Jim's Blog

the point, however, is to change it.

URL

XML feed
http://blog.jim.com/

Last update

1 year 8 weeks ago

February 3, 2007

14:32
Moderate Muslims
The Times gives an interesting account of the views held by “moderate” Muslims in England.

January 20, 2007

06:52
I was right.
Jane Galt acknowledges she was wrong about Iraq. I, however was right - back in November 2001 I said that nation building would fail - that the US would find it easy to break nations, but would fail at building them - which is pretty close to what is happening in Afghanistan, and is exactly what is happening in Iraq. In my post when the Afghan war had just begun, well before the Iraq war I wrote of Afghanistan:If the US government merely sticks to a goal of making sure that objectionable people are unable to rule Afghanistan, it is going with the current flow of history, and will probably succeed. If, however, it gets involved in "nation building", attempting to impose a "good government" of its own choosing on Afghanistan, then it is running against the tide of history, and will probably fail. In my post when the Iraq war had just begun I wrote War is a chancy business, so is regime change and nation building — the US is overwhelmingly likely to win the war — but people always underestimate the prospects of a surprise outcome. The bigger danger, however, is "Nation building": … The non Shi'a minority in Iraq are rightly worried about democracy, because they figure the majority will democratically elect a bunch of Shi'a theocrats, who will round up everyone they deem insufficiently Shi'a and kill them, resulting in the all too common outcome of nation building -- one man, one vote,once.

January 3, 2007

20:58
Open Source War
Global Guerrillas "http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2007/01/journal_stochas.html"> recaps the concept of Open-Source War John Robb argues that the growing complexity of the modern world explains the advantage that we have seen in the last two decades of open source warfare over centrally planned warfare, but the world has always been complex. I would suggest that the superiority of open source warfare over centrally planned warfare is a manifestation of improved communication technologies (for example the cell phone shown in beginning of Black Hawk Down). The reduced cost of switching networks has resulted in networks becoming geodesic, rather than star shaped. A military hierarchy is a star shaped network. Used to be that was the only kind of network possible.

December 30, 2006

15:33
snatching defeat from victory.
As usual, the state department is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. As I write this, the Ethiopian army and air force is doing a highly successful hit and run against the Union of Islamic Courts, a radical Islamist and terrorist movement that had in the past few weeks managed to dominate most of Somalia. Ethiopia has announced it has no intention of sticking around to do any nation building, it is merely doing what armies do best - nation breaking. But the state department, despite the ongoing disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, remains committed to nation building. According to the Voice of America, the State Department: said warlordism and clanism should have no role to play in the future of Somalia. It warned that the quality of the United States' future relationship with the Transitional Federal Institutions, and with all elements of Somali society, will be driven by the degree to which they work to achieve genuine national reconciliation. In a talk with reporters, State Department Deputy Spokesman Tom Casey said that dialogue has to include members of the Islamic Courts militia movement who controlled the capital and much of the rest of southern Somalia until this week. This totally stinks. Surely we should be calling on Somalis to wipe out the Islamic courts movement to the last man? Inviting radical Islam into the government of Afghanistan did not stop them from fighting, it merely gave them the opportunity to attack from within as well as from without, it led to the government of Afghanistan disarming our allies, without disarming our enemies. I predict that if anyone in Somalia is stupid enough to take the State Department's advice, state building in Somalia will have exactly the same disastrous outcome as it has had in Afghanistan.

December 29, 2006

22:49
Saddam hangs
As I write this, Saddam Hussein was hung forty five minutes ago. It will make enemies of the west think - but evidently not enough. I suggest that the pentagon forget this building democracy and nation building bit, and instead throws some darts at a map of the middle east and hangs a couple more. Then democracy will build itself. For example if Basha al Assad hangs, Lebanese will have no difficulty building democracy without the dubious assistance of an American soldier on ever street corner.

December 28, 2006

21:30
Building democracy failed
What has gone wrong in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, is the same thing as went wrong in Athens, in the Weimar republic, and in Algeria. The majority of the voters have voted for maniacal evil. This is not a problem that can be solved by external military assistance. That Islamo fascists have been freely and fairly elected in Iraq is now becoming apparent. Not only were we better off with Saddam, but so were Iraqis, though the Iraqis do not realize it yet. Meanwhile in Palestine, Hamas has won the elections on a platform of total war without end by the most brutal methods available against an immensely more powerful enemy. Hamas has simultaneously argued that Israelis are brutal racists, and also that they are such gentle humane souls that they will not make the obvious response to demented and intransigent terror by a weak enemy. I would bet on the former, rather than the latter. Meanwhile, what is happening in Afghanistan?
  1. Afghanistan is “The Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan”.
  2. Islam is the state religion, and the penalty for apostasy is death.
  3. The constitution of Afghanistan is based on Sharia.
We sold the Northern Alliance warlords down the river to get this? A major newspaper was shut down and the editors imprisoned for disagreeing with the mechanism for determining the application of Islamic law — charged with blasphemy, because the majority of voters really do not tolerate such blasphemy — do not want Islam to be reformed, or to cease to rule. It is not the warlords, except for one warlord that is getting vast amounts of Saudi guns and money. It really is the damned voters. Everyone in politics in Afghanistan is pretending to be a lot more Islamic than they actually are, because that is were the votes are. You can tell what the voters want when the politicians flatter the voters and tell them what they want to hear. Not only did the Afghan voters elect some Taliban, they elected a lot of people who disagree with the taliban only over minute theological differences, incomprehensible to outsiders, like the differences between the commies and the nazis in Weimar Germany.

December 26, 2006

18:47
War too damned long
Americans have been fighting in Iraq longer than they fought in World War II. There is a good case for long wars when the cost to ones enemies is grave and great, while the cost to oneself is small - for example the very popular pre westphalian tactic of sending armies to wander through enemy territory pillaging, looting and raping, without bothering to accomplish any very definite military goals. However the kill ratio in this war is really bad. Because their lives are worth considerably less than our lives, we need to have a kill ratio that is overwhelmingly in our favor - as it was in the first three weeks of this war. After US troops got Saddam, this war ceased to serve American interests. This does not mean we should submit to Islamic terrorists. It means we should find ways and places to fight them that have a cost ratio that is in our favor. The most favorable war, the one with cost ratio most lopsidedely in our favor, was when the Pentagon assisted the Northern alliance to defeat the taliban - but now America is disbanding and disarming the Northern alliance in favor of the useless and dangerous "Transitional Islamic Republic of Afghanistan", whose announced basis is to transition to an Islamic republic. We should be funding the northern alliance to destroy it, and similar forces in Iraq to destroy the Iraqi Transitional Government. Nation building has been a failure. Not only are the nations the American government constructed dangerously weak, requiring endless American blood and treasure to sustain them, but they are also dangerously evil. Far from being puppet regimes, they are dangerously close to radical Islam.