A Government Fraud - Take a Bonus to Re-enlist for the CA National Guard

Government lawyers in the Pentagon are demanding that California National Guard members who took bonuses to sign up for re-enlistment and future possible deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan ten years ago, now have to pay back those bonuses.  The government was not authorized to make them.

Now, how likely is it that the service members knew that government officials were unauthorized to offer the bonuses that helped the government to solve its shortage of war-fighters?  Of course most people hearing about this wonder how hard it would be for them if the government asked them to pay back $15,000 the government may have given them 10 years ago for any reason.

But worse than that, the government is compounding its mere incompetence with a very dramatic fraud.  Men extended their enlistments knowing they would likely be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan and might lose their lives or their limbs or their minds fighting there. But now they learn that the bonuses were a case of fraud upon their trust in their government!  Effectively, it was just a trick to help the government steal their labor, their lives, their limbs, and their minds.

Well, what can you expect of a government that expects everyone except high politicians and high bureaucrats to obey the laws?  It is government by fraud for the fraudsters laid heavily upon the defrauded.  This is a fine substitute for the Rule of Law.  The People are now no more than fleeced sheep in the hands of these monstrously evil rulers.  There is a multitude of such frauds, but this is one of the more egregious of that multitude.

Update:  Today, 27 October 2016, the policy of recovering the bonus money was revoked due to complaints by some Congress members, at least some of whom recognized the offering of bonuses to be later taken back as fraud.

We Hear So Much Less About Casulties in Afghanistan Under Obama's Command

I was reading a book review of  Betrayed, The Shocking True Story of Extortion 17 as told by a Navy SEAL’s Father by Mark Baisley and found this interesting bit of data:

During the seven years of war in the Bush Administration, 630 Americans died in Afghanistan and 2,638 were wounded in action. During the first four years of the Obama Administration, 1,544 Americans have died in Afghanistan and 15,036 have been wounded in action.

Perhaps there are some manpower issues involved in the different numbers and there are surely some differences in the Rules of Engagement, but remember how often and dramatically the count of dead Americans was played up in the media when Bush was the Commander-in-Chief?  Do we hear this drum beat so often and as loudly now?

General McChrystal and the War in Afghanistan

I have just finished reading the Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings called The Runaway General on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, prior to yesterday, the commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan.  My sense is that Gen. McChrystal was the right man for his previous job as head of U.S. special forces operations, but was not diplomatic enough for the Afghanistan command role.  He is bright, but he too much likes kicking butt and proving he is top dog to manage the necessary cooperation of actors in Afghanistan, NATO, the Pentagon, the State Dept., the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.  The number of interests he had to address was something like the number that Eisenhower had to address as Supreme Commander in Europe, except that Eisenhower had Gen. George Marshall to provide the interface with the Pentagon, the State Dept., the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.  Sure, Eisenhower did have more troops to manage, but a top general should be good at that. The political management of the war in Afghanistan is a very confused and ill-manged mess.

Gen. McChrystal is more an analog to Gen. George Patton than to Gen. Eisenhower.  Gen. Patton was a great general and played a critical role in Europe in WWII, but he would have been the wrong man for Eisenhower's job.  Eisenhower had to find ways to get the most he could from Patton and from many another prickly general, many of whom were British or French.  The Rolling Stone article suggests that McChrystal simply could not get the most out of the many actors in Afghanistan, such as the U.S. Embassador Carl Eikenberry, the Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, National Security Advisor Gen. Jim Jones, and VP Joe Biden.  Apparently, he did enjoy the support of Sec. of State Hilary Clinton.  Now, I have no doubt that he was bombarded with many a mickey mouse request, which must have been irksome for a fighting general.

This Obama administration is particularly ill-managed.  Pie-in-the-sky socialists simply wish things to be as they want them.  They wish that everyone had health insurance, so it must be made to be so, somehow, they do not care or know how.  They wish the poor had more money and better homes, so it must be made so, somehow, they do not know how or care how.  Socialism is divorced from reality.

Socialists pass two thousand page bills that legislators have not read and do not understand.  The bulk of the bill is a paper weight which is a pretense at addressing an issue the socialists want to change.  The bulk is to hide the basic fact that they have no clue on how to actually bring about any given stated desire to improve conditions for some broad interest group or other, except if the interest group is a narrow one.  The socialists disdain for management is also evident in the generally poor management of the many executive branch departments under Democratic administrations.  The terrible management under FDR and Truman, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and now Obama are symptoms of a lack of socialist concern for good management.

