Friday, August 04, 2006

For the Want of A Nail



The war was lost, as the old story goes, because the nail fell out of the horseshoe, which caused the horse to go lame, which in turn made riding the horse impossible, which stopped the king from participating in the fighting, which made his soldiers discouraged and then the enemy won. I've made up some of that but you get the point.

This point matters today, because the U.S. military is running out of people:

The Defense Department quietly asked Congress on Monday to raise the maximum age for military recruits to 42 for all branches of the service.

Neat. We could have mother-and-son teams in Iraq. But this is not the reason for the higher maximum age, and neither is the wonderfulness of the new more mature recruits. No, it's the want-of-a-nail kind of thing. We don't have enough cannon fodder. Just think of this:

Last week the Pentagon increased the number of US soldiers in Iraq to around 130,000 by extending the tours of some 3,700 combat troops by an extra 120 days to help quell the sectarian violence in Baghdad.

It's like recycling. The same soldiers keep going tour after tour. This can't be mentally healthy. Hence the attempt to somehow attract more recruits.

Now that I think about it my initial example is terrible. But it will stay, because I'm too tired to rewrite anything today. So how can I save this post from total idiocy? Perhaps by pointing out that this personnel shortage might stop Bush from invading Iran or attacking Syria or helping Cuba get a leg up on capitalism or whatever brilliantly scary plans he might be hatching. And his inability to follow up on these plans might save the world from armageddon.

There is just one snag in that beautiful chain of logic, and that is bombs. They can be launched with a military force consisting of just a few old men, say, and armageddon is still practical. This is pretty much what an article in The National Review urges:

Our U.N. representative, John Bolton, is an admirable man and an outstanding spokesman for America, but his masters in the Oval Office and the State department have saddled him with an impossible job. Diplomacy before a war can sometimes provide an honorable alternative. "Diplomacy" in the midst of a war we are losing by failing to confront our main enemy is a euphemism for appeasement — a dead end road. The more eager our president is to rely on "the international community," the U.N., and our EU "partners," and to avoid, at all costs, any military confrontation with Iran, the more confident of ultimate victory the mullahs become. To them, and to hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world, watching Al Jazeera or its like on their TV screens, it looks like Iran is winning one glorious Islamist victory after another, striking blow after paralyzing blow at the once-mighty giant of the Christian West, while we cower in fear, afraid to strike back. We look like losers, while Iran looks invincible, and that image of invincibility is the most effective weapon Iran has in its hugely successful battle for the allegiance of the Muslim masses everywhere. Most Americans are still unaware of Iran's promise to light up the skies with a great surprise on August 22, but Muslims everywhere are keenly aware of it; most await the day with growing excitement.

We should not wait, passively, for the Iranians to unveil their surprise. We should light up the skies with our own surprise: a massive aerial bombardment that wipes out most of Iran's nuclear facilities, and decimates the ranks of its mullahs as well as those of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij forces that keep them in power, defeating these monsters and decimating their fan base by shattering their image of invincibility. Retired air force Lt. General Tom McInerney already has a plan to wipe out most of Iran's nuclear facilities from the air. As I've argued , we should augment it with additional targets and let fly, as soon as possible, with no forewarning, for maximum effect. Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu, one of the few who argues in public for a similarly bold course sums it up this way:

By waiting for a first strike we are put in a position of playing a retaliation game after we have already endured unacceptable losses in population and perception. Once America and Israel are seen as weak enough to defeat, then the international jackals will all join in for the kill. This is what our enemies hope to accomplish…We face a crisis of major proportions. Hesitation may be fatal.

He's right. The time to act is now.

It's not a loose nail that bothers the writer of this piece, it's a loose screw. For consider what would happen right after all those bombs have fallen. Does she expect the millions and millions of Iranians not to react to such an attack? Or does she expect flowers from the children and a statue for Bush in the middle of Teheran?

No, the Iranians would fight back. And we're out of soldiers, pretty much. Though it's not a bad plan for armageddon if you want one so urgently.