How To Lose A War

Before the United States enters Syria, it should consider the lessons of history.

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There are many reasons why nations lose wars. Sometimes small states are simply overwhelmed by large empires, such as Poland’s fall to Nazi Germany in September 1939 or the invasion of Finland by the Soviet Union in 1939. These outcomes are almost always foreordained by huge imbalances in manpower and national wealth, although the superhuman heroism of the Finns and the weather postponed their inevitable defeat for six months.

But such vast mismatches are history’s exceptions. And, on occasion, even the far weaker power can trump the advantages of numbers and resources of the stronger. The Greeks at Marathon, and a decade later at the battles of Salamis and Plataea, proved that even a massive Persian fleet and army did not doom the badly outnumbered Greek cause.

Generals, good and bad, can transform a war—at least up to a point. Had the Confederacy had leaders like Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George Thomas, it might have held out for years until offered a negotiated settlement. Had Gen. George Casey remained in command in Iraq after 2006, there would have been no surge and no American salvation. Without Hannibal, the Carthaginians would have lost the Second Punic War a decade earlier. Take Matthew Ridgway out of Korea and the Americans by February 1951 might well have been back to Pusan awaiting evacuation.

   
  Photo credit: TTVo

Technological inferiority—and the permanent inability to rectify it—on rare occasions can lose a war. Hernán Cortes had not one force multiplier, but several—Spanish steel swords, harquebuses, cross-bows, horses, cannon, and body armor—that allowed his conquistadors to craft the destruction of Aztec armies well more than ten times the size of the Spanish and indigenous allied forces at Tenochtitlan. Saddam Hussein in 1990-91 had no answer to the overwhelming American coalition that swarmed his air defenses in a one-sided bombing of Iraq—in the manner that Slobodan Milosevic was similarly outmatched by the NATO air armada that bombed him out power by 1999. Yet, in most cases, even clear weapon superiority—remember both the Russians and Americans in Afghanistan—does not guarantee victory.

How then do nations more often lose wars? In short, mostly by fighting them without careful examination of what are their political aims and whether they have the means to achieve them. It is common for most nations to go to war without its leaders telling the people either what political goals they seek through the fighting or whether they possess the resources to obtain them.

Amid this confusion, a sure way to lose a war is to shed allies and gain enemies. In 431 B.C. Sparta invaded Athens to begin the Peloponnesian War. Both sides had roughly commensurate allies. That parity helped to ensure a stand-off for the first ten years of the fighting of the three-decade long war. But after the catastrophic defeat at Sicily in 413, Sparta and the Peloponnesian League had been joined not just by Thebes, but also by Sicily and soon Persia.

The result was that Athens was defeated in 404 not by Sparta, but rather by the greatest Greek city-states and the Persian Empire combined. The volatile Athenian Assembly was probably right at the war’s outbreak that Athens may have been able to fight Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies to a stalemate, but it never imagined that it would end up fighting allied powers with far more combined resources than its original Spartan enemy.

By May 1941 Hitler had won World War II—at least in the sense that the area of most of the present European Union was under his control. Italy was allied, the Iberian peninsula sympathetically neutral, Russia a partner, America distant and not interested in war, and its sole surviving adversary, Great Britain, was isolated and weak. Yet, by invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, and declaring war on the United States six months later, the Third Reich gained far more powerful enemies than all those it had previously defeated.

Hitler had originally sold the war to his generals on reclaiming lands and glory lost in World War I. But had he warned them in 1939 that he was intent on soon declaring war on both America and the Soviet Union before defeating Britain, they would have thought him insane—especially given the fact that just twenty three years earlier, Germany had lost a winnable conflict on the Western Front by drawing the United States belatedly into World War I. In other words, like Athens, Germany lost to enemies that were not even conceivably enemies when the war started.  CONTINUE READING

Lies About Libya

There can be honest differences of opinion on many subjects. But there can also be dishonest differences. Last week's testimony under oath about events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 makes painfully clear that what the Obama administration told the American people about those events were lies out of whole cloth.

