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On Mother’s Day I read two news stories that really got me thinking about what drives our foreign policy.  Twin car bombs were detonated in Damascus killing fifty-five people.  This set off a worldwide media frenzy about how fragile the current truce is and how the UN better get on the ball.  On the same day, a bus was found in Mexico with the bodies of upwards of seventy people butchered, their heads, hands and feet cut off.  The gruesome discovery was just a blip in the news cycle. 

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I was eight years old when Watergate broke, and I literally grew up immersed in the belief that the government was always out to cover something up, and the press was the white knight out to expose these transgressions.  After seeing the press shenanigans for the last ten years, I think a readjustment is in order.  I’m not saying give the government a pass – the inoculation took, and I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them.  I’m saying it’s time to shine that same light on the press.  They aren’t white knights, out to protect the poor shlep who can’t do it himself.  They’re out to make money, no matter whom or what it harms.  Everything else is just bullshit posturing in the name of the first amendment.

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The Syrian regime, like Libya a year ago, continues its slow slog to utter demise.  Unlike Libya, though, we haven’t seen a bandwagon of countries jumping on board the Jihad to get rid of the region’s latest despot in trouble.  

Considering the death toll in Syria is now around 8,000, I find this peculiar, but not particularly troubling.  As I’ve stated in previous blogs, I thought the whole Libyan intervention was short-sighted to begin with because eliminating a bad regime is only half the solution.  Ensuring something better comes along is the other half, and apparently no democratic government on earth has the staying power to make that happen.   

Unfortunately, it’s a hell of a lot easier to topple a government than it is to ensure the replacement is better.  We should already know this;  just look at Iraq.  Or maybe Libya.  Nobody’s watching anymore, because there are no longer any cruise missiles, but the place is still a mess.  Militia torture on a grand scale and threats of secessionist fighting splitting the countryside.   

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This didn’t get much play in the press, but it’s really big news.  There appears to be a crack in the Axis of Evil love triangle between Iran, Syria, and Hamas.  Last Friday, at a grand mosque in Cairo, Egypt, Hamas denounced Assad and overtly supported the opposition forces against him.  I was a little stunned on a variety levels.  

Iran and Syria have funded Hamas from its creation.  They’re its sugar daddies, and Iran is definitely on the Assad bandwagon.  Hamas has now made a conscious effort to literally bite the hand that feeds it.    

Right off the bat, the pronouncement spits in the face of Iran’s statements that the troubles in Syria are caused by “western powers” fomenting and aiding the rebellion.  It’s going to be hard for Iran to continue saying this with a straight face when one of the primary terrorist groups against those same western powers supports the rebellion.    

Why, though?  Why would Hamas, which even has an office-in-exile in Damascus – well, at least it did – choose to denounce Assad with so much hanging in the balance?  

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Last Sunday on 60 Minutes the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, said if the U.S. gathered intelligence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon, it would be a red-line, and all options were on the table, including military.

On the surface, I find the statement a little ludicrous.  Even the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran is developing nuclear weapons technology. The administration’s official line is that they “aren’t convinced” Iran has decided to make a weapon, and that maybe they’re simply building the components for a nuclear device that someone can assemble later – should they choose.  Huh? That’s not a red-line?

They’re trying to make a bomb, period.  Given that, what will it really take to get them to quit?  In my mind, it’s simple: Regime change. 

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The Obama National Security Team announced a dramatic shift in strategy for our military capability yesterday, and after all the bluster about “reorganizing for 21^stcentury threats”, I couldn’t help but be struck by how everything said pointed back in time, not forward. 

The center-piece of the strategy is cutting down the size of our Army.  Making it “leaner and more agile”.  No longer will we be structured for “legacy tasks” of stability and support operations or nation-building.  Nope, it’s all about “responding quickly and effectively to a variety of contingencies.”  Sounds a lot like what I heard during the Clinton drawdowns because of the “Peace Dividend” after the wall fell.  We would “pull back from our forward deployed bases” overseas and use “power-projection platforms” (read Army bases) to deploy “Joint Forces” (read Army guys in Airforce aircraft) to any contingency.   

While this draw-down has caused a hue and cry about losing our ability to fight two mid-intensity conflicts simultaneously, a corner-stone of U.S. military strategy for as long as I can remember, that’s not what concerns me.  In reality, we haven’t had that capability since Reagan was in office.

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When we lost a drone to Iran the other day, I thought, “Wow.  Someone is in trouble.”  What I didn’t think was, “Wow.  It’s the end of the world.  Now Iran has our most top-secret information.”  I wouldn’t even blog about this, because it’s really a non-issue, but then a drone crashed in the Seychelles islands doing work over Somalia, and the next thing you hear is that OUR ENTIRE DRONE INFRASTRUCTURE IS IN DANGER.  Really?  Come on.  Drones are made for one thing:  Disposable intelligence.

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   It’s been five days since the horrific attacks in Oslo, Norway, and I’ve been amazed at the speculation and misinformation being reported on the tragedy.  After reading yet another article full of poor terrorism analysis, I decided to write a blog on the top five fallacies being reported by the media, either out of ignorance or because they want to advance a particular agenda.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide which.

   First, though, a caveat:  I wasn’t in Oslo on that day, have never met the killer, and am forced to use the very news reports I’m chastising as my source of information.  Thus, some of these fallacies may shift over time as more information becomes available.  For instance, first reports were that 16 people had been killed. This jumped to 93 within two days, then settled back to 68 after four days.

1.  Anders Behring Breivik is a European Timothy McVeigh – a Christian Terrorist.  This comparison is all over the news, and flat out wrong.  “Experts” take the circumstantial similarities, then make the logical fallacy that they’re the same.  Saying Breivik is like McVeigh because they both used a fertilizer bomb is the same as saying an obstetrician is like Charles Manson because they both use knives on pregnant women.  Terrorism is defined by the intent, not the method.  Or the religion, for that matter.