Brain Dead At Live Oak High

Yesterday was 5 May, Cinco de Mayo. The date does not commemorate Mexican independence. That comes on 16 September. Rather the Fifth of May is celebrated in one Mexican state and the US as a tribute to a meaningless military victory by the outnumbered Mexican army against the French invaders back in 1862.

For a number of reasons which center on the blooming of identity politics and its Siamese twin, the politics of victimization, the Fifth of May has loomed ever larger on the American folk horizon. Going back fifty or so years ago, Cinco de Mayo was no big deal at least in New Mexico, a state which, as the name makes explicit, is not without a certain Mexican heritage.

Times have changed. In California it has become such a major phenomenon that officials at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, a burg south of San Jose gave five male students a stark choice: take off your tee shirt with its American flag or go home. To their credit the guys chose the latter course.

The bigoted officials justified their violation of the First Amendment rights of the students by averring that the American flags might, by their mere existence and display, so outrage students of Mexican ancestry that violence was a real possibility. Not only did this action on the part of timorous school administrators shred the First Amendment, it constituted an insult to the students of Mexican descent by alleging these folk had, shall we say, poor impulse control and low anger management skills.

At the same time the school wallahs had no problem with the wearing of tee shirts and other clothing displaying the Mexican flag. Apparently they were convinced that nice, Anglo kids could see the flag of our "neighbor to the south" without flying into fist waving, butt kicking rages.

The senior personnel at Live Oak High are far from alone in their warped view of people, history, and human dynamics. They are, in fact, in words and in actions, quite obviously members in good standing of the American hoi oligoi. Card carrying True Believers of the Blame America First movement which has infested so much of American academia for the past forty years with results evident throughout the political, media, and educational structures of this country.

Before catering to and thus reinforcing the nasty and destructive nature of identity and victim status politics, the learned administrators of Live Oak High should get a grip on the history of the French adventure in colonialism in Mexico between 1861 and 1867. The same advice applies to the legion of "advocates" who noisily praise Mexico and Mexicans while damning the US and Americans.

In 1861 Napoleon III of France decided the time was ripe to overturn the Monroe Doctrine. To this end he used the default on Mexican bonds ordered by President Juarez. The French Foreign Legion and a few elements of the long out of practice French army were dispatched to collect the debts and raise the flag.

There was one reason and one reason only that Nappy the Third felt up to the task of carving a new French Empire in the Western Hemisphere. The US was preoccupied at the time in a fracas variously called the Civil War and the War Between the States. Absent this preoccupation there would have been no French invasion.

In the early months of the invasion the poorly organized and commanded French force of some 8,500 men had a meeting engagement with the roughly 4,000 man Mexican army detachment at Puebla. The Mexicans won--or, more accurately, the French lost--that May Fifth. Not that the loss mattered, the French flag did eventually fly over Mexico City as Nappy installed a distant relative, Maximilian, as emperor.

The reign of Emperor Maximilian I did not last long. The Big War Up North came to an end as all wars must. The French military attache watched the two day long Grand Pass in Review, first the smart looking and marching legions of Grant and then the shambling, hard bitten, hard marching and harder fighting warriors of Sherman's Army of the West. After Sherman's "Bummers" slouched by in the long, lazy ground eating gait of the experienced combat infantryman, the French attache advised his masters in Paris that the US not only had a first class army in Grant's troops, more it had a new breed of warrior who "could and would not be defeated."

With the military means readily available the US now reminded Nappy that the Monroe Doctrine still applied. Our SecState implied that we would enforce it with means of our chosing at a time of our choice.

Not yet the fool he would soon prove himself to be, Napoleon took the hint. The French withdrew. Maximilian having far more guts than good sense did not do likewise. As a result he died well (issuing the commands himself) before a Mexican firing squad.

Neither the officials of Live Oak High nor the assorted ever-so-concerned advocates may like to admit the truth. Neither may the hypernationalistic sort of Mexican. Yet it is unmistakable. Ejecting the French, ending their occupation of Mexico, was an accomplishment not of the Mexican army and patriots but rather the credible threat of American action in support of the Monroe Doctrine.

