Analyzing how wars are won has taken a back seat to measuring the level of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as if a mere downturn in violence is the key path to victory. Perhaps one reason for this is that any proper analysis would indicate neither war is winnable, at least by the United States. That Bush administration officials and military commanders are talking about both wars lasting into the indefinite future only confirms that winning them is more than illusive. It is impossible.
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In an earlier post here, I spoke of a lot of people saying they study history but nobody ever really learning anything from it. I don't know whether they actually believe (stipulating they read the same elementary history texts I did) they have a better idea. Hitler and Russia is a prime example. Yes, I know Hitler was crazy, but did he actually think he could force a surrender before winter set in? Or could it be arrogance, deliberately ignoring the lessons history books impart? Did Hitler expect winter not to arrive in Russia? Did he assume it would not be severe? Did he assume it wouldn't matter, contrary to all previous evidence? Or did he just assume little Germany had the manpower and industrial might to fight wars on so many fronts?
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[US] Counterinsurgency doctrine calls for a force of over 350,000 to be able to police Iraq. This is not possible under current U.S. force levels. Nor is a dramatic increase in the Army and Marines politically viable. Current plans anticipate only a modest increase in Marine and Army recruitment.
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General Shinseki told Congress as much before the war (and subsequent occupation) in Iraq. The Army manual backed him up. What made 'those who decide' think they could realize their objective with a third of that force? Ignorance? Arrogance? Greed, and let the consequences be damned? As many who've 'been there and done that' knew in 2002, success could never be attained using the Bush op plan. Whatever the ultimate goal of the invasion might have been, history and experience showed us it could never be attained, long before the first drop of US blood was shed.
... According to the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, official American military counterinsurgency doctrine stipulates that more than 400,000 troops would be required in Afghanistan.
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The Soviets had 100,000* troops in Afghanistan and failed miserably, facing the same intractable problems of culture, local economics, and 'outside players' we are now. The Army manual calls for 400,000. What makes 'those who decide' feel they could accomplish the task with 30,000?
Granted, in hindsight, Afghanistan was just the 'entry war', an opportunity to achieve their ultimate goal, the invasion of Iraq. Common knowledge now that the Iraq invasion had been 'on the books' since early 2001, only waiting for an excuse. 11 September was a 'gift from Allah' to the Bush administration.
But as we look at Afghanistan, what did they intend to accomplish? A stalemate, a status quo? Especially knowing the majority of our troops would be deployed toward Iraq in the near future. Aware of the Soviet experience there, how could anyone in their right minds even think about an operation in Afghanistan? Recent history demands us to believe we will leave with our tail between our legs, just as the Soviets did, achieving nothing.
I can even understand the accepted rationale (now that all the lies have been exposed) for going into Iraq; seizing control of the second largest oil reserves on the planet. Moral considerations aside, the payoff would be astounding. But, with that goal in mind, wouldn't you do everything you could to win? Did 'those who decide' actually believe our only combat casualties in Iraq would be from grunts drowning in rose petals? Why didn't we wait for the Army we wanted instead of the Army we had? Mr. Berry again:
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It is not a stretch to conclude that Iraq and Afghanistan are among the most impossible countries to be politically instituted by foreign forces. And creating a functioning state is what winning is, as defined by the Bush administration. Bush even goes further by adding the element of democracy to the governments he seeks in both. The traditional, divided, antagonistic, and parochial social fabric of Iraq and Afghanistan provides infertile ground for democracy. Whatever political construct finally emerges will only come once foreign forces leave.
And we will leave. Public opinion will eventually force it (think 1972), or the next President will see the futility of it and bring the troops home, or our economy dictates we end the wars or face ruin, as the Soviets did (a bit too late). We will leave both places empty-handed, just as we left Vietnam with nothing but 58,000 corpses.
Our failure to learn from history's lessons is unforgivable. Our decision to ignore them is criminal.
Update:
Ranger, with a great post up on the situation in Afghanistan, leaves us with this thought:
We can't win, and rearranging the geology isn't going to win it for us. Time to go, because if we haven't killed Osama and rolled up al-Qaeda by now, odds are we never will.
CNN actually dares to put one foot outside the circle this morning. Shocking! Such valor! Such Bravery! Such daring!!
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush and his top aides publicly made 935 false statements about the security risk posed by Iraq in the two years following September 11, 2001, according to a study released Tuesday by two nonprofit journalism groups. [emph added]
"In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003," reads an overview of the examination, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and its affiliated group, the Fund for Independence in Journalism.
According to the study, Bush and seven top officials -- including Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- made 935 false statements about Iraq during those two years.
The study was based on a searchable database compiled of primary sources, such as official government transcripts and speeches, and secondary sources -- mainly quotes from major media organizations.
It’s just astounding that the official media is actually getting around to discovering what patriotic Americans have been screaming about for six years. The ostriches of Big Media were terrified of the vindictive Bu$h malAdministration. The outing of Valerie Plame was in fact the tip of the iceberg, and perhaps one day we’ll be fortunate enough to have our own Truth and Reconciliaition Commission, and Americans will learn the truth about the criminal cabal that has worked tirelessly to destroy our country’s democratic traditions, and turn it into a fascist corporate state.
He has repeatedly said that despite the intelligence flaws, removing Hussein from power was the right thing to do.
Ahem.
I submit in evidence the history of our failed imperial mistake, leavened with the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and many thousands more maimed, the two million internal Iraqi refugees and another two million who fled the country, the almost 4,000 dead Americans, the 30,000+ wounded and maimed American soldiers, and the estimated 100,000 who have suffered some form of traumatic brain injury. Add to that the money we’ve sunk so far in the sands of Iraq (probably close to a trillion if you add in all the incidentals) and the two or three trillion more we will pay over the next 30 years as we pay compound interest on our loans from the Chinese and Japanese.
And for all this cost we removed a dictator with a useless military that had its teeth pulled in Gulf War I.
Some journalists -- indeed, even some entire news organizations -- have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical," the report reads. "These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, 'independent' validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq."
Note carefully that CNN has merely reported this study, and not said (as they should)
“Yeah, and we were some of the most egregious news sources that sold you the Bu$h “false statements.”
Even now, no one in the media has the courage to call it “lies.”
Frequent commenter Tim brought this Gulf Newseditorial to our attention and it’s perhaps noteworthy since it appeared in an independent but government-approved newspaper in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
Dear Mr. President;
Lest you forget. Invasion of Iraq. Thousands of dead. Looting the National Museum. Disbanding the Iraqi army. Donald Rumsfeld. Shock and Awe. Jay Garner. Paul Bremer. Inciting sectarianism. Abu Ghraib. Thousands of detainees without charges. Torture. Oil. Ghost WMDs. The Niger connection. Halliburton. Blackwater. Deadly security contractors. Mercenaries. Fallujah. Haditha massacre. Blind support of Israel. Instigating the suffering of Gaza. Ignoring the expansion of illegal colonies. Defying United Nations resolutions. Securing "a Jewish State". Allowing Israelis to extend the destruction of Lebanon in the 2oo6 war. Providing Israel with new Bunker Buster bombs to attack Lebanese towns. The War on Terror. "The Crusade". Clash of civilisations. Where is Osama Bin Laden? Afghanistan. Bagram massacre. Bombing media offices. Guantanamo Bay. Kangaroo courts. Indefinite detention. Presidential orders to ignore Geneva Conventions. "Unlawful enemy combatants". Illegal National Security Agency wiretapping. Fingerprinting visitors. Black prisons. Kidnapping foreign citizens on foreign lands. Khalid Al Masri. Abu Omar. Maher Arar. Central Intelligence Agency. "Aggressive interrogation techniques". Destroying the torture tapes. Iran tension. Isolating Syria. Embracing Syrian opposition Iraq style. The Chavez coup. Denial of global warming. Rejecting Kyoto Protocol. Marginalisation of the United Nations. John Bolton. Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank. Carl Rove. Alberto Gonzales. Firing attorneys. Nepotism. False democracy promises. Dick Cheney, Dick Cheney and Dick Cheney.
