The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Tales of the Mission Gone Wrong

Posted on | July 20, 2014 | 18 Comments

Last night, my 12-year-old son Emerson got the DVD of Lone Survivor from Red Box. My wife can’t watch this movie — the true story of Marcus Luttrell and a squad of Navy SEALs that gets wiped out in Afghanistan — because Army son Bob is training to do this kind of special ops stuff, and his mother does not want to think about it.

After watching it, I realized Lone Survivor is like Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers — the Mission Gone Wrong.

The old military adage is that no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy. The Bad Guys — whether they’re the NVA or Somali militia or the Taliban — have their own battle plan, and if our intelligence has underestimated the enemy’s numbers and capabilities (a common theme of the Mission Gone Wrong), a lot of Good Guys are going to die in the process of discovering the error.

We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young, the 1992 book on which the 2002 movie was based, is the story of the November 1965 attack of the First Battalion, 7th Cavalry (Airmobile) against a regiment of the regular North Vietnamese army (NVA) in the Ia Drang valley. It was the largest such battle up to that point in the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. You can read Hal Moore’s after-action report.

What happened was this U.S. battalion at Landing Zone X-Ray — about 450 troops — had landed right next to the headquarters of a full regiment (about 1,600 troops) of NVA, which held the high ground on Chu Pong Mountain. The battle at Landing Zone X-Ray went on for two days, and the total U.S. losses (79 killed, 121 wounded) were more than 40% of the total battalion strength; NVA losses were 634 killed, by body count, which means that the U.S. inflicted casualties at about an 8-to-1 ratio — clearly an American victory. But the day after the two-day battle at LZ X-Ray, the Second Battalion, 7th Cavalry was overrun at Landing Zone Albany, suffering 155 killed and 124 wounded after they were ambushed by fresh NVA units. Both of these 7th Cav units were basically put out of action until they could replace their losses, and the unexpectedly high U.S. casualty rates in the Ia Drang were an omen of things to come.

Black Hawk Down — also a book before it became a movie — began as a mission (code-named “Gothic Serpent”) in October 1993 targeting Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. The heavy losses to U.S. special forces in the resulting two-day Battle of Mogadishu were primarily caused by the discovery (oops!) that Somali militia could shoot down U.S. helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and the lack of U.S. armored vehicles (which the Clinton administration had denied to the U.S. commander).

Lone Survivor continues this tradition of Mission Gone Wrong tales, beginning with a bestselling book. It is very similar to Black Hawk Down in that the mission (code-named “Red Wings”) began with a plan to target a local Islamic militia leader (Ahmad Shah) and involved the shoot-down of a helicopter (in this case, a CH-47 Chinook with 16 troops). There has been some dispute about the number of Afghan fighters faced by Luttrell and his three comrades. If Shah had only 20 militia, then the four SEALs were outnumbered 4-to-1 — worse odds than Hal Moore’s men faced at LZ X-Ray — and there have been some who say that Shah’s militia numbered 40, 50 or even as many as 200. The number of Bad Guys is tactically irrelevant to what went wrong in Operation Red Wings. The four SEALs were inserted on a remote mountain where communication proved difficult, without much consideration of what might happen if the Bad Guys found them. Evacuation or reinforcement would be equally difficult and, because of the comms problem, headquarters didn’t even know the mission had been compromised until the SEALs were already under attack.

U.S. troops are the best in the world, and Special Forces are the best of the best, but they are not bulletproof superheroes, and when the excrement hits the rotary ventilation device — the Mission Gone Wrong — bad thing happen to the Good Guys.

After watching Lone Survivor, I e-mailed my Army son: “Your career goal should be to have only missions so successful that nobody wants to make movies about them.” Can I get an amen?

 

Category: Military

Andrew ‘The Nailgun’ O’Hehir Calls Israel America’s Frankenstein Monster

Posted on | July 20, 2014 | 29 Comments

Andrew O’Hehir (@AndOHehir) is the all-purpose genius at Salon whose job includes (a) writing crappy movie reviews and (b) spouting off about any random thing that catches his fancy. Last year, O’Hehir got himself memorably owned by Ace of Spades:

Nailed it again. I’m gonna just call this guy “The Nailgun” because he nails everything in sight.

