The Dictator Is Dead, Long Live The Dictator

The world is minus yet another megalomaniacal dictator with blood stained hands. According to news reports from North Korea, Kim Jong Il's 17 year reign as the Dear Leader ended when he died Saturday of natural causes. Over a year ago, Kim named as his successor his youngest son, 28 year old Kim Jong Un.

 North Korea is a communist police state founded on a cult of personality so potent it would have made Stalin jealous. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, though it maintains a very large military and it has nuclear weapons. North Korea has historically been quite aggressive. In 1950, it invaded South Korea, prompting American intervention. When the war concluded two years later along roughly the same line of demarcation, North Korea refused to agree to peace with South Korea. North Korea has since engaged in numerous provocative acts aimed at its democratic neighbor to the south, including most recently the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel and the shelling of civilians on South Korea's Yeonpyong Island.

The below video gives a good four minute introduction to the nightmare that is North Korea



What will happen in North Korea now is anyone's guess. I lived in South Korea for five years, spending a significant part of that time stationed on the DMZ. I became very familiar with the intelligence surrounding North Korea, such as it was. When Kim Il Sung died, I did not think that Kim Il Jung, a much lesser figure, would be able to successfully consolidate power. And indeed, given how mecurial and unstable Kim Jong Il was, I thought there a high likelihood that he would attempt another invasion of South Korea as a last ditch effort to salvage his failing nation. Obviously I was wrong.  Thankfully so, as renewed war in the Koreas would have a body count well into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.  It would make Iraq look like a cakewalk.

As it stands today, North Korea's economy, always weak, is in free fall with near starvation - the typical diet is 700 calories per day - being the daily reality of life. Kim Jong Un, at age 28 and with no military experience, is himself a much lesser figure than even his father. Moreover, North Korea's military has apparently gone into severe decline over the past decade because of the poor economy.

 So what happens now? That is anyone's guess. But my money is against anything good happening any time soon.

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Defenseless - The Obama Budget

Obama sent a record budget to Congress, proposing billions in funding for every left wing cause imaginable, then claimed yesterday that he is fiscally responsible for asking for cuts amounting to 1/2 of 1% of his total budget. It is shameless to the point of parody. But scratch the surface of the budget and the savings and you quickly go from parody to ominous.

The bulk of Obama's proposed savings are coming from our Defense budget, the one place where significant increases in funding are necessary. And to make matters worse, among those handful of billions Obama intends to save, a goodly part of it comes from deep cuts in our missile defense program. This in a world that is getting more, not less, dangerous, and with our military desperately in need of expansion and refit. Obama is ignoring the exponential growth of the nuclear threat and he is reordering our defense spending priorities in the same manner that France did prior to 1939.

You can read at Hot Air the story of the Obama budget and Obama's mind-numbingly ridiculous assertion of fiscal responsibility for his proposing of $17 billion in budget cuts. And Bizzyblog points out that even the $17 billion in cuts is all smoke and mirrors. I will not add to that. My concern is with the defense side of the coin - and a small coin it has become.

Our military is in dire straights in terms of size and equipment. The following is from an article by MG Robert Scales discussing our military readiness posture in April, 2007. It was, at the time, critical, and there is nothing that I have seen since to suggest a significant change to that posture.

We have learned from painful experience in Iraq and Afghanistan that tomorrow's ground forces must be re-equipped with many more fighting vehicles that are light, mobile, easily transported and capable of keeping more soldiers protected for longer periods. Properly equipping the Army to win the long war will be very expensive. But we have fought 12 wars in the last 30 years and all but one has been decided on the ground. We will fight another one sooner than any of us would like. If we are to break the cycle of underfunding followed by rapid re-funding that has caused so much human tragedy, we must start now and must build a new Army for tomorrow rather than put yesterday's Army back on the shelf.