Mr President;
The list goes on. You might not be able to recall some of it. But the people around you, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice especially, would. And they realise that on the subject of human rights, your administration has had the worst record of all, surpassing most Third World countries. The tension and the misery in parts of this region can very well testify to this.
Mr President;
In a famous speech in 2003 you announced an "historic" shift in US foreign policy. You pledged to support democracy and liberty while declaring "victory" in Iraq. More than four years later, Iraq is in chaos. It has virtually disintegrated and "the surge" did little to stop the killing or ease the sectarian tension. At the same time, you gave up on your freedom-for-all prophecy. We are all back to the old ways of doing business - arms and oil. The agenda of your current tour is evident.
Mr President;
This is your first official trip to a land you long claimed has a very special place in your heart. The land of the Prophets. However, you started out wrong. By maintaining your support of an Israeli "Jewish State", you are flouting your own ideals upon which your great country was founded more than two centuries ago. So much for the promise of democracy. What you advocate in fact is the creation of states on religious and racial lines, thereby justifying the atrocious actions of terrorists who hate and seek to eliminate the followers of other religions: The same terrorists you like to blame for every ill on earth and every failure of yours.
Mr President;
It has been reported that you are here to "lecture" us on democracy and human rights. But with a record like yours, you will not be very convincing. The people you are addressing have greater respect for human rights and dignity.
You also said that your current tour aims to realise the long neglected peace in the Middle East. Regional peace, Mr President, will not be achieved by escalating tension and threatening to change regimes. And most importantly, it will not be achieved by supporting Israel, which continues to defy international law, occupy Arab lands, oppress the Palestinians and rebuff peace initiatives.
Mr President;
We hope you have enjoyed the trip so far. The scenery is great. The food is exotic. As for the more "serious" things, it is unlikely you will make any difference.
It’s said that in the UAE, it’s all about business. It appears the businessmen that own this paper might consider Mr Bu$h’s life and times far too expensive. Before you all go getting too smiley-faced about this, let’s remember that it was “businessmen” in the UAE who financed 15 Saudi Arabian terrorists who killed 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001.
Last year I featured a few articles written by CPT Jeff Leonard, a California-based Army Reserve officer who served in Iraq with the 114th Medical Detachment as a combat stress specialist. They deal with his life in Iraq, and his duty traveling around a portion of the country, talking with GIs who’ve found the stress level of combat high enough to affect their performance, which is a major concern of the Army. A good soldier, CPT Leonard worked hard to relieve the stress by working with soldiers to overcome the natural fears a man develops when his life is in danger on a daily basis. Along the way, we learned of CPT Leonard’s own fears, and that was a very personal, revealing look into a man trained to help others.
He wrote of the pain felt by men who were supposed to be professional healers and who conducted memorials for dead soldiers, agonizing over the deaths of men they respected and loved. He wrote of soldiers second-guessing themselves after failing to save a life, and of his task to help these men get past combat’s inevitable consequences. He wrote about how to make contact with a wounded man, a bit of “us guys together” – not stage fakery, but the honest and open expression of caring about the troops.
In one of my articles I called CPT Leonard one of the bravest men I have ever heard of, and I stand by that statement today.
Waiting to go back to his family, CPT Leonard wrote openly and honestly about what he had learned about Iraq, combat, and himself. As I recall he came in for some disapproving comments in that piece. Combat and killing is very glamorous to those who’ve never been there.
DefenseLink published an article several days ago that I‘ve wanted to feature for several reasons. It deals with a similar section of counselors in Afghanistan. Company C of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Support Battalion deals in shattered nerves and minds, as CPT Leonard did. The Sky Soldiers have a long and treasured reputation as a fine unit and have earned the (sometimes grudging) respect of the paratrooper community.
They operate from Forward Operating Base Fenty somewhere up in Afghanistan, where the real war against terror – the Taliban and al Qaeda, continues unwon. The Combat Stress Control Detachment works with an Air Force Detachment doing the same job at FOB Fenty. This is a good thing for the 173rd because everyone knows the Air Force is a glide outfit: they get three hot meals a day, clean underwear every other day, clean sheets, and if they run out of ice cream, they fly a load in on a C5 Galaxy. It’s true. Really. Just ask any soldier. Plus they always load their beer pallets on a C-130 and test fly the bird up to around 15,00 feet for an hour. Makes the beer r e a l cold.
A small team of airmen and soldiers work hand in hand to help deployed servicemembers battle stress here and at some 20 surrounding forward operating bases.
The issues troops for which troops seek help vary, team members said.
“It depends a little bit on where the individual is based out of,” said Air Force Lt. Col. (Dr.) Jeffrey Wiser, a psychiatrist with the Combat Stress Control Detachment. “I think a lot of people in the forward locations deal with combat stress reactions. FOB Fenty and some of the areas south and east of here tend to be more operational stress, home-front issues and difficulties within the unit.”
OK, all kidding about the Air Force aside, working on a base in Afghanistan is not a skate job. Dull, unchanging days of 16 hour shifts, seven days a week, bitter cold winters and nasty hot summers with the unending threat of rocket or mortar attacks do not make a happy trooper. While out in the boonies you have a better chance of getting killed, the boredom on a base like that creates its own problems. Things happen at home and you’re not there to deal with them. Wives are forced to do double duty, handling the tasks that are “Daddy’s job.”
And let’s not forget that women also serve in Afghanistan and they also have issues.
Air Force Tech. Sgt. Laurie Wienclawski, a mental health technician on the team, said the team sometimes helps troops hours or days after they have witnessed tragic or shocking events. “The 173rd has lost a lot of people. Being back home, you hear about soldiers being killed and wounded in action. Until you are deployed and actually live it and see it and hear about it, it doesn’t seem real until you are actually there,” she said.
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Wienclawski said she hoped being a woman would make it easier for troops to talk to her. When she hit the ground, she found out that was not the case. Now, she said, she can best relate to troops by finding things in common with them, like family situation or background.
Not all soldiers realize they’re suffering from stress. Some, wrapped up in that macho “super warrior” syndrome refuse to believe combat stress exists.
Servicemembers don’t always come out to seek help with their problems. Some internalize issues, and only people who really know them notice a change in their behavior, daily routine or sleep patterns, the combat stress experts said. It is important for everyone to know the typical behavior of their battle buddies, or to know their “baseline,” the experts said.
Back in 1999 the DoD realized the dangers of combat stress and developed a program to deal with it. This program has undergone continuing change as adaptation to the realities of war became apparent.
Recently the Army developed the “Battle Buddy” program, given to each soldier as part of his training to teach GIs to watch each other or signs of stress or depression. (Power Point presentation)
Like CPT Leonard, the teams travel to outlying bases because some soldiers are prevented by circumstances or inner reluctance to ask for help.
