Justin Raimondo can’t even get the story from the movie “Red Dawn” right, much less the nature of guerilla warfare:

Does anybody besides myself remember the movie Red Dawn? It’s a cold war morality play in which America is invaded, conquered and occupied by the Soviets: the story revolves around the exploits of an underground resistance, consisting mostly of teen-agers, that springs up to combat the Red Army and its collaborators. The resistance starts out small, with minor acts of sabotage, and escalates over time into a well-coordinated and virtually unstoppable general rebellion that ends in the defeat of the occupiers.

“Red Dawn” happens to be one of my favorite movies, by one of my favorite directors, John Milius, who also directed “Conan the Barbarian,” “The Wind and the Lion,” and my personal favorite of all Milius’ movies, “Farewell to the King.” I own a copy of it on VHS tape, and can assure you that the resistance portrayed in the movie never “escalates over time into a well-coordinated and virtually unstoppable general rebellion that ends in the defeat of the occupiers.” Well-coordinated, yes, but quite stoppable and never including more than about a dozen members (hardly a “general rebellion”). The movie ends with it’s being stopped by the Soviet Spetznaz (special forces) counter-terrorist soldiers, the leaders of the resistance being killed, and the survivors escaping to Free America - territory still held by the armed forces of the USA. The epilogue to the movie refers to the Soviet invasion being defeated, but not by the guerillas. In the 3 phases of guerilla warfare as defined by the 20th century pioneer of the theory and practice of guerilla warfare, Mao Zedong, the guerillas in “Red Dawn” never reach Phase 3, conventional operations in which the enemy is directly engaged in open combat and decisively defeated in battle. “Red Dawn” is a heroic tragedy, not the triumphalist work Raimondo makes it out to be.

Raimondo is evidently letting his wishful thinking about how things will go in Iraq today influence his memory of the movie. However, serious students of the history of guerilla warfare know that, among other things, guerillas must have foreign support in order to succeed, to provide them with supplies, safe haven, etc., and the Iraqi fedayeen and jihadists have very little foreign support today. What little they have they’re getting primarily from Syria & Iran, both of which are highly vulnerable to U.S. pressure.

Congressman Ron Paul recently made some claims about the evidence used to justify Gulf War 2 which richly deserve rebuttal:

The charge that Saddam Hussein had aluminum tubes used in manufacturing nuclear weapons was in error.

Actually, an Iraqi scientist just recently revealed centrifuge parts which he’d been ordered by Saddam’s regime to bury under a rose bush in his back yard. Furthermore, not even International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed El Baradei denies that Iraq had the aluminum tubes, or that they could be used to enrich uranium. He merely denied that there was any evidence that Saddam’s regime intended to use them in that way. Personally, I find the fact that Saddam went to so much trouble to conceal the parts for so long to be evidence that Saddam’s intentions regarding them were less than innocent.

A fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles capable of dispensing chemical and biological weapons did not exist.

The 63,000 liters of anthrax and botulism have not been found, nor have any of the mobile germ labs. There are no signs of the one million pounds of sarin, mustard, and VX gasses alleged to exist.

We don’t know that these things did not exist, all we know is that they haven’t been found. As far as the chemical weapons are concerned, we do know that they did exist in Iraq at one time, and we don’t know what became of them. They might have been destroyed, they might have been transferred to Syria or Iran, or we might not have found them yet.

No evidence has been revealed to indicate Iraq was a threat to the security of any nation, let alone America.

Tell it to the Kuwaitis, Kurds, & Israelis.

The charge that Saddam Hussein was connected to the al Qaeda was wrong.

Actually, we know they were connected through Ansar al-Islam, the al Qaeda offshoot that used to be based in Iraqi Kurdistan, and which had Iraqi intelligence personally assigned to it:

“Ansar took its inspiration from Osama Bin Laden and Afghanistan, but the group has its roots in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Iran provided aid to all anti-Saddam groups during this period, but it also created fundamentalist groups to supplant them and turn the Kurdish fighters into a tool for Iranian influence in Iraq. Fundamentalist fighters in Northern Iraq were organized by Osman abdul Aziz during the late 1980s with Iranian assistance. Azis was a Muslim intellectual and cleric imprisoned by Saddam for several years. Upon his release, in 1987, he immediately fled to Iran, where he organized the Bizotnawa, or Islamic Brotherhood. The Bizotnawa fractured and then reunified over the course of 15 years to become an instrument of al-Qaeda.

