The Colonel Comes to Jesus

Well, not really. I do expect that the sovereign leader of Libya will remain a devotee of the Islamic faith. Nevertheless, the Colonel's done something that I regard as intelligent.

Several points:

1. The Country Pundit is glad this worked without (publicly-known) direct military action. We're a little busy elsewhere, and don't need to be getting too many irons in too many fires.

2. TCP likes sanctions as part of a daily breakfast an overall diversified portfolio of diplomatic options that starts with "The United States would like to express its displeasure..." and stops just short of the shiny things in the silos.

3. Bouncing off of the point above, I'm not entirely sure when the relevant sanctions were put into place, and I'm not sure what they were put into place for. These sanctions things do, unfortunately, take a long time and you're never guaranteed that they'll do much other than enrich the local dictator and irritate the people he's ruling.

4. It's good that the United States is ready and willing to cut deals when the opportunity arises. The 'no regime change' for Libya in exchange for whatever it is exactly that the Colonel's giving up is a good deal, and we've made it before, with Castro. Leaving that nitwit in power down in Cuba was probably a decent deal in exchange for getting the Soviet missiles out of there. Admittedly, it wasn't too good for the Cuban people, but that can't be helped.

5. Both withdrawals of sanctions seem to have been intelligent moves. Call it the two-carrot approach if you will; the problem is that this doesn't always work, and so you have to keep a big stick laying around.

6. Hopefully the State Department had a positive hand in this, and can start pulling its weight instead of being like a dead-in-train locomotive.

7. Also, this may set a good example: Work with us, and you stay in power. Keep up your NBC program (or keep acting like you've got one) and we bring the hurt. Crude, not particularly subtle, but probably effective.

In summary: I'm glad this worked and so forth. I'm hopeful that "Libya" can stop being short-hand for "state sponsor of terrorism" and can move towards the group of nations who at least act like they've got a measure of civilization about them. Hooray for Washington and for London.

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Several Saddam Points

Hrrm. Now might be a good time to remind people of the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia:

Sic semper tyrannus.

Anyways, I've been mulling over the Saddam situation and I've got several points:

1. It's good that we've got him, dead or alive. This takes the wind out of Howard Dean's sails when he says "...blah blah haven't caught Saddam or Osama." Make that "haven't caught Osama...yet", Dr. Strange.

2. Unfortunately, the clock is now ticking and the European Union is now keeping score. The longer we hold this individual, the more pressure that will probably be exerted upon us by Old Europe to treat him as an international criminal, that we should send him to the Hague or the International Criminal Court. This is, of course, not the way he should be handled in my opinion, but that doesn't mean that the power-hungry bureaucrats of the aforementioned organizations won't be clasping about in order to get their hands upon the prosecution (or not) of Saddam Hussein. That this should be resisted goes without saying, but these efforts could complicate an already complex situation.

3. What do we do with him now? My first instinct is to get information from him, then take him out to a ditch and shoot him. The next thing is that we might not want to do that, because he may be of use to us. I don't know exactly how, but I'm not employed at high levels of DOD, CIA, DIA, or State. I'll leave potential uses of a captive Saddam Hussein to the people who are paid to think of those things.

I'm not fond of an automatic reconvening of the Nuremberg Tribunal (Nuremberg II: Fun in Fallujah), because as Terry Moran points out, there are some problems with the Nuremberg model. (The old saw of "pot calling the kettle black" vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany is one of them, although I haven't read any legal criticism on the things.) I am in favor, however, of him being tried by Iraqis. The problem there is that it doesn't seem to be possible, due to the (apparent) fact that the Iraqis don't have a post-Saddam judicial system set up yet. I suppose the way around that is some sort of special tribunal.

Whatever the means of trial, Saddam Hussein will probably wind up dead. Therefore, the important thing is to deny him a martyr's death. Whatever happens to him must be carefully calculated, probably by Iraqis or other experts in the Arab Islamic culture, so that there is maximum psychological damage to our opponents. A little bit of 'shock and awe', if you will. The problem for me is that I don't have a clue as to what would deliver that while simultaneously extracting some punitive result.

Suffice it to say that I'm very glad he's been captured, and I hope that this quells some of the noisier Democratic carping. My personal hope is that this in some way moves the Iraqis closer to freedom and sovereignty, and our boys (and girls!) closer to returning home.

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Hooray

We got him!

Saddam Hussein has been captured.

Details are sketchy to me at this point since I just basically fell out of bed to answer the phone, but that's the CNN link and that's all that I've got at the moment. Hooray and all that. Bloody rot, mother calling me to get me out of bed.

He looks like Jerry Garcia or something with that Santa Claus beard. Too bad, so sad, you murdering bum. Hopefully we've got him and we've got the right one, so now the Iraqis can rest a little easier and look forward to the future of their country without this monster.

Huzzah and praise the Lord.

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CVN Charles de Gaulle

It appears that the French navy is having second thoughts about its flagship, the atomic-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. An un-verified account at strategypage.com indicates that the French are considering retiring the vessel, because of various problems.

Whether the report of French intentions is true or not, there are demonstrable problems with the vessel, and the article (which is probably a temporary one) goes through them. In brief:

1. It's expensive. Big deal. Make your economy something other than a revenue generator for a welfare state, and you'll be able to afford as many carriers as your European state will want.

