Content by AaronVB
Posted at 4:18pm on Aug. 7, 2006 Crazy, or can he just see what we refuse to?
By AaronVB
As noted on PowerLine today, Tom Ricks gave a remarkably frank interview to Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources (transcript available here). In it, he was asked by Kurtz about the role civilian deaths will play in future warfare as the media’s access to warzones grows. Here’s Ricks’ response:
THOMAS RICKS, REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": I think it will be. But I think civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play for both sides here. One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.
KURTZ: Hold on, you're suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it's fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?
RICKS: Yes, that's what military analysts have told me.
KURTZ: That's an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here.
RICKS: Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well.
(emphasis added)
It is easy to dismiss Ricks as another member of the budding Moonbat Conspiracy Society, as PowerLine does, especially when one recalls that he very recently published a highly critical book on the Iraq War. However, I am not so quick to simply dismiss his comments. That is not to say that I am sure he is factually correct – he may be, and probably is, dead wrong. What bothers me is that his comments sound plausible. I can reasonably believe that the media’s growing role in influencing public opinion on the justifiability of a war can give incentives to a country to keep its body count rising at a pace lower than the enemy’s but high enough that it can claim some kind of continuing casus belli.
How did we get to this point?
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Posted at 6:26pm on Aug. 3, 2006 Ground to a Halt (or, what does Hezbollah stand for today?)
By AaronVB
An editorial appears today under the above title in the New York Times by Professor Robert Pape, whom I had the pleasure of having as a lecturer for one quarter at the University of Chicago in an undergraduate class on military strategy. His knowledge of international relations theory and strategy is indeed far beyond mine, which is why I find his editorial in the Times today so troubling. With all due respect to my professor (who after all may be reading this at some point), I would like to level some criticisms of his line of reasoning concerning the nature of Hezbollah and the battle that Israel faces today.
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Posted at 8:26pm on Jul. 23, 2006 Some thoughts on strategy for 2006
By AaronVB
Chances are that by now most RedState readers are tired of the pro-Romney, anti-Romney, or anti-McCain, or pro-Allen, or anti-Allen diaries that are almost literally invading the diary listings. I'm all for presidential campaign speculation, although I think most of it at this point is little more than idle daydreaming about any given author's "dream candidate." For one thing, most such authors seem to think that the list for 2008 is already complete, with John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, George Allen, Bill Frist, and perhaps, if you're particularly prone to fantasy, Newt Gingrich on its coveted roster. Historical experience shows that this is emphatically not the case, and by winter 2007 I expect several of these names to have been dropped from "The List" and several more to have been added to it. On the other hand, there is an election whose proximity allows us to put up a complete list of candidates and races we need to pay attention to: 2006. RedStaters like Adam and Saul Anuzis have done a good job focusing the attention on the races that matter this year (though to be fair, Mr. Anuzis does chair a state GOP chapter so one would expect his attention to be on such matters!), but thus far have seemed to have focuses mostly on the "horserace" aspects of these campaigns - i.e., the weekly poll numbers and on-the-ground tactical news. Those are all valuable pieces of information, but I would like to weigh in on some overall strategy that I think will help the GOP maintain its control of Congress this fall.
Please forgive the length of the diary but I have segmented it by issue so that anyone can easily skip to the issues that interest them most.
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Posted at 10:44am on Jun. 27, 2006 No 1994
By AaronVB
From the diaries...
