Your Daily Qadaffi

Kings of War ran an excellent satire of Qadaffi's anti-Switzerland rant. Funny how the tiny economic powerhouse in the Alps bears many similarities to Afghanistan--mountainous terrain, an assault rifle in the home of every military-aged man, no common language from canton to canton, and they only just now joined the international community in the UN and allowed women to vote.

The analogy isn't lost on Kings of War, either--in honor of Qadaffi's sure-to-be ludicrous address to the UN today, they wrote the greatest satire of Qadaffi's latest tirade to date. I particularly like the allusion to Hannibal [Qadaffi] coming through the Alps. COINdinistas--take note of the insurgency tactics coming out of that particular nation.

Can Switzerland be broken up?

As Libya’s Gaddafi is getting ready to speak before the UN General Assembly, we thought it is time to consider that question more seriously. His foreign minister, after all, will preside the body for the next year. And Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, probably fed-up with all the diplomatic tact and boring dark suits, proposed tobreak up Switzerland, in case you missed it. The place is “a world mafia, not a state,” he said. A couple of months ago the German finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, had already proposed to send the cavalry to do away with the money-launderers in the Alps.

We Europeans, you will understand, take all things UN very seriously. Sure, Switzerland entered the UN in 2002. But that bunch of cantons never applied for EU membership. As a result it looks like a bird dropping on Europe’s neat map. Now Gaddafi proposed to “wipe it off.” Right. To break it up and give the French part to the French, the German part to the Germans, and that one Italian canton to the Italians. Sounds good, you might think (if you’re not Swiss or Italian).

So, can it be done? Our analysis: forget it.

The drag starts with the casus belli already. You need a reason for going to war, or at least it helps. At first glance, the “safe haven” trick might work: the Swiss live on inaccessible, landlocked mountains; many have long bushy beards; they hate foreigners; they don’t let their womenfolk vote (at least not until recently); every other village seems to have its own funny language; they quarrel amongst each other; everybody has a gun at home; and there’s a big supply of religious nuts. Problem is, there’re no terrorists.

OK, you could say they are a financial safe haven. After all they bunker loads of secret money. Germany tried to go down that road and had Switzerland put on an OECD black list for rogue states. Problem is, that won’t get you Article 5 and NATO support. So no invasion there.

Well, you’ll think, screw terrorism and NATO and do the WMD thing. Bern, Baghdad? Clearly they are messing with nuclear power plants. They have dodgy high-tech factories all over the place, surely some of them mobile. It should be easy to find tons of aluminum tubes. And they can ship all sorts of things to London in 45 minutes. Problem is — World War I, World War II — they never attacked anybody.

Good. So ignore the casus belli. Who needs that anyway? Think operational. But here the real headache only begins. You think insurgency is new? Recent field manuals? Swiss Wanderhackbauernharassed European powers well before Americans could start their own insurgency against the British. Back then. Erasmus of Rotterdam already called them “butchers” in the early 1500s (veluti carnifex quispiam ad lanienam precio emptus). Swiss officers have been publishing insurgency manuals since the 1950s. With a 450-years delay, you might think. Well, they might be slow, but they mean business (Der totale Widerstand).

Yeah, doctrine, you’ll say, history, pah — what counts is action. But here it gets even worse. Ever heard of the Réduit? Switzerland is probably the only country that has a national security strategy of insurgency. In the case of war, ruthless mountain warriors would harass the enemy in what they call Middle Earth, probably a deterrent hint to Mordor, and maintain their sovereignty in the Zentralraum, as the generals called it in 1940. The Swiss have the means to resist, such as fighter jets hidden in steep mountains walls, ready to swoop out, and they have the will to resist — after all tiny Switzerland deterred the Wehrmacht. Korengal will be a cakewalk against Appenzell.

So go ahead, Gaddafi, send Hannibal to the Alps. We’ll sit and watch the fun.

If our demands are not met, we will kill these bunnies...

I’ve been filling in for someone for the last week or so, doing a job that occupies a great deal of time, but involves very little actual work. This has given me some time to pop in a DVD or two, read, and work on catching up on some miscellaneous administrative things.

One of the DVDs I watched recently was the old James Bond film “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, circa 1969. The film had always been one of my favorites, and was based on one of Ian Fleming’s best 007 books. In the book, Bond uncovers his arch-nemesis Blofeld hiding in the Alps and running an allergy research institute. Unbeknownst to the world, Blofeld (and his cat) are using the research institute as a cover to develop biological weapons, which they will use to blackmail the world in exchange for…

…One million dollars! Or something like that.

Anyway, after capturing 007, Blofeld decides to do two things. First, he (naturally) decides to keep James Bond alive for...um...some reason or another. I have to give the writers credit, as Blofeld actually says he has some motive for keeping James Bond alive (unlike his actions in a number of other films). Secondly, Blofeld also decides to broadcast his dastardly threat to the United Nations, naturally prefacing the statement with “if our demands are not met” (wonderfully parodied using a sock puppet in the 1960s Bond spoof video game "No One Lives Forever"). This is in keeping with the modus operandi of James Bond villains throughout the Cold War—whether it be threats broadcast to the UN in New York or to NATO headquarters in Brussels (the nuclear weapons threat in Thunderball).

I find it interesting that, today, you never see the villains broadcasting their threats to the UN or NATO headquarters—they usually just direct their threats toward the American government itself, and more often than not, the US President (Air Force One, Independence Day) or the Secretary of Defense (Transformers) has to fight off the terrorists or Decepticons or Aliens or whatever we’re fighting in that particular movie. I wonder if either a.) This reflects the US' decreased involvement in the UN, or b.) Hollywood thinks that most Americans are unfamiliar with the UN and NATO, hence resort to having the Secretary of Defense battle Decepticons.