OBL is Dead! Let Us Rejoice? — Not so fast. . .. I just thought that this post was so good that there is nothing meaningful I could add to it other than ‘have a read‘ and then ‘have a think‘…
Edit: this post (mine not Cecilia’s excellent piece) was just a little too minimalist (first time I have used ‘Press-It” so know for next time) so I have added a lead-in image with a Reflections theme…
PDF: OBL is Dead! Let Us Rejoice_ — Not so fast. . . – Inspired Vision
The Gulf conflict is considered with regard to Warden’s five ring model and the concept of the self-contained air campaign. The criticisms of Warden’s theory of parallel warfare will be analysed as will its relevance to a smaller air force such as the RAAF.
The 1990 Gulf War was a little more, from an air power perspective, than Warden’s largely discredited theories. It saw the first real demonstration of the US’ global air power reach with B-52 missions launched from CONUS; it demonstrated the rift between USAF and USN where the only common ATO format was printed paper; it validated the role of CAS aircraft like the A-10A, to the immense disgust of the fast jet fraternity; it proved the value of SEAD as a key enabler and tactical alternative to low-level strike e.g. the RAF Tornado airfield attacks on Day One; it saw the advent of stealth and practical information technologies; and it saw the birth of the myth of surgical warfare….
Questions
1. Warden & the self contained air campaign – is it now possible for air power alone to force a favourable conclusion to any conflict?
Only as an exception to proven rules. The number of times where air power alone had a strategically decisive effect on the outcome of a conflict could be counted on the fingers of one hand:
The Doolittle Raid which provoked strategic stupidity (Midway) on the part of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
The Battle of Coral Sea which ended the Japanese advance south.
The two USAAF atomic bomb missions against Japan.
The Berlin Airlift was the first major Cold War confrontation and proved Western resolve to stand up to Uncle Joe.
The Linebacker II campaign which lead directly to the settlement under which US forces withdrew from South Vietnam.
2. Warden sees wars as essentially discourses between policy makers on each side. Is the implication that all actors are rational and will achieve rational results, a valid one?
There is not much evidence to support any proposal that any aspect of human behaviour is governed by rationality. Discourse between policy makers is diplomacy, not war.
3. The mind of the enemy and the will of his leaders are targets of far more importance than the bodies of his troops. Does Warden differ from Clausewitz with this assertion?
No. Warden’s ‘theory’ is nothing more than the popular interpretation of Clausewitz’s Trinity (government, people, military; or, for the COE, leadership, people and action arm) with icing on it but not adding much of anything new. Warden’s take on this has been described as “…if you hit enough things with a hammer, eventually there will be a reaction…” i.e. Warden’s application of force in Gulf War 1 was not a precise surgical application of force and there is yet to be any connection shown between the ‘Warden’ campaign and the eventual eviction of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. On the other hand, the systematic obliteration of those forces and those in southern Iraq was definitely a key factor in the Iraqi withdrawal.
Ultimately, an history bears this out time and again, it is the will of the leader(s) than is the ultimate target and determinator.
4. Did a special set of political circumstances allow the Gulf air war to be so seemingly successful?
Not really. Gulf War 1 was the first real information war when a large part of the conflict was ‘fought’ on the television screens of the world. A disproportionate amount of coverage depicted the socalled surgical strikes; considerably less was devoted to the proportionally more attritive air campaign conducted against Iraqi land forces in and around Kuwait.
If so, would it be wise to draw universal conclusions from it?
No but unfortunately, many did, adopting as doctrine (or maybe dogma?) that a clean surgical war was now possible. After the air power false triumphs in Bosnia and Kosovo, this culminated in the ‘shock and awe’ campaign that opened Operation IRAQI FREEDOM in March 2003. Eight years down the track, this misperception still exists although with reduced popularity and it is currently being disproved again in Libya. It may be that Ghaddafi reads and applies more air power doctrine than NATO…
5. Do Warden’s theories as employed in the Gulf War only have application in state-on-state conflict?
If ‘If you hit something often enough, it should break’ is the theory, then, no, it can be applied more broadly; whether it will be any more effective than it was in 1991 though is debatable. It would more doctrinally sound and have a greater chance of success to stick with targeting Clausewitz’s attributed trinity: leadership, people, action arm.
Grow UP, Mike, you're 44 and running out of time...
