Viet Nam 1966 vs Iraq 2004

Today Phil Carter of Intel Dump posted a comparison of US Casualties in Viet Nam in 1966 with Iraq in 2004. He and Owen West have a companion article on Slate. They have made a “constant casualties” comparison, similar to a “constant dollars” comparison, of these two sets of casualties. Their thesis is that relative to the size of the forces involved we are taking casualties at the same rate in Iraq as in Viet Nam. They are questioning the opnion that some people draw that since the number of casualties in absolute numbers is less in Iraq than in Viet Nam that Iraq is a much eaiser war. I am sure that everyone agrees that no causalty is light to his or her family.

I have no doubt that they are correct. One of their examples is to compare the Battles of Hue (1968) and Fulajah, and note that the casualty rates are pretty much the same.
The dynamics of a fight are more or less the same with little reference to the larger situation of the war. This how a military staff can estimate with reasonable certainty the number of casualties a given operation will receive. The US Army’s FM 101-10-2 (NOTE Very Large PDF file) is a series of tables with historic rates of just about everything measurable that happens in a battle. Included are tables for estimating casualties based on experience from several wars. Find the right row (assault of a fortified position) and estimated number of days and multiply by the size of the attacking force. Such tables should always be taken with large grain of salt when making future estimates, but is amazing how close they come to reality if you compare actual casualties to what actually happened after the fact. I would have been very surprised that if the Battles of Hue and Fulajah had very different casualty rates. Over all casualties would be subject to a number of different factors but it would be reasonable to assume that casualty rates for the war as a whole would be close.

I think that this sort of comparison minimizes the very big differences between the two wars. If we compare these wars to Mao Zedung’s theory of guerilla war we see some very big differences. In Viet Nam in 1966 the North Viet Namese were enaged in a Phase III campaign which is characterized by engaging the governments forces in conventional warfare to bring on final victory. US combat units were introduced because the South Viet Namese Army was stretched to thin to handle this threat. In Iraq we are facing an enemy who is struggling to break out of Phase I operations. The analogy may not quite hold since the insurgents are using the urban warfare methods pioneered in Chechnya. While the dynamics of individual combats remain the same, the Iraq actions are taking place in a very different situation than Viet Nam.

In an earlier post Maosthought or Who is Winning? I used Mao’s three phase theory of guerilla war to provide a tool for evaluating the success or failure of guerilla/counter guerialla operations. Read it and form your own opnion on our success or failure in Iraq. It seems to me that the insurregents are failing to make milestones to move to phase II, or when the get their temporarily they get pushed back. However it also seems that we are slow in making our milestones to defeat the insurrgency in the Sunni Triangle. Guerilla wars are never quick and easy.

A Child Knocks will We Listen

Chris Blosser of Against the Grain and the Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club posts an excerpt that brings to life the meaning of Christmas.

The Word became flesh. Alongside this Johannine truth there has to be put also the Marian truth as rendered by Luke. God has become flesh. This is not only an immensely great and remote happening, it is something very close and human. God became a child who needed a mother. He became a child, someone born with tears on his cheeks, whose first utterance is a cry for help, whose first gesture consists in outstretched hands searching for protection. God became a child.

Nowadays we also hear it being said, in contrast, that this, after all, would be nothing but a sentimentality better put aside. Yet the New Testament
thinks differently. For the faith of the Bible and the Church, it is important
that God desired to be such a creature who has to depend on a mother, on the
sheltering love of humans. He wished to be dependent in order to awaken in us
love that purifies and redeems. God became a child, and every child is dependent. To be a child thus contains already the theme of the search for shelter, the elementary motif of Christmas. And how many variations has this
motif seen in our history!

In our days we experience this anew and in disturbing ways: the child knocks on the doors of our world. The child is knocking. The search for shelter is profound. There is indeed an atmosphere of hostility toward children, but is this not preceded by an attitude that altogether bars any child from entering this world because there would be no more room for him? The child knocks. If we would receive him we are to rethink thoroughly our own attitude toward human life. Here we are dealing with fundamentals, with the very concept of what it means to be human: to live in grandiose selfishness or in confident freedom that knows its vocation to be united in love, to accept one another.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger p. 404,
Co-Workers of the Truth: Meditations for Every Day of the Year.

