I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres.....
"I want you to kill people individually."
"This is the 15th Memorial Day since the battle of Falluja in late 2004, in which 82 American service members died. The battle was a key operation at the outset of the Iraq War and resulted in the fiercest urban combat since the battle for Hue in Vietnam in 1968."
Note: not "in which 96 American and British service members, 800 Iraqi soldiers and civilians, and 1200 insurgents died". Not "resulted in the fiercest urban combat involving US troops since the battle for Hue".
Ackerman and the NYT instinctively ignore everyone and everything that isn't American. Intellectually they probably know, if you asked them directly, that the siege of Sarajevo and the battle of Grozny and the civil war in Beirut lasted longer and killed far more people than Fallujah. But it would no more occur to Ackerman to use those as comparisons than it would to use the sack of Kings Landing or the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. They simply do not exist in the same mental space. No real people were involved.
He doesn't actively argue that non-Americans don't have any reason to exist. The bar is really low these days.
Everyone can actively take part in massacring either of these articles. (I have found myself literally wanting popcorn while reading things online lately. That would create unstoppable addiction synergy though, especially if it's that lightly salted "gourmet" popcorn.)
I think the Atlantic piece is essentially right. (And, without intending to be a dick, if one pays any attention to foreign policy at all, not just right but no shit Sherlock right, consensus view for a decade at least.) And I don't know where heebietake comes from, it isn't about the human cost of war, it's about the strategic direction of war, and America's total failure to do so.
I'm about a third of the way into this, which so far is basically crap, but the point the author seems to be fumbling toward is that the Cold War as actually fought largely involved superpowers bankrolling other people's state/nation-building projects. This produced lots of atrocities, some state collapses, some successful state construction, and a few successful developmental states, the result as I read it depending mostly on the competence of the local actors.
As the Atlantic piece says, what DoD has being saying for the length of the GWOT is that any successful strategy must similarly be centered on state-building; yet political leadership has consistently denied being involved in any such thing, nor planned to do so, nor committed sufficient resources. Consequently, we see totally directionless foreign policy and a whole bunch of destroyed states, with the very partial exceptions of Iraq (post ISIS) and Syria (courtesy Russia).
And I don't know where heebietake comes from,
I try to read the links, in theory, at least a little, but that's a pretty high standard.
the result as I read it depending mostly on the competence of the local actors.
I'd think you'd want to cross this with a heaping helping of "underlying factors", but:
I think this general idea illustrates something I strongly believe in that is IMO undervalued across the board: people want to attribute success/failure to grand, big-picture elements (ideology, institutional structure, some innate character of the people involved), but I think just basic competence/diligence matter so much. Why?
Because lots of systems can be made workable through good faith and competence, as long as the resources are adequate. A really good instance of this is national health care: AFAICT, not every system is equally successful, but there's no discernible structural pattern to which do better or worse. But they mostly work pretty well, because, in every advanced country but ours, there's a national consensus that A. adequate resources should be applied, and B. competent, committed people should be in charge.
When you get to nation-building and other Cold War-type concerns, both the consensus and A. are often missing, meaning that B. is your only path to success.
There was a Twitter thread yesterday(?) asking why Napoleon failed, in simple terms. Many pointed to Russia, of course, but an interesting sub theme was his failure to create lasting stability in places he conquered, and a lot of that comes down to his installing his incompetent brothers as rulers. Maybe, ultimately, it was a game he couldn't win, but, boy howdy, competent functionaries in Italy, Naples, Holland, and Spain would've helped, hmm? You see some of this in imperial Rome as well: it was a crazy, Rube Goldberg system, but when you had a competent Emperor with a couple of competent, trustworthy generals, suddenly it would hum along for a decade at a time.
The Roman Empire kind of lasted a really long time, as far as empires go.
a heaping helping of "underlying factors"
Goes without saying. Until now.
14: And also fought lots of bloody forever wars in places nobody had heard of,. I'm guessing because the ruling class agreed the barbarians and rebels had to be suppressed, and committed to making that happen.
They were kind of assholes that way even before they were an empire.
Bah, I had no time for this thread today, but now it can be the weekend longread!
not just right but no shit Sherlock right, consensus view for a decade at least
Yeah, exactly, and to such a degree that the complementary piece to this article would go into details about why it can't sink in where it needs to.