Just for a day…
The WordPress Daily Post challenge…I usually don’t play but this one is easy – and it’s 0449, I’ve just had a mega-coffee and can’t go back to sleep after an early start to listen in on Dr Sarah Sewall’s presentation at the COIN Center on civilian casualties and their mission effect. It references her recent report ‘Civilian Casualties’ however the link provided for the report either either broken, mistyped or CAC access coz it doesn’t work for me…
I was sufficiently intrigued by her comments that reducing civilian casualties is not a binary ‘me or them’, ‘either/or’ equation and that there are ‘win/win’ approaches that do not prescribe operational effectiveness in reducing civilian casualties. An insight gleaned from some of the text comments made during the presentation is that there has to be a balance between force protection and achieving the mission which I think we all accept but what do you do when your force protection measures themselves jeopardise the mission i.e where those measures undo or erode the force’s credibility or acceptance with ‘the people’…? More to follow on this if I can source a copy Dr Sewall’s report….
Anyway back to the Challenge “...Your phone, laptop, tab, ipad and desktop are dead. Will you make it through a normal working day and evening? What would you miss the most?...” The answer is so simple…quite simply: none of the above…it’d a be a great opportunity to catch up on professional reading, go to the gym, go for a staff wander and doing some face-to-face networking and maybe even tidy my desk (apparently there is one there somewhere under the accumulated detritus) but I only have a day so maybe not…
I remember a few years back an organisation-wide email asked for feedback on the likely impact if email got switched off for an unspecified period…every other response including much gnashing of teeth and predictions of the collapse of civilisation as we know it…our boss simply asked if the ‘switch-off’ could start that week: “…we’ll just have to fall back on good old-fashioned written correspondence, signal traffic, and maybe even picking up the phone or getting out of the office to actually talk to people…don’t see it as a biggie at all...” As handy and convenient all this e-connectivity may be, we should be letting it endanger personal communication nor should we rely on it to such an extent that we become dysfunctional if we lose it…I wonder if the drop-off in physical letters is one reason that NZ Post is set to close shops…? I don’t practise what I preach here but I firmly believe that there is a ton more value in a physical written letter than the tending-to-casual nature of email….
Operation TIDAL WAVE (c) Nicholas Trudgian
How has the concept of precision attacks against key economic targets changed since WWII?
It has only been since the latter part of the Vietnam War that an actual precision attack capability has truly existed, although one might argue that the brief ascendancy of the dive bomber in Germany, Japan and the US provided a degree of precision against point targets. Even so, the key issue is not so much the method of attack but the target and the actual outcome and effect desired by striking it. If anything this was the true weakness in so-called strategic air campaigns: an over-focus on the targets and considerably less upon the desired outcomes. It is doubly a weakness in that it indicates a dogmatic approach to applying the thoughts of the accepted military theorists.
Why were civilians regarded as a legitimate target for the strategic bomber offensive?
Why not? The notion of ‘total war’ has been well-accepted across history from the Romans into the ‘peacekeeping’ campaigns of the colonial nations between the wars. But once again, the key element that is being overlooked is the OUTCOME. Targeting ‘the people’ on its own offers nothing to a campaign unless there is a clearly defined outcome that has some chance of success/achievability from that targeting. If a logical case can be made that targeting ‘the people’ will achieve a strategic effect, then probably they should be targeted. Certainly the targeting of ‘the people’ in Japan directly affected Hirohito’s decision to terminate hostilities; it is less certain that the targeting of ‘the people’ in Germany and Britain achieved much at all other than strengthening their resolve. Perhaps, in considering the Roman approach to ‘the people’, the critical factor in targeting is to employ sufficient shock effect and brutality to get the message through? Certainly this worked well for the Soviet Empire, Saddam’s Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Did the area attacks (punishment strategy) make a significant contribution to allied victory?
If the desired outcome was ‘punishment’ then probably not as there is no strategic effect to be gained from ‘punishment’. But if the actual outcome was that they diverted capacity and manpower from the land and maritime campaigns, which they did, then they most definitely made a significant contribution to not only the allid victory in WW2 but in later conflicts where strategic bombing effects were sought.
Or were the ‘precision attacks’ of the 8th Air Force more effective?
There was a difference? Any distinction between the night and day campaigns became largely not after the concerted city-busting attacks began.
Do targets now determine what is strategic or not?
No. Targets are simply the means to an end. If that end is poorly divined, then no matter how well the targets are struck, the long term effects may be minimal or activate the law of unintended consequences.
Should Douhet, Mitchell, and Trenchard now be forgotten?