Ever since talk about the 2006 midterms began heating up - which would be, oh, a day or so after Election Day 2004 - one thought has been on the mind of Democratic strategists and the left-leaning punditosphere (is that a word?): 1994, the year of the "Republican Revolution." In that year, the GOP wrested control of the House by taking 56 seats away from the Democrats, the majority of which were shockingly held by incumbents and were not simply open-seat elections. This year, the Democrat Party hopes to replicate that performance, and in fact only has to replicate it on a small level as the GOP has only a slim 15-seat majority in the House. However, on just how to make 2006 a repeat of 1994 the Democrats appear to be mystified. Was it the Contract With America that propelled the GOP to victory by "nationalizing" the election, or was it dissatisfaction with corruption? The Democrats have rolled out some strategies based both on the former and the latter thoughts, with apparently little success. There are several explanations for this lack of success: perhaps the Democratic "New Direction for America" agenda lacks the inspiration of the Contract With America, and perhaps voters view both parties as equally corrupt and that issue is a wash. Or, as Jay Cost, probably my favorite writer on political science, argues at his blog on RealClearPolitics, perhaps the 1994 Revolution was based on something else entirely (emphasis in original):
Our system of government - in particular its doctrine of separated powers - makes it very difficult to identify who is responsible for any given policy or any given result. So many different actors are involved in any given situation that confidently identifying a causal chain is virtually impossible. Hurricane Katrina provides a perfect example. Who should we blame for Katrina: the state government, the city government, the county government, the President, the Congress, all of the above, none of the above? I think it is literally impossible to place blame with any precision. Most answers I have read ultimately hinge upon the partisanship of the writer - liberals are more likely to blame institutions operated by the Republicans; conservatives are more likely to blame institutions operated by the Democrats. The reality is that power is so divided that nobody is clearly to blame. This enables all parties involved to shirk any responsibility they might have...
Just as the Republicans did in 1994, the Democrats have to find a way to counteract the advantages that incumbency confers. The question becomes: how did the Republicans manage this counterintuitive result?
They did this, in essence, by using Bill Clinton's knack for the art of persuasion against him. Clinton was able to persuade Democratic members of Congress to go on the record supporting left-center policies that their districts opposed. He thus made what is usually an opaque picture of responsibility crystal clear. This enabled the Republicans to do what is so rarely done: bring the national mood home to the district.
The point that is to be made about this is one that has been recognized since the times of Sun Tzu: outcomes in battle often rely on factors either outside human control or within the control of the enemy. In other words, the problem with the Democrats' electoral strategy for taking back the House in 2006 is not that they haven't been creative or inspiring enough in their agenda setting (although in my opinion they haven't been either of those things), it's that a 1994 style revolution this year simply is not possible.
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Posted at 4:06am on Jun. 21, 2006 Nuclear decapitation: what it means, how it's done
By AaronVB
Much has been made about the recent announcement by North Korea that it would be launching a test missile in the very near future. The speculation has inevitably centered on the possibility of North Korea in fact detonating a bomb on an American city, and if Kim Jong Il's missile "test" is in fact just such an attack. For several reasons, I think both of these possibilities are highly unlikely, although in the game of international relations, no one can responsibly claim with 100% certainty that a given event will or will not happen. Ignoring the question of whether North Korea would actually ever launch a nuclear weapon at the United States for a moment, I want to focus on what a North Korean attack would actually look like, and how much damage we could expect.
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Posted at 11:49pm on May 29, 2006 The War on Terror frame
By AaronVB
The LA times exit poll showed that Bush voters were more concerned than Kerry voters on only three issues: moral values, terrorism, and taxes. Pre-election Zogby polls showed Kerry winning on nearly every single issue, except terrorism, where he was slaughtered. The problem is not, like many hawks would have us believe, that we are not taking national security and the "war on terrorism" seriously. The problem is not that we failed to successfully separate Iraq from the war on terrorism in the minds of the voters. The problem is not that we failed to produce a compelling counter-argument as to how the war on terror should be conducted. The problem is that we are gleefully going along with the conservative frame "war on terror." This is a battle we can never win, because it evokes inherently conservative ideas. Complicity with this frame will only serve to make the country more conservative, no matter what contortions and forms of hyper-cognition we engage in, and thus reduce our own chances of victory.
--Chris Bowers, myDD
The Memorial Day weekend marked a great amount of reflection on soldiers and the sacrifices they make, as well the current war our nation has called them to fight. These reflections have ranged from the patriotic to the seemingly inane, an example being the Chris Bowers quote above from December 2004, echoed this weekend by Pachacutec at FireDogLake. The reawakening of the Left's claim that the War on Terror is merely an idea and not an actual condition of current events allows us an opportunity to reexamine the fundamental problems of today's Leftist movement.
