The attacks had been relentless for several months. The GOP candidates had “gone to the consultants” and negative ad after negative ad quickly followed. The Romney-Gingrich War was raging. Dignity was found slumped in a barber's chair. Good taste went down in a revolving door. Honor never had a chance.

One ad showed Don Mitt’s eldest son driving through a toll booth without paying. Romney protested that the car had a Speedpass, but the damage was done. Another spot depicted one of Mitt’s boys in Moe Greene’s Utah hotel, arm-in-arm with a pair of cocktail waitresses. “Two at a time,” the closing graphic damningly read.

"This business will get out of control."
– The Hunt for Red October 

In the last few years diplomatic pressures and economic sanctions have been imposed to convince Iran to allow international inspection of its nuclear research facilities. A number of states have also pursued a violent clandestine campaign of bombings and assassinations that have killed scores of Iranians, including nuclear scientists.  These attacks are almost certainly directed by Israeli, Saudi, and US intelligence services. They may also be acts of war.

In recent weeks Iran has decried terrorism around the world (somewhat paradoxically, to be sure), put up a clumsy plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador, boasted of its missile strength, and briefly seized the British embassy in Tehran – an act done not by students as with the US embassy in 1979, but by toughs of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).  Most recently, the IRGC went on alert, ostensibly to brace for more attacks inside the country.

The Coen Brothers

Starring: Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Barry Pepper

(This is an interpretive essay rather than a film review. Accordingly, there is detail that will almost certainly give away key parts of the film.)

When I heard that the Coen brothers were remaking the 1969 John Wayne oater True Grit, I was puzzled. Which way were Joel and Ethan going with this one: a satire of the western genre, which they are eminently capable of, or a serious reworking of the film with dark ironic themes, which they are cuttingly expert at. Their True Grit is very much the latter. It is a harrowing journey into the murderous frontier of 1879 Arkansas and the foreboding Choctaw Nation to its west. It is also one of the finest westerns ever made.

I know it was you, Fredo.

That Osama bin Laden has been living comfortably in Abbottabad and evidently directing al Qaeda from there – all within earshot of a Pakistani military facility – has been a tremendous embarrassment to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), but it comes as no surprise to Indian or many other intelligence services, though realization in Washington has been too long in coming. Paradoxically, US intelligence's recent success in Abbottabad has underscored a long-running failure.

ISI has long been complicit in aiding al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, Lashkar-i-Taiba, Jaish-i-Mohammed, and a slew of other militant groups operating along the Af-Pak line and in Kashmir. ISI organized Sipah-i-Sahaba to intimidate and kill Shia and Christians inside its country.

After weeks of indecision, the NATO powers and a few Arab states have taken action against the Kadafi regime and its armed forces. NATO aircraft and missiles have devastated loyalist air defenses, troops concentrations, and supply convoys. Rebel forces have been heartened and have even made some counteroffensives out of their enclave in Benghazi.

NATO resolve is not strong, but an agreement today (March 24) will likely guarantee that the air campaign continues. Abandoning it now or reducing it to a no-fly zone only would be a severe embarrassment to the alliance and lead to lasting mistrust within it. Furthermore, it might leave Libya in a murderous stalemate or an unstable partition ever on the brink of renewed war.

The Libyan uprising once seemed sure to follow the pattern in Tunisia and Egypt where longstanding autocrats stepped down after large popular demonstrations. Colonel Kadafi, however, has rallied his forces and is quashing the opposition. This has put policymakers in the region and around the world in a dilemma between their preference for democracy and their reluctance to intervene. There are a few actions that can be embarked upon, but which is optimal and who if anyone will take the lead?

The Military Situation
Early reports of large-scale defections of the Libyan military over to the rebel side are evidently untrue or at least greatly overstated. Kadafi has retained control over sufficient numbers of trained soldiers to launch successful counteroffensives from Tripoli. Loyalist forces have demonstrated a decided competence in logistics and tactical movement and also in the use of coordinated air power and artillery.

