Military Tactics, RummyWar, Iran, and the Dear Departed Dodo Bird.

Watson: "Is there any point to which you wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night time."

Watson: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That is the curious incident."


I've now got forty-three "folders" on my pocket recorder, questions and suggestions from friends and readers - not necessarily the same thing - for Mongoose Trick "blogs." "Americans" are very argumentative people, including those willing to argue on subjects about which they admittedly know almost nothing useful or probative, and it even seems I've started a small blogging war - people who disagree with me. That's fine: one favorite tactic of mine has always been to let the fustian and fervent one talk - sooner or later, his ignorance of the subject or the illogical character of his argument yells louder than he can. One fellow, Dr. Brooks Mick (http://www.theconservativevoice.com), who - as an instance of what I mean as respects "Conservative" reasoning - suggests that what we do about global warming is wait and see what happens. Pretend it isn't there. If the doctor uses that sort of logic concerning symptoms of infectious disease in his patients - well, you know. Sheesh! I wonder what the Liberal point of view is on that one!

Hopefully - with regard to the argument thing - somebody will write to me and tell me how to set up a comments page here that works. The several Microsoft FrontPage books I've bought are written in the gibberish and jargon typical of a nation of people who seldom or never read a book, and who think the English sentence still another place where you do what-the-hell-ever you feel like, to hell with rules or effect. A blog I intend to write shortly will discuss the growing paralysis of our society on that very account, from Malapropping nationally syndicated columnists to feminists seemingly intent upon altering all of reality by way of torturing language, to tech writers totally devoid of awareness concerning pronoun reference.

I suppose, parenthetically, that I should explain that last - this is not a super-literate or comprehending society, you know. The particular example of ambiguous pronoun reference I refer to occurs, for instance, when the author of a manual on Microsoft Office Front Page writes a paragraph in which he discussed six separate programming operations, then refers to one, several, or all them all by using the pronoun "it." A-a-a-a-r-gGH! If that weren't enough, you find - having tried all the various combinations of possibilities (seven hundred and twenty, by the way, and assuming that only one of the possible "mouse" maneuvers is the right one) - that NONE of them work.

If you were a devotee of tactical assessment and determination of best method by means of extrapolation and inference using microcosmic example - a variation on statistical probability, in other words - you'd see right there how I think our nation has come to be in such a helplessly spastic mental state. Nothing confuses like mangled communication, and we are a society hell-bent on destroying any chance that anyone might say clearly what he thinks or means - especially where communication between the public and its "leaders" is concerned. No single segment of our society has contributed more to the witch's brew of ditzy equivocation, Malaprop, and solecism that is our national discourse than the sociological mental meandering of feminism. Ladies, if you give me a pain in the ass, for instance, does that mean I have an ass "issue?" How about when - as we hear the supposed victim has in every such case we hear about (and we hear about one a week, these days) - the raped woman has "vaginal bruising." Does that mean she has "vaginal issues?" There used to be another word for that.

Anyway, having made my contribution to the futile war that seeks to restore to society some semblance of what the male once was, I come to my real topic - military tactics. When the first glimmer (actually, that was the day G.W. Bush announced his intention to run for POTUS) of possibility that we would commit the colossal blunder that is Operation Iraqi Freedom, my tertulia at the Calypso Cafe here wanted to know my opinion of the invasion. When I said "stupid," the question became one of military tactics, which happens to have been my profession for twenty three years.

Maybe I should point out here that generals - and before the dawn of RummyWar - U.S. Secretaries of Defense - haven't had much to do with the tactical, or strategic, planning of battles and warfare. Modern generals - post World War Two, I mean - are more like CEOs. They plan logistics, costs, and all the things one studies in business administration courses (remind you of anyone?). Most - and there are notable exceptions who quickly get fired nowadays - can't fight worth a shit. It's just the way it is - go back and read what I said a minute ago about "spastic."

So what did I say we should do in Iraq (besides "stay the hell out," that is)? Well, this won't be verbatim, but my friends would attest that it is damned close. First, I said (I think I said "nobody in his right mind would . . .") - I sure as hell would not go into combat led by George W. Bush or Donald H. Rumsfeld. People with degrees in Business Administration make damned poor military tacticians ("profit margin" there tends to have to do with bodies - dead ones).

Donald Henry - Rumsfeld, that is - is actually a U.S. Navy Captain and pilot (aviator). He ought to know tactics, someone at the table that day averred. Uh-uh, I said. Never let an Air Force or Navy Aviation General or Admiral run a ground war. Guys in planes always assume once they've blasted hell out of their target that everything is over. Airmen always think they can win the war from the air. They never have. Not close. "Tactical Air" - or whatever the hell they're calling it today (more foggy language, you know), will call to you from way up there in the blue and tell you "target destroyed;" then, when you go sauntering in, the bad guys jump out of the rubble and shoot hell out of you. If you note a similarity between "target destroyed" from ten thousand feet and "mission accomplished" from the deck of the Abraham Lincoln, you may have the makings of a tactician.

