War and Peace

Just Another Random Crime by Arab Muslims?

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Reuters is on the case. The key sentence:

The attacker said he was Algerian, police said.

Those wacky Algerians! Of course it could have been anyone who randomly attacked an airplane crew with an axe: a Chinese, a Brazilian, an orthodox Jew. The guy was probably just upset because his reindeer died or something.

Random violent crime is rare in the Nordic nation, but one person was killed and five others wounded last month when a knife attacker stabbed passengers a tram in the capital Oslo.

In case we haven’t gotten the point, Reuters added this gratuitous paragraph to make clear that the last Norwegian mass-stabber was an immigrant nutcase (i.e., not an obvious Islamist terrorist). It appears that readers are expected to infer, though there is no logical reason to do so, that the plane attacker isn’t a terrorist either.

But we don’t know the attacker’s motives. Maybe they weren’t Islamist, but that’s not the way to bet nowadays. Reuters, rather than merely presenting facts, seems determined to force the story into an editorial template. However, most readers probably are not going to accept Reuters’s version of the story at face value, and will read between the lines and use common sense to draw their own conclusions. The truth will out, even if it isn’t a truth that ideologically-engaged media operators like.

Fog of War

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The Israeli government released transcripts of conversations among and between the pilots who mistakenly attacked the USS Liberty in June 1967, and the military air controllers who directed them. You can find a composite transcript, as well as excerpts from an interview with one of the pilots, in this Jerusalem Post article.

The transcript is worth reading, if only because it confirms that the attack was a tragic blunder rather than an intentional act.

The excerpted interview with the pilot is also worth reading because it gives a sense of what strikes me as a culture clash that has to some extent framed the interpretation of this event. On the one hand some Americans, including former Liberty crew members, are convinced that the Israeli attack was deliberate and that the U.S. and Israel conspired to cover up the truth about it (see, for example, this site). On the other hand, Yiftach Spector, the pilot interviewed in the Jerusalem Post article, comes across like a caricature of Israeli cluelessness about public relations. He seems to misread the motives of the Liberty conspiracy theorists, whom he speculates are motivated by anti-Semitism, or by a desire for monetary compensation, rather than, as appears more likely to me, by traditional American conspiracist wackiness. (Spector was one of the pilots cashiered by the Israeli government after they publicly protested Israel’s policy of assassinating terrorist leaders. Whatever his good qualities, he appears to be at least politically naive.)

An analysis of the attack on the Liberty, by an authority on the subject, was recently published as a book.

(Via In Context)

War Movies IV

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I finally saw Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers (2002). My sister got me the DVD, and I watched it on the laptop. Small screen indeed. I thought it was a solid effort. Gibson is a competent but not brilliant film-maker, who knows his limits and operates within them. He reminds me of something George Thorogood (I think) once said — I only know three chords, but I know ’em cold. Gibson, similarly, knows how to do war and violence and mourning and survivor?s guilt, stoicism and family life all in a very plain and unironic style. Gibson also uses stock characters — the tough commander with a heart of gold, the hard-ass top sergeant, the handsome and idealistic officer doomed to die, etc. This all works decently well in Gibson’s hands, though it is a set of artistic blunt instruments he is wielding. Gibson tells a linear story — a war is underway, troops assemble, a leader (Lt. Col. Hal Moore, played by Gibson) appears, Moore trains them, he leads them into battle, many die, there is mourning over the dead. The parallel plot about the wives at home receiving death notices allows a counterpoint to the din of gunfire, explosions and screaming, wounded men. Moore’s wife is played in a convincing and dignified way by Madeleine Stowe. She is a good actress, with striking looks, who seems to have spent almost her entire career being squandered in sub-par movies. A third somewhat muted parallel plot has unidentified men in Saigon trying to figure out how to “sell” the story of what is happening back home. This allows the suffering and courageous soldiers to be contrasted with a cynical leadership which cares nothing for their lives and which has, in effect, betrayed them before it even committed them to battle. This seems true to historical fact, alas. It is also a theme which has deep roots in American war cinema, including the similar scenes in Pork Chop Hill (discussed here). Some scenes shown from the point of view of the NVA commander and his men are done well, and the NVA soldiers are depicted without rancor or ideology.

