Hillary Clinton on Sunset Boulevard

Martin SIEFF

The ravening narcissism that can never, ever be satisfied – The sense of Humanity only as a vague adoring audience “Out There” in an imaginary – endless auditorium – The tantrums – The rages – The petulant behavior of a spoiled brat – The bewilderment that the world could possibly go on without her. Billy Wilder understood it all.

Nearly 70 years ago Wilder one of the greatest movie directors and scriptwriters who has ever lived made the definitive biography of Hillary Clinton, future First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State and Twice (so far and counting) Presidential candidate of the United States when she was only three years old : For Hillary Clinton is Norma Desmond.

And her address is not in upstate New York but in a rotting, eerie old Hollywood mansion with a swimming pool and a dead body floating in it – Street address: “Sunset Boulevard.”

This wonderful genius insight is not mine: I owe it to a lifelong friend and brilliant California lawyer Jeffrey Calkins.

Jeff’s insight cuts to the heart of the strange, miasmic madness which has poisoned US politics ever since The World Turned Upside Down on Election Night 2016. It explains the intensity of the hatred for Donald Trump, who has delivered unparalleled economic growth and Wall Street share surges over the past three years while managing to least avoid starting any new wars to a degree that no other president has managed before him for more at least 40 years.

But Trump’s Original Sin Can Never Be Expunged: He was meant to go down to Humiliating Landslide Defeat in the Coronation of the Great Queen Spider Empress Herself. Instead, he carried 30 out of 50 states.

Nor was this the first time Hillary Clinton squandered a Sure Thing: In 2016, she wasted $1.25 billion in her Presidential Campaign that was universally agreed was Impossible for her to lose. Eight years earlier, she blew away $250 million and never even got as far as the Democratic presidential nomination. Barack Obama, a young first term senator with four years as a national figure to her 26 (since the 1992 campaign elected her husband and made her First Lady) had beaten her stone cold four months before the 2008 Democratic convention.

Hillary is still clearly convinced that she can and will be the Democrats’ candidate to defeat Trump next year. Yet every time she opens her mouth in public, she exposes herself as an ugly and ridiculous ass: Her accusation that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard – who voluntarily served in war zones in the armed forces of the United States – was an agent of the Russian government was as obviously ridiculous as it was repulsive.

This, remember is a woman who on the night of her election humiliation at the hands of Trump came up on the spur of the moment with the Big Lie that Russia had masterminded her election defeat – An accusation which three years of frenzied research by the US Deep State and Democratic Party establishment has failed to find a single iota of evidence to support

Not only was the lie ludicrous: It was also inept. A person who could concoct such a fiction to alibi her own amazing incompetence was risking a collapse of superpower relations that could set off World War III. Such a person should never be allowed within a 1,000 miles of serious political power.

Yet here we are, four years on and Hillary Clinton once again has the mad delusion that the American people – or at least a few dozen of them – really want her to run for president yet again.

This ecstatic delusion eerily echoes Norma Desmond, the raving, mad, long forgotten, silent movie star superlatively played by the great Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard.”

We should note here incidentally that in real life Swanson was everything that Hillary Clinton pretends to be but is not.

Ms. Swanson was her own woman first and last. Far from rising to national fame, wealth and political power simply as the supportive wife of an unfaithful, recklessly promiscuous philandering dog, she was filled with talent, beauty, brains, wit and courage. She dispatched several husbands herself and broke up with one lover, Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of THOSE Kennedy’s) when he was unfaithful to her (with other women as well as his wife).

Far from being the monstrous and mad Norma Desmond, in her own life, Ms. Swanson was stunningly beautiful, a pioneer of health food living, the author of an acclaimed, brilliant 500-page autobiography, the mother of several children and she lived a full, happy and amazingly constructive existence well into her 80s.

In other words she wasn’t Hillary Clinton either.

But shrieking Norma Desmond mouthing the immortal screenplay of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett was.

Today Hillary, like Norma Desmond, has no conception that her time has long since come – and gone.

Like Norma, Hillary still imagines that she is “Big” and it is only the rest of her country that got “Small.”

Like Norma, she imagines millions and millions of worshipful believers waiting for her Great Return.

Like Norma, Hillary dances in the limelight in what she imagines are girlish, feminine, alluring and graceful ballets of exquisite perfection when they are only the fantasies of a mad, raddled old hag.

It does not matter: Hillary Knows the Truth:

“You see, this is my life… it always will be…. There’s nothing else, just us, and the cameras… and those wonderful people out in the dark … Alright, Mr. De Mille I’m ready for my close up.”

Martin SIEFF

During his 24 years as a senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and United Press International, Martin Sieff reported from more than 70 nations and covered 12 wars. He has specialized in US and global economic issues.

Douglas Macgregor: America’s De Gaulle, Unheeded Prophet of Houthi Victory and Saudi Fall

Martin SIEFF

By 1937, the German Army, the Wehrmacht was confident enough to show off its new Panzer armored combat tactics to visiting military delegations from other nations. Senior officers from Germany’s ancient enemy France were especially impressed – and appalled – at the radical new weapons systems and tactics on display.

