Braxton Bragg still sucks

I just finished Failure in the Saddle: Nathan Bedford Forrest, Joseph Wheeler, and the Confederate Cavalry in the Chickamauga Campaign, by David A. Powell.  Powell, a nationally-known expert on the Chickamauga Campaign, also wrote The Maps of Chickamauga.

To make a short story long, the Chickamauga Campaign of the Civil War involved the Union Army of the Cumberland under William Rosecrans maneuvering the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Braxton Bragg out of the critical transportation center of Chattanooga, without fighting a major battle and basically without firing a shot.  The loss of Chattanooga was a major defeat for the Confederacy, which most Confederate officers as well as most historians have blamed on the incompetence and temperament of Bragg. 

Rosecrans pursued the retreating Confederates into northern Georgia, but Bragg managed a counterattack near West Chickamauga Creek.  Because of a(n un)timely mistake in Union communications that opened a major gap in the Union line just as an attack column commanded by James Longstreet, recently arrived from the Army of Northern Virginia, launched an attack in that very spot, the Union suffered a major defeat.  The defeat, however, was a only tactical, not strategic, which most Confederate officers as well as most historians have blamed, again, on the incompetence and temperament of Bragg.
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Still more additions to the library

The Maps of Chickamauga, by David A. Powell and David A. Friedrichs
The Maps of the First Bull Run and The Maps of Gettysburg, both by Bradley M. Gottfried

Chinese hoisted by their own petard?

It's always frustrating to me to see how the US is vilified for supporting "tyrants" across the globe while countries such as Russia and China get a free pass for their support of such vile regimes as Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Kim Jong Il's North Korea and mullah-mad Iran.  Now, perhaps they will pay a price:

No one is an expert on Libya’s rebels, and we haven’t a clue who the next leader of the country will be or how he will be chosen. (Libya is very much a man’s world so the next leader absolutely will be a he.) Even so, small indications about what to expect from the future government do bubble up once in a while.

The Chinese are trying to ingratiate themselves with Libya’s future leaders after opposing the assistance given them by the West, and they’re meeting resistance. “We don’t have a problem with western countries like the Italians, French and UK companies,” says a rebel official in charge of the Agoco oil firm. “But we may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil.”

Muammar Qaddafi has few real friends in the world, but thug regimes from Caracas to Moscow have been sticking up for him anyway. He isn’t exactly Moscow’s or Beijing’s man, but that’s how he is perceived.

MLK as Mao

So they wanted to put a memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington. Fine. No problem with honoring the man who brought the second-class treatment of blacks in this country to the forefront of the national consciousness so that it could be corrected.

But couldn't they have come up with a better memorial than this?
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The bigger war

We have been at war since at least September 11, 2001.  But that war is not with al Qaida or the Taliban, or, more accurately, not just with al Qaida or the Taliban.  Michael Ledeen explains:

If we are going to win in the Middle East, we have to get the context right. As I wrote in The War Against the Terror Masters, long before the invasion of Iraq, we cannot just “do” a country like Iraq, or today, Syria, and then move on. That’s one of the strategic mistakes Bush, Rice, Hadley, Cheney and Rumsfeld made. They viewed Iraq in isolation. They thought they could just “do Iraq,” and then consider their options. We then belatedly discovered (even though our enemies publicly announced what they were going to do) that Iraq and Afghanistan could not have decent security so long as Syria and Iran actively supported terrorists in those countries. American soldiers and countless Iraqi and Afghan civilians have paid a terrible price for our failure of vision.

The regional war has expanded, but we still look at each battle field in isolation, rather than seeing the war whole:

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Food prices and social unrest

You don't hear about it much, but there may be an underlying cause to many of the riots across the globe: the price of food:

What causes riots? That's not a question you would expect to have a simple answer.

But today, Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they've found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world.

This single factor is the price of food. Lagi and co say that when it rises above a certain threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet.

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I just love the headline

Apology Accepted, Captain Needa.

That was probably my favorite scene from The Empire Strikes Back.  Yes, I have a dark sense of humor, as did Darth Vader, obviously; that was part of his total coolness.  But part of it was also that the guy who played Lorth Needa, the CO of the Star Destroyer Avenger, did a really crappy acting job in that scene.  While he's feeling the effects of Vader's force choke, he's on his hands and knees, then as soon as he dies he flips over and looks like he has gone to sleep. Huh? Then when the naval troopers (the guys with the black uniforms and black cockroach helmets) drag Needa's body from the bridge, you can see him standing up to help them pick up his body.

Lousy acting job, but a great scene that captures the essence of Darth Vader.  In the real world, of course, such an action would be inherently unfair, which is Ed Driscoll's point with the column.