AMEN

Celebrate

Christ's Mass

at

Mass

A joyful and merry Christmas to one and all

Saving Social Security

Michael Kinsley has made a bleg through Andrew Sullivan (HT: TM Lutas of Flit TM) for input on President Bushes privatization of provisions for Social Security. His theory is that it is mathematically impossible for the proposal to succeed. But he does not really define by what he means by success, he implies that he means increased benefits. Other suggestions would be maintaining the solvency of the fund or protecting the ability of the beneficiaries to receive some money when the main trust fund goes belly up.

Aside from the fact that long term Social Security is in the hole, the questions he asks do not seem to reflect a useful understanding of how the Trust Fund works. But, then in the last two presidential elections, the president made comments about the trust fund that were so general as to be meaningless and the opposing candidates, members of the Senate with multiple years of experience, said things that were just plain dumb. As a former employee of the SSA who later took graduate courses in Government finance, accounting and budget; I always find these discussions entertaining. For that reason I am not going down his questions point by point. However the main issues I discuss are related to his questions.


First of all:

Can Republicans even pass a reform bill

I do not think so.

The only time there has been a major overhaul of Social Security was in the Jimmy Carter Administration. This reform was a major reduction in future benefits, though that was not the primary argument used to sell it to the public. The argument for public consumption was that there were inequities (and there were) between several groups of beneficiaries. The reform was to correct them. The reform did remove the inequities but when the new tables came out the actual reduction in benefits for every one was amazing. The people who disadvantaged by the inequity would have been better off without the reform. You will almost never hear it said that Jimmy Carter and the Democrats are the only people who reduced SSA benefits but that is what happened.

This is how Social Security will be reformed the next time. The Republicans always explain the actuarial tables saying the benefits need to be reduced to save the system. There supporters fall asleep listening to the accountants. They are always slaughtered in the “you’re destroying Social Security” response. Bushes personal account plan is in part a way to avoid the trap; I have serious doubts he can pull it off. The next time there is Democratic President, he/she will announce a reform to remove inequities or some such thing, and not advertise it slashes benefits. Whatever support it loses from a minority of Democrats who see the catch, will be made up from Republicans who see the actuarial tables. The other possibility is that the Democrats will make a counter proposal which will get some Republican support “as the best that can be done” which will slash future benefits.

The Mechanics of the Trust Fund

Despite what some pundits say, there is a Social Security Trust Fund. There is a safe someplace that holds the paperwork. Every year SSA public relations sends out a press release that shows a picture of someone holding the paperwork. The Trust Fund is controlled by the Social Security Commission, which consists of the Secretaries of the Treasury, and Health and Human Services and the Social Security Commissioner. These are “at will” positions that serve at the pleasure of the President. The President and two of the members also have major responsibilities for managing the General Fund. The Trust Fund by law loans its assets to the General Fund. This is a massive conflict of interest. A private pension fund set up like this would quite properly result in people going to jail.

Social Security Taxes are paid into the trust fund. The Trust Fund buys Government bonds. Originally these were no interest bonds. In the 1950’s the Republicans forced a change in the law that requires paying interest. I forget the formula but the interest rate is less that the average rate for bonds sold on the open market. The money borrowed from the Trust Fund is part of the National debt and the interest part of the debt service. Benefits are paid from the interest and taxes. The fund will be considered bankrupt when general revenue funds and not interest payments are used to pay benefits.


The Legal Status of Social Security Benefits.

Back when the Roosevelt Administration set up Social Security, it chose to make Social Security contributions a tax which one is obligated to pay, like any other general tax, without imposing any obligation on the government. Payments are an entitlement, granted at the pleasure of the government, but to which you have no right when the government elects to change them to your disadvantage. However the Roosevelt chose to sell it to the US population as Social Insurance that lead most people to believe they had a had genuine retirement insurance with a right to the benefits. If you have a contract with an insurance company and they unilaterally change the benefits to your disadvantage, you can go to court and enforce the contract. Social Security is set up so this cannot happen. Part of the current problem with the trust fund is that Congress (usually the Democrats but the Republicans helped) increased benefits several times with out a proportional increase in Social Security taxes, leaving the Trust Fund in the hole. But since the beneficiaries have no right to the benefits this wasn’t a problem, Congress could always adjust them back. If there were a right to the benefits this would have been a big problem.

