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!

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.

Click the cover, buy the book!

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.

Click the cover, buy the book!

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.

Click the cover, buy the book!

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.

Click the cover, buy the book!

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.

Click the cover, buy the book!

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.

Click the cover, buy the book!

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.

Click the cover, buy the book!

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.

Click the cover, buy the book!

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.

Click the cover, buy the book!

Before heading back to Moscow in June 2008 to face the Kremlin “audit” of The eXile, which I knew meant the death of the newspaper at the very least, I worked out a deal with my editors at Radar magazine to blog about it for an American audience. I hoped at the very least that it might give me a bit of protection.

Radar was the only great print outlet in America, which is why it was doomed to collapse–it’s since been taken over by a celebrity gossip site. I went through the cached archives and found the old blog posts–here they are, in chronological order:

A TROUBLESOME VISITOR

With the recent inauguration of new president Dmitry Medvedev, how have things changed in Russia? Is the authoritarian freeze of the Vladimir Putin years starting to melt into a glorious new spring of freedom? Mark Ames, founder of Russian newspaper the Exile (and Radar contributor) will provide occasional dispatches in pursuit of an answer to that question … if the authorities don’t lock him up first.

June 9, 2008

Thursday morning, Moscow time, four Russian government officials came to the office of my English-language newspaper, the Exile, and conducted an “unplanned audit” of our editorial content. They are carrying out an inspection of my paper’s articles to see, in their words, if we have committed “violations.” And they specifically asked to question me, since I’m officially listed as the founding editor-in-chief.

I started up the Exile 11 years ago with a Russian publisher, and it grew into a kind of cult phenomenon, with an online readership of 200,000 visitors per month, launching the careers of Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi and the “War Nerd,” Gary Brecher, but ensuring that anyone who sticks with the paper is condemned to a life of poverty and paranoia.

In all my years I’d never heard of an “unplanned audit” of editorial content. The insiders whom I contacted all said, “It’s … strange.” That’s how my Russian lawyer reacted, it’s how an American official reacted, and it’s even how the head of the Glasnost Defense Fund reacted, even though his NGO focuses on problems between the Russian media and the Kremlin.

“As far as I know, there has never been a single Moscow-based media outlet which has been audited like this,” Glasnost’s lawyer told me. “We’ve seen a few of these in the far regions, but never Moscow. But really, don’t worry about it, Mark, I don’t think you’re in any personal danger at this point.”

Whenever a Russian tells me, “Don’t worry, Mark,” or, “It’s no problem,” I start to sweat.

I first learned of the government audit last week while I was out in California dealing with a family illness. I was already in a heightened state of paranoia at the time—one week in my native suburbia is all it takes to trigger panic attacks—so when the government sent notice of the “unplanned audit” to our office, my first thought was, “Can an American get political asylum in his own country?” Then I remembered some of the articles I’d written from Moscow—for example, my post–2004 U.S. presidential election editorial titled “Gas Middle America,” and how former U.S. congressman Henry Bonilla (R-TX) once used his office to pressure the Russian authorities into arresting mebecause of a prank I’d played—and the next thing I knew, I was rifling through my mother’s medicine cabinet looking for something strong to steal.

Eventually I calmed down and flew back to Moscow in time for the audit. At 11 a.m., four officials from the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications, and the Protection of Cultural Heritage arrived—the men in shabby Bolsheviki suits, and a squat middle-age woman with pudgy arms and hands that pinched the seams of her wrists. On the advice of a Russian attorney, we greeted them with a box of dark chocolates. It was solid advice, and probably did more to protect us than a hundred attorneys’ briefs could have.

The Exile‘s office is in a radon-poisoned basement in an old part of downtown Moscow called “Clean Pond,” which refers to a toxic puddle in the center divider of a nearby road. The office is so small that we have to take shifts showing up for work. So it wasn’t easy fitting the four bureaucrats and the few Exile staffers who turned up.

The varied emotional responses to the meeting were interesting. The Westerners, who until last week supported our paper and kept it alive, immediately cut all ties with us, so they weren’t there. The younger Russians on our staff were relatively calm about it. But when our Soviet-era accountant opened the office door and saw the four squat figures in bad official Soviet outfits, she turned white and vanished, the door closing on its own. When our middle-age courier arrived, she too turned white, stopped, then put her head down and walked past us, crossing herself three hurried times in the Orthodox Christian fashion before locking herself in the design room. You have to understand, to anyone with a memory of the Soviet era, those bad suits that the officials wore are extremely menacing, like red stripes on a reptile.

Their very first question was about the writer and opposition leader Eduard Limonov, one of my newspaper’s star columnists since the beginning. It’s not surprising—the Glasnost Fund people thought that Limonov would be their main focus. When I told Limonov about the audit, he seemed proud of me, kind of like how the Goodfellas gangsters greeted the teenage Henry Hill after his first trial: “Well, it’s finally happened!” Limonov said. “You should prepare to be taken to a stadium somewhere, like they did in Pinochet’s time!” he said cheerfully.

The officials asked us why Limonov was in our paper. Did we know much about him? Why did we publish him? Why was he on our masthead as a contributor? They asked to see an example of a recent Limonov column—the first one I pulled out was titled “Mr. Limonov on Mr. Medvedev“—I quickly shoved it under a pile and grabbed the next column I could find. They took that issue, and two others, with them, and told us that they’d have experts translate and check to see if we’d violated laws on printing “extremism,” “inciting national hatred,” “pornography,” and “pro-drugs propaganda.”

Here are a few of the Limonov lines from the article I gave to the officials, written in his trademark broken English: “Russian Government is bloody beast eating human flesh. It is deeply medieval in its principle conceptions … Russian women are very, very bad. The worst of all. Russian women is like the Russian Government. Millions of bitches walking our streets. I am absolutely and positively on the side of Muslim strict code of behavior for women. Their system of separation of sexes if effective and healthy.” Imagine now that you’re a Russian government official tasked with reading this column. Because I sure imagined it. And then I imagined them sending me a new notice, which is why a voice in my head started whispering, “There’s no place like home …”

Next, they asked us to explain our newspaper’s editorial style and concept. It was a good thing that our gorgeous young sales director, Zalina, was speaking for me, because how do you explain to a Russian bureaucrat that a newspaper whose motto is “vanity and spleen” is a low-tech suicide bomb designed to destroy our journalism careers and take down a few assholes with us?

After a difficult and failed attempt at explaining ourselves—a subject they came back to a couple more times—they said that some unspecified Russians had filed complaints about the Exile because it supposedly offended Russians, and mocked and degraded Russian traditions and Russian culture. What did we have to say about it?

Zalina, bless her heart, defended me: “No, Mark loves Russia and Russian culture! Really!”

All four of them turned and looked at me; I could feel a cheesy grin straining over my deer-in-the-headlights expression. Ahem … is this mike on? Hello? So, anyone here from Tomsk-7? No? Tough crowd.

In my opinion, this is the real reason they’re moving to shut us down. What offends the Russian elite more than anything about the Exile is its aggressive refusal to play by the “serious” rules. The authorities can deal with serious print-media criticism of the Kremlin—so long as that media outlet makes everyone look serious and respectable, with serious dull language quoting serious dull think-tank analysts. These days, Russia is all about getting serious and respectable. And it’s also in the grips of a national persecution mania, in which grievances and complexes about the West have exploded into a kind of mass grievance obsession, a frenzied Easter egg hunt for evidence of Western disrespect or unfairness in order to feed this grievance jones. The fact that our paper has also exerted a lot of bile in savaging the West’s Russophobe industry is irrelevant to them, even annoying; all they care about is sifting for evidence of humiliating Russia.

At one point in the three-hour audit, they started leafing through our February Barack Obamaissue, in which we posted a comparison chart of Russians and African Americans in order to tweak Russian racism (examples: “Blacks: Freed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863/Russians: Freed by Tsar Alexander II in 1861″; “Blacks: plastic covering on furniture/Russians: plastic covering on remote control”).

The lady-bureaucrat, who headed the audit team, leafed through the issue … and stopped when she saw a bad drawing of a semi-limp penis.

“What’s this?” she asked, putting her glasses on.

“It’s a column called ‘The Recession Penis,’” I explained. “You see, the Recession Penis reacts to America’s economic crisis, so every time American banks default and housing prices collapse, the Recession Penis gets more excited. It’s, uh, humorous, you see.”

She folded up the issue and handed it to her subordinate to bring back for the inspection.

From there, much of the meeting focused on all of the newspaper’s petty administrative fuckups: missing addresses, missing license number, something should be in Russian here, a registration number there. In all, the violations led to a $25 fine, which was levied on me personally as editor-in-chief.

The official with the mullet took over one of our computers and typed up a “protocol,” which essentially summed up our three-hour meeting. I signed it, only afterward wondering if in fact I’d signed some sort of confession admitting my role in a Trotskyite plot.

After all of the nervousness and fear in the buildup to the meeting, when the three hours were up and they got up to leave, we felt fairly confident. Too confident, in fact. Because today, I’m starting to think differently. I’m thinking this:

A: I live in a gangster police state that’s hell-bent on being respected.
B: These people are now auditing my articles to see if they’re extremist, pornographic, or if they humiliate Russia.
C: Before they left, they took our most recent issue, in which I wrote that the Exile “farts in Russia’s face” and that Medvedev is so liberal our paper can “urinate into the president’s mouth without any fear of consequences,” and he’s so small he should be “zipped up in a squirrel costume and put in a Habitrail.”
THEREFORE, D: The California suburbs are sounding pretty nice to me.

The Russians I consulted with before and after the audit all came to the same conclusion: The authorities are planning to either tame us or shut us down. There’s no more room for the Exile in the new serious/respectable Russia, the Russia of fanatical consumerism and materialism and vile conformism. This is a country where two separate magazines launched proudly billing themselves as the “New Yorker without political reporting.”

In the current climate, the authorities don’t need to jail or destroy you; all they need to do is notify you that you’ve earned their attention, and if you’re on their radar screen, then you immediately comply with whatever you think they want you to comply with, and you get abandoned by everyone around you who doesn’t want to get sucked into your vortex.

And if you do fight the law, then … well, just this past week there have been two examples of what can happen. The opposition webzine ingushetia.ru was closed by court order, and its lawyer had his apartment raided last week (I was planning to use him to help the Exile until that happened); and one of Russia’s largest radio companies was raided by armed police, leaving it temporarily off the air.

Now it’s like I have the Ebola virus. Longtime friends won’t call, contributors want their names expunged from the online record. Even the American media is eerily silent about this story, despite the fact that one of their own is being attacked—could it be because we’ve spent 11 years savaging the Western media here? Or because we once threw a pie filled with horse sperm into the New York Times bureau chief’s face? Just as a single controversial article in Russkii Korrespondent led its rather brash billionaire backer to immediately shut it down last month, so this single audit means that the Exile is now, after 11 years, dead.