Not to put too sharp a point on the knife: They might be speaking French south of the Rio Grande were it not for the Monroe Doctrine and Sherman's Army of the West. Both of these were Hecho en Los Estados Unidos.

Of course it may be too much to expect that credit be given where credit is due in the final defeat of the French--a defeat which did not occur on 5 May 1862 but nearly four years later--and fly the American flag. After all the same people who sent the boys home for doing so also don't acknowledge another "inconvenient truth." When the US won the war with Mexico it took only very little territory and almost no Mexican citizens outside of California (and not very many there) despite the fact that the war was both provoked and started by the Mexicans.

Don't you just hate it when history didn't go the way your beliefs of today would like it to have gone?

A Brit Tells It Like It Is

Brig Mark Carleton-Smith, the British force commander in Afghanistan shows a firm grip on reality. He spoke a hard, blunt truth when he took the position that there is no way a military victory can be achieved in Afghanistan.

He accompanied that voyage to Realityland with the equally accurate observation that a political solution must be achieved as it has been in all successful counterinsurgent efforts.

This position has not made the Brigadier popular either with his own government or the Current Administration in Washington.

Popularity doesn't matter. The truth does. The weight of history is on the Brigadier's side. The best that can be hoped for from military counterinsurgent operations is, in the Geek's term, "not-losing."

There are very few counterinsurgent campaigns that have resulted in a clear military victory. The American War Between the States stands almost alone in this category although a strong argument can be made for the proposition that finally the Southern political will collapsed not under the weight of Grant's offensive(s) in northern Virginia but with the slash of Sherman's March to the Sea and its sequel, the March Up Country.

The US and its allies had no chance in hell of achieving a purely military victory in Afghanistan from the very start. Had the invading force focused on the task of destroying through death or capture the two target groups, al-Qaeda and the Taliban government of the country, a purely military success would have been possible. At least in principle.

The shift in focus from punitive to nation building assured that the likelihood of military victory slipped down the pole from slim to none. In a nation building, counterinsurgency effort, particularly when the announced political goal is the construction of a liberal, pluralistic, secular democracy in human terrain where all these are either unknown or unacceptable, there is no chance the military effort can achieve more than "not-losing."

Even not-losing has become problematical in recent months and years. The black turbans have grown in numbers and confidence even though their primary tactics still include suicide bombings directed against soft civilian targets. The sanctuary of the FATA coupled with years of Pakistani ineptitude exacerbated by pro-Islamist sentiments within the Pakistani population and critical governmental components such as Inter-Services Intelligence have given the Taliban and its ilk a mega-dose of growth hormone.

While Taliban capo Omar has rejected categorically Karzai's invitation to talks and has engaged in the standard issue bluster regarding the decline of the US, this is inherently meaningless. Taliban is not a monolith. Afghans are increasingly sick and tired of the war. This includes members of Taliban's leadership echelon.

No matter how much one might be comfortable with martyrdom, no matter how much meaning one might seek by one's death, the notion of a Predator having its cross hairs on your back gets tedious. Constant anxiety is a great eroder of morale.

Military pressure--the great and terrible hammer--must continue to be applied to the black turbans on both sides of the porous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Predators and Pakistani military operations, cross-border raids by US and NATO specialist forces and never ending combat patrols and ambushes must continue.

While applying the hammer(s) relentlessly and, when necessary, ruthlessly, the US and its allies must never forget the other absolutely essential tool of counterinsurgency--the wrench. Wrenches are great, they are used to turn things, like people's minds. The wrench kit includes, must include, power sharing. It must included negotiations. It must include the recognition and accommodation of people's needs. Even those which sit poorly with Americans such as Sharia.

This is what Brigadier Carleton-Smith was getting at. He has done what any knowledgeable and honest commander must do. He has recognised and admitted publicly that the most the military can do is prevent the other side from winning.

The military can assure that we do not lose.

The wrenches of politics, negotiation, compromise and other distasteful accommodations to the reality of the Afghan human terrain alone can assure victory. Even then it will be an Afghan victory. Not a NATO victory. And, most assuredly, not an American victory.

We the People as well as the current administration (and its successor) better take a firm grip on that. In Afghanistan as in Iraq any victory will be achieved only by the people who live there. The people who will have to keep on living there.