D-day: 70 years

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a repeat of a previous post from the 65th anniversary of D-day. I have added some new commentary in brackets to update.]

Today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy landings in WWII. Here’s a video with a few grainy clips of the Allies wading ashore:

I wonder how many people under forty, either here or in Europe, now know or care what happened there. The dog barks and the caravan moves on, and all that.

The world we now live in seems so vastly different, including the relationship between the US and western Europe. But make no mistake about it; if threatened in a way that finally gets their attention, Europeans would be counting on us again. And I have little doubt that our armed forces would be up to the task; the question is whether our government would [in the five years that have passed since I wrote this post, I have gotten to the point where I have little doubt that our government would not be up to the task, and I’m beginning to doubt whether our armed forces would, either, because of the way it’s been hamstrung under Obama].

But back to the D-day landings. About thirty-five years ago I visited Omaha Beach, site of the worst of the carnage. A quieter place than that beach and those huge cemeteries, with their lines of crosses set down as though with a ruler, you never did see.

omahacemetery.jpg

But the scene was quite different in 1944. The D-day invasion marked the beginning of the end for the Germans.

The weather was a huge factor, and the Allied commanders had to make the decision knowing that the forecast for the day was iffy and the window of opportunity small. For reasons of visibility and navigation (maximum amount of moonlight and deepest water), the invasion needed to occur during a time of full moon and spring tides, and all the invasion forces had already been assembled and were at the ready. To postpone would have been hugely expensive and frustrating, but to go ahead in bad weather would have been suicidal.

This is how bad the weather looked, how difficult the decision was, and how much we owe to the meteorologists, who:

…were challenged to accurately predict a highly unstable and severe weather pattern. As [Eisenhower] indicated in the message to Marshall, “The weather yesterday which was [the] original date selected was impossible all along the target coast.” Eisenhower therefore was forced to make his decision to proceed with a June 6 invasion in the predawn blackness of June 5, while horizontal sheets of rain and gale force winds shuddered through the tent camp.

The initially bad weather ended up being an advantage in other ways, because the Germans were not expecting the invasion to occur yet for that reason:

Some [German] troops stood down, and many senior officers were away for the weekend. General Erwin Rommel, for example, took a few days’ leave to celebrate his wife’s birthday, while dozens of division, regimental, and battalion commanders were away from their posts at war games.

In addition, there was Hitler’s personality and his reluctance to give autonomy to his military commanders:

Hitler reserved to himself the authority to move the divisions in OKW Reserve, or commit them to action. On 6 June, many Panzer division commanders were unable to move because Hitler had not given the necessary authorization, and his staff refused to wake him upon news of the invasion..

This didn’t mean that the beaches were not heavily fortified and manned, especially Omaha:

[The Germans] had large bunkers, sometimes intricate concrete ones containing machine guns and high caliber weapons. Their defense also integrated the cliffs and hills overlooking the beach. The defenses were all built and honed over a four year period.

The number of Allied casualties was enormous. Reading about it today makes one appreciate anew what these men faced, and how courageously they pressed on despite enormous difficulties. This is just a small sampler of what occurred on Omaha Beach at the outset; there was much more to come:

Despite these preparations, very little went according to plan. Ten landing craft were lost before they even reached the beach, swamped by the rough seas. Several other craft stayed afloat only because their passengers quickly bailed water with their helmets. Seasickness was also prevalent among the troops waiting offshore. On the 16th RCT front, the landing boats found themselves passing struggling men in life preservers, and on rafts, survivors of the DD tanks which had sunk. Navigation of the assault craft was made more difficult by the smoke and mist obscuring the landmarks they were to use in guiding themselves in, while a heavy current pushed them continually eastward.

As the boats approached within a few hundred yards of the shore, they came under increasingly heavy fire from automatic weapons and artillery. The force discovered only then the ineffectiveness of the pre-landing bombardment. Delayed by the weather, and attempting to avoid the landing craft as they ran in, the bombers had laid their ordnance too far inland, having no real effect on the coastal defenses.