Since not everyone comes running with their issues, the Combat Stress Control Detachment sends out a small team to surrounding FOBs to “canvas” the neighborhood and see if someone needs their assistance. Weiser said Army Spc. Christopher Truax, a mental health specialist with Company C, is great at “mixing with soldiers and engaging them in conversation and prompting them to come in for evaluations or a more extensive interview.”
Truax, who studied psychology in college, learned about his military occupational specialty on the Internet. He said he finds his job rewarding. “We don’t wait for someone to come and see us; we go see them,” Truax said.
He usually travels with Army Capt. Bryan O’Leary, a 173rd Airborne Brigade psychologist working with the Combat Stress Control Detachment.
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Team members travel for three to four weeks at a time visiting remote locations. Since some places are really hard to get to, the team spends a lot of time at flightlines and trying to jump on convoys. There is no way to give out actual appointments, but they always notify command elements and aid stations that they are on the way so servicemembers can get the word.
In addition to their physical health, soldiers must be mentally healthy to complete the mission and – the most important duty – come home to their families.
It’s a good thing the 173rd has decided its troopers aren’t iron men.
The very well-respected blog Mountain Runner is one of the leaders of the pack on this topic, and posted this up several days ago. I was lazy took my time about mentioning it.
Another slap in the face of George Bu$h’s elitist contempt for the average American.
French Warship to Deliver 10,000 Books to Disadvantaged U.S. Children
This Christmas, Santa Claus is leaving his reindeer behind and hitching a ride on… a French warship! The Jeanne d’Arc, a helicopter carrier which serves as a training ship for French navy midshipmen, will dock into New York Harbor on Friday December 28 carrying over 10,000 books destined for disadvantaged American students, giving new meaning to the expression “turning swords into ploughshares.” The French books, including dictionaries and textbooks, but also novels and comic books, will be offered to the children participating in New York’s newly launched French-English dual-language programs, as well as to New Orleans schools devastated by hurricane Katrina.
A delegation of students from the Jordan L. Mott Middle School (CIS 22) in the Bronx, one of the three schools that have launched a French-English dual-language program this year (the other two are PS 125 in Harlem and PS 58 in Brooklyn), will be welcomed on-board the ship at 2pm on the 28 th. Following a performance by their school band and a tour of the two French ships (the Jeanne d’Arc will be accompanied by the antisubmarine warfare destroyer Georges Leygues), they will take delivery of the books on behalf of all the schools involved. Sixty of the eighty crates will remain in New York, while the rest will be shipped overland to New Orleans.
At 3pm, the ship’s commander, Captain Hervé Bléjean, will hold a press conference in the presence of Catherine Petillon, the French Embassy’s Attaché for Educational Affairs.
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This unusual delivery was initiated, coordinated and financed by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, but the books themselves have been donated by two French associations, Adiflor and Biblionef. Both specialize in providing French-language books, which are either new or in excellent condition, to needy children throughout the world. The French Embassy’s contribution comes in addition to the $100,000 the French government has recently earmarked to support dual-language programs in New York City public schools.
Students participating in these dual-language programs are being partially immersed in a French-language environment, with half of their classes taking place in French, and half in English. They are expected to become completely bilingual after five years of such bilingual teaching.
The Jeanne d’Arc will remain moored in New York until January 2 at Pier 92 ( West 52th Street). It will be open for visits by New York area children learning French and their parents from December 29-31 (schools with French-language programs will receive the necessary registration information).
Jeanne d’Arc shows its respect to George Bu$h
The Bu$hCo has spent its time, efforts, and our tax money, performing what it interprets as the proper venue for “public diplomacy” – domestic propaganda, with a little bit of spillover around the word. Its record precedes it, and the stench of evil, predatory fascism has spread an oil slick of contempt for all civilized behavior. The nations of the world have quire properly returned that contempt.
Can you remember back to 2002 when the French were roundly criticized by the room-temperature IQs of the never-right for refusing to join the great glorious crusade to get even with someone who had done us no harm? Oh, what great fun we had, laughing about “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” and “Spanish salad dressing! Morons like Patrick McHenry (Fascist-VA) took repeated victory laps before the fawning news cameras for his little bit of cleverness. After we got well-stuck in the tar baby, and France, in its own orgy of bigotry over immigrants, elected its very own Fascist, all was forgiven.
France was the country that came to the aid of a desperate Colonial Army in 1778, and poured money, international assistance and recognition, soldiers and naval support into our struggle. The two countries found themselves allied once again during the war of 1812, and the friendship and mutual admiration society was off and running. It was France, not Great Britain, that honored American Freedom with a magnificent tribute, a gift that has been the lodestone of oppressed peoples around the world.
And now, in the days of George Bu$h’s No Child Left Behind, when only white children attending Christian private schools seem to be entitled to a great education, once again France has stepped forward.
This morning’s Gorilla’s Guides points up a thematic of irregular warfare espoused by Lt Col T E Lawrence, of the General Staff, Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Yes, that Lt Colonel Lawrence. Some of the picked out passage is quite apt to our shaky occupation of Iraq, and perhaps we should look to see if the dynamics of war in the desert of 1916-1918 are still viable today. (This will be a brief look because one could write a book about the topic. I see no reason to give it all to you for free when I might be able to score some beer money.) OK, I’m kidding about the beer money.
The piece was first published in Army Journal and Defence Quarterly, October, 1920 and is available on microfilm, I believe.
As I recall, most of Colonel Lawrence’s writings were not well received within the ranks of Britain’s small professional Army in great part because of institutional prejudice against a temporary officer who had “gone native” and served with irregular forces rather than with one of his country’s regiments. His very well known “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” was quite well-received throughout the world, but not in Britain. (cf: Matthew, 13:57, A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.)
It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts.1 It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy.2 Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent. active in a striking force, and 98 per cent. passively sympathetic.3 The few active rebels must have the qualities of speed and endurance, ubiquity and independence of arteries of supply. 4 They must have the technical equipment to destroy or paralyse the enemy’s organized communications,5 for irregular war is fairly Willisen’s definition of strategy, “the study of communication” 6 in its extreme degree, of attack where the enemy is not. In fifty words: Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.[emph added]
1. Aware readers will recognize that some of Lawrence’s requirements exist in Iraq. The resistance has enjoyed freedom not only from attack but from fear of it only because the occupying US troops were unable to exert their technological superiority of intelligence-gathering and observation until, within the last year UAVs had been brought to bear monitoring group movements. Direct intelligence gathering has suffered due to a lack of qualified translators. This is due in part to a failure within the Armed Forces to perceive that the Russians would in fact not be coming through the Fulda Gap, and future strategic threats might evolve in other theaters, and to prepare accordingly. Additionally the failure to supply sufficient ground forces to carry out the occupation is directly attributable to the ideological insistence of the civilian leadership that the invasion and conquest of Iraq would be a “cakewalk” and their eagerness to seek advice from “yes-men.”
2. Until the application of UAVs the occupation was severely limited in obtaining real-time information regarding movements of resistance bands. Direct intelligence gathered from the populace was often prompted by motives of clan and sectarian revenge.