Bushes proposals can be debated under a number of substantive and technical items, but one of the effects would be to make part of Social Security benefits an enforceable contract rather than an entitlement. I think that is Bush’s unstated success standard; that when Social Security goes bankrupt part of the benefits will isolated from the regular trust fund, titled to individuals, and not available to the government. Thus retirees will have an assurance of some benefits beyond the discretion of Congress. This is probably the most important result to be achieved from Bushes proposal. Possibly with a gradual shift from a single trust fund to individual accounts the collapse of the social security system can be avoided.


How Long Will the Social Security Trust Fund Last?

Assuming that the Social Security Trust fund is to be treated like a genuine insurance trust fund (which it legally isn’t, though there is considerable political pressure to do so) the actuarial statistics depend primarily on the rate of inflation. Low inflation means that long-term revenue will be more in line with outgo. With high inflation, the cost of living increase payments will rise much faster than income increases. This will probably hold true with any reform. When you see an estimate of how long the trust fund will last, the speaker is using an (often unstated and/or unrealized) inflation rate to suit his/her rhetorical purpose. The general consensus of the data I’ve seen is that 2 or 3% inflation the Trust Fund will last 30 or 40 years. At 20% and more maybe 5 years. The tables I’ve seen very widely, this is the general pattern but I would put not faith in any single table. Even more important than any reform is keeping the inflation rate low!


Demography is Destiny

Essential to the program is that there are more workers paying in than retirees taking out. It was about seven or eight when the law was passed it is currently approaching two. A number of factors created this, however the only real way to have prevented it would have been to outlaw contraception and abortion in 1973. There would now be an additional twenty to thirty million workers supporting the system. Even if the Supreme Court were to say preserving Social Security is a “government interest that outweighs the privacy interest of Griswold and Roe” it is most likely too late for the resulting population increase to compleatly correct the problem. And I know the chances of that happening are slim and none. I think there are some who would rather see Social Security go down. But with in the limits of political acceptability we need to increase the birth rate and promote immigration of younger people who will hold jobs and pay into the system if the system is somehow to survive.


It’s the Economy Stupid.

Part of a solution is to maximize economic productivity, employment, profits, wages, and business growth all without increasing inflation. This is what produces the economic activity that pays Social Security taxes. The tax revenue income will come in long before the workers are due the benefits delaying the problem for decades, with enough population growth and minimum inflation an actuarial equilibrium might be reached. Basically higher productivity per worker can reduce the required ratio of persons paying in to those paying out. Unfortunately, the strongest proponents of the current system are the most likely to hate the hyper capitalism required to save the system.


What will happen if part of the trust fund is invested outside the Federal government?

The Social Security taxes going to personal accounts will not be available for loan to the general fund. But the general fund will not have to pay interest. If the interest rate was the true rate at which the government borrows money this would be a net gain to the general fund in a few years, and probably is over a few more years at the actual rate, the money saved on interest will outweigh the value-received on a loan from the Trust Fund. However on a one-year basis the General fund will usually be behind, and Congress budgets annually. On a long term average the combined personal accounts/trust fund will receive more money than if it had loaned to the general fund because there will be a higher average rate of return, especially at the below market rates paid the trust fund. But remember the long-term average includes some years when where there will be a loss.

The probable effect of investment outside of the government will be to help stimulate the economic productivity, if it is invested in that job and industry creating activities, that will pay more taxes including Social Security taxes, and reduce benefits paid if it creates an incentive to retire later. This would increase tax revenue to both trust fund and the general fund.

In a strict economic sense, depending (a big IF) on how it is set up investing some of the Social Security Taxes outside the Government should be a long-term net gain to both the Trust Fund and the General Fund.

What is really WRONG with the privatization proposal?

All the above misses the biggest objection to the proposal. Sooner or later the government will end up with a voting stock proxy on a major portion of US industry. If it is not part of the original law, it will be added in 5 or 20 or more years, the money and power involved is to big of a temptation for this not happen. Major economic and business decisions will be made based on transient political considerations. Given the track record of nationalized industries elsewhere the productivity gains necessary to keep the fund solvent will be lost. There are most likely ways to avoid this, most of the proposed plans initally assign this to the individual. That the government will never hold the Proxy's need to be put in, ironclad, up front.

