I may see you all again in September on a new blog. In the meantime, I’ll be on http://michaelpeck.wordpress.com/ But whether I see you again or not, I hope that I brought something to your world. Because you brought something worthwhile to mine.

Take care.

Michael

“Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation”, proclaims a headline in the Guardian.  John Kerry says they raise significant questions about the conflict. The iconic Daniel Ellsberg himself says he was “very impressed by the release.” Pundits have been focusing on various elements that are mentioned in the papers, such as civilian deaths from American fire, Pakistan’s covert support of the Taliban even while they’re supposed to be fighting them, and the existence of an American special operations group to hunt down Taliban leaders.

Yet when even Mother Jones says the Wikileaks papers are no big deal, then perhaps there’s more smoke than fire here. The best commentary so far comes from counterinsurgency scholar Andrew Exum, whose reaction can be summed as: Dead civilians? Pakistani double-cross? Taliban leaders on a hit list? No kidding? What rock have you been living under?

The Pentagon Papers were a bombshell because they showed that the American government lied when it claimed to want peace in Southeast Asia, even as it escalated the Vietnam war. The snippets I’ve seen of the Afghanistan documents so far aren’t bombshells. They’re routine reports from American soldiers in the field. They mostly say that “we handed out goodies to the civilians. They still don’t like us. Our Afghan allies are a bunch of boobs.” These are not revelations to those who have been following the conflict. And those who don’t follow the war, which includes the majority of the American public, will not be galvanized. Dry bureaucratic reports don’t have the same impact as a video of helicopters strafing Iraqis.

If there is any good to come out of the Afghan and Iraq wars, it’s that any romantic illusions that war is precise and high-tech have been shredded. After nearly 10 years of fighting, we know that civilians die in war.

Unfortunately we have also become anesthetized to this. An after-action report of a botched commando raid that killed civilians isn’t gong to provoke mass protest. And perhaps it shouldn’t, because all wars have their share of stupidity and futility, which are usually documented somewhere in the vast military machine. The difference is that they are being revealed now by WikiLeaks instead of by some historian digging through archives 40 years later.

The WikiLeaks documents will provide ammunition for those who want us out of Afghanistan now. But the ammunition will mostly be blank, because Obama has laid down his Afghanistan policy, and like Johnson and Nixon, he will be reluctant to back out of it. So we will snort and snarl at the Wikileaks Papers. And the war will go on.

The most interesting part about the Washington Post’s series on America’s booming national security empire isn’t the revelations about wasteful spending and lack of oversight. It’s the neat map of government installations as well as private contractors who have cashed in on top-secret contracts.

Some very hush-hush organizations occupy some very nondescript buildings. You never know which acronym agency is in that little office park down the road. So let’s take a look at the map. The great state of Oregon, which has almost no federal military installations, but does have five companies doing top-secret work, mostly in the Portland area. Indiana has four companies, New York 51, South Dakota zero (how could the Mount Rushmore state miss out on the gravy train?) and Virginia several hundred. If defense dollars make the heart grow fonder, then Virginia really is for lovers.

Does your town have a top-secret government installation or contractor? Take a look at this map.

The Marine Corp general’s tough-talking style has attracted a lot of admirers among defense reporters, who have compiled a list of “mattisisms”. Some of the more notable ones:

* “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”

* “You are part of the world’s most feared and trusted force. Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.”

*  “When Gen. Abrial arrived to relieve me as the supreme commander, only don’t ask, don’t tell kept me from hugging and kissing him.”

Here’s an Atlantic compilation of 16 favorite Mattis quotes. And here’s a Twitter page devoted to mattisisms. Some are from Mattis, and some are quips about Mattis (“General Mattis doesn’t cheat death. He wins fair and square.”):

Tell me Gen. Mattis doesn’t chomp cigars. It just wouldn’t be right if he didn’t.