The battle scenes are graphic in the contemporary post-Private Ryan style. However, it seemed to me that both the Air Cav troopers and the NVA regulars all fought too bunched up. There were repeated charges, by both sides, with men standing only a few feet away from each other, against an opponent with automatic weapons. That struck me as wrong. This led to a video-game-like destruction of many NVA troops by the Americans. I suspect they did not die quite so easy. Also, an American counter-attack at the end led to a very “Hollywood” moment which did not strike me as plausible. But, I haven’t read here).

The fact that the critics hated this movie on ideological grounds was strong and accurate reassurance that I would like it. One film reviewer I read (can’t find a link; it was a long time ago) went on about how it was mawkish, corny and unbelievable to see Lt. Col. Moore, saying prayers with his children at bedtime. Since I and millions of other parents do the exact same thing, this scene in the movie struck me as perfectly normal. Apparently this particular film reviewer has never met anyone in person who prays with his children. A classic contrast between red state and blue state America right there.

All in all, We Were Soldiers is a good movie. Better than The Patriot, not as good as Braveheart. Worth seeing. Three stars.

Quote of the Day

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Wretchard frames our problem:

In one sense, the prodigious American technological engine assures a near chronic imbalance between US military capability, which has increased exponentially and the slow, uncertain and labor intensive process of political transformation.

Diplomacy AND Arms

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Instapundit links to a BBC story about Libya’s recent, newly-found diplomatic pliancy. The Beeb claims that it was American threats, not British and American diplomacy which has led to Khaddafy giving up his nuke program. This is news?

Let me be the millionth person in Blogistan to repeat the ancient dictum, “diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.” (I always thought it was Metternich who said this, but it was apparently Frederick the Great.) Either way, the old-timers understood that all the jaw-jaw in the world won’t move anybody off a position they think is advantageous unless there is the prospet of war-war (or some lesser threat) to compel them to do so.

Modern liberals like talking so much that the mere fact that there might be consequences, if the talking is going nowhere, seems a bit scandalous to them. To the liberal, an endless faculty meeting, where nothing happens, is the model for the whole world. The Europeans, who don’t want to pay for real military power, like the “all talk, all the time” model, too. Sorry dudes. In international politics, death threats are the coin of the realm, and always will be.

Diplomacy which has no threat underlying it, at minimum withholding some benefit, is mere chit-chat. War without the possibility of some negotiated resolution is mere arbitrary violence. You need both arms and talk, but arms are primary. Of course, when you are fighting against someone like al Qaeda, which isn’t a country, has no interests, has only one desire — your extinction– then there is nothing to talk about. That struggle is like Clausewitz’s hypothesized “absolute war”, which is unlimited in both means and ends and can only conclude with the annihiliation of one side or the other. (Goes who that is going to be.) Fortunately, Col. Khaddafy is someone who can be talked to, i.e. threatened. He has something to lose, and so he is amenable to threats. Which means, with him, diplomacy can work.

UPDATE. This link (Via Drudge), shows some of the European leadership is composed of people who do understand the basics: EU Military Official Says, Time For Europe To Defend Itself. Finnish general, Gustav Hagglund, chairman of the EU’s military committee, proposes that “[t]he American and the European pillars (of NATO) would be responsible for their respective territorial defences, and would together engage in crisis management outside their own territories.” The U.S. forces wold tackle “high-intensity operations involving terrorism and weapons of mass destruction while Europeans would concentrate on sustained low-intensity crisis management such as conflict prevention.” Hmmm. Sounds like we get all the heavy lifting. I think the Europeans are going to need to add some more hard capabilities, like battalions of infantry and lots of tough, sneaky commandos, not just sending people to direct traffic after the USA has spilled blood somewhere. Still, this is more sensible than the status quo. These people need to develop some capacity to defend themselves and participate in imposing order on the world.

A coalition of the willing must be a coalition of the capable. The Europeans need to start developing their capabilities. That will take sustained willpower. And cash. Let’s see how far they are willing to go.