V.D.H. Strikes Back. Victor Davis Hanson skewers Maureen Dowd today.

It might be neat between cappuccinos to write about leaders getting "giddy" about winning a terrible war, or thinking up cool nicknames like "Rummy," "Wolfie," and titles like "Dances with Wolfowitz," but meanwhile out in the desert stink thousands of young Americans, a world away from the cynical Letterman world of Maureen Dowd, risk their lives to ensure that there are no more craters in her environs--and as a dividend give 26 million a shot at the freedom that she so breezily enjoys.

Priceless.

How dare they. I read this story about the hundred or hundred-and-fifty Iraqi children who were imprisoned in northeast Baghdad, and all I could think was, How dare they. Not the Iraqi regime. We know the horrors they perpetrate. The meat hooks. The plastic shredders. The hot metal rods. How dare anti-war protesters tell us we have no business being in Iraq. How dare they. How dare they tell us it is immoral and unjust to free these people. Would they rather see these children rot away in these cells and cages? Maybe certain folks think this war is a failure of we don't find WMD. I think we will--and soon--but this war would have been just if the goal was only the removal of Saddam Hussein because of his reign of terror. It is worth it just to see these people freed. Just look at the faces on these people, oppressed for so long, free at last, at long, long last. These people who talk about human rights and dignity, about peace, about the "evil" US--what do they say to these pictures, these horrifying images, of torture chambers and rape rooms? And what about the children's prisons? Are they willing to acknowledge that their "peace" would have left these innocent children, and myriad other human beings, in jail--for no reason except that they prayed to much, or yearned for freedom, or didn't join the party? How dare they speak of peace. A peace bought with the freedom and dignity of a people is no peace at all. It is a sham.

"Chemical Ali"...Dead. No longer a threat to America or her friends and allies. Nor to the Iraqi people.

Today's Lileks Fix. Lileks is in great form today. On video games, war, and "video game wars":

I've played three games in the last ten months, each a first person shooter with all the usual flaws and uncomfortable moral dilemmas. I had no moral qualms with Return to Castle Wolfenstein - frankly, Nazis who are attempting to build an army of cyberzombies are just asking for some of that sweet, sweet lovin' you only get from a Tesla-coil powered energy weapon.

Priceless. And hilarious. (Interestingly, today's FoxTrot plays on a similar theme.) But there's more. It's serious. And a great point:

I remember what Robin Williams, the intermittently amusing hairy-backed hyperbabbler, said last week about Bush: "He's like 'We have to get rid of dictators,' but he's pretty much one himself."

If someone invaded America tomorrow, how many big public posters would they have to tear down? How many airports and hospitals and highways would they have to rename?

How many statues would they have to topple?

Or how many hundreds of human remains would they find in cardboard boxes? Or how many death squads would they find roaming the country?

Sunday Thoughts.

Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him....all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another...

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. --John Donne, from Meditation XVII

The bells for our war dead have been sounding, and the scenes are all too familiar--flags clutched, held to the breast, the hot tears of loss, knowing that a husband or wife, son or daugther, mother or father, will not return, the puzzled faces of the young who sense the grief and yet still want to write daddy another letter. The survivors' lives have been narrowed by their loved ones' noble sacrifice in a just cause. We, the rest of us, those who watch at a distance, are diminished, too, by the deaths of these heroes, these American heroes. We are less, our country is less, for the passing of these soldiers. The bells will peal yet again this spring afternoon, as another soul departs. And when we hear those solemn bells that break our silence, we know they toll for us. And we, too, mourn.

The Tightening Vise. This map tells the tale.

The Clausewitzian View. In Vom Kriege, Clausewitz discusses the point at which victory arrives--which he says "results from the superiority of one side," physically and psychologically. During war, various factors enter the equation, adding or decreasing strength. If Clausewitz's criteria are any judge, we seem to be accruing strength as the war progresses. He lists seven causes of additional strength:

1. The losses suffered by the defending forces are usually heavier than those of the attacker.
2. The defender's loss of fixed assets such as magazines, depots, bridges, and the like, is not experienced by the attacker.
3. The defender's loss of ground, and therefore of resources, from the time we enter his territory.
4. The attacker benefits from the use of some of these resources; in other words, he can live at the enemy's expense.
5. The enemy loses his inner cohesion and the smooth functioning of all components of his force.
6. Some allies are lost to the defender, others turn to the invader.
7. Finally, the defender is discouraged, and so to some extent disarmed.