- MG Robert Scales, discussing the degraded state of Army readiness as of April, 2007. Indeed, as he points out, but for the Reagan era, our military had suffered significant underfunding for decades - under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

You will recall that a central argument of Obama and the left for bringing the Iraq War to an immediate surrender was because our military was undersized and the Iraq war was taking a tremendous toll on our equipment. The fact of a degraded military was certainly true, though the answer to that was not to surrender in Iraq, it was to make a big increase in defense spending. Bush and the Republican administration through 2006 attempted to fight two wars without increasing the defense budget to realistically account for equipment degradation and shortfalls. This remained true when the left took over Congress in 2006.

Now that the left has the reins of power, the one thing that Obama is not doing is making any increases in defense spending. Indeed, instead of rearming the military so it is prepared for the most difficult of confrontations - a conventional war - Obama is making huge cuts in expensive weapons systems that we will need for such confrontations in the future. He is instead, through Sec. of Def. Gates, reordering priorities in order to fight the much less costly "last war." You can read the itemization of cuts here. Secretary of Defense Gates seems fully complicit in this - and if his performance at Senate Hearings the other day are any indication, then he is both acting as the front man for specific Obama policy he is willing to be less then honest in furtherance of that policy. I am very surprised by that.

But that is an aside. The long and short of it all is that, instead of keeping us on a track so that we maintain superiority on the conventional battlefield, Obama is ordering our military to focus on unconventional warfare - i.e., the "last war." While it gives Obama the luxury of not having to sink billions into defense, the "last war" theory of military preparedness has ever been a trap for nations. For example, one need only to look to France in the late 1930's. They prepared for the next war expecting a replay of the last one - and thus, they based their defense around fixed fortifications of the Maginot Line. The line was breached by a new form of warfare - blitzkrieg - using superior weapons. France fell in days.

And it is not as if we face a paucity of conventional war threats. China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran are the four most obvious of those threats at the moment, but who knows where the next threat will come from. Indeed, Iraq was a conventional threat in 2002. But our conventional warfare capabilities then were so superior that they quickly folded - as indeed, they had near a decade earlier. Moreover, we now know that the Soviet Union considered attacking the West in the 1980's. Kim Il Sung put North Korea on a war footing about a year or so prior to that. Both pulled back. Why they did so is simple to assess - they had a very realistic respect for our capabilities to fight a conventional war. To paraphrase - it was "peace through superior firepower." But take away the perception of that superiority and, as surely as night follows day, the enemies of the West will not feel so constrained.

If we remain fully prepared for a conventional war, we can still also be prepared for unconventional conflicts. The reverse is not true. And thus, if we give away our conventional warfare superiority, we do so at great cost. Nor will it be something that can be at all easily resurrected. Combat systems today take years to develop and then years to ramp up production. The decisions made today will be with us for decades to come.

Compounding this situation by orders of magnitude is Obama's unfathomable decision to cut spending for missile defense. One of the cuts about which Obama so spuriously crowed yesterday was almost a 15% cut - 1.2 billion dollars - in the budget for the Missile Defense Agency. Can there be any possible justification for this? This is a system that grows more critical by the day. Pakistan is on the edge of takeover by the Taliban. North Korea wants to sell its technology to the highest bidders. Iran is continuing with their nuclear program and it has kick started proliferation throughout the Middle East. With that in mind, nothing could be more important to the defense of our nation and the free (for the moment) world than a robust missile defense.

Obama's cuts in defense are not rationale. ACORN is set to receive vast amounts of funding, while our military capabilities are to degraded. It leads one to wonder whether Obama is simply cynical and opportunistic, or is he really as naive and unrealistic as his budget priorities make him appear? Or is it a toxic mix of all four?

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McCain Lights Into Obama Over Iraq

John McCain responds to Obama's continuing criticism of his "hundred years in Iraq" remark, stating that Obama has no "experience or background" as regards the military and our national security. Its sort of the Clinton's "3 a.m." ad on steroids.








