Antiwar.com Blog

Here.

Judge it for yourself.

“And to George W. Bush: You have asked us to “Bring it on.” And, so have we, like never expected.

Have you another challenge?”

WMV downloadable file here. Please download rather than hotlink.

Yuschenko isn’t interested in finding out who tried to murder him until after the election.

Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko called for a serious investigation to determine how he was poisoned by dioxin, but urged it be conducted after the December 26 presidential run-off election to avoid influencing the results.
[..]
“I don’t want this factor to influence the election in some way – either as a plus or a minus,” Yuschenko said in Russian as he left the clinic and headed back to Kiev.

“This question will require a great deal of time and serious investigation. Let us do it after the election – today is not the moment.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I think if someone tried to kill me, I’d want to know who it was. Also, I’m trying to imagine how an investigation would affect the election. It’s kind of central to the election already, isn’t it?

I thought I’d do a report on Fallujah Reconstruction:

American warplanes pounded Fallujah with missiles Sunday as insurgents fought running battles with coalition forces in the volatile western Iraqi city. The U.S. military said two troops died in separate incidents.

Well, OK then!

Via the indispensable Yankeedoodle at Iraq Today, we find this interesting article by Phil Carter in the NY Times. Phil argues that the Great Armor Crisis is due to the US military fighting a conflict in which there are no front lines with equipment designed for support behind the front lines.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the military has slowly recognized that its fundamental assumptions about warfare are being rendered obsolete. In Somalia, American troops faced guerrillas adept at trapping military convoys in ambushes in urban areas. In Bosnia, partisans on both sides used land mines to great effect, making every road a potential hazard. And now in Iraq, the insurgency has transformed the battlefield into one that is both nonlinear and noncontiguous, with sporadic fighting flaring up in isolated spots around the country.

Simply put, there are no more front lines. In slow recognition, the Army purchased light armored vehicles in the late 1990’s for its military police to conduct peacekeeping, and more recently spent billions of dollars to outfit several brigades with Stryker medium-weight armored vehicles, which are impervious to most small arms and rocket-propelled grenades and can be deployed anywhere in the world by airplane.

But the fact that there is no longer a front line also means there aren’t any more “rear” areas where support units can operate safely. Support units must now be prepared to face the same enemy as the infantry, but are having to do so in trucks with canvas doors and fiberglass hoods because Pentagon procurement planners never expected they’d have to fight. Remember that Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the Iraq invasion’s most celebrated prisoner of war, was a supply clerk with a maintenance company.

Americans who have never served in the military may not realize the scale of the problem. Napoleon’s army may have marched on its stomach, but ours requires a juggernaut of mechanics, medics, logisticians and truck drivers carrying everything from ammunition to underwear to keep moving. As a general rule, these support troops outnumber combat soldiers by about seven to one.

Phil has additional commentary on his own article on his blog, Intel Dump.

However, there remains a giant elephant in the room: equipment. The Army’s “MTOE’s” — “modified table of organization and equipment” — have not changed much, except for organizational changes such as the move to create “units of action” that are more flexible and modular. Unfortunately, these units still contain much of the same flawed equipment allocations, such as light-skinned vehicles with no armor to protect the crew and too few crew-served weapons for force protection. These MTOEs were drawn up a long time ago. Though they have been revised many times, they have not been changed to incorporate the new realities of warfare. That’s a real problem, and it’s one that must be fixed.

For more detail on the problem, visit Noah Schachtman at Defense Tech, here and here. Those posts point out the issues involved in acquiring new equipment and armor kits for equipment already deployed. Considering the unexpected levels of wear and the enormous resupply effort required for simply keeping the equipment already in Iraq running, one wonders how the addition of some 12,000 troops, many light infantry (i.e. no armored vehicles – the 82nd Airborne currently deploying is an example) will affect the current crisis. More troops mean not only more possible targets for the resistance, but also far more supplies.

I read the following passage in David D. Friedman’s Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (published in ’97):

In the previous discussion, we were considering a pure depletable resource — a resource whose price was entirely determined by its limited supply. Consider at the other extreme, a resource of which only a limited amount exists but for which production costs are substantial and for which that “limited amount” is very large compared to the quantity demanded at a price sufficient to cover the cost of production. The amount is so large that technology, law, and political institutions will have changed beyond recognition long
before the supply is exhausted.

Under those circumstances, saving the good now in order to sell it when supplies run short is not a very attractive idea — before that happens we may have stopped using it, the owner may have been expropriated, or the world may have ended. Changes in its price over time will be almost entirely determined by changes in production cost. The good is, strictly speaking, depletable, but that fact has no significant effect on its price. The pattern of oil prices over the past ninety years or so suggests that that may well be how the market views petroleum.

This reminded me of my arguments, months ago — on this blog and in Backtalk — against the Peak Oil Theory (POT). Curious about the present level of POT’s popularity I checked Google News and found that in the past few days POT has been mentioned in articles on numerous dissident sites, including Axis of Logic, Al-Jazeerah, ProgressiveTrail.org, From the Wilderness, Slashdot, DisInfo.com, CounterPunch, Znet, Common Dreams, AlterNet, Mother Jones, and Washington Dispatch. Two Indian news sites also mentioned POT but no mainstream Western sources did. In this case, I think the mainstream is getting it right. IMO, the relatively high current oil prices are due to political chaos, cartel decisions (possibly), and dollar inflation (depite the Iraq invasion, the euro price of oil has risen little; the prices of gold and real estate have risen with the price of oil but neither gold nor real estate is being consumed) — not due to oil’s peak passing.

Chris Nelder’s GetRealList blog has a good selection of pro-POT articles: here.

Not exactly on-topic, but here are a couple of articles about increasing fuel efficiency from the The Economist‘s Technology Quarterly: “The Rise of the Green Building” and “Plugging in, at Last.”

For previous blog and Backtalk debate on POT, click here.

Marwan Barghouti has released a set of demands for withdrawing from the Palestinian election. See them here. A couple of them are conditions on Israel, so it looks like Marwan will be running in the election.