Alternator Swapout

A long running project (about 6 months since I diagnosed the problem) has come to an end. I finally installed the replacement alternator in the 1987 Range Rover. The idiot light is off and the Rover is running. Of course it remains to be seen whether any other old parts get jealous and demand expensive repairs too... I used a remanufactured Bosch 90 amp alternator rather than the OEM for a lot less money. I would have gone with the 120 amp mentioned below but the 90 amp had the virtue of being available and I don't really have that much in the way of excess electrical demand on the Rover.

This link was invaluable to the process

Modern Terrorism and its Origins

Here I go, flying in the face of this week’s reading assignment… The author seemed dismissive of a western concern over the spread of communism, framing it as a fear of democracies being undermined. Not only does he decline to provide examples though one assumes he refers to the United States and perhaps West Germany and other European states on the edge of the Iron Curtain, he makes the statement in the face of the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam in which neither of those states was recognizably democratic. To his credit he does recognize that communism proved far more effective in killing vast swathes of its own populations than overthrowing Cold War democracies. Insofar as McCarthy and Palmer have been remembered as extremist in their “Red Scare” tactics, post-USSR information form Soviet archives has rather moderated the accuracy of that charge. Interesting he also didn’t note that Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President McKinley in 1901, was an avowed anarchist and much approved by Emma Goldman.

“In memory of the countless, men, women and children of all creeds or nations or races who fell victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.” – dedication of Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism

From the French Revolution to the virulent strains of Marxism and Anarchism to the current Islamist terrorism there is a unifying trait which both inspires the movement and permits it to excuse even the most violent excesses. The trait is belief that a discoverable set of laws similar to those of Newtonian Mechanics govern society and provide both a key to understanding and directing the development of society. Marx believed capitalism was merely a necessary stage in the inevitable transition to an egalitarian, socialist paradise. French idealists, promising Liberty, Equality and Fraternity drank heavily from the same utopian well of idealism, leading John Adams, a skeptic along with Burke regarding the French Revolution, to remark

" I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity as you do, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine."

And despite Salam Al-Marayati, notable for his 1996 comparison of Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech with the ideal of Jihad in Islam, protesting to the contrary, it is the same holistic, over-arching fantasy ideology deriving from fundamentalist Islam which drives those like Bin Laden and Sayyid Qutb.

Ah you say, “But aren’t “Democracy” (as distinct from the radical “storm the Bastille” egalitarianism of the French Revolution) or “Capitalism” prone to the same faults?” To which I reply, “No, by their nature, they are inclined to what Popper describes as piecemeal engineering, meaning they are not driven by a central plan or absolute ideal deliberately guiding all aspects of social development, whereas the other ideologies I cited are indeed consumed with the idea of thoroughly and holistically re-engineering of society, be it to a restored Caliphate or Worker’s Paradise.” F.A. Hayek and Karl Popper both derided as Scientism (defined as a “slavish imitation of the language and method of science”) the attempts from the Enlightenment to the modern day, particularly of Marxism, to apply the methods of a “natural” science like physics to a “social” science like history. The radical Islamist ideology needs little more explanation than the rambling missives of Al Qaeda lamenting the lost glories of an Islamic empire which vanished inarguably in 1919 with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.

The media perception of Iraq as Vietnam

I'll wade right into this one... What follows is unavoidably an oversimplification and shouldn't be understood as applying in detail to every member of the press corps but as an attempt to cover the most salient points. Call it a straw man if you will, but please propose a more accurate way, viable within the timeframe of this class, to frame the argument :-P

I believe the frequency of Vietnam analogies, which have appeared in the media since October of 2001 up until the Taliban were defeated and then resumed perhaps two weeks into the invasion of Iraq, is a good indicator of desire for a Tet moment among a wide swathe of the MSM (mainstream media). The use of the Iraq/Vietnam analogy communicates more than a perceived similarity between conflicts in far-off lands. Of course that is what makes analogy so effective; explaining one thing by reference to another, conveying an extensive set of unspoken connotations and opinions. Superficially, Vietnam and Iraq might well look similar; an ideologically driven insurgency, enemy logistics trains operating from across the border of neighboring nations, and accusations of abuse and war crimes. In this case however, the analogy does not survive any more detailed comparison of those three points of similarity.

In Vietnam, the VC were only a small part of the enemy forces which were primarily the North Vietnamese Army, not insurgents despite the conter-culture allure of the image of black pajama clad rebels defeating the mighty United States. Similar to what happened to the French in May 1954, a perception of futility after a particular battle had much to do with the winding down of US involvement rather than actual weakness of military position. Further distinguishing the two, is the fact that the majority of "insurgents" in Iraq are foreigners, not Iraqis, and their most visible leader is Jordanian, Al Zarqawi whereas in Vietnam, while there were Chinese advisors, the Vietnamese themselves comprised the overwhelming majority of enemy forces.

Supplies to the NVA from China were particularly plentiful, especially after 1953 with the end of the Korean War which allowed the Chinese to divert more resources to fighting the French in Vietnam, culminating in the battle at Dien Bien Phu (See Bernard Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place) and setting the stage for the gradual escalation of the US involvement, whereas the insurgents in Iraq are backed by no formal military and are compelled to subsist upon whatever they may steal and the largesse of Syria etc, hardly comparable to the supply train which kept General Giap's troops equipped.

Since late 2001, Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib have achieved mythic proportions in some quarters. In 1971, the content of John Kerry's Winter Soldier testimony was similarly regarded as revealing the ugly, abusive underside of our military's operations, with Peter Arnett's famous quote "We had to destroy the village in order to save it" as a pithy summarization of US conduct. Two major distinctions dispel this perceived similiarity. The accusations of the VVAW and Winter Soldier testimony have since been revealed as a mixture of hearsay, propaganda, exaggeration, and in some cases outright lies by individuals who either never served in Vietnam or never served at all. And despite much searching for its source, Arnett's quote remains unattributed and Arnett himself was disgraced for appearing in what was effectively a propaganda interview on Iraqi state TV at the outset of the current Iraq war. From the recent kerfuffle over handling of the Koran at Gitmo to the vile behavior of MPs at Abu Ghraib, the investigations of abuse originated within and were pursued by the military itself, as much as Seymour Hersh and other media figures would like the credit for "breaking the story". Compounded by the irony that most "abuse" of Korans was apparently carried out by Gitmo detainees themselves, distorted media presentation more than the substance of the accusations themselves provides the most similarity. In short, the two are similar, but not in the way they are frequently portrayed as comparable.

Use of the Vietnam/Iraq analogy ends up saying more about the speaker than the subject. Michael Lind's Vietnam: The Necessary War offers an excellent analysis of Vietnam, neither beholden to ideals of the left or the right which further undermines the comparison between Iraq and Vietnam. As for the matter of revolutions and what distinguishes them from terrorism etc, that will have to wait until tomorrow. I'm done with the soap box for today :-P

Nothing to say yet

Eventually I plan to post something meaningful. Just not today. Today went on far too long and I don't have two active brain cells left after work this week.

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