First up, Mitchell and Trenchard are in a totally different class than Douhet, who rides alongside the likes of Mahan, Clausewitz and Napoleon. As covered in a previous seminar, Mitchell was more a tactical thinker and Trenchard a hopeful one who was influenced more by his passion for the emerging importance of air power as a military tool than any particularly deep thought. The names of the classic military thinkers come up again and again simply because their work is enduring and attempting to discount them purely because their works do not apply literally to modern times is rather short-sighted to say the least. And once written-off who might them replace them? Warden…?
There is risk in considerable the works of the classic thinking through too narrow a straw and failing to determine the underlying themes and insights in there works; or to consider their work against the literal context of today. Anyone who has been involved in a flight safety or air accident investigation will know the importance of considering events from the perspective of and context in which they occurred. Similarly, to be able to really consider these thinkers’ relevance one must really have read their works in some detail and there is also danger in taking them out of their broader context and attaching too much or too little importance to them.
The answer to the question is, of course, no…
Just in case no-one noticed, the Lone Ranger is a myth, a legend, something not real and if he had existed, someone would more than likely have put some .44 calibre lead in his back one night…the moral of the story is that if you believe your own press and keep interfering in other folks business, you are only buying into grief, and lots of it. Yes, folks, that right and just as right or even righter, even if you are (or think you are) sitting up on the moral high ground…and the bigger you are, the more this applies… This might be because the bigger you are, the more powerful you think you are and with that comes the perception of license…
Well, here’s a fact…no one has a license to boldly interfere in the internal workings of another nation – a resolution from the defunct and impotent UN is no more a license than a letter from Osama Bin Laden authorising the world to go to war against the West…As much as we might not like the current leader of Libya, there is no evidence that the socalled Libyan rebels have anything to offer that will make Libya one iota a better place to live or to deal with than it is today. Just like Saddam Hussein, just because we don’t like someone and even if they are real bad bastards, this does not mean that they do not actually offer benefits in international affairs, especially in maintaining regional stability.
In intervening interfering in Libya, the West is acting like the world policeman that it is not; in interfering in Libya but not in Syria where protestors are being subject to 7.62mm ball riot control, the west shows itself to be not much more than the same bully it accuses Ghaddafi of being. More so, in wibbling (yes, it is a word – see Blackadder’s Guide to Trench Cooking and Tactical Lexicon) until the US agreed to support the interference, the European nations showed themselves to be impotent and cowardly – Libya is not such a conventional threat that France or the UK (on the days that its remaining jet is flying) could not easily cope with. The Libyan forces are even less a threat to Western forces when the object of the interference is enforcement of a no fly zone and not actual ground lodgement and intervention – of course, having seen all the footage of destroyed Libyan armour, one wonders just exactly what technologies the Libyans employ to get them into the air…maybe we should be a little worried…?
Our moral justification for interfering Libya was further undermined when the Arab nations that so vocally supported it (one wonders why all THEIR high tech toys were as incapable of dealing with a regional issue as those of the European nations) turned on NATO in much the same way that Tonto rediscovered his roots…
“Those Indians look pretty dangerous, Tonto, we could be in trouble” “What mean ‘we’, white man?”
We can’t remember what we’re doing in Afghanistan any more – the making the world safe for democracy line is pretty worn these days – and we have no good reason for being in Libya…the air power option is nice and clean and simple: it reinforces the myths of DESERT STORM that air power cleans up messes with minimal cost or loss…how soon we forget the lessons of Iraq…shock and awe versus blood and treasure or is it shock and awe = blood and treasure…??
40 Squadron B757 at Christchurch Airport
As at Saturday 26 February 2011, more than 1400 New Zealand Defence Force personnel are now committed to the earthquake response efforts in Christchurch City.
NZ Army personnel and their Singapore Armed Forces counterparts are continuing to provide the 24/7 cordon around the central city, with security patrols also in place in the suburbs of Bexley and Waltham.
"Hey, you fellas want to swap patrol cars for the night? Ours has got flashing lights..." "Nah, bro, sorry, ours has got a jug and a cooker..."