The biggest fear of every foreigner in Russia is becoming the focus of Kremlin attention. Any attention. Russians fear it as well, but they’ve internalized it since birth and deal with it differently. Foreigners here operate with a kind of looter’s mentality: On the surface is overconfidence derived from the general sense that there is no authority over us because we think that the Russian authorities would never mess with a Westerner, but underneath that arrogance is a constantly bubbling terror of being stopped at the border, turned back, and subjected to Russia’s arbitrary and brutal state. It’s such an alien country to Westerners that it’s easy think you operate in some kind of H.P. Lovecraft–like parallel plane with the Russians: In one reality, the Westerners as the humans; in the other parallel reality, the Russians as those flying fanged eels. Now that my paper is being examined, it’s as if everyone around me suddenly grew a giant pituitary gland, and all they see are Lovecraft’s fanged eels orbiting around my head, snapping at anyone who comes near me.

Meanwhile, I’m still here in Moscow, waiting for the Kremlin’s experts to audit my dead newspaper’s articles.

*          *          *

THE END OF THE EXILE

June 10, 2008

The Exile is shutting down. Last night I met with my Russian publisher to “put one in its brain,” as George Romero‘s humans would say. Except that putting this paper down is not so easy—imagine if Romero’s zombies had things like tax bills that can’t be ignored, debts to pay off, favors owed to other important zombies—because you never know when you’ll run into that zombie again.

The partners who’d financed us fled for the hills, leaving my publisher and me holding the debt-bomb in our hands. This is not an easy situation. As a rule, my publisher is unusually easy-going for a Muscovite, but he’s also quite large and intimidating—I mean Baltimore Ravens defensive end large. He also runs a massive nightclub, and, well, let’s just say that my publisher knows a lot of people, including a pal of his who runs the Rasputin Gentlemen’s Club, a multi-floor fleshpot that is everything a male wishes the Winchester Mystery House would have been: rooms that lead to everywhere, to desires and fantasies that you never even knew you had, and that you’ll never admit to the following morning. Rasputin is more than a strip-club and more than a Moscow institution: It’s the apex of a flesh-network, involving scores of smaller, lesser strip clubs that feed into Rasputin like minor league teams feeding into the major league club. For nearly five years, from 2002 to 2007, my newspaper’s office was located in the back of Rasputin’s sex club; when we’d order business lunches during work hours, strippers in see-through negligees and glass high-heels brought Borsch and Kotleti to our offices for a mere 40 rubles ($1.50), leading one American former editor to spasm in dangerous palpitation sweats.

Point being: These are good friends to have, but bad enemies to make.

So when my publisher told me last night, “As far as I see it, the Exile‘s debts are yours as well, Mark,” my little saga took a very unforeseen and unpleasant turn.

And then today the media circus finally erupted here in Moscow. What set it off was an article about the Exile‘s closing in today’s Der Spiegel, which was translated into Russian for the online media. Throughout the course of the day today, I’ve been deluged with phone calls and e-mails from the Russian media, who have already begun posting articles misquoting me in that special way that only the Russian media can manage.

Edward Limonov, the politician-columnist whose articles are at least partly responsible for attracting the authorities’ attention, told me that he too was posting an article on www.grani.ru about the government attack on the Exile, and he told me that his opposition partner Garry Kasparov had called him today to ask him about us.

I’d tell you more, vaguely related stuff, like about how the northern city of Syktykvar just had all of the sand stolen from its makeshift “beach” on its river, and the prosecutor is looking for the sand-rustlers, who are believed to be operating a barge on the river … but I have to run to a meeting with my remaining employees, to give them the final death notice, and they keep ringing me as I write this.

Later tonight, FHM magazine is holding a party on the top floor of a new Moscow skyscraper. Since everyone is treating me as if I’m dripping in polonium, I plan to attend, to shake hands with everyone I can, take photos with them, thank them for their crucial support. You see, ever since I was a kid I vowed that if I wound up paralyzed and in a wheelchair, that I’d have my nurse wheel me up to restaurant windows and leave me there to drool, to make the ambulatory types squirm.

My current situation isn’t exactly stick-on-the-forehead dire, but it’s close enough. I’m going to see how people try to squirm from me tonight. Try to squirm, and not get away with it.

*          *          *

HAPPY RUSSIA DAY!

June 12, 2008

Today is “Russia Day.” It’s the official holiday when Russians celebrate their independence—from their own empire. On June 12, 1990, the Russian Republic’s parliament passed a resolution declaring “sovereignty” from the USSR, paving the way for Russia to “free” itself from the 14 other republics it had spent centuries conquering. It would be like Mexico celebrating February 2, 1848—the day Santa Anna was forced to sign away California and the entire Southwest to the gringos—as “Mexico Day.”

Which may explain why Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti grimly announced, “Unfortunately, the name of this holiday disorients the people completely.”

Whatever. Today’s a holiday, so I should relax and enjoy the party and forget about the fact that I’m under attack. For the celebration here in Moscow, the Kremlin is flying in none other than former French president Jacques Chirac, so that Medvedev can pin a medal on the old whore’s saggy man-boobs, to honor his “contribution to promoting Russian culture“—exactly what my paper is accused of not doing properly enough. I guess you don’t get Kremlin medals when you headline your paper that you “dare to fart in Russia’s face.” But that doesn’t explain why Chirac would agree to make such a complete ass out of himself on the world stage. It would be like flying to Riyadh so the king could honor you with a “Female Driving Instructor of the Year” sash.

Perhaps Chirac came just for the after-party. Now that Medvedev is the new tsar, he has the authority to hire his favorite band to play at his Red Square Russia Day party—and wouldn’t you know, he chose none other than Uriah Heep to rock the Kremlin walls down. If you’ve never heard of Uriah Heep—and 99 percent of you haven’t—you’re missing out: They’re a real-life Spinal Tap classic-rock outfit that packs stadiums from Smolensk to Kamchatka, even though they couldn’t land a gig on open-mike night in a Tuscaloosa saloon. True to their Spinal Tap calling, Uriah Heep pulled out of their Red Square gig today at the last minute, fucking up Medvedev’s classic rawk party, which their website blames on the “tour promoters [sic] complete lack of adherence to contractual stipulations.” I can imagine how the Heep fell out with their promoters: “You call this a sandwich, huh, Vladimir? I don’t want this! Because, look, you have to fold it like this, and then … no, it’s a fucking joke, really. I can’t do this, I won’t go to fucking Belarus if I can’t get a proper fucking sandwich.”

Heep or no Heep, there will be no rain on Medvedev’s parade, as the air force scrambled 10 rickety Soviet-era planes to disperse the clouds. And they’ve called up 6,500 police, including 550 OMON paramilitary goons, to make sure to make sure no one bum-rushes the stage when the vertically challenged leader makes his appearance. For a sample of the OMON at work and play, watch this video cut by the Exile‘s coeditor Yasha Levine:

For me, it’s a good thing there’s a holiday break today, because yesterday, my now-dead newspaper, the Exile, became the cause-célèbre story in the Russian opposition media. The attack on my paper got converted into a bag full of burning shit and tossed on the Kremlin doorstep to embarrass Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev on the very same day that he gave the keynote address at the World Russian Media Conference in Moscow, where he pledged to “ensure media freedom and respect for human rights.” Exiled oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky‘s popular online portal, newsru.com, juxtaposed Medvedev’s speech with the closing of the Exile: “Medvedev made his announcement about supporting the press in the background of the incredible story about the Moscow-based American newspaper the Exile, which is being threatened by officials with censorship due to the newspaper’s alleged extremism.”

Eduard Limonov, the radical opposition leader-slash-celebrity, told leading opposition radio station Ekho Moskvy (the same station Condi Rice makes a point of visiting whenever she flies into Moscow for her annual missile defense hustle) that the attack on the Exile is really an attack on Eduard Limonov—and that it’s all about him. This isn’t just a case of Limonov pulling a PR stunt: On Monday, a dozen young members of Limonov’s banned National Bolshevik Party stormed the Russian government’s Railways Ministry building in central Moscow, seizing offices, smashing open windows, and unfurling antigovernment banners in solidarity with striking railway workers. It ended as it always does: The dozen activists were hauled off, and no one knows what their fate will be.

Four years ago, a similar stunt by Limonov’s National Bolsheviks led to the arrest of nearly 50 activists, a spectacular trial, and the Russian Supreme Court banning Limonov’s party.

It’s a tough and dangerous job out here in opposition to the Kremlin. Publicity is the most prized currency: It’s generally considered your best defense against a bad fate, and since most opponents are of the public-transport-riding socioeconomic class, it’s really the only defense. Everyone knows that there’s a roughly zero percent chance of winning against The Man, but losing comes in many different forms—from glorious standoff to extinction. That’s why the opposition needs to divvy up the publicity—and the exposure—as widely as possible.

And right now, I’m part of the developing story, and I’m getting sucked into the bigger battle. Two opposition media outlets, radio station Govorit Moskva and magazine/portal New Times, want to interview me early next week about theExile in the context of a wave of audits that are sweeping the Russian provinces. (My paper’s audit is still the first one ever for a Moscow-based newspaper.) New Times made international headlines last December when one of its investigative reporters, young über-babe Natalia Morar, was expelled from Russia and labeled a threat to state security. I met Morar for lunch with another American journalist about a month before she was expelled, and I left that meeting deeply annoyed by her Tracy Flick–like ambitiousness, as well as her clear lack of sexual interest in me. But after her expulsion, well, any criticism just seems vulgar and cheap. Meanwhile, Govorit Moskva called me and asked if they could put me on a live debate next week across from the chairman of the Russian Duma’s Committee on Political Information, Valery Komissarov.

I dunno, folks! I mean, should I? Should I start wearing a helmet? Or the flack jacket that’s still in our office, a gift from the first war in Chechnya? Is there a lawyer in the house who can e-mail me a little advice on this? Or would a rabbi be more appropriate at this point?

I have no idea where all this is leading, and neither does anyone else. In the meantime, I’ve just downloaded Black Sabbath’s Paranoia album, because Black Sabbath is apparently one of Dmitry Medvedev’s favorite bands. When I listen to “War Pigs,” I’m brought back to my bong-stenched dirthead youth in the San Jose suburbs—and for the first time, those dirthead days don’t seem so bad. I wonder, what does Dmitry Medvedev think of when he listens to “War Pigs”?