Of course, certain factors work to decrease strength. To that end, Clausewitz also names five causes of loss of strength for an invading army:

1. The invader has to besiege, assault or observe the enemy's fortresses; while the defender, if he has previously been doing the same, will now add the units so employed to his main force.
2. The moment an invader enters enemy territory, the nature of the operational theater changes. It becomes hostile. It must be garrisoned, for the invader can control it only to the extent he has done so; but this creates difficulties for the entire machine, which will inevitably weaken its effectiveness.
3. The invader moves away from his sources of supply, while the defender moves closer to his own. This causes delay in the replacement of his forces.
4. The danger threatening the defender will bring allies to his aid.
5. Finally, the defender, being in real danger, makes the greater effort, whereas the efforts of the victor slacken off.

Some food for thought from the master, as victory seems to near.

Quote of the Day. "Frankly, what irritates me the most are these blow-dried Napoleons that come on television and, in some cases, have their own agendas." --House Majority Leader Tom "The Hammer" Delay, on Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.)

Why I'm going to miss Michael Kelly. Words such as these, from a post-9-11 column:

We remember that love of country is a wonderful thing; that it is not incompatible with a liberal society but rather the great force that binds together that society. We are reminded that our values are not the values that the civilization-trashers of Hollywood join the civilization-haters of the Taliban in ascribing to us, the values of "Fear Factor." We remind ourselves, as David Letterman did, that our real values are the ones that led hundreds of firefighters and police officers to risk and lose their lives. We are, we learn again, brave and compassionate and strong. We are good people and we have built what is in fact "a just and fair and decent place," and we will preserve this place from those who would destroy it.

Gulf War II: The Movie. Samizdata has written a summary, complete with cast, of just such a film. Their choice for Kofi Annan nearly sent me out of my chair.

"We either kill them or they give up." The Republican Guard is no longer a cohesive fighting force.

Kelly's Immortality. Martyrs' Day is up to 58 on Amazon.com.

"We are United States soldiers and we're here to protect you and take you home." More on the Lynch rescue.

Yale Profs on War. Donald Kagan has a new book coming out in May. Well, not entirely new. It's a one-volume abridgement of his classic of his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War: The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, The Archidamian War, The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition, and The Fall of the Athenian Empire. The Peloponnesian War has much to teach us, and so does Kagan.



Victor Davis Hanson has a nice review in April's New Criterion, although the article is not online.

A rising star among military historians, Mary Habeck also has just had a book published (based on her Yale dissertation), The Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919-1939.


Worth a look if tanks are your thing.

Michael Kelly, RIP. I was saddened to learn of the death of columnist and editor Michael Kelly while reporting in Iraq. I looked forward to his columns in the WaPo--always insightful, sometimes angry (some obituaries are saying "caustic" and "savage"), but always well written. What I didn't know was that he was also a first-rate reporter. That had started to come out in his more recent columns, filed from the front lines, but I had no idea, for example, that he rose to fame as a reporter in the first Gulf War in 1991. I will soon (I hope) be reading his book on those experiences, Martyrs' Day. (The book, as of this writing, has climbed to 109 over at Amazon. It's unfortunate that many people will discover his writing now that he will produce no more.) I have also spent some time with those articles written back in 1991 for the New Republic. Some particularly stunning excerpts:

The one-sidedness could be seen in the air. In the nighttime raids, the anti-aircraft fire would begin a few minutes before the bombers came, in scenes of incandescent hysteria and beauty, the tracer shells tracking lovely curves, and Ss and parabolas of orange-red light against the backdrop of a blacked-out city skyline. Only every fifth or sixth shell was a tracer, which created a spacing that gave the ack-ack trails a pleasingly deliberate, almost lazy look. You could see the tracers hit their apogee and then explode in delicate bright-white starbursts, like the better sort of fireworks. You could hear the defense too, in a big sweeping wash of noise, the sharp staccato bursts of the lighter guns punctuated by the thuds of the big ones. ("Blitzed," TNR, February 11, 1991)