“Secret cells formed inside the Bizotnawa with independent agendas. In 1995, Islah or ‘Reform’ was formed inside Bizotnawa, but did not declare itself and separate until 1999. It was led by the notorious Mullah Keraker, now in prison in Norway.

“In 1997, Kurdish Hamas, or ‘Enthusiasm,’ formed and split off and the Arabs formed a secret cell called Markas (’Center’). In 1999 Aziz died in Syria. His brother, Ali, succeeded him, but was not admired. Bizotnawa had lost its leadership. The Bizotnawa crumbled further. That same year Islah declared itself and split away. Tawheed, or ‘Unify’ was formed and split off in 2000. Finally, Komal, or ‘Group’ formed and split off. At this point there were six separate fundamentalist groups opposing Saddam, including the original Islamic Movement of Kurdistan, or Bizotnawa. Iran seemed to have lost control of the fundamentalist movement it had founded as it splintered. It would be re-united by OSama bin Laden, with the help of Saddam Hussein.

“In October 2000 Mullah Keraker of Islah sent a delegation led by a Mullah Namo to Afghanistan to receive al-Qaeda training and ask permission to join with bin Laden. Tawheed sent an emissary to Afghanistan as well later the same month. Travelling the drug smuggling routes controlled by al-Qaeda, they came to meet with the new power of fundamentalist Islam. They were accepted, but ordered to reunite.

“The unification of fundamentalist groups in IRaq coincided with bin Laden’s attacks on the U.S., suggesting a comprehensive regional strategy to not only declare Jihad on America, but seize control of the oil-rich Gulf states to use as a power base.

“Bin Laden sent a Lieutenant to lead the largely Arab Markas. In April, this Lieutenant, a Jordanian named Abu Abdul Rahman Al-Shami, was killed ina skirmish with the PUK. He was replaced by another bin Laden representative named abu Zubair (also Jordanian). In July 2001 The Tawheed Front was formed from the union of Hamas and Tawheed. Finally, Markas and the Tawheed Front were unified under bin Laden’s control on 1 September 2001 with the creation of the Jund-al-Islamiah, or ‘Soldeirs of Islam.’ They launched their first attack on PUK forces on 23 September, killing 43 in an ambush near the town of Halabja, the birthplace of Osma Aziz and the scene of Saddam Hussein’s devastating chemical attack on the Kurds in 1988. In December 2001 all groups except Komal, which guarded the valley approach to the new base, unified under the banner of the ansar-al-Islamiah.

“The group began bringing in chemical and biological weapons and storing them in mountain bunkers. A ‘retired’ officer from Iraq intelligence named Abu Wail took charge of the Iraqi Arabs in the group. At this point, Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Palestine, and Jordan, many of them with Afghanistan experience, made up over 50-75% of what was once a majority Kurdish organization. The group launched repeated operations against PUK fighters. On 2 April 2002, an Ansar hit team launched an unsuccessful assassination attempt on PUK Prime Minister Barham Salih, a key U.S. ally in favor of a democratic Iraq aligned with the West. Ansar has become bin Laden’s arm in Iraq. The presence of Iraqi intelligence indicates a direct link between the two, long denied by Saddam.”
- Victor Black, “Northern Iraq Firefight,” Soldier of Fortune, July 2003, pp. 48-49

This is in addition to evidence from Youssef Bodansky, which I’ve previously posted to this blog, and Roland Jaquard, author of “In The Name Of Osama Bin Laden” and consultant to the UN on terrorism, both of whom also affirm the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. I’m not aware of any evidence that Black, Bodansky, and Jacquard are all wrong about this, and Paul doesn’t cite any.

Saddam Hussein’s violations of the UN resolutions regarding weapons of mass destruction remain unproven.

Actually, those are proven by the very fact that we know that Saddam once had chemical and biological weapons, but we don’t know what became of them. The UN resolutions regarding Iraqi WMD required transparency on the part of Saddam’s regime. The very fact that those programs were opaque is proof of violation of the UN resolutions. This would be true even if Saddam’s regime really did destroy all of its WMD programs after 1998 (although I seriously doubt that really happened). The UN resolutions didn’t merely require Saddam to destroy his WMD programs, they also required that he make their destruction manifestly evident to the rest of the world so the international community could be assured that he had been disarmed of his WMD.

