Blood & Treasure

their finest hour

So it’s the 62^nd anniversary of the start of the Big Bug Out:

Sometime during the evening prior, over 180,000 Chinese soldiers from the “People’s Volunteer Army” (PVA) surged south of the DPRK border, ambushing the United States Eighth Army en masse.  American soldiers, overwhelmed by superior numbers and shock, reeled backwards in what would become a desperate bid for survival in their retreat south.

Dissidents in China sometimes like to point out that contra to official propaganda, the Kuomintang did most of the fighting against the Japanese in China. This is true enough, but  the propaganda also obscures the essentially rather impressive trajectory of the PLA from when it was reconstituted at the end of the Long March. You’re talking at that stage about people fighting with pointy sticks and mines made out of chamber pots. By 1944 they were deploying columns of around battalion strength. By 1947 it was winning huge encirclement battles on the North China Plain. By 1949 the PLA was staging army corps sized amphibious landings on Hainan. And then in 1950, a decade after the PLA’s main personal weapon was a bamboo pole with a knife tied to it, it was driving first rate US and UN formations at speed down the Korean Peninsula. As a grace note, you have the walloping  it handed to the Indian army in 1962, before casually declaring a ceasefire and withdrawing from most of the territory it occupied.

And then there was the Sino-Vietnam war...well, never mind.

The fact that the PLA played a comparatively minor role in fighting the Japanese is in keeping with Maoist military theory - in which you don't engage in formal battles until you're good and ready -  and its later successes tend to vindicate that theory. The irony here is that the PLA’s performance in bringing the Communist Party to power and sustaining it there is never really going to be properly acknowledged in China until it gets out from under CPC control and is no longer tied to its wider founding mythology.

passport control innovation

So, Labour peer John Gilbert calls for nuking the Pakistan-Afghan border, amongst other places:

In this context I draw your Lordships' attention to what used to be called the neutron bomb. It is a very misleading description. It was not necessary a bomb. It was a warhead that could be attached to a torpedo or a missile. The main thing was that it was not a standard nuclear warhead. Its full title was the ERRB-enhanced radiation reduced blast weapon. I can think of many uses for it in this day and age. It is something that we could go and talk to the Chinese about. Building on the example that I just gave your Lordships about the Straits of Magellan, you could use an enhanced radiation reduced blast warhead to create cordons sanitaire along various borders where people are causing trouble.

I will give an example. Your Lordships may say that this is impractical, but nobody lives up in the mountains on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan except for a few goats and a handful of people herding them. If you told them that some ERRB warheads were going to be dropped there and that it would be a very unpleasant place to go, they would not go there. You would greatly reduce your problem of protecting those borders from infiltration from one side or another. These things are not talked about, but they should be, because there are great possibilities for deterrence in using the weapons that we already have in that respect.

I have already taken up half my time, and that is probably quite enough today. I am very relieved to say that I do not have any fears whatever of being confronted with a nuclear-free world so long as we have the French, God bless them.

Via. In part, this is just one of his Lordships doing his loveable eccentric thing. But it’s also classic cold war theorizing in the Herman Kahn let’s make nuclear war thinkable vein. The idea that if we make it clear to the little brown people that they’ll die if they stay where they are was also Samuel Huntington’s rationale for free fire zones in Vietnam. It’s not all that strange considered as political heritage of a cold war era Labour right winger. The fact that it seems crazy now is maybe evidence that the world is in some respects a slightly less crazy place.

Still, good game: ‘borders where people are causing trouble’ as a nuclear opportunity. Now let’s see...

surviving fragments

For your Sunday night reading, JG Ballard's The Index is now available online. Excellent mid-period stuff:

After World War II he founded a new movement of spiritual regener­ation, but private scandal and public concern at his grow­ing megalomania, culminating in his proclamation of himself as a new divinity, seem to have led to his down­fall. Incarcerated within an unspecified government insti­tution...

Enjoy.

leverage over Lei

Shanghaist has further notes on the Chongqing sex tape affair, perhaps the first signature scandal of the Xi Jinping era, which we note is gaudy, attention grabbing, quickly resolved, involved a mid-level official and tied back to a previously discredited individual:

Between 2002 and 2006, while Lei was Dianjiang County Party Secretary, he allegedly took advantage of his position to grant a number of lucrative contracts to his brother's construction company, pocketing a large sum of money for himself in the process. By 2007, after Lei had been promoted to Vice Party Secretary of Chongqing's Jiulongpo District, Lei's personal fortune had grown to the extent that developers effectively found him impossible to bribe.

One developer discovered Lei's weakness for women however, and set about hiring a number of attractive young girls, all under 20-years-old, and using them to set a "honey trap" for Lei. The women, after becoming Lei's mistresses, would secretly video themselves having sex with the corrupt official, giving their employer leverage over Lei.

I guess is just goes to show that you can have a classic British style tabloid expose under the most robust regulatory regimes.