*          *          *

PAYING THE KREMLIN

June 16, 2008

Today’s lesson is that even after the Russian authorities have destroyed you, they’re not satisfied; they still have to humiliate you in little ways. And even then, they’re annoyed with you.

I went to the Russian state bank and paid the 500 ruble ($22) fine to the government for all of the little administrative screw-ups in my now-defunct newspaper, the Exile, which was effectively shut down over a week ago by the authorities. The fines I paid today are completely separate from the alleged “extremism” or “drug-promotion” or “mockery of Russian traditions” that our paper is currently being investigated for. We were indeed guilty of all sorts of little errors that starched ‘n professional media types would never flub—we forgot to put in our new address, forgot to use Cyrillic fonts in the masthead, forgot to print our license number—but more than anything, we forgot to show the appropriate enthusiasm for President Medvedev, an enthusiasm which should be calibrated just a respectable notch or so below his mentor, the slightly-less-vertically-challenged Vladimir Putin.

Now that the Russian government has successfully frightened our paper out of existence, they can start working on their new spin: this had nothing to do with censorship, and everything to do with making sure that we got our address properly written down. Sort of like how Third World despots shut down opposition media outlets for “tax evasion,” rather than opposing the local Boss.

It was a strangely humiliating experience, standing in line for half an hour in a crowded, sweaty Sberbank outlet, waiting to pay the government for the pleasure of losing my newspaper of 11 years. Two meat-heads to my left almost got into a free-for-all fight over who was ahead of whom in line—cutting is a Russian tradition, and threats of violence are all part of the line-cutting ritual.

When the teller took my passport and the ticket for the fine, she froze for about 2 long minutes, clutching my US passport like it was a live wire. What’s an American doing paying a fine to the Russian government? Doesn’t Russia only levy unnecessary fines on its own citizens? What if the world found out about this?! Clearly she didn’t relish the potential scandal that this might cause. She called over her manager, and the two of them conferred for about 10 minutes, discussing whether or not accepting an American payment for a fine could turn into what Russians call “an international incident.”

My (now former) sales director Zalina tapped on the teller window and told them that they had to let me pay, that my American passport was valid and named on the ticket for the fine, and that they shouldn’t worry, it was unlikely to spark World War Four. A Gary Powers incident at most, but nothing more.

War or no war, according to a few journalists who interviewed me today, the ministry officials are starting to get seriously annoyed with me. One foreign correspondent told me that the press spokesman for the Federal Agency for Media and Communications (as it’s now called) snapped in annoyance at his questions, claiming that the audit was “completely normal,” and that I had apparently lied about it being an “unplanned audit.” So I emailed a scan of the ministry’s official notification of their audit to the reporter, on which it reads in plain Russian “Unplanned Audit.” He wrote me back, “Do they think we’re fucking morons?”

A better question would be, “Do they fucking care?”

Another Western reporter told me that when he called the ministry spokesman, that the man “exploded” and barked, “Why is everyone calling me about theExile?!” As the reporter explained, “It sounded like my call was about the 15th call he’d taken in the last hour, and he couldn’t take anymore. It was kind of funny.”

Perhaps. But pissed-off Russian bureaucrats don’t have a bygones-be-bygones habit of popping open a Miller with people who piss them off at the end of the day. When they get angry, they have a nasty habit of…actually I’d rather not think about that right now. They already made me pay this humiliating fine for a paper that they’d taken away from me.

Tomorrow I’m to be interviewed in the anti-Kremlin media outlet New Times. Meanwhile, the story is finally getting delayed coverage in the English-language print media. I’m not sure if that’s buying me some time here, or just pissing off the ministry officials even more.

*          *          *

RUSSIAN MEDIA CRACKDOWN GAINING ATTENTION

June 18, 2008

Today’s Wall Street Journal brings word of a troubling blow against press freedom in Russia: “An English-language newspaper in Moscow famed for lampooning Russian and Western officialdom has shut down after it fell under the scrutiny of the government for its raucous content. The demise of Moscow’s Exile newspaper is the latest sign of the homogenization of the press within Russia, where an official crackdown on dissent has led to the self-censorship of many publications.” Of course, that won’t come as news to you if you’ve been following Exile editor Mark Ames‘ dispatches from the front. If you’ve missed them, you can read them here.

*          *          *

WHEN A FASCIST CALLS YOU AN EXTREMIST, YOU KNOW THINGS ARE BAD

As this article is going online, I’ve either made it out of Moscow to London, or I’m stuck in a border-guard interrogation room in Sheremetyevo International Airport. Nothing will surprise me anymore. Two weeks ago, the Russian government closed down my newspaper, the Exile. And then last Thursday, during a live Moscow radio show on which I was a guest, a Putinjugend-turned-Duma deputy accused me and my newspaper of “extremism.” That might be a badge of honor for a journalist anywhere else in the world but Russia, where the word “extremist” has serious legal and extralegal implications. During Putin’s reign, the meaning of the word “extremist” was expanded to include anyone or anything who upset the Kremlin—particularly liberal critics such as the Washington-based think-tank analyst Andrei Piontovsky, who last year faced criminal charges over two books that are critical of Putin, on the grounds that they are “extremist.”

Thursday was a bad day from the minute I woke up—it started with a rude hangover, following the Exile‘s staff funeral party. Thanks to the persuasive skills of our sales girls Zalina and Lena, we managed to cop an all-expenses-paid feast at a striptease club/bordello named Violete, located directly across the river from the Kremlin. It was our way of saying “fuck you” to The Man, heavy emphasis on the “fuck.” The party rolled on from Wednesday night late into Thursday morning—and it was a very long night indeed, abandoning the slow cocktails for entire bottles of “Platinum” Russian vodka, drowning ourselves in long lugubrious toasts, then disappearing into the dark pole-dance room, where flocks of naked girls vastly outnumbering the males pile on top of you like you’re Axl Rose, and then one of them leads you farther back into Violete’s catacombs, into one of the lap dance “cabinets” for a little “extremist” activity: a 15-minute reenactment of the Mongol horde’s plunder of ancient Rus, with me as Genghis Khan and Nastya playing the war booty. The Exiledied that night just as it was born: deep in sin.

And then, in just a matter of hours, I went from Violete to hangover-nausea to the awful news that at 10 p.m. Thursday, I’d be squaring off on a live radio show against one of the most menacing creatures in the new Putin generation: Robert Schlegel, a 23-year-old ginger-haired Kremlin tool whom a girlfriend of mine described as “looking like one of those perverts from a Todd Solondz film.”

While it’s true that Schlegel has a kind of hairless-scrotum twinkie-porn look about him, when you put that into the context of his frightening “Heil Putin” politics, and the fact that he comes from Volga German stock, you start to suspect that Schlegel isn’t entirely human the way you and I are, but is rather some kind of genetically engineered Boys From Brazil product, created so that he might one day serve a cruel and scary tyrant.

And Schlegel’s aggressively enthusiastic gig has worked out pretty damn well so far: In just a few short years, he’s risen from spokesman for the Kremlin’s young goon squad organization, Nashi, which was created to harass and frighten Putin’s critics (including even Britain’s ambassador to Russia), to taking a seat this year in the state Duma, where he promptly went to work pushing through a bill that would strangle the already strangled Russian media.

When I found out that I’d be debating Schlegel, my sweat glands started to swell up and produced a ghastly odor that I can only trace to my grandfather’s ancestors from Fez. So I did my equivalent of Tooter calling for Mr. Wizard, which in my case meant calling up Eduard Limonov, the radical opposition leader whom I was sure would have an opinion on Schlegel.

“This Schlegel is just a schmuck,” Limonov said. “He’s rather intelligent, young, but very arrogant, and really he’s a fascist. And you should tell him that, too. Really, tell him that he’s a fascist schmuck, that he’s a traitor to the motherland, because he’s really a disgusting kid.”

Limonov’s party members have been violently attacked on more than one occasion by baseball-bat-wielding Nashi youths while Schlegel was acting as their spokesman, so his contempt is easy to understand. But still, an American accusing a high-profile Duma deputy of treason and fascism can be a very expensive affair these days—in more ways than one.

I arrived late at Govorit Moskva’s studio, housed in a rundown building just a few hundred yards from the Violete striptease club. I had to run up the stairwell to make it in time. My head was pounding, and I stank up the entire room with fear-sweat as I took the headphones. Luckily, Schlegel wasn’t in the studio. Russia’s Duma deputies are currently touring the provinces for a kind of “get to know the people whom you’re oppressing” ritual they do every so often, meaning Schlegel was phoning in for the show—and I wouldn’t have to look at him.

“How long will the interview last?” I asked the radio host as I put on my headphones.

“An hour, of course,” he said.

I sank in my seat. My Russian is decent enough under the right circumstances, but in the throes of a hangover, at 10 p.m., debating a fascist hothead Duma deputy with my tongue hogtied was terrifying as hell. The only question now was how to limit the damage, and make it through without completely shaming my ancestors, my country, and my profession.

Right from the start, Schlegel was extremely confident, lamenting the fact that his censorship bill, which he rammed through the Duma this past April almost unopposed on the first reading, was then rudely smacked down by President Dmitry Medvedev. Schlegel admitted with a wry laugh that indeed he had been brought to heel by the new president, and that there was no point in reintroducing the law. But he didn’t show much respect for Medvedev’s moderation, terming the veto “his opinion.”

Then it was my turn. As I explained what happened to the Exile, how the ministry inspectors frightened our investors away, leading to the newspaper’s collapse, Schlegel dismissively countered that there was nothing unusual or frightening about a Russian ministry audit of a newspaper’s article. But when I explained to him that such government audits only take place in Third World dictatorships and not in serious countries, his tone changed, and his fangs started to show.

“The Russian media is completely free,” he claimed. “Our television stations express all the opinions of the people.”

How do you respond to that? I told him that he lived in some strange parallel world separate from the world everyone else in Russia lives in; his world was some kind of formalistic fantasy land where all of Russia ran a law-abiding state; the world the rest of us saw was one in which people hid from Russia’s cruel and arbitrary powers, so when a media outlet like the Exile gets fingered, people understandably run. Schlegel didn’t take kindly to it.

When I started to talk about the shameful self-censorship that went on in the American media in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and the disastrous consequences that followed, Schlegel loudly cut me off: “The American media was right to support the invasion of Iraq, because the American people supported that war. Of course the American media should back the president!”

“But the only reason that the American people supported the war was because the media duped them! They didn’t do what they were supposed to do!” I stammered.

“No, Bush was right to invade Iraq!” Schlegel yelled. “I absolutely support his reasons for invading, and I believe the American media did the right thing in supporting the war, because the American people supported this war.”