Four stars out of five

Director: Delbert Mann

Starring: Richard Thomas, Ernest Borgnine, Patricial Neal

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078753/

I know remakes are usually not very good.

I know made-for-TV movies are usually not very good.

I know Richard Thomas was the cloyingly wholesome John Boy on the 70s TV show The Waltons.

I know Ernest Borgnine can be rather hammy.

Nonetheless, this is a great film and every bit as good as the famed 1930s version by Lewis Milestone. And yes I know that's near sacrilege.

The story is of course that of idealistic German schoolboys coarsened, maimed, and killed during the First World War. The remake has the advantage of having a leisurely pace and natural performances -- not the overstated acting of the 1930s and earlier, when facial expressions and bodily motions were tailored toward theater audiences far away and not toward those watching on the screen, small or large.

The remarkable rising against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has roused interest throughout the world. Interest is especially keen in Iran, where official statements and propaganda have been aimed at the so-called Arab Street for many years now. Egyptians did not need a foreign agit-prop campaign to know Mubarak was brutal and corrupt, that he had acquiesced to various US and Israeli policies, and that their futures were not bright. Nonetheless, Iran will seek to take advantage of the new situation, and interaction between the two countries will be critical for years to come.

The Conflict With Sunni-Arab States

Director: Jerry Schatzberg

Writers: Joan Didion and Gregory Dunne

Starring: Al Pacino, Kitty Winn

Four stars out of five

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067549/

This tough look at young heroin addicts on the Upper West Side of New York made Pacino a star before he did The Godfather the following year. The story goes that the studio did not want Pacino to be Michael Corleone, then they saw him in this movie. Unfortunately – and inexplicably – the film did not do a great deal for Kitty Winn, who gives a very powerful and sympathetic performance as Pacino's accomplice/girlfriend.

Growing up in Washington – the very heart of Redskin territory – it wasn’t easy to like Don Meredith. Nothing personal, it was just that too often he hit Bob Hayes long or handed off to Dan Reeves, who then went on to win the game. It was Don Meredith versus Sonny Jurgensen back then and the two QB greats made the Redskin-Cowboy rivalry one of the greatest in the NFL.

I came to like Don Meredith when he became part of the Monday Night Football broadcast crew, where he and Gif and Cosell made the first day of the work week something to look forward to. He skillfully countered Cosell’s pretentious diction with rural witticisms. It was all natural to him. Not like the practiced Good Ol’ Boyisms of today’s broadcasters, who, whether they know it or not, are imitating Dandy Don. They might just be taking cues from producers and reading “spontaneous” remarks from sheets offered up by consultants. Seems every other football broadcast team has a designated-Meredith now, but few if any come through the way he did.

(Julius Caesar’s letter to the citizens/subjects regarding frontier checkpoints)

Salutations, esteemed fellow Romans!

I write you from Gaul, site of another of our many legions’ encampments around the world. The auguries tell me that there are growing objections, both in the Forum and Senate, to the system of searches upon travelers coming into our territories from barbarian regions along our expansive periphery, especially southern Arabia and Mesopotamia.

Securitas Republicae, a part of Rome’s government akin to our legions, has ordered these searches to better safeguard our freedoms from those who hate us for those freedoms. This, I’m sure you will agree, will improve the safety and wellbeing of the citizens of our Republic, ignorant and churlish and ungrateful though they be. [Strike that last part? -JC]

Director: Richard Lester

Starring: You know full well

Four stars out of five.

Revisiting this film might make you think that it's going to be dull and dated, but AHDN retains its freshness and energy. The film is semi-documentary as it traces the four lads taking the train from the North (presumably Liverpool, though none of the film was filmed in the North) to London where they are to perform on the telly. (Late in the film, Ringo derisively calls one local, "Southerner!"

