"General Hamlet:" One thing we know: for whatever reason, Howie Kurtz really, really doesn't like Clark. His aversion to the retired general takes him to the point of dismissing Clark's military record as consisting of "some stars" and (after describing the results of a poll showing that Clark's entry into the race increased the number of undecided primary voters) sneering that Clark's "core constituency" is "[p]eople who can't make up their minds."

That seems, as Howie might say, a stretch.

 
The worst is yet to come? The WaPo notes that, after the long decline in crime rates in the 1990s, gang crime is on the rise again in the nation's capitol, led by MS-13, a street gang with contacts amongst El Salvador's FMLN. Meanwhile, the Washington Monthly says that Administration policy -- from calling up police-heavy reserves to wiping out federal funds for local police -- has set the stage for a criminal resurgence.

 
Keep them bloggies rolling: The long-missed Daily Review, one of the best liberal blogs out there, has moved into new quarters at The Beltway Bandit. Check 'er out.

 
"We're moving out:" As expected, capping weeks of speculation, Gen. Wesley Clark (U.S. Army, Ret.) announced his bid for President of the United States today. The speech was carried live on C-SPAN 3, and can be accessed via the cable channel's website.

Gen. Clark's speech focused primarily on economic issues, in an evident effort to soothe the fears of some Democratic insiders that Clark would be unable to hold his own outside of foreign policy debates. More on this as reactions develop.

 
The good ol' days: I've little to say about California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante's late affiliation with MEChA, the "Movimiento Estudiantil de Chicanos de Aztlan," not because MEChA is a harmless student organization, but because Bustamante, a colorless career bureaucrat if that state ever had one, obviously has a disinclination to the radical racial separatism espoused by that organization. (For the record, we first reported MEChA's questionable on-campus activities last year.)

Nonetheless, it's interesting to note that MEChA has appropriated the Mexcia "lifestyle" as its own. For example, when discussing the use of Montezuma as a "cultural ambassador" (a non-mascot team mascot) at San Diego State University, MEChA had this to say:

MEChA [and the Native American Student Alliance] call for the complete and immediate abolishment of any human depiction of Montezuma or Mexica culture. ... [T]he university's failed attempt to accurately portray Montezuma has resulted in more disrespect and mockery of the Mexica leader [Montezuma]. ... [Montezuma actor] Alberto Martinez Jr. has been coached and "educated" by scholars who have never been practitioners of the culture. They have amassed their "knowledge" through books and other academia-type sources [sic], which are not always culturally accurate.

Note that formulation: factually accurate, yes; culturally accurate, no. But those facts, no matter how uncongenial to the MEChAnistas, show a culture that, were one to adopt its trappings in the modern age, would rival even Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union of Stalin for sheer brutality.

By the time Cortes and his tiny band of soldiers arrived in the lands of the Aztecs, the Mexica kingdom of Montezuma (properly Mocteuzma) II was in a decline marked by an extravagant and profligate barbarity. Mocteuzma II, leading a force of 60,000 men, captured and sacrificed over 5,000 enemies to mark his coronation as king, following a practice that had been laid down for generations. Commoners (macehualtin) were effectively slaves, forced to build massive palaces for the thousands of idle nobles who flooded the capital Tenochtitlan; when not working, they were liable at any time to be tortured or put to death for offenses as serious as looking a noble (pipiltin) in the eye, or as trivial as drinking pulque -- a kind of bathtub tequila -- in an attempt to escape the horrors of their everyday lives.

Human sacrifice as a religious tool of statecraft was deeply ingrained in Aztec society; the rulers of Mexica drove out all vestiges of the cult of Quetzalcoatl because he forbade human sacrifices. (Quetzalcoatl remained in certain outposts of empire as a kind of subordinate deity to Huitzilopochtli, where the peaceful sage was transformed into a bloodthirsty weigher of sins.) When the eminence gris of the empire, Tlacaellel, consecrated a new temple to the god Huitzilopochtli (the Hummingbird of the South) some 80,000 victims were ripped apart by Tlacaellel and an army of priests in a four-day orgy of methodical violence, their bodies and hearts left to tumble down the stone steps of the temple. So terrible was the bloodletting that the population of the city fled in panic, leaving only the priests and kings at their terrible work.

Years later, as the empire, besieged on all sides by ancient enemies, staggered and toppled, priestly sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli ran at a frenetic pace. Enemies were sacrificed to feed the god; children were slaughtered to ensure the rains. (The native Mexican historian Ixtlilxochitl estimates that one out of five commoner children were sacrificed in the deathly final days of the Aztecs, but even the lower estimates made by historians suggest that literally tens of thousands of children had their hearts pulled out on the obsidian slabs of the temple.) Even though priests by law numbered an overwhelming one-fifth of the empire's population, there were enough sacrifices to keep them constantly busy -- hearts were torn out, victims were burned on massive braziers, and the steps of the temples literally ran with rivers of blood. Small wonder that Cortez, commanding a scant few hundred men with little weaponry and no support from Spain, could destroy an empire already falling to its demise. Had the conquistadores not arrived, the Mexica and MEChA's beloved Mocteuzma II would have most likely lasted but a few more years before revolution and self-immolation laid them beneath the jungle's growth.