And that’s when the young Russian Duma deputy turned his fangs on me: “I understand what type of person you are now, Mark, after listening to you and hearing about your newspaper, the Exile, on this radio program. It’s very clear to me now that you are anextremist, and your newspaper isextremist. I have never read your newspaper, but I don’t need to now because I already have you figured out. You’re an extremist. It’s all completely clear to me now.”

It was the longest hour of my life, an infuriating and exhausting experience that left me feeling corrupted. I went home late that night thinking what Schopenhauer had said about this world being hell, where men are divided into torturing devils and the condemned. Schlegel was born to be a torturing devil if there ever was one.

When I got back to my apartment, I received an e-mail notifying me that the New York–based Committee to Protect Journalists had issued an alert on my defunct newspaper’s behalf. I felt—and still feel—oddly grateful to them for throwing their weight behind our story, but I understand that it won’t do much to help me now that I’ve been labeled an “extremist” by a Russian Duma deputy; nor will it hurt Schlegel, who can say whatever he wants.

About five hours from now, as I’m sending this off to Radar, I’ll be on my way to Sheremetyevo Airport. That vacation I’ve been talking about is now long overdue.

##

Would you like to know more? Read about the Wikileaks cables on The eXile and the Kremlin crackdown.

Buy The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia co-authored by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (Grove).

Click the cover & buy the book!

HAVE YOU NO SHAME!

We’ve been on a suicide mission.

And you’ve had front row seats–and a free ride–the whole way.

But nothing is free forever, folks. Not even career-suicide. So you need to pitch in and help us see through our mission of making this world a little less comfortable for everyone, especially the satisfied-ites.

We’ve been on this career-suicide mission since our humble eXile beginnings in Russia, and we don’t know how to stop: Career-suiciding our way through the wonderful and frightening world of war-spotting with the “War Nerd” Gary Brecher; Running career-suicide missions against the Koch brothers and their libertarian organ-grinder monkeys long before anyone else even knew their names; testing out new innovative forms of Market-Based Invective® on human guinea pigs ranging from Dick Cheney lapdogs and neo-Confederate cross-chuckers to Daily Show Democrats and loathsome Hollywood liberals.

We’ve been holding up our end of the bargain. And we’re ready to ramp it up to new levels. But we can’t do it for free. It’s time to pony up and pitch in with some cash. Think at least two $20 bills in electronic form, and if you’ve got a 2nd or 3rd house, then we want to see some hundred-spots.

You think this eXiled army runs on comments praise? Think again. Everyone’s got to sacrifice to keep the suicide-mission going, including you.

Help right now, it’ll only take a minute…

Make a one-time donation*:

Subscribe for only $6.95 a month:

*One-time donation amounts (and what they say about you):

• $25 :  No thank-you letter needed, but at least I’m not a cheap, ungrateful fuck.”
• $50 :  A pan handler in LA makes more than this per hour working some dirty street corner. But in these tough times, even a pitiful amount like this deserves a thank you note.”
• $100 :  You are a “VIP Sponsor” meaning you have bought the commercial rights to rename our eXiled intern as “The [YOUR NAME HERE] intern” for a period of 1 week per $100.
• $1000 : You are a “VVIP Sponsor” meaning you have bought the rights to commercially advertise your name over the name of an eXiled editor’s parent or spouse, such as “The [YOUR NAME HERE] mother of Yasha Levine” for a period of 1 week per $1000.

Separated at Stone Age: Holocaust-denier R J Rushdoony…
…and Holocaust-dreamer al-Zawahiri?

On Tuesday May 3, a lawyer for the rightwing Rutherford Institute sent a threatening letter to The eXiled to punish and intimidate us because we reminded our readers about the dark, extremist homophobic ideology behind the early years of the Rutherford Institute and its co-founder, John Whitehead. The Rutherford Institute has waged a 15-year public relations campaign to recast itself as a “civil liberties” outfit similar to the ACLU, yet this same “defender of civil liberties” wants to crush The eXiled’s First Amendment rights to free speech over the crime of reminding readers that the outfit was co-founded by one of the most extreme anti-Semitic, homophobic monsters of our time, a Holocaust denier and eugenicist named R. J. Rushdoony.

Rutherford’s attorney sent us a letter objecting to two fully-sourced and documented statements in our April 28 article, Did You Fall for It? America’s Outrage Over TSA “Porn Scanners” Was Right-Wing PR to Prevent Workers from Unionizing:

1) Characterizing Rutherford Institute president John Whitehead as “a one-time Christian Reconstructionist,” which is true;

2) That his “outfit once advocated the death penalty for homosexuals,” which is true.

Rutherford’s lawyer, Tom Neuberger, wrote, “Neither The Rutherford Institute nor Mr. Whitehead, its president, have ever subscribed to Christian ‘reconstructionist’ ideologies. … And the outrageous assertion that the Institute ‘once advocated the death penalty for homosexuals” is clearly a complete fabrication.”

This is an outrageous, baseless and disgusting attack on independent journalism. An outfit that claims to be for civil liberties yet threatens journalists who print the truth, simply because the Rutherford Institute is trying to whitewash its past, is the height of hypocrisy and reveals that the Rutherford Institute has not changed one bit from its beginnings as an attack dog for far-right Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites and neo-Confederate fascists whose one goal was to intimidate and crush any opposition to their plan to turn America into a fundamentalist Christian nation along the lines of the Taliban.

We will report more about the Rutherford Institute’s threats to The eXiled and to others–one reader pointed us to a story in Delaware which resulted in a kind of pogrom against two Jewish families fighting a lawsuit against rabid Christian fundamentalists represented by the Rutherford Institute– and we’ll get into the dark, sordid history of the Institute’s founders and their beliefs, which make our factual statements that they object to seem as though, if anything, we were going far too light on Rutherford.

And to survive this assault, we will be asking for our readers’ support. Gary Brecher has agreed to return to the field of action, but only on condition that you support our effort to resist a 30-year-old rightwing outfit’s efforts to crush independent journalism.

God Hates Fags…So did Rutherford Institute co-founders

But first, there are so many credible sources backing our statement in our article characterizing John Whitehead as “a onetime Christian ‘reconstructionist’… whose outfit once advocated the death penalty for homosexuals” that they are too numerous to list. Here we provide a small sample of sources which repeat, expand on, and/or support this:

* From American University Professor Alan Lichtman’s book White Protestant Nation, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critic’s Award for Non-Fiction:

“A movement known as Christian Reconstruction or Dominion Theology, led by Rousas John Rushdoony of the Chalcedon Foundation, Gary North of the Institute for Christian Economics, and John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, extended Schaffer’s absolutist thinking. Dominion leaders aimed to make America a Christian nation. They desired to ‘take back government from the state and put it in the hands of Christians.’ This meant replacing secular ‘self-law’ with ‘God’s law,’ which meted out harsh punishments, including death penalty for adulterers and homosexuals.” [pp 349, Atlantic Monthly Press, hardcover edition]

* David Brock’s bestselling book from 2002, Blinded By The Right:

“When various settlement offers were rejected by [Paula] Jones [the woman who sued President Bill Clinton for sexual harassment], Davis and Cammarata quit the case and were replaced by lawyers working with the right-wing Rutherford Institute, which had been founded with the support of Christian Right reconstructionist R. J. Rushdoony, who was an early board member.* …The Reverend R. J. Rushdoony believed that civil law should be replaced by Biblical law ‘to suppress, control, and/or eliminate the ungodly.’ He advocated the death penalty for abortion, adultery, sodomy, and incest as well as for blasphemers and ‘propagators of false doctrines.’ Rushdoony was also a Holocaust denier.” [pp 201. Three Rivers Press. 2002 paperback edition.]

* Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family, a 2008 New York Times bestseller:

“John W. Whitehead, a constitutional lawyer who counts Rushdoony as one of his greatest influences [pp. 349]…Rushdoony is best known as the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, a politically defunct but subtly influential school of thought that drifted so far to the right that it dropped off the edge of the world, disavowed as ‘scary’ even by Jerry Falwell. Most notably, Rushdoony proposed the death penalty for an ever-expanding subset of sinners, starting with gay men and growing to include blasphemers and badly behaved children.” [pp.347. Harper Perennial. 2008 paperback.]

* Mark Crispin Miller’s 2004 book, published by W.W. Norton, Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney’s New World Order:

“John Whitehead, an ex-student of Rushdoony’s, and introduced by him once at the council as a man ‘chosen by God,’ directs the Rutherford Foundation, a legal arm of the Chalcedon Foundation (which until his death was run by Rushdoony and funded by Howard Ahmanson). Rutherford’s important mission is to fight the legal battles on behalf of Reconstructionism.” [pp. 263]

* Frederick Clarkson, journalist, author and activist, in a chapter from the 1999 book Eyes Right: Challenging The Rightwing Backlash edited by Chip Berlet:

“The Rutherford Institute’s John Whitehead was a student of both Schaeffer and Rushdoony, and credits them as the two major influences on his thought. … [I]t is not surprising that Whitehead goes to great lengths to deny that he is a Reconstructionist. Rushdoony, introducing Whitehead at a Reconstructionist conference, called him a man ‘chosen by God.’ Rushdoony then spoke of ‘our plans, through Rutherford, to fight the battle against statism and the freedom of Christ’s Kingdom.’” … “The Rutherford Institute was founded as a legal project of R. J. Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation, with Rushdoony and fellow Chalcedon director Howard Ahmanson on its original board of directors. Whitehead credits Rushdoony with providing the outline for his first book, which he researched in Rushdoony’s library. ” [p.69]

* Chris Hedges, writing about Whitehead’s mentor and partner in the Rutherford Institute in his 2006 book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America:

“The racist and brutal intolerance of the intellectual godfathers of today’s Christian Reconstructionism is a chilling reminder of the movement’s lust for repression. The Institutes of Biblical Law by R. J. Rushdoony, written in 1973, is the most important book for the dominionist movement. Rushdoony calls for a Christian society that is harsh, unforgiving and violent. The death penalty is to be imposed not only for offenses such as rape, kidnapping and murder, but also for adultery, blasphemy, homosexuality, astrology, incest, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile delinquency, and, in the case of women, ‘un-chastity before marriage.’ The world is to be subdued and ruled by a Christian United States.  Rushdoony dismissed the widely accepted estimate of 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust as an inflated figure, and his theories on race often echo those found in Nazi eugenics, in which there are higher and lower forms of human beings. Those considered by the Christian state to be immoral and incapable of reform are to be exterminated.” [pp.12-13]

* The Southern Poverty Law Center’s magazine Intelligence Report called Rushdoony “a racist and a holocaust denier.” The SPLC describes the Rushdoony-founded Chalcedon Foundation, for which the Rutherford Institute was set up to act as its legal arm: “Rushdoony supported the death penalty for homosexuals, among other ‘abominators.’ He also opposed what he called ‘unequal yoking’ — interracial marriage — and ‘enforced integration,’ insisting that “[a]ll men are NOT created equal before God” (the Bible, he explained, ‘recognizes that some people are by nature slaves’). Rushdoony also denied the Holocaust, saying the murder of 6 million Jews was ‘false witness.’”

