Month: April 2003

The celebrity activist crowd is shocked, shocked that their feet are being held to the fire, that they are being made to suffer the consequences of taking their overwhelmingly unpopular stands. Welcome to the real world people, a world of personal responsibility where actions can generate reactions. The beautiful ones recoil in horror as individuals and private institutions move to disassociate themselves from anti-war rhetoric. Luckily, that does not shut down the pop icons, they just proceed to reel out more rope with which to hang themselves. Regarding Susan Sarandon and her new play (TelegraphUK) : She would not take the play to the Middle East. “I do work for Unicef but I don’t know if I want to go to the Middle East. It’s so violent and I’ve got a family.” Well shit Suzy, we’re all safe here, so let the human meat grinder keep running, after all, they’re only Arabs and Zionists, right? As for her partner, (WNBC) : (Tim) Robbins reportedly threatened Washington Post reporter Lloyd Grove for interviewing Sarandon’s mother, saying “if you ever write about my family again, I will (bleeping) find you and I will (bleeping) hurt you.” Freedom of the press and speech are wonderful things, unless they are wielded against the extreme left, in which case they prompt threats of physical violence. Since I have now written about Tim Robbins and his family, maybe I am on his potential hit list. I should be so lucky.

Allow me to post this outstanding piece from a good friend, Jim Nalepa:

BRAINS ARE NOT ISSUED WITH RANK As a West Point graduate, I can assure that we took our military history seriously. Most graduates remember the lessons of “The History of the Military Art” others have obviously forgotten. Most Americans would not recall the significance of the date, April 9th as they watched the statue of Saddam Hussein topple in Baghdad and his Ambassador to the United Nations declare “The game is over”. One hundred and thirty eight years ago, on April the 9th, 1865 at Appomattox Courthouse, Robert E Lee, West Point Class of 1829, surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, West Point Class of 1843 to end the bloodiest war in our nations history, the Civil War. There are significant historical lessons to be derived in contrasting Operation Iraqi Freedom and our own Civil War as well as a comparison of West Point generals in both. The motto of the United States Military Academy is “Duty, Honor, and Country.” Unfortunately, a few generals (all West Point graduates) have become “armchair analysts” for whom it seems their motto could be “Demagoguery, Hubris, and Contempt.” More specifically, I speak of General Eric Shinseki, the irrelevant Army Chief of Staff (West Point 1965); General (ret.) Barry McCaffrey, former Clinton Drug Czar (West Point 1964); and General (ret.) Wesley Clark (West Point 1966), former NATO Commander and aspiring Democrat Party presidential or vice presidential nominee. All of these men, through public pontification damned the strategy of this war. General Shinseki called for hundreds of thousands more troops to get the job done. General McCaffrey, only four days into active general combat, wrote a contemptuous article in the Wall Street Journal predicting doom and a protracted conflict. General Wesley Clark joined in the anti-American chorus on CNN to question, erroneously, why supply lines had stretched so thin? Why all this wailing and teeth gnashing from men who heretofore proved themselves valiant in combat as junior officers in Viet Nam and the first Gulf War? The George McClellan syndrome fits all too well. Gen. George B. McClellan (West Point 1846), commanded the Union Army in the early days of the Civil War. A pompous man, who held Abraham Lincoln in utter contempt, built an army of well over 150,000 men and embarked on a campaign to capture Richmond and bring a swift end to the southern rebellion. To historians, this is known as the Peninsular Campaign, one of the greatest failures in the annals of American military history. Faced by a confederate force of barely 40,000 soldiers, McClellan hesitated, begged for more troops, worried about long supply lines and basically attacked piecemeal until he deluded himself into believing that the rebels held superior numbers on the field of battle. Had McClellan, with a vastly superior force, struck decisively toward Richmond, (as we did at Baghdad), the Civil War conceivably would have been brought to a swift modafinilsmart conclusion, saving millions of lives, both soldiers and civilians. McClellan, after being relieved of command and sent on his way, eventually became the Democrat Party nominee for President in 1864 and was soundly defeated by Lincoln. Generals Clark, McCaffrey and Shinseki are nothing more than the heirs of the McClellan legacy, political generals, who have forgotten our motto for their own self-aggrandizement. Where were these three when their patron, Bill Clinton, decimated the U.S. Army in the 1990’s, almost halving our forces for the sake of the phony “peace dividend.”? This unilateral disarmament gave our enemies hope and portrayed us as both militarily and politically weak. Why weren’t their voices heard as brave men (Black Hawk Down) were sacrificed in Somalia because Clinton and his Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, wouldn’t authorize the use of armor forces which the field commanders earnestly had sought? As we know now that our failure in Somalia was the impetus for Bin Laden’s “9-11” attack. Simple, these three were being politically correct, behaving as the military hating administration told them to, and putting on their second, third and fourth stars. Some basic questions to each of them: General McCaffrey, how did the last “war” you fought, the war on drugs, go on your watch? General Shinseki, isn’t it great to know that all you will be remembered for is giving the army black berets made in France? General Clark, will continued political correctness really get you the Democrat party nomination for President or even Vice President? If not you could succeed Chirac in France. The conduct of these men while our troops are under fire is nothing more than reprehensible and, fortunately, stands in stark contrast to General Franks, who conceived and now commands what by any measure has been a brilliant Iraqi campaign. While not a West Point graduate, General Franks is surrounded by graduates of the military academy, who have loyally supported him and the Iraqi Freedom campaign from day one. Men such as LTG John Abizaid (West Point1973); Gen. Frank’s chief deputy, Col. David Perkins, Commander of the 2nd Brigade, Third Infantry Division, the first unit into Baghdad (West Point 1980); and Capt. James Adamouski (West Point 1995), killed in combat. When this great victory is finally assessed, those are the men who are the heirs of Grant, Patton and Schwarzkopf. As to the modern McClellan’s? Just like the Iraqi regime, it’s the dustbin of history for them. Jim Nalepa Mr. Nalepa is a 1978 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. During active service he was assigned to the 2nd Brigade, Third Infantry Division, in Germany and the 82nd Airborne Division. He is a veteran of the Grenada Rescue mission in 1983. Mr. Nalepa, who runs an exclusive Executive Search firm, is a frequent guest on military and foreign affairs in the Chicago area, with many appearances on the highly rated WTTW program “Chicago Tonight”

