Special Analysis: Casualty Allocation in Modern Warfare

The deaths of dozens of civilians in Qana, Lebanon, on July 30, 2006, underscores the complications facing modern military planners and field commanders in prosecuting wars against entrenched opposition forces. To date, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has relied heavily upon a combination of artillery and aerial bombardments of Lebanon to weaken Hizballah, principally to the purpose in the latter, air campaign of degrading infrastructure, destroying bunkers, killing enemy soldiers, and demoralizing remaining enemy combatants. The artillery campaign—comprising as it does mechanized cannon (tanks and other mobile artillery pieces), rockets, and other assets—destroys both infrastructure and tactical targets, including mobile missile launchers being used by Hizballah fighters to fire rockets into Israel.

The reliance upon stand-off military assets, particularly fighter jets and bombers, has been criticized in a number of quarters: indeed, some argue that the United States and its Coälition partners believed that the initial "Shock and Awe" campaign and subsequent air and missile attacks on Baghdad and other parts of Iraq in the Spring of 2002 would substantially, if not utterly, remove Iraqi resistance to the subsequent ground invasion. But while the Coälition might earnestly have believed the air campaign would conclusively and swiftly resolve the war, it is certainly the case that aerial bombardment by bombs, rockets, and missiles did not do nearly as much as expected to bring combat to a swift end. Among the ranks of modern war planners and advocates—particularly those lacking actual experience in war—there does seem to exist a belief that air power can not only define the architecture of dominance in military campaigns, but also be decisive in wars, themselves. The IDF has in its current campaign against the Lebanese Hizballah shown considerable subscription to this belief, having already flown hundreds of sorties in just the few weeks its attack on Lebanon has been underway, while at the same time fielding only token, if highly publicized, infantry forays into Lebanese territory.

In a ground force projection begun on July 25, 2006, IDF soldiers quickly encountered resistance from Hizballah fighters whose ferocity seemed to take Israeli soldiers by surprise. The ensuing skirmishes clearly established why the air campaign had been and remained far preferable, at least in the short run: nine IDF soldiers were killed in a relatively short period of time during combat engagements in southern Lebanon. In the broad history of warfare, such a death toll is minimal and insignificant, but it comes as a shock nonetheless to both troops and the public at large since neither group is used to death in combat at any level, despite having national experience with far higher tolls in earlier times and previous wars. For the public especially in recent times in modern societies, months or a rapid series of high death rate encounters are required for general concensus to accept death toll numbers above one or two in a given day or a given encounter.

At left is a picture of a GBU-28A/B in flight: the "GBU" stands for "Guided Bomb Unit," otherwise informally and generically referred to as a "bunker buster." The GBU-28 was developed for and used in Desert Storm and is now being provided by the United States to the IDF, which is using this weapon in Lebanon to destroy what it describes as some of the 600 or so hardened, underground munitions and personnel bunkers under the control of Hizballah forces. The bomb is mounted under the wing of an F-15I "Eagle," depicted in the first graphic near the top of this article. (The Israelis call the F-15I "Thunder," and they gave the earlier, F-15C/D version the rather ominous—or perhaps insensitive—name "Buzzard.") Because a GBU carries a massive explosives package, in earlier versions its delivery jet would often have to make a critical upward maneuver, releasing the weapon in a lofting trajectory that allowed it to come more or less straight down on its target, this being necessary so the device did not have to navigate around intervening buildings and other structures on its way to the target, which might be underneath a building or otherwise buried and hardened. In the GBU-28, a Paveway III GPS/INS guidance package (which usually removes the need for the lofted release) takes the bomb on the final leg to its target, where its payload of 4,500 to 5,000 pounds of explosives detonates on top of the underground bunker, breaching overlying earth, concrete, and other protective materials.The explosion of the bomb then kills personnel in the bunker and sets off or otherwise destroys any munitions stored there. The force of the explosion is sufficient to destroy any building atop the bunker. Surrounding buildings for dozens of yards left standing around the target are structurally compromised both at the level of their foundations and in their load-bearing walls, making the effect of a GBU-28 detonation particularly destructive in urban and suburban environments. The graphic at right above shows buildings that were near a destroyed target in Beirut.

Effective, mission-specific alternatives to these bunker busters are few and uniformly problematic, as are alternatives to other air-to-surface rockets, bombs, and missiles and surface-to-surface, large-calibre ordnance. In fact, the principal and general alternatives reduce in reality to only one: ground forces. This would include infantry on foot and in armored vehicles penetrating urban and peri-urban environments, fighting house-to-house, building-to-building, degrading enemy assets and killing enemy soldiers during the advance and securitization operations. In the words of Israeli Knesset member and Minister of Justice Haim Ramon, "What we should do in southern Lebanon is employ huge firepower before a ground force goes in... Our great advantage vis-a-vis Hizbollah is our firepower, not in face-to-face combat."

As the Israeli Justice Minister's statement demonstrates, the disadvantages of 'face-to-face combat' are rather more obvious than the advantages. Infantry fighting in close quarters entails a very high probability of significant casualty rates among troops; stand-off weapons, on the other hand, by their nature keep troops far away from ground fire and booby-traps. Furthermore, stand-off weapons will—provided they actually hit their intended targets—degrade enemy assets much more rapidly than infantry and mechanized infantry possibly could, even when the airborne ordnance does not live up to the "precision" frequently used to describe its accuracy. Slogging forward across a hostile country takes days, and target-rich environments can be few and far between along the way. Aerial bombarment from jets and artillery projects destructive force miles and scores of miles forward, thereby offering considerably greater access to widely dispersed targets of interest. For ground troops, after moving forward through sparse encounters on the way to a city of strategic interest, the drop into urban and peri-urban combat environments causes a sudden shift of the target/threat environment from one relatively thin to something so rich and multi-faceted that it can quickly overwhelm even the most trained infantry and mechanized units, leaving soldiers and other war assets vulnerable to everything from snipers to booby-traps to ambushes.

And these are just the beginnings of the problems for the early phases of urban combat environment engagement, even before genuine occupation forces can arrive and establish some degree of order, tense and violent as such might be. Urban warfare is where soldiers of both sides come into contact at close range. Most likely, both sides will attempt to employ small arms fire to neutralize enemy combatants sited or suspected; but the availability of rifles, side arms, and grenades does not entirely remove the possibility of the worst of all possible battlefield scenarios, hand-to-hand combat: those 'face-to-face' fights mentioned above are bloody and violent beyond description, and their nature mitigates at least to some degree any technological superiority one side might have over the other. Extremely close-quarters fighting is where the most ancient roots of warfare rise to the surface in brief encounters that end with the near certainty of deaths of some of those so engulfed.

But ground forces also present an interesting and little noted opportunity: because of the close quarters in which such combat occurs, and because of the human, real-time, visual nature of identifying enemy threats, there exists the capacity, at least in some cases, to determine whether or not potential targets actually merit attack. Unlike stand-off weaponry, which by its nature can only remotely distinguish civilians from genuine tactical targets—forward observers, prior intelligence, remote video monitoring, and target painting notwithstanding—ground force combatants can and do tell the difference between dangerous adversaries and civilians.

This is by no means a perfect trade-off: infantry and close artillery can cause civilian deaths, either by accident or deliberation: the former is a tragic consequence of non-combatants killed or wounded in cross-fire or through misidentification; the latter is a monstrous and very real possibility, with only some of the many small and large massacres of civilians ever becoming widely known as was the case, for example, of the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila in mid-September of 1982.

The accidents and treacheries committed by infantry troops having been noted, the trade-off between force casualties and those on the other side of a conflict is genuine. In an air and artillery campaign, fewer soldiers will be exposed to enemy fire, but more civilians on the other side will suffer as a result. Stand-off weaponry—regardless of the sophistication of technology employed in its guidance, targeting, and detonation systems—will not always nor particularly frequently ensure the safety of those who are not a threat, and this grim fact is unrelated to whether or not enemy soldiers are using civilians as "human shields," as is so often claimed when civilians get killed in bombings. Civilian casualties are an inevitable consequence of the nature of the chosen matrix of weaponry and tactics. When the enemy is at distance, clarity in identification is sacrificed at the same time troops are protected from close-quarters combat with its attendantly higher kill rates.

