Anti-Subjugator

I received an email response from David Yerushalmi regarding my response to the americanthinker article. Let me respond here.

I apologize in the extreme, but your response is incoherent.

You'll have to tell me which bit you didn't understand in order for me to fill in the details.

You suggest the entire “Bush game-plan” is to do just enough to allow the Iraqis to effect a cultural, religious, and social revolution of sorts.

Correct. It's certainly my game plan, and so far Bush has been doing everything I wanted him to do. The advantage of my position is it suggests that Bush is fighting competently, while your position requires the entire Bush administration to be criminally incompetent.

But you provide no evidence, historical or otherwise, that this can be done or that any reasonable person would conclude that it will be done.

Also correct. We have no experience of doing this sort of thing. We don't have a lot of prior experience with Arab Muslim democracies. A lot of people said it couldn't be done - that the Arabs couldn't handle democracy. I have even heard this opinion from Arabs. We needed to get a handle on why Arabs apparently preferred sadistic dictators to liberal democracy, to at least understand WHY the Arabs couldn't handle democracy. Because whatever is wrong with them, it's started becoming a security threat to the free world. Iraq was the country most likely to succeed. With 3 distinct groups, liberal democracy is the only viable system we know of. We needed to find out what on earth was in the Iraqi people's brains, and the only "information" we had prior to the war was that 100% of them had voted for Saddam. I'm not sure why you find this so inconceivable. We needed to first analyze the problem in order to be able to deal with it. We needed the results of a secret ballot with no coercion whatsoever.

Given, that, to send in our armed forces and to expend the lives and the treasure on such an ambiguous battle plan is precisely the analogy to Vietnam.

You are failing to recognize that Vietnam in 1972 was a COMPLETE and UTTER US victory. We had set up a South Vietnamese government that was able to look after its own territory, which it did for THREE YEARS unassisted. The ONLY thing it couldn't handle was an external military invasion by a superior force, be it USSR, China, UK, France or as it turns out, North Vietnam. South Vietnam should have been given the same protection that Australia was given from an external invasion by the USSR.

A military plan could work but it requires a real military’s execution not a rag tag country-regime-army of Muslim Arab Iraqis (order is important in this listing) in the making.

It is the insurgents that a rag-tag army. The new Iraqi Army is better trained, has far superior firepower, and vastly outnumbers the insurgents. Of course it is a long way from being as good as the US Army, but it doesn't need to be as good as the US Army in order to defeat the insurgents. So long as we don't require the Iraqi Army to defend against an external invasion by say Iran, the Iraqi Army will eventually prevail against the insurgents, even without US help. However, there is no reason to prove that. It is better to keep the war grossly one-sided by keeping US troops in the arena.

We might suggest you read the responsive critique of the Colonel’s essay by James Lewis posted by the AT on their blog portion – right side. It is a classic “neo-con” argument that you have proposed in less clear terms. The Colonel and I replied rather vigorously to Mr. Lewis and you can also find that reply posted in the blog section of AT. We have also linked that at SANE. Mr. Lewis posted on final rebuttal but it was more a concession. He showed real intellectual integrity where most men just dig in and bury their heals.

I assume you are talking about this article. It was your reply to James Lewis that caused my original message. This does not negate anything that I have said.

I can only suggest that you peruse our arguments on the War and the war strategy at SANE carefully.

I assume you are referring to this article.

Let me respond briefly to that too. In Vietnam as a whole, a majority had probably been sucked into the siren song of communism. Ergo, democracy meant communism. The non-communists voted with their feet and created South Vietnam. You can argue that we should have left all of Vietnam to the communist majority, and you can argue that we should have forced all of Vietnam to be capitalist. But the US thought a reasonable solution was simply to have two Vietnams, as was working in Korea. Securing South Vietnam was a straightforward technical task, and by 1972 had been accomplished. There was no fatal flaw. The strategy was totally successful. The US only needed to keep a small force to protect South Vietnam from a conventional external invasion. The US's failure to do so was where the fatal flaw was. You didn't even mention that. There was nothing stopping Vietnam from looking like Korea. It is not rocket science. It is a straightforward technical task to give to the US military.