Elsewhere, the NYT has part two of its Wen Jiabiao family interests expose. This involves legislative insider dealing affecting the insurance industry. Boring but glorious, lads. Boring but glorious.

last of the Texas populists

Hagman himself, a member of the Peace and Freedom party, once described fellow Texan George Bush as "a sad figure, not too well educated, who doesn't get out of America much. He's leading the country towards fascism".

The PFP are probably best known for their hookup with the Black Panther Party back in the sixties. So Larry parties with the panthers and goes on to create the world's most preposterous capitalist villain for TV auidiences everywhere, having started by singing there is nothing like a dame' in the same chorus line as Sean Connery. Quite the dude.

kipper or nipper

The education secretary,Michael Gove has said he will launch an investigation into a council that removed three children from foster parents due to concerns about their membership of the UK Independence party.

The announcement came as Rotherham metropolitan borough council said it was launching an internal investigating into the decision, following mounting condemnation from political leaders including Gove and Labour leader Ed Miliband

Gove branded the council's actions as "indefensible" and said he would be personally investigating the situation.

The interesting thing about this is that a consistent off the record line by Tories on UKIP is that they are a crypto-racist party: that’s what distinguishes their line on Europe from good old fashioned Tory Euroscepticism. And here’s the PM saying so publicly: the phrase “fruit cakes” also occurs. And maybe some of this is to do with the wider Tory/UKIP dynamic; Gove’s action seems to have forced a partial retraction from Cameron.

It’s pretty clear from the Groan piece that the children were withdrawn from the family following legal advice; about what specifically isn’t said. Given that there were no concerns about the actual level of care being offered it looks like an overreaction. But then the fact that the missus and I can’t foster in the first place because we’re smokers looks like an overreaction too. Frankly I’d rather they were too strict than too lenient. Social services aren’t a branch of kids ‘r us.

UPDATE: come to think of it, I suspect the public response to denying fostering to members of a political party will be similar to that involved in denying it to smokers - mainly indifferent, some feeling that it goes a bit too far and a general sense that you can't be too careful.

airborne melian dialogue

When Obama went to Cambodia earlier this week there was some talk of him apologising for the ‘secret war’ of the early seventies; not only because one should say sorry for bombing half a neutral country flat, but also on the grounds that this paved the way for the Khmer Rouge takeover.

Up to a point, brother number one. Past that point, the politics matter more than the explosives. What counted more wasn’t the fact that Cambodia was bombed, but the fact that in order to enjoy a permissive environment for that bombing it was either necessary or convenient  to have Lon Nol in office, a man who carried around Nixon’s autograph in the belief that it made him bulletproof and who defended Phnom Penh against encroaching Khmer Rouge forces by sprinkling consecrated sand in a circle around it.

I’m not arguing about whether or not the US helped depose Sihanouk in order to facilitate the secret war. But the US certainly welcomed his fall and took full advantage of it. The fact that he was a deranged autocrat was collateral. What mattered was that he provided political latitude for the conduct of extensive ground and aerial operations. He was good enough for government work.

What I’m talking about here are drones. They’re clearly not anywhere near as destructive as ground invasions or massed B52 strikes, but once again it’s the politics that matter. What kind of state would allow a foreign power to conduct remote surveillance and assassination missions over its territory according to criteria of its own devising and do it in such an obvious, non-deniable way? Moreover, drones are vulnerable; they can’t operate in any state with fairly rudimentary means of securing its own airspace and the willingness to use it.

So it’s not surprising that states which allow drone operations over their territories are ones in which there is already a substantial US military presence (Afghanistan), states which are grotesquely corrupt (Pakistan) and states which have collapsed (Yemen, Libya). There are musings now about having drone operations over Nigeria, which you can add to the grotesquely corrupt column. As far as non-states go, there were so many drones over Gaza this past couple of weeks that they were practically colliding with each other.

The use of drones, inevitably, tends to seal this state of affairs because it is conducive to their utility. It’s a signal that the failure of your state is useful to an outside power which will support state failure for operational and policy reasons. If you’re living in a military drone friendly environment, it’s a signal that the United States wants the failure of your state to continue. And pretty soon, not only the United States. 

choke points

Another crisp report on the current state of the Syrian civil war from Small Wars Journal: 

In the last few weeks, the center of gravity of the ongoing struggle for control of northern Syria has become apparent. The war in Syria is entering a critical new phase. In Idlib and Raqqa provinces, the regime’s lines of communication and supply between its stronghold cities are being seriously threatened. At several points on the map, rebel forces have seized chokeholds on the routes that link the strongholds of the regime to the active battlefields of northern and eastern Syria. These chokepoints are the fulcrum upon which the fortunes of Idlib, Aleppo, Raqqa and Dayr-az-Zoir Provinces will be decided.

This is by the same guy who wrote that piece on the Syrian uprising considered as Maoist people's war the other week. Applying that analogy to the current state of play, this is strongly reminiscent of the Liaoshen campaign of 1948, which I guess puts Damascus on course to fall sometime next spring.

i self-immolate to contribute

17 last month, 79 since 2009. Last testimonies of 19 gathered here.

the rural condtion

'he has masturbated in a muck spreader and set fire to outbuildings.'

That's from a newspaper website called This Is The West Country.