So, here’s the headline on O’Hehir’s latest opus at Salon:

Israel: America’s Frankenstein monster

In the interest of fairness, because I’m willing to give even the most obstinate left-wing doofus the benefit of the doubt, my first reaction was: “Well, that’s just the headline. Everybody knows that Salon.com is a troll operation that publishes click-bait headlines to attract traffic.” But then I read the article, which concludes thus:

From the American perspective Israel looks something like Frankenstein’s monster, a morally dubious and arguably unnatural creation that was stitched together with the noblest of intentions but not much foresight, and that produced a painful litany of unintended consequences. In that analogy we are Victor Frankenstein, who can never unmake his wayward creature, control it or untether himself from it. If I remember the story correctly, they destroy each other in the end.

This is so wrong in so many ways I don’t even know where to begin. I’m going to trust that Ace of Spades will dismantle it for us.

 

Category: Israel

Sharia Schools in England

Posted on | July 19, 2014 | 32 Comments

This is simply astonishing:

Children were taught that all Christians are liars and attempts were made to introduce Sharia law in classrooms as part of an alleged ‘Trojan Horse’ takeover plot of Birmingham schools, an inquiry has found.
The inquiry commissioned by Birmingham City Council found evidence of religious extremism in 13 schools as school governors and teachers tried to promote and enforce radical Islamic values.
Schools put up posters warning children that if they didn’t pray they would “go to hell”, Christmas was cancelled and girls were taught that women who refused to have sex with their husbands would be “punished” by angels “from dusk to dawn”.
The report found that the extremism went unchecked because the council “disastrously” prioritised community cohesion over “doing what is right”. . . .
Sir Albert Bore, Birmingham’s leader, apologised for the council’s handling of the scandal.
He said: “The actions of a few, including some within the council, have undermined the reputation of our great city.
“We have previously shied away from tackling this problem out of a misguided fear of being accused of racism.”

Once you get over your “misguided fear of being accused of racism” — or sexism or homophobia — you start noticing facts.

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

Category: Great Britain, Islam

FMJRA 2.0: Big Mess

Posted on | July 19, 2014 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

They Found Peggy Joseph!

Rule 5 Sunday: On The Beach

Massacre: Ronald Haskell Murders Six Members of Texas Mormon Family

An Omen of the ‘Mystifying Oracle’?

FMJRA 2.0: The Mission

The Precocious Feminist Replies

Good-Bye, Miami Beach? The Problem With Climate-Change Hysteria

How to Get Raped at College

The Lighter Side Of The Border Crisis

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.14.14

They Always Blame the Jews

Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the Long Shadow of the ‘Lavender Menace’

Obama’s Border Game, and Why Republicans Are Doomed to Lose It

Planned Perversion

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Son Describes Abuse by Feminist Pagan Fiction Author

Books…And A Smittypalooza?

Demons of Left-Wing Paranoia

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.17.14

The War in Gaza

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.18.14

CNN Reporter: Israelis ‘Scum’

My Nobel Peace Prize Gaza Plan


Top linkers this week:

  1. Batshit Crazy News (11)
  2. (tie) Regular Right Guy and That Mr. G Guy (9)

…and a few folks who just missed the cutoff. Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


Amazon.com – Read eBooks using the FREE Kindle Reading App on Most Devices

Category: FMJRA Award

Progressives Cheer: Sterilizing Poor People Is Totally Awesome!

Posted on | July 19, 2014 | 72 Comments

Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) was the primary weapon to prevent poor people — mainly black and Latino teenage girls — from reproducing in the Colorado Family Planning Initiative (CFPI). Funded by a “confidential private donor” and operated through the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Title X Family Planning Program, CFPI not only paid for LARC — contraceptive implants and intra-uterine devices (IUDs) — but also paid up to $675 for each vasectomy and $2,600 for each tubal ligation (female sterilization) performed in Colorado’s Title X clinics since 2009.