2. CdG is slower than her half-century-old predecessors Foch and Clemenceau. Why that is, I haven't a clue. You'd think that a late 20th century atomic plant could provide enough raw shaft horsepower to outrun a 1950s (at best) steam plant, but apparently not. The difference in speed is significant; the Foch and her sister are reported by Warships1.com to be capable of 32 knots (a touch faster than Admiral Arleigh Burke, don't you know, but see n1) while CdG is only reported as being capable of 27 knots. Maybe CdG can run that speed longer than the Foch, but I'd be nervous about not having a fast ship.

3. Problems with the propeller design. Apparently, CdG's screws aren't working right (I think she either threw a blade or a screw proper at one point in trials) and so leftovers from the earlier CV program have been implemented.

4. Inadequate reactor shielding. Were he alive today, Admiral Rickover ("the kindly old gentleman"---of those three terms, only 'old' was supposed to be accurate) and in the service of the French navy, would have thrown an absolute fit. Per the article, the amount of leakage (be it particles or whatever; I'm not a nuc) is five times the allowable annual exposure to radiation. Good God! The appellation Hiroshima is supposed to apply to a city in Japan or to a Soviet ballistic missile submarine, not to a carrier in the West! This has been reported elsewhere to have been fixed, but the fact that it was a problem at all is troubling. I'm sorry for the poor guys who had to work next to that plant.

4. Problems with the deck design. Yes, like "It's too short to operate your AEW platform of choice." If memory serves, CdG had to have her deck lengthened (probably at considerable cost and effort) in order to operate the Grumman E-2 Hawkeyes delivered.

The blurb goes on to say that the French would like to get in on the new Royal Navy nuclear carrier program, and add a third unit to the order. That's not such a bad idea as long as the UK's shipwrights get the contract to build the thing and make money off of it. However, Glenn Reynolds tells of a further option that is a bad idea, namely joint Anglo-French operation of the completed vessels. Humbug to that, I say. [Tasteless joke about Mers-el-Kebir snipped.]

To make this a little more clear to American readers, the Charles de Gaulle is comparable in size to our Wasp-class LHDs, which are amphibious assault ships. It's worth noting that we don't try to use those vessels as aircraft carriers for the launching of conventional fixed-wing platforms.

And no, I don't hate the French navy. Once upon a time, they came to our assistance off the Virginia Capes at a place called Yorktown. They also had two pleasant-looking battleships, the Richeliu and Jean Bart.

Additional thanks to Emperor Misha I of the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler for bringing this back to my attention. Some of the comments for that posting reveal other problems, but I'd prefer that Misha get the traffic for the works of his visitors. Go read.

n1 According to Shield of the Republic, a post-WWII history of the U.S. Navy, the "31-knot" moniker was derogatory in nature, because Burke's destroyer group, beset with mechanical or other operational difficulties, was supposed to be capable of more than that. The public, not knowing any different, thought it was a grand name and turned it into a positive. Admiral Burke was, by several accounts, a good man to work for on-balance, and I believe America's navy was well served by his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations.

UPDATE, 02 MARCH 2005: This has remained one of the more popular articles in the TCP archives. The strategypage link is now inoperative, but it appears that this article is more or less the "survivable" version of the report that I first commented upon. The current article makes no reference to a plan to retire the carrier, but I stand by my then-current reporting, because I distinctly recall seeing a sentence or two about it. The statement was accurate for 05 December 2003; whether it is accurate for 02 March 2005 is a completely different matter.

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Network Nitwittery

It appears that CNN has gone and done it again, demonstrating a marked inability on the part of its reporters to figure out what's important about a situation. From a transcript of coverage of the 46-0 Fedayeen loss recently:

[Walter] RODGERS: Once again, it shows that while the United States claims it controls the battlefield, it's actually the guerrillas who generally tend to dictate where the battles will be fought and that battlefield is constantly shifting.

Walt, Walt, Walt. A very simple principle for you: It doesn't matter if the battlefield constantly shifts at your will when you lose. It's not necessarily important to be the one who starts the fight. It is, however, of vital importance to be the one who wins the fight. When the other man is face down in the dirt and never getting back up again, that's when you determine who's the victor.

When you lose 46-0, you don't call that "control of the battlefield". (I'm tempted to call it "stupid".) If the Fedayeen are going to pick fights that end up like this, I'm willing to let them do that all they want.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to Greyhawk over at Mudville Gazette; I suggest going there and reading the rest of his piece.

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Why Arabs Don't Win Wars

Four years ago, long before we had any idea that a bunch of fanatics would make mine Mistel using Boeing airliners, Colonel Norvell De Atkine, U.S. Army (ret.) wrote a piece entitled "Why Arabs Lose Wars" for the Middle East Quarterly, a publication of the Middle East Forum.

There's no way I could possibly summarize this tightly-written and very interesting piece, so I'll cheat and reproduce the section headers:

False Starts

The Role of Culture

Information as Power

Education Problems

Officers vs. Soldiers

Decision-making and Responsibility

Combined Arms and Operations

Security and Paranoia

Indifference to Safety

This has both historical and contemporary value in understanding the nature of formal state forces that American forces may find themselves in conflict with in the near future. Some of it's downright creepy or weird, and other parts will leave you chuckling at the stupidity or incompetence of these guys, and will go a long way towards explaining why the Israelis always win. (Note: This does not reject the premise that they're the Chosen People who have a deal with the Man Upstairs. It probably confirms that premise, because it is utmost providence that the numerically superior Arab powers are so fundamentally stupid when it comes to making war.)

Read it, and enjoy.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to baldilocks, from whose sidebar I found this.

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