3. It has been estimated that the actual “resistance” never comprised more than about 45,000-60,000 fighters gathered from all sources, including disgruntled ex-Iraq Army officers and senior NCOs, Sunni tribesmen, principally from Anbar province, and some Shiite dissidents from the Badr Corps and Mahdi Army, both of which held some degree of loyalty to Iran, the principal wellspring of the Shia sect of Islam. There were also a small number of non-Iraqi fighters drawn to Iraq in opposition to the presence of US troops on “Arab soil.” It has been variously estimated that these fighters were about 65-75% Saudi. As you can see these forces total less than the 2% figure presented by Lawrence, (Iraq’s population being estimated at 25 million) yet were able to hold the occupation for almost four years and inflict grievous losses.
4. The rebels, having grown from youth in the hardpan of Iraq, with its brutal Summer temperatures, were well-adapted to urban combat in the country. US troops were at a considerable disadvantage because of environmental conditions and the necessity to weigh themselves down with a great deal of equipment, which slowed them down and forced them to slower movement on the ground. The resistance fighters were adapted to operating in small, semi-independent bands of 4-8, considered an optimum size for guerrilla warfare. Such small groups can more easily go to ground, disappearing among the populace, more readily than larger bands.
(This is a core point of guerrilla warfare: strike with overwhelming force where the enemy is weak, create casualties, and melt back into the populace.)
5. It’s important to understand that Lawrence uses “communications” here in the sense of unit communication on the ground, i.e. logistical (supply) and tactical support of nearby fraternal units, and not voice and date communications as enabled by the use of radio and data link. This reference to Willisen’s (Lt Gen Karl Wilhelm von Willisen) dictum about communications describes the need in early 19th century warfare to maneuver ground units – infantry battalions and artillery batteries – in close contact in order to maintain cohesion and deliver a killing blow at the schwerpunkt of the battle., where the enemy was weakest, and most vulnerable to a strong penetration of his defenses. When you lose contact with a neighboring unit and find enemy troops moving into the breach, a commander’s instinctive reaction is to withdraw.
6. Lawrence exploited this weakness well, moving rapidly into the Turkish Army’s rear areas, spreading destruction and panic. Nothing like this has occurred in Iraq, but the resistance has maintained a strategy of slow abrasion. The death of 10,000 cuts, wearing down soldiers weary from long days of patrolling and defensive watch at their bases. The overstretching of combat forces and the slow but steady attacks against the supply convoys that the occupation depended upon has been classic communication strategy as practiced by Lawrence. The prodigious use of military-quality explosives left unguarded during the invasion afforded the resistance access to generous supplies of the means to bleed the occupation.
Utilizing its technological superiority in intelligence gathering, a temporary combat superiority through massive infusion of troops, and utilizing the Israeli method of walling off districts into sectarian enclaves, the Occupation forces have managed to create a lessened level of violence in Baghdad. It has long been a military rule that control of a country’s capital is a primary strategic, tactical, and propaganda goal. Through these means the “surge” has apparently tamped down the violence in Baghdad, lending a veneer of control to the central government.
The occupation has adapted one of Lawrence’s rules to its own use. The co-option of native forces through the argument of self-interest has enabled them to create a large force of semi-trained, lightly armed auxiliaries in Anbar province. It should be noted that the Shiite central government has little interest in incorporating these units (estimated as high as 75,000 armed men) into the country’s security forces. Some have speculated that only the payment of monthly salaries by the US has kept these tribesmen calm.
Failure to replace these salaries with gainful employment will keep the restive West a tinderbox, and the tribes tied to the US by monthly stipend. The Shiite central government is resisting the idea of political reconciliation, which would have to include economic development of the tribal areas. The strength of tribal and religious enmity is too great to bring about reconciliation, it seems.
Maintaining peace on the ground will last only as long as the Occupation forces continue to pay off the tribesmen.
Today is when Western nations traditionally mark the birth of a small child, born to parents in an occupied land. The family will soon be refugees when the land’s ruler learns of a prophecy that a child born in a particular city will bring about the destruction of the ruler’s realm.
The child grows to be a man, following in his father’s footsteps to become a carpenter, as was traditional in those days. History tells us little of his growing years other than that, sometime around his bar mitzbah, the traditional celebration of manhood, he astounded the priests in the temple with his knowledge of law and faith. Many today believe he was following in the footsteps of his other father, the creator and law-giver, and revere the words we are told he spoke as he taught his other father’s lessons.
When people write of this day they frequently use words like “hope,” “love,” and “compassion,” all concepts that are sadly lacking in this 21st century. As we stagger into 2008, CE, we see around us on every side war, oppression, cruelty, and hatred. Even those who grandly and publicly profess to be the most devout followers of this man seem to take great pride in turning their backs on his teachings. It is more than unseemly for religious leaders to advocate war, killing, torture, cruelty, and other barbarities. It is in fact obscene, but too many of today’s leaders have lost their way and use the veil of religion to hide the scars of political ambition and lust for power that have marked their souls for eternity.
In these days a nation conceived in the principles of Enlightenment liberalism is being dragged steadily and remorselessly into the pit of fascism.
The first ten amendments to the Constitution are known as the Bill of Rights. Those successful revolutionaries who tore this country away from an oppressive and neglectful British crown thought so highly of these certain rights that had been ignored by the British king that they were specifically enumerated and added to the Constitution to enshrine their importance.
We have seen many of these rights summarily taken away from us under the pretense of “protecting” us when in fact we are less safe today than we were seven years ago. The actions of those who lied, cheated, and stole their way into positions of power have formed the basis for many dark theories of conspiracy.
Most of these “leaders” have shown distressing hints that they intend to make their time in office permanent, establishing a form of government that patriots died to reject over 200 years ago. Members of the Executive and Legislative bodies are feared and despised all over the world. Members of the Legislative branch recently took time out from their busy schedule of ignoring the wishes of the American people to strongly affirm their dedication to the man whose birth we celebrate today, and to his teachings. They did this even as they refused to take active steps to condemn, and stop, the torture of helpless prisoners.
The press, those whose duty in the defense of liberty is enshrined in the Bill of Rights, is rightly charged with the solemn obigation of safeguarding the freedom of the citizens, to ensure that the US Government does not trample upon them. But the press has been co-opted by forces more interested in profit than liberty, and great swathes of the Press has aligned itself with the ideologues now determined to transform this country into something more commonly seen in some corrupt third world backwater banana republic.
Our economy and financial system has been bastardized, turned into something resembling a street corner three-car monte con in which only the insiders can win. Wealth that was once evident in most families has been ripped from the pockets of the middle class and concentrated in the hands of a very small and fortunate minority. Jobs that once paid a decent wage, enough to allow a family to live with pride, have been sent overseas by multinational corporations, sacrificed on the altar of profit. With the connivance of our lawmakers, banks have become predators, sucking the very lifeblood of those desperately trying to stay afloat in an economy rigged against them.
We approach a national election to choose new leaders, unsure that those who direct our nation’s course in the affairs of the world will permit them to occur, and also unsure whether they will be fair elections, or rigged and stolen like the last few we’ve had.
Those politicians running for office are collectively a dim lot, a frightening shadow of our present rulers – a pack of mediocre authoritarians who seem unable to develop a new course for the country, and instead advocate more of what got us to the edge of the abyss we are presently teetering on.
But for one day let us put aside our dark present and the specter of an even darker future and celebrate the message of the day.
