Welcome to the fourteenth day of Blogtober, where we waste my time and yours (but mostly mine) with doing more work to ignore NaNoWriMo through blogging than it would have taken to just, you know, ignore it maybe…
As I keep reminding everyone by reposting the same damn intro every entry, I get reminded that I did sort-of commit myself to one topic right off the bat; to quote:
Heck, at least one piece will be how what happens November 6th is going to impact the Modern Age of Piracy…
Funny, that I used the word “commit” to discuss this…
To be honest, I figured this was going to be an easy one; I pretty well knew how November 6th was going to be, thanks to a certain core faith I held, and reading lots of Nate Silver’s posts since May, so getting the piece up and ready should have been a slam dunk. Unfortunately, the last person to call anything like this a “slam dunk” was George Tenet, and we all saw how that turned out…
It seemed so easy, I thought; Obama was going to continue with coalition actions, using Combined Task Force 151 as a model for further activities, wrapping up Somalia and getting ready for dealing with actions elsewhere, such as off Nigeria where actions have recently gotten more heated, and the waters of Indonesia which has seen a rise in actions. And with the announced basing of 2,500 Marines in Australia announced last year, the odds of Indonesia going the way of Somalia seemed remote. Nice simple piece, write it in my sleep…
Sleep; I remember sleep…
Funny, talking about “sleeping with” here…
OK, I delayed the “but” long enough here; speaking of “bu-”
[SFX: Getting slapped for the delays]
Okay. So what went wrong? The Petraeus Affair, that’s what. Yes, I am calling it an “Affair” without the slightest irony whatsoever; anyone using the word “Scandal” wishes it were a lot bigger than it was, in order to justify their worldview that they are on the way out thanks to nefarious dealings against them as opposed to, oh… say, a bad message for the wrong audience, poorly delivered…
The thing of it is, this is an ongoing story that takes more twists than a sloop in the middle of a Cat 5 hurricane; by the time I post this, some new facet will reveal itself and put everything stated before in an entirely different context. And the steam which is running the boiler for this craft does not look to be petering out any time soon; we could be dealing with revelations throughout the rest of the month the way this is going.
And until that plays out, a major component of American power projection can’t be honestly assessed from without, and maybe not from within as well. Even if it all comes to a tidy end right now the way Kevin Clash’s ordeal just did**, there’s still the matter of picking up the pieces; a new director for the CIA needs to be found and vetted, which could change some of the key people and focus tracking piracy worldwide. The fact that General John Allen is also caught up in this, a man who on his way to commanding NATO, which was conducting Operation Ocean Shield off the Somali coast, makes the picture even cloudier.
Having a new Secretary of Defense as assumed might happen with the Cabinet shuffle would not have had as dramatic an impact on these efforts as the changes closer to the field has had, at least before this. Without the Patraeus Affair, finding a new head at DoD would have been a bit less of a circus than it will be now, as legislators start looking for ground from which to build upon, ground composed of ruined careers and reputations.
Let’s be clear here: The people involved may not have compromised national security or weakened this country through their actions, but they were just too f’n’ stupid in how they conducted themselves. They will probably all get what’s coming to them, which is all going to be short of a turn in the brig, but within that limitation very likely deserved.
And until this all plays out, until every tear has been cried, every scream has been screamed, every bad feeling felt, until then we can’t really know what’s next in pirate interdiction. And if anything, something like this should serve as a reminder that the more we think we know, the more we assume that we have it all figured out, that it’s that moment that a black swan comes in for a landing on the water, reminding us all to check our egos at the hatch and be careful what we say…
** EDIT: So much for tidy; Kevin Clash has just resigned from Sesame Workshop to deal with further allegations regarding his personal life, which will probably take up the majority of his time from now on. What was that about black swans, again…?
James Ryan 