But James Mattis is no “kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out” cowboy. That’s not the sort of man who rises to become a four-star general in the Marine Corps, which tends to think more out of the box than the other services. Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman describes Mattis as a man who helped author the military’s counterinsurgency manual, and one who believes that people are more important than technology in war (“What are we creating today with our command-and-control systems? I don’t think we have turned off our radios in the last eight years.”) There’s a brain behind the cigar.

Obama might say about Gen. Mattis what Lincoln said about Gen. Grant: “I can’t spare this man. He fights.” Then again, a fighting general in a grinding, unpopular counterinsurgency campaign might not be the ticket, especially as casualties soar as America pours in more troops. Yet if you’re going to fight a war, better a tough commander determined to impose his will on the enemy.  Or as Mattis says: “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.”

Now Obama has fired McChrystal, and he will almost certainly pay a price. Obama’s critics will claim that his field commander knew better than he did, and that McChrystal was fired because Obama couldn’t handle the truth. Obama shouldn’t worry. Lincoln and Truman survived, and fared better in the history books than the would-be warlords they dismissed. In the end, Americans would rather have a strong president than a good general.

The fact is that good or bad, generals are replaceable. That is how the military is designed. If a commander falls, another takes his place, with the same training and knowledge as his predecessor, and likely to use many of the same strategies and tactics.

But there is only one President. He, too, is replaceable, or at least every four years. Yet during those four years, our nation invests him with enormous power, prestige and responsibility. A weak President – or a President perceived as weak – has domestic and foreign consequences that extend far beyond a war in a remote Asian nation. We can’t say for sure that Petraeus will be a better or worse commander than McChrystal (though he will certainly be more discreet). But we can that a Commander-in-Chief who meekly accepts ridicule from his generals does not deserve the title and will not command the respect that his office demands. In a world of Al Qaeda and the Iranian bomb, we can’t afford a Cuckold-in-Chief.

Generals frequently tend to be more popular than presidents. They appear stronger, more purposeful, more competent. But they have the luxury of only focusing on war, on killing the enemy or capturing ground. Presidents, whether they want to or not, must deal with the big picture.

It’s important to have good generals. We have had some poor ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we still paying the price a decade later. But whether the general’s name is McChrystal or Petraeus will make little difference. The Afghan war rests on a strategy that we have chosen for better or worse, and the ultimate bearer of responsibility for that strategy is one Barack Obama.

So what a great time to play some railroad games! Fans of Sid Meier’s legendary Railroad Tycoon series of computer games will be glad to know that the master’s deftly digital hand is back at the throttle with “Railroads” (scheduled for October release). In the meantime, for my choo-choo fix, I turned to a board game (remember cardboardware?).

“Railways of the World” is a series of 19th Century rail-builder games from Eagle Games. I tried the base game, which sets up to six players building railroads across the Eastern United States. The first thing that strikes you about this game is its components. The box must weigh 10 pounds, jammed full of trains, water towers, cards, cardboard markers and a large map of the U.S.  There’s enough plastic in this game to send the price of oil soaring.

Each turn in Railways of the World is divided into three rounds, during which players can lay track, ship goods, or draw or play cards. Players earn victory points and money by shipping goods. There are five types of goods – denoted by different colored cubes – that are randomly placed on cities across the map. Some cities on the map also have colors, and game play boils down to shipping, say,  a blue cube to a blue city. The longer the route, or rather the greater the number of cities that the route passes through, the more you earn for each delivery. Problem is, there are only a limited number of rail routes into each city, and if another player is the first to lay track on the shortest route from Baltimore to Philadelphia, you’re either shut out of that market or you build track on a longer route.

And there’s the rub. Laying track costs money. Money is raised by shipping goods. But to deliver goods, you need to first lay track, which also requires money. So you have to take out loans, which means interest payments to bondholders. It’s tempting to go on a track-laying frenzy to sew markets, but it’s a mistake that no one (notably me) will ever make after his first game. The resulting interest payments (curiously, loans never can be paid off) drain your revenues and stifle your growth. Winning in Railways of the World is a delicate balance between expansion and parsimony. As realtors says, location is everything. The Northeast abounds with cities that allow short rail connections that are cheap to build. But there are beaucoup bonus points for building links to the West (which on this map, begins somewhere around Minneapolis).