The US military has been given a similar straightforward technical task in Iraq - train up a new Iraqi army which can look after its own territory. All indications are that this is a complete success. It was a complete success from the moment people started forming long queues to VOLUNTEER to join the Iraqi Army, and continued to form long queues even when those queues were regularly attacked. The Iraqi people have done their bit. They proved to be both brave and to trust the US. Everything else is straightforward. The other thing the Iraqi people did was vote for a moderate government which respects human rights including freedom of speech. Again, we can't really ask for more than this. There was a risk that 90% of them had been brainwashed to vote for someone like Saddam. This danger turned out to be unfounded.

The sectarian violence in Iraq is certainly unfortunate, but it has NO MILITARY EFFECT. It is no different from a lot of car crashes, or the murder rate in South Africa. It lowers the population a little bit, but is not a threat to the government. There are an estimated 20k insurgents who have got it into their head that they can somehow topple the democratically-elected Iraqi government. 20k in a population of 27 million. Up against 300k Iraqi security forces. This is a turkey-shoot. The 300k will eventually defeat the 20k, and US assistance makes the fight even more one-sided and has the extra benefit of making sure no external invader enters Iraq, which would indeed mean the whole war was for nothing.

The current strategy is not just sound, it's EXACTLY the most strategic thing to do. If you have any specific complaints about Bush's actions since 9/11 I will be happy to answer them. The only quibbles I have with Bush's actions are:

1. When bombing the Taliban, he paused, and gave them an opportunity to hand over Osama Bin Laden. This would have been disastrous. Turning Afghanistan into a friendly democracy was far more important in geostrategic terms than catching a two-bit terrorist. Quite apart from the moral obligation I believe the free world had to liberate 25 million Afghans from state-slavery and protect women from being lashed by their own government. Fortunately the Taliban refused to hand him over.

2. Bush told Saddam that he could still avoid war by laying out his weapons. Again, Saddam's WMD were not nearly as important as understanding Arab Muslim mentality so that we can figure out how to respond to 9/11.

So, I do have my suspicions about Bush's competence, but where he has engaged in war, he has done so PERFECTLY, trying to find out the minimum force required to fight a war of liberation instead of a war of conquest. Creating new military doctrine. A new military doctrine that will dramatically lower the barrier to war, and enable a multinational force to liberate people instead of the coalition being dominated by the US. This is where we want to end up.

I have written about this previously on my blog. There are many articles, e.g. this one.

I would like to respond to this article.

It makes some complaints about the Bush Adminstration's handling of the Iraq situation. Given that I totally support Bush's current strategy, let me defend it.

First of all, it is not America's job to win this war. It is Iraq's
job. This is the best use of America's resources, not just in Iraq, but everywhere else in the world. Any work that can be offloaded onto someone else, should be offloaded. There are many problems in the world that need to be dealt with, so we need to find the most strategic manner in which to use our resources.

We are not (yet) at the point where it is strategic to open a general warfront with all Arabs or all Muslims. We are instead at the point where we specifically don't want to be the ones doing the killing. All we want to do is empower "somewhat friendly forces" so that they can defeat mutual enemies. We want to be able to shift blame for any excess use of force onto democratically-elected locals. We also want them to come to the conclusion on their own that they need to confront and reform their sick, intolerant culture. If they don't figure out what needs to be done by themselves, we can always come back to Iraq and change it ourselves. But first we need to observe what effect freedom of speech will have on them. You can see via the Iraqi blogs that radically different views are being freely expressed by Iraqis.

The democratically-elected government of Iraq does not appear to be a threat to the US either. I don't see any danger. In the meantime, Iraq is a huge scientific experiment. We need to observe Arab Muslim behaviour in a free environment so that we can formulate a strategy to prevent another 9/11. After 9/11 we were unsure how to respond. Do we need a genocide against all Arabs and all Muslims? Just Arabs? Just Muslims? Just Arab Muslims? The answers were in Iraq. I have identified three things that need to be fought from observing the Iraqis:

1. dogma (ie the Quran)
2. non-humanism (including racism and religious bigotry)
3. subjugation

All 3 things need to be fought to conclusion in order to prevent another 9/11. Unfortunately there's a hell of a lot of dogmatic, racists and religious bigots in the Middle East. You have 3 options:

1. genocide to eliminate the threat immediately.
2. get them to change their minds immediately somehow.
3. change the education system so that minds are changed over years/decades, and hope that there is not another 9/11 while waiting for this process to bear fruit.

In addition, the US ideally needs to do this without spooking a nation-state into starting a nuclear war, and without having a hostile coalition formed against it (e.g. being kicked out of NATO and having Russia and China enter NATO).