Captain Douglas Morrison, 31, of Westmoreland, New York, headquarters troop commander of 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry, 1st Division, is the ideal face of the new American Army. He is handsome, tall and fit, and trim of line from his Kevlar helmet to his LPCs (leather personnel carriers, or combat boots). He is the voice of the new American Army too, a crisp, assured mix of casual toughness, techno-idolatrous jargon, and nonsensical euphemisms -- the voice of delivery systems and collateral damage and kicking ass. It is Tom Clancy's voice, and the voice of the military briefers in Riyadh and Washington. ("Highway to Hell," TNR, April 1, 1991)

Ten days after what George Bush termed a cessation of hostilities, this road presented a perfectly clear picture of the nature of those hostilities. It was untouched except by scavengers. Bedouins had siphoned the gas tanks, and American soldiers were still touring through the carnage in search of souvenirs. A pack of lean and sharp-fanged wild dogs, white and yellow curs, swarmed and snarled around the corpse of one soldier. They had eaten most of his flesh. The ribs gleamed bare and white. Because, I suppose, the skin had gotten so tough and leathery from ten days in the sun, the dogs had eaten the legs from the inside out, and the epidermis lay in collapsed and hairy folds, like leg-shaped blankets, with feet attached. The beasts skirted the stomach, which lay to one side of the ribs, a black and yellow balloon. A few miles up the road, a small flock of great raptors wheeled over another body. The dogs had been there first, and little remained except the head. The birds were working on the more vulnerable parts of that. The dead man's face was darkly yellow-green, except where his eyeballs had been; there, the sockets glistened red and wet. ("Highway to Hell," TNR, April 1, 1991)

In the old bucolic days the concrete and corrugated tin barns held beasts. Now they hold humans treated like beasts. Each building has been divided into pens, with sheets of tin tied together with twine. The pens fill the barns and the people fill the pens. I counted twenty-three in one ten-by twenty-foot square. The refugees sleep in the pens, on worn and dirty blankets on the concrete floor; the children play in them; the women cook in them, on crude kerosene stoves that are tipsy on the uneven floor. The sick lie still, staring or sleeping, and the others fit themselves around them, in a squalid, squirming zigzag. Rain leaks through the roof and through the windows and doors that are covered only with plastic sheets. The air is fetid and close, rich with the stink of sweat and kerosene and the shit that is everywhere, and that peculiar smell of apple-sweet rottenness that emanates from the lungs and pores of the gravely ill. ("The Other Hell," TNR, May 13, 1991)

The world has lost a fine, fine reporter, whose gifts for describing the reality of war--in all its bloodiness, all its devastation, all its strange, unsettling beauty--were truly great. And because of his loss, the story of this current war will never be complete.

"Evil men triumph when good men do nothing." Writes columnist Jeff Jacoby to his six-year-old son:

The truth is, Caleb, if it weren't for war, you would not exist. In the spring of 1945, my father was near death in a Nazi concentration camp; he survived thanks to the bombs and bullets of the Allies, who managed to destroy Hitler before Hitler managed to destroy every Jew. Men with guns saved your family from extinction. Never forget that.

"Fighting to the Death." From the WaPo:

Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.

Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said. The ambush took place after a 507th convoy, supporting the advancing 3rd Infantry Division, took a wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah.

"She was fighting to the death," the official said. "She did not want to be taken alive."

They raise 'em right in places like West Virginia and Alabama and Kentucky. And train 'em right in places like Fort Bliss and Fort Lejeune.

"No longer credible forces. The Baghdad and Medina divisions of the Republican Guard have been broken. Let us hope that the same can soon be said for the rest.

She deserves every penny. West Virginia University is apparently offering financial assistance to Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the rescued POW and WV native. Bravo to WVU. I hope they give her a full ride.

Quote of the Day. "Europeans are antiwar, but they are pro-commerce." --US Lt. Col. Duke Deluca, noting that mines cleared near Najaf had been made in Italy (from the NYT)