-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Yeah, I know, I know. I really should just leave him alone, but he really makes it too easy sometimes, folks.
<Hettinga comes to the plate. His first at-bat against the Salty Santa Cruz Banana Slugs tonight, lifetime average against them of .314... Here's wind up... and the pitch...> At 10:21 AM -0800 on 4/3/03, Tim May wrote: > It's obvious that we are deeply into police state status. Thousands > held without charges, without trial. Threats to take citizens > inside our country and subject them to military courts. Libraries > ordered to turn over names of patrons reading thoughtcrime books. > Private companies like Google and credit card companies willingly > bending over for Big Brother. And you're surprised because why? This is a nation-state at war, after all. They kill people and steal things, right? To paraphrase Gibson, they eat information, and other people's money, and shit violence. And our nation-state is the best at it in the history of the world, right? > Perilous times. What, you didn't notice we're at war? See above. 3000 people died already. Expect 100 times that in revenge; in actual violent totalitarians, not just their tended sheep. Sounds fair. Besides, *never* separate an angry parasite from its host. As you've noticed, it doesn't even require much thought; it's positively reflexive. Sorta like those cats who attack burglars by clawing their faces off. If the host is laying on the floor with a bump on his head, who's gonna run the can-opener, right? > I doubt the U.S. is salvageable at this point. I expect otherwise. It'll go on as long as it's profitable to do so, and it's going to be very profitable. See the WSJ this morning, below, for instance. Cut a brain from a shark, it still swims. In such a world, it's better to have a bigger shark than anyone else, I recon... I mean, come on, they're busy renaming Saddam Hussein Airport as we speak. (I'd go for Barbara Bush International Airport myself, but I hear they're going to name a highway for her instead. :-). You could always tell she wore the pants in that family...) Iraqi citizens, especially the Wahabbi ones, are cheering our arrival into the outskirts of Baghdad. Some Ayatolla has issued an actual fatwa saying not to interfere with coalition forces. So much for the "Arab Street". Marine units have actually had to stop their advance just to accept all the surrendering troops. So much for the "Elite Republican Guard". As for the house-to-house "Stalingrad on the Tigris" nonsense, those evil Israelis seem to have that shit figured out, so we do it their way. See below. Why use the street and get shot at, when you can blow your way through building walls instead. Kewl. Knew all that money to Tel Aviv was worth something... Absent some kind of technological change in the economics of force markets -- which I'd still bet on happening peacefully sooner or later, or I wouldn't be on this list watching people rend their clothing in such despair -- what you see is what you get. At the moment, USA is the best force monopoly in the history of the business. We allocate the lowest fraction of GDP to capable force since people invented weaponry. So, Kewl. Let's pave over a totalitarian pseudo-theocracy or two, or better, like Iran, and probably even North Korea, just give them a small shove and watch their own people take out such fragile and inefficient market-parasites. There has only been one reason for the existence of a nation state: to confiscate, by force, the maximum amount of revenue from its citizenry. They are most dangerous when some *external* enemy threatens their cash flow, and that has happened, now. I'd include France and Turkey in that, :-), but they're already having second thoughts about shooting their mouths off, so a good-old-fashioned Texas ass-whoopin' is probably not in the cards, no matter how much fun it would be to watch in, say, West Virginia. No shove required, even. Just a dirty look, and here they come, tail between their legs, whimpering for another handout. So much for the opinion of the "global community". In the meantime, domestic pissant whiners, right, left, and "up" on the Nolan chart, will be left in place to prove what nice guys the state really is. Think of it as ideological welfare. Even swarthy kneeling geomancers who crap into a hole in the floor will probably be left alone, even if some of them do end up spending time wearing orange and getting three hots and a cot courtesy of their new Great White Daddy. Besides, the chance of anyone actually bestirring themselves out of their Ultimate Recliners up in Farnham's Freehold, CA, to smash the state themselves, much less to fuck it dead, is asymptotically minuscule, and no amount of ominous "predictive" whinging the equivalent of "will someone rid me of this priest" therefrom about the nation's capital and other points east of the Mississippi is going to inspire anyone else to do it for them either. <The bat cracks. The away-crowd boos. Kewl. Didn't even have to point out the light standard I just hammered. Look at all those broken lights. And all those pissed off people. Here's hoping I get to the dugout before I get hit by a beer-bottle...