Blog Visits, 5: Colin B of EO has a good blog!

I went back for a visit to Evangelical Outpost today, and saw that Colin B has a blog. Went for a visit and commented on his interesting post on the Iraq situation and on the theocracy canard.

The former is relevant to my intention to return tothe Matt 24 watch series - on wars and deceptions etc, so I cross-post:

Remark of interest:

CB: One can never win, in any sense, a proxy war. We learned that in VietNam

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Hi Colin

Great to see you blogging. Keep it up!

I note on the proxy war, that here may be one or more deeper strategic levels at work:

a] Iran (like the USSR or for that matter Napoleon's France were) is a stretched, limited power. So a great power willing to stick it out on an existential threat [as Islamism IMHCO poses globally] -- that is the real biggie issue -- can materially drain the resources through strategic level attrition.

b] Most serious wars are really won at this level - the spectacular sweeps happen AFTER the to-be-defeated power is overstretched and exhausted. (As Giap testifies, the agitprop strategy is really intended to relieve this pressure before it tells; so the idea is that if you target the known American PR vulnerability, then you can get away with an asymmetric victory. Then, once you have nukes, missiles and suicide bombers,the game changes in what is really WW 4. Unfortunately thanks to Chavez, the Caribbean is a likely theatre of operations now. I expect to wake up any morning and see we are in Missile Crisis 2.]

c] E.g. on attrition's strategic role: In WW II Germany bled out on the plains of Russia; often extracting ~ 10 Russian dead for every German -- a convincing example of the power of persistence in existential struggle. This was aided by the air war's attrition of Germany's technological resources and key personnel. These cumulatively set the basis for the spectacular advances of 1944 - 45, once German domination of ground and air were broken. [The sea war was won by the west in 1943, basically by sinking enough U boats to turn the tide in the convoys battle. Attrition again, this time to support the logistical base for the more direct campaigns.]

d] The Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns put Iran in a geostrategic squeeze, and they know it. Thus they are trying to push out the front, in-theatre, to these two border states; and through the global front, to the homeland of the USA. But the key risk is that it exposes the intervention through battlefield capture of key people and documents etc. That is of course a causus belli for carrying the war to the heartland of the main enemy, one way or another. [And the UN is obviously not a decisive front for that!]

e] However, thanks to a blend of naivety and Quislingism in major institutions, esp the media, the US public largely does not realise what is at stake.

f] That means a likely short term defeat in Iraq and the Gulf, followed by a surge in Islamist expansionism and a horribly expensive and bloody fight-back. I think the former Mossad head is right in estimating that this may last 25 or more years, and I think too that it will likely go nuclear.

Sadly, if the West had been willing to face the issues in good time, that could be averted. But, then, that is the same story with WW 2 and Hitler in the 1930s.

Okay, great work

GEM of TKI
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More another day . . . END