May this day bring you and your families the happiness, joy, love, and good will that was the primary teaching of that child that legend tells us was born on this day over 2000 year ago. May your children shout and cry out with happiness and glee. May your argumentative uncle for once shut his yap and pass out early – hopefully not into the mashed potatoes. May your table be overflowing with the bounty of the earth, and may the music be joyous and hopeful as befits the day.
Time enough to worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes.
There’s been a great deal of discussion of this topic recently and it might be prudent to investigate the matter. Two of the better blogs who regularly discuss this topic are Mountain Runner and Swedish Meatballs. Both are good reads, although Meatballs has been accused of being NOT WORK FRIENDLY if you’re a corporate drone working in cubicleland or are employed by say, a fundamentalist christian church.
Despite what you might think, “public diplomacy” these days is not about the public talking with people in other countries. Instead, it means a government (and I do mean this here thing we’ve got across the back of our necks) outreaching to a public. What you call your basic “We care” message distributed to folks in other countries where we have need for their natural resources and don’t want them to get all upset when they find our hand in their pockets.
A good example was Karen Hughes when she was the Assistant Secretary of State for - I forget the exact title – maybe it was “Bullshitting the Third World” or something like that.
In Ms Hughes’ much ballyhooed tour through the Middle East the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs traveled through a number of countries speaking to women’s groups. The “listening tour” mainly consisted of Ms Hughes telling the various Muslim women’s groups how the United States intended to spread democracy in the region. The women were expected to listen, which was probably not what they expected, having thought Ms Hughes’ “listening tour” meant she would listen.
The Bu$h malAdministration has invested a lot of effort in public outreach in the US. When we see this sort of effort in dictatorships we call it “propaganda.” Umm. I may have made my point here.
Mountain Runner has a wealth of information about this topic, and explains what’s good and what isn’t.
Swedish Meatballs specializes in Information Operations and public outreach. You can learn a great deal there. Just put the kids to bed before you dial ‘em up, OK?
One of the best forms of public diplomacy was something I remember fondly – and vaguely, because it was a long time ago – that always happened on Christmas Eve. Way back in the dim mists of time, when the danger to our nation was outside the country, the intrepid airmen of NORAD kept watch 24 hours a day, ever on the alert for Soviet bombers, and later missiles. coming to get us with their dread thermonuclear bombs of socialism. NORAD operated a string of radar stations across the far north, always on watch.
We’d sit around the living room, listening to Christmas records on the radio, watching the tree, and I’d be fighting to stay awake because I wanted to see those lovely wrapped packages appear from Santa’s bag. Starting around 7:30 there would be an announcement on the radio from NORAD about unusual traffic around the North Pole and the game was on!
When you’re seven years old you didn’t consider the logistical difficulties of Santa visiting millions of homes in one evening; you just believed. And NORAD confirmed the truth!
NORAD doesn’t do those Christmas Eve alerts on radio or TV any more. We’re in the 21st century now and the intertubes are usually available.
But he’s still put there, braving the cold, flying through the skies at about a zillion miles an hour, making children’s wishes come true, I know it’s true because NORAD says so.
This, and the Marine Corps’ “Toys for Tots” are probably the best public diplomacy the US Armed Forces, and hence the USG, are still doing. So, thank you, gentlemen and ladies, for what you do. And may you all be home for Christmas next year.
I have no idea how to embed this video so you have to follow the link. Wear asbestos survival gear. Bring your own oxygen.
People standing alongside a roadway with their eyes closed, mumbling and moaning, and testifying to an urban myth, are now considered a motivating portion of what is laughingly referred to as an “informed electorate.”
Stars and StripesArmy Times published a long and perhaps confusing article yesterday about a nasty subject: mutiny. Because it’s convoluted, I want to delineate it enough to make sure all twenty-six of my readers understand the history, so they can understand the story.
The 1st Bn/26th Infantry (1st Infantry Division) was operating in the general area north of Baghdad. Its 2nd Platoon was operating from Combat Outpost Apache, located in the area known as Adhamiya, northeast of Baghdad.
By June the 45-man 2nd Platoon had been in Iraq for 11 months, and had lost four men. On June 21st they had been ordered to patrol a road and a Bradley ran over a bomb buried in a road. The explosion flipped the Bradley over and the platoon watched helplessly as the five men in the Bradley died, at least one of them screaming in the flames.
Something like this will unnerve the best of troops. Command understood this, and withdrew Company C’s 2nd Platoon, moving them from COP Apache to Camp Taji in order to allow them some decompression time.
[SFC] Tim Ybay, 38, served as 2nd Platoon’s platoon sergeant, but also its father figure. The former drill sergeant teased constantly and tried to treat his men like family. At memorial services for lost soldiers, he cried the loudest. He’d been on patrol June 21 when the five 2nd Platoon soldiers died in the Bradley. When he came back, his grieving platoon circled him as the weight of the loss forced him to his knees in the sand. He’d promised to bring all his boys home.
Now he would concentrate on the ones that remained.
“I knew after losing those five guys, my platoon had to get out of there,” he said. “These were the guys they slept with, joked with, worked out with. I don’t think they’d be able to accomplish the mission.”
The tears came again as he spoke, and he looked away.
“And I was having a hard time losing my guys.”
If you haven’t served in the military, and more importantly in combat, you can’t really understand the effects of losing friends. It’s like losing a family member because nothing bonds men more closely than facing danger together. The grief is usually followed by a consuming rage. The instinct to strike back is powerful. Wise leaders understand this emotion, and the ability to prevent your men from “getting some” is one of the greatest challenges a combat leader faces. Many have failed this challenge, as Ernest Medina and William Calley learned to their shame in 1968.
At Taji, the company had a week off… Ybay and his sergeants sat at the picnic tables drinking frozen coffee concoctions. The guys bought Persian carpets and brass lamps to send home as souvenirs — as if Taji were a vacation spot. But the anger over Adhamiya emerged even poolside, and erupted at the mental health clinic, which they visited in groups.
“You never really get over the anger,” said Staff Sgt. Robin Johnson, a member of Charlie’s scout platoon who had been especially close to Agami [gunner of the burned Bradley]. “It just kind of becomes everything you are. You become pissed off at everything. We wanted to destroy everything in our paths, but they wanted us to keep building sewer systems and handing out teddy bears.”
...
Adhamiya remained under the control of 1-26, but the brass moved Charlie 1-26 to another combat outpost, Old Mod — so called because it used to house Iraq’s Ministry of Defense — in a calmer area on the outskirts of Adhamiya. From there, they patrolled Kadhamiya.
“If my guys had stayed at Adhamiya, they would have taken the gloves off,” said Capt. Cecil Strickland, Charlie’s company commander. “We were afraid somebody was going to get in trouble.”
There had been close calls before. DeNardi had to fight back a strong desire to kill an Iraqi — accused of triggering an IED that killed two Charlie Company soldiers — as he held a 9mm Glock handgun to the man’s eye socket.
And Cardenas and Staff Sgt. John Gregory had been ordered to the Green Zone to talk to an investigator after they roughed up two insurgents. A week after Pfc. Ross McGinnis fatally threw himself on a grenade to save four friends, Cardenas and Gregory had chased a couple of guys on a scooter and managed to stop them. Cardenas kicked over a wooden box the two Iraqis stood next to.
“There was a grenade full of nails,” Cardenas said. “We had to go see a major about detainee abuse. We told him [the Iraqis] didn’t want to get in the Bradley.”