* Another co-founder of the Rutherford Institute, Rushdoony’s son-in-law, Gary North, has been described as a “bloodthirsty theologian” who “may actually be a psychopath” by Jeff Sharlet in his 2008 book The Family: “North […] may actually be a psychopath—he favors stoning as a method of execution because it would double as a ‘community project.’” [pp.348]. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Gary North advocates hiding the true agenda of the Christian Reconstructionist movement for obvious reasons: “Theonomists, and especially Reconstructionists, know their views are an anathema to most Americans. Reconstructionist ideologue Gary North, in fact, has written that Reconstructionists need ‘the noise of contemporary events’ to hide their goals. ‘If [non-believers] fully understood the long-term threat to their civilization that our ideas pose, they … would be wise to take steps to crush us.’” (“Confederates on the Pulpit” SPLC Intelligence Report. Spring 2001).

* From a Public Research Associates article:

“Whitehead believes, according to an article by Martin Mawyer published in the May 1983 issue of the Moral Majority Report, ‘That courts must place themselves under the authority of God’s law.’ Mawyer’s article explains, ‘The Institute states that ‘all of civil affairs and government, including law, should be based upon principles found in the Bible.’ That statement is a simplified definition of Christian Reconstruction, an important movement within evangelical Christianity.”

* Bill Moyers, interviewing R J Rushdoony in 1988, (six years after the founding of Rutherford Institute):

Moyers: You’ve written that the Bible calls for the death penalty, and I’m just running down a variety of things as you can see. You’ve written that the Bible calls for the death penalty of some 15 crimes: rape, sodomy, adultery.
Rushdoony: Adultery because in the Bible the basic institution is the family. There’s no law of treason against the state. The Bible doesn’t even imagine anything remotely like that. But the basic institution is the family. And so, several of the death penalties are associated with the family and its life.
Moyers: So adultery was considered a theft of the family.
Rushdoony: It was, yes, it was treason to the family.
Moyers: Homosexuality.
Rushdoony: Yes, it was treason to the family.
Moyers: Worthy of the death sentence?
Rushdoony: What?
Moyers: Worthy of the death sentence?.
Rushdoony: Yes.
Moyers: Deserving of the death sentence?
Rushdoony: Yes, that’s what [Apostle] Paul says.

…

Moyers: But you would re-instate the death penalty for some of these or all of these Biblical crimes?
Rushdoony: I wouldn’t—
Moyers: But the reconstructive society–
Rushdoony: I’m saying that this is what God requires. I’m not saying that everything in the Bible, I like. Some of it rubs me the wrong way. But I’m simply saying, this is what God requires. This is what God says is justice. Therefore, I don’t feel I have a choice.
Moyers: And the agents of God would carry out the laws.
Rushdoony: The civil government would, on these things.
Moyers: So you would have a civil government, based upon–
Rushdoony: Oh yes. I’m not an anarchist. I’m close to being a libertarian. But–
Moyers: But the civil law would be based on the biblical law. And so you’d have a civil government carrying out a religious mandate.
Rushdoony: Oh yes.

* Rushdoony and North were not only co-founders of the Rutherford Institute, but they were also regularly featured members of the “Rutherford Institute Seminars” speakers bureau. In other words, they were intimately tied to, part of, and speaking on behalf of the Rutherford Institute. Here is from a 1994 Anti-Defamation League report:

In the fall of 1986, the Traditional Values Coalition and Citizens for Excellence in Education advertised “Rutherford Institute Seminars” in which Rushdoony was a featured speaker — along with Rutherford Institute founder John Whitehead. Rushdoony was described in the advertisement as a ”theologian…who presents scriptural framework for building orderly structures in society [sic].”

Whitehead, one of the country’s leading conservative evangelical attorneys, has called Rushdoony one of the two major influences on his thought. Rushdoony wrote the introduction for Whitehead’s The Separation Illusion, and the reconstructionist patriarch is the most frequently cited author in the bibliography for Whitehead’s The Second American Revolution – a favored text among evangelical activists (The Institutes for Biblical Law is among the works cited).

Rushdoony reportedly helped Whitehead found the Rutherford Institute, and has been a director of the Institute and a participant in its speakers bureau.

[Source: The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance & Pluralism in America. A publication of the Anti-Defamation League. (1994). pp 111]

Finally, we are not surprised that the Rutherford Institute—which claims to defend civil liberties, but seemingly behaves more like a right-wing attack dog outfit trying to intimidate critics of its far-right Christian agenda— sends a letter from a lawyer to suppress journalists from exercising their first amendment rights. From its very beginning in the early Reagan years, as Whitehead explained in a 1983 interview, “We need to be very aggressive, not passive. Take the initiative. Sue rather than waiting to be sued. That’s where we’ve [the Christian far-right] been weak. We’ve always been on the defensive. We need to frame the issue and pick the court. The [Rutherford] institute, if necessary, will charge that government is violating religious freedoms rather than the church waiting for the government to charge it with violating the law.” [Institute for First Amendment Studies.]

We’ve answered the Rutherford’s outrageous, anti-Constitutional threats and attempts to crush our civil liberties. Now we would like the Rutherford Institute to explain to us and to readers of The eXiled why it failed to successfully challenge the statements made by the authors in passages cited above, and how it claims to be a “civil liberties” outfit that has distanced itself from its extremist hateful past when it threatens to crush anyone who dares to report the truthful past.

—Mark Ames and Yasha Levine

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.

Click the cover, buy the book!

Something’s been going on in Syria for a while now. I’ve already written about the Deraa protests as an example of the big role guerrilla funerals play in irregular war, but it’s time to look at the more general prospects in Syria.

It’s easy to fit Syria into the notion of a wave of protests spreading out from Cairo after the shock victory the demonstrators there had against Mubarak, but I’m not sure that’s exactly what’s going on.

One of the puzzles is that the trouble started in Deraa, a little farm town in the very southwest corner of Syria. Deraa doesn’t seem to have any reputation as a trouble spot. There’s a big Palestinian camp near the town, but I don’t get the feeling that the Palestinian refugee slums are playing much of a part in the protests. The angriest people seem to be the farmers, and they’re mad about the things that always make small farmers mad: water allocation and property rights.
Bashir Assad, the second-generation tall dude with a mustache who runs Syria, did the natural thing by replacing the Deraa regional governor, Faysal Kalthum, who naturally got the blame and the hate for doing what the regime told him to do. But it wasn’t enough. The trouble’s been spreading out from Deraa, even to Damascus, where people marched last week chanting “Deraa is Syria.”

They didn’t use to feel that way. There used to be a saying in Syria that if you got three people together in Damascus, they’d form a political party, but if you got three people together in Deraa, they’d have a prayer meeting. That was Deraa’s rep: Conservative, Islamic country people.

Then came the water wars with Israel and Jordan. If you’ve ever been in the Imperial Valley, or up to Eastern Washington, you know how crazy irrigation-dependent farmers can get when their water’s cut off. Suddenly their land is worthless desert and their whole life is over. There’s nobody crazier than the farmers of Eastern Washington. I spent a summer there once and thought I was stuck at a summer camp for the Iron Guard. And the basis of their wackiness is knowing that wimpy city folk in Seattle can decide any day to cut off the river allocations that let them grow their crops and feel good about themselves. And God, do they feel good about themselves. Most conceited people I ever met, think you’re worthless if you’re not a big farmer.

The farmers in Deraa have the bad luck to be down where the borders of Israel, Jordan and Syria crunch together. It’d be easy to blame the water war on Israel/Arab tension, and that’s part of it, but water just seems to breed hate even when everybody in the neighborhood is Muslim. One example that’s going to make for interesting times soon is the dams the Turks are building on the headwaters of the big Iraqi rivers. When those flows are in the hands of Turkish bureacrats, the downstream Iraqis are suddenly going to be at the mercy of a tap that can be turned off from Istanbul whenever Baghdad lets the Kurds cause the Turks any trouble. Hijinks will ensue, you can be pretty sure of that.

The other factor that might have made all this trouble start in a sleepy Islamic town like Deraa is religion. Yup, we’re pretty much dealing with the usual suspects here, water and religion. And “religion” in most of the world is pretty much identical with “ethnic group/tribe,” so you’ve got that heating up the pot too. The family that rules Syria, the Assads, are Alawites, a weird sect that as far as I can figure out is about halfway between Shia and Druze. Which means they worship the martyred Ali, they have that same sense of doomed defeatism the Shia all love, but they go even further than the Shia toward flirting with other religions in secret, like the Druze do.

The Alawites lived in northwestern Syria, Latakia and the coast, the other end of the country from Deraa. They were considered trash til the French arrived and made them their favorite lackeys. You get that a lot in colonies: The lowest tribe of all is just bound to be more welcoming of the colonists. Why not? Things can only get better, and they have nothing to lose. So the French trained the Alawites to do admin chores and this tribe of losers who weren’t even considered Muslims learned how to deal with cities and offices. That’s an important military skill. And it paid off: After a coup in 1965 by early Ba’athists, an Alawite officer, Hafez al-Assad, consolidated his own power by about 1970.

Hafez al-Assad: Looked like a banker but was even meaner

That was a big black cloud on the Sunni disposition of the average Syrian Muslim.

The first revolt against the Assads and their Alawite cronies came in Hama, a very conservative Sunni town near Damascus. The Muslim Brotherhood made one of those bad-idea last stands in the place, Fortress Hama, and Assad’s scary brother Rifat just brought in the artillery and troops and leveled the place. That kept other conservative Muslim towns like Deraa quiet for quite a while, but there’s this sense that the son, Bashir, isn’t as scary as his dad and uncle were, and it’s worth the risk of rising again.

Bashir al-Assad: Not as tough as his dad?

That’s the big difference this time: The fear factor, to coin a phrase, isn’t there as much. It shocked every Arab alive to see how easily Mubarak fell, and who could resist rattling the chains a little to see if they’re as weak as Cairo’s turned out to be?

I’m not sure it’ll be as easy in Syria, though. The Egyptian Army broadcast barely-coded notice, early on in the Cairo riots, that it wasn’t going to back Mubarak. That’s why the riots worked. The Syrian Army doesn’t seem as convinced that it can work with these crazy demonstrators, maybe because conservative Islamic farmers are tougher to negotiate with than Cairo-based Microsoft VPs. The Army, in a situation like this, signals its attitude by firing or not firing. And so far, the Syrian Army seems to be voting for the Assads by volley.

