Category Archives: Social Constructs

The Iraqi Ambassador to the UN is calling the US and Britain a bunch of war criminals.  This is not the usual parliamentary language that one expects from such an august body as the United Nations.  The US Ambassador, John Negroponte, got up and walked out, which is UN-speak for ‘eat shit and die’.

Listening to the diplomats and the mouthpieces for both sides is like filling your head with white glue and foam packing beads.  Nobody has the stones to stand up and invite their opposite number to “come by the Rose Garden at the White House and keep drippin’ that bullshit for spring planting.”  The French, Russian and Germans are demanding that the US not be involved in setting up the new government in Iraq. 

I suspect the US doesn’t want to be involved in it either.  The US would just as soon finish up things and go home, as long as the essential problem, an insane dictator with nerve gas and maybe even nukes, isn’t driving the bus.  It’s costing the US and UK a ton of cash, every hour, to keep this tent up and they could really use the money at home. 

Unfortunately, the French, Russians and Germans are not the best choice to decide on what kind of new government should be set up.  The French have long Arabic roots as a colonial imperialist power.  Germany just wants to sell their industrial infrastructure.  Russia wants the oil and arms sales along with the French who want some of the rearming sales too.  The US and the UK are doing the noble thing, while the major whiners are just pissy that they got pulled off the money tit.

Speaking of the money tit, I have noticed that France, Germany and Russia have not been terribly vocal about humanitarian aid, or for that matter, forthcoming with planeloads or shiploads of humanitarian aid.  Could it be that humanitarian aid actually costs money while sucking on the money tit, only makes money? 

If they were so concerned about all the shocking things going on, then one would rationally expect those who are so concerned would do everything to help the innocent civilians with food and water.  Except that innocent civilians are dirt poor and can’t sign off on multi-billion dollar government contracts to rebuild the country, re-arm the military and buy huge infrastructure projects.

As for prisoners, I’m not impressed with either side.  The US has been holding a few hundred of truly vicious lunatics in Guantanamo Bay under very strict disciplinary rules that border on cruel.  But, by way of explanation, the GitMo Bay guys are hard-core Al-Qaeda crazies from Afghanistan who are, essentially, rabid and are trying to kill their captors with anything they can get their hands on, including pencils, toast or raisins.  The GitMo prisoners are being held very tightly because they have not demonstrated the common sense to give up.  Even a tomato seed has the sense to not try to grow on gravel. 

Conversely, the Iraqis are not setting their US prisoners up in the Baghdad Hilton either.  We don’t have any information on how battlefield prisoners in Iraq are being held by the US, but I suspect the Iraqi POW’s, are at the hands of the Evil US who insists that their prisoners eat good food, see doctors and get treated reasonably well.  Yes, the prisoners are behind barbed wire and have to wear flexi cuffs.  What the hell did you expect, we’d just toss them the the keys to a new Ford Focus and invite them to the Kuwait City Wal-Mart for a shopping spree and a makeover?

It’s a War, not a Kiwanis Club luncheon.

We had an interesting discussion over dinner.  Is Baghdad one big trap for the US troops? 

Yes it is.  Saddam will let the US get to somewhere around 50 miles away from Baghdad, where the US supply lines are stretched out a bit thin. At the same time, Saddam, rather than defending a long line, is defending a short line, as encirclement makes the line of conflict smaller, putting more Iraqi troops in a smaller area.  At a certain point, Iraqi soldiers will be quite close to each other, physically. 

Based on the current disposition of troops, the Iraqi army can still fight like furies and potentially escape out the back of Baghdad, running away East towards Iran and the hills. 

Historically, this is like the Falaise Gap in WWII.  Patton and Montgomery had the German 5th Army caught in a bubble.  The Allies slaughtered thousands of German soldiers trying to escape through a five-mile gap in defenses south of the town of Falaise, held by the Canadian First Army.  It took two days, but we closed the Falaise Gap, catching more than 10,000 German prisoners in the pocket and killing an estimated 20,000 more.

So, how to pin down the Iraqi Army?  The 4th Mechanized has to come ashore in Turkey, unload their tanks, gas’em up and get rolling into the north of Iraq as fast as possible.  In the meantime, the airspace north and east of Baghdad should be full of aircraft.  Until you get feet on the sand, keep the escape route full of all kinds of exploding  iron. 

