Keep your head down, Private

Sometimes I just get overwhelmed by the people who make up this country, and this couple brings tears to my eyes just thinking about them. They boarded the train sometime between when I fell asleep and when I woke up at 2:00. As the morning wore on, we started talking.

He has just joined the National Guard. Recently. In this climate.

The fact that there are people who are willing to step up blows me away in the best of times. But in this climate, it moves me to tears. Especially in the context of this ungodly clusterfuck of a war in Iraq. I asked him what motivated him to do it with so many reasons not to. Especially given the obviously loathing that he and his beloved both feel for this war criminal president. What his answer boiled down to was there are things more important than self and country is one of them. Our military is strained to the point of breaking and he is young and fit and capable and he appreciates the opportunities this country has given him, and he is willing to give something back. No matter who the president is.

I didn't cry in front of him, but I am on the verge of doing so now, as I type this in a coffee shop in St. Louis, waiting for my train to Kansas City. As I got off the train, I wished them a long and happy life together, and told him "Keep your head down, Private."

I hope like hell when his inevitable deployment rolls around, he remembers that advice and comes home safe to his beloved. This country needs more young people like him...and his bride.

Good luck to them both. There is hope for this country yet so long as we keep producing young people like this.

A Moderate Form of Islam Does Exist

Michael Totten gives us an invaluable look at how moderate Islam does exist, and I do believe that not enough attention is paid to this fact:

I’m accustomed to spending quality time in moderate Islamic environments. I lived in the most liberal and cosmopolitan Sunni neighborhood in Beirut next to the American University, and I’ve vacationed with my wife in famously moderate Muslim countries like Tunisia and Turkey. Kosovo surprised even me and forced me to redefine my very conception of what a moderate Muslim even is. Kosovo is so thoroughly modern and secularized that if it weren’t for the mosques on the skyline there would be no visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all. Kosovo looks no more religious than France.

The fact that Kosovo even exists is because we were finally forced to step up and do something about the Milosevic regime. I have to give credit to President Bush for not following through on what he intimated in the 2000 campaign and withdrawing from the Balkans. I have to say, also, that John McCain was virtually alone in the Republican caucus for supporting Bill Clinton's intervention in the region, even if it was a bit half-hearted. The problem is, the foreign policy decisions made by Bush and McCain are overwhelmingly in the category of disastrous and counterproductive; with regards to Kosovo, we see a glimmer of something positive. If only they were able to think more clearly, right?

Mr. Totten talks about how the bin Laden influence came to the region in the 1990s:

Around a thousand mujahideen, veteran Arabic fighters from the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan, showed up in Bosnia in the mid-1990s to fight a jihad against Serbian Orthodox Christians. They thought they would be welcomed, and they were right. The European community imposed an arms embargo on all of Yugoslavia during the Bosnian civil war which preserved the imbalance of power and arms in favor of Slobodan Milosevic and his nationalist Bosnian Serb comrades in arms. The Bosnian army was multi-ethnic and multi-confessional – it included Serb and Croat Christians as well as Bosniak Muslims – but its leaders chose to accept help from the so-called “Afghan Arabs” because they were desperate.

I don't know how many people are aware of this, but in the hours after the attacks on September 11, 2001, US troops based in the former Yugoslavia went into action almost right away and rounded up as many of these mujahideen as they could. The locals pointed out where they were and members of the 29th Infantry Division, a National Guard unit based on the East Coast, which had sent troops to the region, went into action. They surrounded homes, kicked in doors, and put them into detention before the smoke cleared over Manhattan. I know this because a senior NCO from that unit told me how the raids were carried out--the mujahideen were shocked and surprised and made little or no effort to escape. No one expected the Americans to move so quickly. The 9/11 attacks had caught them flat footed. Thus, the first strike against bin Laden after 9/11 was carried out by citizen soldiers who had been deployed overseas to help protect Muslims from being slaughtered. The irony is they were arresting mujahideen were there do so the exact same thing.

--WS

Heed the lessons, please

Right now, the largest mass-casualty exercise ever mounted in this country is underway in Indiana.

I have taken part in some pretty intense mass casualty drills over the years, but nothing like this. (Mostly because we have never done anything even close to this before.)

Every single mass casualty I have taken part in over nearly two decades, communications broke down every damned time. It was a problem that cost untold lives in New Orleans; and it got a bunch of firemen killed in the World Trade Center because their radios didn’t receive the warnings that the buildings were going to come down that were broadcast from police units. (That will bite Rudy in the ass before this campaign is over. I‘ll be bringing it up regularly. It is not just another post, but a future recurring theme.)