These obstacles and unforeseen circumstances were extraordinarily costly in terms of the human sacrifice that occurred that day. Note that I use the word “obstacles and unforeseen circumstances” rather than “mistakes.” Today, if the same things had occurred (particularly if under the aegis of the Bush administration), they would be labeled unforgivable errors rather than the inevitable difficulties inherent in waging war, in which no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Another historical footnote is the following passage from Eisenhower’s message to the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. It’s another sign of how times have changed; the word “crusade” has become verboten.

In his pocket, Eisenhower also kept another statement, one to activate in case the invasion failed. It read: Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

The note was written in pencil on a simple piece of paper, and is housed in a special vault at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library & Museum in Abilene, Kansas, a bit of thought-provoking fodder for an alternate history that never occurred—fortunately for all of us.

And the hits keep coming

The New Neo Posted on by

There are so many revelations coming so fast in the Bergdahl story that I can’t keep up with them and still manage to do a few other things, such as visit with people and have dinner.

So I’m putting up this thread for readers to post links to breaking stories if they want to, and to discuss them. Right now I just read this one, a good example of how—despite my supposed lack of surprise about whatever outrage Obama commits—he still manages to outrage me:

The deal to free Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five Taliban detainees held by the U.S. military nixed a broader effort by the Department of Defense to include other U.S. citizens held by the Taliban and its allies, according to a top congressional aide.

The Department of Defense had a “broader goal” of including Caitlan Coleman of York , Pa., her baby who was born in captivity and her Canadian husband, Joshua Boyle, in a deal to free Bergdahl, said Joe Kasper, chief of staff to Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who sits on the House Armed Services Committee.

Among Americans held captive is Warren Weinstein, a contractor from Rockville, Md., who was abducted in 2011 in Pakistan and is detained by al-Qaeda militants aligned with the Taliban.

“The DoD was looking at this in the whole scope of things, to deal with these people as well,” Kasper told USA TODAY in an interview Thursday. “Instead of five for one, why not five for five?”

The following quote made me think, WTF?:

Marie Harf, a spokeswoman for the State Department, said Thursday the idea of negotiating for the release of hostages was never seriously discussed. “It is longstanding U.S. policy not to make concessions to hostage-takers,” Hard said.

So what did we just do for Bergdahl? Oh, I see, he wasn’t a hostage so they weren’t hostage-takers:

The exchange for Bergdahl was consistent with that policy because he was “a combatant detained in the course of an armed conflict,” and “not a hostage,” Harf said. “His status as a missing or captured soldier is distinct from someone who, for example, may be a civilian hostage.”

No, he wasn’t “a combatant detained in the course of an armed conflict.” He purposely walked off the base, after sending his stuff (like for example his uniform) home, and either intentionally or accidentally fell right into the arms of the waiting Taliban.

A Pentagon source says…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that Obama passed on the idea of a rescue operation for Bergdahl because he wanted to free the Taliban Five and close Guantanamo. A rescue would have made that a lot more difficult.

It seemed pretty clear from the start that this was Obama’s goal. I think it also was probably true that he didn’t like the PR risk of possible casualties during a rescue attempt, and that he underestimated the PR risks of releasing the Taliban.

I’ve also noticed for quite some time that the British papers frequently publish a lot more information about American stories that reflect poorly on Obama than American papers do, and that the information from the Brits often turns out to be correct.

The military must be incredibly angry at Obama right now. I expect more leaks of this nature in the future.

Not your father’s marijuana, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

In mid-April I wrote a post entitled “Not your father’s marijuana” about the problems involved in underestimating the strength of legal marijuana edibles. I guess Maureen Dowd doesn’t read neo-neocon, because she ran into that exact difficulty in Colorado when she decided to try a pot candy bar and found she’d bitten off a lot more than she could chew:

I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

An interesting thread about Dowd’s experience here.

The sophomoric administration

The New Neo Posted on by

Bizarre Marie Harf, State Department spokesperson, tackles the Bergdahl prisoner swap and its aftermath:

Some people commenting on the video at YouTube say the clip looks like a Saturday Night Live skit. But that doesn’t quite capture it for me. There’s something much more profoundly disturbing about her, as though she’s a bad actress miscast in a role for which she’s learned only some of the lines. The director has given her poor advice on how to play it, how to dress and wear her hair, and what voice quality would be suitable. To say that she lacks gravitas it to say the obvious. But she lacks even the appearance of gravitas; there’s no attempt at gravitas, except perhaps the glasses.