My 2-week trip to the ISIL conference in Lithuania seems to have thankfully spared me from most of the “Bush Lied” Brigade’s hysteria. It’s funny how one piece of forged evidence in support of a conclusion which is still affirmed by everyone except the CIA, the DNC, & the paleos, is enough to get them screaming “Bush lied.” It reminds me of how Holocaust Deniers base their denial upon things like how Anne Frank’s diary was tampered with by her father (to cover up stuff that had nothing to do with the Holocaust).

In fact, a good deal of anti-war argumentation is highly reminiscent of the shoddy historical methodology of Holocaust Denial: evidence consistent with the case for the War on Terror is ignored and its very existence denied, or it is said to be fraudulent, while evidence contrary to the War On Terror is exagerrated or fabricated. Sources supporting the War On Terror are impugned as being biased, while sources opposing it are lionized. For example, the anonymous (alleged) ex-CIA sources who told Frontline that Saddam was a paid CIA asset when he participated in an assassination attempt on Iraqi President Qassem in the late 1960s are taken to be noble whistleblowers by the anti-warmongers, while the anonymous sources of Youssef Bodansky which affirm Iraqi sponsorship of Al Qaeda are dismissed, and Bodansky smeared as a “Republican operative.”

The true insignificance of the “Bush Lied” brigade’s whining can be gleaned from the fact that none of its Democrat members have said they regretted their votes for Gulf War II or that they would vote differently if they had to do it again. Instead, they have tried to have it both ways, claiming that they were misled into voting for GWII, which they still think was the right thing to do. Also, does the fact that one of the pieces of evidence about Saddam’s attempts to reconstitute his WMD program turns out to have been forged invalidate all the rest of the evidence that he was trying to reconstitute his WMD programs? Nonsense. Does it mean that he wasn’t sponsoring Al Qaeda? Of course not. Does it mean he wasn’t tyrannizing his own people? Don’t be silly.

Here is the first in what I hope will be an ongoing series on that carnival of crypto-fascist idiocy and mendacity known to the world as LewRockwell.com. As the graphic symbol for our efforts, I have taken this lovely Mori Chack animation. Interpreted symbolically, it shows a warmongering, libertine/libertarian pink Gloomy Bear (myself, possibly Tim Starr) pounding the stuffing out of a pure Confederate-Aryan-Nordic youth (LewRockwell.com)

(Let it be known that the stolid J. Kennedy and the adorable L. Warren are merely duped, helpless pawns in my sinister scheme!)

And now, on to the Rockwellian paleostupidity! Our first example is courtesy of one Dale Steinreich, who wrote an article for LewRockwell.com during the so-called Beltway sniper attacks. Entitled “Blowback .223″ Mr. Steinreich indulges in some heavy-handed irony to “prove” that the Beltway sniper’s use of a .223 rifle was some kind of Providential vengeance upon imperialist Amerikka. “So the .223 round (like our former allies the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein � we can really pick ‘em can’t we?!) is just another tool that has come back to haunt us.” concludes Steinreich. Mr. Steinreich also seems to believe that the evil .223 round was forced upon our soldiers as opposed to the virtuous (and, Mr. Steinreich implies, virtually painless) .30 cal. round. “Once upon a time in the early 1960s, the military-industrial complex centered in Washington D.C. was the very institution that initiated the practice of using relatively small, high-speed projectiles (like the .223-caliber bullet) in infantry small arms.” Undoubtedly (to fit the current LewRockwell paleoparty line) we shall be informed in future articles that Eugene Stoner was really the secret paid agent of Leon Trotsky, Leo Strauss and Norman Podhoretz.

