thing) on Qaddafi’s orders. There have to be a whole lot of candidates in that pool of suspects, because Younes had been with Qaddafi all the way, since 1969, which wasn’t the summer of love in Libya by a long shot, or volley. That was the date of Qaddafi’s coup, and Younes was one of the OC’s (Original Coupsters).

What makes it even more likely, to me anyway, that Younes was done in by a grudge-holding cousin was that for most of that time, Younes had been running Big Q’s “special forces.” That means the kidnap, torture and assassination squads. You make a lot of enemies that way. Younes was in charge of a force stationed near Benghazi, where the revolution started. This unit was rumored to be anti-Qaddafi, but if they were, it was only in private. A unit located in the hard core of the opposition has to kill a lot of people just to keep drawing their paychecks and stay out of Big Q’s prisons, so you know that Younes had a lot of Eastern Libyan blood on his hands. It was a westie-eastie thing, like if those West-Coast guys got Biggie, maybe they got Younes too!

Some cultures forget who killed their uncles and grandpas easy; some never forget. Take Russians: One of the things that still shocks me is that after the Soviets fell you didn’t hear one story about people tracking down the retired NKVD/MVD goons who shot their relatives. I don’t know why not, but it never seemed to happen.

But Russians ain’t Arabs. Arabs remember. In fact, it’s a moral obligation to kill the guy who shot your cousin or your uncle. In some places in the ME, the only thing that makes people take a second to think before they pull the trigger is trying to remember your family tree, how many relatives of military age you’ve got. The more they can recall, the longer your life expectancy.

So my guess is that somebody from around Benghazi got tired of seeing the man who shot Uncle Rashid playing the brave rebel and talked it over with his bros and cuzzes, and they took care of family business themselves. But it’s only a guess, for now. The truth is, the life span of a general who changes sides in the middle of a civil war is just not that long, no matter where you are.

Not only do you have to deal with grudge-holding relatives of some of the people you placed in mass graves, but the bigger problem of why your new friends should trust you in the first place. You changed sides once; who’s to say you won’t do it twice?

It’s only natural to have your doubts about a man who was fighting against you a few months ago. He could be a double agent, or just a sleaze who’ll jump whichever way the wind’s blowing, a born traitor—as they used to call those types before we got psychologized and started throwing “psychopath” around.

Genghis himself was no big fan of people who changed sides, even when they volunteered to sign up with him. When he took Samarkand, all the Turkish mercs who’d been fighting for the city offered to switch to the Mongol team. He had them all killed: “Great! Glad to have you! We think you’ll enjoy your time with Mongol Hordes Inc.! First, of course, there’s a little initiation to go through, be over in a sec—just kneel down, eyes closed and neck stretched out, that’s it! Stretch that neck! Good, good! Hold still!”

And it’s worst of all for a commander who changes sides when he doesn’t seem to want to win for his new team. That naturally gets people thinking he’s actually still backing his old friends. Younes was in that spot, and it’s not a comfy one. The Libyan rebels put him in charge of military operations—on account of he actually knew something about them. But the rebels weren’t doing well at all. Five months in, they were stalemated on the coast, where everybody expected them to win.

Any Friend of McClellan’s…Shoot’im!

You don’t have to look far for examples close to home about what happens to a man like that. Take the court-martial of McClellan’s favorite officer, Fitz John Porter, in 1862. Porter was a New Englander, but he’d buddy’d up with Lee and other Dixiecrats at West Point and belonged to the southern sympathizers who clustered around McClellan. He was also a big McClellan fan, so when John Pope took over from McClellan, Porter started undermining the new commander every way he could.

The kink in the story here is that Porter was dead right on that issue. Pope was about the only Union officer who could make McClellan look good, which he proceeded to do by managing Second Bull Run so lousily that if it hadn’t been for Porter disobeying Pope’s orders, and a great last stand by George Sykes, the whole Army of the Potomac might have been crushed.

Porter’s real crime came a little later at Antietam, where he commanded the reserve. He supposedly said to McClellan just when the great Mustachio’d Waffler was about to commit the reserves to an attack, “Remember, General, I command the last reserve of the last army of the Republic.” If he really said that—and if McClellan really was considering committing his reserve, which I find hard to believe—then Porter came close to treason right then, because they could have destroyed Lee if they’d pushed on right then.

But that’s not why Porter was court-martialed. Pope was fired and reassigned to Minnesota—on account of Alaska wasn’t part of the Union yet, so that was about as far as they could send him—but the old fool had friends in DC, and he started writing them about how it was Porter’s fault he’d lost, because Porter had disobeyed his orders in Second Bull Run. Which was true, but Porter deserved a medal for doing it.

So they court-martialed him in the winter of 1862-63, found him guilty and booted him. It was right after Fredericksburg, people were in a bad mood. And they were right; the high command was totally incompetent, but it was typical of the way these things play out that they nailed Porter for one of his better decisions, not for what he did at Antietam. They should have just taken McClellan out behind the nearest barn and accidentally shot him a few times, but the rank and file loved him so that was out.

By the way, let’s play a little trivia game here: Which American general does our current prez remind you of? Hint: Came into the job on a huge wave of confidence, backed down before an outnumbered enemy, showed more sympathy for the enemy than his own side…

At least Porter was allowed to die in bed. In most places it doesn’t work that way when a general changes sides and loses battles. A whole lot of ranking Tsarist officers joined the Red Army, and the Bolsheviks were happy to use them as long as there were Whites to zap, but after a while Stalin started to wonder about them. Well, Stalin wondered about everybody, probably wondered about his mom, wanted her dug up and waterboarded—but the death-rate for Tsarist officers who put on the red star, like Piatakov, Yakir, Smirnov and Smilga was near 100%. Or maybe Stalin just didn’t like their names; I sure don’t and neither does Spellcheck. I guess that’s how you tell you’re spelling Russian names right: Spellcheck starts screeching at you.

Same thing has happened every time a rebel army takes control. When Saddam attacked Iran, the Mullahs suddenly started visiting dozens of ex-officer’s in the Shah’s army and especially his air force. The new bosses always appeal to the officers’ patriotism and it usually works. Lots of Iranian pilots joined the Islamic AF of Iran. To thank them for their brave decision, the Islamic Republic allowed some of them to go back to their cells in Ervin. The rest got a lead medal in the back of the head.

Sure, Blame the Fat Guy!

Sometimes officers get shot just for not winning. The most famous case was Admiral John Byng, who got the firing squad for losing Minorca to the French. I guess the English were pissed because they knew that about 150 years later, millions of lager louts were going to want cheap Med packages in English-speaking islands and the Admiral had ruined it for them. Byng didn’t really do anything wrong, besides lose a battle, but under those Georges, the penalty for dogging it against the foe was death, just like it was for stealing a loaf of bread or farting at a magistrate. The only reason anybody remembers him is he inspired some Frenchman to come up with one of the great one-liners: “The English execute an admiral every now and then to encourage the others.”

When a commander’s already marked as a turncoat, his only chance is to be so indispensible to his new friends that they can’t afford to kill him right away. And Younes did the one thing that will lower a turncoat’s chances even further: He didn’t win. That made him expendable, and that made him a good candidate for some justice delayed.

The good news is that it didn’t really matter anyway. The Rebels’ eastern/coastal front was stalled with him in charge, and it stayed stalled after he was shot. It was the Berbers in the west who broke the stalemate. Younes’s odds of living another year were close to zero anyway, and let’s face it: After 42 years of running wet work for Qaddafi, he had it coming and then some.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

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Ackshoo-ul Berbers in Ackshoo-ul Village

Well, that was a quick takedown. One of the strange things about Libya was the pacing. It needed a good editor, because it started fast, then bogged down, and then just when everybody’d given up and gone to get some caramel corn, the credits started rolling.

They’re still rolling, though, and there might be one of those after-credit scenes they put in when they don’t know what else to do with them. Last thing I heard, Qaddafi’s still in Tripoli and his friends’n’relations, along with whatever Sahel mercs are still around, are skulking around the downtown sniping and otherwise expressing their disagreement with the new state of affairs.

But the mobile-warfare stage seems pretty well through. And it was the Berbers who did it, with a lot of help—I’m guessing—from special forces, either US, or maybe French.

Everybody was focused on the Eastern Front, the insurgents moving out from around Benghazi west along the coast toward Tripoli. But they stalled out on the flat coastal plains—very hard to advance on a surface like that against endless supplies of rocket artillery like Qaddafi’s forces had. One thing that’s very clear here: Logistics wasn’t the problem for Qaddafi. He had Grads the way Imelda Marcos had shoes. As long as he had anyone to risk staying in the danger zone long enough to guess the launch angle and press a button, he could deter, like they say. A grad salvo on flat sand—that’s deterrence. It’d deter me, and it deterred the amateurs from Benghazi. I don’t mean “amateurs” in a mean way, but mostly that’s what they were. War’s not as easy as the movies make it look. All that red tape, all that drilling; there’s reasons for it. Without it, you dissolve like the Spanish anarchist militias did every time under fire (except the expat commies), and you can’t even change position without a two-hour argument about who salutes who.

That’s where the Berbers in the West came in. Berbers are interesting people; I wish I knew more about them, but nobody really seems to know much. They were supposed to be bit players in Libya. They’re only about 10% of the population, though even that figure zooms around like the unemployment rate. Depends on who you call a Berber. The word, they say, is like “barbarian,” an old u-PC Roman word for the aborigines outside the walls. They call themselves something else, “Amazigh.” They’ve got a lot of those Harry-Potter words, heavier on the Z’s than a bottle of Halcion. They were there before the Romans and when the Empire crumpled, they came back—until the Arabs came along about 1400 years back. From then on, it was like an English/Irish thing, or the Arab/”black” thing in Sudan: Not a racial deal, more a language and attitude thing. After all, Qaddafi himself—and he hated Berbers even more than he hated…well, everybody else—even he was Berber stock, from a family way down in the desert before they came to Sirte. A Berber is somebody who speaks Berber, acts like a Berber—and isn’t an Arab. Not being an Arab isn’t a good move, hasn’t been for about 1400 years (one of those funny coincidences you get with conquests), and Qaddafi, a secret Berber, an ashamed-of-it Berber, hated them even more than most Arab leaders in the Maghrib did.

The Berber who kept the faith and stayed Berber stick around a few parts of the NW. Towns like the ones you’ve been seeing in the news, Yafran, Zintan, Zawiya—all those Z’s? Berber.

