Category Archives: Military

No, It’s Not the Troops Fault 1

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military, Uncategorized
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It is politically inappropriate and strategically counter productive to merely denounce rank and file members of the military as hired goons for the state. One of the most important political occurrences that happened in US history was the success of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the consequent delegitimization of imperialist wars and military conscription. This success has reduced the US state, the most powerful state in history, to having to fight imperialist wars with armies of indentured servants, mercenaries, and proxy forces. The indentured servants that comprise the state’s official armed forces are largely generated by the economic draft which results from the ongoing impoverishment of poor and working class communities. That’s the reason why the US armed forces are both disproportionately minorities and disproportionately from white working class strongholds like the Rust Belt. The bottom line is that we need our vets for the revolution.

TRUMP: My instinct was to pull out of Afghanistan — here’s why I changed my mind Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Because the consensus of state/ruling class/power elite opinion said so. Duh?

The real issue here is the intramural rivalry within the global-capitalist empire, with the Eastern axis, especially China, but also Russia and Iran, wanting to develop Afghanistan for the BRICS, while the Western axis wants to retain Afghanistan for itself.

As I have said all along, Trump is a Nixon-Rockefeller moderate Republican, who takes his foreign policy cues from Kissinger, and not a “Nazi,” “fascist,” “Alt-Right,” or even “Alt-Lite.” What this shows is that presidential politics is a waste of time, and that sensible people need to forget all about this Red/Blue nonsense just as they need to forget about the Nazi/Antifa nonsense.

Putin seems to me to wish to create a Eurasian alliance against the Atlanticist axis with what would amount to a restored Russian empire as the leadership of an Eastern axis of this kind. It’s essentially happening in the form of the growing relationship between the BRICS, the Shia block and the Global South. Putin is pretty much following the National-Bolshevik playbook, even if he doesn’t call it that, with Alexander Dugin playing the role of the Russian Kissinger. I wrote about the possibility of such a development in the early to mid 2000s and it seems to be happening at present, This is beneficial because it creates an intramural rift and accelerated division in the global capitalist empire led by the G20.  Just as it is a desirable state of affairs for the domestic regime to be divided into the Red and Blue Teams, thereby limiting the maneuverability of the state, so is is desired for the global plutocracy to be divided into the Western axis and Eastern axis.

By Maxwell Tani

Business Insider

After repeatedly criticizing the war in Afghanistan for years, President Donald Trump in a primetime speech Monday night said he was increasing the US military presence in the country.

In an address to military members in Virginia, Trump said he sympathized with Americans who were “weary of war without victory” and said he shared “the American people’s frustration” with a “foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money, and most importantly lives trying to rebuild countries in our own image.”

He also acknowledged the reversal in his decision to increase the American troop presence in a country he had previously called for the US to exit.

“My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts, but all of my life I heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office,” Trump said.

No, It’s Not about “Globalism vs. Nationalism” 1

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Uncategorized

It’s about globalism/globalization vs non-state actors.

Some thoughts on the present political polarization, geopolitical rivalries, the G20, and “populist-nationalism.”

The present political polarization represents an effort by the various factions of the ruling class attempting to create constituencies for themselves. Most of the mainstream media represents the dominant centrist and center-left factions, academia represents the furthest left faction of the elite, FOX/GOP/talk radio represents the right-wing of the ruling class. I actually think the Trumpians represent yet another faction that wishes to pursue a new geopolitical strategy devised by Kissinger, but is being thwarted by the dominant faction and the Deep State in the process. https://www.the-american-interest.com/…/donald-trumps…/

One of the many problems with these populist-nationalist tendencies that have emerged in various Western nations is that they are not revolutionaries or even radicals, but reactionaries who resist globalization in the same manner that the anti-modernist movements of the19th century resisted industrialization. The populist-nationalists simply want to turn back the clock to the 20th century model of relatively autonomous nation-states that are middle-class oriented and ethnically, culturally, and religiously homogeneous. They’re not going to be any more successful at this than the Luddites were at blocking the Industrial Revolution, or the throne and altar traditionalists were at blocking the rise of liberal bourgeois republicanism.

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U.S. risks further battles as it steps deeper into Syrian quagmire Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military, Uncategorized

The US ruling class is the world’s largest collection of idiots. Treason to Washington is loyalty to humanity.

By Louisa Loveluck and David Filipov

Washington Post

BEIRUT — The United States is becoming more perilously drawn into Syria’s fragmented war as it fights on increasingly congested battlefields surrounding Islamic State territory.