Well, guess what they found out? You shove enough free contraception at poor teenage girls, and you get fewer babies:

Fertility rates among low-income women aged 15–24 were compared with expected trends. Abortion rates and births among high-risk women were tracked, and the numbers of infants receiving services through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) were examined. . . .
By 2011, caseloads had increased by 23%, and LARC use among 15–24-year-olds had grown from 5% to 19%. Cumulatively, one in 15 young, low-income women had received a LARC method, up from one in 170 in 2008. Compared with expected fertility rates in 2011, observed rates were 29% lower among low-income 15–19-year-olds and 14% lower among similar 20–24-year-olds. In CFPI counties, the proportion of births that were high-risk declined by 24% between 2009 and 2011; abortion rates fell 34% and 18%, respectively, among women aged 15–19 and 20–24. Statewide, infant enrollment in WIC declined 23% between 2010 and 2013.

Conclusion: Evil is more effective when it’s free — and the progressives at Daily Kos think this is totally awesome!

 

Category: Contraceptive Culture

Daily Kos Founder Markos Compares Arizona to ‘Apartheid South Africa’

Posted on | July 19, 2014 | 28 Comments

Organizers of Netroots Nation, the national left-wing blog conference that began as “Yearly Kos” in 2006, have decided that next year’s conference will be in Phoenix, Arizona. Marko Moulitsas Zuniga is angry:

Netroots Nation announced two days ago that Phoenix, Arizona would host its 2015 conference. I wish the conference the best, but it will unfortunately take place without Daily Kos’ attendance or assistance.
I made very clear in the wake of Arizona’s passage of SB 1070 that I would not be setting foot in the state, nor spending a dime in it until the law was revoked. The law, however gutted by the courts, remains on the books, as does systemic harassment of Latinos, so my pledge still stands. . . .
I doubt the conference would decide to host the event in, say, Apartheid South Africa, in order to “take the fight to the enemy”. If you think that analogy is absurd, it is, but only in terms of degree, not intent in the county that has consistently elected Sheriff Joe Arpaio since 1992. But if you want a less bombastic analogy, look to labor: Netroots Nation refuses to hold events in cities without union hotel and conference facilities. They’re not “taking the fight” to non-unionized locations because we, as a movement, stand for the right of people to organize and we don’t reward those places that deny those rights. It’s the right call. Also, would the conference have been happy to stay in Arizona had Gov. Jan Brewer signed the virulently anti-gay SB 1062 earlier this year? Hard to see that happening.
Latinos deserve that same kind of respect.

So, the conference is ditching its founder, because progressive bloggers don’t respect Latinos as much as gays, or something.

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

Category: Arizona, Daily Kos

CNN Reporter: Israelis ‘Scum’

Posted on | July 18, 2014 | 118 Comments

Media bias? What media bias?

CNN has removed correspondent Diana Magnay from covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after she tweeted that Israelis who were cheering the bombing of Gaza, and who had allegedly threatened her, were “scum.”
After being threatened and harassed before and during a liveshot, Diana reacted angrily on Twitter,” a CNN spokeswoman said in a statement to The Huffington Post.
“She deeply regrets the language used, which was aimed directly at those who had been targeting our crew,” the spokeswoman continued. “She certainly meant no offense to anyone beyond that group, and she and CNN apologize for any offense that may have been taken.”
The spokeswoman said Magnay has been assigned to Moscow.

Here’s how the liberal mind works: The only thing they need to know is, “Who’s the victim of oppression?” Once the liberal media decides Palestinians are victims and Israelis are oppressors, it doesn’t matter what actually happens — Hamas suicide bombers blowing up busloads of innocent Israelis, launching missiles at Tel Aviv, whatever — the victim/oppressor dynamic controls the narrative.

Civilization teeters on the brink of extinction, because liberals believe civilized people are oppressors and savages are victims.

Never forget Shiri Negari.

Never forget. Never. Never. Never.

 

Category: CNN, Israel, Media Bias, Terrorism

My Nobel Peace Prize Gaza Plan

Posted on | July 18, 2014 | 57 Comments

Twenty billion dollars — by my calculations, that’s what it would cost to solve the problem of the Gaza Strip.

The population of Gaza is estimated at slightly more than 1.8 million people. So if we figure $10,000 for every man, woman and child in Gaza, that’s $18,000,000,000, give or take a few hundred million dollars. Add $2 billion for administrative expenses.

The price of a round-trip commercial airline ticket from Tel Aviv to New York, Chicago or Los Angeles is about $2,000. So the cost of transporting the entire population of Gaza to the United States would be less than $4 billion. (Even though these would be one-way trips, you’d have to pay round-trip fare to cover the cost of sending empty planes back to Tel Aviv to pick up more Palestinians.)

