Quickhits
(LATimes) A rare look at one of Israel's rightist politicians.
(NYTimes) The US provided training and logistical support to Uganda's latest failing effort against the LRA which left them active and pillaging villages.
(AFP) Oil is under $40/barrel.
(Guardian) I'm glad the papacy of Benedict is catching tons of crap for un-ex-communicating the Holocaust denier.
(CNN) The Alaska Senate voted to hold Todd Palin and nine others in contempt for refusing to testify in the Troopergate investigation, "but a Senate resolution said no one should be punished...."
And, (NYTimes) The Obama administration is looking at taking nuclear bomb manufacture and maintenance away from the Department of Energy and giving it to the Pentagon. (That would be a huge change at Energy. Questions over whether Congress would allow it.)
(NYTimes) The US provided training and logistical support to Uganda's latest failing effort against the LRA which left them active and pillaging villages.
(AFP) Oil is under $40/barrel.
(Guardian) I'm glad the papacy of Benedict is catching tons of crap for un-ex-communicating the Holocaust denier.
(CNN) The Alaska Senate voted to hold Todd Palin and nine others in contempt for refusing to testify in the Troopergate investigation, "but a Senate resolution said no one should be punished...."
And, (NYTimes) The Obama administration is looking at taking nuclear bomb manufacture and maintenance away from the Department of Energy and giving it to the Pentagon. (That would be a huge change at Energy. Questions over whether Congress would allow it.)
posted by mikevotes at
6:59 AM
7 Comments:
Is the "Holocaust" part of Catholic doctrine? No but it sure is a rationale for Israeli persecution of Palestinians, as the honorable Norman Finklestein but not this blogger has noted.
By
Anonymous, at 1:20 PM
When you have a Pope who was a member of the Hitler Youth Corps taking actions such as this, the "doctrine" really does not matter.
As someone who has pointed out the similarities between the Nazi's and Israel's "lebensraum" policies here, I wish to be the first to characterise your criticism of Mike as unfair and specious. It is also irrelevant to Benedict's recent actions.
The Ugandan fiasco is another in a long list of Bush Administration disasters. The best possible outcome is always assumed to be the only likely outcome. Thus, failures are always something that "no one could have anticipated". And once again, a guerilla insurgency is confronted as if it were a static, WW1-style situation. Of course the LRA scattered into small groups; that's what insurgencies do when confronted by overwhelming force. They don't fight battles of attrition or focus on holding lines.
"Villagers across the area are now banding together in local self-defense forces, arming themselves with ancient shotguns and rubber slingshots."
And we send satellite phones and aviation fuel? Can we spare a few swords and crossbows, maybe? How desperate do you have to be to go up against someone who has an automatic rifle while armed with a slingshot?
By
Todd Dugdale , at 5:10 PM
Todd, I just decided not to respond.
As for Uganda, that's a hard one. I don't want the US out there making enemies, but the LRA is about as bad as it gets right now.
It's one of those, "I want to do something, but anything we do seems to make it worse....."
The US isn't going into Uganda, so, I guess you support with what's asked for. It's a disaster, but I don't know what else you do.
By
mikevotes, at 5:57 PM
Mike wrote:
It's a disaster, but I don't know what else you do.
Well, nearly every successful counter-insurgency campaign in the 20th century has three main components:
- remove external support and insurgent funding (e.g. smuggling, drugs, ransoms).
- arm and train local militias
- impose costs on sympathisers (detention, confiscation of property, etc.)
Usually a combination of these tactics is used, of course.
What you don't do is rely on the regular army. This only produces intractable conflicts such as in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Eritrea, etc.
The regular army is used to impose formidable costs on the insurgency when attacking selected targets. For example, if insurgents attack a detention centre they will suffer heavy casualties even if successful.
The only exceptions are in those cases where the insurgency's funding comes from the same source as the government's funding (e.g. Nigeria), or when the populace is so firmly against the government that they cannot be trusted to form militias (e.g. Vietnam, El Salvador), or when the lot of the sympathisers is so desperate that there is nothing you can deprive them of to begin with (e.g Burma, Sudan, Western Sahara).