What we were told repeatedly last year by the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and the American ambassador to the U.N., was that there was a protest demonstration in Benghazi against an anti-Islamic video produced by an American, and that this protest demonstration simply escalated out of control.

This "spontaneous protest" story did not originate in Libya but in Washington. Neither the Americans on duty in Libya during the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, nor officials of the Libyan government, said anything about a protest demonstration.

The highest American diplomat on the scene in Libya spoke directly with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by phone, and told her that it was a terrorist attack. The president of Libya announced that it was a terrorist attack. The C.I.A. told the Obama administration that it was a terrorist attack.

With lies, as with potato chips, it is hard to stop with just one. After the "spontaneous protest" story was discredited, the next claim was that this was the best information available at the time from intelligence sources.

But that claim cannot survive scrutiny, now that the 12 drafts of the Obama administration's talking points about Benghazi have belatedly come to light. As draft after draft of the talking points were made, e-mails from the State Department pressured the intelligence services to omit from these drafts their clear and unequivocal statement from the outset that this was a terrorist attack.

Attempts to make it seem that Ambassador Susan Rice's false story about a "spontaneous protest" was the result of her not having accurate information from the intelligence services have now been exposed as a second lie to excuse the first lie.

Despite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's loudly proclaimed question "What difference, at this point, does it make?" the difference is between an honest mistake and a calculated lie to deceive the American people, in order to win an election. CONTINUE READING

New Graduates Heading Back to Parents’ Houses

Newscom

As commencement season winds down, it’s discomfiting to think that almost half of new graduates know exactly where they’re headed when school’s out: Back to their parents’ homes.

The Pew Research Center reports that 45 percent of college grads younger than 25 are “living with family.” That percentage is almost two-thirds higher than in 2001. But at least some grads got to listen to a cool speaker before they headed home to stare at faded posters of Barack Obama.

“You’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works,” President Obama warned students in a commencement address at Ohio State University. “They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.”

There are two major problems with Obama’s analysis. First, Obama paints a false picture, in this speech and many others, when he makes it seem there are only two options: either you’re all alone in the world, or you rely on help from big government.CONTINUE READING

Words That Replace Thought

If there is ever a contest for words that substitute for thought, "diversity" should be recognized as the undisputed world champion.

You don't need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodize about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as ugly as reality seems almost sordid.

To ask whether institutions that promote diversity 24/7 end up with better or worse relations between the races than institutions that pay no attention to it is only to get yourself regarded as a bad person. To cite hard evidence that places obsessed with diversity have worse race relations is to risk getting yourself labeled an incorrigible racist. Free thinking is not free.

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the government has a "compelling interest" in promoting diversity -- apparently more compelling than the 14th Amendment's requirement of "equal protection" of the law for everybody.

How does a racially homogeneous country like Japan manage to have high quality education, without the essential ingredient of diversity, for which there is supposedly a "compelling" need?

Conversely, why does India, one of the most diverse nations on Earth, have a record of intergroup intolerance and lethal violence today that is worse than that in the days of our Jim Crow South?

Even to ask such questions is to provoke charges of unworthy tactics, and motives too low to be dignified with an answer. Not that the true believers in diversity could answer anyway.

Among the candidates for runner-up to "diversity" as the top word for making thought obsolete is "fair."

Apparently everyone is entitled to a "fair share" of a society's prosperity, whether they worked 16-hour days to help create that prosperity or did nothing more than live off the taxpayers or depend on begging or crime to bring in a few bucks.

Apparently we owe them something just for gracing us with their presence, even if we feel that we could do without them quite well.

At the other end of the income scale, the rich are supposed to pay their "fair share" of taxes. But at neither end of the income scale is a "fair share" defined as a particular number or proportion, or in any other concrete way. It is just a political synonym for "more," dressed up in moralistic-sounding rhetoric. What "fair" really means is more arbitrary power for government.