> Cheers, RAH - ------- <http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB104933336161333300,00.html> The Wall Street Journal April 3, 2003 REVIEW & OUTLOOK War, What Is It Good For? Trying to calculate the financial cost of the war in Iraq is an exercise in fantasy, at least until it's over. But this being America, everybody wants to know immediately anyway, especially Congress. So we hope the calculators keep in mind that this is a cost and benefit proposition. Estimates so far range from $44 billion to almost $2 trillion, depending on length and intensity, among other variables. The House Budget Committee considered a one- to two-month war, followed by 212 months of occupation, and came up with $48 billion to $60 billion. The Congressional Budget Office, looking at a similar scenario, put the tab at $44 billion. The Bush Administration figures the cost won't exceed the mark set by the first Gulf War of around $80 billion in today's dollars. Its $74.7 billion budget request marks $60 billion to fight the war and includes funds for humanitarian aid and reconstruction, payments to friendly countries, and homeland security. At the Administration's figure, the cost of war amounts to less than 1% of GDP. This is peanuts compared with other wars. World War II cost taxpayers about $3 trillion (in current dollars) or 130% of GDP. The Korean War required 15% of GDP and Vietnam 12%. Some expenses can be easily assumed by postwar Iraq itself. The Iraqi economy would be free of the burden of supporting Saddam Hussein and all he requires -- a huge military, institutions of repression and terrorism and acres of wasteful palaces. Its economy would also be strengthened by the production of three million barrels of oil a day, a modest estimate by most accounts. Yearly revenues could come to $23 billion and lots more if production increases to five million barrels a day. Of course, the largest benefit -- a more stable Mideast -- is huge but unquantifiable. A second plus, lower oil prices, is somewhat more measurable. (Oil prices fell again yesterday on the prospect of victory.) The premium on 11.5 million barrels imported every day by the U.S. is a transfer from us to producing countries. Postwar, with Iraqi production back in the pipeline and calmer markets, oil prices will fall even further. If they drop to an average in the low $20s, the U.S. economy will get a boost of $55 billion to $60 billion a year. But none of this answers the real question: Is the cost reasonable given the goal? To answer that you also have to consider the cost of the main alternative to war -- continuing containment of Saddam. Such an examination was done recently by economists at the University of Chicago's business school. Steven Davis, Kevin Murphy and Robert Topel added up the military expense of containment. The direct costs of troops and equipment come to about $13 billion a year, but they haven't got Saddam to bend to U.N. mandates. The authors assume, therefore, that efforts to contain Saddam might have to be increased by 50%, raising the cost closer to $19 billion a year. The economists estimate that containment would have to be in place for 33 years -- the period that a Saddam-like regime could endure (optimistic considering the lifetimes of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, North Korea and Cuba). In sum, when the expected value of containment is discounted to the present, the cost estimate comes to $380 billion. And don't forget more for homeland security, bringing the total cost to $630 billion. Simply put, containment costs a lot more than war -- even if one doubles Mr. Bush's estimate to $120 billion. But perhaps the best way to look at the economics of the war has been suggested by John Cogan. The Hoover Institution economist says the war is an investment. The proper question then becomes what resources are we willing to invest to achieve peace and stability, and a diminished threat from terrorism and terrorist-supporting states. At 1% of GDP, the war looks like a bargain. - -------- <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/03/opinion/03HENK.html?th=&pagewanted= print&position=top> The New York Times April 3, 2003 The Best Way Into Baghdad By YAGIL HENKIN JERUSALEM With American forces beginning their assault on Baghdad, their commanders would do well to take a close look at the hard-learned lessons of Israel's experience with urban combat. Operation Defensive Shield, the Israeli antiterrorist strike last spring, generated plenty of controversy, but it also supplies a good model for military tactics. After a series of Palestinian suicide bombings, the Israel Defense Forces entered several densely populated West Bank cities, including Nablus and Jenin. Within just a week, Israel gained control of each of them. Twenty-nine Israeli soldiers were killed in these battles, all but six of them in the battle for the Jenin refugee camp. Although the number of Palestinian deaths is, of course, hotly debated, the Israeli estimate is 132 killed in Nablus and Jenin. Compared with casualty figures from urban combat in recent years such as the fighting in Chechnya, where Russia's army lost at least 1,500 soldiers during its first assault on Grozny these numbers are astonishingly low. Urban combat is the most difficult type of offensive warfare, because defensive troops have advantages that can offset an attacker's superior force and technology. Not only are the defenders familiar with the terrain, they often have time to set up mines, position snipers and organize ambushes. And while the advancing ground troops are supported by tanks and armored personnel carriers, the defending army can neutralize air and artillery