On Sunday, a U.S. fighter jet downed a Syrian warplane for the first time in the conflict. By Monday, a key ally of President Bashar al-Assad, Russia, had suspended a pact used to prevent crashes with the U.S.-led coalition in the skies over Syria and was threatening to target American jets.

Separately, Iran said that it had launched a barrage of missiles into Islamic State territory in eastern Syria. That assault marked Tehran’s first official strike against the extremist group in Syria, and it signposted the reach of its military might against foes across the region.

The incident followed a series of U.S. airstrikes against Iran-backed forces advancing on partner forces in a strategically prized swath of land along the Iraqi border.

As the major powers on the opposite sides of Syria’s war intensify operations against the Islamic State, the risks of an accidental conflagration appear to be growing by the day.

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Anarchism or Vanguardism? Critique of Guerrilla Ideology of the IRPGF Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Strategy, Uncategorized

The Free Online

main text  from 

Guerrilla ideology reduces all revolutionary questions to quantitative problems of military force. Nothing could be more disastrous. – James Carr,

Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its “military” dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”.

The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.

To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems — in short for everything that plays down the role of the common man. – Gilles Dauve, When Insurrections Die

 

 

 

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Trump to Arm Syrian Kurds, Even as Turkey Strongly Objects Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Strategy • Tags:

How ironic that the overlords of the American Empire might be backing the Murray Bookchin-inspired libertarian socialist insurgents of the Kurdish territory. But this is actually in keeping with a strategy that I have long advocated for anarchist, anti-state and anti-imperalist movements around the world, i.e. building on the ground resistance while seeking aid from the official enemy of whatever state they’re fighting. Consequently, the on the ground resistance movements located in the nations of the Anglo-American-Zionist-Wahhabist axis should seek aid from the nations of the BICS-Shia-Global South axis, and vice versa. It is perfectly appropriate for the Kurds to accept aid from the USA just as it would be perfectly appropriate for the EZLN, Calexit or the Republic of Texas to accept aid from the Russians, Iranians, and Chinese.

By Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt

New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump has approved a plan to arm Syrian Kurds so they can participate in the battle to retake Raqqa from the Islamic State, a strategy that has drawn deep opposition from Turkey, a NATO ally.

American military commanders have long argued that arming the Y.P.G., a Kurdish militia fighting alongside Syrian Arab forces against the Islamic State, is the fastest way to seize Raqqa, the capital of the militants’ self-proclaimed caliphate.

And Mr. Trump, who made fighting Islamist militants a priority during his campaign, again showed the high regard he has for Pentagon generals by endorsing their advice when faced with a policy dilemma.

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Trump’s Use of Navy SEAL’s Wife Highlights All the Key Ingredients of U.S. War Propaganda Reply

by • Military, Uncategorized

By Glenn Greenwald

The Intercept

During his Tuesday night address to the U.S. Congress, President Trump paid tribute to Ryan Owens, the Navy SEAL killed in the January commando raid in Yemen that Trump ordered. As he did so, television cameras focused for almost four full minutes on Owens’s grieving wife, Carryn, as she wept and applauded while sitting next to and periodically being touched by Trump’s glamorous daughter Ivanka. The entire chamber stood together in sustained applause, with Trump interjecting scripted, lyrical expressions of support and gratitude for her husband’s sacrifice.

It was, as intended, an obviously powerful TV moment. Independent of the political intent behind it, any well-functioning human being would feel great empathy watching a grieving spouse mourning and struggling to cope emotionally with the recent, sudden death of her partner. The majestic setting of the U.S. Congress, solemnly presided over by the U.S. president, vested the moment with political gravity.

Media commentators predictably gushed that this was the moment Trump became “presidential.” Meanwhile, the U.S. media’s most reliable partisan warriors, horrified that the moment might benefit Trump, instantly accused him of exploiting these emotions, and exploiting Carryn Owens herself, for his own political benefit.

While there is certainly truth in the claim that Trump’s use of the suffering of soldiers and their families is politically opportunistic, even exploitative, this tactic is hardly one Trump pioneered. In fact, it is completely standard for U.S. presidents. Though Trump’s attackers did not mention it, Obama often included tales of the sacrifice, death, and suffering of soliders in his political speeches — including when he devoted four highly emotional minutes in his 2014 State of the Union address to narrating the story of, and paying emotional tribute to, Sgt. Cory Remsburg, who was severely wounded by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan:

George W. Bush also hauled soldiers wounded in his wars before cameras during his speeches, such as his 2007 State of the Union address, where he paid tribute to Sgt. Tommy Rieman, wounded in Iraq.