HMNZS Canterbury in Lyttleton Harbour
Good old Canterbury…despite all the bad things the uninformed said about her, she’s certainly proved her worth this week…at the beginning of the week she was only named for a patch of ground between some lines on a map; at the end of the week, she now carries a name synonymous with the spirit of a people…
Egyptians celebrate on the streets after Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down from his position
…a title that’s about as catchy as Jay and Silent Bob Do The World…and with about the same level of connection with the real world…Facebook and Twitter did NOT overthrow the President of Egypt, nor were they much more than enablers for communication (until the Egyptian government turned the internet lights out anyway). A population taking to the streets to demand the removal/resignation of a leader is not that common but it’s also not THAT unusual…Anyone who thinks that the ‘power’ of social networks created an unstoppable critical mass is living in LaLaLand (L3) – that the demonstrations continued after the net was switched off is a good combat indicator here.
If the conditions are right and there are some suitably skilled organisers/agitators available, then mass demonstrations are pretty easy to orchestrate…there are plenty of examples of this across history even prior to the invention of the interweb…to focus too much on social networking software is to distract oneself from the more important topics of the networks themselves AND who is manipulating them.
That a Google executive was involved in this right from the start is indicative of some form of leadership, planning and organisation and NOT of the spontaneous mass uprising that many in the media would have us believe this transfer of leadership relied on. I can’t not say transfer of power because it is simply too early to determine where the real power will lie…I also wonder how many remember how Hosni Mubarak came to power and that his strong consistent hand has probably saved Eqypt from the Moslem Brotherhood of Really Bad People Out For Some Headlines and World Peace (or some such group)…noting that and the lack of any sort of succession plan, I wonder how Google defends its ‘Do No Harm’ motto if Egypt continues to unravel (think it’s run it’s course)?
Much as I’d like see see the recent event in Tunisia and Egypt as a triumph for the information militia, I just can’t see any proof that it was…the upside of the information militia for the most part remains collaborative discussion on the like of Small Wars Journal whose discussion board and blog continue to make my brain run marathons; the downside is the like of Michael Yon who continues to just not get it.
Yes, I am miffed (but not that surprised) that he can blatantly claim that he has only ever blocked/banned 14 people from his Facebook page when the number is well above that; and doubly miffed that my name doesn’t appear on the list of those blocked – I learned today that one should only consider oneself banned if one also ‘unlikes’ Mike on FB as well – preschool hairsplitting at its best. I’m not losing sleep over Mike’s antics – following his FB page is like watching a good soap: you keep watching just to see what inanity happens next – but it annoys me that his antics drag others in the information militia down with him…what force would ever want an embed (from anywhere) are reading Mike’s slurs on GEN McCrystal and BGEN Menard last year? Or after considering the damage he has done to the coalition by constantly attacking key members of coalition forces – who needs the Taliban when Mike’s on your side?\
The Yon saga has been laid out in three interesting threads here:
Overview of the Michael Yon Saga PDFs: [Overview of the Michael Yon Saga – CommentsOverview of the Michael Yon Saga – Perspectives]
Banned by Yon! [PDF: Banned by Yon – Perspectives ]
I think the guy just needs some perspective in his diet and needs to get over being a 19 year old E-5 and look to what he is really good at (besides pissing people off and mudslinging) and get back to telling the human side of conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan, and also offer an alternative perspective to events like Thailand’s recent Red Shirt troubles – when he was there: reporting from afar on Egypt does really cut the mustard…
On the topic of internet shutdowns, Wired has an interesting but pretty light article (PDF: US Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators _ WIRED) on the US’ apparent ability to turn it back on if it so desired – this concept is not really cutting edge. Yes, the delivery mechanisms will have a certain geeky appeal but the concept has its roots in the Voice of America broadcasts over the Iron Curtain and the Allied broadcasts into occupied Europe (you remember, Europe, the last time that everyone else had to come save you) during WW2. In Tom Clancy’s The Bear and The Dragon, Beijing after the US unleashed free (in every sense of the word) braodcasts into Chinese TV and radio systems, spurring a (you guessed it) population uprising.