One indicator of this has been the reports I have from old friends I worked with in the 1980s in the Navy Department over the years.  The downward drift of the Navy Dept. management has generally been steady, but it accelerates under the more socialist administrations.  Under Obama, the mickey mouse regulations and requirements, that keep people who want to do their jobs well from doing so, has skyrocketed.  The choices for management positions are particularly poor.  The computer systems and the incredible cost of the contracts paid for the outside management of these inadequate and inefficient systems that government employees must use boggle the mind.  Showing his unsuitableness for the position he held in Afghanistan, Gen. McChrystal told the Rolling Stone reporter he had voted for Obama.  That was a sure indicator of a lack of judgment!  How he voted was also something he should not have talked about.

Such an otherworldly mentality as that of the socialists is not well-understood by most military men.  They must have some contact with reality and have a real ability to manage men and warfare, or the results are soon apparent in American deaths and a bogged down war.  Many of America's military men come from the same stock of Americans that Tea Party Americans come from.  They commonly do believe that the U.S. is exceptional and they believe that they are fighting to preserve our freedoms and our Constitution.  Military officers may, in most cases, not have a very sophisticated viewpoint on American history and of political theory, but their knowledge of both is usually greater than that of most Americans.  At least they have studied something about America's wars in many cases.  They are also people who have lived in several different states and have often been abroad and learned that most of the world suffers without the kinds of freedom we have in America.  As mentioned above, they are forced more than politicians and bureaucrats generally are to deal honestly and rationally with reality.

A theater commander for a major war effort is a man who must have very special insight and wisdom, as well as intelligence.  Apparently, Gen. McChrystal has the intelligence, but he was lacking in wisdom at the level required for the job he had.

Afghanistan is a country primitive beyond the comprehension of most Americans.  The social organization of Afghanistan is essentially pre-Medieval.  It is of the Dark Ages.  It is a land of clans, tribes, and warlords.  It is saddled with a primitive religion and particularly primitive versions of that primitive religion.  It would take decades to transform the country to anything resembling a modern country, and that supposes that the people there were interested in such a transformation.  They generally are not.  They are simply suspicious of anyone who is not of their own clan, even within their own tribe.  Then each tribe is very suspicious of every other tribe.  Force and treachery has always ruled their lives.  They have no concept of free market cooperation.  They have no concept of the rights of the individual.  These are Enlightenment ideas which it took Europe at least 800 years to develop from the time when Europe was something like Afghanistan.  Of course, with more readily available technology, communications, and travel, Afghans could make that transformation much more quickly, but it still must take a couple of generations or more.

It is not in America's interest for us to maintain a counterinsurgency or any other operation in Afghanistan for two or more generations.  Our purpose in going there was to oust Al-Qaeda and their hosts, the Taliban.  A plausible response to that need may well have been the lower level effort in Afghanistan of the Bush administration.  Though I suspect that effort had too much nation-building in it.  Strangely, the Obama administration has adopted the policy advocated by Gen. McChrystal for an even greater effort in nation-building.  Afghanistan is so much more primitive than Iraq, that I do not believe this effort is in our national interest and I do not believe there will be any chance of getting out of it in reasonable time with positive results.  Most likely our policy should be little more than to go in locally and disrupt any Al-Qaeda or other terrorist bases of operation.  The McChrystal - Obama policy is not in our national interest and it will not work, so a change of commanders may facilitate a change of policy.

While I have read and thought about war and its history since I became fascinated with history in the fourth grade, I have not carefully studied the Afghan war.  My Dad was a career naval aviator and studied and taught at the Naval War College and I enjoyed many discussions with him when growing up.  I was drafted and served in the Army in Vietnam.  I have read about the wars of the Greeks, the Persians, the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Franks and Visigoths, the Scythians, the Israelis, the Carthaginians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Bohemians, the Dutch wars, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mongols, the Vikings, the Celts, the Angles and the Jutes, the Swedes, the Russ and the Russians, the wars of independence from Spain in Latin America, the Hundred Year's War, the Thirty Year's War, the Burgundian wars, the Polish wars, the Cossacks, the Napoleonic wars, the Prussian wars, native American wars, and all of the American wars.  I have plenty of context for war generally, but still I have not the detailed knowledge of present-day Afghanistan to be formulating the best strategy for the U.S. to follow there.  But, I am quite sure the McChrystal - Obama strategy is not in America's best interest and that we should be formulating a strategy with a much more modest goal.

