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WAR IN THE MODERN WORLD

Welcome to the website!

Most of the papers here are from my studies at King's College London in an online "programme" for mid-career British Army officers called War in the Modern World. About half the students were indeed British Army, including a captain who deployed to Afghanistan midway through the four years. (Alas, upon his return he dropped out of the course, left the army, and began to study law instead.) The rest of us were from other militaries or civilian life, from a Danish pilot to an assistant to the prime minister of Singapore. I learned a great deal, and these web pages are to share it more broadly.

But first, my thoughts over the past month:

July 9: No Israelis need apply

My mother and father emigrated to the US in 1927, when it was rare to see the zenophobic line in help-wanted ads: "No Irish need apply." But a generation earlier, the warning was common in American newspapers. After all, an Irishman was apt to be a Catholic, and nobody wanted to work beside one of those!

So it is weird to read that the "Israeli Settlements (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill" passed the Irish parliament on Tuesday. (Ireland had earlier recognized a Palestinian state, though there is no such thing, which is a delightfully Irish thing for a parliament to do.) The law forbids the importation from Israel of goods originating outside the country's 1967 borders.

In the days of my youth, I regarded Ireland and Israel as soulmates, both victims of neighbors who wanted them gone because their religion was unacceptable. (Indeed, 200 of the notorious "Black and Tan" mercenaries, recruited in Britain to stamp out Irish rebels after the First World War, did similar duty in the Palestine Mandate after Ireland became more or less independent in 1921.) Today, Ireland is as "anti-Zionist" as our student-activists at MIT or Columbia -- or Yale, for that matter, where my own granddaughter graduated a few years ago with a keffiyeh on her shoulders.

July 7: No longer her kind of man

It was only a few weeks ago that Elizabeth Warren said of that Totenkopf-tattooed Maine scuzzball that he was "My kind of man." What a change a rape allegation makes! (Worse, this victim is herself a Democrat, so it's mandatory to believe her.) Graham Platner, the make-believe oyster farmer who went to exclusive and expensive prep schools, claims that he's neither a Nazi nor a commie, though until he was 30 he claimed first to be one of those things and then to be the other, while evincing little understanding of either. Apparently Maine Democrats have until Monday to take his name off the ballot and replace it with, hmm, Janet Mills? She's a handsome lady and the current and popular governor, who was running for Senate until Mr Platner emerged from nowhere, to be instantly celebrated by the New Yorker, the NY Times, and the other usual suspects. (Only then did he think to have the Totenkopf obscured.)

Mr Platner is running against Susan Collins, whose resume is as solid as his is empty. She recently cast her 10,000th vote, having never missed one since she was elected to the US Senate in 1996 and re-elected four times since, even as Maine went from mostly Red to mostly Blue. (Both Representatives are Democrats, and the junior Senator is an "independent" who caucuses with the donkeys.)

July 4: What were they doing 249 years ago?

From the Pennsylvania Evening Post, July 5, 1777: "Yesterday the 4th of July, being the anniversary of the Independence of the United States of America, was celebrated in this city with demonstrations of joy and festivity. About noon all the armed ships and gallies in the river were drawn up before the city, dressed in the gayest manner, with the colors of the United States and streamers displayed. At one o’clock, the yards being properly manned, they began the celebration of the day by a discharge of thirteen cannon from each of the ships, and one from each of the thirteen gallies, in honor of the thriteen United States. The evening was closed with the ringing of bells, and at night there was a grand exhibition of fireworks )which began and concluded with thirteen rockets on the Commons, and the city was beautifully illuminated.”

So it began on the first anniversary. Can we do any less today?

(A tip of the virtual hat to Michael McKendry)

July 1: What were they up to in Philadelphia, 250 years ago?

Semiquincentennial -- what an awful word! But I'm an old guy, and in the 1940s we had to study Latin before venturing into modern stuff ("Para Español, oprima dos"), so I can break it down: semi stands for half, quin for five, and centennial for a hundredth, so they add up to half of 500, for the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence from George III and his tyranical British government

But do you know what? Only two members of the Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia 250 years ago actually signed that Declaration on the Fourth of July. One of them, of course, was John Hancock.

This is only one of the factoids I'm learning from a lecture series by (of all people) a British immigrant named Richard Bell, professor of history at the University of Maryland. Appopriately, he earned his BA at Cambridge and his PhD at Harvard, and though born an Englishmnan he's now a US citizen. He's a splendid lecturer, and for $25 or a 99-cent subscription you can sign up at The Great Courses online. It might bring tears to your eyes, as it did to mine.