So, the ideal strategy, in my opinion, is to try to form as broad a coalition as possible, and to use the minimum force required to achieve various effects. Jump-start civil wars between "good" and "bad" locals. Empower the "good", and if the "good" are in a majority, this can be done via democracy. When the "good" are in a minority (e.g. Pakistan), support the existing dictatorship in the short term. In the case of Syria, with a bad dictator and a bad majority, replace the bad dictator with a good one. When an opportunity and the resources are available. Each country needs to be independently analyzed.

I don't know if Bush is following this game plan. Even if he is, it is not strategic for him to spell it out. It is better to be able to take out one country at a time. The ultimate goal is to turn every country in the world into a clone of Australia, or if not Australia (an ally), then at least a neutral, like Switzerland. This plan has been centuries in the making, even if it is not recognized as such, and is instead just recognized as "destroying immediate enemies" by the current governments of the free world.

Now let me respond to some specific points you raise.

"The American loss of will in Vietnam was in a sense justified because our national leadership, political and military, was too cowardly to admit that their concept of "limited" warfare was fatally flawed and as a result they failed to change it even after it had become readily apparent to the man in the street such was the case."

It wasn't fatally flawed. The goal was to convert South Vietnam into the equivalent of South Korea. By 1972 this had actually been achieved. All that needed to be done was to protect South Vietnam from external invasion (whether by North Vietnam or some other superior power). This was not done, and North Vietnam won a conventional military battle in 1975, conquering the South. There was no reason to abandon South Vietnam. South Korea was not abandoned.

"simply adding more troops without destroying the sources of enemy resupply is sending our military on a fool's errand."

It's not a fool's errand. The goal is only to empower the pro-freedom Iraqis. They can win the fight against the insurgents in their own time. If the Iraqis want Syria attacked, let them be the ones to call for it. They need to stop looking at the Syrians as "Arab brothers" and instead as "ideological enemies".

"There is a second latent assumption in your response that has never been tested in the history of war that we know of. This assumption states that it is possible to set up a functioning civil and even democratic government in a country at war even as a significant minority of the country rejects such a government."

Yes, I agree that this is being tested. You say "what evidence exists suggests strongly you are dead wrong". I totally disagree. There has been a massive turnout to the democratic elections, the Iraqis even formed a national unity government, there is an unending line of recruits to the security forces. They have freedom of speech and human rights protected by the constitution. Every indication is that it has been a complete and utter success. The insurgents have no chance at all of toppling the government. They have some limited ability to lower the population a bit. A high murder rate, much like South Africa. So long as the US protects Iraq from external invasion, the Iraqis are on track to defeat the insurgency on their own. They vastly outnumber and outgun the opposition. Even if some areas need to be surrendered to the opposition in the short term, the government will win in the long term. It's a mathematical certainty.

"Hopes and dreams are wonderful things for arm-chair pundits with little real understanding of the historical, political, military and geo-strategic facts on the ground but that is no way to fight a war and win it."

The facts on the ground show that this war was won the moment Iraqis started forming long queues to join the new security forces. The rest is a straightforward, minor technical task for the US military to do. So far it has been done with the loss of one month's worth of US road toll victims. This is not a serious war. This is a minor police action - a simple scientific experiment/data gathering exercise in fact. A serious war was 20 million dead Russians in WWII. We need to find out just how little force we need to use to change governments, so that we can reform the US military to fight such wars of liberation instead of wars of conquest. All indications are that Bush hasn't just done a good job, he's done a PERFECT job.

Is it so hard to see? Do you REALLY think the entire Bush administration are dunderheads? Don't you think it's worth spending some time trying to figure out what they're up to? Do you really think that 5 years after 9/11, no-one in the Bush administration has bothered to read the Qur'an, which is why they still supposedly think that Islam is a "religion of peace"? The war to eradicate Islam from the face of the planet hasn't even started yet. And may never actually start, depending on the feedback we get from liberated countries. Even if the US plans "immediate" genocide, it has not taken any action to jeapordize this. The genocide is being done in a strategic manner, using conventional weapons, and making use of surprising sources of firepower. It's totally brilliant, although we have no way of knowing whether it is by design or by coincidence.

