Update the 1st. You have to read the full resolution to really appreciate the evil at work in Russia and China’s veto, because it doesn’t exactly give Obama permission to set the war machine on Syria:

3. Condemns all violence, irrespective of where it comes from, and in this regard demands that all parties in Syria, including armed groups, immediately stop all violence or reprisals, including attacks against State institutions, in accordance with the League of Arab States’ initiative;

[...]

9. Calls upon the Syrian authorities, in the event of a resumption of the observer mission, to cooperate fully with the League of Arab States’ observer mission, in accordance with the League of Arabs States’ Protocol of 19 December 2011, including through granting full and unhindered access and freedom of movement to the observers, facilitating the entry of technical equipment necessary for the mission, guaranteeing the mission’s right to interview, freely or in private, any individual and guaranteeing also not to punish, harass, or retaliate against, any person who has cooperated with the mission;

Not exactly “send the Marines,” is it? What have China and Russia got against Syrians, I wonder?

Also: are Russian and Chinese embassies going to see unrest? Seven Syrian embassies were hit last night. The expat community is solidly against Assad, which is not surprising in the least.

Update the second: betcha Assad can torture more Syrians than Libyans can torture Libyans.

Update the third: oh look, non-intervention doesn’t deter people from fighting! Who could have predicted the breaking of the levees?

The commander of a force of rebel Syrian soldiers says they have no choice now but to fight to free the country of President Bashar Assad’s regime after Russia and China vetoed a U.N. resolution aimed at resolving the crisis.

Col. Riad al-Asaad, commander of the Free Syrian Army, tells The Associated Press that “there is no other road” except military action by his fighters to topple Assad.

And Putin seems to be making a domestic political gamble:

The price Russia will have to pay in international condemnation of its action clearly doesn’t seem excessive to the Russian leaders. In fact, the Kremlin even may hope to reap some dividends both at home and abroad by coming to Assad’s defense.

With Russia’s presidential election just a month away, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, seeking to return to the Kremlin, appears eager to stand up to the United States by protecting a longtime ally. Putin already has given his campaign a distinct anti-American flavor, accusing the U.S. of trying to thwart his bid to reclaim the presidency, so bickering with Washington over Syria would give him an extra chance to consolidate his support among nationalists.

There’s a reason why torture and disaster capitalism come from the same minds. It’s inherent in the authoritarian personality.

Operation Mushtarak began this weekend. The Obama military is going to war under the banner of a non-English noun.

Mushtarak is defined as “common,” “joint,” “combined,” “concurrent,” or “collective;” in the Arabic of international relations this word is used to form the phrase al-amn almshtarak (collective security). Mushtarak is the verbal noun of the eighth measure of the verb root “Sh-ra-ka,” an ancient Semitic and Nilo-Saharan word meaning to share, to participate, and to partner.

As I expected, this is where the lefty blogosphere prepares to lose its shit; but I have full faith and confidence in my branch of service. See the red blob? That’s the strategic objective of the current offensive.

There are going to be civilian casualties (yes, it’s inevitable). There are also going to be dead American heroes because all military operations in urban terrain produce casualties. Rockets will fly off course because, of course, their every component was built by the lowest bidder. Unit commanders will not hesitate to establish superiority of fire; the mission right now is to find and eliminate resistance. The object is actual shock and we  — not look-at-me-I’m-tough-on-terr’rsts shock and awe, but actual shock and awe that ends the fighting. This is not a fireworks display to announce the arrival of the American hegemony, but the quiet arrival of the Obama army.

When the battle is over and the Taliban are gone, you have established space for peace.

As we saw in the conquest of Baghdad, once that phase is over you can count on things to remain relatively quiet for about 24 hours. Team leaders will have to establish security. It is an interesting force-mix on the ground: infantry, armor…and lots of Military Police. Y’know, the guys who know how to keep a city secure and direct traffic?

Like, guys trained to do this sort of stuff?

Which…looks a lot like this?

Does any nation do it better? Yes, there are other nations who can do it quite well, and thankfully they are on our side. Indeed, it is a telling difference that America’s strongest allies are still with us in this fight, and doing good work.

The Taliban have shooters and they have weapons, and yes they will use the rules of engagement against us. THAT IS THE POINT; WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS. Some helpful background on the current rules of engagement, from AP via HuffPo, emphasis mine:

Under the current rules of engagement, troops retain the right to use lethal force in self defense, said U.S. Col. Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the international force.

The rules seek to put the troops in the “right frame of mind to exercise that right,” Shanks said. They require troops to ask a few fundamental questions:

• Even if someone has shot in my general direction, am I still in danger?

• Will I make more enemies than I’ll kill by destroying property, or harming innocent civilians?

• What are my other options to resolve this without escalating the violence?

Luckily, the troops also have an army of aid workers and a sort of government-in-waiting are at the starting line for the go-order. Huge amounts of cash will be spent where they have the most effect, which is in putting people to work and co-opting the local notables. In other words, it’s the perfect relief army, and it’s made up of every international organization under the sun. (Adding: except the UN, it turns out!)

The war will not be over, but the town will be in NATO hands and it will not implode.

From there, follow-on forces will reach further and the same process will continue. This is not understood well by certain editors (Psst: Arianna! Simon Tisdall is not a good source for an opinion on force sizes).

