Tag Archives: war

The Sierra Madre

This is a weird story. In the South China Sea, there is a Philippines ship that ran aground on a shoal in 1999. Sailors from that country have occupied the ship ever since, and are regularly resupplied while being bombarded by the Chinese navy using things other than guns, like water cannons and lasers.

That month, the Sierra Madre ran aground at Second Thomas Shoal, a small reef in what was then disputed territory, about 120 miles off the coast of Palawan island. A second ship did the same at another shoal later that year. Beijing suspected that Manila was using the beached ships to create outposts.

Philippine officials initially played coy, saying that they meant to repair the Sierra Madre but were having trouble finding the materials, while the other ship was eventually towed away. Yet, more than two decades later, the Sierra Madre remains grounded, a rusted dieselpunk monolith interrupting an otherwise pristine swath of tropical waters. A small group of sailors crews it; they pick their way through its slightly listing steel skeleton as they monitor the area for incursions. Their rotations generally last two months but can stretch up to five. Carlos referred to these tours as a “test of sanity…”

Beijing blatantly ignores this ruling. When the Philippines delivers supplies for the sailors on board the Sierra Madre via small boats escorted by coast-guard ships, Chinese ships attempt to block them. In early August, the Chinese coast guard used water cannons to prevent Philippine boats from reaching the outpost. A second attempt later that month was successful, as was one in September, when a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft flew overhead.

Atlantic

The U.S., of course, feels the need to get involved in all this. Not by being a voice of reason, but by ramping up tensions and threats of violence.

so what’s going on in Syria?

Syria is complicated. This article is by a Cato Institute author with some strong opinions I am not necessarily endorsing, but it does break down some of the key players.

  • Fact: The U.S. government has ground troops inside the borders of Syria, a sovereign country with a seat at the United Nations, and it does not have the permission of that government to be within its borders. The two countries do not have friendly diplomatic relations but nevertheless, neither side claims to be directly at war with the other.
  • The stated reason for U.S. troops entering Syria was to fight the Islamic State group. By many accounts, that objective has been achieved. It is also worth noting that by some accounts, the reason that group formed was blowback from the 2003 U.S. (mostly unprovoked) Iraq invasion.
  • There are, however, regular “drone and rocket attacks” on U.S. troops by militant groups “aligned with Iran and Syria”.
  • The Syrian government is publicly anti-israel, and the U.S. government is obviously an ally of the Israel government. This article doesn’t mention it, but Israel is also known to be carrying out regular strikes against groups on Syrian territory that it considers threatening and/or Iran proxies.
  • The government of Russia is allied with the government of Syria. The United States presence in Syria is therefore “discomfiting” to the Russian government according to some. Russia has troops on the ground in Syria with the permission of the Syrian government. The U.S. and Russia are not directly at war in Syria or anywhere else, but there have been confrontations, provocations, and “harassments”.
  • The U.S. government supports military forces of the Kurdish ethnic group, which some say serves as a de facto government controlling territory in this area. These Kurdish forces are openly engaged in military hostilities with Turkey inside the borders of Syria, which is a NATO member and declared U.S. ally.
  • The government of Syria and the government of Iran are allies, and the U.S. government is openly very hostile to Iran and accuses them of interfering with politics and funding wars and terror groups throughout the Middle East. The governments of Iran and Israel are also openly hostile, of course, with nuclear risks for the region and world.
  • Some say the U.S. is trying to “bring Assad down” or “steal Syria’s oil”. I don’t know how real these claims are or whether either represents any sort of official policy (well, certainly not the latter, and deploying the U.S. military to “steal oil” tens of thousands of miles away simply can’t be a viable business proposition. This one does not pass the logic test.)

There – I don’t know that I “explained” it, but I don’t know that there is anything to explain. We are there because they are fighting us, and they are fighting us because we are there. There are at least four distinct conflicts happening in the same geography – U.S. vs. Russia/Syria/Iran/islamist groups, Israel vs. Syria/Iran, Syria vs. Kurds, Turkey vs. Kurds. What a mess. Even Donald Trump wanted to get out of Syria, probably for what I would consider the wrong reasons. Let’s get the U.S. military out and the diplomats in. Where is Jimmy Carter when you need him? Who is the next Jimmy Carter – Obama maybe?