The trade-off is such: rely on bombardment campaigns to protect one's own troops, and thereby re-allocate the composition of absolute casualty count toward those upon whom the bombardment is being wrought. The greater numbers of dead and injured on the other side will necessarily reflect both genuine targets and innocent civilians.

Readers uncomfortable with or disgusted by this allocation calculus should strive not to wage war in the modern age because technologically sophisticated societies will do whatever is necessary to minimize their own casualties in order to maintain popular support. Deaths of soldiers and civilians on the other side in a war are not nearly as corrosive to that public support as would be large numbers of casualties on their own side.

That means air warfare—despite its limitations in successfully resolving conflicts and despite its inevitable, occasional killing of civilians—will continue to be the first and principal means by which the Western world and its more sophisticated proxies prosecute the grim wars of this century and beyond.



The Dark Wraith trusts that readers have been enlightened—while perhaps being disheartened or even enraged—by this informational article.

Special Graphic Post: Highway in Darkness

Special Analysis: The Sacrifice of Pawns

At left is a picture from the USS Liberty Memorial Website. The USS Liberty was attacked but not sunk on June 18, 1967, while on a spying mission off the coast of Egypt. Israeli aircraft, then torpedo boats, laid waste to it in what the Israelis and 10 official U.S. commissions described as a tragic accident, a case of mistaken identification of the American ship as a much smaller, horse transport boat of Egyptian registry. The picture was taken the day after the attack: the boat is listing, burnt to brown, and pock-marked with holes from ordnance up to and including 40mm cannon shells. Not visible is the damage from several torpedoes. Also not visible are the victims, 34 of whom were killed, another 174 wounded.

In the heat of growing signs of war in the region—what would come to be known as the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—the United States had sent the USS Liberty and other surveillance sea assets into coastal waters off Egypt. According to accounts from crew members of the doomed ship, Israeli Defense Forces aircraft made as many as eight recon passes over it. From The Politics of Anti-Semitism (Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Claire, Eds., AKA Press, 2003), comes this narrative (supplemented here by graphics) based upon statements by the men who were on the USS Liberty the day of the attack:

"A few hours later... Israeli Mirage III fighters [came], armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.

"A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystére jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship's top officers.

"The Liberty's radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called 'a buzzsaw sound.' Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message it was under attack to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet's large aircraft carrier.

"Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty's aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. 'Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately,' he barked. McNamara's injunction was reiterated in saltier terms by Admiral David L. McDonald, the chief of Naval Operations: 'You get those fucking airplanes back on deck...'

"After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull [see graphic at right], flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.

"As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gun fire. No body was going to get out alive that way.

"After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: 'Do you need any help?'

"The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: 'Fuck you.'

"The Israeli boat turned and left."

Virtually none of the survivors of the incident characterized it as an accident, affirming repeatedly that it was a deliberate, concentrated, prejudicial, unprovoked attack to blind a United States asset that could otherwise have detected the military operations Israel was about to mount against its Arab enemies. Official reports say the attack lasted no more than 15 minutes. Survivors claim the attack lasted well over an hour.

From the Jewish Virtual Library, which stands on the conclusion that the incident was a grievous accident cause by both Israeli and American errors, Mitchell Bard writes this: "None of Israel's accusers can explain why Israel would deliberately attack an American ship at a time when the United States was Israel's only friend and supporter in the world."

From the other side of the dispute come explanations ranging from the quite reasonable to the perilously inflammatory. Interested readers may derive a sense of the bitterness of some former service personnel in the scathing critique of official investigations, originally published in the January 16, 2004, edition of Stars and Stripes, by former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Thomas Moorer.

Why the USS Liberty incident occurred that awful day in 1967 will never be known. What happened that awful day in 1967 is without any doubt: an American military ship was attacked, the vessel was destroyed, 34 of its naval personnel were killed, and 174 more were wounded.

As much as the survivors, their families, and other interested parties might want it to be otherwise, the reason behind what happened is not particularly important in light of the compelling lesson to be learned from the incident, a lesson for all time in matters of war and even of peace. The lesson is this:

No rational nation acts against its own interests: intentions are irrelevant; all that matters are capabilities. Wage war and build peace upon this premise, and both the accidents and the treacheries of your allies will be neither frequent nor unexpected.


In memorium for the four United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon soldiers killed by Israeli artillery fire at the UNIFIL observation post at Khiyam on July 25, 2006: may your respective nations—may all nations—learn from your final and ultimate sacrifice.




The Dark Wraith has spoken.

Special Blog Post: Middle East Geography Quiz

While preparing several articles for publication here at The Dark Wraith Forums, your host realized it might be worth the time to whip up a quiz sure to challenge and inform everyone. Actually, compared to that Missile Quiz last week, this one should be a somewhat less than a head-banger. Whether you score high or low on this one, you'll enjoy it. Without further ado, take your best shot. At the end of this post is the link to a modest map of the Middle East. If you get desperate, you can open it to see some of the answers to the quiz questions. I know you won't do that, however: you'll slog through the quiz, find out your score, then you'll click on the link to the map. Yes, indeed. That's the sporting way to do it.

Click here to open the Middle East Geography Quiz.


The Dark Wraith invites you to see the map of the Middle East and, as always, thanks you for taking this nice quiz.

Special Analysis: In Response to 'An Irresponsible Question'

I have yet to directly address in a major article here at The Dark Wraith Forums the latest Middle East crisis involving Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. As noted in comments on a previous thread here, the trajectory and end-point of the violence is obvious to me, yet something seems different this time around: even though the dynamics have not materially changed from previous confrontations, and even though all indications point to no major turning point in the ways and means by which international and inter-ethnic conflicts are resolved in the Middle East, something not yet entirely quantifiable to me is not quite the same.

Answering a request by Moody Blue for my analysis of the situation, I responded in part as follows:

Here's my problem. The current situation in the Middle East has a dynamic that is so obvious to me that I could literally close my eyes and type for 30 minutes, laying out exactly what's going to happen. The particulars of the events on the ground from moment to moment and even from day to day are largely irrelevant to the trajectory and end-point.

Yes, certain members of the G-8 are trying to broker a backroom deal; yes, the Israelis are following a well-worn path of obliterating their potential adversaries at the very level of capacity to carry out the duties, rights, and responsibilities of sovereignty or, in the case of Palestine, future sovereignty; and yes, the Israelis, for doing all of this, are going to leave in place the symbols of their generations-old nemeses in the Middle East. They never killed Yasser Arafat, even though time and time again they could have, and they will do the same with the nominal head of Hizballah, Hassan Nasrallah, or one of his most capable lieutenants. The whole conflagration will cool down in a while, and the brokers of record will move in, help clean up the mess in Lebanon, and feel like they were the agents of quasi-peace who finally got the guns to stop roaring.

Israel will then negotiate a final border solution with a fully and permanently castrated Mahmoud Abbas in Gaza, relieved as he will be of the overwhelming power that Hamas had held in shaping Palestinian policy toward Israel.

Israel will, in the meantime, establish a security buffer zone in southern Lebanon, probably something about 20 miles wide, up to just south of the Lebanese city of Tyre.

Then we'll see negotiations and playing around with the idea of replacing the Israeli troops with a United Nations peacekeeping force in the security buffer zone. That will go on for some time.

A nervous calm will eventually settle over the region, with hot rhetoric and a relative absence of gunfire. Ultimately, status quo ante will return, with the ante being weaponry poised at enemies everywhere, but relative peace and quiet... until, of course, the next round.

It's so easy to see.