Open Letter to John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia

Dear Sir,
I know that Australia has gone to a lot of effort to create a military able to defend Australia. Very few people have the ability to invade Australia. The US could probably do it. Maybe a European alliance could do it. But we're allied with these people and they're far more likely to defend us than attack us! We do not face any serious threat of invasion, yet our military is structured on the assumption that we do. A country like Fiji manages to get by fine without having any ability to defend itself from external invasion. It isn't even in an alliance. Iceland manages fine without any military at all, relying instead on the NATO alliance. Haiti manages to get by with neither a military nor an alliance.

So while it is interesting that we have the ability to defend ourselves without external help, it's all rather pointless, when we are faced with a REAL security threat, and we have essentially ignored it. Our real security threat is from Islamofascists and hostile dictators looking for asymetric ways of attacking us. If not immediately, then in the future. In order to address this threat we need to both topple dictators and change the education system so that they stop inciting hatred against us. This is the minimum we need to do. The maximum would be genocide. Yet we are making no serious effort to counter this threat.

We have token forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. While that is certainly welcome, and is probably the best we can manage with the current structure of our military, it is not the maximum we could do if we were to restructure our military to fight real threats instead of the imaginary threat of an Indonesian invasion. We should ask the Americans to station 10 (out of the 11,000 they have available) of their planes in Australia just so that Indonesia doesn't go completely mad and attempt an invasion. We should then restructure our military so that we can deploy as many troops as possible overseas, within our current military budget. ie make maximum use of our resources, leveraging into the protection that the US is able to provide (at no cost to us), and instead have the ability to do something useful.

The great danger is that the US will get sick of providing 90% of the force required to protect the Iraqi government. They may in fact pull out all their troops and abandon Iraq. Precisely as occurred in Vietnam. Just as Australia should have provided protection for the South Vietnamese, even without a US presence, Australia should protect our Iraqi allies, even if the US gives up. Even if the US fails to provide air cover (as they did in Vietnam, despite the fact that we were in the middle of the Cold War), we can make use of British aircraft. The bottleneck as I see it is ground troops. Instead of wasting time pretending the Indonesians are about to invade us, we should fill this very real bottleneck of war-weary Americans.

There is a real threat to our homefront as well. And it doesn't come from the Indonesians, it comes from Australians who have become so blinded by anti-American propaganda that they think we are the bad buys and Saddam was some sort of benevolent force in the world who needed to be protected from the war-mongering Americans. We don't just need an education campaign overseas, we need one here. You can start by showing some of the torture videos that Saddam's henchman made. Show it to Australian children so that they have nightmares. Some sort of shock therapy is required to let Australians know what their grandchildren face if the military equation ever changes and our generation failed to take action when the military equation was totally in our favour. We are hated by a lot of people in the world. If they can torture "their own" people like that, imagine what they'll do to us!

Please take immediate action before it's too late. The American public is on a knife-edge, and Australia could make the difference between victory and defeat. If we can sway the American people, we will have effectively saved western civilization. Imagine that. Australia saving western civilization. There's something for the history books. And it can go alongside Australia changing the world when the Australian Lighthorse charged Beersheba. Or would you rather history recorded that Australia sucked its thumb, pretending that the Indonesians were going to invade us with their non-existant navy and despite the ANZUS alliance? No more thumb-sucking please Mr Howard. You know what needs to be done. Don't claim ignorance - I've spelt it out in full for you. I hope you rise to the challenge. It may well be down to you personally. Let the Americans know we are abandoning Australia's ability to defend Australia and will instead pick up the burden in Iraq before the panicky Americans abandon it. Maybe this will be enough to keep the Americans engaged until we get there to replace them. Let's hope it's not too late already.

A major milestone has been reached recently. Serbia has been admitted into NATO's Partnership for Peace. You can read about Serbia's reaction to this here. Click on "daily news" and then you can click on "archive" and read the last couple of weeks. So in 1999 we bombed them, and shortly after that they asked to JOIN NATO. And now they've reached the first milestone. Just 7 years. Iraq has made noises about wanting to join NATO too. The best foreign aid you can give someone is to bomb them. It fixes the underlying ideological infrastructure, which in turn means the people finally get a chance to help themselves.

I had an interesting conversation with a Serb yesterday. He was a rare find. He supported NATO's bombing of Serbia because of the Serb actions against the Albanians. A little later in the conversation he said that Kosovo was lost. I told him it wasn't lost yet. He said that the US seemed determined to split Kosovo from Serbia. I asked him why the US would want to do such a thing. He admitted he didn't know. So I explained to him about the US not being pro-Albanian or pro-Muslim but simply anti-racist and anti-religious-bigotry. And that since the Serbian government has changed from being racist and religiously bigotted to non-racist, non-religious-bigot, while the Kosovar Albanians are the ones who are now racist and religious bigots, that the situation has reversed. It is now Serbia that is an ally, and while I strongly supported the NATO bombing myself, I now support Serb troops returning to Kosovo.