There are reasons presidents routinely use the suffering and deaths of U.S soldiers and their families as political props. The way in which these emotions are exploited powerfully highlights important aspects of war propaganda generally, and specifically how the endless, 15-year-old war on terror is sustained.

The raid in Yemen that cost Owens his life also killed 30 other people, including “many civilians,” at least nine of whom were children. None of them were mentioned by Trump in last night’s speech, let alone honored with applause and the presence of grieving relatives. That’s because they were Yemenis, not Americans; therefore, their deaths, and lives, must be ignored (the only exception was some fleeting media mention of the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, but only because she was a U.S. citizen and because of the irony that Obama killed her 16-year-old American brother with a drone strike).

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Trump Foreign Policy: Same Old, Same Old? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

The big question about the new Trump administration is whether its foreign policy will reflect President Trump’s views or long-standing Establishment positions. It is too early to offer a firm answer, but early indications are worrying.

The past several weeks have seen senior administration officials traveling the world, offering reassurances to our (mostly worthless) allies that no policy changes are coming. We will continue to be committed to war with China over the Japanese Senkaku islands, which are uninhabited; war with Russia over the Baltic states (which Russia is unlikely to attack); and, most worrying, to continued confrontation with Russia for no reason in particular.

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My Take on the “Muslim Travel Ban” Reply

by • Administration, American Decline, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Military, Race and Ethnicity, Religion and Philosophy

A number of people have for my views on the so-called “Muslim travel ban” imposed by the Trump administration. Here goes:

Statistically, the evidence shows that right-wing terrorists have been slightly more violent in the years since 9-11 than Islamists, at least in the US obviously. But the meaning I take from this data is that the neocons and other hawks are blowing the Islamic terrorism threat way out of proportion, while liberals and the Left blow the right-wing terrorism threat out of proportion. Both groups need these false narratives to be true for ideological reasons.

The neocons and other hawks want a permanent war against Islam and the Left wants a permanent war against whitey, so there always has to be some looming threat on the horizon. The real violence is the US comes mostly from inner city gangs that murder each other over drug dealing disputes, from fights and domestic violence that spirals out of control, and from the mentally ill or lone nuts like Adam Lanza, Dylan Roof, or Omar Mateen.

September 11, 2001 was a singular but spectacular incident that has predictably kept plenty of people up in arms ever since. The OKC bombing in ’95, which killed about 150, had the same impact on the Left. I remember how after OKC the Left was saying many more such acts were just around the corner. But over 20 years later there’s been no such thing. The same thing happened with 9-11. I remember people talking about how there was going to be nuclear destruction of US cities and terrorism with bioweapons and all kinds of stuff. But 15 years later there’s only been a handful of incidents like Orlando, San Bernardino, and Ft. Hood that were perpetrated by lone nuts or small groups of friends acting as freelancers.

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“Neo-Marxism” And “The New Middle East” Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military

I agree with this analysis but disagree with its conclusions. Ultimately, our enemies are all states everywhere, and our greatest non-state rivals are the Wahhabist/Salafist renditions of Islam. I consider the struggles of the Kurds, particularly the PKK and allied tendencies, to essentially be the same as the struggles of ATS.

By Andrew Korybko

Oriental Review

One of the most curious quirks of recent history is that self-proclaimed followers of the Cold War-era ideology of Marxism are on the upswing two and a half decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and interestingly enough, they’re making on-the-ground progress in the Mideast of all places. This may come as a surprise to casual observers who have been convinced by the Mainstream Media that the region is only awash with religious radicalism, which while certainly true, doesn’t fully encapsulate the whole picture of all the extremism that’s active there nowadays.

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The Fourth Generation vs. an Alliance of States Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Uncategorized • Tags:

I generally agree with Bill’s analysis here, although I’m personally rooting for the Fourth Generation forces.

“…we need a new Triple Alliance or Quintuple Alliance, and here as so often in grand strategy context is important. It is, again, the need for all states to work together against Fourth Generation, non-state entities that wage war. The alliance is a means, not an end.

The end is that whenever 4GW manifests itself, wherever it does so, all states work together to defeat it. The power of Fourth Generation entities, or at least some of them, at the moral level of war is so great that, even with all the states in the world against them, beating them will not be easy. Let me say it once more: what is at stake in the 21st century is the state system itself. If events remain on their current course, by the year 2100 the state will probably be just a memory..”

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

The election of Donald Trump opens the door to change and reform in many areas. The most important, in terms of our country’s future, is grand strategy and foreign policy (the latter, understood correctly, is a subset of the former). The United States needs a grand strategy aimed at preserving the state system.