A Child is Born

Narrator: Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. . . . [T]he angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said

Gabriel: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!

Narrator: But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her

Gabriel: Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.

Mary: How shall this be, since I have no husband?

Gabriel: The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, your kinswoman Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For with God nothing will be impossible.

Mary: Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.

Narrator: Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit; and her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to send her away. But as he considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying

Gabriel: Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

Narrator: All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel" (which means, God with us). When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took his wife, but knew her not until she had borne a son; and he called his name Jesus.

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirini-us was governor of Syria. And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them

Gabriel: Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.

Narrator: And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying

Heavenly Hosts: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!

Narrator: When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another

Sheperds: Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.

Narrator: And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they saw it they made known the saying which had been told them concerning this child; and all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying

Magi: Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him.

Narrator: When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; 4 and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him,

Scribes: In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it is written by the prophet: 6 'And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will govern my people Israel.'

Narrator: . . [A]nd lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy; 11 and going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.




Redacted from the Gospels of Saints Mark and Luke, RSVCE
(Which is in the public domain)

MaoThought or Who is Winning?

We keep hearing a lot of noise on who is winning in Iraq and what is happening. This is submitted as a minor contribution to making sense of the noise. It is intended as a general explanation which I will leave to the reader to apply to Iraq or some other guerilla war

To me the tool to understand the military situation in Iraq is to look at Mao Zedung’s famous theory of guerilla war. This is widely accepted as a valid model whether or not one buys the ideology Mao raps it in. If not held to rigorously it can describe guerrilla wars even if the people involved never heard of Mao or intentionally follow his concept.

Mao proposed that a successful guerilla war goes through three phases:

Organization Phase:
Build up a structure of ‘cadres’ to organize population support (‘agit-prop’ teams to develop popular awareness / use of ‘selective terror’ against government officials, to eliminate landlords and others the population disliked, and to deter informers.

Guerilla Phase:
Introduce guerilla attacks and ambushes (to acquire weapons and blow up infrastructure) à make it difficult for governments to maintain a military presence (creation of ‘liberated areas)’

Mobile War (Third Phase)
Amounted to civil war / force government forces to retreat to major cities until these were surrounded by a hostile countryside.



In general we can describe the process as:

The Organization Phase is characterized by terrorist type attacks. The government forces become progressively spread out in small detachments to protect the population. A small force can attack any of a large number of lightly or undefended targets, which will require a large number of small detachments to defend.

The government's response, in addition to defending critical positions, it aggressively engages in collecting intelligence, police activities, and military patroling. It wants to quickly idenity the guerillas and destroy them before the the war can progress.


The Guerrilla Phase takes advantage of the fact that there can’t be enough troops to defend every thing; and small detachments are subject to attack by larger but still relatively small forces. The guerillas develop forces capable of engaging in small military actions with the intent to destroy stationary detachments or small patrols. They avoid fighting any large formation. The guerilla phase attempts to secure a liberated area (i.e. a base) for third phase operations by creating an area that is the government forces cannot occupy.

The government response is to defend key positions, find and destroy the guerilla units, disrupt the support for these units, and prevent the creation of a base area.

In the Mobile Phase, having secured a good base area, the guerrillas build a “mobile” or quasi-regular force that is able to defeat medium or large government regular units. If the government concentrates forces to defeat the mobile force it abandons a fatal amount of its territory, if it doesn’t the mobile force defeats the government units piecemeal. In either case it forced back to the major cities and has to surrender or starve to death.

The government forces need to destroy the mobile forces and recapture the base area.

Phase three may involve outside intervention, either the guerillas bring in a foreign army to be the mobile force as an alternative or addition to their own, or the government invites foreign troops because it does not have enough strength to both defeat the mobile force and hold the country side.



Historically an effective counter tactic in all phases is for the government to try to create its own guerilla structure in enemy areas until they can recapture it. Operation Phoenix in Viet Nam is one of the most famous (or if you prefer infamous) examples.