Now for the problem: something in my gut is telling me that it's not going to play out this way. It's a tiny voice, and I simply cannot put my finger on exactly what's nagging the Hell out of me.

Mind you, there's always background noise, intrigue, and little sparklers of weirdness in these flare-ups in the Middle East. Small mysteries are like a persistent weed that grows on the landscape of deterministic outcomes in politics, and the current crisis has no small share of oddities.

But I honestly don't think that's what's behind my uncertainty. I don't mind uncertainty: I can always qualify my calls with some ifs, ands, ors, and buts; however, this time, I just cannot lay claim to the well-spring of my concern.

No, it's not Syria. The government in Damascus is relatively weak militarily, and its leadership is not nearly as willing as it would have been a generation ago to engage in full-blown hostilities with Israel; and that government, despite having a mutual defense agreement with Iran, is less than thrilled about having Iran come to its rescue in a show-down with Israel.

As for Iran—setting aside the fatiguing, constant barrage of anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic propaganda emanating from Tehran—the theocratic leadership has no intention of giving Israel a pretext to terminate the Persian state's nuclear program, which in my judgment is considerably closer to deployment (not 'development'—deployment) of nuclear weapons than most other analysts believe.

None of that is what's bothering me. It's something else, and I do not yet know what it is.

My sense of frustration with giving a name to my concern is becoming moot. This is probably just the same story, now cast on the stage of the 21st Century: war, destruction, appalling levels of civilian casualties, behind-the-scenes political wrangling, and lots of inflammatory rhetoric. To the mix we can this time add a maddenly incompetent U.S. Administration incapable of doing anything other than giving the thumbs up to Israel.

The peripheral nations in this latest drama, so often cited by media analysts, do not present serious threats to a wind-down of the conflict in the normal course.

Syria is not a major threat. Its current government, led by Bashar al-Assad, the son of Hafez al-Assad, is far less prone to violence than it would have been under the late Hafez: its military is not strong, and its mutual defense treaty with Iran is actually a deterrent to any interest it might have in joining the fray in Lebanon.

The Syrians are not stupid. While they are more than glad to have the buttressing strength of Iran's considerable military might behind them, they know very well that Iran is a nascent hegemon; therefore, any action Tehran would take on behalf of Damascus would come at a dear price to Syria's sovereign autonomy.

As noted above, Iran's leadership is not keen on turning Israel's attention to it, either. The only way to stop Iran's nuclear program from becoming a nuclear weapons stockpile is through destructive intervention. No, diplomacy is not going to work; and in the absence of the world's great powers being willing to adopt a policy that allows all nations to develop and stockpile weapons while assuring that their use would bring a coördinated, reciprocal nuclear attack, a pre-emptive military strike is the only way to resolve Iran's nuclear ambitions. Whether or not the ambitions should be stopped is another matter entirely; if, however, the goal is to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, the only way the goal can be achieved at this late hour is through the wholesale destruction of its nuclear fuel refining facilities. But the United States is wholly incapable of carrying out such a military strike for two reasons: first, the resources to do the job just are not there at the assured level and, more importantly, at the assured sustainability to engage what could turn out to be a months-long bombing campaign; and second, Iran has become far too economically powerful, now delivering as it does crucial fossil fuel to Turkey and other putative U.S. allies. The U.S. cannot afford to literally cripple major parts of Asia Minor, nor can it afford the wrath of China, which would in the event of military action against Iran be financing through its routine, massive purchases of U.S. Treasury instruments the destruction of one of its emerging trading allies in the Shanghai Coöperation Organization.

In the absence of the United States using military force to neutralize the Iranian nuclear weapons program, only one nation on Earth could and would do it. The leaders in Tehran know this, and they are simply not going to give Israel the pretext to deal with the problem while a grateful Western world looks on and an infuriated China is paralyzed to action by lack of leverage on the Jewish State.

With all of the above as backdrop, as it stands now, a return to that above-mentioned status quo ante within several months seems not just likely, but downright certain. Any remaining doubts I might have—doubts I still simply cannot shake—I shall address in a subsequent post.

Many are the topics concerning the Middle East now being discussed in the Blogosphere. Both long- and short-term solutions are offered, questions are asked rhetorically, shock and outrage are regularly expressed. By way of example of the quality and character of inquiries being posed, the Green Knight published, "An Irresponsible Question," which was as follows:

Given that Hezbollah is both an external threat to Israel and an internal threat to the legitimate government of Lebanon, and

given that the government of Lebanon has information on Hezbollah but not sufficient military power to deal with them, and

given that Israel has plenty of military power but not as much information on Hezbollah as they might, and

given that it's in both Lebanon's and Israel's interest to have peace on their border and Hezbollah gone or at least disarmed --

was there ever a possibility of, you know, some kind of joint operation between the two nations to deal with their mutual problem?

Or is outright war the default option in the Middle East no matter what? Is the "rational actor" theory of the nation state really just inapplicable in that part of the world?

My response, edited and augmented, was as such:

Let us make a minor change to the question set: replace "Hezbollah" with "Druse"; or replace it with "Kurdish."

Hezbollah has been but one of a handful of provisional entities operating in the Middle Eastern theatre. Generally speaking, each has its base of operation—be it a territory, a town, or an enclave—and from that base it fields what are essentially patrolling squadrons of armed militiamen.

These militias vex border areas, provinces, and/or groups of villages, where they kill people, exact extortions, and cause other problems. Some are well financed, others are not. The Christian Druse, for example, have long been rumored to be provisioned by Israel, which uses their services as a counter-balance to Islamic militias and other irregulars. Kurdish militias can be found from Syria to the border regions of Turkey and Iran, in some cases making what nearly amount to regularly scheduled, cross-border raids that inflict casualties and infuriate the rulers in the countries they target.

But these militias create and enforce a curious balance of power; as such, when one of them is removed, the power shifts. This is exactly the same process that occurs in biological systems: take out one "problematic" infecting organism, and its place is filled by one or more of the remaining infectious agents, which then sometimes grow without control.

When Israel eviscerated al Fatah in the earlier years of this Century and the last, two groups arose: a nascent, very militant wing of al Fatah, and Hamas. Both of these groups had been there, but the center of al Fatah—largely by virtue of the standing of Yasser Arafat—had held sway.

Once the political center of al Fatah had been destroyed, all manner of trouble-making groups had their moment of opportunity. Gaza Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has no power to stop Hamas, and enlisting the aid of Israel is simply out of the question. For one thing, Israel has been withholding tax revenues from the Abbas government, money crucial to building a central, powerful military that could deal with provisionals and trouble-makers.

Israel regularly commits the same mistake made on a grand, catastophic scale in 2002 by the United States. By wiping out the Baathist regime in Iraq, and by obliterating the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, we completely removed the twin bulwarks that had kept Iran in check. Absent the vice grip on Tehran, the Persian state grew in regional and even extra-regional influence like wildfire.

We had no capacity to create an instant government in either Iraq or Afghanistan, so we had no capacity to fill a vacuum before the Iranians did so on their own behalf and to their own interests.

Israel similarly has no capacity to fill a vacuum it leaves when it destroys a pestilence, so it guarantees that the most aggressive of remaining pests will rise and dominate the territorial, and then the political, landscape of a country or turf crippled by military action.

Both Israel and the United States act to ensure a short-run solution yet have nothing even close to the resources or wherewithal to project long-term, enduring stability in the absence of the militants of the hour.

As such, whether it would be in unilateral military action or in some program coördinated with a tolerable central authority, eliminating one threat simply ensures that a greater threat will arise subsequently. The current effort will have no different result.

And then the question becomes, "Who really wants a different result, anyway?"

The Dark Wraith will offer further analysis should events warrant.

Special Blog Post: Missile Quiz

With war raging in the Middle East, recent news stories have included any number of references to missiles and rockets being used by the combatants. The quiz below tests your knowledge of a few of the many ways that death and destruction are being delivered from the sky to both fighters and civilians in this latest episode in the never-ending story of bloodshed to which humanity is condemned.

