. . .Needless to say, Osama bin Laden and his Mujahadeen Warriors have blasted their way to the top of the Bongo Party Hit Parade Chart. I'll get around to the other hot groups later, like Dubya the Clueless and his Glorious Imperial Dirge Band, but first we've got to take a brief excursion into the theoretical side of bongo party warfare.
. . .Clausewitzians tend to consider events in what can broadly be called geo-political terms, focusing on the interests of nation-states, and coalitions of nation-states. The Clausewitzian/geo-political crowd perceives armed groups as non-willful tools under the control of willful and sovereign nation-states. In contrast, the Bongo Party theory defines war simply as a clash of armed groups, and thus focuses on armed groups, and considers the involvement of nation-states merely a variant of war, displaying no more or less of the essence of war than a clash between, say, the Crips and the Bloods.
. . .I tend to reject geo-political examinations chiefly because of lack of information. I don't have sufficient knowledge of the swirling and interacting mass of circumstances necessary to make reliable predictions about the actions of any nation-state, except in the most obvious of cases. Furthermore, I don't think anyone does. Geo-political explanations are best considered as illuminating only after the fact, sort of like an analytical rearview mirror. I am more interested in understanding events before they unfold, so I can make useful predictions.
. . .The chief virtue of the Bongo Party Theory is that it illuminates certain military scenarios, tending to rule out certain scenarios, merely by examining the limitations of the armed groups involved. Besides, in any war, there is typically more useful information available about the armed groups involved than there is about the host of circumstances necessary for geo-political thinking. What does the BP theory of war tell us about this as yet unnamed war? First of all, it tells us we will fail what I call the Vietnam test.
. . .Can the American Empire fight a Vietnam-scale war in terms of casualties, which I shall define as a war that results in an average of 100 or more military personnel killed in combat per week for a year or more? That's a total of 5,200 military personnel or more killed in action in any period of combat that lasts a year or more. A Bongo Party examination of our circumstances says the answer to this question is an emphatic "no." We can not pass this Vietnam test because our diverse, imperial demographics prevent our imperial over-class from raising sufficient military personnel, either by appealing for volunteers or by relying on conscription. Conscription, I can state with certainty, will terminate the reservation at the Washington swill trough of any imperial mucky muck holding any elective office.
. . .It seems to be the avowed policy of our Beloved Emperor, Dubya the Clueless, that we are on some sort of cowboy crusade against "terrorism." (He means only non-state terrorism, non-American terrorism, non-NWO terrorism and non-Zionist terrorism, of course.) He also seems to have informed us that his newly hatched "Nobel Eagle" will soar the global skies, and gobble up all the fearsome raghead terrorists for years on end, and never mind the cost in body bags. I hope he sobers up. If he doesn't he will surely bungle and stumble into a war in Afghanistan that we can not win.
. . .One central concern is that the American military will try to seize an airhead inside Afghanistan. That is, they will try to use paratroopers to seize an existing airfield, or at least seize terrain suitable for such an airfield. Once this airfield is secure and turned into a sort of firebase or fortress, their plan may include road-bound raids or heliborne raids into the mountains. I don't see any point in conducting any raids of any sort inside Afghanistan, especially in the mountainous area. Only in the luckiest of scenarios could we kill or capture bin Laden. Here's the basic problem. If they target anything worth going after, it will be so well defended that our casualties are sure to be severe in many cases, including wiping out the entire raiding party. The only way to keep the Afghan defenders off the backs of any raiders will be to use massive firepower, and even massive firepower is no guarantee that you will even be able to extract your surviving raiding force in all cases.
. . .Since there is nothing to be gained from a raiding strategy, there is really no military sense in seizing any airhead or town. After all, if you are not conducting raids from your firebases, all you are really doing is opening up a sort of shooting gallery so that ragheads from the hills can occasionally come down out of their caves to amuse themselves by playing "pot shot the infidel."
. . .That's what happened to the Russians. They invaded, seized the cities, and adopted a firebase-and-raid strategy. This firebase-and-raid strategy proved as ineffective for the Russians in Afghanistan as it had for the Americans in Vietnam and for the same reason -- the firebase- and-raid strategy simply does not work when you have a persisting enemy. All you wind up doing, is buying enemy dead at retail prices because piling up bodies using your own raiding ground troops is very expensive both in the number of casualties you must take, and in the actual economic expense. Buying the enemy bodies at wholesale, so to speak, by carpet bombing is a lot better idea, provided you are not squeamish, and the people you are culling can't retaliate, but that doesn't seem to be much of an option here.
. . .Plus you must keep in mind another salient fact about the military circumstances we are facing. The Afghans have the finest infantry in the world, pound for pound, no question about it, at least when it comes to defending their own turf against invaders. I don't even think the Israelis are as good as them in that respect, and that's saying a lot. Those ragheads have been fighting for something like twenty years now. They have become real-world experts at employing all sorts of mixes of weapons and tactics. It's sort of like fighting an army whose every officer is as good as Stonewall Jackson. Furthermore, they tend to know every rock on the battlefield because they tend to fight in their own area more often than not.
. . .When not fighting, most have been doing nothing but blowing hashish smoke rings while reading the Koran for the last twenty years or so to keep their minds off starving. Most Afghans live such miserable lives that if you shoot them you are doing them a favor. There is such a disparity between the combat skills of the Afghans and the U.S. ground forces that it's like sending the boy scouts to root out the Wehrmacht, it's nothing short of criminal. Our single edge is our massive firepower, and if circumstances strip us of that in any action the vultures will gorge themselves circular picking the eyes out of dead 82nd Airborne grunts.
. . .As of Day 10, I can summarize things by saying that the Glorious Empire's best hope is that it wiggles out this mess by some improbable stroke of luck prior to the time when our Beloved Emperor Dubya the Clueless bungles us first into some disastrous military action, then war, as he surely will if not somehow restrained. I'd love to hear what the generals are telling Dubya when the cameras aren't rolling. As a guess, I'm sure that most of them are opposed to a ground invasion under any circumstances because they understand the magnitude of the difficulties. I suppose that his economic advisors have told him that a Vietnam-scale war would be an economy-crushing event, even if it weren't in the terrible shape it's already in. I hope that his hesitancy so far is based on sober advice of this sort. I hope that he will contrive some public relations victory of some sort, like firing off a few cruise missiles, and then forget about invading anybody.
. . .Meanwhile, back at the imperial ranch, Dubya the Clueless and his Glorious Imperial Dirge Band seem to be treating us to a sort of huge Sheepul Woodstock in a lame attempt to push bin Laden and his boys off the charts. The tube keeps an image parade going past us 24 hours a day of flag wavers, candle lighters, hat passers, soup pourers, song singers and assorted moaners and groaners beyond counting. I've seen exactly one outburst of spontaneous pugnacity, when our Beloved Emperor did a PR thing at the WTC site and the hardhats chanted "USA! USA! USA!" All the other public displays have been in the same vein as Christians waiting for the Lions in the Coliseum, nothing but solemn proclamations, self-righteousness and undeserved suffering.
. . .If there are any awards to hand out, perhaps first place in the category of unintentional parody goes to the fellow who has been showing up daily at the Pentagon to play the Star Spangled Banner on a kazoo. I saw one anchor lady on a daytime talk show wearing a red, white and blue flag dress. Dan Rather actually cried on the Dave Letterman show. As the tears flowed, he moaned something about this being "a test of our will," and then reached out and grasped Dave Letterman's hand. Dave looked embarrassed, as if he almost burst out laughing, but seemed to catch himself in time to keep a straight face. I wondered how many times Dan rehearsed his geek-like display. He came across sort of like a wimpy Dr. Strangelove, blubbering about this "test of our will."
. . .This just in, the first post-Jihad report from Mexico as it appeared in the Sept. 20 Washington Post, page A30, in an article titled, "Mexico's El Dorado Loses Its Luster."

