TOCS – 6:30pm PST – William Stroock On Counterinsurgency, Dan Diker On Obama Alienating Allies, WH Gives Up On Even Making Sense, Etc.

Join us later this evening for this week’s episode of One Jerusalem Radio’s TOCS, focusing (a) on counterinsurgency expert and military historian William Stroock of the Alexandrian Defense Group, his new book A Line through the Desert: The First Gulf War, and how a bunch of potential Middle East wars would play out and (b) on how the Obama administration’s smart diplomacy has gone from merely incompetent to insultingly stupid. Seriously. They’re standing in front of you, they’re intoning this litany of brazenly contradictory nonsense, and they’re doing it with this tone of pseudo-sophisticated condescension that – well, it’s getting a little grating. We’ll discuss.

As always you can tune in live either by going to the main show page or by heading over to the episode page. The switchboard and chatroom will be open for comments and questions, and we’re expecting kind of a full house tonight. So if you’re looking to get on the air you might want to drop me a line beforehand, lest the phone slots fill up with callers just listening in.

Official blurb:

Omri interviews military historian and counterinsurgency expert William Stroock about his new book A Line Through The Desert – a pitch-perfect journey through Operation Desert Storm as seen through the eyes of Jewish tank commander Jake Bloom – and about Stroock’s nonfiction military analysis as a member of the counterinsurgency think tank the Alexandrian Defense Group. The rest of the show will be turned over to a discussion of the White House’s broader diplomatic efforts from the AfPak region through Central Asia and into Israel, with Dan Diker calling in from Israel to focus on what’s driving the Obama administration’s repeatedly failed diplomatic gambits.

In the preliminary queue for the post-Diker news segments: the AfPak/Karzai disaster, the ideological thread running between the WH’s moronic GWOT euphemisms and Obama’s new nuclear use doctrine, the common approach behind that doctrine and Obama’s AfPak COIN decision-making, and maybe some China stuff if we get to it. Which we probably won’t.

Also of course Iran, where Obama’s campaign strutting – that a super-keen diplomat like himself could bring the mullahs to the table – is now being met with open derision and sarcastic mockery. Smart power!

References:
* Alexandrian Defense Chronicles: Your Guide to the Global Issues of Counter Insurgency [Official Site]
* A Line through the Desert: The First Gulf Wa, by William Stroock [Amazon]
* Insurgencies Diplomatic and Military with William Stroock [TOCS]
* Obama Limits When U.S. Would Use Nuclear Arms [NYT]
* Obama’s ‘Intelligence Czar’ Plugs a New Counterterrorism Catchphrase [Newsweek]
* Ahmadinejad rejects Obama’s "beautiful words" to Iran [Reuters]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* TOCS
* Diplomacy
* AfPak