Our present grand strategy was conceived in a world of states in conflict with each other. Its purpose is to make America dominant over all other states. The U.S. is not the first state to attempt this. Like its predecessors, it is failing. No state has ever been powerful enough to establish the “universal monarchy”, as it was once known. Attempts to do so have always resulted in overreach, then fall. Remember, Portugal once ruled half the world.

But the most important thing is not that we reduce our goals to match our power in the world of conflict between states. The most important thing is that we realize Fourth Generation war poses so serious a threat to the whole state system that conflict between states has become obsolete. We need an alliance of all states against Fourth Generation entities. If we and other Great Powers, especially Russia and China, continue to squabble among ourselves, the 21st century is likely to witness the end of the whole state system. Mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world.

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Saudi Arabia: No country is more committed to fighting terrorism than us Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military, News Updates, Religion and Philosophy, WTF!?

hzIvO6d

Joke of the Week Award goes to Saudi Arabian foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir for this knee-slapping declaration:

“We are doing everything we can to fight extremism.

“I don’t believe there is any country in the world that is more committed or more determined or has expended more resources and more effort to do this than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

He added: “We cannot allow people to hijack our faith. We cannot allow people to take a peaceful religion — all religions are peaceful — and turn it into a way to justify violence.

“At the end of the day, Saudi Arabia is at the cross hairs of these extremist organisations because Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam and the Two Holy Mosques.”

And here I was thinking that the best way for the House of Saud to fight terrorism would be to collectively choke on a dick!

~MRDA~

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Bill Lind on “Pussycats”–Martin van Creveld’s Important New Book Reply

by • Military, Uncategorized • Tags:

 

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

Martin van Creveld’s latest book, Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the West and What Can Be Done About It, is so important that it re-defines the military reform agenda. Previously, military reform has focused on the problems that have led to America’s repeated military defeats. The issues van Creveld raises in Pussycats suggests we are moving from an American military that can’t win to one that won’t even fight.

The essence of Creveld’s argument is that we (both the U.S. and Western Europe) have de-militarized our military. The introduction of women is one of the factors, but not the only one, although if a military is to fight it must have an aggressively male culture. That is unacceptable not only to the women in the military but to a broadly womanized society and culture. It would not surprise our ancestors to hear that a womanized society can’t fight.

But Creveld looks at influences well beyond womanization. The de-militarizing of our armed forces begins, he argues, with the way we now raise children, especially boys. No longer do they “go out and play”, get into fights, get into difficulties they have to find their own ways out of. Rather, they live controlled, “safe” lives where they always have adult supervision and are instructed in how to do everything before they have to do it. Instead of growing up, they are forever infantilized.

This problem is very real. Recently, I recommended to a friend, a lieutenant colonel at the Marine Corp’s Basic School for new lieutenants, that they reinstitute the “Zen patrol”. In the Zen patrol, which TBS used to do, new lieutenants are simply taken out on a patrol, without having received any instruction in patrolling. They have to figure it out for themselves, which means they also learn how to learn.

My friend replied, “You cannot do that with this generation. In everything they have ever done, they have had adult instruction and supervision. If you don’t first tell them what to do and how to do it, they get angry. They say, “You are setting me up for failure to embarrass me in front of my peers.”

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A Hello to Arms: A New Generation of Steely-Gazed Anarcho-Communists Head Off to Syria Reply

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right, Military, Uncategorized • Tags:

By John Knefel

Village Voice

A Hello to Arms: A New Generation of Steely-Gazed Anarcho-Communists Head Off to Syria (3)

Illustration by Matt Mahurin

Billymark’s is the most working-class bar in Chelsea, if not all of Manhattan. On a Thursday afternoon in early March, union guys play darts as both TVs air a CBS report on the early days of Syria’s fragile cease-fire. A few minutes after five, Guy, 22, and Hristo, 23, walk in and we grab a booth next to a group of day-drunk FIT students. The minute we sit down, it’s clear something is different. The two men are vibrating with excitement.

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Keith Preston: Apology to Japan would mean US admits past crimes Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military, Uncategorized

Press TV. Listen here.

Preston says “there is no evidence that it was necessary for the United States to” use those weapons against Japan.

The United States will not apologize to Japan over its 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because such an apology would mean an acknowledgment of Washington’s past crimes, says an analyst.

Keith Preston made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Monday when asked about President Barack Obama who has said Washington is not sorry for what it did to Japan in 1945.

This Friday, Obama will become the first sitting US president to ever tour the site of the world’s first nuclear bombing that killed more than 140,000 people in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The attack was followed by another US atomic bombing on the port city of Nagasaki three days later, killing about 73,000 people.