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!

There are times when you look back and wish you’d had the courage to say what you were thinking. With me it’s a spotty record: Sometimes I do, but more often I wimp out. I wish now I’d said the first thing that came into my head when I started hearing about Al Qaeda, which was, “No, it can’t be. Violates every rule of guerrilla organization.”

People are starting to see that now, starting to doubt whether there is such a thing—but that’s only because Al Qaeda has been no-showing like the Second Coming. Libya was the latest place it was supposed to show up. Egypt before that. Remember Glenn Beck talking about the Caliphate? For that matter, remember Glenn Beck? God, there’s another freak who you’d think couldn’t exist. But he did, running on fumes, just like Al Qaeda. Beck is in the Second-Coming business himself, but his Jesus is Osama and he made his money predicting Squidward-with-a-beard

His tentacles of terror reach everywhere!

would show up in Encino any day. The Egyptian revolution was just Al Qaeda in disguise as a few million yuppies. Libya was the same Osama-of-a-thousand-faces, this time as a mixed crowd of bored kids and their dads. Wherever it was, Cairo or Benghazi, it was Osama by another name.

It never made sense. That’s what I wish I’d said sooner and louder and more often. The whole concept of Al Qaeda is wrong. The name means “The Base” in Arabic, and the idea is that it’s a central clearinghouse for dozens of different guerrilla groups, sharing an Islamic ideology but representing different countries and tribes and languages. They get together and share intelligence and personnel and materiel, because they’re all good Muslims working for a common cause. It’s the old kiddie dream of a vast umbrella group of baddies, S.P.E.C.T.R.E from Man from Uncle, KAOS in Get Smart, the ridiculous villain and his volcano HQ in every lame Bond film.

“Let’s have a terror jamboree and share ideas and secret identies!”

It’s just a terrible idea. The last thing any sane guerrilla group wants to do is to go to an international guerrilla jamboree like the Boy Scouts. Sure, you’ll share ideas and prop up each others’ morale—and in the meantime, the informers—because every decent-sized guerrilla group must assume it’s been penetrated—will be taking careful notes, taking quiet candid pictures, and putting together organizational charts. By the time you go to your home country from the big Jihad Jamboree in Waziristan or Tora Bora, you can be sure that the informers have shared their info with their handlers. And although some intel agencies can be stingy, most of them share info very readily, so every informer has in effect given the breakdown of every local group to every intel agency in the world.

And that’s death to a guerrilla, literally death, and not a quick or easy death either. Sharing info is good for intelligence agencies (most of the time; there are exceptions, like sharing the identity of some agents), but it’s the worst thing in the world for guerrillas.

That’s why guerrilla groups either start out with or switch to cell style organizations. Many times you’ll see a guerrilla group starting out imitating military organization, with big units and uniforms and parades. That’s asking to be wiped out. Sometimes they are wiped out; but if they survive, their second coming always involves switching to four-person cells, where three out of four members don’t know anything except the identity of the other cell members. And even the fourth, the cell leader, only knows the identity of one contact in the larger organization.

By bringing Jihadis from around the world to get Osama’s blessing, Al Qaeda was giving them a short-term boost in morale and finances but pretty much guaranteeing they’d be penetrated and destroyed within a few years. And that’s what happened: a big splash on 9/11, a few aftershocks in East Africa, Bali, Madrid and London, and then nothing but cops breaking down doors all over the world to the soundtrack of Hellfire missiles from Predator drones vaporizing mud houses in Northern Pakistan.

What made Al Qaeda so scary was that they went all out, in an age where the military norm is to use a tiny little fraction of your actual power. To see that style in action, just look at Libya now: NATO has the largest common air force in the world and could make every Qaddafi-held town in Libya a column of black smoke in a few minutes, but what they actually do is hold a classic EU discussion before taking out a single tank.

Al Qaeda made its mark by using everything they had. Every contact in every country. Every dime of finance. Every pound of plastique. Every willing suicide bomber. They literally doubled up on their attacks, trying for at least two big targets every time: the WTC, Pentagon and White House on 9/11, multiple tube stations on 7/7, two Israeli vacation spots and a US Embassy in Kenya. That sort of splurging really shocked bureaucrats who’ve spent their lives hedging their bets. And it worked, short-term; it made Al Qaeda look much bigger and more important than it really was. For that matter, the only reason they lasted as long as they did is that Western intel didn’t have any decent Arabic-speaking specialists. They weren’t enthusiastic about real terrorists; too sweaty, too foreign. Up until 9/11 forced their hand, they wanted to focus on the real threat: “Eco-terrorists,” a couple dozen hippies in the nice cool Oregon forests, where there are some pretty comfy hotels a fed can relax in, and the suspects speak English.

If we’d stepped back and looked coldly at the damage after 9/11, it wouldn’t have made such an impression. Three thousand dead, from a population of 300 million. Two large buildings destroyed—about like two trees in the concrete forest of Manhattan. If you ask me, what really hurt us on that day was that the plane aimed at the White House didn’t make it. That’s the way to hurt America: Leave Bush in charge, with a big boost of patriotic gullibility, for six long years. That’s how they really got us. If the preachers had focused on that angle I’d have bought it: “God is punishing America by turning away the plane that was heading for Pennsylvania Avenue! He could have removed the curse and chose not to! Woe unto us!”

There’s a story on the BBC now asking “Where’s Al Qaeda in Libya?” The answer comes down the page where these British agents say how amazed they are that so many young men who were screaming Jihadis last year are now pushing for cellphone revolutions, Cairo style.

“…jihadists…in Libya [are changing] the way they behave and talk in the past two months.

“The way they start to make statements or to understand the conflicts is unbelievable, beyond my imagination. The only explanation I can offer is because they have been affected – whether they like it or not – by the wave of democracy.”

Now there are a couple of ways you can read that news. The one the BBC wants you to buy is that democracy is winning, yay yay yay. And in a way that’s true, if by “democracy” you mean “riots in the streets of Cairo and open warfare in Libya.” Those ways sure worked better than the Brotherhood’s slow sneaky method, or Zawahiri’s offshoot of the Brotherhood, Al Qaeda.

But look back with a good cold eye at what Al Qaeda was and you see they only recruited well in one demographic: Middle/Upper-Class, Not-That-Bright, Middle Eastern Surplus Young Men. There are a lot of those around, thanks to oil money and high birth rates, and they bounce. That’s what they do: they bounce from prostitutes and cognac in Paris to cults in Denmark to one after another school, pretending to be “studying” to become whatever lame childish job takes their fancy and spends their stipends without asking too much. They’re “going to become” lawyers or doctors or work for the UN or they’ve developed a perpetual motion machine or they’re going to bring Islam to the spiritually starved masses of Warsaw—every dumb-ass project a bunch of pampered hicks can come up with. Just imagine an Islamic Jethro from Beverly Hillbillies going down the list with dad’s money: “Ah’m gonna be a doctor, Grannie! …A preacher! …A Inventor!” And every time, it’s slapstick failure. And the older and more annoyed he gets at the way the world won’t let him play the hero, Jethro moves down the list to: “Ah’m gonna be a martyr, Granny!”

Why not? People go back to their roots. Here just as much as there. How many hippies mutated back to real-estate agents in California? How many cokeheads are fulltime Christians now? You warp back to your Granny’s dreams when you’ve shot your own bolt.

And there you are: Mohammed Atta and his overpriced friends with one last chance to show how important they are.

Sorry, Osama–he’s moved on to cellphones and democracy.

That’s a short-term demographic, those dudes. They got no discipline. FARC wouldn’t have them on a bet. They’re good for a big splash, which is all they ever wanted anyway, but when you look back, what you see is a cadre of Afghan vets, funded by western intel all the way, who carried a lot of momentum away from the war against the Soviets, made a lot of connections, and tried playing way above their weight for a little while. It scared the ordinary morons, and that suited the suits like it always does. But along the way they were spending everything they had like New Russians. They spent their best recruits, blew their connections on short-term show-off blasts, and in a few years they had nothing left, and the demographic they drew from—flighty young guys at loose ends in the big cities of the Middle East—had moved on to cellphones and “democracy.”

It’s a fast, lively story but with no military significance that I can see, except if you consider Al Qaeda the propaganda wing of the Republican Party. In that way, yeah, you could say they did a lot. For a patient, intelligent future guerrilla, the lesson is plain: draw from a more serious demographic, don’t go to international jamborees, and spend your assets carefully.

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!

Last Sunday I was grumbling about how there are so many great books about war and not that many great war movies. That got a lot of readers lobbing in their suggestions for good war movies. One reminded me that I’d already mentioned a really great movie about 20th-c. war: Tae Guk Gi, The Brotherhood of War, a great, great Korean movie about two brothers who get dragged onto a troop train at the start of the Korean War. One of them makes it through, but you’ll have to watch the movie to see which one.

Tae Guk Gi has a dozen great scenes in it, from combat to massacre to just how dull it is to sit in a trench waiting to get attacked. There are bits of it you’ll never get out of your head, like when the Southern troops march north and see that the retreating Northern troops have hung villagers who they thought were class enemies. Not just hung them, but hung’em high, as Clint would say. There’s one woman hanging in that traditional Korean dress that looks like doll clothes, and I swear she’s about fifty feet in the air, revolving slowly.

One other thing Tae Guk Gi does better than most movies is show the instant electric switch from boring to terrifying you get in war. The platoon is sitting in the trenches bitching about the army and life in general, it’s hot, the food is lousy, and with no warning at all a volley of North Korean artillery lands right on them. You don’t hear the shells coming in, you don’t get those giveaway closeups of the guys who are about to die. Just one minute bla bla bla, the next kaboom. Totally random who dies that instant and who doesn’t.

A lot of the other movies you mentioned I haven’t seen. It’s hard to get Russian war films over here, though I did see one called Blockpost that someone from eXile sent back when they were based in Moscow. It was in Russian so I had to scrabble hard for every clue what was going on, but I think I got some of it. It’s about an outpost in Chechnya, manned by the classic squad of guys: the cool dude, the country bumpkin, the harmless little mascot comedy-relief that everybody babies and likes. They try to get along with the Chechens—in fact I suspect these actors are roughly a billion times nicer than actual scared conscripts would be when civilians fire on them—but eventually this cute Chechen girl who moonlights as a sniper gets one of them, although she sighs after doing it, like it’s a dirty job but somebody has to.

Just from what I wrote here describing the squad’s make-up, I bet any good war movie fan can tell me which guy gets it. That’s sort of the trouble with war movies, there’s a simple formula and people stick to it like Predestination.