The investigation in the Green Zone of Cardenas and Gregory unsurprisingly came to nothing.
In the years to come, veterans will start telling stories of summary executions after situations like this. It will take time for soldiers to catch their breaths, overcome their inhibitions, and admit to war crimes. Right now emotions are too high and political considerations too prominent to allow honesty. The Defense Department has initiated several noteworthy courts-martial, whose results have generally been whitewashes.
After the Camp Taji decompression and move to COP Old Mod, Company A’s 2nd Platoon found itself patrolling Kadhamiya, a Shiite district where the streets were clean and paved, garbage was collected, and the appearance was almost civilized.
But there were still problems. The battalion would lose A Company’s first sergeant to suicide, and act that would rock the entire battalion.
And then:
On July 17, Charlie’s 2nd Platoon was refitting at Taji when they got a call to go back to Adhamiya. They were to patrol Route Southern Comfort, which had been black — off-limits — for months. Charlie Company knew a 500-pound bomb lay on that route, and they’d been ordered not to travel it. “Will there be route clearance?” 2nd Platoon asked. “Yes,” they were told. “Then we’ll go.”
But the mission was canceled. The medevac crews couldn’t fly because of a dust storm, and the Iraqi Army wasn’t ready for the mission. Second Platoon went to bed.
They woke to the news that Alpha Company had gone on the mission instead and one of their Bradleys rolled over the 500-pound IED. The Bradley flipped. The explosion and flames killed everybody inside.
This shattered C Company’s 2nd Platoon. The similarity to their own loss in June and the “but for the grace of G_d” circumstances emasculated the soldiers. When ordered to go out the next day to Adhamiya the platoon refused.
The company CO was of course enflamed. He contacted the platoon sergeant and reminded him of the consequences.
I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that counseling session. Threats are the perfect way to motivate spooked troops.
“I was irritated they were thumbing their noses. I was determined to get them down there.”
As it turns out, the mental health staff at Camp Taji had the entire platoon on sleeping pills after the shock of losing their Bradley and its crew. But the CO, CPT Strickland, claims he never knew that.
He didn’t know 2nd Platoon had gathered for a meeting and determined they could no longer function professionally in Adhamiya — that several platoon members were afraid their anger could set loose a massacre.
“We said, ‘No.’ If you make us go there, we’re going to light up everything,” DeNardi said. “There’s a thousand platoons. Not us. We’re not going.”
They decided as a platoon that they were done, DeNardi and Cardenas said, as did several other members of 2nd Platoon. At mental health, guys had told the therapist, “I’m going to murder someone.” And the therapist said, “There comes a time when you have to stand up,” 2nd Platoon members remembered. For the sake of not going to jail, the platoon decided they had to be “unplugged.”
This is not the Workers and Peasants Revolutionary Collective of 1917 Russia, and we don’t function by soldiers’ councils, but I can see why the platoon would hang on the words of the mental health social workers, if the report is right.
The process took over. The battalion CO and Sergeant Major stepped into the mess. The soldiers had their rights read to them in what’s called an Article 32 investigation, the preliminary to a court-martial. Soldiers were counseled, given “15 yes-or-no questions” that implied they were wrong no matter how they responded. Seven NCOs were relieved, transferred to other positions, and (undoubtedly) fire-breathing hard-chargers replaced them. Records were flagged and promotions and awards were put on hold.
If you’re going to punish a soldier for an offense stopping promotions is logical. Delaying awards is bullshit. What are you going to do? Claim he wasn’t entitled to his CIB or Bronze Star because he refused to deploy?
Finally, the platoon was disbanded and troops were sent home or distributed to other units. That should have taught them a lesson.
The primary cause of this mutiny is most likely a failure of leadership. The platoon sergeant didn’t fail. SFC Ybay stood up for his men, even going to the battalion headquarters in an attempt to explain the circumstances. CPT Strickland, the company CO apparently failed to properly comprehend the circumstances, because two months later he removed the records flags. The battalion sergeant major should have been all over this and should have grabbed his colonel by the stacking swivel to explain it.
But the real failure lies exactly where all the failures of Iraq stem from: at HQ, Department of the Army.
Let’s once again review the oath of office of a commissioned officer in the United States Army:
“I (insert name), having been appointed a (insert rank) in the U.S. Army under the conditions indicated in this document, do accept such appointment and do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God.”
While there is nothing in there about caring for the welfare of your men, an experienced officer understands soldiers are human beings and as Napoleon Bonaparte observed the moral is to the physical as five is to one. When you forget there are human beings at the base of the military pyramid you forget the difference between “leadership” and “management.” You tend to lose track of what a realistic mission is. We haven’t had much success with realistic missions in the last 40 years.
My Army is dying the death of 10,000 cuts.
My thanks to ex-Corporal of Marines Gordon who lit my fuse about this story
UPDATE: An alert reader, eager to make a pathetic poor ole brokedown sergeant look bad, notes that the story appears in Army Times, not in Stars and Stripes. Thanks for looking over my shoulder, Jason.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused Friday to give Congress details of the government's investigation into interrogations of terror suspects that were videotaped and destroyed by the CIA. He said doing so could raise questions about whether the inquiry is vulnerable to political pressure.
In letters Friday to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees that oversee the Justice Department, Mukasey also said there is no need right now to appoint a special prosecutor to lead the investigation. The preliminary inquiry currently is being handled by the Justice Department and the CIA's inspector general.
"I am aware of no facts at present to suggest that department attorneys cannot conduct this inquiry in an impartial manner," Mukasey wrote to Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat and Republican, respectively, on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "If I become aware of information that leads me to a different conclusion, I will act on it."
That’s right. The nation’s Top Law Enforcement officer™ who used to teach law at a prestigious law school, and who has spent 18 years on the bench deciding legal matters, has no idea what torture is, even though what constitutes torture is enumerated in the laws of the United States.
I’m not a lawyer. I don’t pretend to be one, but I learned in my first year of college, while studying Constitutional Law, that International Treaties entered into by the United States are laws binding upon the nation, and have the effect of law inside the country. It’s true, you could look it up. It’s in the second paragraph of Article VI.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House approved an intelligence bill Thursday that would prohibit the CIA from using waterboarding, mock executions and other harsh interrogation methods.
The 222-199 vote sent the measure to the Senate, which still must act before it can go to President Bush. The White House has threatened a veto.
An awake man would find it fascinating that members of the largest criminal enterprise in the United States today endorse the actions of Heinrich Himmler and Tomoyuki Yamashita.
Down here in the 18th Century we’re having a big legal discussion about whether it’s right to chain up juveniles when they’re brought into court.
U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks…considers the legality of Palm Beach County's policy of shackling all children brought into juvenile courts on criminal charges.
In a two-hour hearing Friday, Middlebrooks struggled to understand exactly when and why shackles are used and what Public Defender Carey Haughwout would suggest to assure others in the courtroom remain safe if the shackles are removed.
Haughwout, who filed the federal lawsuit in August after her pleas to county juvenile judges and an appeals court failed, said she was prepared to have lawyers testify about how the policy prevents children from getting a fair trial and the psychological trauma it heaps on youngsters, many of whom are poor and have suffered from lifetimes of abuse.
However, rather than discussing – you know – the actual fucking issues, Judge Middlebrooks appears to have been distracted by the issue of whether the process has been properly served.
