Stories by trevino
Posted at 7:51pm on Sep. 1, 2005 The absentee.
By trevino
The NYT's bizarre fantasies of being ravished by the Leader notwithstanding, there is a definitive public role for a President in these circumstances. Regrettably for that dwindling band among us who feel the Republic is strengthened by every inactive, hands-off officeholder, modern democracy demands that an elected representative involve himself in the great events of the day. At a bare minimum, he must appear informed and active, lest the perception of leaderlessness engender its own reality.
President Bush is failing to meet this minimum.
The President's lackluster afternoon address yesterday was followed by a truly disastrous Good Morning America interview this morning. (No video or transcript yet, but a BBC writeup is here.) In it, the President went from making the usual minor errors -- stating that the number of "missing" was unknown, when he probably meant the dead -- to making a truly stupefying one: stating that the breaching of the levees was an unforeseen event. This is simply false (see any of the usual left wing sites for copious sourcing), and it's such a basic error in this case as to suggest a real detachment from the situation at hand. New Orleans has been on borrowed times, behind insufficient levees, for decades; it's incredible that the President either does not know or will not acknowledge this.
What does this have to do with the relief and recovery effort per se? Very little. What does it have to do with the President's political fate? A great deal. Fairly or not, his perceived engagement with the de facto loss of a major American city is now the single most important issue affecting his second term agenda. It won't take long for many to make the connection that it's just this sort of de facto loss -- albeit to terrorism rather than natural disaster -- that his Administration has purportedly been preparing to handle since 9/11. That he seems disengaged, and that at the moment those purported preparations seem ephemeral indeed, together may well represent a ripping-away of the facade of the President-as-protector that won him reelection.
It's too early to know, of course. But for the sake of his agenda -- and really, for the sake of our refugee fellow-citizens -- the President needs to get on the ball.
Posted in Republicans — Comments (129)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 9:40am on Sep. 1, 2005 Homes for Katrina refugees.
By trevino
"The American people, the most generous on earth...."
-- Ronald Reagan
The refugees from Louisiana and Mississippi cannot all fit in the Astrodome -- nor should they have to. If you have a spare room, please consider donating your space to a person or family in need. It's the right thing to do, and you'll be helping not just an individual, but your country. There are two web resources you should be aware of:
The Katrina Home Sharing Registry allows providers of living-space to register and match up with refugees. The NOLA.com Homes Available Board is a bit more ad hoc, but serves its purpose equally well.
New Orleans alone will be uninhabitable for months. If you can give someone a place to stay, to find work, and to get on his or her feet in the short run, please do so. It is not just charity, but duty: and the two are not exclusive.
Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (4)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 12:37am on Sep. 1, 2005 Numbers.
By trevino
It seems grotesque, in a manner, to rank and compare catastrophes, particularly when they involve the loss of human life. To do so often enough appears to buy into the sentiment of Stalin's cruel quip that a single man dead is a tragedy, but a million dead is a statistic. Still, there are comparative scales of suffering, and it is enough to note that the suffering attendant to Katrina is immense. Even if we do not arrive at the feared toll of thousands dead, the dozens we know were drowned or crushed in the storm's course is a heavy burden in itself.
Read on.
Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (8)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 7:28pm on Aug. 30, 2005 Our Guardsmen on duty in Iraq -- <i>and</i> at home.
By trevino
A profoundly stupid meme circulating about the left (no links, you can guess where and whom) asserts that people are dying in New Orleans and elsewhere because there are insufficient Guardsmen on hand to deal with the Katrina catastrophe. Bush's war in Iraq, the line goes, has depleted the National Guard's ranks and is therefore harming Americans in need.
Let's strangle this one in its cradle. First, let us note that the National Guard Bureau some time ago committed to the various state governors to keep approximately 50% of Guard strength undeployed for precisely these situations. Second, let us note that of the stricken states now, roughly 60% of their Guard strength is available for disaster duty now. That breaks down to about 6,500 Guardsmen in Louisiana, 7,000 in Mississippi, and 10,000 in Alabama. That's just the numbers available: of those activated, we see that it comes to 3,500 in Louisiana, 1,600 in Mississippi, and 750 in Alabama. Or, 50%, 19%, and 7.5% of available totals respectively. This doesn't even begin to account for Guardsmen from adjacent states: the Arkansans are ready to deploy, and there are 8,200 Guardsmen available in Florida -- for starters.