On Sunday, when Japanese national broadcaster NHK asked Obama if an apology would be included in remarks he plans to make in Hiroshima, he said, “No, because I think that it’s important to recognize that in the midst of war, leaders make all kinds of decisions.”

Preston said Obama is not the only person who has refused to offer an apology for the catastrophic incident in Japan.

“There are many Americans today that continue to claim the use of those weapons was justified in order to force surrender on the part of Japan,” he said, noting “but Japan had expressed interest in a conditional surrender.”

He went on to say that “there is no evidence that it was necessary for the United States to use those weapons in order to achieve victory.”

Preston said that “the United States sees itself as having the capability of doing the wrong and that’s why the United States rarely has ever apologized …for its past harms the American empire has inflicted on societies all over the world.”

“I do think that one of the reasons the Americans will not issue an apology is simply because the Americans continue to try to exercise hegemony over the entire world and to acknowledge the past crimes of that height would essentially undermine the ….empire’s own legitimacy,” he concluded.

Obama’s visit to the city would have enormous symbolic importance, however, it would be controversial in the US if it were seen as an apology.

Who rules the world? America is no longer the obvious answer Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Military, Uncategorized • Tags:

A very good summation of the present world order. It looks like Chomsky heard my recent speech at the National Policy Institute. 🙂

By Noam Chomsky

The Guardian

When we ask “who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.

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Keith Preston: US fighter jet makers fretting over possible scrapping of PG Arab deal’ Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military, Uncategorized

Press TV. Listen here: http://217.218.67.231/Detail/2016/05/07/464471/US-jet-makers-worried

Preston believes US fighter jet makers are fretting over losing revenue if they cannot sell jets to Persian Gulf Arab allies.

US fighter jet manufacturers are concerned about the future of sales to America’s Persian Gulf Arab allies, which in part explains a recent push by some senators to strike a military deal with Washington’s regional partners, says an analyst.

According to The Wall Street Journal, a number of US senators have been building up pressure on the administration of President Barack Obama to approve a major sale of jet fighters to some Persian Gulf Arab states, including Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait.

The bipartisan group of senators believes Washington’s delay over the fighter jets deal would threaten America’s relationship with its regional Arab allies and their commitment to help fight Daesh (ISIL).

Now Keith Preston, chief editor and director of AttacktheSystem.com, believes “the military industrial complex and well the corporate interest within the military industrial complex that generate revenue by means of the manufacture of these jets are certainly concerned about the loss of revenue that will take place if this particular sale does not go through.”

The comments follow the WSJ report where the US daily, which had obtained a letter signed by the senators last month, said the sale of the fighters to Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain has been in limbo for over two years, but the White House has not yet allowed it to go forward partly due to policies that require the US to keep a military edge for Israel in the Middle East and avoid sales to other allies that could take away Israel’s advantage.

Preston also pointed to the conflict of interest with Israel in this case, saying although Washington wants to sell US combat aircraft to its Persian Gulf allies, it does not wish to take away Israel’s military advantage in the Middle East.

US Senators John McCain, Bob Corker, Jack Reed and Claire McCaskill argued in their letter that a delay to sell such jets was unnecessary and the sale would not undermine Israel.

“We understand that these requests must be carefully considered, but a decision on them has been pending too long,” the senators wrote.

The proposed deal, valued at about $9 billion, includes F-16s, F-15s and F/A-18 jets.

The companies that build the aircraft, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, have recently warned they could be forced to close their production lines unless they secure new orders, the WSJ report said.

A senior Obama administration official said in a recent statement that “no decision has been made on fighter sales.”

Is War by Assassination on its Way? Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Uncategorized

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

Russia intervened in Syria, did what it came to do–strengthen the position of the Assad government–and has partially withdrawn. Meanwhile, our war with ISIS continues its endless futility, an inevitable result of war by pinking.

War by plinking, using airstrikes that blow up an ammo dump here, an ISIS leader there, and wedding parties everywhere is largely a product of futility of thought. We think we have to do something, but our military leadership has few options to offer. We can invade, but as we have experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan, doing so merely increases the scope and cost of our defeat. We can carry out an aerial campaign of annihilation, but our civilian leadership’s ideology forbids it. It might also generate new enemies faster than we can kill them, no matter how many bombs we drop. Approaches that require both imagination and skill cannot make it through our leaden, elephantine military decision process (where the process is the product). So we plink.

Much of our plinking seems devoted to war by assassination. There is a reason states have generally avoided that. As I fear we may discover, it is a game two can play. In the end it devolves, as it has, to mere war of attrition. Wars of attrition are usually indecisive, continuing until one party or another, or both, are exhausted. we are likely to tire before ISIS does.

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