Instead, the hearing centered mostly on thorny legal issues of whether the lawsuit was filed properly and whether Haughwout has other options - short of federal intervention - that could resolve the issue.
"What federal right are you seeking to impose to take the unusual step of a federal court telling a state court how to act?" Middlebrooks asked.
Haughwout said her office has tried to persuade juvenile court judges that most youngsters aren't a threat, that they don't need to be restrained with leg irons and handcuffs that are secured to a chain around their waists.
Sure. Why would we worry about prejudicing the jury if we can brutalize the kiddies? Those of us who actually have memories that span more than four days remember the last time a Federal court was asked to decide a local matter.
You’ll be surprised to learn that children charged as adults (yes, we do that down here) are treated more humanely.
[T]eens charged with such serious crimes that they are tried as adults are treated more gently. Adults are restrained only with leg irons. That means they can hold documents, write notes to their attorneys, wipe tears from their eyes or blow their noses.
Tears? They actually allow these criminals to cry? Disgraceful!
Charles Fahlbusch, an assistant attorney general who represents the Department of Juvenile Justice, said the configuration of courtrooms makes it easier to control adults. Adult offenders waiting for hearings are seated in jury boxes with sheriff's deputies at each end. There are no jury boxes in juvenile courtrooms, he said.
That’s what we need in juvenile courts! Holding pens.
But, according to America’s foremost expert on the handling of children, chaining them up is the proper solution. On Thursday night, Bill O’Reilly, the 21st century’s answer to Cotton Mather, proclaimed that it is appropriate to chain up children in the basement for 18 months if they dare to send photos of themselves to their friends. Crooks and Liars has the video clip and the money quote.
Bill, steer out of this skid quickly - very quickly! Right now you’re getting worked up over the thought of chaining naked 13 year old girls in the cellar for maybe 18 months. Stop while you still can!”
The image must be more exciting than a wet hard loofah to this pervert.
As the bloodshed in Iraq seems to have slowed down, either temporarily or permanently, it becomes time to ask about the future. As has been said many times before, (and repeated below) the occupation will continue for many years, until the Iraq oil fields are exhausted, an American President and Congress become sufficiently frightened of popular revolt to accede to the demands of the citizens, or until a combination of Iraqi resistance and the insistence of world opinion force the removal of American forces from the Middle East.
It is estimated that the oil fields have at least 40 years of production at current levels. I’m not at all confident that the nation will stand for investing blood and money into the Middle East for the same period of time. So far they haven’t figured out just how long a project they are in for. Overseas occupations were acceptable when the country was faced by the bogeyman of the World Threat of International Communism™. It seems unlikely the ridiculous danger of a fraudulent “Islamofascism” can be carried on for that long, although a continued American military presence in the Middle East will continue to provide unrest and plenty of fodder for the Long War demanded by the Likud Party.
The declining value of the US dollar on the world market, coupled to a weakened economy that produces little in the way of manufactures as a measure of creating wealth will make foreign adventures more and more expensive in the coming decades.
Americans have had a long tradition of entitlement based upon the geographic good fortune of a large continent occupied by a group of indigenous societies ill-equipped to fight back against a technologically superior culture. An amplitude of raw materials and cheap energy enabled an industrially powerful society to expand well beyond its own shores, fed by an unending stream of immigration from less fortunate countries.
Something will break, and the chances are good it will be the American middle class. Long a bastion of political stability, the disappearance of this economic group would presage a truly bifurcated society: a small ultra-wealthy group of elites and a vast under-educated, under-fed pool of serfs.
At some point in the next four or five years the penny will drop and people will slowly awaken to the looming destruction of their lifestyles. They will quite properly realize that the political leadership has betrayed them and they will rise up to make changes.
Some Americans have already figured out that the current national course is a dead end for the country. Mr Bu$h’s kleptocratic dictatorship has become far less trustworthy; they’re figuring out that the game has been rigged and they’re unhappy.
Dissatisfaction with his fumbling and dishonest stewardship of our nation is evident in a slowly rising tide of dissatisfaction with the symbol of his despotism: the ego-war in Iraq.
The war has been declared a failure on Main Street America. Four years is too long.
Despite the best efforts of the agile propagandists of the Bu$h malAdministration and its corporate whores in Big Media, Americans have had enough of George Bu$h and all his works.
Poll figures expressing unhappiness have been rising steadily over the last two years. We now find almost 75% of Americans want him out of our Oval Office, and our sons, daughters, husbands, and wives brought home from Iraq.
Interestingly enough someone on the scene agrees with 75% of Americans who can actually think for themselves.
AGENCIES, WASHINGTON, BAGHDAD AND NAJAF, IRAQ Wednesday, Dec 05, 2007, Page 6
The radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Monday [Dec 3] blasted US President George W. Bush for signing a deal with Baghdad agreeing to a longer-term US military presence in Iraq.
"I say this to the evil Bush -- leave my country," Sadr said in a statement issued by his office in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.
"We do not need you and your army of darkness," he said. "We don't need your planes and tanks. We don't need your policy and your interference. We don't want your democracy and fake freedom. Get out of our land."
Sadr's salvo comes a week after the US president and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced a deal ensuring a long-term presence of US forces in the country.
Bush and Maliki decided to end the UN mandate for foreign troops' presence in Iraq next year and replace it with a bilateral pact between the two countries for a US military presence beyond next year.
The leader of Iraq's biggest Shiite party on Monday said he hoped an expected security agreement with the US would ultimately leave the country free of foreign troops.
I’ve often been curious why Moqtada al-Sadr is always termed a “radical” cleric. Apparently that’s because he thinks George Bu$h and the American armed forces have wreaked enough havoc in his country, unlike his main political opponent:
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, described the proposed agreement as part of a larger effort to return Iraq to "complete sovereignty."
"For me, personally, I'm looking forward to seeing Iraq as not having any presence of foreign troops just like all the free people around the world," he said through an interpreter at a forum in Washington hosted by the United States Institute of Peace.
"I don't think that any [free people] will have the desire to see foreign troops on their soil," said Hakim, whose political party is a cornerstone of the Shiite alliance behind Maliki.
Perhaps Mr Hakim was out of the country, conferring with his controllers in Iran during the purple fingers moment. It’s certain enough he was in Washington DC on December 5th, 2006 when he shook hands with Mr Bu$h on a deal to sit still for a permanent occupation of his country.
But of course that was last year, when the world still believed Mr Hakim’s handlers in Tehran were in danger of imminent attack because Mr Bu$h and Mr Cheney had harried and bullied the national intelligence community into prostituting themselves and agreeing with Israel’s demand that Iran be destroyed in much the way Iraq has been rendered impotent.
The issues of Iraq and Iran are intrinsically tied to the fortunes and future of another Middle Eastern country, and my country has suffered greatly over the years because of this. While it is essential to support one’s allies, it is also vital to understand that the fate of the United States is more important to us than the fate of an ally.
As many familiar with the intelligence community have revealed, more realistic opinions have forced a change in the public view of the Iranian threat. COL Pat Lang noted recently,
The chimera of Iran as deadly menace is a product of Israeli paranoia and debilitating fear of the "other." This fear saturates Israeli strategic thinking making impossible for them a rational contemplation of the odds against Iranian suicide attacks against Israel. Israel rejects the concept of deterrence of nuclear attack through creation of MAD (mutual assured destruction).