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If Obama thinks that he has a bullet with which to attack McCain by claiming he wants, to paraphrase, endless warfare, he is sorely wrong. Besides taking McCain's "hundred years" in Iraq remark out of context, it also highlights the grave weaknesses in the Democrats calls to pull all troops out of Iraq and to do so within a short time frame. And today, McCain has responded appropriately.

“It displays a fundamental misunderstanding of history and how we’ve maintained national security, and what we need to do in the future to maintain our security in the face of the transcendent challenge of radical Islamic extremism. And I understand that because he has no experience or background in any of it,” McCain said. “(He) either hasn’t read or (doesn’t) understand…the history of this country in warfare, and the way that we secure alliances and secure the peace–and that’s through military government to government agreements that call for United States presence and mutual defense. Not only in that country itself, but also in the region. Our troops in Japan maintain a military presence in Asia. Our troops in Japan and South Korea maintain stability in Asia. The same thing was true after World War II about our troops in Germany.”

You can read the story and hear McCain's remarks here.

McCain is completely correct on this. The case against the war needed to be made in 2003. Once the decision was made to go in, the only appropriate place for the argument that "the war was wrong" was in the history departments of academia. Once we crossed into Iraq, we had and still have only two options - to win or to lose. Winning, in the long term, means establishing a functioning democracy with a functioning economy that is free from external aggression. This requires a long term committment - as it did with Japan, Germany and Korea. All of those countries, in the end, flourished. That is winning for any on the left still having trouble defining the word as regards Iraq. And on a side note, it took nearly thirty years for Korea to actually develop a functioning democracy.

Obama's argument that we need to leave Iraq now is completely political - and laughably sophomoric. His argument, that the war was wrong at inception and thus we need to leave -wholly ignores all that has occurred since March 20, 2003. It ignores that Iraq has become the main battleground for the Wahhabi extremists of al Qaeda and it ignores the designs the Shia theocracy of Iran - arguably the West's most dangerous enemy today - has upon Iraq. Whatever the situation in 2003, it has no bearing on the reality in 2008. The only things that have not changed since March 20, 2003 are our strategic interest in the Middle East and the existential threats posed by al Qaeda and Iran's theocracy. Obama does not address these arguments.

But history has showed us how to "win" in Iraq, and McCain does a good job of discussing them in thumbnail fashion in the video linked above. The other option, the one being touted by Obama, will clearly lead in another direction. Obama, some time ago, dreamed up the idea of protecting us by relying on some sort of quick reaction force operating out of Kuwait to keep Iraq free of al Qaeda and, I would assume, from Iranian aggression. That is ridiculous on so many levels it is almost impossible to know where to begin.

1. It is taking well over 150,000 of our soldiers in country to try and break al Qaeda's hold on the Sunni areas of Iraq and to limit Iran's deadly meddling. How a QRF of a few thousand combat soldiers could possibly be expected to accomplish a similar mission and how they would gather the intelligence necessary to attack specific targets inside Iraq is simply unimaginable.

2. If we leave Iraq, the likelihood of a real civil war, driven by al Qaeda and Sunni countries on one side and Iran on the other, is palpable, if not probable.

3. If we leave Iraq, under what possible scenario do we think that the Iraqi government will allow the U.S. back in, whether to attack Iraq al Qaeda targets or Iranian targets. It is quite probable that the weak central government would fall under Iranian influence - and I severly doubt Ahmedinejad and his cronies will allow a sattelite government to roll out the red carpet for the U.S.

4. Obama's suggestion is the equivalent of a politician playing general - a scenario that is disastorous the vast majority of the time. Yes, I know he has General McPeak at his side. McPeak is an Air Force officer and, if this was his idea, he is just completely clueless about the reality of ground warfare.

There are two theories. One, Obama is making his pronouncements wholly to feed a far left base that is completely out of touch with reality and only concerned with destroying conservativism in America through a toppling of Bush. Two, Obama really does have no clue about the lessons of history or about the capabilities and limitations of our military. While both are possible, neither one is remotely acceptable. In either case, really, McCain's remarks are dead on point.

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