Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics.
Omar Bradley(?)

Colonel Brighton: I want a decision, sir.

Prince Feisal: You want me to fall back on the Yenbo.

Brighton: Well, you’re not doing much good here, sir. I’m sorry to rub it in, sir, but we can’t supply you here.

Feisal: You could supply us through Aqaba.

General Petraeus’ logistic staff seems to have learned from Lawrence of Arabia.

With the British troops retreating to their air-base near Basra and eventually leaving, the U.S. supply route from Kuwait harbour to Baghdad is endangered. It is assumed that any U.S. conflict with Iran would lead to unrest in the southern Shia provinces in Iraq and disrupt that logistic ‘line of communication’.

But the U.S. military doesn’t seem very concerned. As the NYT wrote two weeks ago:

There is little talk of increasing the American troop presence along the major supply route, which links Baghdad and Kuwait and is called M.S.R. Tampa, although officials in Baghdad and Washington say other options include increased patrols by armed surveillance aircraft, attack helicopters and combat jets.

There are about 2,000 trucks per day hauling supplies on the red road, including some 3.3 million gallons of fuel per day. It is quite optimistic to believe that a 300 miles long road with many
big bridges and lots of heavy traffic could be kept open by ‘armed
surveillance aircrafts’. So this didn’t sound right to me.

Now we learn that the military built and uses an alternative. It only didn’t talk about it.

McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau chief Leila Fadel travels by car from Baghdad to Amman. She finds the road through Anbar province open and full of trucks:

The biggest obstacles were huge convoys of cargo trucks, escorted by American Humvees, ..
…
The highway then stretched for miles of dusty desert. Sometimes we veered onto access roads to avoid huge convoys of trucks, often with American military escorts. In one I counted 202 vehicles.
…
Later, I got an e-mail from Mohammed about his return trip to Baghdad.

"We drove all the way back at night and there were hundreds of trucks and many passenger vehicles on the road," he wrote.

While the route through Anbar was closed during the U.S. fights with the Sunni resistance, now  huge U.S. convois use it day and night without much trouble.

The ‘Anbar awakening’ created an alternative to MSR Tampa. The tenth of millions of dollars the U.S. payed to those pesky Sunni sheiks are a good investment. They bought a new secure supply line. These Sunni sheiks will also not complain very much when some day bombs might fall on Shia Iran …

One might even suspect that opening an alternative to MSR Tampa was the real intent of the money induced ‘awakening’. But we likely will never know …

While the new Route Blue is about double as long as the red MSR Tampa, a long haul from the port of Aqaba is better than no haul at all. Especially when it carries your breakfast.

(Note to those nuts who will damn McClatchy for ‘again revealing military secrets’. Folks in the Middle East know perfectly well how to count the trucks passing their windows. They don’t need ‘western’ news services to evaluate its meaning.)

Did the state of the world get worse or has the increased volume and intensity of my reading throughout the last years intensified my perception of world problems?

In early September three people alleged of planing to bomb some U.S. bases were captured in Germany. WaPo wrote:

Prosecutors said the men — two Germans who had converted to Islam and a Turkish citizen who lived in Germany — had trained at camps in Pakistan run by the Islamic Jihad Union, a Central Asian network that is a close ally of al-Qaeda.

The leader of the Islamic terror research group of Germans internal intelligence service, Benno Koepfer, thinks the above is wrong. There is no IJU. Here is an interview published today in the German daily TAZ (my slightly shortened translation):

TAZ: Were the three bomb-builders backed by the Islamic Jihad Union?

BK: I doubt that these three were working on orders by some fixed organization named Islamic Jihad Union.

Cont. reading: Let’s Bury the Islamic Jihad Union

News & views & other issues …

A screen-capture from the homepage of the New York Times …

… which leads me to predict one of next year’s headlines:

Charges Will Be Dropped for Contractor in Iraq Killings
Investigators have recommended dropping murder charges against a security contractor charged with killing 17 apparently unarmed Iraqis in the volatile city of Haditha nearly a year ago, a defense lawyer in the case said Thursday.

Hannah K. O’Luthon pointed to this Haaretz’ analysis by Amir Oren about the Israeli air attack on Syria three weeks ago.

The farce came to a partial end yesterday, and even though there is still a gag order on most of the juicy details, we can safely say that behind the successful blackout campaign lies an enormous failure. The silence of official Israel was not meant to protect military secrets.
…
Policy was shaped on the basis of a certain assumption about Bashar Assad’s behavior in response to the operation. … [I]t seems that once again Assad surprised Israel; whoever expected him to respond to the operation in a military operation was wrong.

In my September 11 piece I also claimed that the operation was a failure. One of the Israeli jets dropped its extra fuel tanks over Turkey. This only made sense as an emergency measure while under threat from Syrian air defense. The Israeli planes likely never saw their real target.