Click here to open the Missile Quiz.

Enjoy.

Special Graphic Post: New Bumper Sticker by the Dark Wraith

Above is the latest bumper sticker created by your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums. This one's a beauty if I do say so myself. Maybe no more than a year ago, putting one of my bumper stickers on your car probably would have immediately earned you a set of slashed tires in many parts of the country. Times are different, now: most likely, your tires won't be slashed for at least a couple of days.

Wait...

Okay, I just read this marketing book that said something about not mentioning the downside of your product if you don't have to. I'm not sure what that's all about, but those guys are the experts, so you need to ignore that first paragraph.

Now, below is a graphical layout of all the bumper stickers I've designed and offered over the past year or so. Although the normal cycle I must follow is to pull one down before I offer another, anyone interested can order directly from me (not through the e-store) any bumper sticker in lots of 100 or 250 at a decent discount from the e-store retail price. If you would like to do so, contact me using the Feedback Form, which is always available over in the sidebar. Tell me which one you want (mouseover the desired image, and you'll see the inventory reference number), and specify how many you want to order in increments of 100 or 250. You'll get a quote within 24 hours.

   
   

Remember, this is a mid-term election year, so bumper stickers are mighty important. You can share them with your friends so they, too, can get their tires slashed by Right-wing thugs.

Wait...

That marketing book says it's not a good idea to mention how the product can bring harm to lots of people.

Lordie. Marketing certainly has its share of nuance.


Consider this an open thread as I gear up for publication later this week of the second article in the Dark Arts Politics series, along with a few other articles, including a rant on education, one of the very most rantable of subjects in my arsenal. (And I have no idea whether or not "rantable" is a word, but it should be. Of course, given that it has now been published here at The Dark Wraith Forums, it is.)


Say what you have to say. Sing praises, complain bitterly, speak obtusely, or bitch excessively. It's all part of a good thread on a quiet night here on the outskirts of civilization on the frontier of the 21st Century. Grab a chair and enjoy the company. In just a few short months, we'll know whether or not the neo-conservatives will rule for another two years with majorities in both houses of Congress, or whether they'll rule for the next two years with Democrats asking if it's really, really safe once again to have a spine. For God's sake, no one say, "BUSH" to them, or they'll vanish into a cloud of wuss-hood like they've been doing for the past six years. (And yes, "wuss-hood" is a word. See the parenthetical exposition above on "rantable" if you don't believe me.)


The Dark Wraith starts up the industrial-sized coffee pot for the evening's festivities.

Special Blog Post: An Open Letter to NARAL Pro-Choice America

To the President of NARAL Pro-Choice America:

According to the Endorsed Candidates Webpage of NARAL Pro-Choice America, your organization has endorsed incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman for the United States Senate in his race against challenger Ned Lamont for the Democratic nomination in Connecticut. Although I shall not make a counter-endorsement here principally because I have yet to determine to my own satisfaction the qualifications of Mr. Lamont to serve as a United States Senator, I must criticize your decision to endorse of Mr. Lieberman, given the mission of your organization.

According to a post at Pam's House Blend, NARAL Pro-Choice America has stated, "[Mr. Lieberman] since clarified his position, to our satisfaction" with respect to several matters, including his vote for cloture to prevent a filibuster of the Senate vote on the appointment of Judge Samuel Alito as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and his support of hospitals that refuse to provide morning-after contraception to rape victims.

Although such may exist and be widely known, I can find precious little reference in the way of clarifications that Mr. Lieberman is supposed to have made on the aforementioned matters; however, whether or not Mr. Lieberman made such clarifications—and in particular, whether or not he made them to representatives of NARAL Pro-Choice America—is irrelevant.

In the case of the Alito nomination, any statement he would have made after his vote is moot: he cast his vote, he did so with full knowledge of the opposition of his constituent base, and the consequence of his vote is that a jurist with radical views far outside the mainstream of public opinion and judicial review now sits on the bench of the highest court in the land, able as he now is to affect the political, social, and economic landscape of this nation for generations to come. As I made clear in a letter I sent to the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, and which I republished here, the vote on Samuel Alito was a defining moment not just for America, but for the United States Senators in office at that momentous occasion.

Many if not most votes that a Senator makes can be mitigated, at least to some extent, after the fact. A Senator can come to understand the error in judgment or can seek to create a political smokescreen by approving in principle but not in subsequent funding some piece of legislation. Even in a matter as grave as authorizing military action against Iraq, a Senator can diminish the shameful fact of his or her favorable vote in subsequent condemnation of the war and the lies that led to the catastrophically wrongful vote. This is not to say that a Senator should be forgiven for the initial vote; but retrospective and introspective contrition can be demonstrated by forthright and firm resolve in subsequent votes on the matter.

Such is not the case with a Senator's vote to end a filibuster on a radical Supreme Court nominee. Nothing can be done to repair the damage of the action, and no amount of "clarification" will alter the trajectory of American jurisprudence at its highest level arising from such a damnable act. That you believe Mr. Lieberman can somehow repair the wide-ranging, inter-generational consequences of his cowardice belies a fundamental lack of understanding of just how grave, decisive, and permanent Mr. Lieberman's vote was on that melancholy day of January 30, 2006.

Now, concerning Mr. Lieberman's statement about "conscience" rights of medical service providers, he demonstrated a fundamental blindness to the essential and foundational nature of objectivity in the dispensation of the results of science. Mr. Lieberman does not grasp that public policy cannot be formed on the parochial interests of a handful of common carriers of medications and procedures; in fact, public policy must stand firm against any and all selective medical care delivery, and it must do so precisely because the individual seeking care is asymmetrically at permanent disadvantage in relationships with doctors, hospitals, and even to some extent pharmacies. This is the nature of what is called "fiduciary duty," which is robust to sentiments, opinions, and provincial judgments of those accepting such duty.

If Mr. Lieberman spoke to NARAL Pro-Choice America officials and satisfied their concerns, that's all well and good; but NARAL Pro-Choice America is not the gatekeeper to public trust. Private citizens render judgments with the advice—which we hope is sound—of other individuals, private organizations, and public entities and their responsible representatives. However, no such body external to the individual has any business attempting to secure the trust of information consumers by simply stating that it has received in confidence information to which its constituents are not a party.

NARAL Pro-Choice America might be satisfied, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not I am, and NARAL Pro-Choice America diminishes itself markedly by anticipating otherwise. More importantly, NARAL Pro-Choice America calls into wide-ranging question the judgment in more fundamental assertions, representations, and statements it makes if it is of such a mind that it can in secret discuss matters affecting others' lives in the absence of persistent and thorough transparency.

Your endorsement of Mr. Lieberman renders evidence that NARAL Pro-Choice America is nothing more than a consummate Washington insider, an organization that finds quarter wholly and without concern in its configuration and closeness to the power structure within the Beltway. In the 21st Century, progressive causes will not be won there: what little remains salvageable in this degraded era will be won in street-level political operations arising from the grassroots, a territory NARAL Pro-Choice America has not visited in a long time, standing as it has on press releases the mainstream media barely notices, lobbying that has not prevented the erosion of a woman's right to choose, and the altogether useless mantra that "It's the law of the land—end of discussion" that now proves to have been a bureaucratic apology that became a death trap for the pro-choice forces.

The fight for privacy rights moves on into the grim, year-by-year, election-by-election, vote-by-vote battles across the land. The fight moves on, and it moves on past NARAL Pro-Choice America.



The Dark Wraith has spoken.

Special Graphic Post: Childhood's Ending

Dark Arts Politics: Firebreaking, Part 2

Author's note: Each article in this "Dark Arts Politics" series will be published in two parts. Part 1 of this article may be read by following this link.