The LewRockwellian stupidity of this ham-handed “current events” article shines forth in several ways - in the tortured “reasoning” that Steinreich employs in order to tie an ongoing tragedy to the usual LewRockwell obsessions, in the ludicrous notion that being shot with any high-powered rifle round can somehow be made “humane”, or why the evil “military-industrial complex” adopted a round that the author seems to think is both a. militarily ineffective and b. horribly wounding. (Apparently the “military-industrial complex” just enjoys Pain for the sake of Pain.) But the crowning stupidity lies in the fact that although (presumably) most Rockwellites would describe themselves as being pro-RKBA, they saw fit to run an article that could easily be used by gun banners as an argument for banning .223 caliber weapons! (In the excitement of trying to score one against the hated “neocons”, one suspects that Mr. Steinreich’s overheated paleobrain failed to notice this contradiction.)

Mr. Steinreich is described as an “adjunct scholar” (whatever that is) of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and as a consultant to the “investment advisory” AgainstTheCrowd.com. Further comment, I think, would be both cruel and superfluous.

(Unhappy paleocons - and others - who find my approach offensive and my tactics unfair are invited to register their complaints here)

My friend R. is sometimes known as the “ninth invisible arm of the Octopus”, sometimes she is known as “the nicest libertarian” or sometimes she is simply referred to (in terrified whispers in every Third World den of villiany and crime) as The Tall One. (But soon enough she’ll be known to some as “Mommy”.)

R. has a private weblog of her own (lung has been known to post there), and one of her friends is a certain “russellb” (about whom - including possible alternate names - I know virtually nothing). Mr. B. has a weblog of his own (are you getting dizzy yet? This is becoming a little like the Saragossa Manuscript) and he posted this comment on the TERMINATOR 3 movie. I firmly intend to never, under any circumstances, see any TERMINATOR movie, and Mr. B’s comments are an agreeable substitute thereof.

One frustrating aspect of the Terminator movies is that you get a peek into human dreams about what their victory against the machines would look like (in this movie, John Connor dreamed they were standing on top of some downed jet, cheering and waving a bullet-riddled flag), but you never get to see what the machines dream their future being should they win the war.

etc., etc., etc.

- russellb

(In Gene Wolfe’s short story FEATHER TIGERS, alien explorers discover an Earth mysteriously deserted by humanity. future lung does not make an appearance.)

Dondiil assented with a body-shake. “I have found their machines,” he said diplomatically, “to possess only a low degree of knowledge. Biological knowledge, that is.”
Quoquo appeared not to have heard him. “They know history,” he said “and geography. The geography consists of place names and the history of unmotivated moving and fighting. A colleague of mine has spent over a score-score wakeperiods in establishing beyond contradiction that, as far as any machine knows, Paris, France and Paris, Texas had nothing whatsoever in common but their names. France means ‘the country of the Franks,’ that is, of those who speak unadorned truth; Texas signifies ‘the land of friends,’ which is to say, of those who do not fight among themselves. The ‘friends’ for whom the country was named were cannibals. Do you find this suggestive?”

- FEATHER TIGERS, by Gene Wolfe

…with a French girl. I’m in love with Sabine Herold.

From this Telegraph article.

‘You work so hard - I love it’
(Filed: 26/06/2003)

Now, she wants to come to Britain. Her email is simple: “I would like to spend my time meeting politicians. I don’t wear jeans; I like red meat; please could I bring a camera crew?”

It is with considerable irritation that I read this. Particularily when the Frogman could have gotten that explanation at the time of his visit.

Luckily I restrained myself to a Saul Bellow excerpt (see “Nothing But Grief”, below.) and did not send the nasty E-mail to the Museum I had been contemplating.

I should have remembered that the people in question were Norman, and that makes a difference.

…with revolver and sketchbook.

(My desk, July 3, 2003. Note the tribute to Mori Chack’s Gloomy Bear. Happy Fourth, everyone!)

Having caught Rothbard before in some lies about the Winter War (Soviet Russia vs. Finland, 1939-1940), I thought it only fitting that I should point it out when I caught him in some more, brought to us courtesy of Lew Rockwell, the pseudo-libertarian crypto-fascist I love to hate:

All this, of course, is a beautiful way of vindicating a “hard-line” policy against the Enemy regardless of what actually happens. Two particularly neat examples are the policy of Finland toward Russia in 1940, and of Poland toward Germany and Russia in 1939. The Finns (Poles) insisted up to the moment of outbreak of a war that could only be disastrous for them that the Russians (Germans) were only “bluffing,” and that a rigid, inflexible, hard-line, no-negotiation policy would force Russia (Germany) to back down and cease their demands. After adamantly proclaiming this view throughout, the ruling Finnish (Polish) hard-liners suddenly found that the reverse had happened, that the Enemy had not been “bluffing,” and that war had indeed broken out. Was their reaction an abject admission of error and a turn toward peace and negotiation? Certainly not; on the contrary, the hard-liners immediately proclaimed that no negotiations were now possible until every single Russian (German) soldier had been driven off every square inch of holy Finnish (Polish) soil. The rest is history; the difference in ultimate outcome is only due to Finland’s having the luck to find leaders willing to abandon a hard-line policy before it was too late.