There is nothing automatic about this strategy and it fails more often than it succeeds.
Even at phase three, phase one and two operations never stop. Moving to the next phase without successful preparation is usually fatal. The guerillas can be defeated and the phase progression turned around at any point. Usually the primary reason the government loses is it loses it's nerve, which may or may not be related to the military situation.




Some key elements needed for success are a cause, leadership, a fighting force, and at least minority of the population willing to support the cause. These and the need to create a base provide targets that the government forces can attack to defeat the guerillas


Cause

People have to fight for something. This type of operation is to long and costly for mercenaries. It can be real or invented, held by a small group or a large group, but there has to be something to motivate the people who will actually do the working and fighting.

The government response is to provide a better cause and/or discredit the guerilla cause.

Active propaganda methods, control of news media, and tight discipline of military units to prevent incidents that can be used to inflame a cause are important to both sides.

Leadership.

Strong, usually charismatic, leadership is necessary at all levels and especially the top. The guerilla force will be operating under adverse conditions they need to be able to look to their leadership to give them confidence. Also operations require careful planning and execution, which needs leadership.

The government response is to find, kill, arrest, convert, or neutralize the guerilla leadership. It also needs to provide alternate leadership for it’s own cause

Fighting Force

Wars are fought with armies. Even though it is a guerilla force, it is subject the same dynamics as any other army. Actually the operational conditions for the guerillas are extremely harsh.

The government attacks the cohesion of the guerilla fighting force in the same way as any other army, defeating them in battle, setting a pace that is to fast for effective reaction, denying supplies, propaganda aimed at morale, etc.


Population:

In Mao’s phrase this is the sea in which the guerrilla fish swim. A small minority of the population actively supporting the guerillas is all that is necessary if the rest are passive, however the smaller the percentage the greater the need for terrorist type activities. The terrorist option has the potential to backfire, whether of not the population likes the government, guerilla terrorist acts against the population, to enforce support, can alienate the population from the the guerillas.

The Government response is to create any sort of incentive to move the population from active support of the guerillas to passive and from passive to active government support. Also physically isolating the guerrillas from the population is effective. Chasing the guerrilla so hard that they do not have time to interact with the civilian population is effective.

Both sides face the continuing problem of conducting successful combat operations without alienating the population where they take place

A Base

Guerillas, like any human being, need a place to sleep, eat, train and feel relatively safe. For this they need a base area. The size and sophistication will increase as the movement grows. Maybe safe houses and campsites at phase one, installations capable of supporting the logistics of a 5000 to 20000 man force at phase three. Mao used the very vastness of China. More likely, since most guerilla wars are fought in a more restricted area, guerillas seem to prefer the opposite side of a foreign border that the government cannot afford to violate. The creation of adequate bases is both a necessary goal for the first two phases and a perquisite to advance to the last two phases.

The government response is to prevent the creation of bases, and destroy them when they exist.



A New Twist – an Urban Strategy.

Increasingly there is a major draw back to Mao’s concept; Mao assumes that most of the population is rural and moving into the cities in force is the last part of the Mobile Phase. It also assumes that it would be difficult for government forces to know what is happening in the hinterlands. However the population of the world is becoming more and more urban, the groups supporting the “Cause” are likely to be urban with a dislike of camping in the woods. Modern surveillance technology makes isolated groups in outside the urban built up area stand out for investigation/destruction, where as they can be lost in background of a city. Unfortunately the Chechens have found a potential alternative, which seems to be in use in Iraq.

T. C. Wretchard of the Belmont club pointed to two articles by LTC Timothy Thomas (Retired) of the U. S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office at Global Security and in the Army War Collage's magazine Parameters describing the Chechen statagy.


The guerilla force takes over a neighborhood or small city by infiltration, coordination with local supporters and or criminal elements. In some cases such as the beginning of the First Chechen war the Government forces is not in control of the urban area. In others it gains control by attacking police stations staffed only for normal law enforcement activities. The government forces will have to counter attack. The guerillas conduct a “defenseless defence” of ambushes, sniping and small attacks aimed more at causing damage to the attacking force than actually holding any particular place. After being defeated they move to a new neighborhood or city and repeat. And repeat until the government is forced to give up. The Chechens fought the Russians to a stand still in the first Chechen war.