Krauthammer - Young Hamlet's Agony

Charles Krauthammer has written a well-done commentary on Obama's handling of the war in Afghanistan called Young Hamlet's Agony.  He says:

When the Iraq War (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly anti-war. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

Summarizing his argument:

• "Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the "Iraq War bad, Afghan War good" posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern."
• Obama chose a civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan in March after an extensive review and much consultation with military commanders.  He made a big deal of this.
  
• He picked Stanley McChrystal as the ground commander in Afghanistan to implement the strategy.
• McChrystal requested 30,000 to 40,000 more troops to save Afghanistan on 30 August.
• The Commander-in-Chief and his foremost military experts, Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden, all gagged.
• Obama dithered and now we hear that it because we have no strategy.
  
• General Joe Biden has chosen a counter-terrorism strategy and is eschewing the counter-insurgency strategy decided on in March.  He wants us to fight only with cruise missiles, predator drones, and special operations troops.
• General McChrystal is the expert who did just this kind of counter-terrorism effort in Iraq for 5 years, but he is now recommending the kind of counter-insurgency strategy that worked in Iraq under General Petraeus, who wants that strategy used now in Afghanistan.
• Whose advice makes more sense, that of Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal or that of Generals Emanuel and Biden?

OK, Krauthammer did not use the Generals title before the names of Emanuel and Biden.  I just could not resist throwing that in.

Krauthammer observes:

Less than two months ago -- Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans -- the president declared Afghanistan to be "a war of necessity." Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause?

Obama is rather like Peter Keating brought up as a Marxist.  This gives him a great many twisted reference points and always has him peering at reality through a muddy, translucent window.  He surrounds himself with the advisers he is comfortable with and all of them are as removed from reality as he is.  Their view of reality is so hazy that their dreams and whims take over in helping them develop their ideas of what is out there.  They are all Platonists, more precisely Marxist Platonists.

Meanwhile good Americans are dying in Afghanistan and are removed from their families without adequate support as Obama, Biden, and Emanuel stir their tea leaves in a pot and try to read them through natural sphalerite lenses for advice on a strategy for the war in Afghanistan.

Sphalerite is crystalline ZnS, commonly found with pyrite (Fool's Gold, FeS2).  It is commonly found in a range of colors from yellow to red-brown to black.  When reacted with HCl, it gives off H2S, the rotten egg smell.

Obama will Intuit When to Read General McChrystal's Report

On 20 September 2009, we learned that General McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, had given a 66-page report on the deteriorating situation there to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. I saw an interview with Sec. Gates today in which he said he was sitting on the report while Obama decided what the new strategy in Afghanistan would be. He said he would decide when to give it to Obama. Then he corrected himself and said that he would give it to Obama when Obama asked for it.

What is really going on here is this:

• Obama wants to concentrate on taking over the medical services industry and then on taking over the use and control of all energy, and then on union card check.
• He needs all of his remaining energy for telling the world that America is nothing special and is just one among equals. Same, same constitutional representative government, dictatorship, communist oligarchy, and kleptocracy. They are all just peachy, except that the first does not do enough redistribution.
  
• Obama needs to keep his socialist cadres happy while taking over medicine and energy.
• Obama cannot do that if he gives General McChrystal the troops he wants in Afghanistan.
• If Obama does not increase the troop numbers, he is blamed for losing Afghanistan, which he said he would fight for vigorously when he said we should abandon Iraq.
  

Now if I were President (ha, ha, ha), everything would be different! I would be putting constant suggestions before Congress on how to get the government out of all sorts of properly private sector activities so Congress and I could focus on the rational use of the enumerated constitutional powers of the government. In particular, I would note that defense issues are about the foremost issues for a proper President. I would also very much want to read Gen. McChrystal's report before I tried to formulate a new policy for the conflict in Afghanistan.

But this is not the way Obama functions. No, he seeks new, unenumerated powers as his first priority. He claims to be formulating new strategies for Afghanistan without the benefit of reading a report from his top commander on the ground. Somehow, he will intuit when the right time comes to read this report in the future..... after a new political policy is already in place.