Having spent $4,000,000,000 to fly 1.8 million Palestinians from Gaza to America, we would then give the head of each family a check for $8,000 for every man, woman and child. “Mom, dad and three kids? Here’s your check for $40,000. Welcome to America!”

Or imagine the young Palestinian bachelor arriving at LAX, picking up his $8,000 check as he leaves the airport. He calls a cab, books a week’s stay at the Holiday Inn ($133 a night, or less than $1,000 for the week) and still has $7,000 left to help him find his first apartment and look for a job. He could spend $12 for a CD to help him learn English, buy himself a laptop computer for less than $400 — of course, he’s shopping Amazon links at my blog, as a gesture of gratitude to the visionary genius who thought up this brilliant peace plan — and even after he pays the first month’s rent on his new apartment, he still has two or three thousand bucks left to tide him over.

This plan would not merely bring peace — by completely depopulating Gaza — but it would also be an economic stimulus, by the logic of the Obama administration. I mean, they pissed away $800 billion on the 2009 “stimulus” bill, so what’s another $20 billion? Twenty billion dollars is a drop in the bucket. The federal budget for fiscal year 2014 was $3.8 trillion; $20 billion is less than 1% of that.

“But wait a minute,” says the skeptic. “Aren’t you underestimating the potential economic impact of all these new Gaza immigrants?”

Haters gotta hate. Sure, there are xenophobic racists who resent the cost of public services for impoverished immigrants.

If a few hundred Palestinians were to settle in suburban Minneapolis, for example, the local school system would have to absorb the cost of educating their kids, who don’t speak English and may have trouble adjusting to American cultural norms. There might also be costs in terms of police, courts and prisons to deal with the occasional “honor killing” of teenage Palestinian girls who start dressing and behaving like typical American teenage girls. (“What do you mean, you kissed a girl and you liked it? Whore! Infidel!”) And, yes, you hateful bigots probably think the new Gaza refugees will take advantage of the welfare system — food stamps, Medicaid, public housing, etc. — the same way you think other Third World immigrants take advantage of the welfare system.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Party leadership say otherwise. They keep telling us that an unrestrained flood of impoverished immigrants who don’t speak English is a net benefit to our national economy, no matter what the impact may be in the local communities where the immigrants settle.

So if a certain neighborhood in your hometown becomes “Little Gaza” — where all the signs on the stores and restaurants are written in Arabic, where all the women and girls are wearing the hijab — this is a small price to pay in terms of the wondrous gains to the U.S. economy that the open-borders lobby keeps telling us about.

We’ll have to ignore the Islamophobic racists, just like we’ll ignore the cheapskates who begrudge a piddling $20 billion to resettle the population of Gaza to America, and don’t listen to those economists (probably subsidized by the Koch Brothers) who criticize my peace plan in terms of “opportunity costs,” blah blah blah.

No, if we really want peace in Gaza, my plan is the only way to go. And once we’ve flown the entire population to America, what do we do with the 139 square miles (88,960 acres) of uninhabited Gaza?

We sell it to Sheldon Adelson.

The Las Vegas casino mogul’s net worth is $37 billion. If you figure the cost of land in Gaza at $10,000 per acre, Adelson could buy the whole place for less than $900 million. Gaza has 30 miles of prime Mediterranean coastline, and in just a few years Adelson could turn Gaza into an international resort destination — luxury hotels, casinos, shopping centers, condos, amusement parks, etc.

Skeptics — why do I always have to bother explaining stuff to you guys? — may wonder: If you’ve completely depopulated Gaza by flying all the people to America, where will Sheldon Adelson find workers to build these new beachfront resorts? Where will he find employees to run the hotels, casinos, restaurants, water slides and roller coasters?

Simple: Bus ’em in from the West Bank.

Two birds with one stone, so to speak.

The wonders of capitalism, combined with the helpful assistance of $20 billion from U.S. taxpayers, can solve the whole problem.

Last time I proposed a Middle East peace plan, Andrew Sullivan nominated me for a “Malkin Award.” But that was five years ago.

This time, I’m ready to go for The Big One.

Call the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Tell ’em you found a winner.





 

Category: Israel
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