Republican John Anderson ran as an Independent for President in 1980. At the peak of his popularity, he was pulling by some polls in excess of 20 percent of potential, registered voters, causing no small amount of discussion of how the Constitution prescribes appointment of a President from those who cannot muster the required number of votes in the Electoral College. The discussions turned out to be entirely academic: by Election Day 1980, Mr. Anderson's support had waned considerably, and his candidacy now stands as something remembered by few. Pundits doing the requisite Monday morning quarterbacking attributed Anderson's fall to the hypothetical voters who finally came to understand in the final days that they would be wasting their votes if they were to cast them for a man who obviously could not win. Perhaps those political analysts were right; but there might have been more to the story.

At John Anderson campaign rallies across the United States, supporters weren't the only ones in attendance. Also milling about were young people carrying piles of flyers. These folks were handing them out to everyone. At some events, the flyers were so thick they were on the floor, on tables, even on the stage where Anderson would be speaking. Although there were several variants, he flyers were all pretty much the same. The title at the top was "An Angry Man," and the document as a whole was a professional piece of work: fairly well-written, no misspellings, two-column layout, justified margins (remember that this was before the advent of modern word processors for the masses), a few quotes, and some citations to sources.

The message conveyed in the document was clear. John Anderson was no liberal. He was, in fact, a conservative, and his record in Congress was right there for everyone to see. He was no friend whatsoever of progressive causes, and he was certainly no man that any self-respecting Democrat should even consider voting for. John Anderson was a wolf in sheep's clothing, and his candidacy was a ruse to help Republican Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan win the election.

In October of 1980, while I was at the rooming house of a friend who had been active in the Anderson campaign, I saw one of those flyers on the side of his desk. On that visit, I also learned that he wasn't "all that interested" in working on the campaign anymore.

Jimmy Carter's people were making inroads. More importantly, they were doing so not among the fickle masses, but among the grassroots workers who had been pumping Anderson's candidacy. How much damage "An Angry Man" did, I can't say; but I do know that it was not completely ineffective. By late October, I was flat-footed trying to defend John Anderson's congressional record. It was only later that I actually read "An Angry Man" and found the talking points right there in plain English. Worse still, most—not all, but most—of what was in that hit document was true.

Here's your first principle of political action in the dark arts: if you want your candidate to win, "truth" and "facts" are not the issues. You want your candidate to win because you believe in him or her. You've made it through the decision process, and you've even made it through what might constitute some tiny hint of buyer's remorse. By the time you're at the point where you're a political activist for a candidate, truth is no longer a "thing"; it's a weapon, both for you and for your opponents. They're going to swing it at you, you're going to swing it at them; and sooner or later, one side or the other will almost inevitably move past truth, especially if the other side is making it lethal. If that bothers you, then you've already waded way too far into this article.

The political dirty trick of "firebreaking" derives from the firebreak built to fight a wildfire. In Part 1 of this article, two kinds of firebreaks were built: Phil, Dan, and their boys built a fireline; John built a trench. The purpose of both was to deny the spreading fire its fuel. John's trench removed the fuel the fire needed; Phil and Dan's actually forced the fire to eat up its fuel in one place so it had no more ahead of it. In both cases, the fire had nowhere to go from the firebreak. Denied fuel to move forward, the fire died.

The more dramatic—and by far the riskier—of these two defenses is the fireline; but in either, there's always the chance that the fire will jump the break. Embers can fly through the air a long way. Firefighters out West can tell stories of watching wildfires jump six-lane highways, rivers, and even wide canyons, so you need to keep that in mind as we apply the concept of a firebreak to dirty tricks in political campaigning.

Step by step, here's what you do when the opposition is distributing negative literature about your candidate.

When you get your hands on that flyer, do not under any circumstances get mad and wad it up. Keep that thing pristine like it's a treasure. Get as many copies as you can. The more, the better. You're going to use some of those copies later: you're going to give a few away to select targets; the remainder, you're going to use as a prop. The more of them you gather, the fewer copies you'll have to make on your own nickel. The point is that you want a lot of them.

You probably won't know how long these have been getting distributed, but that doesn't matter. It's important that you know where they're being handed out. Most likely, rallies for your candidate will be a prime distribution location. Consider your candidate's rallies like honey attracting the pests. You'll use this knowledge later, but before you get to that point, you have some serious work to do, and it involves playing in the world of document forensics. You don't need to be an expert, but you do need to work in details.

Take your prize home or to whatever hovel you consider a residence. Sit down with that negative piece of crap the opposition pumped out of the bowel it calls its brain trust, and start analyzing. You're going to work on two levels: technical structure of the document and literary details of the content.

On the technical side, note everything: paper color and weight; text margins on every side; typefaces and font characteristics including point sizes; document layout including use of columns, justification, line and paragraph spacing; use of bold-face, italics, small-caps; flat or sectioned by sub-titles. Your goal is to be able to set everything up on your word processor so you can create a document that looks just like this one.

Now, read the document; and by this, I don't mean peruse it, scan it, look at it, or even merely go through it; I mean read it. And when you've finished reading it, read it again; and keep doing so until you understand exactly how the writer of the document writes. Look for everything: misspellings, repeated comma splices, and odd usages are just the beginning. Dig deeper. Does this writer use what grammarians call "simple" sentences, or does the writer use "compound," "complex," or even "compound/complex" sentences? How consistent is sentence structure from one sentence to the next? Why does the writer break from one paragraph to the next? Is the writer's style breathless or controlled? Does the writer use parentheses a lot?

What you're doing above is what used to be called, before the term became discredited by overuse in television and movies, "profiling." You don't want to know about this writer; you need to become this writer.

Let it sink in. Go back and read the document after a day of thinking about it.

Once you're confident you have it down, you're going to reproduce the document, but you're going to make some changes, and the changes you're going to make are going to turn the original document, which attacked your candidate, into a document that literally savages your candidate. That's right: you're going to write a document that is worse against your own candidate than the original was.

This is where care has to be taken. You want to make the document mean and unacceptable to all but the looniest people, you want to make it less truthful, and you want to marginally increase its stridence; but at the same time, you don't want to go so far over the top that it looks phony or, far worse, actually causes real damage to your candidate in the event that your version gets spread around too widely. In other words, you have to assume embers can fly.

Once you've created this document, make a handful of copies of it. No more than a couple dozen. You've built a bomb, and the last thing you want is thousands of copies of that bomb floating around. It's yours, and the fewer copies of it that are available, the more you control its use and vectors from its source.

Now for a note of caution. The printer you use for the output of your version may very well be embedding a unique signature. Don't use your own printer to print out your version. Take your file to a public library, to the local university or community college, or to someplace else for the final draft printing. And when you make the copies (remembering to use the same color and weight for the copy paper), use self-serve at the copy store, if that's where you're going to make the copies.

Now, you're ready to build the firebreaks.

Copies of the originals need to get into the hands of reporters. Make sure that happens, both at the local level and at the national level. You can be pretty much assured that not one reporter is going to give a rat's ass about what you've sent, and that's just the way you want it. Reporters almost always see themselves as too important for nonsense, and they'll dismiss this as nonsense. It's just politics, and if they have any seasoning at all, they'll think they've seen it all. Although it probably goes without saying, you need to ensure that you can't be sourced to the document you're sending to the media. You want it to look like the opposition is trying to inform reporters of the "facts."

Send the same document out to them again in about a week. You're saturating them with garbage. They'll treat it the same way they treated the first: they'll dismiss it, but this time maybe with a little more annoyance that somebody's trying to tell them how to do their job.

Soon after the second distribution—not more than a couple of days—send your version to the same people. Then send it again about a week later. You've already established your information distribution pattern with the first document; now you're fitting the distribution of the second document into the same pattern.

In the same time frame that you were sending the original document to the news media, be sure to send the document to the bigwigs in your own candidate's campaign. If they aren't completely clueless dolts, they'll already know about it, but do not take chances on this matter. You might be surprised by how the top end of some campaigns float above it all as if their candidate's "message" is all they need to know about. Don't leave it to chance that the people sitting on the porch know there's a grass fire way down the hill. When you send the original to your candidate's fancy people, put a brief note with it saying, "This is being distributed at our rallies." And for God's sake, don't sign it.