And there we are back where we started…the good old spontaneous uprising…when it all gets post-mortemed, I am fairly confident that the dead Germans will have played a strong hand in all of it…that is, that the popular interpretation of Clauswitz’ trinity will bear out: there will have been a leadership group, an action arm and, coming a very slow third (like always), ‘the people’, the poor old bloody people…Small Wars Journal has on its blog, a very robust discussion entitled A Populace-Centric Foreign Policy which talks about the role of ‘the people’ and how best to engage them…it was quite satisfying for a while (won’t last) to see some other contributors following my practice of parenthesising ‘the people’ as an indication that the word represent influence and power that doesn’t really exist…
[RDFs: A Populace-Centric Foreign Policy _ Small Wars Journal; A Populace-Centric Foreign Policy _ Comments 2; A Populace-Centric Foreign Policy _ Comments 1]
PS…when I post links to online discussions, it is with the faint hope that one or two readers might be bold enough to contribute their own thoughts to those discussions…Small Wars especially has not pretty impressive street cred in its active community (yeah, I know, they list Mike Yon as a author but no one’s perfect)…I recently read through some of the 65-odd pages of the ‘Introduce Yourself‘ thread and was humbled to see in whose presence I virtually walk…
…Hamid Karzai says it is time foreign troops left his country because the troops are now “hindering progress.”
It's not a large picture as the vacuum between the ears causes a steady implosion of the head...
At the same club meeting, Oxfam said it is time the PRT’s got out because it is putting aid workers at risk as they are too often linked to the military. Yes, I am sure that is why they are being attacked and certainly not because they are soft unarmed targets from whom decent ransoms can be earned…or because the decreased military component of reconstruction teams means there is less of a local deterrent to errant bandits…news flash!! Afghanistan has been a dangerous place to visit or work for the last 31 years…
Mr Karzai’s comments are not the first time he has called for foreign troops to exit. He is under pressure at home from locals who want to control their own country. Now, there’s a surprise…surely not because they tire of a foreign force propping up what many Afghans consider a puppet government attempting to inflict central control over cultures that have always (well, since before Alexander’s Afghanistan Tour) been quite happy thank you very to do their own thing without so much as a nod towards any notions of central government…
There's the door...go on...leave!! I dare you, I DOUBLE-dare you...
“Afghanistan wants control of its own affairs by all means in the security sector. Whether Afghanistan is ready or not must not be a reason,” Karzai said. “The Afghans don’t want a European government, the Afghans don’t want an American government. . . . Afghans want an Afghan government.”
What is even more amazing than Karzai’s latest is that every contributing nation didn’t seize this exit strategy golden egg by the horns and fill the Afghan night with ripples of pops as as the vacuum left by each exiting force was filled by something else…
The spin on the exit strategy goes round and round, round and round...
Regardless, though, of when and how, ISAF depart Afghanistan, each contributing nation (yes, that include you EU folk too!) needs to ante up and accept responsibility for the cultural and social changes that it has supported in Afghanistan. Even assuming that the Karzai government or its ISAF-backed successor lasts beyond the first night of independence, it’s unlikely that it will last much past when the money runs out which will more likely be when the last suitcase packed full of dollars goes through the luggage check-in at Kabul International than when it is expended on running the country…and when the darkness comes, those nations and agencies that thought it was so ‘right’ to introduce democracy and free speech and equal rights and all that other good Western ideology need to step up to the plate and do right by the vulnerable people they left behind…
GEN Petraeus also looks to be gearing up for that day when the last helicopter lifts off the roof of an embassy…from the Financial Times via Michael Yon:
Petraeus defends plan to arm villagers
By Matthew Green in Kabul
Published: February 7 2011 18:42 | Last updated: February 7 2011 18:42
General David Petraeus, the top US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, plans to triple a scheme that has armed thousands of village recruits, dismissing fears that the strategy could nurture a new generation of warlords. [Comment: the current warlords don’t seem to have a shortage of weapons now…]
With violence in Afghanistan rising and Nato allies anxious to hand over to Afghan forces in 2014, Gen Petraeus wants to bolster security, in part by sending 12-man teams of US special forces to train locals. [Comment: that’s 2014 THIS century or in three years time; like, only one third of the time that we haven’t been able to sort Afghanisatn out in since November 2001]
Human rights groups and aid agencies have called for the plan to be scrapped, fearing it threatens to fuel conflicts and empower the kind of militia commanders who ravaged Afghanistan during years of civil war in the 1990s. The government of Hamid Karzai, the president, has also been wary of similar initiatives. [Comment: damn right it’s ‘wary’ – last thing Uncle Hamid wants is more people able to resist central government – it’s a bit of an ask to consider it ‘governance’.]
But Gen Petraeus said the scheme was vital in enlisting the support of locals.
“The idea is that these actually mobilise not just individuals, but communities,” he told the Financial Times. “Elders support it. The elders also police it to a degree.”
The plan has echoes of the approach Gen Petraeus adopted while commanding the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, where he encouraged the Awakening movement of Sunni tribes that helped curb violence.