The bad thing about hanging around there is that it’s close to Tripoli. It was a quick commute for Qaddafi’s cousins and mercs to bring the artillery in range and start shelling those Berber towns when they rose up after Benghazi waved the No-More-Q flag. They had plenty of reason, like the fact that Qaddafi hated them, made it real clear he did, changed the names of their towns, banned their language, arrested anybody who acted too Berber and called them “Children of Satan” and said their language—the oldest one in the Maghrib—was a colonialist myth.

But the way I recall the script, the way it was supposed to go, the Berber were going to be—let’s face it: The human-rights tragedy. They were going to resist bravely, then they were going to be massacred. Mulched into war propaganda. It happens. Nothing a good network loves more than a lost cause, especially with photogenic villagers, and best of all when they’re lying dead in the street, mom howling over the kid’s body.

That was the way it was supposed to go: Qaddafi’s forces massacring the poor Berber in the West, providing propaganda cover, if I can put it like that, for the air cover that NATO was giving the real power, the Arab insurgents in the East.

Didn’t happen that way. The Berbers ad libbed, by beating the crap out of Qaddafi’s people. They suffered along the way; their towns were blasted, a few thousand were massacred on schedule—but they dug in, held on, and then, out of nowhere, broke through Qaddafi’s lines and right into Tripoli.

Where of course they were welcomed by “cheering crowds.” Lemme tell ya about those cheering crowds, by the way: Don’t put too much stock in them. When the enemy breaks through into the center of town, cheering is just common sense. I’d probably cheer if it was the Khmer Rouge barreling into my subdivision. In fact I’d cheer even harder if it was them. If it was, say, the UN blue helmet, you could probably get away with shrugging, even spitting in the street, but when it’s serious people, you better borrow their flag and cheer til you sound like Rod Stewart after overdoing the crack pipe all night.

The same cheering crowds that make network photo ops will be throwing rocks the first time the price of gas goes up. Maybe a lot of people in Tripoli were glad to see the Berber roll in, maybe not. We shall see, as the atheist said to the firing squad.

More important: How’d they do it? I repeat, Berbers are less than 10% of the population; they were pushed out of the army, never trusted; how’d they smash into the capital?

As far as I can tell, there were a few big reasons, starting with geography. They were close to Tripoli to start with. It’s a long drive along the Med from Benghazi to Tripoli, and a lot longer when you’re being shelled. Zawiya is a close to Tripoli, which is bad when Qaddafi sends his SP artillery over there but suddenly becomes a huge advantage when your guys dig in, hold on, use that NATO air support and start picking off his rocket batteries. Once you’ve done that, neutralized his advantage in heavy armor, it’s infantry on infantry and I haven’t seen one single sign that any of Qaddafi’s units had any stomach for close-in fighting. And that includes the “elite” Khamis Brigade, under the command of Son #29 or whatever. “Elite”! I think in terms of Qaddafi’s army, that means they showed up at roll call more often than not. Supposedly Qaddafi was using his Sahel mercs, the only real fighters in his forces, as MPs: They had orders to shoot anybody running from the front. That works, as long as you can keep the troops in their trenches, but bad troops can never fight once the line is breached, and they’ll run through fire to get away—they’ll be braver running away than they’d ever be attacking. One of the longterm weirdnesses of military history.

But that skips the big question: How exactly did they neutralize that heavy artillery? My guess is: hand-held laser designators. See, one of the scary questions involved in helping the rebels is what happens to the stuff you give them once the war’s over. It’s not even a matter of “Islamic militants,” it’s a matter of profit. Somebody gives you a Milan antitank weapon—well, maybe it never gets unpacked, sitting in a crate. Kind of a shame. Say Qaddafi’s tanks never showed up on your section of the front. It’s going to cross your mind that there are people out there who want that kind of merchandise. Maybe you’ve got an uncle of a cousin in Algiers who knows somebody in Beirut who’ll hand over some serious cash for that. Shame to let it go to waste. (God, with the rent coming due here I’m drooling over the possibilities myself.)

Flat-Hat using laser designator to Disagree with Taliban

So how do you give the insurgents effective weaponry without putting them into the business of selling weapons on ebay? My guess, just a guess, is: laser designators. Very effective, when used with first-world air power, but best of all, totally useless when the air cover’s withdrawn. You may remember I did an article spitting on that phony USN “laser weapon” that set an Evinrude on fire after only five minutes—but I never denied that as target designators and rangefinders, lasers are lethal. So I’m betting we had an alliance between Leading Edge and stone-age village going, between the Berbs and the ‘Burbs, har har, going here.

Laser designators are just versions (OK, very very expensive versions) of your Community College prof’s laser pencils. Good for blinding pedestrians, highlighting powerpoint presentations…and also good for putting the little red dot of death on a Grad launcher or SP artillery. I’m guessing, just guessing, that those things were handed out like Kinko’s copycards all along the Western front. Tell your Berber friends to point them at a tank, hold the dot on the tank, and wait for the magic F-16 to make it go away. I can just imagine the instructional session after they handed those suckers out, some career noncom from Arkansas twanging away in a Nafusa Mountain camp: “This designator is capable of illuminating targets up to—Hey! You! What’s yer name, son? Well, Usem, what you just did is a good lesson in how NOT to use this designator! This is not a toy! Do NOT point the designator at your friend in the Toyota unless you want the Toyota to disappear! No, it is NOT funny! Translate that for me, wouldja Tacfin? And don’t take it easy on’em, this is something they better figure out real quick.”

And the best thing about those designators is that once the planes go back to Ramstein, these turn into laser toys, about as dangerous as a paintball gun. You’d like to get them back, because they run about $250,000 each for the top models, but look, if you want to save money just don’t have a war. You can’t pinch pennies in a war, it ruins the whole feel of the thing.

Although I’m not sure the instructor would have an Arkansas twang. Not this time. Just as likely, he’d have whatever kind of accent French dudes from the sticks have, because this was a Frog pond all the way.

The French aren’t getting much credit—they never do in the US—but they’re the ones who showed guts this time. Americans sort of assume we’re the ones who have to go in and knock heads because the Euros are still going through Stalingrad PTSS. Not this time. Obama did what he usually does: Waiting around for somebody to make a move. And it was the French who made it first, pushing for NATO air support and going ahead with arms shipments to the Libyan rebels. The French take Africa dead serious, and there are a lot of voters in the scuzzy French suburbs (they put their welfare losers in giant suburban highrises over there) who hail from the Maghrib. Sarkozy had been a little too cozy with the ex-dictator of Tunisia, and he took a lot of heat for it. So when he had this chance to snuggle up to the new powers in Libya, look good for those high-birthrate Maghrib voters, and play the hero all at once, he didn’t have to think too hard about it.

And the British—well, I have to give them credit: They’re just up for it, anywhere, anytime. A Russian reader wrote me an email about his people’s attitude which I copied down because it fits the Brits even better than the Russians: “Nam nuzhna voynooshka,” which he says means “We need a little war now and then.” (If that actually means, “You suck, Brecher,” or something on those lines, I’m going to be pissed off. That’s why I can’t believe these guys who get tattoos in some language they don’t know; how’d you know the tattooist wasn’t in a funny mood that day and just inked “Kick me here” on your elbow?)

The Russians actually didn’t want a little war this time around, not in Libya. They were tight with the Big Q (or “The Big Gh”; I’ve seen Qaddafi’s name spelled more ways than those cutesy made-up girl names like “Siara”) and it’s bad news for Russia now that Q moved on to R, as in “rebels.” They’re already talking about cutting Russia out of the new oil deals in Libya.

The other party who didn’t want any fuss in Libya was us. If you can still call the USA “us.” I’m not so sure any more, not since I lost my three-month no-benefit job. I take that kind of thing personally. Just funny that way.

The US didn’t want another Arab mess. It’s that simple. Obama owes the job to a simple equation: Bush = Iraq. Well, that and his excellent dental hygiene, and the fact that bastard seems to get by on about 10 calories a day. You can’t be too thin and too rich if you want to be president.

So the last thing he wanted was a new equation: Obama = Libya + Iraq + Afgh. We were the squeamish Euros in this one, and the French were the hawks. Even the suckers out in the flyover states tend to notice when you start a war. You can do just about anything else to them and they’ll just change the channel, but a war—that gets the Skraelings’ attention for a few seconds. And not in the way that our JC Penney’s model of a prez wanted. (He does look like a Penney’s catalogue model—admit it! Selling that suit, that’s his strong point. Downhill from there.)

And he had serious people to worry about too, not just the dummies in Kansas. Like the Israelis. They didn’t officially like Qaddafi; he was always one-upping the other Arab mouthpieces about chopping the Jews up into little teeny pieces, way teenier than those other wimps wanted! But look, after 40 years of all quiet on the Libyan front, the Israelis kind of noticed that his woof-to-weight ratio was even lower than the Arab-dictator average. Just pick up a rock and this mutt would dodge, then come back on his belly every time.

So Obama had to deal with people like Daniel Pipes, a classic old-line Likudnik and Muslim-baiter. For these guys, and there are a lot of them, there is only one time zone on the planet and that is Jerusalem time. And Jerusalem as the capital of Yeretz Israel, too, and don’t you forget it. Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians—none of those people are real to them until they get rid of their dictators. That might energize them, and that means nothing but trouble down the line for Judea and Samaria, which means trouble for DC too.

So Pipes was screeching that dislodging Qaddafi might free up “radical Islam” in Libya. And it might. That’s what happens when people wake up; they get ideas. Deal with it. Personally, I dunno, but if Islam is so damn radical and there’s 1.5 billion of’em and they control damn near all the oil—personally, seems to me we’d be in a lot more trouble than we are. Personally, seems to me I’m not suffering from Islam as much as from the fact that they sent all the jobs away—mostly to Muzzie countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia, thanks very much—then used to profits to keep us suckers scared of some dingbat imam. But that’s just me, I’m not very trusting. Unemployment does that to you.

And since all those boring old liars are sounding the alarm that this’ll be the end of the world…well, look, you can’t go wrong betting against the people who brought you that monster hit, “The Baghdad Cakewalk.” There’s that saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day, but if the neocons were a Rolex, somehow they’d manage not to do it even once. I don’t know how, but they would.

So I’m gonna say here: Just maybe, the whole thing ended pretty well. Not that expensive, money or lives; gotta be better for the Libyans if anybody actually cares about them; can’t see any risk for the big picture—only 6 million Libyans to start with, for God’s sake, and I don’t see the Berber going on a global jihad any time soon. Jeez, what a thought: What if it turned out good?