I also believe we need NATO to change. When there was actually a serious threat in the form of the USSR, NATO needed to be a serious military fighting force, structured along the best lines we knew of. And that meant the competent Americans in charge. But NATO no longer has any challenger at all. No-one stands a snowball's chance in Hell against NATO militarily. NATO now faces a different challenge. How to get Russia to adopt NATO's values, and thus join NATO. At the moment Russia knows that it is not part of the club, and not accepted by the club. All it sees is a hostile alliance seemingly trying to encircle it. The most strategic thing to do at this point in history is to placate Russia (while still expanding NATO). Here is what I propose to do to placate Russia.

Put ethnic Russian Estonians in charge of both NATO's military command and political command. This means that the US needs to stop being arrogant about not letting its troops fall under foreign command. Everyone else puts their troops under US command, now it is time for the US to do the same. There is no need to tell the ethnic-Russian Estonians what to say or do. Let them decide what they would like. It will significantly change the nature of the battlefield by having ex-Soviet Russians talking to other Russians about cooperation between NATO and Russia. They can even talk in Russian. The Russians (in Russia) will probably be flabbergasted that the Americans aren't controlling these Estonians at all. Which is exactly what is required. The Russians need to have a deep understanding that the US doesn't control ANYONE. The Europeans are all INDEPENDENT ACTORS who ally with the US (just as I do) of their OWN FREE WILL.

I was thinking of maybe putting France in charge of the military command (so long as they promise to speak English), which would have made them less miffed about being seen as inferior to Americans (which they are). But I think it is more important to placate Russia than France. Note that in the unlikely event of a challenger to NATO emerging, I would support the US taking back military command. But at the moment, US leadership of NATO is a hindrance. It is feeding into the "US imperialism" carnard. And it's completely unnecessary to do so. Which is exactly why I wrote this letter to the Australian government, asking them to unilaterally declare war on Iran. To make it clear that Australia is an independent actor. And I spend my time on IRC, without much success, trying to get foreigners, such as Filipinos, to write a similar letter to their government. It would be great if an independent actor like the Philippines were to take leadership of the free world. No-one's going to accuse them of being imperialists. Or racist white supremacists.

It is amazing how novel a concept this is for people. It appears that I am genetically tuned for war, like no other. To me it is plain as day. I see weapons systems and I see the motives of those controlling the weapons and I assess risk to me personally. My goal is to get those weapon systems on my side, and to see a threat in any weapon that isn't on my side. And I seek to find a way to eliminate that threat. It's basic survival instinct. It wasn't me who coined the phrase "the price of freedom is eternal vigilence", but it appears that I am the only person in the world who actually takes that saying seriously. The most obvious was in the Iraqi blogs. Anyone who took freedom seriously should have been there trying to figure out the motives of Arabs/Muslims/Iraqis so that we could assess and deal with the threat. Quite apart from all the people who should have turned up to protect the Iraqi people's human rights. Out of both security and human rights, a measley 100 people in the entire world bothered to show up, almost all of them Anglophones. Non-Anglophones were presumably too busy yodelling or something to engage in the most important scientific endeavour in the history of mankind - threat analysis and elimination.

I read an article yesterday which seems to reflect a thinking among pro-war right-wingers. Who also simply don't get it. They are railing against the "PC war" that is being waged and comparing it to the war against Japan. In their frustration, they are lobbying for carpet-bombing of "enemy" cities.

The first thing that they are totally missing is that the 3.5 year war against Japan was won in 5 weeks in Afghanistan and 3.5 weeks in Iraq. Both countries effectively surrendered as requested and a friendly government was installed. The fact that the complete and utter victories were followed by an insurgency in Afghanistan/Iraq where none existed in Japan/Germany is simply a reflection of the different mentality people have. That different mentality needs to be analyzed and dealt with. But that's a separate problem from the fact that the military vs military clash was won long ago, with essentially no allied casualties.