And this is real. This is one of the people leading our country—an eager and snarky high school student giving a school report, or trying to think on her feet as a member of the debating society.

Harf is quite young—she’s 32—and although that’s hardly the whole problem it’s some small part of it. The fault lies in an administration that would place her in such a position and expose her inadequacies. But those inadequacies are congruent with those of the administration itself, an administration too lacking in judgment to even recognize what’s missing here, or to even recognize that there is anything missing here. Or, if they do, they see it as a feature, not a bug.

I’ve been focusing on Harf’s manner and style, but of course a much larger problem is her message. That, too, is congruent with that of the administration and so many of its other spokespeople. Dude, that was five years ago [minute 1:41]! And who are you going to believe, those lying soldiers who knew him and saw him leave, or us?

How shocking is the Bergdahl prisoner swap?

The New Neo Posted on by

Nothing about the Bergdahl/Taliban affair should have surprised me—or, for that matter, you. Nothing.

Not Obama’s audacity, nor his disregard of prior bipartisan warnings in Congress or from the intelligence community, nor his aides’ attempts to discredit those from Bergdahl’s unit who are calling Bergdahl a deserter or worse, nor Obama’s refusal to offer any apologies whatsoever for his actions in this affair, nor his lies and broken promises, nor the fact that many Democrats are lining up to defend him like the good party hacks that they are.

But an intellectual reaction is one thing. Intellectually, I’m not surprised. But there’s still an emotional reaction—what Peter Wehner referred to as a visceral reaction—which is to be stunned, disgusted, outraged, and full of trepidation about both the long-term effects of this move and what Obama will be doing for a series of encores.

I’ve been wanting to know what the American electorate thinks of it all. Today I read that the results of a Fox News poll showed Americans evenly split on the subject, and that news surprised me, too, although it probably shouldn’t have.

But turning to the poll itself, I see that it was taken June 1-3, which would be the second, third, and fourth days after the story broke. If I understand these things correctly, that would mean that approximately a third of respondents were questioned June 1, and another third on the second. That makes the results of the poll as a whole nearly meaningless, since so much of importance in the story hadn’t come out at the beginning.

The poll is a curious document, as these things often are. It is one of those general things with tons of questions about many topics, and Bergdahl was hardly one of the main issues it probed. That was one of the very last questions asked, number 45, and its phrasing went like this: “Do you approve or disapprove of the United States releasing five Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the release of a U.S. soldier who was being held as a prisoner of war in Afghanistan?,” with 45% approving, 47% disapproving, and 8% uncertain. Note that Bergdahl’s name isn’t even mentioned.

So I don’t think we can conclude much about public opinion of the Bergdahl exchange from this poll; subsequent ones will tell the tale. The poll did measure a fairly high level of dissatisfaction with Obama about the VA scandal that had been dominating the news prior to the Bergdahl incident. Hmmm. And I found the response to this question interesting, too: “Do you think the Obama administration is more or less competent than the George W. Bush administration?” Only 42% said more competent and 48% less competent. Interesting, no? And yet Obama’s approval rate in the poll was 40%, which seems to represent the percentage of Americans who will not desert him no matter what.

[NOTE: One other thing really did surprise me, and that’s Krauthammer’s defense of Obama in the Bergdahl affair. To be sure, I don’t always agree with Krauthammer. But this is inexplicable.]

Not Obama’s PR guy

The New Neo Posted on by

A Taliban commander who has been in touch with Time magazine for years and according to them “has consistently supplied reliable information about Bergdahl’s captivity” has told them that there’s more to come:

It’s better to kidnap one person like Bergdahl than kidnapping hundreds of useless people…It has encouraged our people. Now everybody will work hard to capture such an important bird.

Well, Obama has to have some excuse for emptying out Gitmo, doesn’t he?

