Postcard from Berlin

Dear America,

We're having a blast today. Today, we celebrate 20 years since the downfall of the most oppressive system of governance the world has ever known. We celebrate the triumph of the free market over central control, of individual rights over collectivist suffering, of unbridled prosperity over the chains of poverty, of democracy over dictatorship, of free speech and thought over the gulag, of free will over diktats, of every truly Western, liberal, and enlightened value that thinkers, fighters, leaders, and citizens have treasured and defended for hundreds of years.

Wish you were here.

No "tragedy"

I'm back from the first of what will be many week-long sojourns up at 29 Palms, having successfully completed TACP school and achieved a new MOS as a FAC. The firing exercise itself saw some good training with a wide variety of aircraft and weapons; I was a tad disappointed that we didn't get an AC-130 or A-10 to show up with their various calibers of hate and discontent, but we had a never-ending stream of F-18s, AV-8s, and AH-1s, and they brought plenty of fireworks with them (and I certainly enjoyed being the only student who got to control a live Hellfire shot).

It felt good to wrap things up on Thursday; as we say in military parlance, a lot of learning occurred for me in the last four weeks, as I struggled to understand the nuances of a side of aviation that was completely foreign to me (most people in the class were either TACAIR pilots i.e. they've dropped ordnance for ground units before, or ground-pounders who'd been in situations where CAS was required. As assault support, we're generally told to hang out somewhere else until all the bomb-dropping is done and it's relatively safe for us to bring our fat asses in). This course was no joke, but hey, at the end everything clicked and that's what's important. Our class' collective elation at finishing, however, was sobered when we came back from the range Thursday night to learn that a dozen more American soldiers were dead and several dozen wounded in a bloodbath that took place not in some remote outpost in Afghanistan, but in our own back yard.

The name of Major Nidal Malik Hasan will doubtless live in infamy in Army history well beyond the day he finds himself on the wrong end of a firing squad or is hung from the yard-arm until dead (I don't know if we still have yard-arms but I think it's a tradition worth reviving for him). Equally infamous will be the enduring knowledge that Hasan exhibited enough disturbing behavior over a long period of time that his actions may well have been prevented at any number of points had anyone in the Army's bureaucracy shown some stones. As it is, an attitude of political correctness and fear of repercussions for alleged 'discrimination' by people in Hasan's chain of command deserve at least some of the blame held by the trigger-puller himself.

That attitude, unfortunately, seems to pervade the current investigation into what drove Hasan to gun down the soldiers he was supposed to be helping. Various explanations are floating around, all apparently designed to support the head-in-the-sand notion exemplified by one army wife who lamented that she wished the gunman's last name had been Smith. There's the cure-all theory of post-traumatic stress syndrome, always a favorite to explain irrational violence by vets returning from Bush's unjust wars; yet Hasan had never deployed. There's the story that Hasan felt - evidently very deeply, judging by his actions - that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were wrong and that he really, really, really didn't want to go, to the point where he hired lawyers to help him avoid deploying. Well, there are many legitimate courses of action for conscientious objectors to take (first and foremost: not joining the military to begin with), and in the past eight years military personnel have taken them (as well as not-so-legitimate choices, like fleeing to Canada). Yet within the ranks of objectors, no one else ever decided to express his opposition by murdering his comrades. Finally, of course, there's the argument that Hasan was on the receiving end of that always-just-over-the-horizon anti-Muslim 9/11 backlash that CAIR insists will arrive tomorrow. There are recourses for that too, from bringing such discrimination to the attention of the Equal Opportunity officer resident in each military unit (yes, I'm not making that up, we all have one) to using the rank of major he held to tell the offending party to STFU.

All of these straw men are currently employed in obfuscating the clearest explanation, which is that somewhere along the way, Major Hasan's Muslim beliefs became increasingly radicalized to the point where he turned into a free agent for the opposing team. This means that his actions Thursday afternoon were not a "tragedy" - as if this were an earthquake or wildfire - but a pre-meditated example of jihadist terrorism at its vilest. Everyone is going to great lengths to say that his religion had nothing to do with murdering a pregnant mother just returned from combat duty, a nurse who wanted to join the Army after 9/11 despite being over 50 years old, a PFC from a family of military service stretching back to Vietnam, a female sergeant who vowed to personally take on Osams bin Laden, and half a dozen other fine men and women. Yet all the evidence points to just such a motive. As early as 2001, Hasan attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, VA, at the same time two 9/11 hijackers were receiving 'spiritual guidance' from an imam who was an ardent al-Qaeda supporter. His fellow medical students frequently heard him erupt in 'anti-American' rants (though, notably, did not report them for fear of being considered discriminatory). Hasan's local imam in Texas reports that the gunman had reservations about fighting fellow Muslims (evidently lost on Hasan was the irony of seeking support for his radical views from an imam who was a retired first sergeant and Desert Storm vet); the imam did not report this to Hasan's superiors presumably because as a former first sergeant, he assumed that the Army would discipline Hasan if they knew about it (which they did, but did not act). Hasan allegedly posted rants on the Internet equating suicide bombers with soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save their comrades. And, finally, as Hasan rose from his desk, looked his fellow soldiers in the eyes, and started shooting, he shouted "Allahu akbar" - "God is great", a cry I have heard on countless jihadist videos right before an IED shreds a convoy, a missile plucks an aircraft out of the sky, or a suicide bomber wipes out a marketplace. Claiming that Hasan's religion had nothing to do with his actions is like claiming that when it came to the Final Solution, Hitler's anti-Semitism was beside the point.