Rumsfeld, I said that day several years ago, would do the equivalent in Iraq, racing to an over the target and leaving behind - and all around - UN-destroyed enemy soldiers and guerrilla fighters. In combat of any kind, you do not pass over or walk around where you know your enemy was without assuring that he can't shoot any more (and if you're saying, "Big deal - I knew that," you're right - any damned fool but a general or a flyboy knows that). We must not do that, I said, and we must not get drawn into another example of the Vietnam Era "firebases," hilltop enclaves, and the like. If we did, I said, it would be just like Vietnam, where to travel on a given highway was to invite disaster because you didn't control the country around it.

And the single thing that I said that day, the thing my friends will remember most, was that were we to invade Iraq a guerrilla war would erupt with absolute certainty. Arabs would come to the aid of Arabs, no matter the cause we purported; and to starve guerrillas, we would have to seal the borders of the nation just like we failed to do in Vietnam, and the reason we could not win there. Strictly off the top of my head, I said that day that we would need to have more troops in Iraq than we did in Vietnam, and I noted that we hadn't had enough troops there for the purpose we supposedly had. The number I used that day in discussing Iraq was six hundred thousand.

SO? Yeah, I know what you're thinking, and that's damned poor tactics, too. I don't think Lieutenant George W. Bush and U.S. Navy Captain Donald H (stands for Henry, you know) Rumsfeld are stupid. Think your opposition is stupid, believe it, he'll get behind you and wax your ass. There's damned well something wrong here, but it isn't that they're stupid. Yale University doesn't give stupid people Masters Degrees in business administration, and nitwits don't learn to fly and navigate an F-102 jet fighter. Donald Rumsfeld graduated from Princeton University, learned to fly and do aerial navigation well enough to be an instructor, and the U.S. Navy neither lets dummies teach flying, nor does it promote them to Captain. So what's the real problem?

I don't know. That's because I'm a tactician, not a psychologist or sociologist. That's where the problem has to lie. There was a guy back home once, a guy who had an absolutely stunning beauty for a wife. More, she was a person of the highest character, maybe the best I ever met. The idiot I'm talking about once told me that they had never in eleven years of marriage ever had a fight, or even serious disagreement. So what am I talking about? The fact that one night he ran off to Florida with a stripper in a local nightclub. Why the hell would the man do a thing so stupid and self-destructive?

Oh, yeah - and there was "collateral damage" there, too - three kids.

Sometime during his little escapade (and I tried to talk Jeanie out of the divorce that followed), Scott should have asked himself the same question the people here on the Big Rock Candy Mountain should be asking. Why are we doing all this shit?! Iraq was not only about the stupidest thing any rational person can imagine, the way we proceeded defies all tactical science - just about every tenet of land warfare. A kid who plays computer games would know better.

Well, Hal - you're the horn-rimmed honcho here, and you got yourself into this; what IS the answer? Well, go back to the top here. Every dispute - until we recover from the malaise associated with it, I won't say the damned word "issue" - in this country goes to its extremes so fast it makes your head swim. All heat, no light - just noise. And nothing accomplished. New Orleans. Illegal immigration. National health care. Gasoline prices and oil companies reneging on the people who kept them in business with staggering welfare payments. The environment (stick your head in the sand, and see if your ass cooks or freezes solid). Name it. A flood of criminals from Mexico are here just looking for work, and I don't care if it turns out that every Duke University Lacrosse player at that party was impotent and gay, or that the men the "victim" has identified weren't there, there will be people who say the purported victim was raped. Anybody remember Tawana Brawley?

I've got to digress long enough here to ask again why the hell that is NEWS! If thirty guys - or girls - get killed tomorrow in combat, one woman claiming she was raped will push their deaths off the media. Better ratings for the rape.

And you still ask me how the hell we've come to do something as Keystone Kops Krazy as Iraq and, I remind you, the totally unrelated "war on terror?"

So my answer is that you should restore some sanity. Come back to the real world. That's the one where the Dodo bird got killed because it was stupid. The one where when a voluptuous, nine-tenths nude woman walks up to a sex maniac, she does not defeat his crazed advances with slick karate moves and deliver his battered carcass to the police station; she just gets dragged into the alley, raped, murdered, and left. The world where when the people of Sleepy Hollow elect Beau Brummel President, they can't just scare him away with a pumpkin-headed horseman when things get spooky one night. If I become too alliterative with allusions when I point out that living on the Big Rock Candy Mountain doesn't change anything down in the real world, it's just because I continue to hope there's a way to wake the Dodo birds in this country up to the fact that no matter what you think, facts and reality don't change. The Dodo is extinct because he watched his fellows be killed and eaten, and learned nothing about his own safety from what he saw.

The last time I saw my friends at the Calypso, they had the pre-Iraq question for me again - but Iran, this time. Same as before, I said, and that - for GOD's sake - means we don't let George W. Bush and Donald H. Rumsfeld run the show.

And - in the name of all that's honorable - DON'T DO IT!

Now that I think about it, that's probably what happened to the Dodo. Everybody talked about the fool who got eaten last night, but went right on talking and doing business as usual.

Bye-bye, Dodo. Too bad about you.