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico-- This border city has been a gleaming El Dorado for the last 10 years, luring thousands of poor Mexican workers to ever-expanding manufacturing plants offering plentiful jobs at double a farmhand's pay. But as the U.S. economy slows and consumer demand sags, Ciudad Juarez suddenly has 40,000 newly unemployed workers. People from other parts of Mexico keep coming, but the jobs here are gone. Street crime has jumped and the number of people sneaking across the border into Texas has surged. ... Pink slips are being generated at a record rate; 13 percent of this city's 250,000 maquiladora jobs are suddenly gone."

. . .It is too early to determine what impact the 911 Event will have on our demographics. A swelling of the ranks of unemployed and fit young Mexican males in the S.W. would greatly accelerate the eruption of civil war there. With nothing to do, many will drift to street gangs and secessionist groups. If this trend observed in Juarez spreads, then we will soon be past the point where even a determined change in immigration policy will be unable to stop the Mexicanization of the Southwest and thus civil war.
. . .If nothing else maybe, the price tag on the 911 event will put an end to the unending propaganda barrage about "immigrants revitalizing our economy." Or how about, "They're only taking jobs Americans don't want." Yeah, like hijacking our airliners and crashing them into our cities. My fellow imperial peasants, it's high time we pack the Statue of Liberty with ANFO and blow it to hell along with all the "huddled masses teaming to breath free.'
. . .There is much buzz on alternate web sites about the alarming number of indications that a police state is about to be instituted. Certainly we are moving in that direction, and our newly-hatched Volksturm or "Homeland Defense Agency," complete with a "Czar" who just happens to have a military background, makes me sick. Soon it will have SWAT teams, and start converting school children into new age Red Guards by inducing them to snitch on people via hotlines.
. . .However, all is not well for the NWO boys, not by a long shot. It is now clear that there has been no rush of volunteers to the recruiting offices of our Glorious Imperial Legions. According to the Sep. 22, 2001 New York Times, recruiting "has not gone up or down." And there are indications that an active and pugnacious anti-war movement is springing up all across the empire, despite all this tube propaganda about total unity. 1,500 anti-war protestors recently rallied in New York City. There are something like 400,000 Moslems in New York City alone. If the NWO/Zionist boys think setting up an effective police state apparatus in an empire with demographics like this one is a cakewalk, they've got some surprises coming. I think they're biting off more than they can chew, here as well as abroad.

. . ..An independent military analyst and intrepid social critic, Thomas W. Chittum is the author of the enduring right wing classic Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America and the satire on the New World Order and America's misadventures in the Middle East titled Sgt Skull's Field Manual for the Practical Modern Warrior. Both are available as ebooks from America First Books.

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