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

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A funny thing happened while a GOP congressional staff weasel was doing his job last week. He actually tried to use European military history to justify one of his little twists. And when I say “funny,” I mean hilarious. This guy was counting on Americans’ total, absolute ignorance of everything that happened in Europe before 1945 beyond the fact that the Nazis were bad people. That’s not a bad bet, most of the time, but this time, this particular weasel just went a lie or two too far.

The weasel in question is named—oh, but that’s the problem right there: What exactly IS this weasel’s name? Well, it used to be “Peter Simonyi.” Nice Hungarian-American name, you’d think. Nothing wrong with that. But this guy, to use the old punchline, had been getting it all dirty, doing what weasels do: Skulking around K Street moving from regulatory agencies like the SEC to bloodsucking financial giants like Goldman Sachs and back to government by landing a job with Darrell Issa, the new GOP hetman of the Congressional unit in charge of corporate crime.

Would You Buy A Hot Car from This Man?

Before Issa took the job, this group was in charge of cracking down on that sort of crime. Officially, at least. Since Issa took over, they’ve dropped the whole front, and made it official that they see themselves as facilitators for the billionaires. I’m not saying Issa’s a lifelong hood who graduated from Grand Theft Auto to locksmithing, a totally classic crime bio, then hit it big and became a rightwing thug on a whole new level. I’m not saying he even stole his Army buddy’s car, then ditched it on the freeway when he felt the heat. But then I’m not not saying it either.

Naturally, a sleaze like Issa wanted a guy like Peter Simonyi on his new crime-helping team in Congress. And little Peter wanted to be a part, a small, humble, part, of that great big racket, by helping Issa write bloodsucker-friendly legislation.

There was just one problem: It didn’t look squeaky-clean for the same Peter Simonyi who used to turn the thumbscrews for Goldman Sachs to be joining the Congressional staff who were supposed to be fighting corporate cartels.

But like Shakespeare or somebody said, what’s in a name? Money, Peter figured, easy money—but only if he came up with a new one that he hadn’t messed up yet. So just like that, Peter Simonyi officially changed his name to “Peter Haller.” But it was his tear-jerker of an explanation that really had me in the aisles.

See, this reporter Lee Fang at ThinkProgress tracked down Simonyi/Haller’s bio—the whole crawl of shame between lobbyists, congress and bloodsucking finance companies—and sweated him about why he needed an alias. And who was more entitled to ask than a guy with a standout name like “Lee Fang,” anyway? Stonewall Jackson would’ve been proud to have that for a nickname. I bet there’s a neo-Confederate bio of Jackson out with a name like that: “Stonewall Jackson: Lee’s Fang.”

Here’s what Simonyi/Haller said when they pressed him on the name change:

“My mother, whose maiden name is Theodora Maria Theresia haller-koi gr Haller (in the U.S., Dora Haller), married Imre Gabor Simonyi and took his name. Her father Alfred haller-koi gr Haller was killed in Budapest in 1944 by fascists as he attempted to prevent children from being conscripted into the military. Prior to his return to Hungary in 1944, he served under Regent Miklos Horthy, as a Hungarian diplomat stationed in England supporting the British in opposition to Germany. His last request was that if Theodora marries, her husband and children would carry on the Haller name.”

There are a lot of funny bits in that little one-paragraph melodrama Peter wrote, but the funniest of all is this line: “…He served under Regent Miklos Horthy, as a Hungarian diplomat stationed in England supporting the British in opposition to Germany.” That is what is technically called a flat-out lie. One thing you can tell about Peter from this story: He thinks Americans don’t know a thing about European history. And he’s probably right, since a lot of the reader comments to this big lie called it “a touching family story.” Whoo-ee! It’s a story, all right. About as accurate as Rambo’s version of Nam.

Miklos Horthy was “Regent” of Hungary from 1919 to 1944. If he was “supporting the British,” it was a well-kept secret. If only Hitler had known that about his pal Miklos, he might not have posed with him in quite as many photo ops, where you can see the Fuhrer and the Regent shaking hands, strolling together, taking a little ride in a convertible together, just generally lovin’ up a storm, as Jerry Lee would say.

Horthy & Hitler: The 2H Love Tour

H&H: Secret “Pro-British” Handshake

I don’t even know where Peter came up with that “pro-British” lie of his. The British weren’t even a factor in that messed-up, landlocked multi-ethnic gangfight. South-Central Europe between the wars—well, it’s a lot like South-Central LA back in the day, except a whole lot bloodier and more confusing. Basically it’s pretty much the way Eastwood describes his killer past in Unforgiven: Nobody remembers much of it, they were drunk most of the time–the main ingredient for a war in those parts is slivovitz, or anything else if you can’t get that, including hair oil and wood alcohol—and they shot a lot of people. And hanged a lot of people. And raped a lot of people. Hungarians, Germans, Slovaks, Rumanians, Croats, Serbs, Ukranians, with the Jews and Gypsies hiding in the bushes trying to sell a little booze and not get lynched—Did I leave anybody out? If so, they’re lucky, because nobody was a hero in that mess. Primitive warfare with superb German or Czech weapons; you can imagine how that went. Killing everyone in the village before you leave—standard practice. Avoiding combat, torturing civilians until they tell you where their last side of bacon is—a day at the office. Raping every female before you bayonet them and go—part of the job. .

When the totally worthless, sleaze-ridden Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed after Germany surrendered, some ethnic gangs rose in the rankings and others sank. The Hungarians lost out big, because as the second-meanest and biggest gang in the Empire (after the Germans), they’d had a sort of little-brother status that allowed them to beat up all the other ethnics lower than them. By local standards, believe me, that was a good deal.

But their big brothers, the Germans, lost out, so they lost too. In 1920, thanks to the Treaty of Trianon, which was the B-League version of the Treaty of Versailles that did such a good job of pacifying Europe, Hungary had lost three-quarters of its old territory and about two-thirds of its population. What was left was a core area, a Hungarians-only district—and that’s what’s now “Hungary” on the map.

You’d think that’d be fine, since those tribes couldn’t live with each other. Why not split up? Well, remember the Balkans in the 1990s. A bunch of Hungarians got left behind in the parts that were grabbed by all the other ethnic gangs, and that drove the homeland Hungarians crazy. Crazier than before, I mean, because the truth about Europe before 1945, the one key truth nobody wants to hear, is that they were all, and I mean all, from London to Moscow, bloodthirsty creeps, totally out of their minds. The only difference is that they weren’t all as good at war, or not at the same time anyway, and the ones who were more in the mood grabbed what they could, when they could.

The Goldman Sachs-turned-Darrell-Issa-staffer Peter Simonyi/Haller’s hero, Miklos Horthy, was a classic specimen of South-Central European strongman between the wars. A fascist, absolutely. Not the worst of them, but a fascist all the way, in that half-comedy way the smaller European dictators had, from Mussolini on down. His title was a punchline in itself: “Admiral Miklos Horthy.” Admiral? Take another look at Hungary on the map; Admiral of what? Turns out Horthy had been an Admiral in the Austro-Hungarian navy, which was another punchline in itself.

“Admiral? Admiral of What, the Zoo Ducks?”

Nobody thought it was funny, a landlocked country with an admiral for a dictator. Nobody thought it was funny that Horthy took power in the name of the official King of Hungary, but when the King tried to come back and take the throne, Horthy, his “Regent,” told him to get lost. Twice. I’m telling you, Europe, before it got gelded in 1945, was dead serious, and blood-crazy.

Horthy came to power after the commies tried, and failed, to restore Hungary’s glory with the “Hungarian Socialist Republic.” The Republic, which should’ve had “Short-Lived” as part of its official name, started in 1919 woofing about workers’ rights, but in a few months Kun was drafting every man under 60 to go fight the Rumanians. They marched east and got slaughtered.

So much for Communism. It was time to go back to what South-Central homies knew best: A strongman who had a fancy uniform and would snuggle up to the Germans. That was how they thought, and there was a kind of nasty South-Central logic to it. After all, it came down to the Germans or the Russians, and when you had that choice, most people, even the Jews, generally went with the Germans. The Russians just played too rough. At least the Germans tended to go easier on their allies; the Russians, then and now, played it more down the line, killing just as many of their friends as their enemies. Something about low self-esteem, I don’t know.

And from 1933 on, “The Germans” meant “The Nazis.” Hitler had pulled Germany out of starvation, or that’s how the homies in South-Central saw it. And if you’re really ignorant enough to think that anybody in Europe, circa 1935, actually objected to the Nazis’ Jew-baiting, race-bragging stuff…well, you must be one of those pig-ignorant Americans little Peter is counting on.

Besides, kissing up to Hitler paid off, at first. Hungary got land back from all the other South-Central gangs, thanks to the Wehrmacht backing. And Horthy was so happy he jumped at every photo-op Hitler offered him.
When the war finally came, Horthy was all for it. Hungarian troops fought with the Wehrmacht all through South-Central, and even contributed a huge contingent to the Axis troops on the Don Front in Russia (where they got a rep for looting and cowardice that made even the Italians look down on them).

Then came Stalingrad and Europe suddenly got a conscience. As in, “Whoa, the Germans might actually lose!” Yes, children, that was the moment when the Great European Moral Awakening took place: When they realized that they were going to be explaining all those Hitler portraits on the wall to a Soviet Army political officer someday soon.

Horthy woke up a little later than most of them. Nobody ever said the old landlocked Admiral was a very smart fella. It wasn’t until 1944, when the Soviets had been bleeding the Wehrmacht for years, that Hungary tried to withdraw. And even then, they failed: The Nazis, with the worst intelligence system of any modern power, managed to find out that Horthy planned to ditch them, captured him and put a reliably insane Hungarian fascist in his place.

And if I remember correctly, Peter, it was in 1944 that your brave, “anti-fascist” ancestor with that aristocratic German name came back to Hungary, right? Weird timing, huh? A Horthy supporter who was “killed by fascists” in ’44—let’s translate that into something that makes sense. Grandpa Simonyi-Haller was a Horthy loyalist, you mean, an ordinary garden-variety nationalist-fascist Hungarian/German upper-class diplomat whose backer, Horthy, had tried to ditch his Nazi sponsors and failed. So what you mean, Peter m’boy, is that your fascist granddad was killed by OTHER fascists—and with a name like Grandpa had, it was pure German-on-German violence we’re talking about here—because his “moderate fascist” boss Horthy had double-crossed the German Army that he’d been cheering for as long as it helped him steal more land from the other gangs in South Central.