According to one story, which may be apocryphal, a French general asked a senior German officer where the new concepts came from. “But we just read the book of your own great armored theorist, De Gaulle,” the answer came.

The French generals were even more puzzled: None of them had heard of their own lowly Colonel Charles De Gaulle, author of “Vers l’Armée de Métier”  (“Towards a Professional Army”). Only 700 copies were sold in all of France.

In Germany, Heinz Guderian and other senior commanders eagerly seized on De Gaulle’s teachings of integrated armor, artillery and infantry forces. They developed the Blitzkrieg techniques that conquered the large nation of Poland in only five weeks in September through early October 1939. Still the French generals would not listen to De Gaulle. The following year, their own nation -supposedly the supreme military power in the world – fell to the Wehrmacht in only eight weeks.

Today, the United States and its allies have received a military wakeup call and warning in the Middle East as epochal as the Conquest of Poland was in 1939.

For a new Revolution in Military Affairs has just begun. Three brigades of the Saudi Arabian Army armed to the teeth by the United States in Riyadh’s $90 billion a year military budgets have just been wiped out by a handful of Houthi rebels from Yemen employing military equipment that was largely adapted from commercial models now easily available in chain stores all across the United States and the rest of the developed world.

The Houthis used cheap and easily available Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones and small, precision-guided missiles and ordinance. Neither the US-supplied Saudi Hardware nor the US-inculcated Saudi tactics proved a match for them.

Ironically, the US armed forces have introduced the military use of drones for surveillance and targeted assassinations on an enormous scale. But they have failed to take the next step and integrate this new military technology with all its myriad potential into tactical combat doctrine for full-scale land battle.

In very large part, this is because since the catastrophic decisions of George W. Bush and his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the US Army over the past 18 years has been sucked into endless, exhausting counter-insurgency campaigns around the world – always without any realistic political framework or strategy at all.

The British Empire made the same mistake in its own long counter-insurgency campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s in Ireland, Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan – all territories that have an eerily contemporary ring.

When the great land clash of armies to decide the fate of Europe came in May 1940, therefore, the British Army and its High Command were woefully unprepared for it: The US Army leadership over the past two decades has gone down the same rabbit hole.

The brilliant Houthi military victory over the Saudis fulfilled the predictions in military doctrine made by America’s own De Gaulle, a retired US Army Colonel, Douglas Macgregor with an outstanding combat and command record who has been treated over the past 20 years by most of his own country’s four star generals and civilian theorists with contempt: Just as the French Army ignored De Gaulle’s armored warfare doctrines 90 years, when they were being read and applied passionately by the generals of Germany.

Macgregor observed after the Houthi victory in September that that there was no reason for surprise. Sure enough, two and a half years earlier, in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on March 7, 2017, he stated:

“The skies over the battlefield will be crowded with loitering munitions, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones). These agile cruise missiles are designed to engage beyond line-of-sight ground targets. With proximity-fused, high-explosive warheads, these systems will remain airborne for hours, day or night. Equipped with high resolution electro-optical and infrared cameras, enemy operators will locate, surveil, and guide the drones to targets on the ground… When these loitering missiles are integrated into the enemy’s Strike Formations armed with precision guided rocket artillery that fires high explosive, incendiary, thermobaric, warheads including sub-munitions with self-targeting anti-tank and anti-personnel munitions warfare as we know it changes.”

Macgregor was even more prescient in predicting the previous Houthi precision missile strikes that wiped out half the production capacity of Saudi Arabia’s oil refineries earlier in September. Those attacks humiliatingly exposed the ultra-expensive, endlessly praised US missile defense systems sold to Riyadh as worthless dinosaurs.

Yet, writing in his book “Transformation Under Fire” published back in 2003, Macgregor had said: “The idea is to link maneuver and strike assets through a flatter operational architecture empowered by new terrestrial and space-based communications throughout the formation… Long-range, joint precision fires and C4ISR [Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] offer the possibility to reach over enemy armies to directly strike at what they hope to defend or preserve. Precision strategic strikes closely coordinated and timed with converging Army combat forces would present a defending enemy with an insoluble dilemma.”

In an article in “Joint Force Quarterly” in 2011, Macgregor concluded that such “precision effects (kinetic and non-kinetic) using a vast array of strike forces enabled by the rapid and timely dissemination of information through net­worked ISR capabilities point the way to a fundamental paradigm shift in the character of warfare.”

Thanks to the lowly Houthis, supposedly reduced to the status of cannon fodder for Saudi Arabia’s hot shot F-15 pilots and the most expensive munitions the United States could sell to its Riyadh ally, that paradigm shift foreseen by Macgregor has arrived. Its effects will soon be felt all across Asia and Europe as well as in the more obscure corners of Arabia. We are about to enter dangerously interesting times.

Martin SIEFF

During his 24 years as a senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and United Press International, Martin Sieff reported from more than 70 nations and covered 12 wars. He has specialized in US and global economic issues.