It is totally ridiculous that people pine for the days of carpet bombing cities. For what purpose? Killing random civilians or destroying random property? Afghanistan actually came pre-bombed. There was very little we could actually do to Afghanistan that they hadn't already done to themselves. That alone should dispel the inanity of carpet bombing. The Taliban hadn't surrendered even though their country was lying in ruins. What makes you think they would have if they had had some infrastructure we could have bombed before-hand?

Is the purpose to sap the Afghan civilians will to fight? The civilians weren't even IN the fight! With election results (secret ballot) under our belt we know that these people never supported living under an Islamic dictatorship. Carpet bombing civilians in these circumstances would have effectively been terrorism. Even worse than terrorism in fact. Terrorism is killing random enemy civilians in order to make a political point. We would have been killing random allies/neutrals in order to show how much we hated our mutual enemy. With an attitude like that, remind me to stop voting for the right-wing. Oh, wait. Or at least stop buying that newspaper. Oh, wait.

What Bush has ACTUALLY done is totally correct. Even though no-one on the left or right seems to get it. And I haven't seen anyone besides me actually attempt to analyze what Bush's game plan might be. Instead, the right wing is convinced that Bush is so stupid that he thinks Islam is a religion of peace. That in 5 years, neither he nor any of his advisers have actually double-checked the Qur'an to see if it does indeed, promote peace, tolerance and love.

And now to the nature of war. If Bush's ultimate plan is actually to commit genocide against all Arabs and all Muslims, which not even the carpet-bombing-promoters even appear to be advocating, he has not actually done anything to detract from this goal. Hell, even if his ultimate plan was to commit genocide against all non-Americans, even Australians, or to perhaps enslave the world, including Australians, he hasn't actually done anything to detract from this goal. It is unwise to let an ally like Australia know you're coming for them, at this point in history. The ducks aren't in a row to enslave Australia. Far better to leverage into whatever resources Australia is willing to offer, in order to use against armed forces that are still hostile. And this is another part of the nature of war. Civilians don't matter a damn. It is weapon systems that matter. If Bush is waging a world war, no matter how wide the scope, he should hone in on the weapon systems. He also needs to have a deep understanding of the mentality of the people who are in control of those weapon systems, in order to determine whether they are friend/foe/neutral. He needs to be able to predict the behaviour of those weapon systems.

And indeed, as an Australian myself, I need to do something similar for my own security - I need to be able to predict whether America's weapon systems will suddenly be turned on me one day. Fortunately for me, I am inside the Anglophone culture, so I know the mentality of Americans, and thus the government they elected. I can predict the behaviour of their armed forces and their people. The multitude of different opinions expressed allows me to determine that Americans have freedom of speech and I can have a high degree of confidence that they are expressing their views, and I am able to analyze those differing views in order to understand the different motives.

People outside of the Anglophone culture have a different problem. They are unable to understand the anti-racism/anti-subjugator/etc nature of the Anglophones, and instead project their own racism and instinct to subjugate onto the Americans, and perceive that they are in danger from an essentially unstoppable America. And are thus fighting for their lives! And perhaps they think that Saddam was a bulwark against the American advance, and thus his atrocities can be excused. This sort of question can be answered by asking the anti-Americans in an environment of freedom, such that IRC provides. E.g. I was talking to a Brazilian, and his response to America being the most generous nation on the planet was that they were just trying to sell weapons. And that that's what he had been told and everyone agreed. Basically this perverse "logic" has reached a critical mass where people risk being ostracized from the group if they dare to challenge "conventional thought". Anti-Americanism is basically a religion of its own. And all I can say is thank God America is armed to the teeth and can actually respond to this anti-Americanism when the time is right.

While we're on to interesting IRC conversations, I was talking to a Kuwaiti, and after some initial talk I simply asked him "what would you like America to do?". And his response? "Kill all the Shiites". Like wow, man! No wonder we have sectarian violence in Iraq. I told him I didn't think that "we" could do that for him, but we could probably replace Iran's dictatorship with a democracy, would that be good enough?

And on the subject of IRC conversations, why am I the only one who appears to be using this opportunity to study human psychology? I'm not even a psychologist. Finding out what is inspiring some people to violence, some people to human rights abuses, is the question of our time. The entire scientific community should be attempting to solve this puzzle, which is the key to security. We need to thoroughly understand all humans so that we can e.g. predict whether America's guns will ever be turned on Australia. Indeed, I can remember reading something on a cannon located in Sydney that a US warship turned up unannounced some centuries ago, so the cannon was installed (or something like that, I didn't take that much interest in what is ancient history).

