The Emboldenment View

Military 10 Comments

National Bureau of Economic Research;

Using data on attacks and variation in access to international news across Iraqi provinces, we identify an “emboldenment” effect by comparing the rate of insurgent attacks in areas with higher and lower access to information about U.S news after public statements critical of the war. We find in periods after a spike in war-critical statements, insurgent attacks increases by 5-10 percent. The results suggest that insurgent groups respond rationally to expected probability of US withdrawal. As such counterinsurgency should consider deterrence and incapacitation rather than simply search and destroy missions.

The PDF is here.
h/t

Bobbing For Atta

Baiting The Left 116 Comments

I’ll state my position as plainly as I can – the CIA could waterboard “Mahmoud” once a week, and western democracies would be nowhere in danger of becoming “no better than the enemy” or “losing our soul” or other such nonsense. Some of the tactics employed during WW2 in defeating the Axis feel rather short of pleasure thresholds, but the victors emerged from the morass as the “greatest generation” nonetheless. (Of course, give it time. Another 20 years and we’ll could well be sending reparations and “never again” mea culpas to the descendants of Hiroshima.)
But then again, relativism was never my strong suit. Try as I might, I cannot place “water up the nose” on the same ethical plane as say, the application of a cordless drill to a prisoner’s temple or forcing him to watch while his children are raped and then slaughtered.
Not so the readers of the Guardian!

What’s interesting to me is how the subject is currently being discussed, or rather reacted against, very often with wholesale fantasy. For every partially serious response to a particular point, there are two, perhaps three, comments that are unhinged and simply perverse, albeit in a broadly similar way. I stopped counting after a dozen different commenters asserted, smugly, that no war against terrorism exists, or that the West shouldn’t have made efforts to defend itself, or that the US is some kind of fascist autocracy, or that Osama bin Laden and his associates weren’t responsible for 9/11, or that the US government killed its own citizens for unspecified reasons, or that Bush and Blair are morally indistinguishable from homicidal jihadists. As a thumbnail sketch of Guardianista opinion, or a large part thereof, these reactions are worth noting.

And then, there’s the whole question of, you know – winning. One of the most maddening arguments utilized by the political left that goes largely unchallenged is the assertion that “you cannot win a war against an insurgency”.
Well, speaking as a lowly citizen, may I make a suggestion? Could we please get busy and come up with a way to defeat insurgencies, because if we don’t, western civilization as we know it is doomed.

“Dear Mahmoud. Sorry about that dunking thing a while back. We’ve voted those dreadful people out and replaced them with Enlightened Diplomats. Here’s the thing – you and I both know we are incapable of defeating an enemy who wears no uniform, obeys no rules of combat, engages in terrorism and random attacks on civilians, but this is of little concern because we are confident that you will never bring those tactics to our soil.”

Perhaps that’s the true legacy of Vietnam and to an extent, WW2 – the notion that one can lose a war and still go home again. After all, Germany, Italy, and Japan still claim spots on the map. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake on our part.

Eliot Mess*

Roadkill 118 Comments

* h/t to commentor Neo for the most excellent post title suggestion.
New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is reported to be resigning from his office later today;

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has told senior advisers that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, The New York Times reported Monday, citing an anonymous top administration official. […] The Times reported that a person with knowledge of the governor’s role believes the governor is identified as a client in court papers. Four people allegedly connected to a high-end prostitution ring called Emperors Club VIP were arrested last week.
Spitzer, 48, built his political legacy on rooting out corruption, including several headline-making battles with Wall Street while serving as attorney general. He stormed into the governor’s office in 2006 with a historic share of the vote, vowing to continue his no- nonsense approach to fixing one of the nation’s worst governments.
Time magazine had named him “Crusader of the Year” when he was attorney general and the tabloids proclaimed him “Eliot Ness.”
But his stint as governor has been marred by several problems, including an unpopular plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and a plot by his aides to smear Spitzer’s main Republican nemesis.

In my opinion, it was the driver’s license fiasco that should have brought him down. But this will do.
Update: Commentors have already noted that a certain detail has been overlooked in this report and others – Spitzer’s party affiliation.
Update 2: The fastest purge in political history. That and other links are collecting at Hot Air.
Update 3!

As a sidebar to an article at ABC news about Elliott Spitzer, they’ve helpfully put together this slideshow of 13 politicians involved in famous sex scandals.(Collect them all!) Anyway, it’s rather interesting that of the 7 Republicans on the list, all of them save one are identified by ABC as Republicans. Of the six Democrats on the list, only one is identified by party affiliation.

I Want To Live In A Country

Political Animal 58 Comments

Where my government subsidizes quality time away from my talentless spawn while I haul in a six-figure income;

“We spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we’re spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements. And summer programs… Do you know what summer camp costs?”