Another word that shuts down thought is "access." People who fail to meet the standards for anything from college admission to a mortgage loan are often said to have been denied "access" or opportunity.

But equal access or equal opportunity is not the same as equal probability of success.

CONTINUE READING

Get the Facts and Save Lives With Guns

Teach gun safety in classrooms and leave sex education to parents. Plan B won’t save young people from incurable STDs, but guns will protect women and children from being raped or murdered. The more young people know about guns, the safer our society will be.

Rush Limbaugh said on his talk radio show on May 1: “We know kids are gonna get guns anyway, why not teach them how to use them?” The king of talk was right. Instead of pushing morning-after pills on 15-year-old girls, we should be showing young people how to responsibly use the preeminent tool they have to defend themselves in the event of a violent attack—a gun.

Over the past decade, overall violent crime in the United States has steadily decreased according to FBI reports. Meanwhile, gun ownership is at an all-time high. The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) is one of the best ways to gauge the number of new gun purchases. In 2011, there was an all-time record high of 16.5 million checks. In 2012, Americans set a new record for gun ownership: 19.5 million background checks.

Americans use guns to hold off assault far more than they use guns to commit murder or violent crime. Indeed, Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck has shown that Americans use guns to defensively prevent crime about 2 million times a year—often by merely brandishing a weapon in front of a would-be-assailant. “…most violent crimes end if the victim simply exposes a firearm. Most criminals want to leave the scene with the same number of holes they started with,” writes Michael Martin in his book, Concealed Carry and Home Defense Fundamentals.

On top of all this, the only gun legislation that has consistently been shown to reduce violent crime is concealed carry permit legislation.

All of the data on guns and crime brings us to one conclusion: More guns in the hands of honest Americans equates to less violent crime.CONTINUE READING

Economic Misery: The New Normal

The weakest recovery in the nation’s history continues. On Wednesday, payroll processing firm ADP reported that private sector businesses created a disappointing 119,000 jobs in the month of April. Once again, to use a word that should embarrass those who support the Obama administration’s Keynesian economic policies, this meager total was “unexpected.

Economic “experts” surveyed byReuters had predicted at least 150,000 new jobs. “Nearly every industry has seen slower growth since the beginning of the year,” said Moody’s economist Mark Zandi. “Smaller businesses are experiencing much weaker growth.”

Most of the jobs were created in the service industries, which added 113,000 positions, while goods production accounted for the other 6,000. Both figures represented 7-month lows in growth. Adding to the misery, ADP’s March total of 158,000 jobs gained was revised downward to 131,000, and the latest data show the manufacturing sector, which lost 10,000 jobs, has plateaued, or may be slowing down again.

The level of economic weakness is daunting. According to Bespoke Investment Group, the seven year stretch of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth below three precent, occurring from 2006 to the present, represents the longest one since 1929, the year which marked the beginning of the Great Depression.

Furthermore, despite a U3 unemployment rate of 7.6 percent, used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to calculate “official” unemployment, the U6 rate that far more accurately reflects reality, is 13.8 percent. The reason the U3 rate is misleading is because people who have given up looking for work aren’t counted as unemployed. Since America’s workforce participation rate is at its lowest level since 1979, reality is being manipulated to make the Obama administration’s dismal economic policies look better than they actually are.

Still more manipulation is being pursued by the feds. They are going to revise how GDP growth is calculated. Research and development spending, as well as the capital value of all “intellectual property,” such as books, movies, records, television programs and plays—produced since 1929—will be added to the total. Michael Pento, founder of Pento Portfolio Strategies, cut to the heart of the subterfuge. “When GDP numbers are chronically bad and the labor force participation rate is perpetually falling, our government will do the same thing they did for the inflation data—tinker with the formula until you get the desired result,” he explained. CONTINUE READING 

America's Insane Asylum for Jihadists, Hustlers and Frauds

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon killing spree by foreign-born jihadists, see-no-evil bureaucrats in Washington are stubbornly defending America's lax asylum policies. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told the Senate Tuesday that the screening process is rigorous, effective and extensive.