In the weeks and months to come, we'll get the full story. No doubt Hasan himself will have something to say; either he'll tell us that his fellow soldiers were a bunch of infidels about to make war on innocent Muslims and deserved to die, or if he decides to manipulate the legal system for all it's worth, we'll hear that he was suffering from 'pre-post traumatic stress syndrome' and was so terrified by a deployment he didn't want to go on that he just snapped and in a fit of despair killed and maimed those who happened to be around him, reloaded, and killed and maimed some more. My guess is he'll get a lawyer who will go with the latter (and though it makes me sick to my stomach, I'll also go out on a limb and guess that he'll have a long line of America-hating opportunists looking to represent him, as all our buddies in Gitmo do). And we will have to endure further obfuscation as attorneys claim that everything from redneck discrimination to the fundamental injustice of American foreign policy around the globe is responsible for thirteen people lying on slabs, while the perverse ideology that justifies the murder of the innocent and unarmed in the name of Allah goes unchallenged. Maybe I'll be wrong and prosecutors will get to the heart of the matter (not getting my hopes up, though, when our wishful cultural ignorance goes up to the top, with the head of Homeland Security warning against an anti-Muslim backlash in the wake of the shooting. Well, Janet, in your quest to assuage the world that Americans won't go all ig'nant and start getting pissy at 'towelheads', I'd point out that, based on Thursday, non-Muslims have more to fear from Muslims than vice versa. Surely even you can count: after Thursday, Muslims killed = 0; non-Muslims killed = 13. Who should fear who?). Either way, at least there's no chance that Hasan will ever walk the streets of this fair country again. Let's get down to finding that yard-arm . . .

Fallen angels

This has been a rough week for naval aviation. We started with a mid-air in Afghanistan and ended with nine lives lost in a collision near San Diego and a training aircraft missing out of Corpus Christi. In a time of war and with a high op tempo, this is the cost of doing business. Keep all of them in your thoughts; they're your neighborhood guardian angels, braving friendly and unfriendly skies to bring you home when you're lost and keep the wolves from your door. They are sorely missed.

I'm spending the next week in the field at 29 Palms and so will be out of touch. Spare a thought for Bree and Aaron too; they're about to endure another phase of separation that came unlooked for when I assume my new post up here.

'One of the best'

Apologies for the hiatus, I've been immersed in the arts of FACdom at TACP school pretty deeply, surfacing only to jaunt out east for 30 hours to run a marathon and then come back home for more FACdom. I was on the verge of shooting out some quick thoughts on Afghanistan when things there took a tragic turn yesterday.

"One of the best". That certainly describes Capt Kyle Van De Giesen, who was killed in action two days ago in a helicopter collision. He graduated a year ahead of me from St. A's, and was one of the first people I encountered on my own road to the Marine Corps. Since it's a small Corps and we were both helicopter pilots, we crossed paths occasionally after both of us graduated, and I remember that each time, he always exuded the utmost enthusiasm for his job. I think he was one of those Marines who completely loved what he was doing and wouldn't have traded it for anything else. Of all people, he surely deserved to finish his tour and go home to his wife and kids. It was gut-wrenching to learn that he was within a week of doing so, and doing so in time to see the birth of his second child, when his aircraft went down. I hope you'll all spare a moment and a prayer for his family who are now planning a funeral instead of a homecoming.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

A fine leader, Marine, and American, taken from us at 29. Requiescat in pace and semper fidelis.

Peace in our time

We've all spent the last week basking in the shared glory of our president winning the Nobel Peace Prize less than a year into his first term (technically he was nominated after serving only 10 days, or 0.82%, of that term, but hey, this is the Information Age and things move more quickly). As both the president and the Nobel committee admit, this is less an acknowledgement of things accomplished than things anticipated and promised by amazing speech-writing. I personally enjoy Richard Cohen's take on this the most and agree that earning this award is "f---ing awesome." It certainly takes the sting out of seeing the Olympics handed out to Rio. I'm also wondering if perhaps the president knew he'd be getting the prize and oriented his foreign policy accordingly. It makes his recent decision to ignore the Dalai Lama more understandable; Obama didn't feel worthy meeting a fellow laureate without a prize of his own. Now they can talk on equal terms, and the Lama will no doubt be comforted knowing how concerned the United States is about Tibetan and Chinese dissidents and how we'll get to them right after we halt the rise of the oceans and start healing the sick. In fact, imprisoned activists in those two countries and around the world should be heartened by the path we've taken with dissidents sentenced to death in Iran: I'm not sure what to call the doctrine yet, and I'm torn between "everything W. did, we will not do" and "hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil, and BTW pound sand", but in time I'm sure an appropriate tag will suggest itself and in the meantime, Iranian dissidents and the Human Rights Documentation Center that until now has advocated for them with State Department help will just have to chalk their misfortunes up to the poor economic climate. They simply have to understand that America isn't made of money; you spend billions on Cash for Clunkers and Cash for Refrigerators and Subsidies for Solar Panels and Funds for non-Flourescent Light Bulbs to curb a changing climate which has actually gotten colder in the last ten years, and you run out of the paltry $3 million required to document the state-orchestrated torture and murder of one of the globe's leading exporters of terror against its own citizens.