If you are struggling to make ends meet on a half-million a year — a 1040 that puts you in the top 2% of Americans — then the problem is you, not the country.
Still this woman, who was never proud of America when her husband was elected to the state legislature or even the United States Senate, whines and whines and whines.
America is, she said, “just downright mean.”

The Top 10 Reasons

Blogging 39 Comments

Bloggers don’t succeed, at Right Wing News. All good advice, numbers 8 and 9, in particular.
I’ll add 11) – Gratuitous profanity, in posts or in your comments section is going to turn off the average right-of-center reader, and in some cases cause problems for those reading from work computers. Keep profanity to a minimum, and police it in your comments, or you’ll risk driving a portion of your potential audience away on their first visit.

Y2Kyoto: Weather Is The New News

Climate Cult 26 Comments

Or, as climatologist David Phillips puts it – “storm porn”;

To date, this winter is the coldest in 12 years and Phillips’s winter forecast is considered 70 to 75 per cent accurate, which he said is pretty good for a long-range prediction.
“It wasn’t necessarily the perfect forecast but I think to many Canadians it was bang on because there was something to complain about, it was a tough winter,” he said.
“And I must say, in kind of a perverse way I’ve been delighted in a way the way winter unfolded, I felt confident that it would.”

Whoa. 75% accuracy is “pretty good” for a seasonal forecast? He get in touch with those climate modellers, no? They have it nailed down to the century.
Related: The media snowjob on global warming. And brace yourself for more manufactured “storm porn”, as this Ottawa Citizen report suggests that “145 leading Canadian scientists” managed to put a 500-page report together blaming this winter’s widely predicted “wild weather” on “more heat into the atmosphere” without managing to stumble across this year’s La Niña, or the news that global temperatures have been slowly dropping for the past 10 years.

(Source – “Jim B” in the comments here)

The Red Catchers of Mosul

Little Known Facts 6 Comments

Terrorists. The ones who murder children in front of their parents. The ones who take drugs and rape women and boys. The ones who blow up schools. The ones who have been forcibly evicted from places like Anbar Province, Baghdad and Baqubah by American and Iraqi forces. Terrorists are here now in Mosul. They call themselves al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI cannot win without Baghdad, and cannot survive without Mosul. The Battle for Mosul is evolving into AQI’s last great stand.
[…]
During the Jihad Shift, pilots use fewer precision weapons. They swoop in too low and too close to the enemy, whom they often don’t see until the enemy begins firing from nearly point-blank range on the Kiowas. Hellfires are useless that close.
Pilots are not supposed to fly under one hundred fifty feet but are often at more like twenty or thirty feet, though I have seen some fly much lower. In 2005, I photographed a Kiowa and could read the time on the pilot’s watch (without telephoto). I asked an infantry commander if he thought the pilot would get into trouble if that photo were published, and he suggested not to publish it, so I canned it. LTC Jamison leaves the altitude to the discretion of the pilot in charge, but generally they have to be either very high, or very low.
The quick and the dead: Truly

Another great piece by Michael Yon. Grab a coffee.

From Public View

Great Moments In Socialism 68 Comments

It should come as no surprise;

… that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearing on March 25th — where human rights commission staff themselves are to be cross-examined on their dubious tactics of anonymous infiltration of websites, entrapment and even the bizarre practice of commission staff themselves planting bigoted remarks on websites — is going to be closed to the public.
It is hypocritical in the extreme that HRC staff who scrutinize every public utterance and private thought of their victims will be exempted from public scrutiny themselves. There is no legitimate reason for this blackout, other than the HRCs simply being HRCs and engaging in censorship and the restriction of public debate. Usually they censor political expression they disagree with; this time they censor their own embarrassing conduct from being seen and heard by taxpaying Canadians

Ezra will be a guest on Cross Country Checkup this afternoon with Rex Murphy, at around 4:40 ET.
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“In many high schools”

More Pavilions At Folkfest 79 Comments

…English teachers have been developing literature curricula to meet the needs of their culturally diverse students. However, because in most cases these educators have not had at their disposal the interpretative techniques of postcolonial literary theorists, they have been relying, instead, for their reading strategies upon traditional literary theories. Unfortunately, when teachers employ New Critical, archetypal, feminist, or reader-response methods of literary analysis in their reading of multicultural literature, they are often unaware of the Eurocentric biases contained within these perspectives. This lack of understanding of their theoretical frame of reference can then lead teachers to encourage their students to accept uncritically problematic representations of various cultural groups as they encounter these representations in their literary texts. Postcolonial literary theory, on the other hand, encourages students to problematize Eurocentric representations of imperialism’s Others.

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