Along the way they have light-hearted fun with the Older Generation. On the train, the guys have a barney with a middle-aged man who boasts that he had served in the war. Ringo retorts, "I'll bet you're sorry you won!" Later, British and German soldiers are seen as extras in a stage production of a war story, suggesting that a young generation saw it as a hackneyed form of entertainment (a sentiment later expressed: “I saw a film today, Oh boy . . . The English army had just won the war”).

Director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst (referred to a few times in Inglourious Basterds)

French and German, with English subtitles

Five stars out of five

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022017/

Events in Chile reminded me of a film I saw a while back about a mine cave-in and rescue in France, near the Franco-German border. Kameradschaft is set a few years after the end of WW1, which is referred to a few times and which establishes a context of bitter resentments – in some. The film is based on an actual incident that took place about ten years before WW1 began.

Director: Monte Hellman

Stars: James Taylor (of "Fire and Rain"), Dennis Wilson (Beach Boy drummer), Laurie Bird, Warren Oates

Four stars out of five

When Two-Lane Blacktop was released, Esquire proclaimed it Movie of the Year, featured a photo representing the film on the cover, and printed the screenplay inside.  The hype was at once publicity boon and curse. I don't think it did well in the theaters but over the years it became a cult movie.  I saw it when it came out, liked it, but found it a little empty.  Nonetheless, it was haunting and it stuck with me.  A second viewing 39 years later has not changed my view greatly, though I better appreciate the purpose of the film's bleakness.

Pakistan has closed the legendary Khyber Pass through which flow critical NATO supply convoys. The stated reason for the closing, now in its fifth day, is in retaliation for an attack inside Pakistani territory by American forces on a Taliban band that had sought safe haven in Pakistan.

Regardless of any past understanding between the US and Pakistan, and regardless of where international law stands on the matter of hot pursuit, Pakistan has retaliated. Its move – whether temporary or not – has momentous implications for the US conduct of the war in Afghanistan and indeed for the geopolitics of the region.

I just saw that a character actor named Joe Mantell died. I didn't recognize the name, and his face looks only dimly familiar. But Joe Mantell spoke two of the most famous lines in movie history: "Whadya feel like doin' tonight, Marty?" and "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

Link

Their moral passion spent most of its force in self-accusing, self-denial and self-scourging. They began by howling their sins from the mourners’ bench; they came to their end, many of them, in the supreme immolation of battle.

– HL Mencken

While thinking (more) about Terry Jones’s efforts to win friends and damage foreign policy, it came to me. Once again, HL Mencken gave me inspiration. Yes readers, while reading his “Puritanism as a Literary Force” it came to me and with such blinding clarity that I had to reach for my Ray Bans.

At first I thought the solution lay in Terry and the Pyrotes following the grim example set by Jim Jones (any relation?) and his People’s Temple – and go off to Guyana, I mean. But I decided the answer lay in a different change of venue. Instead of Florida, why not burn the Koran in Afghanistan, which by chance has a sizable Islamic population, as I have recently learned. After all, judging by the spirited demonstrations I see there, he has evidently excited great interest already and there will be little need of the media attention that has come about – through no action of his, of course.

If you’re looking for insight on Terry Jones and his mission of burning the Koran and getting the Islamic world to despise us even more than it already does, I recommend HL Mencken. The caustic essayist of the early twentieth century was a great writer and a jaundiced observer of American life. So jaundiced was he that sometimes I wonder how he avoided slipping into a coma. I find him inspirational.

Consider Mencken’s observations on the Religious Right of his day. “Any literate plowhand, if the Holy Spirit inflames him, is thought to be fit to preach.” His theological training was held in a “single building in its bare pasture lot, and its faculty of half-idiot pedagogues and brokendown preachers.” Hmmmm.... As best as I can tell, that plowhand in Gainesville has never even had the benefit of half-idiot pedagogues and brokendown preachers. He acquired his theological learning by watching Jimmy Swaggart on the TV and taking copious notes.

A review of Keith L. Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America's Military Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Over the last twenty years, the US has engaged in wars in Iraq (twice), the Balkans, Somalia, and Afghanistan. It has done so with a fearsome military that has availed itself of technological advancements since the seventies. Shimko looks at this “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) in the context of military change over the years and the recent wars the US has been in.