In fact, cover your tracks everywhere. As I'll explain in brutal detail in the next installment of "Dark Arts Politics," you lose your effectiveness if you become personally known, either to the opposition or to your own side. This isn't about you; it's about winning.

Now, concerning that second document, the one you created, make as sure as you can that your own candidate's top people get it and see it. That means you need to send it to them more than once, and you need to send it from different postal stations. At the very least, mail it out from different places in your city, better still from different cities. The wider the net of postal stations, the more it looks like that second document is out there all over the place.

You're trying to build a fuel line. If your candidate bites, the media will already know that this document is out there, and the moral outrage from your candidate's media handlers will have fuel to feed their reaction. Everyone knows this dirt is out there, and the fireline will feed itself.

If your candidate is an idiot, you'll get nothing out of this. If your candidate is something less than an idiot, his handlers will see the two documents together as an escalating campaign of dirty politics, and the second document, containing as it does lies, half-truths, and other manner of dirt, will spur them to action.

If top of the food chain in your candidate's campaign latches on and starts raising Holy Hell, the opposition candidate will have three choices. First, he can deny having anything to do with either document. That won't play very well at all: he's already been attached to a dirty trick that's escalating from one distribution to the next. The rejoinders from your campaign headquarters to his denials will be predictable: "Just where will this guy stop his dirty campaigning?" "What's next on this guy's agenda to trash a decent, God-fearing, patriotic American who just happens to be his opponent in this election?"

Second, he can affirm the first document but repudiate the second. Again, that won't play very well in Peoria. He obviously got cocky: no one said anything about the first piece of crap, so he thought he could get by with a second one; and now that he's getting burned by it, he's just lying when he claims he didn't do the second one.

Third, he can put his head in the sand and pretend it will all blow over. The longer his head is in the sand, the longer that second document can be used to beat on his exposed backside.

You have to understand that what's happening here is a game of chance. The more intense your own, personal campaign to raise awareness of the existence of the two documents, the better your chances of getting the fire to catch the fuel you've set on the fireline. If you're successful, the resulting fire will burn out that grassfire that was creeping along. The opposition candidate will have had damage done to him, and your candidate's campaign people will be none the wiser that they've been used.

That's all fine, but a great deal of what happens in this phase is out of your control. You have to get people's attention at arm's length, you have to get them focused, and you have to hope that they'll react the way you want. All of that is most decidedly not a prescription for a sure hit. Almost nothing will get you certainty when you're doing dirty tricks: it's a game of odds, and the more numbers you bet on, the better your chances of a score.

You've done what you can with the remote control. Now it's time to get up to your second fireline, the one where you'll be right there when the temperature goes up to medium-rare on the meat thermometer.

You've made copies of the second document, and now it's time to take it to the people—specifically, the people at a rally for your candidate. You'll need to be patient: if the opposition isn't handing out copies of its own document, you are most decidedly going to keep yours in the bag you'll carry them in. But if the opposition is worth its salt, one or several of its foot soldiers will be there to spread their junk around like clowns handing out candy at a birthday party for six-year-olds.

You need to arrive early. You do yourself no favor by not commanding this trench as quickly as possible. Try your best to identify the troublemakers, and keep your eye on them as the site fills with people. You're going to find this harder than it sounds: operatives—even the rankest amateurs—aren't going to be obvious.

As a note of caution, all your campaign literature in the bag should be sandwiched in the middle of standard campaign literature in favor of your candidate. You most assuredly don't want some rent-a-cop for your own campaign doing a casual look inside you bag and seeing literature trashing the guy you're working for. That would ruin your fun.

If you've ever been to a campaign rally—a good one, not some lame affair where everybody just mills around grunting—you will have experienced the extraordinary energy one of those events can generate in the expectant crowd. The people get wound up. A candidate who's captured a strong following can expect a room full of cheering, waving, clapping, yelling fans. Before he or she arrives, the crowd builds. Signs are in the air, occasional demonstrators do parades through the crowd, and the noise can almost drown out the obligatory music.

Keep clearly in your mind that you're not there for the festivities. You have work to do. First, you're looking for copies of that original document. We'll assume you see them. You might even have one stuck in your hands by an arm through the packed crowd. Now, it's time to work.

Look around the crowd. Look for the energy. Look for the people who have it in high gear. Bring a copy of your document out of your bag. Show it someone.

"Have you seen this shit?" Get people to check it out. "Someone's passing this out around here. We've got people in here trying to trash our guy." Get people's attention: one by one, redirect focus. Don't hand your document to just anyone, but if someone wants to take it and look at it, that's a good sign. That's the kind of person you're looking for.

Keep going through the crowd. "Have you seen who's handing these out?"

Move quickly. "This needs to stop here and now."

Bring a few more out of your bag. "I didn't see who handed it to me. Look at what it's saying."

Work from the periphery toward the center. Your target is somewhere in the crowd, invisible in plain sight.

In the ideal situation, someone's going to spot the opposition's distributor while you're nearby. If that happens, magnify the spotting. "Are you sure? Omigod!" Get people to notice, especially people who've already seen what you're showing around. This is the moment when you'll know whether you're going to have success or failure.

Watch for crowd movement. You want to see if some small part of the swirl of people start going toward that operative who's your target. If you've tapped the energy of that crowd the right way, you'll see a couple of people push right through the thicket of event-goers and toward the target.

Step back, but keep looking right at where the trouble is about to begin. Tell people you're passing what's going on over there. Act like you're stepping forward to help out. Do not go overboard. You want a small mob, but you sure as Hell don't want a total riot.

Now, you need to leave, and you need to do so quickly and quietly. Ideally, you might want to move to another planet for a couple of days. If your work was good, grassroots opposition folks have found out that it's not, "Tee-hee-hee, I work for my candidate at other candidates' rallies!" They become acquainted with one of the age-old consequences of playing games with dirty tricks politics; to wit, they find out it can get their asses harmed in material ways. That crawling fire for which they were the lame, limp grass suddenly hit serious, high-octane fuel and turned everyone within range from a carbon-based life form into a standing piece of gristle blinking wondrously at the inferno that just did an impromptu cook-out.

That could be you, too, if you're not careful. What you're doing is dangerous as Hell: not only are you trying to burn out a simple grass fire building against your candidate, but you're also using people from your own camp for combustion. That's not cool in anybody's book. It doesn't mean you can't sleep with yourself at night, though. Rest assured, you'll get much better sleep than the ones at the rally who got their backsides kicked.

You've created a deterrent, and the more rallies you attend from city to city, the more chances you'll have to make crawling grass fires burst into flame and die right there and then. And the more you do it, the better you'll get at it. Remember that a few copies of your version of the negative document will be out there. That's good. At the rally, you've created localized, controlled chaos; and when people try to figure out who's handing out what, you will have created even more of it. If you don't understand the power of being the genesis of chaos, you obviously haven't read my article, "I Am Become Battle, How White Be My Tears."

Now, about those documents you sent to the media and to your own candidate. Don't expect miracles. Far too many grassroots activists these days wail about how "weak" their candidates are in attacking the opposition and responding to negative campaign tactics. If that weakness bothers you, look right inside your own ranks and ask, "What are we doing?" Contrary to what you might have seen on the occasional bronze statue from long ago, most generals these days don't ride into battles, and they surely don't dive into trenches to do hand-to-hand combat. That's the job of foot soldiers, and that's what you are. It's just that you're a little different from the average trooper—if you want to be, that is.

And about all those copies of the original document you gathered up, keep those handy. A subsequent article in this series will be entitled, "Infiltration, Set-ups, and Intimidation." Those documents might be worth having around if you're up to those kinds of tactics.