Cards add a nice random touch to the game. They offer bonus points for being the first to complete certain goals, such as shipping four different colors of goods. Or they allow players to change the color of a city, creating instant markets.

Did I learn a lot about real-life railroads? Not really. But I learned about cutthroat capitalism, and the fine line between ambition and megalomania. Railways of the World is addictive. My board game group has been playing it for months. The randomness of the cards and the random setup of goods make every game different.  I hope railroads will come back. But I’m glad that rail games are.

Franz Gayl, a civilian science and technology advisor to the Marine Corps, wants to drop one of the Pentagon’s giant bunker-buster bombs, the kind that would be used to destroy Iranian or North Korean nuclear site buried deep inside mountains. The GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb is 30 feet long and weighs 10 tons. There are also leftover Vietnam-era BLU-82B “Daisy Cutter” bombs containing nearly eight tons of high explosive.

In an email to Uncommon Defense, Gayl explained that the bombs can be used like a depth charge used against submarines. Instead of being dropped by C-130 transports, the giant bombs would be encased in a simple pressure shell and lowered to a few feet above the leaking well head.

If you explode such devices above ground the released energy would be observed as a huge blast that moves outward through the low pressure and “squishy” (i.e. highly compressible) air. However, at a depth of 5,000 feet the blast bubble will be quite small in volume, even at detonation, and as the gases rapidly cool they will of course shoot towards the surface 5,000 feet above.

So, the obvious question is what becomes of the tremendous amount of released energy in the detonation, if there is no huge blast, as one would get above ground? The answer is an absolutely incredible shock wave that will in a fraction of a milisecond crush every volume that it encounters that is less than the pressure of the water shock front through which it is propagating.

That devastating shock wave will treat any metal cavity like soft Play Doe, sealing every perceived cavity with a crushing force thousands of times greater than even the ambient water pressure. The oil plumbing is filled with rapidly flowing oil that has at any moment a lower density than the surrounding and effectively incompressible water through which the shock wave moves. Not only is crude oil less dense, but it also is compressible, unlike the water surrounding it. At 5,000 feet depth the shock wave will therefore have the effect of a concentric fist crushing every inch of plumbing and instantaneously sealing the full length of exposed pipe, but seal it permanently.

Gayl calls the big bombs an environmentally “green” way of sealing the well.  I’m not enough of a physicist or explosives expert to judge whether the idea is genius or insane. One obvious concern is that the blast might rupture the pipes around the well and worsen the leak. But Gayl argues that detonating the bomb a few yards from the well head will be far enough to avoid destroying the plumbing. I’m also hesitant to call dropping giant bombs a “green” solution, although it’s much greener – and much saner – than underwater nukes.

Gayl previously caught public attention for blowing the whistle on delays in mine-resistant Marine Corps armored vehicles. Then-senator Joe Biden demanded that the Marine Corps cease retaliating against him.

Gayl notes that one party that won’t be keen on the “green bomb” idea is BP. “BP wouldn’t like that option because they wouldn’t be able to reopen that particular well. Fortunately I think the President and the public are at the point of saying this is a national emergency (actually international) and the the business case for preserving the well is trumped by the emergency.”

Meanwhile, Israeli students are planning to send a convoy to aid  victims of Turkish genocide and persecution. The convoy will bring humanitarian aid to the Armenians – 1.5 million exterminated by the Turks in a forerunner of the Nazi Holocaust – as well as  the Kurds. “It’ll be a peace flotilla without the knives and stones that hurt IDF soldiers, without violence, which is intended for all those oppressed by the Turkish government,” said one of the organizers.

