Obama Bin Laden

The name...

2008-08-25T08:26:00.000-05:00

So if I like the guy so much, why the name of the blog? Well, partly pure theatrics. I mean, who's going to read a blog entitled "Don't Vote for Obama!?" Partly, it stems from my own failures of speech that occasionally border on the awesome. I must have said "Obama bin Laden" thinking I was saying "Osama bin Laden" a dozen or so times without realizing it, much to the amusement of friends and family.

However, there is also a deadly serious reason for the name. A man doesn't have to be evil, or even mean to do harm in order to do great harm. Simply being badly deluded will do the trick. Lord Rothmere was an Eglish Lord and admirer of Adolf Hitler in the 1930's. He wrote a great many articles in his newspaper "The Daily Mail" extolling the virtues of Nazism. He was a big supporter of Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement.

For those who slept through history class, Adolf Hitler spent 1936-1939 grabbing small countries by diplomatic blackmail while he was building up the Germain army. In 1938, he grabbed Czechoslovakia at a conference in Munich. The German army was still small, and the German generals were exceedingly nervous about all this. It is now generally accepted among historians that if Chamberlain had stood up to Hitler at Munich, Hitler would have backed down, and most likely been overthrown by his own generals. Instead, Chamberlain opted for appeasement, saying in effect "you can have Czechoslovakia, but you better not ask for anything else." As it worked out, he did. World War II started in September of 1939, and only ended after 6 years of fighting, and over 30 million dead (including 6 million Jews.)

Now there's pretty good evidence that Chamberlain actually knew better at the time, and was responding to domestic pressure. Pressure created by guys like Rothmere. Guys who were badly deluded about how the world worked. Rothmere wasn't stupid, or ignorant. He owned and ran a very popular newspaper for heaven's sake! He wasn't evil. He was devastated when war broke out in 1939, and Hitler's true nature revealed He was just deluded about the nature of Adolf Hitler, and of war. But that delusion was enough to help ensure that 30 million people died in the greatest holocaust to ever consume the earth.

And that brings us back to our man Barak. He is a really bright guy. He is clearly of good heart, and wants the best for our country. And he is just as clearly deluded about the nature of our enemies, and of war. And that makes him possibly the most dangerous man on earth.

Next up... Obama, and the invasion of Pakistan!

Obama, Pakistan and you.

2008-08-24T15:57:00.001-05:00

I talked earlier about delusions, but I'm going to veer aside for a moment and talk for a moment about some plain old ignorance. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with ignorance. We all have lot's of it. I, for example, am abysmally ignorant of electric circuitry (as was recently demonstrated in my son's science experiment.) However, some things it's very, very bad to be ignorant of. For example, I am a programmer. It's how I make my living and feed my family. If I was ignorant of the C# programming language, I couldn't do my job. More to the point, if I applied for a C# job, and didn't know a damn thing about it, then they should not hire me, right?

Back in August of last year, Barak Obama said this. In particular, he said "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." What he means is if we find some terrorists in Pakistan and the Pakistanis won't do anything about it, we will invade and get them ourselves. I gotta say, I appreciate the sentiment, but that one statement speaks volumes about his ignorance in some very, very crucial areas.

First off is Pakistan itself. Pakistan is much tougher than it looks. We in the west have a very hard time shaking off the notion that brown people just can't be all that dangerous. Unfortunately, that is not true of Pakistan. They are obviously not the strongest military in the world, but they are in the top ten. I think they are actually in the top five or six, ahead of several European countries but I don't have my book here so I can't look it up. Pakistani troops are quite well regarded, and much sought after as peace keepers, for example. They use mostly US equipment, and spend a lot of time cross-training with U.S. troops. A lot of their officers go to the US War College. They are tough, well trained, well equipped, and well led. They are nowhere near being a pushover. Saying we are going to just pop over and invade Pakistan to chase bad guys is like saying we are going to pop over and invade Russia looking for bad guys. We might just be able to do it, but it would take pretty much everything we had, and we'd take a lot (I mean tens of thousands) of casualties.