Guess what Caine does with that helmet spike.

But there are some really surprising, unexpectedly cool war movies. Somebody mentioned The Last Valley, an old Michael Caine movie about a band of mercenaries in the Thirty Years War who stumble on an untouched, perfect valley in the Alps and decide to wait out the war there. I saw that as a kid and was seriously impressed. You can tell when somebody’s done their homework, even if you’re a kid, and whoever made that movie really had. I found out later James Clavell, the historical-novel guy who did all those books about Asia, wrote the story and directed the movie. That was where I learned a proper respect, more like total horror, for the Thirty Years War.

But I don’t want to give you the idea it was some dull textbook of a movie. This had action, serious action. In fact it had one of my favorite kill scenes in all the movies. Michael Caine, the captain of this band of mercenaries, has captured Omar Sharif, a wandering scholar. He’s going to kill Sharif, of course—that’s how you said hello to strangers in the Thirty Years War, slitting their throats—when Sharif blurts out some useful info in a last-ditch try to save his life. He tells Caine, “Wait, wait! Don’t just do the obvious, normal thing of killing me and everybody else in the valley, then moving on! Sure, that’s fun for a little while, but where’s it get you? Winter’s coming on, you don’t want to be down on the plains of Hell scavenging with all the other jackal packs! Stay here, live off the land, take it easy!”

Caine starts thinking it over, which pisses off his second-in-command, a serious Christian who gets sick at the idea of sparing heretics. He starts yelling at Caine—and he’s a huge hairy monster—when Caine, who’s holding his helmet in one hand, casually jams the spike of his helmet into his second-in-command’s gut. Shuts the guy up real quick. As this man-mountain slumps to the ground, Caine turns to Sharif and says, by way of explaining why he just terminated his associate’s career, “Goot ideazzz are rrrrrare.”

I’ve always loved that scene, and that line, “Goot ideazzz are rrrrare.” Of course there’s the question why a German in the middle of the German lands would speak English with a German accent, never mind one as bad as Caine’s. But listen, if you’re going to watch war movies at all, you’re going to have to accept the fact that Germans speak with a German accent, even when they’re supposed to be speaking German. Logically, you’d either have them talk in actual German and subtitle it in English, or have them talk in normal English and hope the people watching get the fact that this is happening in Germany among Germans and they’re actually speaking German. Instead most of the movies I’ve seen have German officers talking like Sgt. Schultz: English in a heavy accent with a couple of phrases left in German, usually the ones that sound military and obedient: “Jawohl, Mein General” and such.

Don’t even get me started on Mel Gibson’s accent in Braveheart, or Julia Roberts’s Irish one in Michael Collins. All the same, though, the actual scenes of medieval battle in Braveheart were good, and showed how crucial morale can be when battle is a matter of fighting with sharpened tire irons. And as for Braveheart being “anti-English”—which some reviewers said with a straight face—Oh my sweet lord Jesus, if those people had any idea, their heads would explode. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing. Oh, and a quick comment on Michael Collins, the movie: first of all, Mister Producer, you DON’T cast a sad-faced mope like Liam Neeson as a guerrilla leader. Leaders like Collins do it by infecting people with their own confidence. Neeson has the kind of face that tells you the biopsy doesn’t look promising. He’s the last guy to get men to go up against better-armed regular troops. Casting, damn it, comes down to casting.

Leigh in Flesh and Blood: Soooo Medieval!

But back to the Thirty Years War. Much later, they made another movie about European mercenaries called Flesh and Blood, starring a very weird cast with Rutger Hauer, the Blade Runner guy, as the leader of a mercenary troop and Jennifer Jason Leigh as the lady of the castle they storm. This movie was directed by Paul Verhoeven, who’s good—did some great fight scenes in Starship Troopers, which I guess was a war movie although it’s hard to take sci-fi seriously—but Flesh and Blood just doesn’t work, except as a medieval skin/rape flick–they should’ve called it Skin and More Skin to be honest about it. As a movie about the year 1501, it bombs,for a simple reason that every film director and producer needs to know right now: Some faces are pure modern world and can’t be backdated. I’m talking about Jennifer Jason Leigh here. She’s the lady of the castle? Come on, guys. The only way a face like that could get a castle is if she started out as a cocktail waitress at the airport Hilton and charmed, let’s put it that way, charmed her way into the heart of a degenerate jetset prince. There is just no way on earth Jennifer Jason Leigh’s flatline American voice—why is it American women try to iron out any little hint of inflection in their voices? Kansas is the Dolomites compared to a graph of their vocal range, I swear to God—there’s no way that voice could rule a late-medieval castle. Rutger Hauer, OK, he has one of those old faces. But Jennifer…when the mercenary band storms the palace and starts raping everybody, you expect her to yell in a Valley whine, “Whuturyou doin’ here, the lawn was just mowed on Tuesday and you don’t even look Mexican!”

It’s like Verhoeven, a smart guy, figured out Jennifer’s L.A. face wasn’t going to work, no matter how many snoods and damsel-veils he put on her, so he upped the violence level. I mean yes, there’d have been plenty of mass rape in a situation like that, but you’ll notice a lot of times in movies the directors up the graphic violence to make you believe you’re in another time, when anything could happen etc.. What’s much harder to do is make people believe they’re in another time, another world. And the way you do that is make it all look normal, because that’s how the world looks, any world, when you’re in it, when you’ve grown up in it. The screams are background noise if they happen every day.

I noticed that when I lived in a building by a busy street, not quite a freeway but almost. A girl was jaywalking and got killed one night. There were a few sirens and lights, everybody went back to the tv, and I walked by the spot where she got hit every day. I was pretty young and I thought there’d be something creepy about that spot. There wasn’t. No ghosts, spookies or voices. And if I’d driven by like about a million cars did every day, I’d never have felt a thing. Got me wondering how many other times I walked or drove over a massacre site (since massacres are much more common than battles) and never knew. It’s like we want to believe there are demons or something that get born from all the bad stuff, because that would be a kind of arithmetic that balances for us: so much death equals so many demons and ghosts. But as far as I know there’s nothing. I remember thinking, what if a kid had been run over every day on that spot of asphalt for a million years, would you get demons then? And knowing, just quietly knowing in every cell of my fat body: nope. Nothing. Lawsuits maybe, but no demons.

Our world feels normal, hit-and-runs and all, and we drive right over them. So did slavery, so did everything but the big sudden eruptions: The Mongols, the Plague. And I’d imagine after a while those felt normal too. You have to make a movie world feel normal too, to the people in it.

Black Robe also features the coolest dwarf shaman ever.

The movie I’ve seen that does that pretty well is this one about the French and Huron in Quebec in the 17th c. called Black Robe. It’s about a French priest who has to canoe a thousand miles upriver at the beginning of winter—the kind of assignment you got as a special favor if you were one of those gung-ho religion commissars they bred in Europe back then—with a band of Huron. They have to cross Iroquois territory to get there, and they’re captured—which they would be—and tortured—which they would be. The Iroquois go to work on the priest’s fingertips with dull-edged mussel shells. Then the chief tells the prisoners to get some rest with this little speech: “Today was only the first caress. We will peel the skin from you and you will still be alive.”

It’s all pretty hardcore, but when the French say, “The Iroquois are animals!” the Huron, not generally pro-Iroquois, shrug and say, “They’re just like us. If they show weakness they’ll be wiped out.” That’s the line a war movie has to try to walk, and it’s a thin one: showing all the gross weirdness but making it clear this is the normal world the people in the movie live in, have lived in all their lives.

That’s if you want to make a real movie about primitive/irregular warfare. You don’t always have to do that. Take Red Dawn…oh yeah, I can see you guys blushing, but admit it, you liked Red Dawn when it came out in the Reagan years! I know I did. The idea that Americans could be guerrillas was so cool, and John Milius had done a little homework—not a lot, but more than most Hollywood directors—on how guerrilla wars get their start under occupation. At least he showed a long line of civilian hostages getting shot in reprisal, although since it was a classic teen movie you didn’t really care about all those dull middle-aged hostages. In fact, it was kind of a relief to have the Dad-figure, Harry Dean Stanton as a classic redneck disciplinarian dad, get machine-gunned. That left the field wide open to the teen gang, and that’s what they were, a teen gang hanging around some desert National Park with prop RPGs. The Breakfast Club meets Stripes, but it was fun, admit it. You just wouldn’t want to use it as a blueprint for insurgency, that’s all, because guaranteed, Lea Thompson’s down coat would get puffed open by the belly gun of an Mi-24 a lot faster than it does in the movie. (Though that was another cool scene, the one where they’re lounging on scenic National Park red rocks when the chopper-whops start echoing around the canyon and the next thing you know Lea’s coat is exploding like popcorn. As I recall she dies for about ten minutes, because when you come down to it, Red Dawn is date-bait for teen war nerds. Not their dates—I imagine there were a whole bunch of furious Mormon Idaho girls who got taken to that movie by one of my brother war nerds in the expectation of post-combat romance, only to get orders to take her home NOW, and all that money on her Mickey D’s Big Mac meal just wasted. Such, like they say, are the fortunes of war.

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!

Today’s Civil War Caturday (by the way, that’s pronounced “Kivil War Katurday”), right in the middle of Easter. Got me thinking about my religion, if I have one now, and I realized I do, kind of: The Monitor and the Merrimack.

If there’s an idea of god I could buy, it’s the two ironclads, total opposites, fighting each other. That scene is burned in my brain—and not just mine, either. Real Americans see it all over the place, which is why there’s a rock formation in Moab, Utah, called “Monitor and Merrimack.” We see those two shapes the way Richard Dreyfuss saw Devil’s Mountain in Close Encounters.

Monitor and Merrimack, Moab, Utah

For you heathen who weren’t raised right, the Monitor and Merrimack were the first two ironclad warships in combat. They fought to a draw in March, 1862, at Hampton Roads, a harbor near the mouth of the James River that flows down from Richmond, capital of the Confederacy. There’s something permanent about their fight, though. In a way, if you believe in it like I seem to, it’s like it never ended. The Monitor and the Merrimack are still fighting, and always were fighting, even before people got the idea of building them.

They’re a perfect pair, because aside from the fact that no crummy wooden warship had a chance against either one, they have nothing in common. Even the way they were born showed how they were the heart and soul of the two totally different Americas that made them, the two Americas that were at each others’ throats then, and still are, and always will be. I’m not saying good and evil, but…yeah, I am saying good and evil, as long as I get to admit that evil has a big pull too, I’m not automatically non-stop on the side of good. But yeah, with that in mind I’ll admit: North equals good equals Monitor, and South equals evil equals Merrimack. It’s like: Yay for them both, but I hope the Monitor wins.