But he said the Afghan Local Police – as the plan is known – would be a very different exercise. It aims to work with the government to reach often isolated areas where people wanted help to resist the Taliban.
To critics, the scheme represents a quick-fix solution adopted to meet political pressures for withdrawal in western capitals.
Since Gen Petraeus took command of international forces in Afghanistan in July, the programme has been started in 17 sites, with a total of more than 3,100 paid recruits, he said. The Nato-led force is awaiting Afghan government approval for more than 40 additional sites, and hopes to add another 4,500 men by spring, a US military official said.
The recruits, whose biometric data is recorded, are given a salary, registered weapons and khaki uniforms. Their primary role is to man checkpoints or patrol their home areas.
General Petraeus says the training is being conducted with the oversight of Afghan authorities, local government, police and elders. “They work for the district chief of police, not a local warlord or elder or power-broker,” he said.
Nato allies have launched a sucession of similar schemes with scant success, but US officials believe extra resources and closer collaboration with the government will deliver results. A similar programme, the Local Defence Initiative, ran into problems last year when it donated $1m to the Shinwari tribe in the eastern Nangahar Province, which became embroiled in a land dispute last year instead of fighting the Taliban, according to Oxfam.
ca. 1850 --- Afghan Soldier --- Image by © Christel Gerstenberg/CORBIS
Probably too little, too late…even though Jim Gant’s plane got diverted from Iraq to Afghanistan after Steven Pressfield published his excellent One Tribe At A Time paper, tribal engagement is s campaign that needed to have been continued and expanded from 2001 after the Northern ‘Alliance’ was used to gain an initial upper hand on Terry Taliban…
It’s been a while since I visited my blogroll but I am making a serious attempt to get back into a proper work routine that balances my blogwork with Air Force projects, domestic ‘honey todos’, and my relationships with Hawkeye UAV and FX Bikes…I’m well into my summer programme which seeks to do as much work from home in order to optimise the longer summer days for honey todos: it’s just a case of getting the balance right…
So, having spent a day on base reviewing draft doctrine and keeping up with ASIC admin, I’m now feet up catching up with UK Masterchef and attempting some concurrent activity blog-surfing…
My first stop was Coming Anarchy…twas a bit of a worry when the first headline I saw was “Invade New Zealand!” but fortunately it’s actually a series of links to some great satirical Aussie piss-takings from a couple of years back – have a look and a laugh!
Speaking of having a laugh, and the reason for this post’s title, was a brief commentary on Julian Assange’s lawyers having a squawk because the same media that he used to publish the latest batch of wiki=leaks is now printing his linked Police record…oh dear…! WHat has Assange wrought the title asks…pretty much exactly what he has sown, I’d say…it seems that his urge for openness doesn’t apply to his own information…it amazes me how self-righteous Assange’s supporters become when their own privacy is challenged as it is now being at the rapid rate by various US government and law enforcement agencies…how dumb are some of these people when they blithely use US-based communications and networks, and then bleat when the US asserts ownership over information on those US-based networks, you know, things like Twitter, Facebook, Paypal, Google, etc, etc, etc…
Also on wikileaks, Chirol asks some long overdue questions about Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the Western world…
Even before Wikileaks, it was abundantly clear that Saudi Arabia is the largest financer of terrorism in the world. The US knows this, and Saudi knows we know. The continue to do to a half-assed job, doing enough to keep us happy but not enough to seriously attack the problem. My question, given that Saudi Arabia is not actually a major oil supplier to the United States (see Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Nigeria etc), what is keeping us from really putting the screws to them? Is it because maintaining an uneasy friendship and geting some cooperation is the lesser evil than making them an enemy? That is my reading of the situation. Would serious pressure even make them an enemy or could we still maintain decent relations? The more I think about it, the less I understand the special relationship we have today.
Not new news perhaps, when you get down to it, Osama Bin Laden was their dog and they’ve naff-all to shoot him or any of his rabid takfiri spawn…John Birmingham also makes a similar comment on spinelessness in the Gulf after wikileaks exposed “…Arab governments who’ve been caught out urging an attack on Iran…” He also comments on various leaked discussions regarding China’s true military capability and intentions with a link to a further Australian commentary on this topic…it’s worth a read but possibly only to see how confused Australian strategic thinking has been in the last decade: China has now taken over from the Indonesian bogey-man of the 70s and 80s, justifying Australia’s really quite amazing military expansion of its own…
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