These people can't handle the truth. Or tell it.

The Tsarnaev brothers reportedly were granted asylum by "derivative" status through their parents. After entering on short-term tourist visas, the mother and father (an ethnic Chechen Muslim) won asylum and acquired U.S. citizenship. Next, younger son Dzhokhar obtained U.S. citizenship. Older son Tamerlan, whose naturalization application was pending, traveled freely between the U.S. and the jihad recruitment zone of Dagestan, Russia, last year before the bombers' gunfight in Watertown, Mass., last week left the Muslim terrorist dead.

Though they had convinced the U.S. that they faced deadly persecution, the Tsarnaevs' parents both returned to their native land and were there when their sons launched last week's terror rampage. Authorities will not reveal any details of the sob stories the Tsarnaevs originally spun to win asylum benefits for the entire family.

The whole thing stinks. And it's an old, familiar stench. Immigration lawyers have been working the system on behalf of asylum con artists for decades. The racketeers coach applicants with phony stories and documents from "chop shops" and game their way through "refugee roulette."

Asylum and refugee claimants are being rubber-stamped at all-time-high rates. Government data analyzed by the nonpartisan TRAC website show that "the odds of an asylum claim being denied in Immigration Court reached an historic low in FY 2012, with only 44.5 percent being turned down. Ten years ago, almost two out of three (62.6 percent) individuals seeking asylum lost their cases in similar actions. Twenty years ago, fewer than one out of four (24 percent) asylum applicants won their cases, while three out of four (76 percent) lost."  CONTINUE READING

Obama Fail!

You know what it comes down to, Barry-0? People don’t trust you. Simple as that. Oh … certainly you do have your supporters. It’s not that NOBODY trusts you .... just most productive Americans above the median IQ. The moochers, leaches and parasites still trust you … they trust you to keep forking over the government checks. When the checks stop coming … when they find that a change of regimes in Washington will necessitate their actually becoming marginally productive again … their fealty to their long-gone here, the great and powerful 0bama, will fade to resentment and scorn.

Your gun control ploy failed, didn’t it? And didn’t you look like the petulant little boy at that presser yesterday afternoon. Even one of your greatest protectors, The Washington Post, said that there was not one portion of this bill; not one clause; not one section; that would have prevented the shootings in Newtown. No matter. Most people don’t read the Washington Post, and whoever wrote that blasphemy was going to be ignored by the rest of the media sycophants who hang on their Dear Ruler’s every word. You are, after all, sort of a God, right? That’s what Newsweek said! (By the way, Newsweek is toast now. Their sort-of God couldn’t save them? For shame, Barry!)

But the question wasn’t really whether or not your gun control measures would work, was it? The point was that you wanted to take an incremental step toward your ultimate goal, right? You remember, don’t you? You told a fellow professor at that Chicago law school that you didn’t believe that people should be allowed to own guns. His name was John Lott. Even if you’ve conveniently forgotten that moment, Professor Lott hasn’t. Pesky things, those memories. Anyway … you knew that the troublesome Second Amendment was going to be problematic, so take anything you can get, right?

Yesterday you called the opponents of your gun control measures “liars.” Lies? What lies? You mean like that lie you’ve been telling for years about the “gun show loophole?” There really wasn’t any such loophole, was there? The same laws applied to selling a gun at a gun show that applied anywhere else. People soon figured that out, knew that you had been lying to them, and the distrust grew.

Then people started wondering about the timing of your push for gun control. There was a shooting in Aurora, Colorado last year. Remember? Some nut case walked into a movie theater dressed as the Joker and started shooting. Ahhh! But that was last July! You were campaigning for re-election, so other than making a visit to Colorado, you were pretty quiet about gun control, weren’t you? And there was that lunatic who shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in early 2011. Again, that was in your first term. Re-election was not assured by any measure, so again you had to forego the massive push for gun control.

