The emperor at war

Wreckage of the downed Osprey (had a "hard landing"), after the crew destroyed it, via Defence-Blog.

That US bombing raid in Yemen on Sunday, first military action of the Trump presidency, killing at least 14 people including an 8-year-old girl who happens to be an American citizen, not that I care what kind of passport she was carrying (or who her father was), and a US commando as well, made me wonder if we were already seeing some kind of collapse in our military's ability to do anything right, akin to what happened to it when George W. Bush was president. It just seemed like a much worse cock-up than anything they'd perpetrated in recent months or years, correct me if I'm wrong. Central Command denies that any civilians were killed.

Sure enough, reporting in the Guardian (Spencer Ackerman, Jason Burke, and Julian Borger) makes it clear that it was an action the Obama administration had refused to approve, for whatever reasons:

Bibi guns redux

Recall how Israel has its own terrorist cult of Persian killers holed up at Camp Ashraf in eastern Iraq, from which they sally out from time to time to assassinate Iranian physicists? Formerly the pet terrorists of Saddam Hussein and taken over by Israeli management when Hussein no longer had time to take care of them?

Not quite. It turns out (Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker via Juan Cole) that there was an interval when they belonged to US—me and my government—in the form of the Joint Special Operations Command, which was training them in God alone knows what kind of counterinsurgency technique at a secret site in Nevada during the Bush regime, even though they were an organiation on the US terrorist watch list with six murders of US citizens notched on their belts.

That was pretty illegal of them! But we all like to look forward, not backward, don't we, except when we're rubbernecking at whistleblowers who may have broken a law or two in the course of unveiling large-scale crimes against humanity. If you know what I mean.

Iranian troops in the Persepolis years, in historical costume, Teheran 1971. Photo by Associated Press.