Coming up next in Dark Arts Politics: "Foundations"

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Dark Arts Politics: Firebreaking
Part 1  ·  Part 2

Dark Arts Politics: Firebreaking, Part 1

Author's note: This begins the series described in the foreword, "Dark Arts Politics: The Beginning," here at The Dark Wraith Forums. Each article in the series will be published in two parts. Part 1 will be a story, sometimes appearing at first pass entirely unrelated to politics. Part 2 will use the story as a backdrop for an exposition of a method or tactic in the dark arts of politics.

One Summer many years ago in Tennessee, the countryside had suffered a months-long drought. Every blade of grass from one county to the next was as brown as it could get without just disappearing into the dirt. The crops were in bad shape, too. The heat was enough to wither every living thing, be it plant, beast, or the occasional man who should have been out doing field work but instead sat on the porch just staying quiet in the shade, provided there was any.

John lived on a large patch of land, about half of it in front of his house and half behind. Sitting on the front porch, he could look down a long, fairly steep slope of grass toward the road maybe a quarter-mile away. Calling it a road might have been a little on the optimistic side. Stone hadn't been put down in a couple of years, so it was mostly a dust cloud machine every time a car or truck went by. Fortunately, no one had a house too close to the road. Other than the mailboxes, it was pretty barren down there except for a stack of hay bales John had put down there a couple of weeks before for a farmer who never came to pick them up.

The road was to the north of the house. The west side of the property was a thicket of tall, thin trees, more than a few of them dead, with enough underbrush to make it hard to step into the woods except along a couple of paths that led to the little shack by the creek. John had vowed any number of times to get his chainsaw and hatchets out of the barn and take to those dead trees and brush. There was a lot of firewood back in there just waiting to be harvested.

To the east of the house was the long driveway that came up and forked off to a pull-in near the back door on one side and kept going on the main part back around to the old barn, which looked as if the slightest wind would have toppled it even though it was actually, despite its terrible appearance, just as solid as the day it was built, other than for a few boards missing here and there.

Phil and Dan, John's brothers, had come by from the other side of the holler with their two boys one fateful Sunday afternoon in early August. The heat was just ungodly that day, but the front porch was under a canopy of huge trees that kept it awfully pleasant. The iced tea Sarah had brewed that morning made it altogether pretty darned nice sitting out there, the five of those fellows barely saying much of anything but enjoying the company nonetheless. The two boys were about 12 and 15, just learning how to be lazy when the occasion merited, even though they fidgeted a little more than they needed to, given the heat and humidity.

Someone mentioned the thin line of dark clouds banding the horizon to the northwest. The line was solid, and that meant serious rain was on the way; but it would be at least several hours before the storms hit. There wasn't much point in doing anything other than sitting around, what with the heat and all.

Now, that slope in front of the house was just steep enough to keep the road out of sight. The tops of cars could be seen, but the road itself was hidden. That's why the men sitting on the porch didn't see what was happening down there right away. In fact, even after they saw it, they didn't really think about what they were looking at.

White smoke. It was pretty thick and spread out by the time Dan said something like, "What th' heck is that?" John stayed seated there for a second, and then he just flew out of his chair, ran down the steps and out a ways so he could see.

"Grass fire!" he yelled as he came running back up the hill, past the house, and on back to the barn. Dan and Phil weren't far behind. The boys just sat, not quite knowing what was going on.

When Dan came back, he had the chain saw in his hand. Phil wasn't far behind, lugging a splitting maul and several hatchets. "Come on!" Phil hollered at the boys as he went flying toward the tree line and down the hill.

Contrary to what some people might imagine, grass fires don't always move fast—at least they don't look like they are. Sometimes, they look like they're just crawling forward, but somehow they manage to be all over the place very quickly, forming a wide perimeter of black that glows along its edge. It's that width that's the problem. As the fire spreads, it becomes harder to contain it, even though it looks like it's manageable.

A grass fire can be patient. It'll crawl along feeding on the dried up, mashed down carpet of what used to be green lawn; but what it's actually doing is probing, looking for the real fuel that would turn it from a crawling, smoldering problem into a raging, towering monster.

Phil, Dan, and the two boys had about forty feet between where they were at the edge of the woods and where the grass was on fire in a twenty-foot wide swath working its way toward them. Dead trees, live trees, brush—they took everything down and threw it forward. The boys chopped and dragged the trees Dan was dropping, while Phil was using the splitting maul to the entirely inappropriate purpose of busting up the clay dirt and kicking it forward along with the grass and weeds in it.

As the fire pushed forward, the boys pushed toward it with all the fuel the forest would have otherwise provided to start a conflagration.

Sarah had joined in, hauling two buckets of water at a time down from the cistern behind the house. She didn't throw the water right on the fire; she knew better. That water was going behind the fuel the boys were pushing and on the sides of where the fire was going to be as it moved toward the trees.

A gust of wind came up, and nothing happened; then all of a sudden both boys jumped backward just as that wood and brush they'd been dragging and pushing burst into flame. If there'd been any more of those wind gusts, the embers would have gone right past were Dan was still sawing down trees; but fortunately, the fire stayed right where it was, feeding itself like a glutton.

And that's where it died. The men had fed it everything they could to deny it anything it might find behind that hog trough of wood, dead grass, and dry brush they'd pushed forward.

Once the fire on the line had died down, Sarah's last buckets of water put the thing to sleep for good. After quite a bit of stomping and kicking the remnants back into the blackened area where any remaining embers could do no harm, the crew trudged back up the hill toward the house.

It was along the way that they realized they were walking beside a strip of blackened grass going up the hill. Once they got up far enough, they could see John: he was sitting on the ground maybe ten feet in front of the porch, drenched in sweat, with a shovel stabbed into the ground beside him.

There was John, there was a swath about eight feet wide of black grass, and between the two of them was a ditch about two feet across, a shovel blade deep, and some fifteen feet long.

That's where John had made his stand. And all by himself, that's where John had saved his house.

After everyone stopped shaking and sweating, Sarah drove into town. She went to White's Grocery and bought quite a bit of beer and enough slices of ham to feed an army. She wasn't in the mood to cook, but she figured everyone was in the mood to eat and drink, so beer and ham sandwiches would do fine. She got the boys some bottles of Fanta grape soda, and everyone was going to like Hostess cream-filled cupcakes for dessert.

The storms finally got there in the late afternoon. The rain was one of those all night affairs, the kind that start hard and just keep on pouring.

Those big old front porches are great when it's raining. The whole family can sit and watch the showers come down and stay dry as a bone. Staring out at the deluge, John grinned and said, "See? If we'd have just waited, all this rain would've taken care of the fire." Everyone grunted something sort of like a weary laugh.

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Dark Arts Politics: Firebreaking
Part 1  ·  Part 2

Dark Arts Politics: The Beginning

The next post here at The Dark Wraith Forums will be the first in a new series entitled "Dark Arts Politics." Articles in the series will objectively describe what are commonly called "dirty tricks" and related political activities. Topical subjects will include push polling, false opposition support, challenge lists, media manipulation, and other tactics, some proactive, some reactive, some legal, some not. Even though this is the stuff of a degraded political landscape far from the ideals of fair, decent, and honorable campaigning, I make no apology for writing and publishing the articles.

This series will not be favored by everyone. In fact, it is sure to offend those who hold hope of a better nation, one where candidates for public office can set forth their positions openly in reasoned and dignified ways, allowing their opponents the same right of honorable discourse unfettered by the shadows of lies, intimidation, and fear. This series is not for those who believe that candidates always win by taking the high road against vile opponents; neither is this series for those who believe it is better to lose than to take the low road against a hateful opponent who has no problem with vicious campaign tactics. It is certainly not for those who hope for a better future of political activity in America. This is a chronicle of how to survive and flourish in a degraded land. It is not, however, an invitation to engage such an awful place.

To give readers a feel for what Dark Arts Politics has to offer, this series will begin with an article describing a specific tactic I call "firebreaking." The second article will step back and lay out important prior matters, including technical issues of organization and action. Subsequent articles will return to specifics. All descriptions of activities should be viewed as entirely academic: readers are at their own risk in actually transforming words into deeds.