Ask any cop, emt, firefighter, or ER staffer and they will tell you – if the shit hits the fan, we’re fucked. And it’s going to be worse than it has to be because communication is going to break down. I won’t be surprised if choppers collide as a result if the real deal takes place.

Reading the Washington Post piece in this mornings paper, this is the part that I seized on - In one tent, Capt. Kevin Jones of the Kentucky Guard manned a satellite communications network able to patch together radio systems used by local police, firefighters and the military -- a critical function absent during Katrina. Twenty-five such teams exist nationwide, with one planned for each of the states. "We can allow anyone to communicate with anyone," said Jones, whose team has had its equipment less than a year.

[Snip]

"We want to see where this is going to break," said Air National Guard Lt. Col. Kim Sencindiver, who trains the 45-person medical teams that are part of each response force. "These guys have been out here three days -- they're tired."

The exercise showed new response capabilities, but it also revealed ongoing problems: radios and phones that malfunctioned, too few aircraft and slow reaction times.

That is the link that always breaks. In the event of the real thing, the satellites are going down, and we all know it. Relying on any form of communication that depends on satellites in a drill is a wink & nudge proposal, and we all know it.

We are not the only members of the “we-can-shoot-down-satellites” club. Hell, you don’t even have to actually blow one up – blow something up in it’s path and create a debris field, and chances are pretty damned good that you can disable your target. The math could be done by a smart high schooler. Definitely by a college sophomore majoring in physics or astronomy.

My point is – their solution to this problem is no solution at all. When the link breaks, for the last decade or so, we have been falling back on our own phones. If we know that a mass casualty is planned, we make sure we have our chargers, because we know electricity isn’t going away in the hospitals – we have generators, so charging our phones does not cheat the rules. Except that if the real deal takes place, either terrorists on the ground will take out relay towers, the satellites will be compromised, or the air will be ionized.

We know damned good and well that those who wish us ill are aware of this problem. A problem that those of us who use the damned system have been aware of and bitching about for years, only to have the politicians who control the pursestrings listen politely, mouth some platitude or another, and then resume ignoring us, and give the contracts to their friends, and it ends up costing the lives of our co-workers. (I’m looking at glaring at you, Guilliani. How bout those radios? Or putting your terrorism command center in the basement of the WTC after the 1993 attack? Let’s do examine your terrorism track record. Carefully. Behind the rhetoric. I can’t wait for that feeding frenzy. Hoo boy.)

Every major city in the country has a study on some shelf in city hall or police headquarters that is collecting dust. If Homeland Security wants to do something that would make sense and justify their existence, they should collect those reports and start an analysis, and they should take the steps to mandate a standardized communication system. It’s absolutely stupid that we don’t have that. It’s frankly a no-brainer. This is one of those things that is just too damned important to be left to the vagaries of the free market. But that is exactly what has happened, and it has cost the lives of men and women who serve you first-hand here at home, the people who show up when you call 911.

The party that gets us a working comm. system that won’t crash immediately if something we think about so you don’t have to comes to pass - will have the endorsement of every police, firefighter and nurses union in the country for decades.

If they get it to us in time.

I hope I'm just being paranoid, but...

The news that four brigades of National Guardsmen will be redeployed to combat in Iraq in December is being met with a reaction that falls far short of enthusiastic.

Guardsmen are supposed to be limited in the time they can spend deployed to a combat zone. That was not the deal that was made when these people joined up. There was a 24 month limit on the time Guardsmen could be deployed to combat zones in a five-year period.

But stretched thin by the ongoing quagmire in Iraq – a debacle that is destroying men and materiel at a phenomenal rate – the Pentagon just changed the rules and struck the limits on deployments.

The four National Guard brigade combat teams given that were informed they would be deployed in December are:

• The 39th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Little Rock, Ark.
• The 45th Infantry Brigade, Oklahoma City.
• The 76th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Indianapolis.
• The 37th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Columbus, Ohio.

Call me paranoid, call me overly suspicious of the motives, but at least the brigades from Ohio and Arkansas raises questions in my fevered brain.

Okay – follow the bouncing ball – I’ll try to explain…

They are deploying in December, from states that will prove critical in the 2008 election.

Is there at least an element of politics at work here? Think about it…Send a Guard brigade from a swing state back to battle, and then bring them home early – four to six weeks before the general election.

Did someone at the Pentagon start cross-referencing deployment dates with election maps?