October 2023 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Israel-Palestine. From the long-term grind of the failure to make peace and respect human rights, to the acute horror causing so much human suffering and death at this moment, to the specter of an Israeli and/or U.S. attack on Iran. It’s frightening and depressing – but of course it is not my feelings that matter here, but all the people who are suffering and going to suffer horribly because of this. The most positive thing I can think of to say is that when the dust settles, possibly years from now, maybe cooler heads will prevail on all sides. Honorable mention for most frightening story is the 2024 U.S. Presidential election starting to get more real – I am sure I and everyone else will have more to say about this in the coming (exactly one as I write this on November 5, 2023) year!

Most hopeful story: Flesh eating bacteria is becoming slightly more common, but seriously you are not that likely to get it. And this really was the most positive statement I could come up with this month!

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The generally accepted story of the “green revolution“, that humanity saved itself from widespread famine in the face of population growth by learning to dump massive quantities of fossil fuel-derived fertilizer on farm fields, may not be fully true.

1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030!

The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post says China will have 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030, an increase from a few hundred now. This is bad, in my view. It is also less than the U.S. and Russia have (5,000-6,000 each). Whatever one may think of China’s policies toward Tibet, Xinxiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, China has not invaded any sovereign UN member states without permission in recent memory (ever? there’s a good history question but I can’t think of one.) The United States and Russia have both invaded multiple sovereign states each in very recent memory (do I need to list them? Panama, Bosnia, Iraqx2, Afghanistan, Libya, Georgia, Ukraine, and I’m probably forgetting some – oh, Syria, when and how the f— did the United States invade Syria without anyone noticing? I’m not counting the dozens or hundreds of countries where we have boots on the ground with the permission of sketchy governments.) So who has reasons to be afraid of whom? I’m just saying, the United States leadership could try putting themselves in another country’s shoes and ask what they might be thinking and feeling. You don’t have to agree with your opponent to try to understand them better.

Only one country has ever used nuclear weapons in war. I hope we can continue to make this statement for a long time to come. If we have 5,000 nuclear war heads, China has 300 (making up some round numbers here), and is threatening to build more, maybe there is some room for negotiation? Maybe they would agree to stop at 1,000 if the U.S. and Russia both agreed to reduce to 2,000. The whole world would be safer. We would have a shred of credibility when we tell other countries they don’t need nuclear weapons. This would be a clear win-win-win-(etc.) situation. Are there any courageous leaders left in our country or anywhere on Earth?

Ol’ Lindsey Graham’s gettin’ pretty hot, Time to turn Iran into a parking lot

Lindsey Graham was on Meet the Press on Sunday, October 16 (yesterday as I write this) saber-rattling against Iran. I couldn’t help myself thinking of this catchy little hit from 1980…uh, what year is it now?

I looked up the lyrics to this 1980 song. Pretty offensive. Or, let’s go with intended as parody.

Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb
Bomb Iran
Let’s take a stand
Bomb Iran
Our country’s got a feelin’
Really hit the ceilin’, bomb Iran
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran

Went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks
Tell the Ayatollah, “Gonna put you in a box!”
Bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb
Bomb Iran
Our country’s got a feelin’
Really hit the ceilin’, bomb Iran
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran

Ol’ Uncle Sam’s gettin’ pretty hot
Time to turn Iran into a parking lot
Bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb
Bomb Iran
Our country’s got a feelin’
Really hit the ceilin’, bomb Iran
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran

Call the volunteers; call the bombadiers;
Call the financiers; better get their ass in gear

Bomb Iran. Bomb, bomb, bomb
Bomb Iran
Our country’s got a feelin’
Really hit the ceilin’, bomb Iran
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran
(Let’s nuke ’em! Whoo!)

genius.com

keep an eye on Iran…

I always say I don’t want to comment on fast-moving current events, and I always say I don’t want to comment on other countries’ politics, especially ones I have never been to and have no connection to, and most especially Israeli politics. But I have thoughts, you don’t have to read them and here they are:

  1. My heart goes out to all the human beings suffering in this conflict.
  2. What could be the motive of the Hamas leadership and fighters responsible for this attack. One story could be that they are angry about the expanding settlements and other perceived losses of human rights and dignity, and that they feel they have exhausted all political recourse and only violence is left to make their point. Maybe this is all there is to it.
  3. But…assuming Hamas has some rational political aims, it is hard to imagine this furthering those aims. It seems more likely to embolden the most conservative parties in the Israeli government, and to rally to Israeli public and international governments to support them even more than they already do.
  4. I have heard suggestions that the political aim could be to stop the Israel-Saudi Arabia diplomatic normalization process. Iran would gain from this. But if there is even a hint that Iran was involved in planning this attack, if anything it seems more likely to accelerate that process after an initial pause.
  5. Which brings me to Iran. This just seems extremely risky for them. Reports are that their leadership has “publicly praised” the attacks. Maybe they have to do that for domestic political reasons. But again, if there is even a whiff… the Israeli right wing could use this as their excuse to attack Iran.
  6. The Israeli government has repeatedly said “they will not allow” Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. How close are they to obtaining a nuclear weapon? Very close, it would seem. If the Israeli government can find some evidence that Iran was behind this attack, it would seem to give them the justification they need for a military attack. And it might just bring enough international opinion to their side, or at least keep it on the sidelines, to allow them to do it.
  7. If someone were to want to fabricate evidence that Iran was involved…well, before 2003 I might have said that was far fetched, but it is hard to imagine more flimsy see-through evidence than the W. Bush administration came up with against Iraq in 2003. And that was adequate to justify a mostly unprovoked invasion of a sovereign UN member nation at the time.
  8. Am I saying this was a false flag attack? No, as much as I enjoy a good conspiracy theory, I won’t say that without evidence. I’m just saying that false flag or not, partisans are smart enough to take advantage of something like this to justify their preferred course of action.
  9. So…it would not surprise me if Israel attacks Iran in the coming weeks or months. And it would not surprise me if the U.S. supports that or at least remains silent. It would surprise me if they joined in, but in the end that seems unnecessary. An the major players in the region of Egypt to Saudi Arabia to the UAE will probably be just fine with it too, whatever they say in public.

Operation Atlantic Resolve

We hear that the U.S. is mobilizing about 3,000 reservists for deployment to Europe. I wondered how troop levels now compare to the past. Here are a few facts and figures:

  • In the late 1950s, the U.S. had about 450,000 troops in Europe. (from The Week)
  • For “most of the Cold War”, the U.S. had around 330,000 and NATO as a whole around 900,000. The Warsaw Pact had around 1.2 million. (same source as above)
  • After 1991, U.S. troops were reduced to around 66,000. (same source as above)
  • In 2018, it was around 65,000. This is a bit surprising to me – so even though “Operation Atlantic Resolve” started when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, troop levels were still maintained around where they were during the supposedly peaceful 1990s.
  • Currently in 2023, the U.S. has around 100,000 troops in Europe. (Politico)
  • I tried to figure out how many troops Russia has in Ukraine, but I found this number elusive. CNN says around 500 battalions, and just from random web searching a battalion varies but could be something like 500 soldiers. So multiply these very rough numbers you get 250,000 troops.

So the headline about 3,000 reservists seems like a pretty small number in the grand scheme. What are the troops in Europe actually doing. Going back to the The Week article (from 2022):

The US will establish a permanent headquarters of the US 5th Army Corps in Poland, acting as a forward command post and army garrison headquarters. There will be an additional brigade stationed in Romania to enhance Nato forces across the eastern flank, alongside other manoeuvrable US army units. The US will also increase deployments of special operations forces, armoured vehicles, aviation and air defence to strengthen the security of the region.

The emphasis is on combined operations with other Nato allies, using forces that have enhanced flexibility and combat readiness. The US will also deploy two additional F-35 fighter bomber squadrons to the UK and two additional destroyers at Rota naval base in Spain.

The Week

March 19, 2003

As I write this on March 19, 2023, today is the 20-year anniversary of the U.S. launching its attack on Iraq. This article in the Intercept reminded me of something I had forgotten – that in addition to the supposed weapons of mass destruction, which the administration probably knew was doubtful, part of the narrative to build support was the narrative that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks. This article tells a story where the CIA looked and looked for connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and was never able to prove anything despite the administration pushing the theory in public. Only when it finally and embarrasingly became clear that the evidence could not support case did the administration throw its full weight behind the “missing weapons of mass destruction” theory.