As I’ve written before, the enemy always was interested in capturing Americans, military members or otherwise, even before this. But I can’t think of a single reason why the Bergdahl exchange wouldn’t make them far more eager to do so during the rest of Obama’s term. “The enemy” doesn’t just refer to the Taliban in Afghanistan, either. I’m talking about jihadists around the world.

[NOTE: By the way, I’ve noticed that Time appears to be covering the Bergdahl prisoner exchange story with somewhat more honesty than it usually deals with news that reflects poorly on Obama. This particular incident seems to have stirred up some alarm there.]

Why England voted the way it did

The New Neo Posted on by

Even though the Bergdahl prisoner swap is dominating the news, there are other things happening in the world.

For example, remember the elections in Europe just a short while ago? Here’s an article that sheds more light on what happened in the UK and why people voted as they did:

The minute you gave drastically poor countries free entry to the UK, the inevitable happened. Since 1997, four million people have come to Britain ”“ the equivalent of a city the size of Birmingham ”“ yet there has been no concomitant expansion of roads, schools or hospitals. It explains why it is now easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to buy a coffee in England from a native English speaker.

It also explains why regions such as my own East Anglia voted Ukip so overwhelmingly last week. If places such as Peterborough turned purple with apoplexy, it is not because its residents are necessarily racist or because they saw in Nigel Farage the finest statesman since Winston Churchill. It is more likely to be because women in labour are often turned away by one of the region’s major maternity units, which has several times actually locked its doors, so difficult does it find a soaring, immigrant-driven birth rate. A midwife friend who was seconded there described conditions as “third-world”.

Until recently, it would have been “racist” to point this out. Four years ago in Rochdale, when Gillian Duffy challenged Gordon Brown on immigration, the affronted prime minister shied away and muttered darkly about that “bigoted woman”. It is quite clear now who was the bigot. Brown was typical of a political class that became shamefully biased against its own people. In thrall to a post-war European ideal, they had scant interest in the difficulties and discomfort it caused ordinary people on the ground. If anyone complained, simply shut them up by hissing “bigot” or “racist”.

A plasterer out of work because Poles living five to a room undercut him? Little Englander!

A mother-of-three hit by the child-benefit cuts, which come into force next week, and expressing disbelief that the UK is still sending £30 million in benefits to the kids of EU workers, who aren’t even living here? Sorry, nothing we can do about it, madam. It’s all for the greater European good, you know. Do be quiet.

A teacher hounded from a school by Islamist hardliners who want girls and boys segregated and treated in a way that is anathema to British values? Racist!

Disgusted at countless male, Muslim grooming gangs treating vulnerable white girls like “chewing gum thrown in the street”? Racist!

Fed up with being required to show cultural sensitivity to customs we find morally repugnant, and getting no cultural sensitivity in return? Racist!

I hope this isn’t our future. It’s perilously close to being our present. At least we don’t have membership in the EU to contend with.

The Bergdahl scandal and public opinion

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a growing sense that, at least for now, the Bergdahl prisoner exchange and its fallout has the left spooked.

Maybe Obama will weasel out of this mess, too, either by way of the same tricks that have extricated him from so-called “scandals” such as Benghazi, or by distracting us in some new and horrific way. Or maybe there will be a hurricane somewhere that can provide a serendipitous photo-op to impress those Americans who have political attention-deficit disorder.

But at the moment this story, probably more than any other story of Obama’s presidency, is one that makes him look bad. It seems to simultaneously expose his disregard for the safety of America and Americans, his sympathy for fundamentalist Islamist governments, his failure to do his homework, his drive towards greater executive power, his disregard for Congress (including some members of both parties) and the law itself, his mendacity, and the stupidity and collaboration of his advisors in all of the above.

I may have left something out, but you get the idea.

The military men and women who served with Bergdahl and on whom Obama counted to keep their mouths shut are (unlike the diplomats in Benghazi) speaking up and telling what they know. The NY Times and Time and other organs that normally can be counted on to carry Obama’s water are spilling it all over the place. That leaves lonely folk such as TNR’s Brian Beutler and Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce doing their level best to convince the world that it’s only vile Republicans complaining about the swap, and that their carping is motivated by petty politics and a cold attitude towards the suffering of prisoners of war.