You’re right, Peter. It’s a heartwarming family story you’ve got there. You should coach your kids so they can tell it at those elementary-school “My Family’s Ethnic History” days. Why not? People who’ll vote for Darrell Issa will swallow anything.

There’s another happy ending for the other hero of the story, Dear Old “pro-British” Admiral Horthy, so beloved by the entire Simonyi, I mean Haller, family. Those squeamish Nazis didn’t do the sensible thing and stand this worthless traitor up against the nearest wall. In fact, Horthy must’ve talked fast in Nazi custody, because the old swine survived to snitch on his ex, Adolf, at the Nuremburg Trials. So you see, the story has a happy ending: The Germans, the only fascists who actually had courage to match their crazy, were the official bad guys and Admiral Horthy was an “anti-fascist” hero whose shining image is clean enough to make even a sleaze like Peter Simonyi-Haller look good enough to be a congressional GOP staffer.

You see where I’m going here. Where the whole miserable human race is going: Downhill fast. From brave and bloodthirsty to cowardly thieves.

You can see the bad old days, though—the much-better bad old days, fresh off the Steppe–if you look at Simonyi/Haller’s picture. See those downturned eyes? Look at a painting of Genghis himself and you’ll see the same eyes, turned down like a compound bow.

Genghis Khan-Haller-Simonyi

Those are steppe eyes, right out of the Central Asian grasslands into the plains of Pannonia.

You know what the Europeans called war in those days? “The movements of the peoples.” They were a lot more honest in those days, in more ways than one.

Yes, and eventually some of the peoples moved all the way to DC, where they got busy fooling some of the people all of the time, looting without even being good warriors, with car thieves for leaders and little weasels like Peter writing crooked legislation. If you ask me, there was far more honor in being a Simonyi, descendant of the mounted archers who fought their way into the best grasslands in Europe and fought the Mongols almost to a draw.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

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I’m back, thanks to the don’t-call-it-a-depression. Thanks to this brief correction in the US economy, then. My new job lasted three months. I did all the right things, too, even smiled. Didn’t matter. I was the last hired, and you know how that one finishes up. They were sorry to see me go, and could you go right now, please? We need the monitor.

I missed a lot of great stuff in the war world these last few months. I’ll try to catch up, item by item, as often as I can. In between those application letters that make you feel even worse than usual, and getting the 12 or so hours of sleep that you need when being awake means remembering you’re totally useless, nobody wants you, just like you always figured.

For your reading pleasure, The eXiled is reposting one of the War Nerd’s most famous–and hilarious–episodes: The epic battle pitting Gary Brecher against neocon historian Victor Davis Hanson, guru to Dick Cheney and “Scooter” Libby. Like Bull Run, this battle came in two parts: the first part begins with the War Nerd’s devastating opening salvo attack on July 28, 2005, in an article headlined “Victor Davis Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor”:

Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor
by Gary Brecher

I‘ve survived some terrible summers, but this is the worst. Somebody kill me. Fresno’s been putting on a show, crunching a whole lifetime of stupid misery into a few hot months. And I mean hot. We’ve been setting records down here. Today it hit 107 degrees. Tomorrow we’re due to reach 109. Luckily, Thursday should be a cool, breezy 103.

I had figured this summer would be a little easier to handle now that I’ve shucked off a layer of blubber (I slimmed down a bit to try to ease my kidney situation). But no, God just made it a few degrees hotter to make sure I stay as sweaty and miserable as ever, cooking in my own fat.

People here have been going crazy since it started heating up. The Fresno PD managed to get our fine city some international press with a new approach to fighting crime: cracking down on 11-year-olds. In case you didn’t read about it, what happened was this 11-year-old girl threw a rock at some kids who were splattering her with water balloons, so the Fresno cops swooped down with three squad cars and a chopper. They wrestled her down, cuffed her and charged her with felony assault. She did a week in juvie isolation, with no access to even her parents, before they let her go.

Naturally her lawyers yelled racism, because she’s Mexican. I don’t buy that. It’s not racism, it’s plain cowardice. That’s the key to understanding what’s happening in the world today: plain old cowardice. Somewhere along the line we lost all the brave people. Now we’ve just got a lot of phony blowhards. The cops who wrestled that little girl around were just like the cops you see on Reno 911, playing tough once they were sure the suspect couldn’t fight back. I drive past gang corners every damn day, and I never see the Fresno PD giving those bastards any trouble-they’re too scary. So they wait till it’s a little girl who defended herself against a bunch of bullies, then they swarm her like a SWAT team.

We’ve got this Fresno intellectual who likes to strut the same way in the local paper. He’s one of these snotty assholes with three names: Victor Davis Hanson. Oh, sorry: Doctor Victor David Hanson. He’s got a Ph.D. and he teaches at Fresno State.

This fool passes himself off as a military historian, writing columns about Iraq and Afghanistan and everything else he feels like babbling about, but he doesn’t have a clue about contemporary warfare. Every war nerd on the net knows more about what’s happening in Iraq than he does. But that doesn’t stop him. He teaches Classics, he’s written a half dozen books on ancient warfare, and he never lets you forget that he’s a professor and you’re not.

In his last column for the Fresno Bee, he sneered at people who don’t have Ph.D.’s for daring to have opinions about the war in Iraq: “What do a talented Richard Gere, Robert Redford and Madonna all have in common besides loudly blasting the current administration? They either dropped out of, or never started, college. Cher may think George Bush is ‘stupid,’ but she-not he-didn’t finish high school.”

Since I never even finished my AA degree, I took that kind of personally. I guess it’s my fault for not getting into Yale on pure merit like Bush did. That column got me so furious I daydreamed about driving down Highway 99 to Hanson’s farm and setting all his orchards and vineyards on fire. I kept thinking of what the Spartans said when one of their neighbors threatened them: “Your cicadas will chirp from the ground,” meaning, “We’ll burn your fucking olive orchards if you mouth off again.”

Professor Hanson is one of these “back to the land” assholes who can afford to live on a farm because he’s got tenure for life at Fresno State-they can’t fire him for anything less than a major felony. It’s classic welfare state socialism that funds his estate, but that doesn’t stop him from moralizing about the benefits of free market solutions. So he writes these columns from his farm in Selma, a few miles down the road from Fresno, about the sanctity of private land and private enterprise and the life lessons of farming.

He doesn’t even suspect what a total hypocrite he is. According to his official online bio, Hanson graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1975. I don’t know if you non-Californians understand what that means. UC Santa Cruz is the official sex-and-drugs campus of the whole UC system. It’s so hippie-cool and mellow it doesn’t even give grades, which are just too bourgeois. You just get little notes from your teachers. The kids who go there are rich brats who don’t have to worry about getting a job-because graduating from there is like telling your future employers you were stoned for four straight years.

And Hanson graduated from there in 1975. I can only dream about what it must’ve been like to be a student at Santa Cruz back then, at the climax of the hippie days. I seriously doubt if anybody on that campus was un-stoned from enrollment to graduation, or un-laid for more than a week.

So here’s a question for you, Professor Hanson, Mister Morality: how many coeds did you screw when you were at UC Santa Cruz? And how many drugs did you take?

But you know, I could take all Hanson’s hypocritical pompous bullshit if he only knew something about contemporary warfare. He doesn’t. All he knows is that he’s in favor of Gulf War II, and to defend that mess he’s willing to slander Bush Sr’s magnificent victory in Gulf War I. This is insane, really insane-taking America’s only outright strategic victory since 1945, our most glorious campaign since Inchon, and turning it into a defeat just so you can make Bush Jr’s fiasco look a little better. Here’s Hanson’s treasonous account of Gulf War I:

“War I (January 17 to March 3, 1991)

“The First Iraqi War : started over Saddam Hussein’s August 2, 1990, invasion of Kuwait. His occupation precipitated the American-led coalition’s efforts to reclaim Kuwait through land and air attacks. Saddam’s complete capitulation was seen as satisfying the war’s professed claim of restoring the sovereignty of Kuwait.

“But despite retreating from Kuwait and suffering terrible damage to his armed forces, Saddam, like the Germans in 1918, claimed that his armies had been repelled while on the offensive. So he passed off a setback as a draw against the world’s superpower – and thus a win by virtue of his own survival against overwhelming odds.

“In any case, we called off our forces before the destruction of the Republican Guard. We also refused to go to Baghdad; we let rebellious Shiites and Kurds be tragically butchered; and we failed to enforce all the surrender agreements. Apparently the U.S. wished to bow to the U.N. mandates only to expel Saddam from Kuwait, or was worried about our Sunni partners who wanted a lid on Kurdish tribalism and Shiite fervor inside Iraq.”

There are so many evil lies here, I don’t know where to start. First there’s the phony comparison to Germany after WW I. There’s no comparison at all. Saddam’s Kuwait invasion wasn’t a nationalist war like WW I, and no matter what Saddam said, every dog in the street in Baghdad knew perfectly well that the Iraqi army had been outclassed and savaged. Moreover, the Germans fought for four years and nearly won, whereas Saddam got his ass completely whipped in a three-day land war. Fact is, we did it right in Gulf War I. We neutered Saddam, destroyed his ability to threaten anybody, and left him in charge of his hellhole country. It was American diplomacy combined with military power at its finest. And this pig tries to say it was a defeat!

Hanson goes on to say that we “refused to go to Baghdad” because we wanted to please the UN. Bullshit. We used the UN to build a huge alliance (something Bush’s idiotic son didn’t think was necessary), and we stayed out of Baghdad because Powell and Bush Sr. knew what would happen if we tried to occupy Iraqi cities. We’re going through the consequences of that mistake right now; how can anybody pretend not to understand, by now, why it was a bad idea, and why Bush Sr. was right the first time?

What’s amazing is that Hanson is actually trying to blame Bush Sr. for not jumping off the cliff first, before his idiotic son did. Like I said, it’s insane-until you realize it’s being done just to make Junior’s disaster look good, which Hanson needs to do because he’s been shilling for Bush Jr.’s war from day one. Hanson isn’t just insane. He’s one sleazy dude.

He proves his sleaze when he moves on to Gulf War II:

“War IV. (April 2003 to present)

“The Fourth Iraqi War (“The Insurrection,” “The Occupation”) began immediately after the end of the conventional fighting and continues today. It was framed by the fact that the United States would not simply leave after toppling Saddam yet had never really gone into the Sunni Triangle in force during the three-week victory. War IV was waged by a loose alliance of Wahhabi fundamentalists, foreign jihadists, and former Baathists against the American efforts to fashion an indigenous Iraqi democratic government.”