The modern American left is shot through with men who cut themselves shaving and blame Bush's war in Iraq for the blood thus spilt. There's no point in trying to convince them otherwise, or that Katrina's devastation is not somehow, somehow the Administration's fault. But you, dear reader, can and should know better.
Posted in Breaking News — Comments (35)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 5:13pm on Aug. 30, 2005 The face of the enemy.
By trevino
Who or what is the enemy in the appalling HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa? Is it the fearsome virus? Is it the squandering, corrupt governments? Is it the sunken mores that transmit the plague like wildfire? Or is it the political bete noir du jour of the cosmopolitan left?
Read on.
Posted in Foreign Affairs — Comments (15)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 12:41am on Aug. 29, 2005 The deluge.
By trevino
Most Americans are fortunate to have never seen a Class 5 hurricane or its effects. I have. In fall 1998, I deployed with my US Army Engineer battalion to Nicaragua to conduct relief and reconstruction missions as part of Operation Fuerte Apoyo in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch. That tremendous storm packed enough ferocity to smash Central America, drench the Yucatan, hit Florida, and and persist as an identifiable weather system north of the British Isles. Tens of thousands, mostly in Central America, were left dead in its wake.
When we arrived in Managua, there was trash and debris strewn in the streets of the capital city. Some houses had visible debris lines marking the height of the water in the neighborhood. In the countryside, vegetation was broken and scattered across wide fields. Trees with snapped trunks and limbs; grasses lain flat by mighty winds; scrub plants uprooted and thrown far afield at crazy angles: all greeted us as we progressed inland to our area of operation. Huge bridges lay on their sides, broken cleanly at their concrete bases. Shells of houses, sometimes single walls, recalled the ruins of antiquity.
We saw tremendous gorges carved where tiny streams once flowed. One day I traveled with my platoon sergeant down a deep, wide, and steep dry riverbed, and we noted the houses perched precariously on the banks' edge. Finally we came across a well emerging from the riverbed towering fifteen feet in the air above us; and we knew that this was not an old, dry riverbed at all. Beside us, a tiny trickle of streamwater burbled toward the Pacific, its damage long since done. That well was inaccessible; others were simply erased from existence. I spoke with some children playing in a sandbank at a worksite where my platoon was building a river-crossing; they showed me a featureless shallow depression where el pozo used to be. They also spoke of how all the known land mines were now moved about. This made it unsafe to play.
The most affecting sight of catastrophe came when a Nicaraguan soldier took me to see a bleak landscape of hardened mud. He related how there were once towns on this deathly vista. The hurricane hit and blew the buildings down. Then the rains flooded the fields and carved rivers through the streets. Then the long-slumbering volcanic crater above, filled with water, burst open, and the pitiful survivors were themselves slaughtered by the hundreds as a mountain's worth of hot mud, water and stone entombed them all. It was the Casita lahar.
I've seen what a Class 5 can do. That's why I pray for New Orleans now.
Update [2005-8-29 10:41:24 by trevino]:
The flooding is underway, and will intensify as the western eyewall's stronger winds start hammering the waves against the levees. The Ninth Ward of New Orleans is reportedly experiencing flooding varying from three to eight feet of water. You can see the Ninth's levee heights here, and a broader overview of the New Orleans levee system here.
Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (36)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 1:32pm on Aug. 27, 2005 RS on the BBC
By trevino
I'm briefly featured on the BBC World Service's Analysis program this week. You can listen to the Real Audio stream here. The topic is Cindy Sheehan, and the slant, I think, speaks for itself.
Posted in Breaking News — Comments (3)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 12:45pm on Aug. 15, 2005 The immeasurable burden.