The doctrine for this is the Viet Nam era, Linebacker and Linebacker II campaigns, where the B-52’s ran around the the clock from as far away as Japan and Guam, pounding Ha Noi with good, dumb, cheap, effective, iron bombs.  If anything in Ha Noi moved during Linebacker, the US dropped lots of bombs on it, day or night for two weeks.

Do the same thing north and east of Baghdad until you can get troops in there to physically close the line.  It might take a week to twelve days for US troops to get there, but the idea is to have the Iraqi Army caught against the US troops on three sides. 

Their only escape route should be full of angry, well-armed pilots, aviators and helicopter gunfighters who can call up all kinds of bad for tanks, trucks, missiles and foot soldiers, like the Highway of Death in the first Gulf War.  This effectively closes the only escape for the Iraqi Army.  In that little pause that you give them, you can also fill in some gaps in your supply lines.

A sensible leader would then surrender.  An insane leader will invite a house to house fight.  Back our guys about three kilometers from the front lines and start bombing anything left standing in the city.  You can’t win a house to house fight, so make all the houses go away.  Stop every three days and ask ‘Enough?’.

This is going to get me in trouble, but stop screwing around with the humanitarian aid.  The logistical aim should only be keeping the front line supplied with gas, groceries and guns.  If we’ve got some slack time, we’ll do some humanitarian shipping, but frankly Scarlett, too damn bad until they surrender.

Now that its underway, a quick look at the holes.

The visuals are amazing.  Any of the networks with ’embedded’ crews are returning live, unfiltered reality into people’s living rooms.  So far, we haven’t seen a reporter doing a stand-up in real danger.  The prediction from the cynical side, is that before this is all done, the image of a reporter doing a stand-up, then having their head explode in a bloody cloud, just as the camera goes to snow, will be burned into our collective retinas.  That is the danger and the thrill of live television in a war zone.

Watching the tactics early this morning (0200) of a squad clearing an area near the port of Oum Quasa (?) is a lesson in how military doctrine works.  It seems time consuming and very, very slow, but it is how you do it safely when there are people shooting at you.  Walking across open fields in urban areas is a simple statement:  “I Am An Idiot. Please Kill Me Now.” 

Keep in mind, for those without the knowledge, that a simple rife can fire a chunk of lead about a kilometer.  Or, from one end of a city block to another, with accuracy and lethal effects.  Staying more than a city block or two away from people with guns puts you in a ‘safe’ position.  Tanks, mortars and artillery can throw very large pieces of metal, further. 

For those who watched the three tanks clear the buildings near Oum Quasa and saw little jets of dust pop up as you heard a gun sound from the tanks, here is the explanation:  Each of those little puffs was probably a .50 calibre machine gun round.  .50 cal means the bullet is a half-inch across and a bit longer than your driving finger.  .|..    Those bullets go through things like concrete block walls, cars, and sandbags like red chillies through your insides.  Of course, those tanks were firing a few hundred of those things every minute.  There is a high likelihood of at least one of those pieces of lead hitting the Bad Guys, causing big, bloody holes to appear in their bodies. 

For the big bangs, you saw or heard, odds are it was an 80 or 120 mm mortar.  80 or 120 millimeters being the diameter of the shell, perhaps not quite as long as your arm from elbow to fingertip.  Inside the head of the shell is more explosive, about the size of your clenched fist, designed to blow a hole the size of a big garden shed in whatever it hits.

Lob one of those things into a high-rise and you essentially turn a one-bedroom apartment into a big smoking hole.  If you were a neighbour of that one-bedroom apartment, you would most probably be severely injured, or at least, have to do some underwear laundry with a hellish ringing in your ears. 

If you watched the first ‘Shock and Awe” show live, many of those things you saw blowing up were 2,000 pound bombs and Cruise Missiles.  In perspective, the Oklahoma City bomb that took out the Murragh Federal Building was estimated at 5,000 pounds of not-so-great explosive.  Divide by two and that gives you the approximate force of laser-guided bombs or cruise missile explosives that are of much higher quality in a smaller weight and pack a very intense wallop.  That bang is contained in something more or less three times the size of the propane tank on a backyard gas barbecue. 

This is the kind of bang that can take four or five regular suburban houses in a block and turn all of it, land, furniture, trees, windows, pets, people and dishes, into a deep, smoking hole that leaves no trace there was ever anything there.  It all just disappears.  Park one or two in a 10-storey office building and expect the building to fall over.