Here again, there’s so many lies it’s hard to know where to start. Like, what the hell does Hanson mean by saying we never attacked the Sunni Triangle? As military history, that’s pure nonsense. The only reason he says it is because he has to explain to himself how come the insurgency was able to come on so strong after we kicked ass in the conventional war. And see, Hanson can’t admit to himself that there was a difference in the kind of war being waged, a transition from conventional to urban-guerrilla warfare. If he once admitted that we’re dealing with an urban guerrilla war now, he’d have to face the historical fact that modern armies still don’t have an effective counter for that mode of warfare.

And all that ancient Greek stuff won’t help Hanson deal with urban guerrilla war, because there was nothing like it in the ancient world. In those days conquerors wiped out cities the second they showed any sign of uppity behavior. Urban guerrilla wars were pretty quick and pretty unsuccessful: rise up against the occupier, and literally every man, woman and child gets slaughtered, and the offending city covered in salt. End of story.

One of my favorite examples of Roman “pacification” policy was what happened to the Helvetii, a Celtic tribe that used to live where Switzerland is now. Europe was a feisty, tricky place in those days, like Africa is now. Tribes were always on the move.

The Helvetii decided they’d make a move on Northeastern Gaul, grabbing the land and wiping out the Roman-vassal tribes occupying the land. The entire Helvetii tribe numbered about 370,000, and from that they could field about 110,000 fighting men-every male who could hold a spear. They smashed into the settled Gaul tribes easily, grabbed a swathe of territory and prepared to keep advancing until they had enough good land to support the whole tribe.

What the Helvetii hadn’t factored into their big move was the Romans. Julius Caesar got a message from his Gaul vassals pleading for help against the Helvetii. At this point he had six legions under him in Gaul, almost 300,000 men. But he wanted more, because he had something a little more drastic in mind than just defeating the Helvetii. He was out to exterminate them. So he called up another two legions, which meant he had 400,000 trained soldiers against 110,000 part-time tribal warriors.

It was no contest. The Romans surrounded the Helvetii and started stabbing their way through the mass of warriors, then the civilians. As they advanced, the legions would herd a few saleable-looking women and children away from the killing. They were sent to holding pens in the rear to be sold as slaves. The main body of Roman soldiers kept working through the mass of Helvetii, stabbing and stabbing. Roman soldiers were taught to use the short sword-”gladius,” which is where “gladiator” comes from-to stab, not slash. Stabbing made a deeper wound, more likely to tear up a guy’s guts and give him a fatal infection. The stab was also quicker than the big dramatic downward smash those hammy heavy-metal barbarians were addicted to.

At the end of the battle, they had slaughtered 220,000 men, women and children-60% of the whole tribe. Must have been exhausting too. Imagine the sheer hard work it took to kill that many screaming, scrambling people with the Roman short sword, not much bigger than a Bowie knife.

We could do it, way more easily than the Romans. We’d burn only as many calories as it takes to press a button. If we had the will, we could wipe out the whole population of the Sunni Triangle in a few days. If we used neutron bombs, we could do it without even messing up the area too badly. It would sure stop the insurgency.

Trouble is, that kind of genocide just isn’t popular these days, and nobody, not even Professor Hanson, is ready to argue for it. It’s hard to argue you want to bring democracy to the Sunnis by making them extinct. And what Hanson and morons like him won’t admit is that short of genocide, there is no military solution to urban guerrilla warfare.

So Hanson cheats like a ninth grader, trying to avoid facing the urban-guerrilla problem. He makes fake lists like this one: “From the various insurgencies of the Peloponnesian War to the British victory over Communist guerrillas in Malaya, there remain constants across 2,500 years of time and space that presage victory or defeat.”

Oh, like we’re supposed to believe he chose that Malaya example just by chance, huh? It so happens that the Malayan insurgency of the 1950s is the ONLY guerrilla war that was won by the occupying army, in this case the Brits, and that’s why Bush’s spinners like to cite It. You know why the Brits “succeeded”? It’s real simple: the insurgents were all ethnic Chinese, and the Malays hated their guts. They were a small, easily identified ethnic minority. The Malays never needed much of an excuse to start chopping up Chinese people, and when the Brits gave them license to kill they went at it full time. Then the Brits up and left.

It was a relatively small affair: over 12 years, some 7,000 MRLA guerrillas were killed. Just to give you a real comparison, one American general recently said that in the last year alone, we’ve killed or captured 50,000 Iraqi insurgents, yet, this same general admitted that the insurgency is only gaining strength.

If Hanson thinks we can chop up millions of heavily armed, aggressive Sunni Iraqis the way the Brits mopped up a few thousand Red Chinese in Malaysia, he’s insane. And maybe he is-all those years of the state subsidizing his phony “farm” and students sucking up to him for a good grade have driven him into a psychotic delusional state.

But I don’t really think he’s insane-just a traitor, a liar willing to keep shoving American troops and money into a meatgrinder just so he doesn’t have to admit he was wrong. Sooner or later we’re going to have to face it: these NeoCons don’t care about America any more than Stalin cared about Russia. They’re not just wrong. They’re traitors.

*     *     *

After a month of recovering from Brecher’s surprise attack, Victor Davis Hanson counter-attacked in miserable comic failure, even going so far as to accuse Gary Brecher of setting fire to his beloved vineyards. The eXile captured the hilarious sequel in a two-part special “Victor Davis Hanson Declares War” pull-out section: the first article, headlined “Hanson Snitches, War Nerd Suspended!”, sums up Victor Davis Hanson’s literary hijinx and email exchanges with editor Mark Ames; the second article, “An eXile phone call to the Fresno branch of the International Dyslexic Association” transcribes a phone call we made out of concern for the great historian’s mental health. These articles were  published in The eXile on September 9, 2005.

Hanson Snitches, War Nerd Suspended!

It was a long, hot August, folks. After War Nerd Gary Brecher’s takedown of neo-con mandarin and fellow Fresno-ite Victor Davis Hanson, the ol’ professor counter-attacked from his fortified perch in the National Review, America’s leading right-wing intullekshual rag. As counter-attacks go, Dr. Hanson’s was about as effective as Manuel Noriega’s brilliant defense of Panama City in 1989. Dr.Hanson’s article attacking Brecher was so sloppy and careless, not to mention patently insane (he even accused Brecher of having set fire to his grapevines), that we felt compelled to write a letter to his editor at the National Review. The NR editor forwarded our letter to Dr. Hanson, probably as a passive-aggressive way of alerting his star neocon professor about his terminally shoddy writing. Incredibly enough, Hanson responded to our criticism of his spelling errors– by misspelling the name of the editor whom he was responding to as “Mark Aimes” [sic]. The next week, Dr. Hanson, ever the honorable academic, attached and enddnote to his National Review column to clear up the outcry over his many spelling and grammar errors. Fittingly, he misspelled this endnote, titling it, “Authorr’s note” [sic]...

First, Dr. Hanson, in his own words:

August 26, 2005, 9:09 a.m.

The Paranoid Style

The National Review

Iraq: Where socialists and anarchists join in with racialists and paleocons.

II. THE ANARCHIST HOWL

But if Meyerson’s skewers facts and twists progress into abject failure, take the example of someone using the name Gary Brecher of Encore magazine. In an article called “Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor,” Brecher became incensed about a suggestion that neither the formal education nor the autodidacticism of the Hollywood elite granted them any privileged wisdom about American foreign policy:

“That column got me so furious I daydreamed about driving down Highway 99 to Hanson’s farm and setting all his orchards and vineyards on fire. I kept thinking of what the Spartans said when one of their neighbors threatened them: “Your cicadas will chirp from the ground,” meaning, “We’ll burn your f…ing olive orchards if you mouth off again.”(*

To understand the mindset of the anarchist, consider his similar fury right after 9/11.

“The best war is when you can hate both sides, and that’s how it was with the WTC. I cheered those jets…Until those planes hit the WTC nobody dreamed you could knock down an American corporation building. Nobody ever thought one would come down. And when they did, damn! It was like the noche triste, when Aztecs made the Conquistadors bleed for the first time and said, “Hey these aren’t magic six-legged metal monsters, they’re just a bunch of victims like us.”

“Hate both sides” in fact, is not quite accurate, since in reality more often the invective is reserved only for the United States — as when he cheers for the terrorists on 9/11, not for us. But then compare the recent antiwar hysteria that equates Abu Ghraib with Saddam’s death jails, Guantanamo with the Gulag and Nazi death camps, and the terrorist killers in Iraq with Minutemen.

** How strange that about the time that Mr. Brecher’s article appeared, someone in fact did try to torch our vineyard, but managed only to scorch about 20 vines near the road before the nearby Mid-Valley Fire Department arrived to put out the fire.

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200508260909.asp

Now here is Dr. Hanson’s correction to his mistakes in the above column. Note that he even misspells the column title, which should be “Dog Days”…

September 02, 2005, 7:18 a.m.

Our Dogs Days

AUTHORR’S NOTE: Correction: In last week’s essay, I referred to the wrong title of the website/newspaper that published Gary Brecher’s article, “Victor Hanson. Portrait of an American Traitor.” The online newspaper is called eXile , and the article can be found in the table of contents, under the subtitle “The War Nerd puts local Fresno academic Victor Hanson (Doctor Victor Hanson) on trial and recommends the firing squad.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson.asp

And now here is the email exchange between Ames and VDH:

From: Mark Ames [mailto: editor@exile.ru]

To: ‘letters@nationalreview.com’

Subject: letter from Moscow, Russia on Victor Hanson

Editor,

Victor Hanson’s attack on one of my newspaper’s writers, Gary Brecher (“The Paranoid Style,” August 26), reveals an appalling level of intellectual laziness. Rather than engage the substance of Brecher’s argument — that Hanson should know, as an expert on Ancient Greek warfare, that the reason why insurgencies cannot be defeated in our post-WW2 world is that genocide is no longer tolerated, since genocide has been a key strategy in defeating insurgencies from the Ancient Greeks up through the imperial Europeans — instead, Hanson merely calls Brecher cheap playground names like “anarchist,” “fascist,” or whatever else helps him avoid serious debate (just as he labels Cindy Sheehan an “anti-Semite,” the biggest debate-squelcher of them all). Furthermore, Hanson suggests that Brecher set fire to his vineyard in his footnote at the bottom, as proof that Brecher is a terrorist. This is a highly irresponsible accusation to make, although it is also highly comical.

