War Commentary

“How We Won”

Greyhawk boldly writes that, though the media hasn’t noticed, we’ve won the war (or at least the battle of Iraq), despite the attempts earlier this year by the Congressional Democrats to seize defeat from the jaws of victory:

…few people are paying attention to what those of us who are here fighting this war might have to say. Everyone is focused on the death metrics, and everyone is wrong. Call it “hearts and minds” or people fighting for their lives and futures who do not fear turning to us for help and helping us in return without fear of retribution from an enemy falling fast – these are the numbers that tell the tale. These are the numbers that indicate something worthwhile. These are the numbers that will drive the death metrics further down and keep them there.

He has a lot of links to support his thesis.

And as I’ve noted before, it’s all about the evolutionary pressures favoring cooperation over chaos.

To use combat (or even civilian) casualties as a metric for progress in a war is puerile, but it serves well the purpose of those opposed to this war, and war in general (and particularly wars waged by the BusHitler). Had we done so in the second World War, one would have thought that we were losing all through late 1944 and early 1945 in Europe, and in the summer of ’45 in the Pacific–after all, casualties were soaring as we took territory, and the Japanese were unrelenting in their brutality against the population in the territories they still occupied. Fortunately, the press was smarter then, and knew how to measure progress–by territory increasingly controlled by the victors, island after island, sea after sea.

Similarly, we’ve been seizing territory from Al Qaeda in Iraq, town by town, district by district, to the point at which they’ve been completely routed, and the Iraqis now seem ready to forge a new nation. (And for those of limited patience, it’s always useful to recall that it took our own nation eight years from Cornwallis’ surrender until we had a constitution in place).

This doesn’t, of course, indicate that we can immediately pull the troops out, any more than we could have done so in Europe or Japan after the surrenders there. Now, as then, the war is merely transitioning from the major battle that we just won in Iraq, to the larger upcoming ones on its borders, and until its neighbors (all of them, really, other than Turkey, Jordan and Kuwait) stop fomenting sectarianism and hatred, Iraq will remain at risk of slipping back into the abyss, despite the hard-fought victory of Americans and Iraqis. The question for the administration at this point must be, what next?

Tomorrow is the 89th anniversary of the end of the war that was to end all wars. One can hope that there will, in time, be the last war, but that one wasn’t it, nor was the one against the Axis, or the one against the Soviets. Each of these wars, in fact, contained the seeds and provided fertile ground for the next, just as the end of the Cold War resulted in a resurgence of violent Islam. We are now deep in the middle of another world war–a fourth one, both cold and hot.

Will it be the last one? Let us hope.

History

The Night Of Shattering Glass

It’s been almost seven decades since Kristallnacht. Today is the sixty-ninth anniversary. Hilda Pierce remembers:

In Paris, on Nov. 7, 1938, a 17-year-old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, distraught over the treatment of his German Jewish parents in Poland, shot and killed the German minor official Herr von Rath. That was the excuse for Kristallnacht two days later.

Thousands of people participated in this horrendous carnage, an organized massacre dictated by Berlin. Not just hoodlums, but ordinary middle-class men and women, neighbors, former friends, smashed windows, looted Jewish shops, burned synagogues, tortured and beat senseless thousands of Jews and the rest sent to concentration camps. In my Vienna, the bloodshed was even greater; hundreds of Jews committed suicide. There it happened on Nov. 9. Austrians had one great regret, that so much needless damage was inflicted on property.

Crystal Night was the beginning of the Holocaust. It sowed the seeds for the Second World War. Had Hitler been stopped at that time, the war and genocide might have been avoided. All these valuable people, Jews who had contributed so much to the world in science, art, music, mores and medicine, could have continued giving their invaluable gifts to mankind.

Sadly, though, many in modern Europe seem to have forgotten:

Take the much-abused term

Administrative

Networking Bleg

Can anyone imagine why, when I drag a wmv file over to my local drive from my file server, and play it from the local drive, the file transfer occurs quickly, and Windows Media Player plays it fine, but if I try to play it directly from the server, it runs like molasses?

Space

SBSP In Pop Mechanics

I finally just got around to reading the report that Colonel “Coyote” Smith (that’s Michael Valentine Smith–no kidding) and company came up with on Space Based Solar Power, and will be commenting on it, but I should note for now that the January issue of Popular Mechanics has this as its cover story. I haven’t read it yet, but may post some thoughts after I do.

On a related note, while a ten buck per ton carbon tax on coal probably would be good for the nuclear industry, as Randall Parker notes, it wouldn’t hurt SBSP, either.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, not much to the Pop Mechanics piece. I think it’s quite an overstatement to say that powersats are “all the rage” at either the Pentagon or in private industry. I would think that something that was “all the rage” would be getting significant funding, and so far the amount that’s been appropriated to this recently is…zero. In fact, one of the significant things about the Pentagon report was that it was done with no DoD budget, entirely by volunteers, other than the Colonel’s time. It might be a useful model for future such studies that have trouble otherwise finding government champions, but it hardly justifies the notion that this is now a major priority, either within the five-sided building, or in the government in general.

As for the article itself, my only quibble is to note that the seventies studies were jointly by DoE and NASA, not just DoE. It’s been noted many times in the past (and Coyote’s report notes as well) that one of the reasons that this concept has had trouble getting acceptance and ownership within the government is that it’s had no natural home. DoE thinks it’s a space program, and NASA thinks it’s an energy program, and both agencies consider it to be outside their charters. I do like the idea of the establishment of a quango, perhaps using COMSAT as a model, to provide a government-blessed (and at least initially, funded) focus for this.

[Update a couple hours later]

I see from his comments that Monte Davis now has a blog, which I’ll be adding to the sidebar.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!