Bigger than that, we’re getting into exotic weapons.  The ones I’ve described are run-of-the-mill ordinance that flings about regularly, giving the enemy a Bad Day.  The rule of thumb is to not make bigger holes than you need to make.  This will, hopefully, convince those who are shooting at you, to give up, or stop shooting at you and run away as quickly as possible in a pink Toyota pickup truck.

Make well-organized holes in enough things and all the Bad Guys give up.  Then you can go home.

Understanding human behaviour comes down to an understanding of a basic human condition: We exist in tribes.  This condition seems hardwired into us.  How we describe our tribe depends on many situations, but it is a cornerstone of how people work and consequently, how we behave.

We understand the concept of tribe in different ways today.  In hunter-gatherer days our tribe were those who lived near us and had the same dog-tooth-on-a-sinew-around-the-neck.   We could identify other tribe members by their dog tooth on a rope and didn’t have to know every individual tribe member, although we usually did and if we met someone who didn’t have the dog tooth on a rope, they were strangers and strangers, we learned, were very dangerous; they stole our food and hit us with rocks.  So we called our other dog-tooth buddies for defence.  The tribe became our defense, our food, our companionship, childcare, health system and burial society.

Naturally, we became more sophisticated as we evolved, but the same basic loyalty remained.  Today, we’re loyal to many tribes; ethnicity, political viewpoint, car ownership, location, or socioeconomic strata.  The essential concept of this is still tribal.  A small group of people with definable commonality of viewpoint.

The reason I bring this up, is Iraq is in the process of being overrun by the US, who have promised not to pick up the pink slip to the country.  The United States will turn over the joint to the people of Iraq.   Canada will get involved as peacekeepers and humanitarian aid people, as is our usual way.  However, the one group being left out of discussions here is the people of Iraq.

Will the resort to being tribes again?  Human history has taught us the essential and smallest unit of loyalty is the tribe, so I see no reason why this should be an exception now.  Iraq will become a tribal enclave as human beings always revert to tribes, especially in times of stress.  I propose that invasion and war counts as ‘stress’.

How many tribes will pop up?  Probably hundreds, if not thousands.  So, how do we manage this mass of grumpy, suspicious, fearful and belligerent tribes?  I have no idea and I suspect that the UN and the US have no idea either.  What I can say for sure is that trying to supplant the baked-in-at-the-factory loyalty to a tribe with something bigger, never works. 

Somalia should be a case in point.  When Somalia imploded, one of the key reasons was people were loyal to their tribe, not the country and viewed anyone not of their tribe, in a position of power, as a threat, as they knew, in their heart of hearts, that the politician in power who was not of their tribe, was going to throw rocks at them, or steal their food:  Rebellion, mass starvation, conflict, yadda, yadda, yadda, thousands dead…etc.etc. etc..We know the words to that song all too well.

Watch how the tribes in Iraq start jockeying for position.  The Kurdistan have already staked out their piece, having fought the Baghdad government for years, demanding their own homeland. 

My, my my, sounds like the Israeli/Palestinian deal all over again.  Let’s see…1947 minus 2003….50, 56 years or so of, essentially, tribal warfare.

It all comes down to tribes.

George W. did it last night, as billed.  Saddam Hussein got his eviction notice to vacate or face deliveries of rapidly moving steel bits, courtesy of the Army Ordinance Depot from Fort Benning, Georgia.  A good speech that pushed the right buttons and gave Saddam Hussein the heads-up dictated by international law that there is a pile of manure and a fan, coming together.

If I were running the show, I would be looking at the 21st as the jump-off day.  Saddam is figuring a prompt 48 hours, so go in 72 or so, after everyone is all keyed up to start festivities and is starting that slide down from being pumped to being disappointed.  That’s when you whack’em.  Much like the police delivering a warrant, nail the bad guy at 0400 when they’re still asleep.  Don’t ring the doorbell at 1000 and ask if the Republican Guard can come out to play.

Now, assuming the ground war runs a week or two and the US gets the pink slip to Iraq, what the hell do we do with it?  It is like a dog chasing a car.  If the dog ever catches the car, the dog has no idea what do with it. 

George W. has said he doesn’t want to run it and frankly, neither does anyone else.  Canada could have a role in here, doing what we do best, peacekeeping and delivering humanitarian aid.

Except Iraq is just a collection of tribes held together with a money teat of Oil.  Kurds, Suni, Afghani and a few hundred thousand other lesser brands, who, like Yugoslavia, don’t like each other, or anyone else.  Keeping the peace in that mix is, at best, difficult. 