Dr. Hanson’s laziness is the most shocking feature of his writing. Consider the transitional sentence in which he mistakenly introduces our newspaper: “But if Myerson’s skewers facts and twists progress into abject failure, take the example of someone using the name Gary Brecher of Encore magazine.” Not only does he get the name of our newspaper, “The eXile,” wrong (this in spite of the fact that Dr. Hanson freely admits to having pored through our archives, suggesting that he spent a lot of time familiarizing himself with Brecher’s works), but the sentence makes no sense whatsoever. It simply stops dead halfway through the comparison to Meyerson, or rather, to “Meyerson’s” – Meyerson’s what? Shouldn’t he remind the reader? Basically, he’s saying, “But if Meyerson’s [sic]…take the example of Encore [sic]…” There is no link whatsoever between the two clauses. One wonders what the ancient Greek rhetoricians would have thought of such lazy logic. Probably they would have assessed Dr. Hanson’s rhetorical skills just as Brecher grades his military logic on the Iraq occupation: an unmitigated disaster.

Yours,

Mark Ames

Editor

The eXile

www.exile.ru

editor@exile.ru

+7-095-795-3376

From: victor hanson

[mailto:victorh@csufresno.edu]

To: editor@exile.ru

Subject: Re: FW: letter from Moscow, Russia on Victor Hanson

Dear Mark Aimes,

I was sent your letter. Two typos occurred and were corrected in later versions on my website; a note of correction about your website title with a link is planned for the Friday column, along with the full title of the article and its listing in your table of contents.

That someone set a fire is on the record and can be verified with the Mid Valley Fire Dept. who stopped it from doing much more damage. When one writes about burning someone’s property, and thousands read it, it is completely reckless and constitutes a threat, as are other references such as “firing squad.” After your magazine printed that essay, I had numerous calls and emails about threats from your magazine, which prompted me to examine them. What “Brecher” wrote about me, as what he wrote about 9-11 was beyond normal journalism. I should say a number of readers also wrote that you, using a pseudonym, were in fact the real author of that attack, which I don’t put any credence in. In any case, the arson complaint, with pertinent information, is on file with the authorities and hope nothing more ensues.

Sincerely, VDH

From: Mark Ames [mailto:editor@exile.ru]

To: ‘victor hanson’

Subject: RE: FW: letter from Moscow, Russia on Victor Hanson

Dear Dr. Hanson,

My first response to this letter clearing up your typos and errors is that you misspelled my name. It’s “Ames,” not “Aimes.”

Sincerely,

Mark Ames

From: Mark Ames [mailto:editor@exile.ru]

To: ‘victor hanson’

Subject: RE: FW: letter from Moscow, Russia on Victor Hanson

Dear Dr. Hanson,

I am trying to follow up on the arson attack you reported. Could you please tell me the date of the alleged arson report? I cannot get confirmation from the Mid Valley FD without a date (or address, but I understand you might be wary of giving that to me). In the meantime, I am suspending Gary Brecher this issue without pay.

Sincerely,

Mark Ames

# #

An eXile phone call to the Fresno branch of the International Dyslexic Association

We were so worried about Dr. Hanson’s sloppy writing that we decided it was time for an intervention. Posing as his beleaguered editor at the National Review, we called the Fresno branch of the International Dyslexic Association…

eXile: Hi, is the International Dyslexic Association?

Front desk: Just one moment, I’ll get you that division.

eXile: Thank you.

Dr. N.: This is Dr. N——, may I help you?

eXile: Yes hi, I’m calling basically about a colleague whom I suspect might have dyslexia. I just had a few questions. First of all, I wanted to see if I should confront him with this, and how to do it tactfully.

Dr. N.: Sure.

eXile: This is a person who is quite an accomplished writer and academic, yet seems to make a lot of glaring spelling errors. He’s a professor at Fresno State, he writes for the Bee sometimes and writes regularly for the National Review Online. And even in columns he’s publishing at the National Review, and I work at the National Review, his columns are replete with big spelling mistakes that go online or else there’s a word that should be there and he uses a different word that sort of seems like it could fit. I guess the first question is, Is this a sign of dyslexia?

Dr. N.: Well, he could just be a crummy speller [laughs]. I guess I can’t answer that exactly. This person is educated and I’m assuming has many academic credentials. Dyslexia is a language processing disorder. Spelling is sort of like, like an artistic talent, either you have it or you don’t. You can improve it, if you’re a really horrible speller …

eXile: Well he’s already in his 50s and we have to deal with delicate ego situations and so on. I’m not saying that Dr. Hanson is… well, for example, one of the problems is that even in corrections that he makes online about two mistakes in a previous issue had mistakes. And we’re worried there are issues about editing him. I just got assigned to this and I’m getting sort of chewed out by a higher up. I’m having a problem approaching Dr. Hanson about this. It’s very glaring — I haven’t ever seen something as glaring as this in my professional career. It’s not like every third word, but particularly when two letters in a row that were addressing the issue of spelling errors and words that were wrong, twice in a row he made glaring spelling mistakes.

Dr. N.: You might just ask the gentleman, you might flat out ask him, “This is what I’ve seen, you’re making these errors, is this something new to you?” I mean, what if he had some neurological thing going on that just came on last year or so? He might say, no I’ve never had any problems until last year. Or he might say yes, all my life I’ve had difficulty spelling.

eXile: That’s interesting because just about exactly four years ago, from what another colleague said, some of the things he started writing were different and then there’s the spelling mistakes…

Dr. N.: Have you asked a family member or someone who worked with him five, ten years ago if there’s a difference? If you’re in your 50s — well, I’m older than that — it could be a mini-stroke.

eXile: I was wondering, do you think maybe marijuana use in his youth, does that have something to do with this?

Dr. N.: [laughs] Not that I know of, but they say it’s not good for cognition. If he was a heavy user in the past, who knows how many neurons are gone.

eXile: Well he was a UC Santa Cruz student in the ’70s…

Dr. N.: [laughs] Can you give me an example of a misuse of a word?

eXile : Yes, he was attacking a critic who attacked him at this magazine called the eXile, and he wrote it as Encore, even though he was making a detailed critique of the magazine. He actually attacked mistakes. Then he had an exchange with the editor of that magazine and misspelled the name of the editor. It was A-M-E-S, and he put A-I-M-E-S. And this is in the National Review Online, a big, influential Republican magazine out of Washington. And then in the next issue, when he made an author’s note about his mistakes, he wrote an “authorr’s” note in which he wanted to correct the spelling mistakes he made in the last issue.

Dr. N.: Now this isn’t just a poor keyboarding kind of thing? What about the intellectual content?

eXile: It’s been making less and less sense. He was quite a renowned Greek classicist through the mid 90s, and then something happened. Even for us, and we’re a pretty renowned Republican magazine, he’s been vigorously arguing a position in favor of continuing the Iraq war that even we find — and we’re supporters of it and of President Bush — even we find increasingly loopy and not very coherent. The arguments are not intellectually rigorous anymore. Maybe we are talking about a neurological event. Is that possible?

Dr. N.: From your position, when you’re getting manuscripts from a person who normally had good thinking skills and they seem to be off a little, I’d worry. The spelling things are mechanical and easily handled. As far as the content, if it’s starting to not make sense, you should send it back.

eXile: Well this guy’s a Prima Dona. Let’s get back to the mental deterioration. This is a man who used to write very complex, nuanced arguments tying Greek history to current events. In his last piece, he attacked Cindy Sheehan for being an anti-Semite, he was calling people socialists, anarchists, fascists. He accused somebody of setting fire to his vineyards. And it was full of spelling errors. It was…. I don’t know what to think.

Dr. N.: Well it doesn’t sound like dyslexia. Are we talking about Victor Davis Hanson?

eXile: Exactly.

Dr. N.: I read one of his books recently. The one about the valley.

eXile: That was then. In terms of the battery of tests, if I were to suggest it to him…

Dr. N.: He lives in this area, and I could send you a referral list. The fact that this man has been an accomplished writer he obviously had no difficulty with reading and writing in his past. If there is a change going on, I would be worried about other things. A mini-stroke or, well, you don’t want to say dementia, but something awry in the neurology. But you’re way out of my area of expertise.

eXile: One last thing I wanted to ask. Is there much of an ego issue?

Dr. N.: Well, I don’t know. I’d start with the spelling errors, and well, if the content is bizarre, well I don’t know how you’d address that. Other than you just don’t accept it as appropriate for publication. You can’t be calling people anti-Semites and fascists if they’re…

eXile: Yeah, this is a woman whose son died.

Dr. N.: You know, people’s political views sometimes get a little strange. The fact that this man has a doctorate, is renowned and, regardless of his political views, whether I agree with them or not, some kind of expertise in that area would make me think that whatever is going on is not dyslexia. This is an interesting conversation, I’ve never quite had one like it.

eXile: Thank you so much for your help.

Dr. N.: Thank you.

Podcast originally aired on April 7, 2011.

Watch The Dylan Ratigan show weekdays at 4pm EST. Also, check out Dylan Ratigan’s podcasts–like this latest “Best of RFD” episode…

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here. The rest of his stuff is here.

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The second I had to quit daily blogging they got Osama. That was just one of the joys of starting a new job: Seeing all that great material wasted on mainstream journalists who have got to be the dumbest, most gullible cage-raised pullets ever born.

I couldn’t do a thing about it. This new job is much tougher than the last one. All the new jobs are much nastier than the old jobs, from what I can see. They know we’re all scared to death, so they can push us all harder. And you better smile too, unless you want to join the Guatemalans standing by the offramp for yard work.

So I’m giving the job most of what little energy I’ve got. But it was hard focusing on civilian paper while all this Osama stuff was happening. I’d groan out of bed, stuff my gut into a starched office shirt and choke myself with the brightest most optimistic tie in the closet—I actually pick the ugliest ones because I figure they say “Cheerful employee!” more than decent ones–and head off to work. The commute was the worst, because I can’t drive without the radio talking to me and that meant I had to hear them talking about the Osama raid. Haven’t heard that much absolute sportstalk stupidity since 2003.

Oh, I planned lots of columns, believe me. I’d have a great idea and plan to write it down when they weren’t watching at the office like I used to. But then I’d catch a sight of my fat neck in the rear-view mirror and think, “God, I have to button that top button!” And I’d try, and realize that even though I buy these 18 neck shirts the damn thing won’t button, so I have to try to hunch the knot of the tie up to hide the gap and watch for sudden brake lights so I don’t rear-end some asshole’s giant truck. I’m the last man in town to drive a sedan, apparently if your car can fit under an overpass you’re a wimp, so I can’t see anything but brake lights at eye level.