Did the Finns think that the Soviets were bluffing? Not unanimously:

…it was the opinion of nearly everyone in the Finnish government that these [Stalin’s] demands, as stunning as they were, were only the prelude to other, more severe demands–demands that the Finns would be powerless to reject because they would have already lost their strongest line of defense.

Foreign Minister Erkko in particular was convinced that Stalin was bluffing and that Finland needed only to stand fast and the Russians would back down. There were acrimonious discussions in helsinki between Erkko, those who thought as he did, and Marshal Mannerheim, who kept insisting that the Russians meant what they said, would not hesitate to take what they wanted by force, and could not be stopped by Finland’s armed forces.”

- William R. Trotter, “A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940,” p. 16

Rothbard clearly misrepresents the Finnish response to Stalin’s demands by presenting only the side of Finnish Foreign Minister Erkko, and not the side led by Marshal Mannerheim, the architect of Finland’s military defense.

Were the Finns unwilling to negotiate?

All through the rest of October and into November, negotiations continued. The Finns were willing to compromise slightly on the Isthmus border and were willing to cede some, but not all, of the gulf islands. As for giving the Russians a base at Hanko, on the Finnish mainland, that was quite unacceptable.”

- ibid

So, once again, Rothbard’s account proves false: the Finns weren’t entirely unwilling to negotiate and compromise, although they were far less willing than the Soviets had expected. The Finns had good reasons for the position they took, too, as demonstrated by the subsequent Soviet invasion & attempted annexation of the whole of Finland.

Finally, the Finns did hold to a hard-line policy of refusing to negotiate with the Soviets right after the war began, because it would be wrong for them to appease Soviet aggression, and because the Finns were winning the war in the battlefields. However, the Soviets were equally unwilling to negotiate because they only recognized their puppet government as the legitimate government of Finland. It took some doing for the new Finnish Foreign Minister, Vaino Tanner, to get negotiations started with Molotov.

The Finns were induced to resume negotiations with the Soviets because the Soviets finally managed to improve the quality of their forces enough to start winning the war on the battlefield, but by that time pressure was being brought to bear upon the Soviets, too, by the Western Allies, who had condemned the Soviet aggression against Finland and were threatening to intervene on Finland’s behalf. So, shortly after the Red Army’s honor was restored on the battlefield, Stalin was willing to negotiate with the Finns and compromise for much less than total annexation and Sovietization of Finland.

That greatly differs from Rothbard’s account of the factors explaining the different outcome to the Soviet invasion of Finland and the German invasion of Poland. It wasn’t that Finland acquired enlightened leaders who were willing to appease Soviet aggression and thus end the hostilities, while Poland’s leaders remained intransigent. It was that, first of all, Finland’s armed forces killed enough Red Army soldiers to give Stalin pause. Secondly, the Red Army eventually was successful enough on the battlefield to make the Finns more willing to compromise. Thirdly, the threat of Western intervention made Stalin willing to settle for less than his maximum demands.

Unfortunately, Poland had none of these advantages with regards to Germany. The Polish Army proved no match on the battlefield for the Wehrmacht, the Poles didn’t have enough time to change their minds about Hitler’s demands, and there wasn’t enough of a credible threat of Western intervention to make Hitler back off from his maximum demands.

Thus, Rothbard’s falsification of history in defense of appeasing totalitarian aggression isn’t confined to the Winter War, but extends to the German invasion of Poland, too.

The never-ending civil liberties hysteria about detaining enemy combatants is addressed once again by Henry Mark Holzer:

The Quirin Court made it very clear that an enemy combatant of the unlawful type can be detained, tried by a Military Tribunal, and eventually put to death if he is convicted of a crime cognizable by that court.