This is the past so proudly claimed by MEChA; it is as if Italy proudly cited the Borgias as exemplars of the Italian spirit, if the Spanish pined for the days of Torquemada, if Japan spoke fondly of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Before anyone rushes to defend MEChA -- not Bustamante -- against the charges of racial separatism, one should ask that organization exactly which acts of Mocteuzma II, which facets of the Mexica civilization, they intend to emulate -- and where they draw the line between "factual" and "cultural" accuracy.

 
Bootnotes: Just a few random thoughts that I haven't had time to synthesize into a coherent piece.

Flytrap:

The "flytrap" strategy, advanced recently by some commentators and persons with Administration ties (including Gen. Sanchez), posits that having troops in Iraq will draw out terrorists from the region, allowing American soldiers to fight them on foreign soil. But even if jihadists are flocking to Baghdad and Tikrit, it doesn't follow that, as Gen. Sanchez put it, "This will prevent the American people from having to go through their attacks back in the United States." (This is not, it should be noted, by any means the same argument made by the President when he called Iraq the "central front" in the war on terror.)

In a war without a front, where enemy troops travel by commercial air, it's absurd to think that terrorists from Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia or Europe will necessarily gravitate to Iraq, or that the presence of American troops in Baghdad constitutes a front that terrorists must pass through on the way to the United States. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein has indisputably made things better for Iraqis in the long term, and as long as America can stay the course in Iraq it will probably help stabilize the region, but it cannot be plausibly maintained that the war in Iraq was a war to stop terrorism as we primarily perceive it -- i.e., Islamist groups such as al'Qaeda.

Old Europe, New Iraq:

Iraq is not in need of transitory stabilization, or multilateral nation-building. It is now one of the Provinciae Imperii Americani; expecting the United Nations and "old Europe" to secure what is a de facto American territory is akin to Rome asking the Parthians to help suppress the revolt of the Arverni Gauls. (To be fair, though some might see parallels between Bush and Marcus Lincinius Crassus, a Security Council veto is hardly equal to the sporadic but brutal warfare between Rome and Persia -- though the Weekly Standard does rather overheatedly describe French participation in Iraq as "a threat more lethal than Baathism and bin Ladenism combined.")

Few foreign nations have any interest in taking bullets in the interest of American hegemony, and thus their proposals try to get America out of Iraq as quickly as possible, a tactic that is patently unacceptable to American negotiators and which could only result in the total collapse of Iraqi civil authority.

Boots on the ground, feets t' follow:

Individual soldiers cannot be indefinitely stationed in Iraq; units must be regularly rotated out of the immediate theatre to maintain fitness for duty, and soldiers have to eventually be returned to the States. Sustaining a long-term commitment like Iraq is different than a short-term projection of power (in which a large number of soldiers are briefly deployed for warfighting) or the maintenance of power in a largely peaceful environment (such as South Korea, Japan, or Cold War Europe), and force strength estimations have not taken into account the vast number of troops required to occupy an Iraq for years at a time.

Unfortunately, these troops are of the "boots and wheels" variety, part of the pre-RMA, mud-and-blood conception of warfare that the current SecDef has worked so hard to break down. All the acronyms of postmodern war -- TLAMs, SOFs, and UAVs -- have proven to be of little help when we have to secure a province street by street, house by house.

A great many active soldiers are still covered by stop-loss (which keeps critical-skill soldiers on duty after their official tour expires), and as that program phases out over the next few months, the military will have to rely on new recruits to fill front-line positions in Iraq. The Marines can take over some of duties, as can British troops, but both of those options come with their own chain-of-command problems -- indeed, interservice rivalries can be even more damaging than language and nationality barriers. National Guard and Reserve units can also paper over the most obvious gaps (and 174,403 such soldiers are currently deployed domestically and abroad, with the tours of many extended beyond the normal twelve months), but continuing to mobilize part-time soldiers will result in political hits the Administration has shown itself largely unwilling to take.

As a Weekly Standard article notes, the current Administration, as much as the last one, is to blame for the reduced manpower of the armed forces:

After the 2000 election, a bipartisan delegation of pro-defense members of Congress trekked to Austin to appeal for increased spending and a larger force. To preserve his tax cut plan, the president rejected the appeal: The administration would not "throw money" at the Pentagon, declared White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

The current and previous Administrations have tried to create pennywise proconsulates, empires on the cheap, with expectedly dismal results.