Anyway, it's all happening right here on this blog. This is the only place I know of where you can see this sort of analysis. Places like Little Green Footballs and Jihad Watch are reporting the violence, and making very amusing sarcastic comments, but they're not actually doing analysis. They're trying to make the US public aware of the threat, which is certainly a good thing, but that's all they're doing. If you want to see the results of incessant probing of hundreds or thousands of people via IRC, this is the place to be. Tell your friends!!!

Oh, and one more surprising thing to report. From our friend Ali Abbas. He was talking about the "puppet" (as reported by Al Jazeera) Iraqi government being "handcuffed" by the Americans. I asked him why the alleged puppets were whinging about the US, instead of just obeying the super-secret orders that Bush sends them every morning, and it seemed like the cogs started turning. There's hope yet. :-) If not, there's always genocide.

Finally we have this, by Gregory Davis, who says:

(on "moderate" Muslims)
"I have spoken with such Muslims and, while they are much to be preferred over the true-believing jihadists, the illogic of their enterprise is readily apparent. Within any Islamic context, their position will always been tenuous at best, which makes them inherently unreliable allies".

But this is the real meat:
"To secularize or pacify Islam would require it to jettison two things: Muhammad and the Koran."

And that is it. Muslims need to either reject Mohammed and the Qur'an (and I don't see how they can do that without ceasing to be a Muslim), or they need to find a way to incorporate what is basically absolute evil (Mohammed and the Qur'an) into a new philosophy. I have done the latter, because the ENTIRE WORLD (not just Muslims) were too stupid to have figured that out for themselves.

I am still in a curious position. The problem has been completely solved, for over 2 years, but I have yet to find a way to "dumb down" my message for consumption by the general public. Not even the highly intelligent people who sometimes frequent this blog, such as PeteS, get it. As far as I can tell, because the logic and evidence is in conflict with dearly-held dogma. These days I am spending my time in IRC, trying to understand humans. It is absolutely shocking the blatant disregard most people have for the rights of Iraqi women to not be raped by Saddam. How people can do that and still believe that they're going to Heaven is phenomenal. But not nearly as phenomenal as Saddam chanting "God is great" as he was sentenced to death in Iraq. Despite the horror this man is responsible for, he seems to think he's on God's good side. Someone has taught him that simply by saying "I'm a Muslim", he gets a one-way ticket to heaven, no matter what atrocities he commits.

What a world we live in! What a mess! I'm still trying to sort through the mess. At the moment I am pretty much stuck when people don't even accept that women have a right to not be raped. I also haven't been able to penetrate the illogic that ensues from people who have been brainwashed with some dogma. I made a conscious effort when I was a child to reject anything I'd ever been told and scientifically scrutinize everything. Later (ie just a few years ago) I found out that this is called rationalism or free-thinking. This was all fine as a first step. I needed to get my own brain around the problem first. Clearing my head and calculating. Looking for solutions. But that phase is now over. I had assumed that God/EC would fix everything now that I had rumbled him via science and atheism. But that is evidently not the case. I have to assume that this is just the next part of my challenge.

It is an interesting challenge for sure. I was essentially born into this world with a genetic desire to kill as many human rights violators as possible before I die. I have been trying to do that by leveraging into the existing security forces that are available. E.g. I didn't want to waste valuable taxpayer money on keeping thieves alive, who were a negative impact to society when released (above and beyond the dole), so just wanted them shot. This was of course before I had grasped the concept that these were NATURAL ANIMALS. To me they were just evil vermin who needed to be exterminated.

Getting my own brain around the problem was something that was under my control. But it was not something I was actually able to solve until the Iraq war, where nation-states interacted in alliances in the same way that individuals do. Once again this is a complicated concept that no-one else gets. Modelling human behaviour on the behaviour of nation-states. No-one else sees the fundamental opportunity that the Iraq war opened up. I have spoken to a Russian at length to try to penetrate the Russian mindset, to find out why they weren't joining us to liberate the world, now that they were free themselves, but although I could see there was a difference, I couldn't explain it. It was only the Iraq war, where I got to see Iraqis reacting to minimal displays of force, that I was finally able to put all the pieces together.

On IRC I mainly interact with young Filipino and Indonesian women. It's not a great cross-section of the world. But it's all I have ready access to. I theoretically have access to Sydney too, but I was unable to even advertise my website in the local newspapers. They rejected my ad. Unbelievable! My ad just said "Jesus has returned" and gave my web site (www.mutazilah.org). A long time ago I advertised my old website in a free magazine, and I didn't see any evidence of a single person visiting my site because of it!

