Another Year Shot to Hell

As 2015 draws to a close, it's hard to find anything redemptive about it.

The Iraqi army seems to be largely in control of the rubble that used to be Ramadi, indicating that the carpet bombing approach endorsed by almost all the Republican candidates for president is not too different from the approach being used by the Obama administration.  A couple of Sunni militias seem to have been involved in the "reconquest," but it remains to be seen whether the Abadi government will turn out to be any less sectarian than the Maliki government.

Tamir Rice's murderer has been cleared by a grand jury under the transparently biased guidance of County Prosecutor T. J. McGinty.  Anybody who's watched the intro to "Law and Order" knows that police and prosecutors are as close as two turds in a toilet.  Cases of potential police abuse should always be handled by outside prosecutors — preferably from outside the state.

The Canadians have started admitting the 25,000 Syrian refugees they plan to accept in the coming year.  Uh oh!  Looks like we'll need a border wall to the north as well as to the south!  (Tr*mp, of course, will make the Canadians pay for it.)

I was looking at my very first post to this blog, from January 2008, and found the following:

     Hillary Clinton says, "Just trust me. My experience as First
     Lady means I understand the change you want even better
     than you do, and I promise to deliver.  It'll be just like when
     Bill was President. You'll be back to drinking lattes and
     making paper fortunes in no time flat!"

     Uh huh. She'll just "change" things back to the way they were
     before Dubya and all your dreams will come true. But what if
     you're like me, and the Clinton Administration made you
     nostalgic for the liberalism of the Nixon  Administration?
     And by the way, just what's the chance of Hillary voluntarily
     giving up those new authoritarian powers Bush/Cheney
     usurped for the presidency? (I'd put it just shy of 0.03%.)

I didn't have much hope for "hope and change" either, and I was right.  Happy New Year.

Crisis in Education

No, this isn't about public schools, it's about another kind of education entirely — the training of foreign military and police forces by the US military and the CIA.  Even when compared to the success rate of your typical inner-city high school, it's a failure.

How many billions of dollars has the USofA spent "training" the Iraqi army and police forces who promptly abandoned their positions, leaving their US supplied weapons behind, when IS took over Ramadi?  How about the half billion or so spent recruiting, training, and arming Syrian "moderates" — 51 of them by best estimates, of whom roughly five still are in the field?  Then, just last week, American trained forces in Afghanistan abandoned Kirkuz to Taliban invaders, despite outnumbering their enemy and being better armed.  To add insult to injury, military spokespersons have persistently reported glowing success for the training programs, even as graduates turn tail and run away.

Some blame the inadequacy of Iraqi and Afghan officer corps, but it's probably just as well that the USofA can't take responsibility for officer training.  Our Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly called the US Army School of the Americas, has been training Latin American military leaders for many years.  Its graduates are best known for leading military coups against elected governments and some of the worst human rights abuses on record.

So why do we continue to throw good money after bad in the Middle East?  Because "training" seems like a reasonable substitute for boots on the ground.  Given that a reprise of the Bush invasions that got us into the mess in the first place would be understandably unpopular, and that just taking what remains of our marbles and going home is not an option, we seem to be trapped in what economists call the "sunk cost fallacy."  We'll continue to invest more and more into a losing proposition.