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Posted at 4:29pm on May 21, 2006 China: the false threat
By AaronVB
Of all the threats that can be identified in the world today - a lengthy list that includes terrorism, Iran, Venezuela, Putinist Russia, and so on - China is probably the specter that we fear the greatest (in the long term, at least), and at the same time the threat least worth worrying about. In truth, while China's economic growth for the last decade or so has been quite impressive and its military build up much discussed, those who believe China will seriously rival the United States in the 21st century ignore some fundamental aspects of the modern international system, features that are well worth spelling out, for they shed some light on where China is going and what it will mean to us. The real picture is far different than the one painted by those worried about a militantly expansionist China damaging American interests in ways both overt and subtle and overthrowing our hegemony.
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Posted at 10:13pm on May 18, 2006 Beating Jack Murtha
By AaronVB
Jack Murtha has been in the headlines for awhile. First, he called for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq and labeled the American army as "broken." Now, he's decided to put out the word that he has already tried, convicted, and sentenced several of our young Marines in a case where the facts are still in dispute, and is using the tragedy to make political hay and lend support to his claims about the poor state of our armed forces under President Bush. As AcademicElephant has pointed out, he is dangerously close to the heretofore unknown territory of the "ex-Marine," a Marine who has renounced the values and honor of the Corps.
In 2004, Murtha ran unopposed in Pennsylvania's 12th District. This is no surprise: at the time little attention had been paid to Murtha, and as a 32-year incumbent in the house, Republican strategists would not have given his district a second look in their election plans. Now, however, things are different. Murtha has decided to tie himself to the anti-war wing of the party. His comments are probably just as damaging to the image of our armed forces in the eyes of the civilian population as are those of Dick "NazisPolPotStalinGitmo" Durbin. That puts him in the national spotlight, and now he has attracted a very able challenger in the person of Diana Irey, a commissioner for Washington county. Below the fold is some analysis of her chances for beating Murtha.
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Posted at 10:05am on May 12, 2006 The French riots and immigration: what really happened
By AaronVB
Promoted from diaries - Moe Lane
France has been buffeted by waves of riots and protests in recent months, first by Muslim immigrants in the banlieus, and most recently by young students and unions protesting labor law reforms. At the time of the immigrant riots in particular, theories raged through the television and radio waves as to why the predominantly Muslim immigrant neighborhoods had exploded into violence. Some, thinking the riots were driven by the same will to power that is driving Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, declared a "French intifada.". Others argued it was poverty and French cultural arrogance that the rioters were protesting against. Some six months removed from those riots, and several weeks removed from the student protests, we may have the perspective to sort through the mess that is France and perhaps uncover some surprising links between the students, Muslims, and our own immigration situation along the way.
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Posted at 11:17pm on Apr. 30, 2006 Some quotations for the times
By AaronVB
The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.
----G.W.F. HegelA nation which makes the final sacrifice for life and freedom does not get beaten.
----Mustafa Kemal AtatürkMoral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men.
----General George S. Patton
From the panicked stampede rushing away from the president on the issue of Iraq just as countries like Iran and Syria are testing our resolve, to the cynical manipulations by mediocre politicians on issues ranging from immigration to gas prices, it seems like a bad time to be an American, let alone a conservative Republican. Our economy may be doing well, but the public either doesn't know it, or doesn't care. The war in Iraq is almost certainly going far better than pundits and media outlets are depicting, but you'd never guess that from Bush's poll numbers. We haven't had a terror attack since 9/11 after suffering about one a year for the eight years prior (yes, that would be under the Clinton administration), but Democrats appear to have convinced the country we are not as safe as we were during those glory days of the "peace dividend." Manufactured scandals like Valerie Plame, Katrina, and oil company profits dominate the headlines while the real scandals, like the treasonous CIA disclosures of highly classified information to sympathetic media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post has been mostly brushed under the rug. What are we to make of these depressing times?