It never does, though. The battle always comes out a draw, because that’s the frustrating annoying way the world is set up. That draw is part of why the two ships fighting for eternity makes such a perfect religion. I never liked the idea of God being all-powerful because how come…well, never mind my fill-in details; everybody’s got their own “If God’s so nice, then how come…” to fill in.

The only way you can forgive god, or the gods, or the galaxy or whatever you call it, is if it’s not all-powerful, if it’s trying its best but having a very hard time, like the Army of the Potomac. And evil has its own problems and its own heroes and to be honest is pretty damn cool in its own right.

Evil has to improvise, like the South. They knew they couldn’t fight the North’s naval blockade ship-for-ship. The US Navy ballooned up to the biggest and strongest in the world. That’s right, “strongest”—and don’t you Brits give me your Royal Navy theme-music. I just wish, God how I wish, our navy had had a chance to slap you guys around circa 1862, when you were flirting with Dixie Cotton every time you thought her ex wasn’t looking!

So the South had to think harder, the way besieged countries do. The Merrimack came out of the same brilliant desperation that coughed up the Me262. It wasn’t as beautiful as that interceptor, though, because it was a ship brought back from the dead. The Confederate Navy wanted to build an ironclad warship from scratch but found out they just didn’t have the industrial base to make steam engines powerful enough to push all that armor plate and ordnance. So they dug up the dead US Navy steamship Merrimack, wrenched her up from the bottom of a river, cleaned her up and built a totally new superstructure for her, in-sloping walls that started with two feet of wood reinforcing, fronted by four inches of iron plate. More than anything, the reborn Merrimack looked like a WW II sub resting on the surface, with a flattened, stretched conning tower. Which is another perfect detail that can’t just be an accident, because didn’t the South raise her up off the mud and bring her a second life? And didn’t that same South give us the first working war submarine? If you ever wanted a clue that you’re dealing with the forces of the underworld (South equals under, for that matter), the history of the second life of the Merrimack would be it.

They fight forever in our heads.

And the Underworld is always good with guns. The Confederate ironclad had gaps in the armor for 10 guns, including two big Dahlgrens, the best naval guns in the world. On March 8, 1862, the Merrimack—which the Confederates called “C. S. S. Virginia,” but I’m calling it “Merrimack” because for one thing the two deities here both start with “M” and I’m not messing with something as perfect as that—sailed down the river to attack the US naval vessels anchored in Hampton Roads.

This is like the scene in every good horror film where the good people, the loyal deputies, all fire at the monster-hero without effect. The Terminator driving straight into, and I mean into, the LAPD station, that scene. The US Navy was something back then, brave, knew what they were doing—but they were in wooden ships with small cannon. They didn’t have a chance. The Merrimack, which had a few wooden steamships in tow like a bully’s hangers-on, steamed slowly up broadside to the USS Cumberland and opened fire at point-blank range, while the Cumberland’s small deck guns bounced shells off her iron sides.

Soon the Cumberland started sinking, still firing. More than a hundred sailors were dead on her decks. She went down trying to take the monster with her, just like the doomed good-guy should, because the Merrimack’s iron bow ram was caught in the Cumberland’s hull and Cumberland did her best to take the Terminator down with her. But it’s too early in the story for the monster to die, so Merrimack broke free just as Cumberland went under.

The monster needed another victim to show its strength; you know how these scenes go. So the Merrimack turned on another wooden ship, the Congress. Congress fired back for an hour—an hour, a wooden ship firing point-blank into iron plate studded with heavy artillery! Then, sinking, she surrendered. The sailors were allowed to start evacuating until Union shore batteries fired at the Merrimack. That made the Confederate captain mad and he ordered hot shot, literally hot lead, fired on the Cumberland, which burned and sank and took more than a hundred men with her. Don’t make the monster mad. It’s like these people had never seen a horror movie, which they hadn’t.

The third time, something different happens. That’s in every story I know. And that’s how it was this time. The Merrimack looks around for another target, finds the USS Minnesota. And let’s stop there. Minnesota–the state, that is–was the purest of the pure back then. The furthest north, the furthest west, the two good directions. A new state, no slaves, settled by innocent Scandinavians who never really got the Ulster crazy hum America always carried in its belly. And now this iron monster from the murkiest heat of Dixie turns on the ship named after the headwaters, where the Mississippi is still a clear little brook. It’s too perfect. Tell me this isn’t a battle of gods!

The Minnesota ran aground, like the leading lady tripping over her high heels as the monster bears down on her. But since the Merrimack, loaded down with all that heavy ordnance and iron plate, had a much deeper draft, it couldn’t even get close enough to Minnesota to kill her. So it had to draw back, sulking like Christine when some victim makes it across the ped xing, headlights just aching to plow through the cheerleader.

Now it’s night. The Merrimack steams home for repairs—Schwartzenegger digging buckshot out of his hydraulic arm in that skid row rented room—while the rest of the US Navy waits to be destroyed, one wooden ship at a time.
Except another ironclad was coming toward Hampton Roads, the equal and opposite, the good twin, as pure a product of the good, well-fed North as Merrimack was of the feral South: The Monitor. Another three-syllable “M” word. I read that in the Mayan religion, the hero is, or are, twins. I’ve always liked that idea, but not identical twins, more like opposite twins, but still twins, more like each other than they are like any of the ordinary mortals they fight for/against.

The Monitor was born in cool, rational heads, the opposite of the South’s booby-trap rigging desperation. The Monitor plans were drawn up on clean paper in the offices of brilliant, educated men. It was the child of an official body called “The Monitor Board,” appointed by Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, a typical Victorian superman, and designed by John Ericcson, a Swedish engineering genius, Minnesota, Ericcson…I’m telling you, this is about the most Northerly north meeting the most Southerly south, not even geography, this is a god-fight.

The North had the immigrants’ brains, and immigrant desperation is a match for the cool Satanic inventions of the South any day. Ericcson’s design was as pure, clean, and strange as the Merrimack was ugly, dark and lethal. The turret was a perfect cylinder, the engine and hull were smooth minimal steel, everything had the almost-alien look of a truly brilliant design. Ericcson’s model was called a “Monitor” because it was like one huge eye, an armored cyclops. Or, like other people with no respect for religion said, it looked like a tin can on a board. The tin-can turret held two huge guns, 11-inch Dahlgrens. That was all that showed above water. None of the fuss and mess of other ship architecture at all. It was the cleanest design in the history of weaponry. Samurai swords look over-embroidered and busy compared to the Monitor.

And naturally it looked helpless against the big, bad, grinding mass of the Merrimack. The contrast is everything here. It’s the basis of my religion, if you want to put it that way. They’re equal, more or less, but they don’t look equal. The Monitor looks too small and fragile, like it should. But it’s faster, it’s smarter—it’s David to the Merrimack’s Goliath, only better, because that Bible story never worked for me thanks to Yahweh already declaring for David. Once an all-powerful god announces he’s on your side, where’s the suspense, where’s the heroism? There is none. David could have picked a piece of lint off his tunic and blown it toward Goliath and it would have blinded him and made him trip and break his neck. The rock was just a prop. That’s cheap, and dirty—who’s the bully anyway, Yahweh, you cheating punk up in your cloud, fixing the fight to get good odds on the little guy?

The Monitor, I keep trying to say, is a different religion, a Union religion that Yahweh would’ve had a jealous little-girl fit over. It had nothing on its side but the cool Northern brains that dreamed it up, and they hadn’t had much luck against the hot crazy demons of the South in the first year of the war. It must’ve been some seriously cold comfort for the wooden ships of the Navy to see their tuna-can savior stationing itself just offshore of the Minnesota. “Oh, great: My bodyguard, the five-foot nothing science nerd!”

When the Merrimack came out of its upriver lair at dawn on March 9 and steamed downstream to kill off the Minnesota, the Confederates didn’t even recognize the Monitor as an opposition vessel. They thought it was a spare boiler being towed across the harbor. Then the boiler opened fire with its 11″ Dahlgren, bigger than any gun the Merrimack had. The Monitor was big in offense, but a tiny target, the design goal of any armored vehicle. In fact, if those 11″ guns had been charged with a full load of powder they could have pierced the Merrimack’s hull. But the Northern design team was a little wary of that much bang in a tiny turret, and I can’t say I blame them. So the Monitor’s big shells dented but couldn’t break the Merrimack’s shell.

Merrimack fired back with a broadside that missed Monitor’s little turret but hit the Minnesota, the big TKO’d Swede Monitor was protecting. The Minnesota, game as ever, fired its cannon back, stuck there on its mudbank. A big dumb jock, but brave, and on the right side. You have to love the Minnesota. And Cumberland, for that matter. That’s what’s better about this religion: everybody’s got a good job to do, and even the evil is great.

The Merrimack: Now she is a god.

They fired at each other point-blank, with the Monitor’s big guns in their 360-degree rotating turret always bearing directly on the Merrimack, and the Merrimack’s big black slab-sides absorbing all that punishment and still spitting back shells. If the Merrimack had had solid shot for its Dahlgrens, they might have zipped right through the Monitor’s thinner armor plate. But the Underworld always has to improvise, it’s always under embargo like Dixie was, and they didn’t have solid shot in the right size, so the Merrimack had to be content with exploding shells.

Finally one of them blew just in front of the viewing slit of the Monitor’s turret and the little savior withdrew. The Merrimack was happy to call it off too, seriously dinged up, its zombie engines, that’d lain in the mud a long time before being resurrected, grumbling and threatening to quit, the armor plate buckled and bent.

Both deities steamed away and both declared victory. And both those particular ships died, in another perfect opposites way: the Merrimack died by fire, burned by her crew when her base was captured by the Union, and the Monitor died by water, sunk when high seas slopped over her little turrets out on the ocean.

But those were just the two temporary things that held the fight that day. North and South, Minnesota and Virginia, they’re still fighting. Not just in DC but my head. And in Moab. Everywhere, actually, because there are other pairs like that. For me, making up a better religion while I had to sit in the pew and listen to the grownups ranting, the Monitor and the Merrimack were just the first and best of the fighting pairs. The next I recognized was the same one every normal person has in their heads: the whale and the squid, fighting forever in your head and in the black depths of the ocean.

Other bodies, same battle

The Merrimack comes up from the mud to fight the Monitor; the whale goes down to the underworld to fight the squid. And just like the Monitor and the Merrimack are both perfect and wonderful, the whale and the squid are both great too, the muscle, big lungs and strong jaw of the whale against the cold boneless pull of the tentacles. They’re not exactly equal; I’m always on the side of the Monitor and the whale. But I worship the Merrimack and the squid too, where they belong, proper gods of the underworld.

And they fight forever, amen.

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!