Some reports say the Taliban are regrouping in Uruzgan, north of Helmand. The question thus arises: is the allied offensive merely displacing the problem? And what about the war’s hinterlands: the Talib and al-Qaida bases in Waziristan – where Pakistan perpetually prevaricates – hostile Baluchistan, and the northern borders, where a spreading war threatens fragile Uzbek supply routes?

Helmand Province is a breadbasket. Afghanistan will need it to survive as a landlocked state with so little infrastructure and export power. In other words, if The Thing Called Afghanistan is to become an actual country instead of a basket case, it will need this province. The best look I’ve had at a map is at the Guardian, but it’s a Flash file with no embedding. From UnderstandingWar.org comes a fairly good one that I’ve marked up:

The red horseshoe around Marjah is the perimeter, supported by camps and fuel points throughout the operational zone. The black arrows represent actual strategic real estate. The blue circle is the region where the Taliban have fled: the same  sparsely-populated mountains where American firepower was unleashed in 2001. So much the better in the age of Predator drones.

Nor is the Taliban monolithic; “divide-and-conquer” is the order of the day. You’ll note that no one in this administration is giving speeches about the Taliban’s destruction. It’s a remarkably impersonal kind of war for a change.

Perhaps McChrystal can win over the Taliban himself ala George Washington and Doublehead and put a nice, yellow bow on a victory. Which leaves me wondering what a military victory under this president would look like on Fox News. Speaking of which, I predict fake outrage at naming the operation in Arabic in 5, 4, 3, 2… In fact, the better this offensive turns out, the more I expect United Nations hysteria to show up on Faux Noise. Get ready for the John Bolton rerun.

The only question: where are the internationalists among the left, and can the left adequately promote success?

And would someone in the vast liberal media conspiracy please get a political geographer on the air to explain how employment migration patterns will have men returning from those mountains for work in Spring? Number one job: create jobs.

War is a sort of unnatural disaster. Worse, it is a blunt instrument. Yet as a disaster, it is something to be managed by professionals with plenty of supplies and money to maintain the peace. Obama has no intention of being remembered for his wars, but if he is able to keep his promise and announce troop reductions in 2011 he may very well be remembered for redefining America’s military doctrine for the 21st Century.

UPDATE: According to the AP and CNN, Pakistan has captured a senior Taliban commander with knowledge of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. Again, I ask: what does an Obama victory look like on Faux Noise?

Polls showed that a majority of people initially supported having the discussion about national identity. But those numbers quickly reversed themselves as media commentators attacked the debates for stigmatizing foreigners and their children and as conservative politicians participating in the town hall meetings made what many considered to be racist or xenophobic comments. For example, a conservative mayor in eastern France argued that the country would be “eaten up” by immigrants who already constitute “10 million (people) we pay to do [expletive],” while a former right-wing minister warned that France risked disappearing “when there are as many minarets as cathedrals.” Secretary of State for Family Affairs Nadine Morano also provoked a scandal when she appeared to describe young French Arabs as being unpatriotic and shunning work.

In the most recent survey conducted by the polling firm Obea-Infraforce in late January, a mere 33% of people considered the debates to be constructive and 61% said the process had in no way defined what being French means. More than half of respondents also felt the entire idea was motivated by concerns by Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement party that it could suffer big losses in the March elections.

Sarkozy’s mistake: he didn’t have a Glenn Beck or a Faux Noise Network. Plus, French society doesn’t have that toxic religious angle.

Which reminds me: this ad, or a version of it, has been running for months. The US Navy has matched the “Army Of One” campaign with branding of its own. I wonder what John Paul Jones would make of “a global force for good:”

We start this week with President Obama, who met Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva amid the G-20 meetings in Washington. Obama is siding with the developing world against Europe, which has become very stimulus-shy. Paul Krugman points out why:

Europe’s economic and monetary integration has run too far ahead of its political institutions. The economies of Europe’s many nations are almost as tightly linked as the economies of America’s many states — and most of Europe shares a common currency. But unlike America, Europe doesn’t have the kind of continentwide institutions needed to deal with a continentwide crisis.

This is a major reason for the lack of fiscal action: there’s no government in a position to take responsibility for the European economy as a whole. What Europe has, instead, are national governments, each of which is reluctant to run up large debts to finance a stimulus that will convey many if not most of its benefits to voters in other countries.

In many ways, Obama is the first American president who ‘gets’ globalization. In a press conference today, he spoke of the need for global action to recover from global recession. Click here to see the video.

But speaking of global governance, yesterday’s edition of the New York Times featured an op-ed from Evo Morales, President of Bolivia:

In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the coca leaf in the same category with cocaine — thus promoting the false notion that the coca leaf is a narcotic — and ordered that “coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention.”…So for the past eight years, the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law.

[...]

The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C… Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population.

Morales explains that coca leaves contain alkaloids chemically similar to caffeine and nicotine. The alkaloids aren’t narcotic until they’ve been concentrated and processed. This points to one very important problem with international lawmaking: the ruling bodies are distant and disconnected from the societies their laws affect.

Last, we have this bizarre video from China. The alpaca-like animal is a “grass-mud horse,” which is a Chinese-language pun on “fuck your mother.” This silly video has spread like wildfire among the Chinese. The NYT explains:

Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.

Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”

h/t to Disgrasian for that one.