Tenet was so intimidated by the fallout from the fight over the intelligence on connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda that he was eager to cooperate with the White House on WMD. After all, there were plenty of old intelligence reports, dating back to the 1990s when United Nations weapons inspectors had been in Iraq, that strongly suggested Saddam had WMD. There was even a sense of guilt that still ran through the CIA over the fact that, at the time of the Gulf War in 1991, the agency had failed to detect evidence of Iraq’s fledgling nuclear weapons program. That the CIA had almost no new intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs since at least 1998, when U.N. weapons inspectors had been withdrawn from Iraq, was largely ignored by Tenet and most senior CIA officials; they didn’t want to admit that they had been dependent on the U.N. To account for a gap of at least five years in much of the intelligence reporting on Iraqi WMD programs, the CIA assumed the worst: that the weapons programs detected in the 1990s had only grown stronger and more dangerous.

Whenever intelligence was collected that countered this narrative, CIA officials discredited the sources or simply ignored it…

By contrast, any new nugget of information suggesting that Iraq still had WMD was treated like gold dust inside the CIA. Ambitious analysts quickly learned that the fastest way to get ahead was to write reports proving the existence of Iraqi WMD programs. Their reports would be quickly given to Tenet, who would loudly praise the reporting and then rush it to the White House — which would then leak it to the press. The result was a constant stream of stories about aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapons laboratories, and nerve gas produced and shared with terrorists.

Intercept

So maybe some people pushing the narrative understood that it was a lie, but many, it seems, fooled themselves with their own bullshit. They started a war that broke hopes for a peaceful world emerging from the Cold War.

civilian victimization

I think it is clear that Russia felt threatened by NATO expansion since the 1990s and this played a role in the decision to invade Ukraine. This does not excuse their actions, but perhaps if different decisions had been made in the 1990s and 2000s we would not be here. Given that we are here, the question is how much to support Ukraine and oppose Russia militarily. Some are suggesting that pumping in as many deadly weapons as possible will shorten the war and ultimately reduce civilian suffering. Some scholars, for example the ones quoted in this Atlantic article, are citing evidence for the opposite. My hunch has always been that there may be a rational case for war to achieve geopolitical objectives at times, but I doubt that it ever reduces civilian suffering.

Alex Downes has conducted methodologically rigorous research on the causes of civilian victimization, a wartime strategy that targets and kills noncombatants. To this end, he compiled a data set of every country in the world that participated in “interstate wars between 1816 and 2003, which produced a list of 100 wars, 323 belligerent countries, and 52 cases of civilian victimization.” He found that states are significantly more likely to escalate against the population as they become more desperate from higher battlefield fatalities, longer war duration, or the transition of the conflict to a war of attrition.

Whether civilian victimization pays remains contested, but the strategic logic is not—to sap the morale of an adversary’s population or undermine the enemy’s ability to resist. Empirical research by other scholars with different samples likewise finds that “as a conflict actor weakens relative to its adversary, it employs increasingly violent tactics toward the civilian population as a means of reshaping the strategic landscape to its benefit.” Contrary to the conventional wisdom, scholarship suggests that Ukrainian citizens may paradoxically benefit from us supporting them less.

Atlantic

February 2023 in Review

Sorry to all my faithful readers worldwide (who I could undoubtedly count with the fingers of one hand with some left over) for my lengthy posting gap. Anyway, let’s have a look at what I was thinking about in February.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Pfizer says they are not doing gain of function research on potential extinction viruses. But they totally could if they wanted to. And this at a time when the “lab leak hypothesis” is peeking out from the headlines again. I also became concerned about bird flu, then managed to convince myself that maybe it is not a huge risk at the moment, but definitely a significant risk over time.

Most hopeful story: Jimmy Carter is still alive as I write this. The vision for peace he laid out in his 2002 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech is well worth a read today. “To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war.”

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: It was slim pickings this month, but Jupiter affects the Sun’s orbit, just a little bit.