And I can’t hear anything on the radio but “Osama Dies Yellow.” You ever hear that line, “Rocky Dies Yellow”? It’s from an old gangster movie, Angels with Dirty Faces—my grandma liked those Cagney things and I sat through them for her sake. Cagney plays this gangster who’s going to the electric chair, still tough as whitleather, and this minister who preaches to a bunch of slum kids (those Hollywood brat actors, they’re the “angels” in the title) goes to see Cagney in the Death House and says, “Rocky, could you please die yellow? For the kids, see.” Meaning: Could you act all chickenshit when they drag you to the chair so the sweet little bad seeds I’m pastoring, who all think you’re the toughest guy in the world and idolize you, will have this sudden Paul-to-Saul moment and go, “Jeez, foddah, I getcha now, dis whole gangstuh rumpus ain’t on da up-n-up”—I can’t do the dialogue but something like that.

Cagney doing “scared”

The preacher’s idea is if Rocky dies yellow, they’ll all be so disgusted they’ll change their ways, stop with the switchblades and go be lawyers and bankers like the guys who got us where we are—and what could be better than that.

So Rocky the gangster puts on a big show of being “yellow” when they fry him, all “No, please, help, Ma, Oh, I’m such a scaredy-cat!” They didn’t go in for underacting in those days. And so Rocky goes to Heaven, because he did it For The Kids. Or to put it another way, lying is fine when it’s for The Kids.

The only difference with Osama is that they shot him first, then yellowed him up. It was as corny, as obvious, as plain ridiculous as that Cagney movie.

The first thing you heard was that Osama used his wife for a “human shield.”

Any time somebody does that in a movie you know they might as well put up a subtitle, “deserves to die horribly” or “bad man.” Remember Heat, that fucked-up movie with de Niro and Pacino supposedly LA cops though they acted more like Hollywood producers with badges? Tom Sizemore was one of the hoods in that movie, and at first you like his character, seems like a good criminal–right up to the scene where Sizemore grabs a schoolgirl and uses her as a “human shield.”

That’s supposed to tell you: “Attention please, Mr. Sizemore’s character is now officially a bad man, so please cheer when Mr. Pacino’s character takes him out.”

One little problem: It wasn’t true. Here’s the headline from the same paper one day later: “Osama Was Not Armed and Did Not Use Wife as Shield.”

They put the little mistake down to “confusion.” But this kind of wartime “confusion” is a cheap out, like Keegan’s stupid cliché, the “fog of war.” While we’re at it, lemme tell you Keegan’s why Keegan uses that catchphrase all the time. His angle is simple: The Brits are always right. That’s hard to argue when you’re doing military history, because most European officers laughed out loud when you said, “British officers.” British troops, yeah—tough bastards, great fighters, but British officers? Waterheads.

So Keegan has a whole lot of idiocy to explain when he takes you through his favorite Empire’s various fiascos—and that’s how “The Fog of War” was born. Churchill wasn’t the dumbest military strategist of the 20th century—oh no, it was just “The Fog of War.” Gallipoli? Not noticing that machinegun bullets are faster than infantry? “Fog o’ War.” Total collapse of Singapore, Hong Kong…sending Repulse and Prince of Wales out with no air cover? F.O.W., F.O.W., F.O.Frickin’ W. Might as well call it “Fog of Sandhurst.”

It’s not fog, it’s smoke, as in “blowing smoke.” That’s what they were doing with the nonsense about Osama going out like Tom Sizemore, guns blazing, poor wifey held in front of him: Put the picture in the suckers’ heads first. Then, by the time you have to give the correction, everybody’s stuck with this Naked Gun scene of Osama shooting it out with the SEALs.

The only time you can blame the “fog” or “confusion” is when it goes the other way—first reports say Osama was shot unarmed, and didn’t use his wife as a shield, and then it comes out he did both. But don’t worry, that’ll never happen.

Next story was the reappearance of Goofy the Bounty Hunter, aka Gary Faulkner.

Faulkner negotiating: “How ’bout TWO million then?”

You might remember Faulkner if you follow news of the stupid. He was a one-hit character straight out of South Park, an unemployed Colorado mental patient who announced he was going to stalk Osama and kill him and claim the $25 million reward:

“Faulkner was found last year in the woods of northern Pakistan armed with a pistol, sword and night-vision goggles. The Greeley, Colorado, man says he believes he had a hand in forcing bin Laden out of the mountains where he supposedly was hiding.”

Faulkner is poster boy, an extreme case, of what’s wrong with the way American war nerds think. When they find him, he’s loaded down with gadgets, armed to the teeth right down to the Samurai sword from some Tarantino movie. But I will bet you anything you want that Gary Faulkner didn’t bother to learn a single one of the local languages before he loaded up for bear and started sneaking around Pakistan. That means the only way he’d ever find Osama is if he hitched a ride and Osama was driving. That’d be a good movie, like an update of that old movie Melvin and Howard where some hick picks up Howard Hughes in the desert and wants a chunk of the old nut’s billions: Osama and Gary, they could call it, and the big climax would be when Gary thanks Osama for the ride and saws his head off with the Samurai sword, which would be kind of awkward actually in a truck cab, not enough space for a real Samurai home-run swing (which is why people use knives, not swords, Faulkner, ya dummy!).

But in the grownup world, you couldn’t find the Fresno Chamber of Commerce by sneaking around with that gear.

Imagine a Pashtun tribesman who gets offered $25 million to go to Bakersfield and find some landmark, say the Barnes Cabin. This cabin is a big thing in Bakersfield, at least it was when the place was Okie. Barnes was an ex-Confederate who invalided out to Kern County—two sure proofs he was an idiot, he fought for the Planters and he moved to Kern County—but we went on a field trip, stood around looking at this Clampitt cabin going, “So?”

Mister Pashtun could try finding the old shed with night-vision goggles, an AK and a Samurai sword. But even if he didn’t get arrested, which he would—even if we just make a rule, “OK, this guy is also invisible to the police”—even then, he would never, ever find that cabin. He might bust into some houses in my old neighborhood where the people had gotten old and crazy because some of them looked a lot like a log cabin after about 40 years of senility and stray cats, but he wouldn’t find the official Barnes Holy Shack in a million years.

He’d wander around Bakersfield for eternity. Maybe that’s what Hell is, actually: billions of Pashtun ghosts wandering around Bakersfield. It’d be my idea of Hell anyway, especially in August. And when us Bakersfielders die, we have to wander around Waziristan like Faulkner. Nasty idea. Good thing Brother Archie never threatened us with that or I’d still be in the pews.

So how could Mister Pashtun actually find the cabin? Duh: He has to ask somebody. He has to schmooze. He has to bury that AK,sell the Samurai sword to the sodomite pawnbroker in Pulp Fiction so Willis can use it on him later in the movie, ditch the night-vision goggles and learn the local language, which in Bakersfield is English more or less—not Spanish, because Mexicans don’t get all weepy about old Anglo shacks. This Pashtun dude would have to shave, and smile like Mohammed Atta at the boarding gate, and come up with a good back story to explain why he’s there. My suggestion: He should tell them he’s a Christian Iraqi who was liberated by our troops. Do that, and the suckers would literally drive Mr. Pashtun to that cabin with tears in their eyes.

So this Faulkner—let’s pretend he was sane and intelligent for a second—would have to do the same stuff in reverse. Learn Pashto, schmooze–Above all,find some excuse for being there in the first place.

There are only two things that’d bring an American to that messed-up backwater; one’s CIA and the other’s opium. (Not that there’s a total split between the two—in fact, I wonder if they found Osama thanks to a drug connection: “Hey Hamid, we’ll let you send 150 keys straight to Manhattan if you give up the big guy!”)

So logically, the way to settle in to Waziristan would be marry a couple of the local girls, put a few hundred thousand into the opium business and sit in the tea houses bullshitting with your in-laws hoping to hear something. If Faulkner had a huge run of idiot’s luck, he might last long enough in the opium-smuggling business to maybe, maybe, hear somebody who couldn’t handle his high babbling about Osama. And if the idiot’s luck held, that one blurt might be the one out of a thousand that’s not bullshit. And that might get him somewhere.

Opium dealers talking product

So there’s another angle on irregular warfare nobody likes (or admits they like anyway): dealing drugs. A huge, huge part of most insurgencies. Pimping, dealing, joining the police or army—somehow or other, you’re going to have to do something totally sleazy. You say you’re ready to kill and die for whatever crap it is you believe in? Killing and dying, those are the easy parts. The clean parts. Not anywhere near the most important parts.

Irregular warfare is a social thing. That’s the last thing most of us want to face because most of you are like me, you don’t like people that much and want a nice clean war to cut down on them a little. I know, I know, me too, but if you want that you need a conventional army, which couldn’t find Osama either. If you want to do a job like that, it’s like my last boss loved to lecture me, “Gary, you can’t be afraid to talk to people.”

This leads me to maybe the most depressing thing I ever thought. You know who’d be good at guerrilla war? Ugh, I can’t say it. No, it has to be said. You know who’d be good at guerrilla war? Cheerleaders. What with the social skills and the pillow talk thing and…it’s too depressing and I’m not going to go on about it, but it had to be said. Jesus, what a world.

Maybe actually it’d be better to hire a high-price hooker, instead of a cheerleader. Yeah, that’s not so depressing somehow. Parachute someone like that into Waziristan and she’d get them talking…no, wait, they like boys—well, the male equivalent.

Or one of these expensive lesbian whores that specialize in women producers in LA. “Portia, America needs you to go to Waziristan! Ellen will wait for you and besides you might learn some stuff she’ll like from them Muzzie girls!” I bet there’s a lot of dykey angry multiple wives in Waziristan and I bet they know a lot more than their idiot husbands think. Slip one of them into the local chief’s harem and see what you get. I The Turkish lobby rented one to screw-and-blackmail Jan Schakowsky, a bleeding-heart Illinois crony of Obama. If it’s good enough for the US congress, it’s probably good enough for illiterate Pashtun wife-stock.

Jeez, I’m going to stop talking about this. War is one thing, drug dealing, OK…but pimping, that’s where I draw the line. I can do that, because I’m just an armchair irregular. But a real guerrilla can’t afford to draw that line or any line. A guerrilla NEEDS to be a pimp—among a lot of other things. A people person, in all the worst ways.

Gary Faulkner was not a people person, unless you count talking the voices in his head. And even if he had been, he was something like 40 years old when he hit Pakistan. He’s going to learn Pashtun at that age, when he’s probably never learned another language in his life, even menu Spanish? Ni modo.