Quick throwaway comment that alongside these pieces I want to read the best of all possible versions of Spencer Ackerman's upcoming book, although I don't know how close his actual book will come to the Platonic ideal.
https://twitter.com/attackerman/status/1123261218016452611
I read/heard this thing recently. GWB was deciding on the Iraq surge, and one of the senior Army generals was opposed, arguing existing deployments had stretched them to the limit and the surge could "break the force"*. And GWB said no, losing this war will break the force, and did the surge. I think GWB was right there,** but suspect the US might have been better served if the force had been broken, another Saigon rooftop clusterfuck moment.
*Argued with good reason; and that a deployment of five additional brigades (Not even divisions! Brigades! 20,000 men!) could plausibly have broken the army suggests how vast the gap is between current US treaty commitments (never mind implicit commitments) and available forces.
**Not that the surge won the war, in any clear sense, but won enough political space to retreat in good order.
retreat in good order
Some years ago I represented a US government contractor that was nearing completion on a significant project in Iraq just as US forces pulled out. The chaos that followed wasn't exactly good order. Of course, that's not what you meant, or what anyone was thinking about.
For instance. They emphasize substate rather than state proxies, but AFAIK that's less of a departure from the Cold War era than they make out.
[Napoleon] installing his incompetent brothers as rulers
IIRC, and I like this story too much to check it, the brother he installed in the Netherlands became a diligent and earnest caretaker of the Netherlands and N.B. thought he should have been a better supporter of the empire/N.B. Can't remember if unexpectedly-dutch-dude was competent per se.
Didn't one of his marshalls get adopted by the Swedish royal family and still sits on the throne?
Yes, Bernadotte, who disappointed his Emperor bitterly in 1813. But I think he's dead now.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38794886
Things are getting weird over here.
"Michael Delabroc, 26, a pro-Donald Trump campaigner, says he expects thousands of people to attend a counter-protest to show "there are people here who are fond of the president".
He says there are plans to bring a giant float of Trump dressed as the Emperor from the Warhammer 40,000 series"
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On research, I think you're mixing up various Napoleonic cronies. Bernadotte was a French general who was made adoptive heir to the Swedish throne in 1810 as a means of alliance, and also because they just liked him AFAICT. He joined the anti-French allies in 1813 and became king de jure as well as de facto in 1818, and his dynasty reigns to this day. The one who tried too hard to be a good Dutch king was Louis Bonaparte (Konijn Lodewijk) who only lasted 1806-1810 and went into exile in Austria
Argh, I'm sorry, nobody was equating those two people! Glad I learned the stories though.
24. If you google the said Emperor and look at the images tab, you will find (a) his taste and Trump's in grandeur seem pretty much in sync and (b) images of Trump AS the Emperor. Also possibly related, the Emperor is dead and decaying but apparently it doesn't slow him down at all; he just sits in his throne and rules all humanity.
One can also be distracted by reading the WH40K wiki, which reaches levels of nerdity never before achieved.
Glorious confusion reigns over comments 21-27 (at least in my head). Mossy, I may need more out-of-context Southeast Asian history to max it out.
I have since discovered that the giant float already exists. Some Italians made it as a joke. It is Trump as the Heresy-era Emperor (power armour and sword) rather than the "present day" Corpse God propped up in his giant throne and kept alive only by the sacrifice of a hundred victims every day. And it is ANIMATRONIC.
Here.
To further confound things: the general Napoleon sent to manage the Dutch defenses, and thus show who was the real boss? Bernadotte. And literally nobody involved in this story was a corpse god-emperor.
The latter would be better because the premise of 40k is that the Imperium is actually ruled by an insanely complicated bureaucracy that spends most of its time conspiring against other bits of itself, refighting squabbles from centuries ago, treating science and technology with superstitious dread and hatred, condemning rivals as heretics and worshipping members of elite military units as literal angels, meanwhile huge threats to humanity go unchecked and ordinary people are ignored or trampled and as a result lead lives of unrelenting grimness.
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Six of the army's top generals lay dead at the bottom of a well. The seventh, Nasution, was deeply traumatized.|>
Great opening line for a short story. I'm stealing that.
The eighth general decided to get his water elsewhere.
31. The creator of WH40K said:
"To me the background to 40K was always intended to be ironic. ... The whole idea of the Emperor is that you don't know whether he's alive or dead. The whole Imperium might be running on superstition. There's no guarantee that the Emperor is anything other than a corpse with a residual mental ability to direct spacecraft."
He created WH40K in 1986 (hmm, who was President then?). Seems equally apposite to today's national and local situation. "I think Boris Johnson would make a fine Prime Minister," said the God-Emperor, adding "Nigel Farage is a fine man." (A residual mental ability to tweet.)