But the second assertion in Oren’s analysis is much more frightening. If he is right, which I think he is, the Israeli air attack was done to provoke a military answer by Syria. The attack was an attempt to justify the start of a wider war.

Back in September I didn’t see the real picture but had questions:

There will be no major IDF response to Qassam strike in Negev due to tensions in north,
Haaretz analyzes. But why does the Israeli army need all it has on the
border to Syria? This when it also claims that there are no signs of Syrian preparations for war?

If the Syrians refrain from retaliating for the air strikes, which
they will for lack of capacity, why is the Israeli army preparing to
fight on or from the Golan heights?

These question are now answered. An immediate attack was planed based on some provokated Syrian action. But Syria didn’t fall into the trap. The chief of the UN observation force on the Golan, in an interview (in German) with Der Spiegel, recently unveiled that throughout the summer Israel has intensly trained and prepared for large attack operations. This despite quietness on the Syrian side of the Golan boarder.

But to what purpose might Israel have tried to provoke Syria into a wider war? Why did it train large ground attack operations?

I can think of three possible intentions:

Cont. reading: Israel Failed to Provoke War

Robin Wright and Ann Scott Tyson are fulfilling their party duties. In today’s Washington Post they fib about Iraqis to Pay China $100 Million for Weapons for Police:

The China deal, not previously made public, has "alarmed military analysts who note that Iraq’s security forces already are unable to account for more than 190,000 weapons supplied by the United States, many of which are believed to be in the hands of Shiite and Sunni militias, insurgents and other forces seeking to destabilize Iraq and target U.S. troops.

The article does NOT quote any "alarmed military analysts" who notes something towards what these ‘journalists’ assert. They, without sourcing, put culpability on Iraqi security forces, where the U.S. military is known to be the culprit.

As the Government Accountability Office was reported to have found:

Cont. reading: WaPo Journalists Rewrite History

Some suspected all along that the United States still officially tortures. Despite the expressed will of the people of the U.S., the policy has not changed even after new legislation purported to restrict it.

A new NYT piece confirms as much. It comes just in time for the hearings for a new AG. The continued policy is an outrage and should be another reason for impeachment. But I don’t expect Congress to do anything about this.

Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen write: Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

[S]oon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. […], an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
…
Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
[…]
[I]n July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, President
Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the
administration calls “enhanced” interrogation techniques — the details
remain secret — and officials say the C.I.A. again is holding prisoners
in “black sites” overseas. The executive order was reviewed and
approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

With all the talk about Blackwater, the mercenary outfit running wild in Iraq, a question:

There is this one group where people voluntarily sign up for money or other perks to join an outfit that is dedicated and used to wage wars.

There is this another group where people voluntarily sign up for money or other perks to join another outfit that is dedicated and used to wage wars.

In both outfits people work to fullfill the interests, mostly financial ones, of their owners.

People in both outfits are sometimes stepping over the boundaries of legality. They wound and shot up civilians in panic or without specific reason.

Some people in both outfits are outright criminals doing worse stuff.

Whatever they do in a warzone, people in both outfits will usually will not face any serious punishment for committing crimes against civilians. (The higher folks are within each hierarchie, the smaller the chance.)

Both outfits have a generally far rightwing leadership that also believes some quite radical religious theories.

Both outfits are successfully avoiding any meaningful oversight.

Where is the practical difference between Blackwater and the U.S. military?

[R]eports about very innocent people being thrown into detention, where they could be held for years without any representation or charges, is distressing;

Press Briefing by Dana Perino, The White House, October 1, 2007

She was talking about Myanmar, though other places come to mind …

Anti-semitism justifies itself through conspiracy theories of "Jewish bankers ruling the world" and with outright forgeries like the protocols of the elders of zion.

These nutty thoughts can are easy to refute by facts. But one cannot deny that some rich Jewish supporters of Israel are doing there best to fuel new anti-semitic claims. Consider the new Jewish-Republican group Freedom’s Watch:

Freedom’s Watch is dedicated to educating individuals about and advancing public policies that protect America’s interests at home and abroad, foster economic prosperity, and strengthen families.

While that sounds benign and not really controversial, the organization real agenda is hardly about these lofty claims.  After defending Bush’s continued "surge" with full page advertisements, the group is planing to launch a campaign for war on Iran:

Cont. reading: Freedom’s Watch Fuels Anti-Semitism

Last Thursday congress increased the federal government debt limit from $8.965 trillion to $9.815 trillion.

That will be some US$ 32,600 of debt on every U.S. citizen – suckling to old.

Not that the debt itself matters that much. Who says a government will have to pay back its debt at all?

Sure, the interest has to be payed, but the Fed can certainly influence that rate. Additionally a little inflation can do wonders on debt burdons. As long as China and the Middle East oil-sheiks find reason to agree to such a devaluation of their reserves, everything is fine. But it is foolish to assume that they will do so forever.

Cont. reading: Supressed Debt Limit News