The US military went hi-tech before the term was widely used. Over the last forty years, precision-guided munitions (chiefly those delivered by airpower), surveillance systems, communications equipment, and other technologies have been adopted and their lethal capabilities have been demonstrated in several conflicts. This RMA has offered the promise of shorter wars that use smaller forces and inflict far fewer civilian casualties than in previous wars. If that last part seems dubious, compare Baghdad in 2003 and Berlin fifty-eight years earlier. Baghdad was pockmarked; Berlin was flattened.

Is this RMA truly a revolution? That is, do these changes constitute a military revolution comparable to the one effected by the French when they fielded huge armies against enemies of the Revolution or the one Germany set loose on Poland and France in World War Two? Shimko believes it does but gives fair treatment of those who disagree – so fair that a reader might come to agree with the other school. But that debate is one for conclaves at political science meetings, not for policy makers or concerned citizens.

Bloody hell . . . Blud-dee hell! Those impertinent colonials have gotten their way and forced me to step down. But if they expect me to hand over my sword, like that nit Cornwallis at Yorktown, to some southern governor from another part of our Empire, well then, they’ve another thing coming, don’t they. Too bloody right they do!

I’ve already had to abase myself before the very politicians who cashed BP checks in their hundreds and will again soon unless I miss my guess. Where's Guy Fawkes when America needs him? In better times we’d send our fleet up the Potomac and do to that insufferable town of Washington just what Fighting George Cockburn did in 1814 when the colonials were supporting Bonaparte and the Frenchies. The freedom fries and sherry would be on me, I can tell you that.

The proposed spy swap between the US and Russia has hit a snag. At the last minute, just as the pass off was about to take place at an undisclosed location and not the sentimental favorites of Checkpoint Charley or the Glienicke Bridge, the Russians made a new demand. They are insisting that LeBron James sign with the Russian national team. More on this fast breaking story as the cheap puns occur to me.

“Look at it from our perspective,” said an anonymous Russian intelligence colonel. “We’re giving up several people with proven records of delivering intelligence to the your CIA – All Stars!. And what do we get in return? Ten or eleven rookies who got picked up before delivering us anything important, such as . . . oh say, the [Redacted] you guys use to track our nuclear subs.”

General Stanley McChrystal, visionary commander of our legions in Afghanistan, has been recalled to Washington after some incautious words regarding his civilian superiors in a prominent journal of military science called Rolling Stone – doubtless homage to "Rolling Thunder," the storied air campaign over North Vietnam.

McChrystal’s recall from the head of his troops could not have come at a less auspicious time. The general’s brilliant campaigns throughout Afghanistan over the last year have driven the Taliban foe from the field of battle and into a desperate enclave in Kandahar, where they are surrendering in their thousands to our forces. Everywhere, the locals are cheering on the Yanks as they drive through liberated villages and head for Kandahar and victory.

The fiscal crisis rocking Greece will be soon occur in other European countries. In a few years, it will occur in the US, where government spending and the national debt have risen in an effort to counter the recession. President Obama and economic advisor Paul Volcker have expressed grave concern over the national debt and signaled that deep budget cuts will be needed.

Just where the cuts will come is unknown, but for many citizens and observers, reduced military presence around the world will seem a likely place for the budget axe to fall. For a number of reasons, however, a marked reduction in US commitments around the world is unlikely.

The economic downturn has brought a lot of changes, few if any for the better. Old assurances and comforts are gone and new situations and adjustments are everywhere – even in a sub shop along Route 66 out here in New Mexico, between the downmarket stores of the university area and the tony shops of the Nob Hill neighborhood.

I ordered an Italian cold cut sub (a favorite, this) and shuffled off to my right as various meats, condiments, and adornments were neatly placed between the bread slices as my meal made its way down the line. Lunch was looking good. The counter fellow putting it all together seemed out of place somehow and I took note of a few things.