But then came Newtown, Connecticut. You had already secured a second term, so the coast was clear! In fact, you had been waiting for an incident just like this, right? Start the gun control campaign! Go after the bitter clingers and grind them into the complacent, frightened, unarmed Americans. All part of your “fundamental transformation of the United States of America,” right Barry?  CONTINUE READING

Silence of the Lambs in America

In present-day America, we are being bombarded with increasingly dire headlines about the condition of our nation. Common elements among these headlines of domestic disorder and discontent are reports of unbridled government overreach into our lives, from much-publicized gun control laws, warrantless searches and seizures, to the perverse and absurdly shameful degradation of our human dignity at the hands of the TSA and the DHS.

Today, we are facing an assault on our freedoms for which those who lived before us have shed their blood, entrusting us with the gift of an indivisible nation under God. Yes, under God.

Time seems to have separated us from the ultimate sacrifices of our forefathers, for we no longer see their blood that once stained dirt on the battlefields of America. We no longer relate to the sorrows of our ancestors or their sacrifices, nor do we feel the pride of their successes. We are no longer taught the history of a nation that freed itself from tyranny and oppression. Instead, we are subjected to the deliberate perversion of history that characterizes our founders as terrorists—along with portraying those of us who object to such depictions as threats to the state—by an ever-increasing totalitarian government operating in tandem with modern-day academia and a state-sponsored press.

As Americans, we are witnessing the systematic dismantling of our country by the incremental erosion of our liberties and rights by methods that are shaking the very foundations upon which this country was founded. We’ve seen this before, as history is filled with examples of our current predicament; but somehow, today, things seem different to those who are paying attention. In many ways, things are indeed different, yet it is fitting to cite what was written long ago: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Today’s headlines proclaim that those of us  who cherish the rights bestowed upon us by our Creator are now considered to be terrorists. This is the result of the cancer of moral and cultural degradation that we have allowed to take root in the very soil stained with the blood of our forefathers. The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children. What are we going to tell our children and grandchildren about what we’ve done to stop the metastasis of tyranny? CONTINUE READING

Middle East 'Democracy'

The Obama administration treated the creation of "democracy" in the Middle East as a Good Thing. Ironically, those who created the United States of America viewed democracy with fear-- and created a Constitutional republic instead.

Everything depends on how you define democracy. In its most basic sense, democracy means majority rule. But there can be majority rule in a free country or in a country with an authoritarian or even a dictatorial government.

In this age of sloppy uses of words, many people include freedom in their conception of democracy. But whether democracy leads to freedom is an open question, not a foregone conclusion.

In the United States, when the Union army of occupation withdrew from the South, years after the Civil War, majority rule returned to the Southern states-- and the freedom of blacks was drastically restricted from what it had been under military rule.

Those who applauded the spread of democracy in the Middle East seemed to assume that the "Arab Spring" meant greater freedom. But there was no reason to assume that beforehand-- and certainly no reason to believe it after the fact. Christians in Egypt have already lost whatever security they had under Hosni Mubarak.

The idea that "all people want freedom" is one of those feel-good phrases that some people indulge in. But you do not get a free country just because everybody wants freedom-- for themselves. You can have a free country only when people are willing to let other people have freedom.

Nazis were free to be Nazis under Hitler and Communists were free to be Communists under Stalin and Mao. But nobody else was free.

Toleration for others is a precondition for a free society-- and it is hard to think of more intolerant societies than most of those in the Middle East. There have been female heads of state in some other Islamic countries, but not in the Middle East.

Democracy in the Middle East context means majority selection of which individuals get the power to oppress. Why would anyone have seriously believed that it would mean anything more than that? Certainly not from the history of the region.CONTINUE READING