Terrorists Everywhere!

A cynic might note that if you pay people to track, monitor, handle, arrest, or disrupt terrorists, you’re going to have more “terrorists” than you can shake a stick at. And the cynic might be right, because an unusually broad and eclectic range of terrorists have been in the headlines lately. Nazis. Jihadis. Trailer trash. Et cetera, et cetera. Unfortunately, they haven’t been making the news the way we like: with a couple of Seal Six guys conducting a cable-news war of attrition, about who gets the credit for capping them.

German Nazi Terrorists!

Spanning the world, to bring you a look at the wide range of dysfunctional and degenerate humanity that gets stickered with the all-purpose cautionary label, “terrorist.” First, we’ve got a neo-Nazi woman terrorist in the dock in Germany. So they’re not entirely a creation of nebbishy Hollywood screenwriters’ bad dreams! Who knew? The Nazis and their wannabes were pretty much extinct in the Bundesrepublik before the Wiedervereinigung, but they’re back like the raptors in a weaker Jurassic Park sequel – “the second time, as farce.” Only it probably wasn’t funny to their victims. No better place to learn about Nazis than Der Bloomführer’s news agency:

The trial of Beate Zschaepe, a member of a neo-Nazi cell accused of a series of xenophobic murders, opened in Munich today — after weeks in which public attention focused more on the court’s media policy than the charges.

The National Socialist Underground, or NSU, allegedly killed the 10 people as part of a plan to terrorize minorities and force them to leave the country. Eight of those murdered between 2000 and 2006 were of Turkish origin. The others were a Greek man and a German policewoman. The killing spree came to light in November 2011 after Zschaepe’s companions, Uwe Boehnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, committed suicide in a camper van in eastern Germany.

For some reason, the Bloom Shirts think this trial is not about murders, but about the Germans having insulted the Holy Media. What next, they cooked their schnitzel in trans fats?

Times change; we remember when NSU in Germany meant an interesting, but undependable, car, with a Wankel engine before Wankels were cool — before Mazda applied Japanese reliability engineering to the design, and made it stop emitting blue oil smoke.

Boston Jihad Terrorists!

There’s all kinds of news about Flashbang and Speedbump, but we’re mostly interested in the how, and in laughing about how the media are puzzled by the glaringly clear why. One more piece of the puzzle comes in with the probable time and location of their test blasts, along with some new potential accessories/co-conspirators, coming to light. See here on ViralRead and more analysis of probabilities at the Jester’s page. (Any successful bomber tends to have done tests, and that’s usually very important to putting the sonofallah away).

Minnesota trailer-trash “terrorist”!

The FBI is calling this loser a “terrorist,” but it seems like the word doesn’t mean what they think it means. He’s a 24-year-old career small-time criminal who apparently intended to off someone or -ones with an illegally owned AK and a collection of molotovs and pipe bombs. In other words, he was a typical resident of South Side Chicago, a state or two out of place.

It’s almost as if someone gave the Bureau the Word to “find some terrorist who never cared what direction Mecca is in.” And they did!

Geezer Hippie Terrorist!

And the poster child for the narcissistic-rich-kids’-tantrum-of-the-seventies, the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers, made an appearance at Kent State to hog the spotlight in classic Baby Boomer fashion, and say his years of terror bombing were just a sensible, legitimate reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War. He now claims that various bombs that failed to kill people were not intended to kill people. (So why did he pack them with shrapnel… was he trying to be a high-explosive Jackson Pollock?)

Even as a terrorist, Ayers was more jacked up than Flashbang and Speedbump. He was a Gilbert & Sullivan revolutionary.

But we shouldn’t lose sight of his intentions, of which he repents not. Let’s even take him at his word, that Vietnam animated his terrorism, but let’s unpack what he means by that. Remember, this crumb was on the side of the people who left 5,000 dead civilians, hands bound, in mass graves in Hue in Tet ’68. He stood with the functionaries who introduced the words Re-Education Camp to international discourse. His objection to to our efforts in Vietnam was to the delay in his side’s program of mass murder and brainwashing. If his guys were any better than Hitler, we’re damned if we can see how.

Most pitiful: his attempt to sell himself as young. One of the most unseemly of the Boomers’ pathologies is their endless and futile quest for youth. Gramps, you’re retirement age. Retire already.

And worse, Terrorologists!

And just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, we get the word that smacked-down phony SF/Ranger/Spetsnaz-shovel-slinger and self-credentialed “terrorologist,” not to mention the world’s only expert in hostage negotiation that’s gotten that way without training or experience, is back on the scene again, selling his dubious expertise. Yep, John Giduck, PhD, which in his case stands for Phony Douchebag even though he’s also a Doctor of Philosophy from some overseas diploma mill, is baaaack… and trying to weasel out of the attorneys’ fees he was ordered to pay after his last SLAPP suit. Supposedly, he’s now an expert in Chechnya. Well, it alliterates with Cha-Chingg! we guess.

Paying John Giduck to share his knowledge with you is right up there with lending Flashbang and Speedbump your pressure cooker.

The spirit of  sainted HRH Kim II (illustrated) inspires the Regime of Perpetual Kim Asshattery today. Unfortunately, the clowns are armed and dangerous.

The Chosun Ilbo (S. Korean news) reports that the Norks have taken an American of Korean descent prisoner, in what the Norks call “an arrest for crimes against the state” but the South, including the Ilbo, see as hostage-taking:

Korean American tourist Kenneth Bae has been detained there for unspecified crimes against the state since November last year.

