From the Times….

The scene was the Kremlin on August 12, when Sarkozy flew in to persuade Moscow to call off its invasion of Georgia.

Putin: “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls.”
Sarkozy: “Hang him?”
Putin: “Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”
Sarkozy “Yes but do you want to end up like Bush?”
Putin, after a long pause: “Ah, you have scored a point there.”

Putin will be lucky to end his political career as popular as Bush is as he is leaving office. But the fool thinks he can save Russia. That is more futile than trying to bring democracy to the Middle East.

From Danger Room….

Somali pirates have nabbed their biggest prize yet — a Saudi-owned supertanker, about as big as an aircraft carrier.* The ocean-going hijackers managed to pull off this latest assault, on the Sirius Star, despite a swarm of international warships now working to ward off such strikes.

“Our presence in the region is helping deter and disrupt criminal attacks off the Somali coast, but the situation with the Sirius Star clearly indicates the pirates’ ability to adapt their tactics and methods of attack,” U.S. Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, Commander, Combined Maritime Forces, said in a statement. “Typically, pirates attack within 200 miles of the shoreline and go after smaller prey,” the L.A. Times observes.

This is getting absurd. Don’t sit around telling me you are helping to deter pirate attacks when a bunch of them just nabbed a super tanker. Just a year ago that would have been unthinkable. They are not treating this seriously at all.

This week’s essay of the week is Foreign Aid Goes Military by William Easterly.

What is Peace?
To my simple mind, Peace is when I have no conceivable reason to kill you and you have no conceivable reason to kill me. To my mind, if I might want to kill you or you might want to kill me, but we are not currently doing so, that is a cease Click Here to continue reading.

From the Telegraph…

Mrs Ward and her late husband Charles had 15 children, 172 grandchildren, 36 great grandchildren and 18 great-great grandchildren.

From S4 at war….

When one of my vehicles was damaged I would drop it off at the motor pool. Then it would vanish into the support abyss. A few weeks-usually a few months-later I’d have a fixed vehicle or a new vehicle. Turns out one of two things happen. It gets evaluated for damage and if its below a certain threshold then my unit’s mechanics take a whack at it and fix it. If its over that threshold then it gets turned in to civilians who then take several months to fix/replace the vehicle. The excitement comes when you go to turn in the vehicle and the civilians use the subjective criteria to determine that your bent frame rail isn’t quite bent enough for them to take it, “Sorry, this doesn’t meet the criteria for us to fix.” You then spend as long as you can tolerate arguing with them about the degree of damage to a vehicle knowing full well that you don’t stand a chance of winning. The unspoken truth over here is that civilians run the show. Somehow, eventually(sometimes 6 months or more), the truck gets fixed or replaced but its a nightmare, a logistical nightmare really.

The problem with out sourcing is there is no real unity of command. Two separate parties to a contract have a lot different relationship then a bunch of people who are on the same team. No amount of rhetoric and no amount tweaking to a contract can change this fact. Cooperations that outsource core operations often run into problems for similar reasons.

From the Times…

Pirates caught redhanded by one of Her Majesty’s warships after trying to hijack a cargo ship off Somalia made the grave mistake of opening fire on two Royal Navy assault craft packed with commandos armed with machineguns and SA80 rifles.

In the ensuing gunfight, two Somali pirates in a Yemeni-registered fishing dhow were killed, and a third pirate, believed to be a Yemeni, suffered injuries and subsequently died. It was the first time the Royal Navy had been engaged in a fatal shoot-out on the high seas in living memory.

By the time the Royal Marines boarded the pirates’ vessel, the enemy had lost the will to fight and surrendered quietly. The Royal Navy described the boarding as “compliant”.

This is being talked up as a success. But when I look at the rubber boats that the Royal Marines assaulted the pirates in all I can think is that this is a catastrophe in the making.

The way I understand it, the Royal Marines are operating under rules of engagement that prevent them from opening fire until they are fired upon even when the enemy is obviously armed. In modern warfare, it is not a good sigh when the enemy gets off the first shot. A little better fire discipline on the part of the pirates and a couple of rocket propelled grenades and this would have turned out a lot different.

It only took a few mistakes and a couple of dead men to drive the US out of Somalia the first time. I wonder how strong a stomach the pirate fighters will have?

From the Telegraph…

Russia’s parliament announced it would rush through a constitutional amendment that could see Vladimir Putin return to the presidency within weeks.

Amid growing signs of panic in the Kremlin, the State Duma said it would meet on Friday to pass legislation that could allow Mr Putin to return to the Kremlin for 12 years.

Giving short shrift to the supposed inviolability of Russia’s 1993 constitution, all three readings of the bill will be compressed into a single sitting, rather than dragged out over several weeks or months as convention normally dictates.

Putin is a fool. If he was smart, he would let the others take the heat for Russia’s fall from grace and then ride in on his white horse. But by trying to get himself back in the hot seat now, he is going to find out how shallow his popularity really is.

When everyone loves you because you brought prosperity, you have to expect that everyone will hate you when trouble comes.

Remember the McCain–Feingold Act? Read this post from Belmont Club and ponder the strange way that justice works in this world.

Trying to keep money from talking in an election is like trying to ban guns. It only works on honest people. The goal of champaign finance laws should never have been about limiting the amount of money people could give. Instead, it should have been about creating transparency.

Instead of mandating artificial limits, McCain should have tried to fund independent real time audits. We don’t mandate a limit on how much money can be spent training an athlete to be the best. We just require that they pass a drug test.

But that is not what we got. Instead, McCain created a system that limited what honest people could do with their own money and at the same time provided little in the way of real transparency. President Bush signed that legislation into law in spite of professing to believe that parts of the law were unconstitutional.

It is tragic that the person who tried the hardest to play by the rules should suffer the most. But it also seems just that the man who helped create those rules should also suffer from them.