But wait, it gets worse. Pakistan is like Russia in more ways than one, as Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Let me say that one more time. Pakistan has freaking nuclear weapons! I think pretty much everybody agrees that you don't invade nuclear armed countries, ever. That tells me he either didn't know Pakistan had nukes, or just forgot. Either way, not good.

Next, we come to the questions of Geography, and Logistics. (Don't let your eyes glaze over, I'll make this quick.)
Here is map of Pakistan. (This map isn't labeled very well, but it does a great job of showing the mountains, which is what I want.) Pakistan is the lighter tan country. You can see its states (Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, etc) labeled. Afghanistan is to the north west, across all those mountains. Those mountains are called the Hindu Kush, and they are some of the tallest in the world. Mountains are incredible defensive terrain. That makes attacking the Pakistanis 10 or so times harder than it would be across flat terrain.

Finally, we have logistics. Afghanistan is at the corner of No and Where. It is at the ass end of the world. It has no ports. You can fly stuff in, but it's at least a 10 hour flight, which is horrifically expensive. There aren't many good roads, and those that lead into the country do so over hundreds (or thousands) of miles of bad, mountainous, bandit infested roads. We keep somewhere around 3 brigades of troops plus some air at any one time. The dirty little secret is that that's about all we can keep there, without some heroic efforts. Logistics is hard in this stretch of the world.

So now let's take this hypothetical offensive, and put it into action. We are going to take maybe three divisions of troops, poorly supplied, and attack into those mountains. Oh, no roads means we leave behind most of the tanks and other heavy equipment. We then run into somewhere around thirty Pakistani divisions, who are defending in mountains which means it's more like three hundred divisions, and oh yeah, they have great roads on their side of the mountains, which means they get to keep their tanks and heavy equipment, and, well, you see where this is going.

This article is getting long, so I am going to leave aside the question of Politics inside Pakistan. I think I've made my point anyway. Attacking Pakistan from Afghanistan would lead our young men and women into a slaughter. And it's pretty clear from the cavalier tone that Mr. Obama took when he said this that all of this is news to him. This is the kind of dangerous ignorance I'm talking about. Nothing I have pointed out above is classified, or particularly hard to find.
Senator Obama is applying for the position of commander in chief, but is dangerously ignorant of the conditions that our army is operating in right now! Many, many leaders in history have sent troops off to die because they were too ignorant to know what would happen, so this is not an idle concern. He is already on record as saying that he would override the advice of his military leaders. Just imagine what would happen if this conversation had happened after the elections:

President: General, the CIA tells me they have found Osama bin Laden. I just got off the phone with General Musharef, and he tells me they just can't go get him. I am tired of all these excuses! Now general, I want you to take whatever troops you've got, and go in there and get him. Now!

General: But sir, logistical constraints will prevent me from building up the kind of force it would take to attack into those mountains, to say nothing of the ...

President: General, I don't want to hear your excuses. It's just some Pakistanis and tribesmen in there. How bad could it be? Go Get Him!

General: Yes Sir!

Holy Shit!

2008-08-23T15:05:00.000-05:00

Ok, this is a little off topic, but I just can't let this go.

This is a commercial aired by "The American Issues Project".

Much of the groundwork of this issue is laid out in this NRO Article (read it) and the whole enchilada can be found here at AIP.

I just want to highlight one thing. The terrorist thing is scary, but his response is even scarier, IMHO. In the NRO article (you read it, right?) they point out Obama's response to the ad. First, he aired his own ad. Next, he called the networks and threatened economic retaliation if they didn't pull the ad, which CNN and Fox did. Finally, he filed a brief with the Department of Justice asking them prosecute the AIP under election law.

Let me say that one more time:
He tried to have them thrown in jail because they fucking disagreed with him!
Can't you just wait to have this guy running the DOJ?

Running around with domestic terrorists? Strong arming the media? Trying to get somebody who disagrees with you jailed? Sounds more like a mob boss. This does NOT sound like somebody you want to elect.