The preparations including terrorist type attacks seem to be analogous to phase one, the above to phase two. Presumably at some point there could be shift to offensive (phase three,) operations where the guerillas seek out government regular forces to destroy them.

The first problem to this approach is that it seems to jump Mao’s development process, possibly leaving the guerilla force isolated, without adaquet preperation, and unable to prevent it’s destruction by government forces that have not been worn down in a long campaign.

The second problem to this approach seems to me is that fighting battles on top of the population can be counter productive. What ever they think of the respective causes there is the possibility that the population will individually or collectively take action to prevent the battle, such as informing to the government forces before a new iteration can be started. But the government forces have a similar problem in reverse.


The above provides a basis for analysis. Remember all guerilla wars involve many battles, and for who ever wins, it is always two steps forward and one step back. Look for patterns not specific incidents. Read news stories for facts related to the items presented above, not the authors slant. The reader can apply this on their own to the situation in Iraq or elsewhere, though later I may make a new post with my own analysis.


Related posts.

December: Viet Nam 1966 vs Iraq 2004

February: An Event Table Not a Timetable

August: Escalate in Iraq

June 2006 Book Review: Year of the Hangman

July 2007 A March Up Country?

January 2008 Tet 1968: A Personal Narrative

May 2008 The Iraq Situation

March 2012 Book Review: Dien Bien Phu - Hell in a Very Small Place


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Alexander the Average has published a different sort of metrics. Here is the description of his metrics. A different approach than I took but very good. He promises to update and when he does I will add the new link.

Follow the Star

Little known details about the visit of the three wise men seeking the birth of Jesus.


Being wise men they knew this was to important of an event not bring their wives, so they gladly hired the extra camels and tents so their wives and families could come.

Being wise men they went on the Star Web and got Astrology Positioning System (APS) coordinates and instructions to “follow the star”

Being wise men they always stopped and got directions when their wives suggested. Also being wise men they realized the directions were mostly useless; checked the APS coordinates and “followed the star”.

They and their wives were truly overjoyed at visiting their Savior and His family.

The whole trip was a great success except for stopping to ask directions in Jerusalem. That was a bummer.

The moral: Wise men and women still seek Him.

When Losing is Winning

Jonathan Alter in NRO brings up an interesting question of jurisprudence.


In ASHCROFT V. RAICH the Supreme Court has heard oral arguments that the federal government does not have the authority to prohibit the states from allowing “medical marijuana.” Surprisingly, he thinks this is a good idea from a conservative point of view.


There are two issues here.

Assuming the Federal Government has jurisdiction, should it regulate "medical marijuana"?

Does the Federal Government have jurisdiction to regulate in this area?

This is an interesting problem.

Most conservatives would say to the first one that the answer yes, marijuana should be a regulated as a controlled substance. This is a potentially dangerous substance, not only to ones self but others around the user. Smoked marijuana does not come close to meeting the stringent FDA safety standards. One can already get the active ingredient in prescription pills with measured doses and manufactured to minimize side effects, especially those associated with smoking, but probably more significant, achieving pain relief with minimum risk of having ones judgment impaired by getting to high. Unless this is a subterfuge to obtain recreational marijuana there is no reason for “medical marijuana.”

On the other hand they would answer the second question that the governments claim that this is regulated under the interstate commerce clause is a complete misreading of the plain English language meaning of that clause. If it never crosses a state boundary - how can it be interstate commerce?

Many liberals take the opposite view. At least some recreational drugs, if not all, should not be regulated at any level of government. However they think that the interstate commerce clause is an authorization to regulate everything that can be construed as effecting commerce.

Ironically, despite an initial enthusiasm for the courts decision, many liberals (except those floating off in haze of marijuana smoke) may come to dislike this decision. The authority for much federal legislation that liberal’s support requires a much broader interpretation of the interstate commerce clause than the court took in this case. If lower courts and the Supreme Court site this as the precedent we should see a roll back in the one sided interpretation of the interstate commerce clause that has been in effect since the 1930’s, when the Supreme Court in a very similar case ruled that wheat grown for home consumption was covered by the interstate commerce clause.


TM Lutas gets to the heart of the matter, what do we have if the Supreme Court does not take the Constitution seriously? Fortunately, this sounds like it is going in the right direction.