The real fighting in a successful counter-insurgency campaign is done by the irregular militias, who are already where the insurgents are and have a local infrastructure. An obvious example is the Sahwa in Iraq. You don't need tanks, artillery, bombers, etc. (and the associated susceptible supply infrastructure for these things) to deal with a dozen lightly-armed localised insurgents, which is really all the regular army offers.
So, what we need to do in Uganda is arm those local militias who are now using slingshots and allow them to "impose costs" upon the insurgents. And for the price of one sat-phone, you can pay a score of irregular militia for a month. We don't need to send troops; foreign troops generally create more problems than they solve.
The LRA needs to be shut down. Any "insurgency" that relies on a tactic of amputating limbs to "win support" is nothing short of Satanic.
By
Todd Dugdale , at 12:22 PM
Has Mike endorsed "The Holocaust Industry" by the very effective anti-Zionist Professor Finklestein?
How about Jewish Princeton Univ.Professor Arno Mayer's work "Why Did The Heavens Not Darken?" which says the evidence for mass gas chamber gassing is scant? Who further argued therein the Jewish community, broadly, seemed to be in decline, united chiefly around an unhealthy "Holocaust" metaphysic?
I would argue,with Phil Weiss at Mondoweiss blog, particularly unhealthy for the Palestinians, the American economy, and the American military, most recently sent to Iraq in large part as a spinoff of Lobby's use of same.
By
Anonymous, at 1:13 PM
Todd, I agree on regular army, but your counterinsurgency points are tough because 1) You're going to have a hard time making villagers more afraid of the government than the LRA. 2) You're working in a region with virtually no media system of any kind, so any sort of anti-LRA program or propaganda will fail.
Now, going after funding is probably the best way to get after them, but it's so hard since they run off diamonds and smuggling both of which are very tough to control.
Frankly, and I don't really like this option either, something like the rightist paramilitaries in Colombia would probably have the best effect.
I think you also run into the problem that the Ugandan government doesn't really want to arm locals because they're afraid of longer term power issues.
No, I don't have an answer, and no, I don't like it.
....
Ken, I gotta tell ya, I'm just not going to play.
By
mikevotes, at 2:02 PM
1) You're going to have a hard time making villagers more afraid of the government than the LRA. 2) You're working in a region with virtually no media system of any kind, so any sort of anti-LRA program or propaganda will fail.
Your first point, I just don't understand. It's not about pitting local militias against the regular army's interests. It's letting the regular army do what it does best and letting the local militias do what they do best.
On the second point, no real propaganda effort is needed. The irregular militias are already convinced. They are already taking action, though they are armed with "ancient shotguns and rubber slingshots".
the Ugandan government doesn't really want to arm locals because they're afraid of longer term power issues.
Right, and this is pretty common. The government sees an insurgency primarily as a challenge to its authority, and their natural reflex is to seek to re-impose that authority with the forces at their disposal (i.e the regular army). I question whether the "regular army" model is the first choice of the Ugandan government or if it is rather the preferred model of the Bush Administration imposed upon them.
The rightist paramilitaries in Colombia are a good example, as you note. The problem there is that the insurgency is funded by drug money, but also that the Colombian government "cheated" by using these militias as a political force as much as a self-defence force. Still, all counter-insurgencies are ugly things. The goal is to avoid a protracted struggle that produces protracted ugliness.
The Bush Administration, however, has done even worse than the "regular army" model in every case. As I have said numerous times before, the Administration looks at every conflict (especially counter-insurgencies) as static WW1-style situations. They always treat the insurgency as if it were a regular army, and they expect it to respond as if it were a regular army. They constantly hold up the failure of an insurgency to stand and fight, hold territory, or build infrastructure as a sign of "victory" or being "off balance".
The "regular army" model, as it has been employed in its many failures by other governments, at least takes into account that the regular army is not fighting another regular army. This is why it inevitably leads to either Guatemalan-type situations or the hopeless Nepalese scenario. It took Bush to turn a nominally losing strategy into an even dumber one that nobody in the 20th century ever thought to employ.
By
Todd Dugdale , at 3:05 PM
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