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October 23, 2006
Flags of Our Fathers: Historically Accurate?
David Germain of the Associated Press wrote a review of Flags of Our Fathers, the new Clint Eastwood-directed movie about the battle of Iwo Jima. Germain:
[...] Flags of Our Fathers also stands as a metaphor for the false security Americans felt before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S.-led war on terrorism that has followed.Meeting no opposition, U.S. troops landing on Iwo Jima's black beaches thought maybe the Japanese were all gone or had been killed by the naval bombardment preceding the invasion.
Military intelligence had underestimated the size of the Japanese forces, which were lurking in caves, tunnels and pillboxes to ambush the Marines as they moved inland.
The idea of a hidden enemy biding its time in underground bunkers, striking when the adversary's guard is down, resonates powerfully in a post-Sept. 11 world, when American troops continue to hunt elusive insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Emphasis mine. I'm no expert on the Pacific War, but I do know enough for this to ring some alarm bells. Everything I've ever read about the battle for Iwo indicates that, contrary to Germain's assertion, the Marines in the landing force came under very heavy fire as they crossed the beach. As Iwo veteran Richard Wheeler writes in his book Iwo, the Marines did not come under fire as they exited the landing craft and waded through the surf as did the Army forces assaulting Omaha beach on D-day. The Japanese commander Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi's intention was to let the Americans accumulate on the beachhead, and then firing would commence. According to Wheeler, the Marines were well-briefed and well aware of their peril as they crossed the beach; in any event the respite was very brief--the Japanese let loose with everything they had when the Marines were about 200 yards inland, and the beaches became a killing zone in hell.
I'm also doubtful of Germain's contention that US intelligence underestimated the size of the Japanese force. The island had been the subject of many photo reconnaissance missions by air and sea, including submarine; extensive physical models were constructed, and I can find no evidence that anyone underestimated the island's defenses. What the Americans did underestimate was the effectiveness of their pre-invasion bombardments--the same mistake that cost us so dearly on the Normandy beaches. And Germain's characterization of the 9/11 metaphor is simply weak: after the battles of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu and Saipan, no one who landed on the beaches or planned the operation had their "guard" down.
I wonder if Germain is confusing his battles. Since I haven't seen Flags of Our Fathers I can't speak to the context, but Germain's description of the tactics sounds a lot closer to the Japanese defense of Okinawa than Iwo Jima. On a much larger island the Japanese were able to build a formidable defensive line miles away from the beach, and the US forces landed, assembled and moved off the beaches with virtually no resistance only to later endure a more devastating struggle than even Iwo Jima provided.
I don't know if the inaccuracy lies with Germain's perception, my own reading of Germain's perception, the movie itself. Perhaps someone who has actually seen it can correct me if I'm wrong.
October 17, 2006
Update
It seems it's been an even two weeks since I last posted, and my guilt at leaving my dozen or so loyal readers without an update has finally caught up with me.
For the last couple of months I have resisted mightily the notion that I had blogger burnout--then the evidence could no longer be ignored. I suppose I could explain it away by mentioning outside life stuff, but dedicated bloggers find a way around that. Then a week ago, just about the time I had decided blogging had lost its luster for me, I realized it wasn't blogging itself I was sick of--it was politics in general.
I started this blog shortly after the crucible of the 2004 presidential election; although it seemed as though the midterms began to dominate the news with nary a respite, I figured that nothing could be worse from a stress point of view. But instead of stimulating me, the upcoming elections--combined with the recent Foley scandal, Ronnie Earle's success in removing Tom Delay from office, the ongoing borderline treasonous leaks of classified information and the administration's limp-wrested response, Condi Rice's metamorphosis into the second coming of Warren Christopher, the return of James Baker as a policy influence, the utterly tin-eared and wrongheaded White House approach to the immigration disaster, the insidious and relentless bias of the mainstream media, to name a few--have succeeded in beating down my interest in keeping up. And if I can't be bothered to keep up, there's certainly not going to be much blogging. Not only am I not blogging, my usual voracious perusing of my favorite political blogs has fallen off.
So I, like many others, will take a break. I may very well post from time to time, but it will be on a sporadic schedule. There are a ton of things that require my attention around the house just now anyway; hopefully getting those out of the way will coincide with a renewed interest.
And I do sincerely apologize to any regular readers for not posting sooner.