The Poor Man has a point.

Did I mention that I don’t like Castro? Here’s a concise summary of my thoughts about him.

What’s the connection? Each of these topics is the subject of a very interesting essay on the Val e-diction blog.

Val writes in considerable detail about his experiences as a military pilot in Venezuela back in the day, when he flew the Mirage III. The Mirage was France’s first-generation Mach 2 fighter, a classic aircraft of the 1960s in the same way that the Spitfire was a classic of an earlier period. (The Mirage’s reputation was made by Israel, which used it with spectacular success in the Six Day War.) The Mirage, like the Spitfire, was beautiful. And as with the Spitfire, the Mirage’s brilliant design was achieved partly at the cost of design tradeoffs which limited its overall effectiveness — low fuel capacity and short range in the case of the Spit; an oversimplified, slatless and flapless (!) delta wing with lousy low-speed handling characteristics in the case of the Mirage. This is a fascinating post if you have any interest whatsoever in aviation or military history.

Val has many other great posts on his blog, including this reminder that Castro has used our distraction in Iraq as an occasion to make an example of Cuban dissidents, and a long and thoughtful discourse on tennis, from which I know nothing.

But after his Mirage post, which for me was pure vicarious fun, his most insightful comments may be the ones he makes in discussing the political history of Venezuela. It’s not all about oil, apparently. Rather, Val argues that the country’s chronic problems result from a combination of uncontested socialist theory in the political realm and a Spanish legacy of poorly defined and allocated property rights:

In other words, during the entire second half of the Twentieth Century and while previously poorer countries like Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong were busily and successfully developing under capitalist systems, Venezuela suffered the worst-possible combination of Seventeenth-Century Mercantilism and Twentieth-Century Marxism, as if Adam Smith had never been born. That’s why Emeterio Gómez, one of Venezuela’s top economists, says the country has to relive the Eighteenth Century before it can modernize.

. . . I cannot overemphasize the importance of the historical fact that there were no pro-capitalist political parties or influential pro-market economists in Venezuela during the entire Twentieth Century.

[. . .]

But most importantly, contrary to what happened to the colonies of North America where parliamentary democracy, general access to property and individual rights were part of the English legacy, Venezuela (and Latin America) inherited from Spain an absolutist culture that cultivated state power and opposed individual liberty, responsibility and property beyond personal and basic commercial goods. In Spanish law, later adopted by Latin America in full, the state owned everything, including soil and subsoil and their riches. Contrary to what many pundits believe, Venezuela’s strong and ubiquitous state did not appear suddenly from the oil-polluted sea, like a modern Aphrodite, in a Shell.

Hmm. . . sounds familiar. And worth reading.

(I confess that I may have had a hand in provoking the Venezuela essay. IIRC I asked Val a naive question in which I suggested a parallel between Venezuela’s corruption and that of the Arab oil states. I also plead guilty to egging Val on to write about his air force experiences.)