June 28: Zelensky holds a winning hand

"You don't have any cards!" shouted Messrs Trump and Vance in their Oval Office roasting of the Ukrainian president last year. Today, Mr Zelensky's war seems to be going a lot better than ours against Iran. Ukraine's drones and ballistic missiles are hammering Moscow, closing Russian airports, burning Russian oilfields, and making Crimea unsafe for Russian soldiers and the tourists who used to flock there. Since February 2022, Russia has lost more troops trying to conquer its smaller neighbor than the US did in fighting Japan, Germany, and Italy in the Second World War. By Ukraine's count, 1.4 million of Putin's soldiers have been killed, wounded, or captured in Ukraine. (Not all were Russians, to be sure, and apparently some North Korean prisoners are asking to be repatriated ... to South Korea!)

Well played, President Zelensky!

June 24: a Russian soldier who loves America

For me, the best thing to come out of Mr Trump's strange bellum interuptum in the Near East was that it led me to the Commentary website and its almost-daily essays by Seth Mandel. There's a near-monthly magazine as well, likewise worth reading. I want especially to point you to Irina Velitskaya, who grew up in Russia but emigrated to the US to become a citizen, a UC Berkeley student, a Substack writer, and a contributor to Commentary, most recently A Hierarchy of Hells: What a dying alcoholic taught me about Russia, Gaza, and Iran.

Irina grew up in Sinegorskiy, not far from the Ukrainian frontier. She was a "little shrimp of a girl with acne and chronic cold sores," much bullied by her classmates with the exception of the lad she calls Stephan, who looked after her. Stephan was "a handsome blond boy with classic Slavic features [who] excelled at school sports, though not at his studies." From the age of 12, he was also an alcoholic. Inevitably, he wound up fighting in Ukraine, with little or no combat training. (Ukrainians refer to these raw Russian recruits as "single-use soldiers." The home-country term is ispolzovannyi gondon, or "used condoms.")

Stephan is now hospitalized in Chechnya with a smashed knee, hepatitis C, and other ailments, where Irina was able to reach him by phone. "I wish I could move to America," he told her. "It's a great nation -- I love America! Please promise me you will never come back here."

June 19: The dealer meets the negotiator

Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, earned his PhD in government from the University of Kent, one of a dozen or so universities that Britain established or upgraded in the 1960s to accommodate its postwar baby boom. He later wrote a book, whose title is translated as The Power of Negotiation, in which he explained:

"The main principle of bargaining is ... repetition, repetition, and repetition, combined with steadfastness and persistence. Insisting on positions and repeating demands is a necessity that must be done each time with different rhetoric and reasoning." (Italics added.)

On the other hand, Donald Trump famously wrote a book titled The Art of the Deal, and we now see what happens when the dealer meets the negotiator: he gets taken to the cleaners. The president likes to say that Barack Obama's 2015 agreement with Iran was "probably the worst deal we've ever done as a country." That may have been true at the time, but no longer. Mr Obama paid $1.5 billion for a nuclear agreement that meant nothing, but Mr Trump has multiplied the payoff by many times just to open the Strait of Hormuz and engage in 60 more days of repetition, repetition, and repetition.

Oh, and the president is required to lean on Prime Minister Netanyahu to let Hezbollah send rockets into Israel's towns without responding to them.

Well, congratulations, Mr Trump. The 2015 JCPOA has been reduced to second-worst deal in American history. And you're not done yet!

June 11: Trump is catching on

The president has decided to give Iran some more of his "love taps" after deciding that the mullahs were "playing us for suckers." Well, speak for yourself, Mr Trump! They certainly weren't fooling me, nor, I suspect, the vast majority of Americans. You were the only sucker in that game.

Now you should apply your newfound wisdom to the other American enemy who's been playing you along: Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. And you needn't risk any American lives in the process. Ukrainian soldiers are applying the love taps on our behalf!

June 10: Graham Platner is a creep

He's a liar. He's brutal to women, sufficient to leave bruises though not yet any broken bones. He's married but regularly sexts to his various girlfriends. He opened an account on the social-media platform Kik, beloved of teenage girls and widely known as the "predator's paradise," and posted a photo of himself naked except for his groin (behind a towel) and his famous Totenkopf tattoo (hidden by the camera he's holding). At least until he turned 30, he both boasted of his Nazi body art and of being a Communist. He claims to be a self-employed oysterman, though oysters grow without human intervention, and his only customer is his mother's restaurant.

He's one of those veterans (US Marines, Maryland National Guard, and military contractor) familiar to anyone who served a hitch as volunteer or draftee: the weirdo who joins up for a chance to kill people without any legal consequence. In short, yes, Graham Platner is a creep, and he has a $12 million war chest with which to defeat Susan Collins, one of the hardest-working people in the US Senate and one of its few remaining moderates, along with Alaska's Lisa Murkowski and Pennsylvania's John Fetterman.

I'm sending her a check today, and I hope you'll do likewise: Collins for Senator, PO Box 65, Westbrook ME 04098 or susancollins.com/mail online. Thank you!