The North Korean committee overseeing the joint industrial park on the day did not interfere with the evacuation and merely issued a statement saying it is “concerned” about the way things are going.

via The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition): Daily News from Korea – N.Korea Reheats Hostage Ploy.

In addition to Bae, seven South Korean managers and workers at the now-closed international Kaesong Industrial Complex were taken hostage.

HRH Kim III demonstrates Nork range technology: Suddenly it’s 1990! Dig the OD Green CRTs.

North Korea took hostages in 2009, including two American journalists, and was rewarded with appeasement — they called it “kowtowing” — from President Obama, who dispatched former President Clinton to bow down before then-king Kim II. Kim III gives every appearance of running plays from the ancestral playbook.

The Korean hostages, on the other hand, appear to be held for cash ransom. North Korea is demanding over $1 million each for their freedom, claiming that the state is owed back wages for North Korean slave laborers who worked in the now-defunct Kaesong industrial plants.

The plants are no use to North Korea. They depend on water and power from over the border, which is now cut off. North Korea has too little energy to supply its top-priority munitions factories, its Communist Party courtiers, and the Kaesong plant, too. And so, it doesn’t really seem to have enough money to restart the production that might bring it the hard currency to build a power plant or transmission lines.

Update: Bae has been sentenced for “crimes against the state.” Apparently without the bourgeois Western formality of a trial, not that the Norks could conduct one if they tried.

Exit, stage left: Max Boot, who has the perfect name for writing about infantrymen, has an engaging piece at Commentary on how the four most celebrated talented generals in the GWOT recently have followed some of the earlier ones he does not mention (Franks, for example) into the sunset. The last of his four, Marine General Jim Mattis, isn’t quite gone, but he’s standing in the door. Geronimo!

Some of these guys were undone by personal scandals of a trivial sort. Petraeus couldn’t keep his trousers zipped, and McChrystal unwisely gave a reporter access to his staff; the reporter, predictably, betrayed him for a juicier headline. (You can’t blame the reporter for that, really. Item 1: A snake will always bite; that’s the nature of a snake. Item 2: If you’re self-confident enough to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Juggling Snakes, see Item 1). Allen and Mattis? Well, the administration, which doesn’t like the military much, really doesn’t like successful military men, and undermined them at every turn. (It did to the other pair as well, but they gave the administration ammunition). Mattis in particular was resented for leading the Marines as if he had Marine values — as if there was something wrong with that. Boot:

Petraeus, McChrystal, Allen, and Mattis would be the first to deny that they are irreplaceable—the graveyards, they would no doubt remind us, are said to be full of irreplaceable men. And clearly there are a number of capable officers who will strive to fill their combat boots. Some heroes of the last decade of war—including General Ray Odierno, General Martin Dempsey (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Admiral William McRaven (McChrystal’s successor at JSOC and the man who oversaw the Osama bin Laden raid), and Major General H.R. McMaster (a noted military intellectual and counterinsurgency commander)—remain in uniform.

But the experience and savvy of the four will be hard to replace. Certainly they deserve more public appreciation than they have gotten so far and, at the very least, an honored role in helping to teach a new generation of soldiers and Marines how to operate at the pinnacle of command. We do not have such a surplus of brilliant commanders that we can afford to wave away those like Petraeus and McChrystal and Allen and Mattis, who have demonstrated a mastery of the modern battlefield. We can only hope that President Obama’s cavalier attitude toward the loss of their institutional knowledge, their leadership abilities, and their complex understanding of a dangerous world does not prove to be a tragedy for the nation.

Need we advise you to  «Read The Whole Thing™? Or had you already decided to do that? We’ll be here when you come back.

We don’t share Boot’s (or McMaster’s own, for that matter) degree of being impressed with McMaster. Mattis and McChrystal have probably forgotten more about COIN than that publicity hound has ever learnt. But he is talented, even though a bit of a self-promoter. And every corporal and up knows how to handle a “Spotlight Ranger”: keep the spotlight on him, but spread the kudos around enough to ensure his peers don’t get resentful; you’ll get credit for the great things he does, while his personality deficiencies will be his alone. Of course, no one in the NCA, except Chuck Hagel knows this. He’s the only one who’s actually been a corporal, the rest of them lack that character-forging resumé line.

The other guys he mentions vary in quality. Dempsey, for example, is a politician in uniform; while his bosses may curl their toes happily at his sucking-up, his troops wouldn’t cross the street to urinate on him if he were on fire. Odierno has politician tendencies, but in person we found him impressive on several levels. McRaven is the real deal, a good leader for a moral country in a hard world. They are all probably famous enough that the White House resents and will, in time, undermine them, unless they can hang on until the next guy, who will not be so vain and vindictive, whoever he is and whatever party he comes from (or “she” for that matter).

There are many other generals further downlist who bring similar courage, fidelity, and dedication to their tasks. We hesitate to name names, lest we plant targets on their backs. We, as a nation, have always found talented officers, in bad years and under bad Presidents as well as good ones. Some of the best ones “bubble under” at the O-6 (Colonel/Navy Captain) level, but there’s an incredible amount of talent there.

Indeed, the “up-or-out” rule embedded in DOPMA and ROPMA, sucked into the military from 1920s corporate practice — think Durant’s GM — ensures that the path to high rank is an elimination tournament and the Army and other services shed incredible talent at every level.