And these lies and imbecilities come from a scumbag who should be living out the rest of his wretched existence in prison for his war crimes and crimes against humanity.by KenIt can't be easy to be Dick Cheney. Even now, at his advanced age, in his precarious state of health, there are so many lies left to tell -- and so little time to tell them in. And when you have a record as catastrophically dismal and overweeningly earth-destructive as his to obfuscate and explain away and cover up, that just makes it harder.Still, you have to wonder what sort of human being is capable of this kind of "thinking":Possibly, of course, it's just projection. He's well aware that there are people in public life in the U.S. today who are evil at their very core and whose purpose for drawing breath is to turn the earth into the miasma of destruction, torment, and hate that they live in in their toxic heads. Unfortunately, perhaps because of his profound mental disabilities, he is unable to make the fundamental connection: Look! There in the mirror! There's one of the human-hating Satanites.As you know perfectly well, President Obama never said or so much as hinted at the time of the capture of bin Laden that the problem of terrorism was solved. That's just your compulsive need to make up lies. What was true at the time of the capture of bin Laden was that it was something that, through either incompetence or lack of will, you worthless scumbags of the Bush Earth-Destruction Regime didn't or couldn't do. You know it, but something inside you just makes you lie your putrid guts out. It's who and what you are.The nonsense you spew is so childishly predictable. The demon Obama withdrew us from Iraq and is withdrawing us from without leaving forces behind and thereby creating "a big vacuum in the Middle East." Let's forget for a moment, Big Dick (and I do mean the Biggest Dick of Them All), the way you morons and sociopaths of the Bush Earth-Destruction Regime actually did leave Afghanistan behind for bin Laden and the Taliban -- presumably so you could proceed to turn to the heroic task of turning Iraq into the shithole of your psychotic "dreams."You rattle off the list of groups filling that vacuum as if you know something about them, but of course as always you know nothing. Most of these are forces that you toxic scumbags of the Bush Earth-Destruction Regime did so much to make major players in the Middle East, even though you were warned by people who actually knew something about the Middle East that that would be the all but certain result.But then, on a scale of zero to a kajillion, Big Dick knows diddly squat about Iraq or Afghanistan or any other frigging place on the planet. So it's pointless to point out that he has zero clue as to how any problems in the Middle East might have been averted or even ameliorated. Because his specialty is creating problems that no amount of competence or good will could solve. He did everything in his considerable power to set forces in motion in the Middle East that would wind up, well, very much where they have wound up.Then, of course, with such singularly scumbaggish lack of grace, he blames it all on somebody else.Big Dick and his kind are creatures of such psychotic arrogance that they are probably literally incapable of receiving actual information and trying to figure out how it might be dealt with. Remember how he haunted the CIA rooting out all actual intelligence coming in from and about Iraq and forcing the analysts instead to rubber-stampe his lies and delusions? Haven't you done enough to turn the planet into living hell, Big Dick? Rot in hell.I SUGGESTED THE OTHER DAY THAT IAN WELSH'SPOSTS OFFER A FRESH VIEW ON THE MIDDLE EASTOne that Big Dick might benefit from if he were actually interested in understanding what's going on in the Middle East is "Military Effectiveness: ISIS, Taliban, Hezbollah," which began:
I think it’s worth emphasizing that what we’ve seen over the past 30 years is a revolution in military affairs. New model militaries have arisen which are capable of fighting Western armies to a draw in irregular warfare, or even defeating them on the battlefield (Hezbollah v. Israel.) It’s not that guerrilla warfare wasn’t effective before (ask the Americans in Vietnam), it’s how stunningly cheap it has become and how brutally effective at area denial and attrition warfare.
As an example, Ian cited the transformative influence of IEDs.
With IEDs the cost for occupation soars, and entire areas of a country can be made no-go zones except for large groups of troops.But just as bad is the cost-effectiveness. Western militaries are brutally costly. Islamic “militias” are cheap. The Taliban runs on blackmail and drugs, ISIS runs, to a large extent, on donations from rich Muslims along with some state support. These armies cost peanuts compared to the US or British or Israeli military. Nothing. And they are capable, at the least, of tying down Western militaries for years, bleeding them white and eventually winning. Hezbollah is capable of defeating, in battle, what was (before Hezbollah proved otherwise) widely considered one of the most effective militaries in the world.
"Americans keep thinking," Ian wrote, "they can assassinate their way to victory. They can’t."
In any actual effective organization, lower level people can fill the slot "above them, and the slot above that. A strong ideology, and strong doctrine means that leaders are replaceable. Western leaders don’t believe that because as a class they are narcissists, who think that leaders are something super-special. Almost no leaders are actually geniuses, for every Steve Jobs or Rommel, there are a hundred CEOS or Generals who are just effective drones. They don’t matter. Any reasonably bright person with a bit of experience could run their company or army corp just as well and almost certainly better. (Canadian troops were amongst the most effective in WWI in part because they weren’t professionals. So they did what worked.)Western societies are hard to run precisely because we refuse to actually fix our problems. Temporizing, “managing” is hard. Fixing problems is a lot easier. I know, again, that most people don’t believe this, because they don’t remember ever living in a country that actually tried to fix problems, and have never worked for a company that wasn’t dysfunctional, but it is so true.So the West uses assassination and highly expensive troops who don’t want to die and extensive surveillance. And the various Islamic militias, on budgets that aren’t even shoestring, survive and grow stronger. They are evolving: getting smarter all the time. They are Darwinian organizations: if you screw up, you die.A military doctrine which is hundreds of times more expensive than its main competitor has problems. In general, in military affairs, effectiveness is more important than efficiency. But if your effectiveness doesn’t actually let you win, in the sense of making it so your enemies stop fighting, then efficiency will start to run against you.The West is not unaware of this: drones are cheaper than planes, for example. Ground combat robots, which the army is working on hard, may be effectively cheaper than troops, as well as having the advantage of requiring fewer troops, meaning less danger to the elites and more likely to fire in the case of a revolution.Finally, I note again, that I do not expect drones and the new ground combat robots (about 10 years out) to remain tools of the powerful for all that long. Competent technicians will be able to make home brew models fairly effectively and quickly.
Got that, Big Dick? Any of it? No, I didn't think so.#