support by "hugging" the advancing troops engaging them at close range, which increases their risk of casualties from so-called friendly fire. In addition, invading soldiers must maintain a particularly high level of awareness: not only can snipers and other attackers engage them from the front, back or side, but they may also hide on the upper floors or roofs of buildings occupied by civilians, or even in the sewers below. The inevitable smoke and fire make finding targets that much harder: every shot can hit a civilian, and every mortar shell destroys someone's home. This confusion is all the greater when the defending forces exploit the civilian population. As American troops discovered in Umm Qasr and Nasiriya, Iraqi soldiers and paramilitaries do not hesitate to dress like civilians and mix with the population. Moreover, to create a pretext to denounce American "aggression," they shot from behind residents, then waited for American troops to return fire. While air power and precision-guided munitions might seem to be the logical alternative to the chaos of urban combat, they are rarely sufficient to win a war. You can obliterate the enemy from above, but you can't hold the ground without foot soldiers and heavy armor. Thus an American victory requires ground troops to enter Baghdad, where they will encounter first-hand the complicated conditions of the urban battlefield. Nevertheless, as the Israeli experience in the West Bank shows, the obstacles need not be insurmountable. In Nablus, the Israeli Defense Force achieved its most remarkable success taking control of the city's casbah, a densely populated maze of narrow alleys and old stone buildings in just a few days. Israeli forces used no artillery, and despite estimates predicting dozens of casualties, sustained just four. The key to success was a sort of "planned unpredictability." Instead of using conventional linear tactics taking the outskirts of the town first, then systematically clearing every house Israeli forces simultaneously attacked from many directions. They used a technique known in military jargon as swarming, in which many small units, moving in zigzag patterns and other seemingly random formations, infiltrate to the middle of the city and attack from the inside out. Units constantly disappeared, only to re-appear in completely different places, attacking from new angles that kept the defenders disoriented and unable to dig in. The swarming tactic, of course, isn't a magic cure for the problems associated with urban combat. It is a nightmare for the staff officers trying to coordinate the various units, and it is extremely difficult for the fighters themselves to keep abreast of the big picture. Yet American forces, which have more communications technology than even the Israelis, are surely capable of engaging in unconventional fighting tactics. Furthermore, Iraqi forces are not well coordinated and, long out of contact with the outside world and recent military history, would likely be hard pressed to understand what a swarming force is trying to accomplish, let alone confront it. Israeli experience, as well as Marine Corps studies since 1996 of war games based on urban combat, also shows that most casualties in urban fighting occur when soldiers move along the city streets, exposed to enemy fire. Therefore when Israel took the casbah in Nablus, soldiers moved through holes they cut or blasted in the walls between attached houses. Israeli snipers positioned themselves in the tallest buildings and worked closely with troops at the street level to identify targets and confound their enemies' expectations. As one Palestinian fighter said afterward: "The Israelis were everywhere: behind, on the sides, on the right and on the left. How can you fight that way?" There are also important lessons to be learned from Israel's battle in the Jenin refugee camp. That part of the operation made worldwide headlines after the Palestinians gave reports of 500 of their own dead and indiscriminate Israeli destruction claims that the United Nations has since dismissed. Ironically, it was Israel's reluctance to storm Jenin in full force, as well as its commitment to protecting Palestinian lives and property at almost any cost, that resulted in more Israeli and Palestinian deaths and more destruction of property than would otherwise have occurred. In an effort to avoid civilian casualties and bad publicity, Israel refrained at first from using bulldozers and tanks in the camp. Only after 13 of its soldiers were killed in an ambush did the defense forces put bulldozers to widespread use. Since the battle was already under way, however, this was much less precise and far more ruinous than had the Israelis gone into battle full-force from the outset. American military planners would do well to keep this in mind, even as members of the public and the news media condemn any hint of "excessive" force. Ultimately, urban combat is always a dirty business, no matter what the weaponry and tactics at an army's disposal. But as Israel's experience indicates, with the right tactics, victory can be achieved and casualties minimized. Yagil Henkin, a military historian, is fulfilling his reserve requirement as a researcher with the Israeli military. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPoyo88PxH8jf3ohaEQJbEACg7loKpNrNpZXaVXzbTfLPLSCMg+kAn0Pe z8zg6F7DcgOI1q8pmGAhjyO+ =FMK8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