October 02, 2006
NEA Executive Director Has His Priorities Straight
Mike Antonucci reports that the education bureaucrats in Nebraska have a keen insight into the importance of their jobs:
Quote of the Week. "The struggle in which we are engaged is as vital to our future today as was the outcome of the Civil War to our nation in 1860. The goal of these locusts is to impose their will on state after state until they have completely demolished government as we know it. There is a time for every generation to rise to the call – when the very existence of our nation, our state, our values, our culture and our public schools are threatened with extinction." – Nebraska State Education Association Executive Director Jim Griess on Initiative 423. (October 2006 The NSEA Voice)Editor's Note: The Civil War was a violent armed struggle in which more than 600,000 Americans died, and was fought over questions like slavery vs. freedom.
Initiative 423 is a Nebraska ballot measure that would limit state government spending to previous years' amounts, with allowed increases for inflation and population growth.
Facts and figures aren't worth teaching, eh?
October 01, 2006
Reagan's Vision And Environmental Luddites
William Perry Pendley, writing over at Townhall.com, highlights on one hand yet another unsung accomplishment of the Reagan administration, and on the other a fine example of the malicious short sightedness of the luddite wing of the environmental movement.
Early last month, Chevron and its partners, including Devon Energy, released news that Chris Isidore of CNN reported “could be the biggest breakthrough in domestic oil supplies since the opening of the Alaska pipeline.” [...] Although Chevron had announced the Jack 2 discovery in September 2004, last month’s test confirmed suspicions as to its potential and caused Chevron to conclude that the Gulf of Mexico’s “lower tertiary region” may hold “3 billion to 15 billion barrels of oil.” U.S. reserves are estimated at less than 30 billion barrels of oil. No wonder the news made headlines!The tract is located on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), an area of 1 billion federally-owned acres that extends from the U.S. coastline, beyond waters owned by coastal states, and was leased by the Minerals Management Service (MMS) in July 1996. The true origins of that lease, however, go back another fifteen years to when Reagan Administration officials abandoned the old system of offering only those tracts thought by government bureaucrats to have energy potential and began “area-wide leasing.” Under the new system, those who would spend hundreds of millions (now billions) of dollars would be able to choose where they took their chances. Moreover, bureaucrats, with nothing to gain and nothing to lose, had a terrible track record of finding oil and gas.
Not surprisingly, environmentalists screamed bloody murder. Nonetheless, the Reagan Administration’s approach to OCS oil and gas leasing was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. Environmental groups were not to be denied, however; soon, their congressional allies adopted a moratorium to prevent energy leasing on portions of the OCS. Then, President George H.W. Bush, to validate his claim to being a “kinder and gentler” environmental leader, withdrew a majority of the OCS. President Clinton followed suit.
Today Congress is working on a repeal of the Bush/Clinton ban. Sadly, it is not because Congress recognizes that energy prices are high, that oil supplies are low, or that what we use comes from unstable or unfriendly countries. Instead, Congress fears Cuba’s plans to drill on the OCS and its affect on U.S. resources. Not surprisingly, environmental groups have launched a nationwide campaign to kill the proposal. Plus, Congress, responding to demands from environmental groups, refuses to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy exploration. Finally, late last week, a federal judge halted leasing of a part of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska thought to contain 2 billion barrels of oil; environmental groups said more migratory bird and calving caribou studies are needed. As another summer ends and winter approaches, the imaginative, innovative, and indefatigable folks of the oil patch, who accomplished what many thought impossible, have shown that Brookes and Simon were right. Meanwhile, Congress and environmental groups are casting their lot with Paul Harvey’s long ago pessimist.
That pessimist, as Pendley reports, said, "“When whale oil is gone the world will be plunged into darkness.” I'm quite sure that a return to whale oil would be quite unacceptable to the environmentalists--sometimes I think that they'd prefer that about 2/3rd of us would just die off. Then the remaining third could return to our proper roles of hunter/gatherers.
More seriously I wonder what, specifically, is the environmental concern with offshore drilling? The Exxon Valdez spill was probably the worst incident in recent memory, but that was a tanker, not a an off shore platform/pipeline system.
Maybe someone can enlighten me to the contrary, but this seems like pure reactionary nay saying. Drilling technology has improved by orders of magnitude since its inception, and with ever expanding technology it will continue to do so. Failure to exploit a find that might equal as much as one half of our current reserves would be almost criminally negligent.