There is a clear theme in place with this Democrat administration and Congress. They are not readers, they are talkers. They talk before they study an issue. They talk faster than they can think, hoping that that means they are talking so fast that we, the People, cannot understand how vacuous they are. Frankly, they are simply child-like. I am reminded of the child who pulls the toy out the hands of another child and shouts, "It's mine.", over and over, even though it isn't. But, they think if they shout this assertion enough, it will become theirs.

Yes, Democrats are people who never developed to the stage of adulthood. Sure, some Republicans are stuck in a state of ossified moral ideals, which represents another form of childishness, but this is but a single wing of that party. The problem of arrested development is more uniform in the Democrat party. This is a party which refuses to concern itself with

• individual rights in most human activities, except selected sexual and drug use issues
• whether an action of the government is Constitutional or not
• whether they have read the legislative bills they vote for or the reports of commanders in the field
  
• whether the revenues might ever be available to pay for the new programs they want
• the health of the private sector, which supplies all the goodies the government wants to redistribute to buy votes
• producing conflict among the people based on their age
• producing conflict among the people based on their race
• producing conflict among the people basd on their gender
• producing conflict among the people based on their income
• encouraging the People to be creative and productive
• the health of the people, which requires motivated doctors, modern equipment, improved drugs, a general dissemination of new techniques and procedures, and affordable health insurance tailored to the needs of the individual
  
• whether the People have jobs, though they make great pretense of being concerned
• whether the interests of America are advanced around the world
• whether U.S. companies can compete effectively and trade freely around the world
• whether the People will have the reliable energy they need to produce goods and services, heat their homes and businesses, and can travel to explore America and the world
• whether employers and employees are free of labor union coercion and violence
• whether the intrusions of government upon commerce are so heavy that small businesses cannot cope with them and many larger businesses are at least hurt in international competition
• whether the privacy of the People's financial and medical records is protected
  

Democrats are like a small child how cannot sit still long enough to read a book or even a few pages. They cannot concentrate on a complex issue, which all governing issues are, long enough to think through the consequences of government action. This inability to concentrate and focus on one issue long enough to think it through leads them to substitute their wishes for the real consequences of their actions. So they wish that raising the minimum wage will result in low income people making more money, but mostly it results in few jobs being made available for those with little developed job skills in reality. They wish that appeasing dictators will make them like us, which it does because then the dictators can take advantage of us to better take advantage of their own people. They wish that people with pre-existing health problems can be given health insurance while everyone's health care costs come down without loss of quality, despite the fact that everyone else's health costs must go up or be rationed in reality. Everywhere wishes are substituted for real consequences.

Unfortunately, when great power is put in the hands of a child, mass destruction often results. It is as though we gave the keys to the family car to a five-year-old and told him to get on the beltway around Washington, D.C. and have a ball.

Update on the War in Iraq

Michael Yon, who is an independent war correspondent and blogger embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq for a very long time, seems to understand that war better than any other reporter. He has declared the war won and backs that claim up with a very interesting PowerPoint presentation. In addition to the decreased number of deaths due to fighting, the decreased number of attacks against infrastructure is very important. The lifeblood of Iraq is oil and many of the infrastructure attacks have been against oil facilities. This has resulted in a very high unemployment rate in Iraq, which is commonly a cause of great mischief when many have nothing constructive to do with their time and little hope that they are building a better future. Increased oil and gas production is a key to peace within Iraq and will allow the Iraqis to concentrate on rebuilding a country which has gone downhill for decades under Saddam Hussein and suffered so much at the hands of terrorists since he was overthrown. Of course, increased oil and gas production will benefit the rest of the world greatly as well and will help to bring down the very high fuel prices we have seen lately.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has determined that the time has come to start pulling troops out of Iraq and building our strength in Afghanistan. The surge has done its job and with some care not to withdraw too rapidly from Iraq and to continue supporting the Iraqi government, unlike what the Democrat Congress did with respect to the South Vietnamese government when we pulled troops out of South Vietnam, Iraq should be able to create a nation in the heart of the Middle East which is significantly more civilized than most there.

In evaluating this important victory in Iraq, we should be careful to note who opposed the surge and who approved and recommended it. The problem of Afghanistan must be addressed with renewed vigor and we should be careful in assessing who has the judgment and strength of determination to see that project through. There are also major problems to be addressed with respect to Pakistan and Iran. Who has the experience, backbone, and judgment to deal with those problems?