I have also tried interacting with people on newsgroups, but the people there appear to believe in conspiracy theories about Bush only being interested in oil, and again, they have no regard for Iraqi women, that I make no progress. Bush has already done his bit. It's now up to me to take it from here. One thing I have been trying to get people on IRC to do is to send a letter to their government asking them to declare war on Iran. I get them to read my letter to John Howard saying the same thing. It's a slow process and I'm not having much success with that either. But I am getting a deeper understanding of my environment. And experiencing truly awful English too! I am very tolerant of poor English, but sometimes I just need to tell people that their English is too poor for us to have a conversation. I am certainly glad that they're the ones learning my language rather than me having to learn a myriad of foreign languages.

So, the campaign continues, slowly. Not much to report.

Here is what the military situation in Iraq looks like:

"Most Sunni Arab terrorists favor a secular dictatorship. This, however, is out of touch with reality. Kurds and Shia Arabs outnumber Sunni Arabs by nearly nine to one, have more guns, have American troops to back them up, and want revenge."

Just let this thing run its course. The fight is so one-sided it is not funny. Or if you can't bear to see American troops being killed any more, then at least provide air support. This is what caused South Vietnam to be lost to NVA ***tanks*** - lack of air support. I believe the tipping point was reached long ago. There are simply too many Iraqi government troops for them to lose at this stage of the game. But there's no need to tempt fate. Just let the one-sided battle continue until no-one has any doubt at all that the Sunni aren't going to be coming back with a new dictatorship. Iraqi troops are coming online at a rate of 2000 per week. It's in safe hands. The only question is how long can Sunni Arab terrorists continue to live in a fantasy world?

However, this article is quite disturbing. The new Secretary of Defense is a fruitloop. Look at this:

"the US is not winning the war in Iraq."

By what measure you moron? Territory controlled? Troops killed? Population behind the government (which they elected)? Number of new recruits to the security forces? Total number of security forces? What measure?

"He agreed with the panel that the situation was unacceptable and said he would introduce a change of tactics, if confirmed."

What change of tactics, moron? Anything you change is going to destroy the ability of the free world to protect itself. You have to keep to the current strategy of just enabling local patriots to stand up and make a difference. There's no chance of getting the rest of the world liberated (and at the same time making the world secure for the free world), unless you can come up with tactics that don't involve much more than providing air support (even if it makes the war take longer).

"Said the US should attack Iran only as a last resort and he would not support military action against Syria"

You fucking moron! 70 million Iranian slaves and you want to play patty-cake with their dictator? Ditto for Syria. Where do you people come from? What is it that makes you not care about slavery?

"Called for a broad bipartisan agreement on how to fight war on terror"

Yeah, right. And why not get Castro's approval for any action you take either. God forbid people who support dictatorships should get offended at dictatorships being toppled.

"The group's recommendations are widely expected to include a gradual phased withdrawal of US troops over the next 18 months."

Yeah, run away. The troops themselves are shitting in their pants and asking to be withdrawn from the fight, right? You actually asked them, right? You asked them if they want to be seen as a bunch of gutless pansies, right? It'll be great for morale, right? Secretary of Defense? Should be called Secretary of Unconditional Surrender. Where do you people come from?

"It is also thought to favour the idea of holding a regional conference on Iraq that would involve Syria and Iran"

Yeah, right. Why not involve Pol Pot while you're at it. I'm sure if we all just sit together and sing kumbiyah, everything will be sweet. That's what we need more of. Make love, not war.

Just go away. Please go away. Bush, what are you playing at? Surely you know better than to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? I hope this is all just an act of deception. I sure hope you're playing a tight game of cards, because it's starting to diverge from what I would do myself. Is this a tactic to ensure you get a Republican in 2008 so that you can actually start a blitzkrieg? It is very difficult when you are constrained by what 1% swing voters choose to do. I agree that the most logical thing to do at this point in history is to ensure the swing voters give you another lease of life. And I also agree that I do not know how to influence those swing voters myself. So I hope you are working on this problem, and just toying with the rest of the world. So long as it works out in the end, I don't mind. But if the Iranians stay slaves for a moment longer than necessary, I'm going to dob you in to your mother. Or blow up the UN, whatever.