The prize hasn't impressed the Russians either, who don't feel too good about our new missile defense plan even though we sold our eastern European allies down the river to scrap the old one they didn't like either. I'm not sure how we're going to deal with this new problem; we're running out of friends to throw under the bus. Oh wait, I just saw the the Ukraine could be used to host early warning sites; maybe we can tell them "just kidding" on the next anniversary of the Holodomor.

OK, enough doom and gloom already. How about we all enjoy the latest installment in Saturday Night Live's long tradition of political satire:



I'm not sure what's funnier: the skit (which, to be fair to SNL, isn't the first time they've knocked Obama; I enjoyed their primary skits when interviewers asked Hillary how'd she handle a resurgent Taliban and Obama whether his chair was comfortable enough), or Wolf Blitzer 'fact-checking' the skit on CNN. Wolf, after watching you crater on Celebrity Jeopardy, I don't think you're allowed to fact-check anyone ever again.

The twilight zone

Ladies and gentlemen, we're living in it.

That's the only way to square the circle on the latest from Mohamed ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency's own Inspector Clouseau. He announced today that it's actually Israel, not Iran, which poses the greatest threat to Middle Eastern stability. "Israel is the number one threat to the Middle East given the nuclear arms it possesses," pronounced ElBaradei ominously from Tehran, where he's currently enforcing the IAEA's official policy of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil." That's right: a Western-style free market democracy is a greater threat than the various and sundry dictatorships that surround (and have repeatedly tried to destroy) it. It's not basket-case Syria, which recently had its own nuclear reactor deactivated (by the Israelis, who are far more effective at controlling Middle Eastern nuclear proliferation than the IAEA; just ask Saddam. Well you can't, but there's a big hole in the ground where his nuclear reactor used to be). It's not Saudi Arabia, whose princes promulgate Wahhabi terrorism around the globe with their prolific oil revenues. And it's certainly not Iran, whose leaders recently rigged an election, jailed and killed those who refused to go along with the theft quietly, have pursued an illegal nuclear program for many years now, and who have engaged in global terrorism from the first day of their regime's founding. Nope, it's those damn Jews.

Meanwhile, according to the IAEA's own report, Iran may now have the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon and place it on one of its medium-range missiles. Maybe ElBaradei didn't have time to read that appendix on the way to Tehran. I know, I like to sleep on my flights too. And I'm sure the Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Brigades will be more responsible with nuclear warheads than they've been, say, with all those EFPs that wound up in Iraq or the rockets that have rained down on Israel for years on end.

This is the system that's supposed to safeguard us from the most terrible weapons of mass destruction. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd sleep with one eye open.

To steal J. Nordingler's words: a sickening light

Not to flog a dead horse, but this (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hUZamhqvPGVrYZpGq_clUpC7
dAUgties) - tangentally, I'll admit - to something I touched a little on yesterday; namely, that our current attitude toward various countries has been subject to a perverse inversion recently. Now comes this tidbit of news, that the Empire State Building, one of the most distinctive structures in America and a symbol of our free market and free society, will be bathed in red and yellow lights tonight to honor the 60th anniversary of communist China. Here are some highlights from the last sixty years which we'll be commemorating:

-the Great Leap Forward, China's version of Russia's Five Year Plans. 36 million people died.
-invasion of Tibet in 1950. Tens of thousands are killed in the invasion and ensuing revolt.
-1989 Tienanmen Square massacre of democracy protestors; hundreds are killed by Chinese tanks.
-material and military support of communist movements in Vietnam, North Korea, Laos and Cambodia, resulting in the deaths of millions and the repression of the surviving population.
-class system which treats Chinese peasants little better than serfs, overtaxing them while reserving development and infrastructure for urban areas.
-widespread censorship, restricted freedom of speech, and virtually no freedom of religion.
-gulag prison system similar to that of Soviet Russia.

Happy 60th birthday, People's Republic. And to all those protestors, dissidents, political prisoners, and ordinary men and women who've suffered and died under 60 years of communism and authoritarianism, you're right: those lights on the Empire State Building are telling you to pound sand.