At least the 30-year reign of Saddam Hussein has ridden the country of old-guard communists who were killed for sport when Saddam took over in the 70’s.  Since the people of Iraq have no organized opposition left alive and no obvious replacement in the wings, aside from Saddam, they’ll create their own tribal based version that should, with any luck, result in only a few decades of mindless instability, purges, jihads, mass deportations, one or two winters of starvation, disease and a telethon or two.

As a planet, we’ve become rather skilled at bouncing out dictators and the dangerously disturbed with itchy trigger fingers.  The one we haven’t figured out yet, is how to airlift a full-blown Jeffersonian Democracy into place after the smoke has cleared.  We tried that in Gaza, Cyprus, Korea, Uganda, Somalia, Yemen, Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, Yugoslavia, Viet Nam and a bunch of other countries, with little or no success. 

It did work in Germany and Austria after WW2 and to a lesser extent, Japan, but fell on its ass in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And we’re not going to mention Kenya, Liberia, Zaire, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Haiti or Grenada.

Is Jeffersonian Democracy the best solution to drop in?  Well, no.  It doesn’t work that well in countries that don’t have a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out of.  Good old Stalinist Fascism tends to work better on the desperately poor, as a powerful, insane, needlessly violent central government that has food, tends to overcome ethnic, tribal or village loyalties by the expedient of killing or starving anyone who disagrees. 

Look at Yugoslavia as an example:  Yugoslavia is a put-up job, more or less created by the League of Nations to put all the Croats, Serbs, Macedonians and other ethnic groups into one map reference.  Russian ran the joint with an iron fist until Russia imploded.  Then the population reverted to ethnic, tribal and village loyalties which was what they had all along.  They were not loyal to Yugoslavia, but to Croatia, or Serbia or Obscuria, even though those countries had not existed since the end of  WWI.

If we take over Iraq, will it dissolve into the Suni, Kurd and Afghani, North and South, Oiled and Unoiled?  Of course it will and they’ll fight like wet cats in a sack over oil, food and access to the Gulf. 

At that point the UN will throw its hands up an say “fuck it” and another insane violent dictator will step up to unite Iraq with promises of “democracy” and “freedom” and “prosperity” right after we have another purge of those who still have their right hand or brown eyes, or the wrong hairstyle.  Then we’ll form a “commission of reform and advancement” to decided on how our new constitution will look.  Unfortunately all the members of that commission were killed in a bombing by radicals, so we must continue with martial law until the rebels are captured.  Is this sounding familiar?  India and Pakistan come to mind, along with most of Africa at one time or another.

The whole Raytheon Presents The Gulf War Brought To You By Lockheed-Martin (c) is very confusing now.  Every day until March 17th, you will hear “news” about progress on the diplomatic front.  The reporters who will tell you the “real” message, have no clue what they are saying, as they don’t understand it either, but they have a 70 second news hole to fill and diplomats do not speak in comfy sound bites.  So, take all reporting about diplomatic advances or failures with a 20 kilo bag of rock salt.

Here’s the simple goods:  The US is building up troops.  Britain is onside.  France isn’t happy.  Canada is as confused as ever.  War may very well be imminent, against Iraq.  (I figured I would remind you that its Iraq we’re going up against, as this keeps getting lost in there somehow.)  The rest of it is dancing and debating about the number of Al-Samouds you can put on the end of a pin, which really doesn’t amount of a small hill of anything useful.

So to simplify:

A: Saddam Dead = Good.
B: Saddam in Exile = Good Enough.
C: Iraq People Free = Good.
D: Iraq Run by US = Bad. 
E: Weapons of Mass Destruction = Bad.
F: WMD’s removed from Lunatic = Good.
G: War = Bad.
H: Peace = Good.
I: Terrorists On The Run = Good.
J: Terrorists On The Loose = Bad.
K: Osama Bin Laden Dead = Good.
L: Osama Bin Laden Alive = Bad.
M: How to get there = x

Solve for x

The Solution is G+A+C+F=x

Notice that there still is no solution for I, J, K and L.  That is another problem that is being addressed and is making some advances, but is not solved yet.  Notice there is nothing in the equation about diplomacy, the UN, or vetoes of the Security Council.  Those are variables that you will be hearing a lot about in the next few days.  Ignore them, unless they conclusively (as in Good or Bad, no grey in-betweens) fix the problem.

Your media is going to be filled with fluff for the next week and change.  Please remember the essentials, if only to keep from being confused.