The Ice Axe

2003-04-10T08:57:00.000-04:00

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.

2003-04-09T02:08:00.000-04:00

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.

2003-04-07T04:53:00.000-04:00

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

2003-04-07T01:16:00.000-04:00

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?

2003-04-06T15:00:00.000-04:00

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.

2003-04-06T14:18:00.000-04:00

The Tightening Vise. This map tells the tale.

2003-04-06T01:52:00.000-05:00

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.

2003-04-06T00:39:00.000-05:00

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.)

2003-04-06T00:32:00.000-05:00

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.

2003-04-06T00:27:00.000-05:00

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.

2003-04-05T15:55:00.000-05:00

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

2003-04-05T15:18:00.000-05:00

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

2003-04-05T12:50:00.000-05:00

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

2003-04-05T03:02:00.000-05:00

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.

2003-04-05T02:24:00.000-05:00

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.

2003-04-03T12:43:00.000-05:00

"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.

2003-04-03T02:29:00.000-05:00

"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.

2003-04-02T16:47:00.000-05:00

"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.

2003-04-02T16:44:00.000-05:00

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.

2003-04-02T16:36:00.000-05:00

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)

2003-04-01T23:36:00.000-05:00

The Media and Iraq. In a NYT story today, citing a senior commander at CentCom: "Those who have lived for decades under what he called Mr. Hussein's totalitarian rule tend to discount, even distrust, American promises of liberation and relief aid." "What he called Mr. Hussein's totalitarian rule"? That description is only the source's opinion?

2003-04-01T18:12:00.000-05:00

Idiot of the Day. Stephen Funk, who joined the Marine Reserves and is now seeking conscientious objector status. He had this to say: "War wasn't a part of it at all for me. I never even thought about it. I thought it would be like Boy Scouts." Something about the Marines' Hymn seems to stick in my mind...what is it...oh, yes: "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,/We fight our country's battles in the air, on land and sea,/First to fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean,/We are proud to claim the title of United States Marine." Maybe he was absent that day? And not only are his comments stupid, but they're offensive. Try telling a real Marine, especially one who has served, or is serving, in war, that the Marines are "like Boy Scouts." Those weren't Boy Scouts who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. They were men. They were soldiers. They were Marines. Mr. Funk would do well to heed these words from the Hymn: "In many a strife we've fought for life and never lost our nerve."

2003-04-01T17:57:00.000-05:00

We owe them much, much more. But the least we can do for the dead is read their names and look at their faces. We owe them that much. And more.

2003-04-01T12:46:00.000-05:00

The New Generation. Among other points about The American Way of War, Victor Davis Hanson says, "Criticisms of the present generation are misplaced. In fact, in this last decade of wars our youth shows signs of being the best fighting cohort of Americans since that of World War II." I have to concur. I myself have been quick to criticize this generation (my own). Having come of age in the boom years, the Clinton 90s, they've been accused of laziness and materialism, of apathy and selfishness. Called the MTV generation, they're said to have no sense of reality or sacrifice, to be obsessed with sex and vulgar music. If the 60s gave us Clinton and others like him, we are told, what leaders will the 90s leave us in twenty or thirty years? Some of this may be true; all of it might be true of some folks.

And yet members of this same generation, maybe 18 to 24 years old, fight for us on the other side of the world--and not simply fight, but fight hard and well. We read the news reports--these men and women are not lazy or materialistic; their understanding of freedom is not passive, and it does not imply license. They give of themselves to this country and to the Iraqi people. We read the names of the fallen, see their pictures. People just like us, just like me. People I might have gone to high school with. People younger than I, too, the freshmen we might have maligned as high school seniors. People it was easy to look down upon because they went to vo-tech to learn a trade, because they didn't want to, or couldn't, go to college. Now dead. For a noble cause. For God and country, for family and freedom. For us. For you. For me. The words that come to mind: Honor. Courage. Duty. Selflessness. A far cry from what we, and I, thought.

It's easy to criticize the young and to heap scorn upon them, and maybe we will always be critical of the youth of every generation. Maybe that's just what we do as a society to make sure the future is secure. No generation, and least of all this one, is beyond reproach. But with a generation that produces those brave men and women who fight for us the world over, we need not worry. The country's defense is in good hands, the best hands possible. Its future, though not certain, is promising. This generation makes it so. And, though I have a far lesser calling than those who serve us at home and abroad, I'm proud to be a part of it.

2003-04-01T12:15:00.000-05:00

From Our Honored Dead. One of the most beautiful things I've read in a long, long time, the last letter home from Army Pfc. Diego Fernando Rincon, 19, who was killed in Saturday's suicide bombing in Iraq:

Hola Mother,

How are you doing? Good I hope. I'm doing OK I guess. I won't be able to write anymore starting the 28th of this month. We are moving out. We are already packed and ready to move to a tactical Alpha-Alpha (in Iraq). Once that happens, there will not be any mail sent out. We will only receive mail that is less than 12 ounces. At least that's what they said. I'm not sure where exactly we're going be at yet, but it is said to be a 20-hour drive in the Bradleys.

So I guess the time has finally come for us to see what we are made of, who will crack when the stress level rises and who will be calm all the way through it. Only time will tell. We are at the peak of our training and it's time to put it to the test.

I just want to tell everybody how much you all mean to me and how much I love you all. Mother, I love you so much! I'm not going to give up! I'm living my life one day at a time, sitting here picturing home with a small tear in my eyes, spending time with my brothers who will hold my life in their hands.

I try not to think of what may happen in the future, but I can't stand seeing it in my eyes. There's going to be murders, funerals and tears rolling down everybody's eyes. But the only thing I can say is, keep my head up and try to keep the faith and pray for better days. All this will pass. I believe God has a path for me. Whether I make it or not, it's all part of the plan. It can't be changed, only completed.

Mother will be the last word I'll say. Your face will be the last picture that goes through my eyes. I'm not trying to scare you, but it's reality. The time is here to see the plan laid out. And hopefully, I'll be at home in it. I don't know what I'm talking about or why I'm writing it down. Maybe I just want someone to know what goes through my head. It's probably good not keeping it all inside.

I just hope that you're proud of what I'm doing and have faith in my decisions. I will try hard and not give up. I just want to say sorry for anything I have ever done wrong. And I'm doing it all for you mom. I love you.

P.S. Very Important Document.

Your son,

Diego Rincon

How people, now and in the past, could not support these men and women, how they could spit on and curse them, I will never, ever know.