I can’t wait to see all the humanitarian groups, activists and politicians rushing to join a humanitarian mission to the Kurds, who have suffered for years at the hands of the Turkish military in their fight for an independent Kurdish state. I’m sure the same people who insisted on sailing to Gaza will insist on sailing to Cyprus, where Turkish troops occupied a third of the island, expelled hundreds of thousands of Greek Cypriots, and set up a puppet regime recognized by no one else in the world.

Because, after all, the international peace movement cares as much about Kurdistan, Darfur and North Korea as it does about Gaza, right?  I’ll look forward to the international Free Kurdistan movement.

Real humanitarians don’t beat soldiers with metal bars.

The Islamists on the Gaza convoy that attacked the Israeli boarding party were not peace activists. They were martyrs-in-waiting. Instead of strapping on a suicide vest and walking into an Tel Aviv restaurant, they attacked Israeli soldiers knowing damn well what the response would be. The Islamists knew the Israelis were coming. Anyone and everyone who has been following the news for the past week knew that the Israelis would stop the convoy. There were children and elderly people aboard those vessels. Genuine aid workers with a shred of conscience would have done their best to ensure that there was no provocation, no violence, nothing that would set off heavily armed commandos. Instead we see video of these “humanitarians” stabbing an Israeli soldier. So it was “disproportionate” for Israeli soldiers to respond with lethal force? Try attacking an American police officer with a metal pipe and see how proportionate it is. Better yet, try it on a Hamas cop in Gaza.

Now the usual suspects – the leftists, the progressives, the British media – are leading the usual assault against Israel. They are so filled with self-righteous indignation, and yet so incapable of self-reflection that they cannot ask themselves a basic question: What kind of people would provoke a fight with armed soldiers on ships filled with innocent people? The answer is that these are people who don’t care how many die; martyrdom is glorious, especially against the Jews. These are not people who give a damn about human rights or women’s rights or the environment. The Left does itself no credit by allying with them.

Israel won’t let supplies into Gaza because it fears a flood of Iranian-supplied missiles on its southern border, just like what happened when Iranian-supplied Scuds ended up in Hezbollah’s hands on the northern border. To the Israelis, this is part of a war to destroy the Jewish state.  Sometimes they’re wrong, but not in this case. This convoy wasn’t about humanitarian aid. Those genuinely concerned with human life would have done everything they could to avoid violence. I’m sure many of the people on that convoy didn’t want violence. But some did. If the world is going to blame Israel, it needs to blame them as well.

Of course, what the author of this Facebook page really means is an Everybody Deny the Holocaust Day, which will teach the infidels not to draw Muhammed in a bear suit. His semi-coherent manifesto seems to be that if people have the right to draw the Prophet Muhammed, then they have the right to question the existence of the Holocaust.

He is correct. We can’t defend the right to satire a religious figure and yet bar the right to deny the Holocaust, as some European states do (frequently the ones who directly or indirectly supported the genocide). However, what is fascinating here is the moral equivalence. Outraged at the “insult” to his religion, this fundamentalist won’t strike back by drawing a cartoon of Jesus or mocking atheists. He’s going to do it by denying the Holocaust. Since in his mind, Jews control the world, then question the Holocaust and the Elders of Zion will pull a few levers to make the cartoons stop. Because this is exactly the kind of world that a fundamentalist understands and desires. A cleric decides what is sacred and what is profane, which cartoons are permitted and which are not. There is no dissent.

So here’s what I say. Go right on ahead. Every time someone draws Muhammed, write a Facebook post that claims that 6 million Jews were never killed, and that they have really spent the last 65 years hiding in Grandma Sadie’s basement. Every time someone satires Muhammed, wave banners proclaiming that the Nazi death camps were actually vacation resorts. See if anyone threatens to kill you. But also see if this stops the cartoons or enhances respect for Islam.

I despise Holocaust denial and Holocaust deniers. But if that’s the price that I must pay for the right to free speech, the right to satire, the right to speak our minds without fear of violence, then I can endure it.