But it’s not taking too well so far, not as well as during previous dustups. Obama and his advisors may be surprised at that because they may not have understood the feelings this story would tap into. Peter Wehner understands that this story has had a visceral effect, shocking even some people who didn’t think themselves shockable anymore about anything Obama might do:

My response to what has occurred is not just intellectual but visceral. I consider what occurred, when everything is taken into account, to be substantively indefensible and morally dishonorable. The president, in my estimation, has rendered a great service to our enemies, and they know it. (Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, hailed the release of the top five Taliban commanders from Guantanamo as a “great victory” for the mujahideen of Afghanistan.) The president’s decision may well endanger American lives down the road. And his administration has elevated an apparent deserter”“one whose actions were reported on in the past (see this 2012 Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings) and who is responsible for the death of fellow soldiers who tried to rescue him”“into a hero.

This strikes me as morally grotesque…

In this case, it’s the president and I who occupy different worlds, including different moral worlds.

This story, unlike some of the others, is neither hard to understand nor difficult to follow. It seems awful on its face, and many of the American people are reacting on that same visceral level. For how long they will react that way, however, and to what effect, I do not know.

As evidence of the revulsion towards what Obama has done and towards Bergdahl’s actions, I present Facebook’s “Bring Bowe Bergdahl Back” page and its fellows:

A number of individuals who initially supported the page’s mission are now having second thoughts as troubling revelations continue to emerge…

The page, which is nearly five years old, has about 34,500 likes as of this writing. Other pages, including one called ”˜Bowe Bergdahl is a Traitor,’ have already attracted nearly as much attention in just the past 48 hours.

Administrators of that page are sharing anonymous comments by self-identified soldiers who offer a glimpse into their knowledge of Bergdahl and the circumstances of his ostensible capture by the Taliban.

Comments on the page show an overwhelming shift in public sentiment regarding the prisoner.

When Chris Matthews and Diane Feinstein are among the critics, Obama knows he’s got a problem. Jon Stewart, an Obama supporter who was already angry at the Obama administration over the VA hospital scandal, is at least as unhappy about the prisoner exchange, too.

All of this indicates that there’s something about this one that—at least temporarily—is achieving a level of disgust with Obama that doesn’t seem to have been reached previously. But the only obvious remedy, impeachment, seems to still be politically unavailable. I repeat a question that’s been asked before: what would Obama have to due to trigger a real possibility of impeachment in the House leading to actual conviction in the Senate?

[NOTE: Here’s a good summary of the Bergdahl scandal so far.]

The Bergdahl memes emerge

The New Neo Posted on by

It became clear as soon as the background information about Bergdahl began coming out that the left would say the right was swiftboating Bergdahl. After all, as I wrote previously here, “swiftboating”:

…has become a synonym for “a political low blow.” And of course, in the eyes of the MSM, it tends to be the province of those nefarious Republicans.

Forget about whether the charges are actually true or not; that’s a minor quibble, hardly worthy of consideration.

In the case of those who criticize Bergdahl for being a deserter or worse, not only are their charges against Bergdahl almost certainly accurate, but the accusers (like Kerry’s, the original Swift Vets) are veterans who did serve honorably in the military, unlike Bergdahl. So the parallel is almost irresistible to the left.

What’s more, it’s one of the few defenses available to them for Obama’s actions in freeing Bergdahl in exchange for the Taliban Five. The Bergdahl affair has been distinguished for being so egregiously awful—so nakedly political, so dangerous, so full of knave/fool possibilities and lies—that even the left is hard-pressed to find a silver lining there.

I’ll make another prediction. If those freed Taliban leaders end up doing something vile, whether it be limited to Afghanistan or whether the harm is directed more pointedly at Americans somewhere else, the people who tie it to Obama’s decision to swap the Taliban for Bergdahl will be accused of using the Willie Horton ploy against Obama.

[ADDENDUM: Apparently I’m not the only one who has thought about the Horton meme in connection with the Bergdahl prisoner exchange: James Taranto has written about it as well.]