If you choose to go from reading about dirty tricks to actually trying some of them, you face legal risks if what you do is contrary to applicable local, state, or federal law. Improperly executed, your efforts damage your own candidate's chances of winning. You also face risks from the opposition, such risks running the gamut from mere exposure of you on through to physical violence against your property, your person, and your friends and family. In other words, if you actually take the giant step from learning to applying, you could go to jail, you could get beaten, and people you know and love could get seriously harmed. Yes, it's that dangerous.

Even if you survive a campaign in which you have been a practitioner of dirty tricks—even if your candidate wins in part due to what you've done—you could get burned long afterward. Statutes of limitations leave lots of time for sore losers to scream bloody murder until someone hears them. The risks are real, and retribution can be shocking in how disproportionate it may seem.

Fortunately for the continuation of our spiral into the degraded American political landscape of the 21st Century, some people don't want to live forever anyway.


The Dark Wraith will soon publish the first article of Dark Arts Politics.

Special Blog Post: The Coding Hack's Corner, Issue #2

This is the second issue in The Dark Wraith Forums series on tips and helpful advice for bloggers. Issue #1 provided some useful directions on making HTML tags and special character codes. In this issue, a very narrow matter will be addressed: backing up your template. Although the publishing platform called Blogger will be used for the example, the routine can be applied to blogs on just about any service, provided you know how to get to the screen that displays the code for your blog template.

The instructions that follow are for Windows users. Follow them, and even if your template is completely destroyed by accident or by the incompetence of your publishing service (and no specific service will be named here, but Blogger comes to mind as an example, although no specific publishing service will be named here), you'll be able to simply and easily rectify what would otherwise be a total catastrophe. So without further introductory prattle, here's how to back up your template.

◊ Go to the screen where you manage your blog.

◊ Find the tab for managing your template and click on it.

◊ Your template screen should now appear.

◊ Right-click in the template screen. A drop-down menu will appear; on that menu, click on "Select All."

◊ The contents of the template screen should all highlight.

◊ Right-click again. When the drop-down menu appears, click on "Copy."

◊ Now, open the ancient Windows word processor called Notepad. (That's right: Notepad. Don't argue; just do it.)

Start → Programs → Accessories → Notepad.
◊ Once you've launched Notepad, right-click in the blank screen area. When the drop-down menu appears, click on "Paste."

◊ Your entire template should appear exactly as it looked in the template management screen from which you just exported it.

◊ Save the file.

◊ Just type index2006-07-06 or whatever date it is in YYYY-MM-DD format (with thanks to Dr. Bong for suggesting that variation on my own unfortunately backward date naming method). Notepad will put the .txt extension on the file, which is what you want it to do. Writing the file name this way will allow you to go back through and know when you've made back-ups of your template. If you need to recover your blog template from a deletion or from some coding experiment you've done, you'll know exactly what index file version was your last good one.


◊ WARNING: Do NOT under any circumstances use Word or WordPerfect or any other high-end word processor for saving this file. Use plain old Notepad.


You now have a back-up of your template; so no matter what happens to the template on your publishing service, you'll be able to make everything right again in a matter of a few minutes. If you ever do need to publish the back-up, follow these simple steps:

◊ Open that back-up index file you created in Notepad.
◊ Right-click in the Notepad screen where all the text of the template is displayed.
◊ On the drop-down menu that pops up, choose "Select All."
◊ Right-click again.
◊ On the drop-down menu that pops up, select "Copy."
◊ Go into your template management screen.
◊ Remove any vestiges of the corrupted template code that might still be there.
◊ Right-click anywhere in template screen area (which, again, should have no old code still there because you've removed it).
◊ On the drop-down menu that appears, choose "Paste."
◊ Your back-up code should appear in the screen, and you can now republish the template.


That's it for this edition of "The Coding Hacker's Corner." Click here for a printable pdf version of this article.

More issues in this series will follow in the future. Until then, always keep this in mind: It's Bill Gates's universe; we're all just hackers in it.


The Dark Wraith wants to help folks be good hackers in it.

Special Graphic Post: July 4, 2006

Special Blog Post: Blog Maintenance Coming Soon

As an early warning to you who frequent this quiet tavern on the outskirts of the Blogosphere, this week is moving week for The Dark Wraith Forums. Specifically, your host will be moving this Weblog from Blogger to Movable Type. The journey will be perilous.

I anticipate two major hurdles. First is the architecture of this Website. It is highly customized, the product of many months of deliberate work that took it from very simple to stupidly complex. The index file is literally a mass of creative coding that renders all kinds of interesting, useful, or just visually unusual effects: here you can find graphical tricks like a layered header, a scripted object to deliver the main feed for a news wire service, and a nice implementation of AJAX so sidebar content can be updated on the fly without ever having to recode the template, itself. The problem is that blog services try their best to make everything easy so a blogger's focus can be on content instead of code. In fact, the word "powerful" when applied to a blog service almost invariably means "We do all the hard stuff for you, and we do lots and lots of neat tricks you'll really like."

Whatever. I'll write my own neat tricks, thank you, and I'll need the publishing service to stand aside and serve only as a means of updating content in the main column. The danger is that a new publishing service is going to have no use whatsoever for all of my customized code: it's going to expect to see one of its stock templates, complete with all of its code for calling all of its features.

In other words, no small part of the transfer is going to be an exercise in saying to the new publishing service, "Here's my index file. You're going to eat it, and you're going to like it." The risk is that the new publishing service, upon hearing the culinary butch talk, is going to respond in kind by saying, "Bite me."

The second problem, somewhat related to the first, is the comments here at The Dark Wraith Forums. In my theory of blogging, the comments are an integral part of the overall content. That's why you see the comments right in the blog's main page, itself, rather than as a pop-up window or as content that appears only when you're off the main page. My greatest concern is that the transfer is going to move the articles but leave their attendant comments behind because of the widespread coding theory that only the articles are "true" content. Even though I've integrated the comments into the primary architecture of the index page, I am deeply concerned that another publishing service just won't have a place for the articles' comments to land in the transfer, especially considering how I've customized this blog to put the comments where they are. I'm almost to the point of creating a completely new, mirror image of this blog as a test site to see what happens during a transfer. That would be a whole lot like work, but it might be the only way to put my mind at ease, or it might be the only way I can learn how to trick the system into moving everything just the way I want everything moved.

One way or the other, I will be moving; and as I promised, I'll look back long enough to rip Google and its Blogger service a new one... provided I haven't gone to my grave having a heart attack when the move doesn't happen as planned.

In a somewhat related vein, I am developing an architecture theory for my new Website, Truth2008.com/Truth2008.org, although I am genuinely unsure about what publishing platform is going to most effectively render what I want, which is a newspaper-style format with multiple articles visible (in newspaper-like, multiple-column arrangement), but with the blog feature of commenting available on any article. Even if I were to like Drupal—which I don't because it tends to get brutally slow as an implementation becomes content-heavy—I don't think I can get it to render the visual layout I want, at least not without some seriously fancy coding that would take months to perfect. If any of you have seen an example of a content management system that fits the description of what I desire, please point me in a direction; otherwise, I'm going to end up writing the code equivalent of a new invention of the wheel that I probably wouldn't have to.

So there you are: the plans for the coming week are on the table, although these plans might take more than a week to implement. If things get ugly, you'll know it. Don't worry: even if the blog turns into a total mess, I'll figure out how to fix what my incompetence has wrought. It might require human sacrifices, but there's an oversupply of neo-cons waiting to serve some useful purpose anyway.

Barring that avenue, I can always find some Right-wing economists. They're pretty easy to capture: all I have to do is put out some stale doughnuts under the picture of President Bush in the faculty lounge area, and they'll come running, figuring that they'll be safe from reality as long as they're grazing under the watchful eye of their hero.

They won't know what hit 'em.



The Dark Wraith moves forward with his plans.