By trevino
Those of us who have known the President's character for some time -- be it firsthand, through brief encounters, or through persons who have worked with him -- know that he is above all a sincere man. Whatever our disagreements with him on the policy level, there is never any question that he means what he says, and that he feels more deeply than a hellbent-for-hatred left will ever admit. Remember this as you watch the manufactured grotesquerie of Sheehan Martyr. Remember this as you are told that he is "afraid," or a "coward," or "uncaring," for refusing to participate in the poor suffering woman's progressive self-abasement. Remember this as you read the real story of his encounters with the families of the fallen.
Read on.
Posted in War — Comments (9)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 11:23pm on Jul. 30, 2005 Out of Uzbekistan.
By trevino
The United States is being evicted from the K2 airbase in Uzbekistan. From the beginning of the Afghan war, K2 was a vital staging area for American and Allied forces. This was particularly so in fall 2001, when the Northern Alliance held only its thin strip of territory in the far north of Afghanistan. K2 has been useful since then -- in the few Afghan missions I've been tangentially involved with, we always staged out of there -- but its strategic importantance is considerably less since the occupation of Bagram. The United States also has use of airfields at Quetta in Pakistan and Manas in Kyrgyzstan. The latter is a significant staging area and will probably, along with Bagram in-country, pick up the missions that were previously staged out of K2. Following Chinese-inspired threats of eviction from Manas, Secretary Rumsfeld just returned from Central Asia, where he secured assurances of Allied use of Manas for the foreseeable future.
Why is this a political matter? It's significant because of the reason K2 is being shut down: the United States, having engaged in necessary realpolitik in engaging with the bloody regime of Islam Karimov (see lefty outrage here), has turned up the human rights pressure in the wake of the Andijan massacres -- and in correlation with the decreasing strategic import of K2. The United States has specifically been active in aiding the flight of Uzbek refugees; it was, apparently, a 29 July airlift of several hundred of them to Romania that enraged the Karimov regime to the point of shutting down K2. (American and British human rights advocacy on this point is noticed in the Middle Eastern press, by the bye.) Since the close of the Second World War, American foreign policy has wavered between the twin poles of human rights idealism and naked self-interest. The drawbacks of each in isolation became clear enough in the Nixon and Carter administrations; it is good to see the Bush Administration doing a fairly good job of finding a middle way. In cases like the K2 eviction, the rage of tyrants is a badge of pride.
Update [2005-7-30 22:29:58 by trevino]:
Another example in another region of the Administration acting as a lonely voice of human rights.
Posted in Foreign Affairs — Comments (29)/ Email this page » / Read More »
Posted at 12:30pm on Jul. 29, 2005 In defense of David M. Kennedy.
By trevino
Most of the outrage over David Kennedy's NYT piece -- see a compilation here -- seems to stem from his use of the words "Hessian" and "mercenary," and little else. Of course, the former was invoked to disavow an implicit comparison; and the latter was qualified with explicit acknowledgement that the patriotism of our armed services is not, to him, in question. Sadly, "mercenary" is a loaded term in the armed forces -- and even amongst those who fit the definition in the security-for-hire sector. Mention it, and you get flamed, the quality of your argument notwithstanding.
The pity is that Kennedy's major points are correct, and the US Army agrees with him. When I was a "Gold Bar Recruiter" (ie, a newly-minted lieutenant with nothing better to do) back in the late '90s, our pitches to potential ROTC cadets were roughly 90% oriented toward material benefit for the would-be cadet (in the form of pay, scholarships, and job training), and little in the way of patriotic appeal. When speaking to parents, one left out the patriotic bit altogether. This wasn't my take -- this was guidance from Cadet Command. Since then, the Army, with its lamentable "Army of One" campaign, has moved even further toward recruiting purely on the proposition of material benefit in exchange for service: look at goarmy.com and see the panoply of job training and cash incentive pitches. Lost in there, somewhere, is the nobility of service per se. This isn't necessarily the Army's fault, but that of a society which no longer values these things as it ought.
Given this, does that society need to be reconnected to its military? Absolutely. Does a professionalized, socially separate warrior class lower the barriers to engaging in foreign adventures? Probably. What's the solution? My preferred option is here, and it seems David Kennedy thinks along the same lines: a draft. Even if you disagree -- and honest men do -- it seems absurd in the extreme to deny the very existence of a problem.