He’s going to do what he ended up doing: Wandering around the hills—the only reason they didn’t shoot him must be they were laughing too hard—seeing if Osama shows up better when he put on his night-vision goggles. It’s the ultimate in gadget-fan stupid: “I got these cool goggles so if Osama is around he’ll light up like ultraviolet rocks!”

Sorry, Faulkner. All credit to you for having the titanium gonads to claim $7 million in reward money for not finding Osama, though. That’s real laser-bright logic: He says he “had a hand in forcing bin Laden out of the mountains.” Yes sir, you forced him to hunker down in a giant mansion in a vacation resort. That’s some forcin’ Faulkner.

Ever hear the joke about the elephant repellent? It ought to be the official joke of the whole counter-terrorism profession, engraved on the CIA’s HQ at Langley. But it fits Faulkner even better than the rest of the phonies. Goes like this: A guest asks asks, “What’s that weird ornament hanging there?”

The host say, “It’s elephant repellent.”

“Elephant repellent? There’s not an elephant in 10,000 miles of here!

“See? It works!”

Once Faulkner did his comic relief bit, the news people got back to the supposedly serious business. Which turned out to be nothing but more gadget-worship. For a day or so, all you heard about was the helicopters they used to get in and out of Abbottabad.

And there were lots of pictures of them, mostly from Pakistanis’ cell cameras. Because, uh…one of these top-secret hi-tech wonders of engineering, uh, kinda…crashed. Whoops!

Wizbang Chopper in Osama’s Yard (with privacy fence)

Now, I’m not making fun of the choppers or pilots or even claiming anybody messed up; choppers are inherently air-worthless under anything but perfect conditions, and the official explanation that it was high temperatures and altitude that sucked the air from under the crashed helicopter makes perfect sense.

Still, it was weird how everybody was looking at the pictures of the crashed helicopter like relics of a higher alien technology. They landed three and lost one; no reason to treat these machines like miracles.

The miracle, if there was any miracle in finding a guy who’s 6’5” (can’t exactly melt into a crowd at that height) after ten years of trying, belongs to whoever told the US where he was. It’s a people thing, in other words. But all we heard was gadgets, the magic choppers.

Jeez, It’s a machine, it’s just a muffled Blackhawk, “stealthed” up to be a little quieter and smaller on a radar screen than the production model, that’s all. And if you have to worship any chopper, why not the standard-issue Blackhawk? That is a truly fine craft, a real success, and nobody worships it. I’d bet any three Blackhawks off the assembly line could have done as well as the fancy souped-up models they sent.

But the hard part wasn’t killing Osama—Gary frickin’ Faulkner could’ve killed him. He looks pretty much dead already on the home video they released. I could’ve walked up and killed him, and I breathe hard going up three steps.

The hard part was finding him. And no chopper, no buffed SEAL, no cool NSA traffic analysis found Osama. A snitch did. Some sleaze of an informer fingered him, that’s how he was got.

It was like somebody finally half-figured out that this was about people, not gadgets, because the next phase of news nonsense was definitely people-focused. But in an embarrassing, totally off-base way, naturally. This was when the Navy SEAL cult that’s been perking along for a while finally percolated down to the great mass of dummies out there.

And what they want is Rambo all over again: muscles. Ripped. For a while it was like the whole world was doing gay porn. Just check out this bit from the Washington Post (I’m noticing that it’s always the Post that runs the most embarrassing, fake stuff. I thought they were respectable, but not from what I see). This is a Post writer quoting the idiot who wrote something called Rogue Warrior on what a Navy SEAL would look like. The guy seems to be just making up something from his own lousy book:

“He’ll be ripped,” says the author of the best-selling autobiography “ Rogue Warrior .” “He’s got a lot of upper-body strength. Long arms. Thin waist. Flat tummy.”

This gets me down even more than squeezing into work clothes. It’s bullshit anyway; Subotai was fat, damn it. Audie Murphy was 5’7.” The average VC had less muscle tissue than a Safeway chicken. They just won’t face the fact that the real hero here was a snitch, a snitch whose name we’ll probably never know. (He better hope we don’t, because if we know, both Talibans know too.)

It’s worth imagining that the snitch was the ugliest, fattest, wheeziest, lyingest, most treacherous Waziri you can imagine. Which he probably was, because snitching isn’t an aerobic exercise. He made it happen, this fat unwashed money-hungry, probably opium-dealing, sleaze. Keep that in mind. It cures you of all this gym-bred muscle-worship.

Don’t get me wrong, I respect the Hell out of the Seals. They’re very good, and unlike those three-letter agencies, they really do stuff, all the time. A lot in the middle east that you only vaguely hear about a long time later. Guy I know in one of those three-letter agencies wrote me years ago, “Frankly, if one of our guys says, ‘We’re doing a lot you don’ t hear about,’ you shouldn’t believe it. But when the Seals say that, you can believe it.”

The news creeps sniffed around for more dirt on Osama’s “compound” for days. As far as I know, they didn’t come up with much. Some of the funniest bits were the “vanity” thing, and the porn.

The vanity charge came from a home video clip released by the CIA showing Osama looking at old TV pictures of himself after 9/11. Whoever shot the video thought he was a great director because it starts out with just the TV screen and then pans back to Osama on the couch. The camera—I think whoever made the video, Mrs. Osama or one of the bodyguards, thought this was a funny joke or something, “Look! First here is Osama on television, now we follow the tv wire and look, ha ha, at the other end of the wire there is Osama himself, live and in person! Ha ha, what a funny joke on the Americans!”

As part of the whole smear-the-dead-guy routine, this video was supposed to show you what a conceited jerk Osama is. That was the official talking point, and it got around so fast that in a few days it was a talking point that you could use for anything else you wanted to talk about. Like here’s a column about, I don’t even know, reality shows or some girly crap like that, and this “humorous” lady writing it drags in Osama watching tv:

“Even Osama, lurking in his bunker, had his eyes glued to the television, huddled in the seasick glow of his own image. It was the one indelible moment of the last week.

Forget Norma Desmond. He looked like Gollum.”

Man, that’s writing, lady. That’s some kick-ass writing you did there, like “lurking in his bunker…” Except, uh, not to quibble, Ma’am, but that “bunker” was a goddamn mansion next door to an official Pakistani military academy, with a lot more than lurkin’ room. (We’re not going to have to rehash the “Did Pakistan know?” question here, are we? Of course they knew, Jesus).

She just goes on with the capital-R riting: “…had his eyes glued…huddled in the seasick glow of his own image.” Whoo, “seasick glow”! I bet you were an English major. Cuz we all know TV looks different when it reflects on terrorists, they’re like vampires that way.

And finally, “Forget Norma Desmond.” OK, fine. Easy, because I don’t know who she is and I’m not even going to google any name brought up by an idiot like this. So instead of our pal Norma, “He looked like Gollum.” Well, at least I know who Gollum is, but here’s a little witty repartee, Ma’am: no he fucking didn’t look like Gollum! He didn’t look like Gollum at all! He hardly even looked like Osama. Gollum looked pretty cool in a starved dangerous way; Osama just looked old and sad, like any Pakistani grandpa. If they say that was Osama, OK, it’s possible, maybe likely, but not on visual ID. On visual ID, that could be about a hundred million sick old Paki or Indian men. Maybe it’s the Nehru hat, I don’t know, or maybe because I used to go over to this half-Pak guy’s house as a kid and he had a grandpa who sat just like that in front of the tv. Same blanket over his shoulders even though it was Bakersfield, same drool, same whole thing, you’d say “Hello Mister Bhullar!” and he’d go, “Eennh” and sort of half wave his good hand and then it was back to Wheel of Fortune.

That’s what Osama really looked like: A sick old man. And he didn’t look vain, he looked depressed as Hell, for obvious reasons: There’s a younger and healthier Osama on TV climbing around Tora Bora in the video (although he didn’t look too spry even back in that video) and here I am now, a trembly old grandpa wearing a blanket in the heat. If this is great movie-making here, it’s the classic “poor old dude remembering his days of greatness” deal.

By this time, a chimp could have programmed the next step in the Osama Dies Yellow story: Some kind of sexual dirt. And right on time, out it came: “Porn Found in Osama Hideout.” And not just porn, either, but “Hardcore Porn.”

Of course Osama had several bodyguards who were young guys, stuck in a compound where all the women belonged to the big fella, so it’s not totally surprising one of them brought some videos to do one-handed curls with. But that’s not the way the story played. It was “…could fuel accusastions of hypocrisy,” which is chickenshit press-talk for “Osama was a perv phony.”

It was hard watching all this when I couldn’t talk back. Doing that blog was getting very comfortable to me, made me feel like I could laugh off all the lies because I got to talk back to them. But with work, no time. So I had to sit there in traffic with a tie choking me and just take it. Suddenly it was angry-world all over again. I’d just sit there waiting for the turn light to go green so I could legitimately honk at the idiots who take three seconds to move, like they need official verification that green means go, and grind my teeth wondering, When did everybody get so stupid?

For some reason I notice it most when I’m driving. I thought when I got to be over 40 I’d notice me slowing down and everybody else getting faster but people half my age drive like grandma. And they think worse than they drive. The same way, but worse: like old ladies. Safe and ultra-cautious and happy to be slow-witted. Safe It’s like if you’re not dumb and super-cautious and scared of being called “inappropriate” now, you feel weird.

What got lost in all the gibberish was what Osama’s death means, what Al Qaeda amounted to—the real questions. I want to talk about them next. If I make it through the week.

I got there all right, but 45 minutes late. Great way to be introduced to your new co-workers. I had to change in the car, a great way to remind yourself of your waistline. I made the horn go off at the worst possible moment, reaching for the shiny new pair of shoes with the pants not as up as I thought. Parking Lot M hasn’t seen that much fun in a long time.

Then they took me around the office. Helpful. Seems my coat collar was up in back. Fixed that.

I couldn’t stop sweating. That’s what happens when a fat man runs through an office complex looking for his new building.

Nobody else was sweating. They looked like they could have leaned back and had a nap, they were so relaxed. But I kept wiping the sweat off my forehead, fixing my pants, and trying to use all the cheerful/team player lines I’d rehearsed on the 87-mile detour Google took me on.

They haven’t said I’m fired yet, so maybe the impression will wear off. Gonna come to work early, lose weight, all the usual lies.

But anyway, the upshot is I can’t blog today. I’ve done my best, 40 days and 40 nights, but you have to give me the weekend off. For the next two days I’m not going to be able to hear much except the yuppies laughing when my belly made the horn go off.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here. The rest of his stuff is here.

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