Evidence that this change in NIE judgment about Iran has turned Tel Aviv semi-hysterical abounds all over the net. Yossi Klein Halavi has attacked it in Marty Peretz’s New Republic, and Danielle Pletka has derided it the WaPo, both with no facts, merely anguished denunciations. I eagerly await the smiling face and gleaming teeth of the most bloodthirsty warmonger of all, William Kristol, on today’s Fox Noise programs as he howls his rage and hysteria at this betrayal of Eretz Yisroel’s dream of assimilable land across half the Middle East.
So far, despite the best efforts of the vast AIPAC-funded support network, VADM Michael McConnell, Director of National Intelligence is standing firm in support of the Intelligence Community.
At some point the United States must decide whether it is proper for our military and foreign policy to be made in Washington or in some other country.
Just over a week ago George Bu$h stuck another finger in the eyes of the 75% of Americans who want to see an end to the occupation of Iraq.
WASHINGTON: US President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki agreed Monday to hold formal talks next year to decide the future of US forces in Iraq and other thorny issues, the White House said.
Washington hopes to complete those negotiations -- meant to institutionalize a long-term political, economic and military partnership between the United States and Iraq -- by July, the US "war czar" told reporters.
"The basic message here should be clear: Iraq is increasingly able to stand on its own; that's very good news, but it won't have to stand alone," Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said at a White House briefing.
A puzzled man might ask why it is necessary to plan to continue the occupation past 2008 if the Iraqis are in fact more and more able to stand on their own two feet. And why shouldn’t it stand alone if it is in fact a sovereign nation? We did have all those purple fingers, after all.
Lute said issues like how many US soldiers would stay in Iraq and for how long, and whether there will be permanent US bases, would be decided in next year's negotiations.
"The shape and size of any long-term, or longer than 2008, US presence in Iraq will be a key matter for negotiation between the two parties, Iraq and the United States," the general said.
Monday's announcement means that the Bush administration and Iraq will work out the future of US forces in Iraq in the shadow of the November 2008 US presidential election and despite sky-high US public opposition to the war.
Any resulting agreement could limit the ability of Bush's successor to break with the current US strategy, as Democratic candidates have promised to do amid increasingly vocal calls for a US withdrawal.
Faced with a cratering public opinion of the republican Party it becomes more and more important for Mr Bu$h and his criminal cronies to tie the hands of a Democratic successor in as many ways as possible. The dearth of humanoid candidates for President among the republican Party makes it more likely the next occupant of our White House will be a war fan like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, both of whom are on record supporting and opposing the Iraqi occupation, depending on the day of the week and the wind direction.
The entire Beltway zoo parade seems to think it’s vital to keep Americans occupying Middle Eastern countries from now until Tish'ah B’Av. Apparently the recent NIE finding that Iran really isn’t seeking nuclear weapons, or if it is there will be a five to ten year lead time until that happens, is merely a threshold to be stepped over.
That 75% by the way, includes 58% of US military families who have had George Bu$h’s ego-war right up to their last nerve.
WASHINGTON -- Families with ties to the military, long a reliable source of support for wartime presidents, disapprove of President Bush and his handling of the war in Iraq, with a majority concluding the invasion was not worth it, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.
The views of the military community, which includes active-duty service members, veterans and their family members, mirror those of the overall adult population, a sign that the strong military endorsement that the administration often pointed to has dwindled in the war's fifth year.
…
[A]mong those families with soldiers, sailors and Marines who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, 60% say that the war in Iraq was not worth the cost, the same result as all adults surveyed.
"I don't see gains for the people of Iraq . . . and, oh, my God, so many wonderful young people, and these are the ones who felt they were really doing something, that's why they signed up," said poll respondent Sue Datta, 61, whose youngest son, an Army staff sergeant, was seriously wounded in Iraq last year and is scheduled to redeploy in 2009. "I pray to God that they did not die in vain, but I don't think our president is even sensitive at all to what it's like to have a child serving over there."
Obviously Ms Datta doesn’t understand the importance of keeping enduring forces in Iraq for the next four or five decades, or until the oil is finally exhausted.
A recent announcement indicates that Big Oil is about to complete the first phase of their Oil Grab of Iraq’s wealth. Ben Lando “Mr Oil” of the UPI, has the details:
Big Oil's big dreams are close to coming true as Iraq's Oil Ministry prepares deals for the country's largest oil fields with terms that aren't necessarily what companies were hoping for but considered a foot in the door of the world's most promising oil sector.
Iraq's proven oil reserves are only smaller than those in Saudi Arabia and Iran -- and the country is only about 30 percent explored.
Iraq produces about 2.4 million barrels per day, a recent increase from the 2 million bpd post-invasion average, but far below what its reserves could handle. Its oil sector is suffering from decades of Saddam Hussein-era mismanagement, U.N. sanctions and the effects of the current war.
A couple of notes in front: the “Saddam Hussein-era mismanagement” is a code phrase for “ a lot skimmed off the top.” The normally squint-eyed oil professionals understand there will still be a rake-off, but now it will be going to a new pack of wolves in Iraq. The new contracts will be placed despite the lack of a national oil law regularizing the rape of Iraq’s future wealth. They will be placed only for technical assistance and production advice for presently-producing oil fields, and only with the large companies (Shell, BP, Conoco-Phillips, and probably ExxonMobil.)
The decision of how to develop a resource that provides for nearly the entire federal budget is political and controversial. To each side's alarm, the national government will rely on a Saddam-era law and Iraq's Kurdish region is signing deals on its own.
A September NY Timesarticle noted the Department of State viewed a contract between the Kurdish Regional Government and the Hunt Oil Company of Texas as being “at cross purposes with the stated United States foreign policy of strengthening the country’s central government.” Apparently now that the Central Government has decided to pay ball too, the Hunt agreement is more acceptable.
Knowledgeable observers note that Mr Ray Hunt, President and CEO of Hunt Oil, is described as “a close political ally of President Bush and serves on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board,” in case anyone was concerned about apparent improprieties of undercutting the Central government.
MarketWatch reports executives from BP and Shell were to meet with Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani following Wednesday's meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Abu Dhabi. The global energy information firm Platts reports top ministry and company officials are to meet in Amman this week.
Shahristani himself dropped hints to United Press International in a recent interview. He said he's moving forward with oil deals despite the lack of a new national oil law, a draft of which has been stalled in negotiations for more than a year.
"This has nothing to do with the national oil law. There is no timeline. Whenever we finish our discussions we'll just sign the contracts," he told UPI on the sidelines of the OPEC heads of state summit last month.
"This is basically technical-support contracts," he said, adding the contracts will not be the result of a bidding process. "Selected companies will offer us technical support that we need to develop our producing fields."
So, who gets what?
Shell – Kirkuk
BP - Rumaila
Shell and BHP Billiton – Missan
ExxonMobil – Southern Zubair field
Conoco-Phillips – West Qurna
Dome and Anadarko Petroleun – Sabha and Luhais
Chevron + Total – Majnoon
These fields are all described as “super giants” with at least 5 billion barrels in established reserves. There are other fields not included in the current negotiations that might reach the 5 billion barrel figure.
Mr Lando notes rather blandly that,
Oil company officials met with U.S. officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, prior to the war and since, to discuss contracts for Iraq's oil. Former top officials of the companies were tasked by the U.S.-led occupation with advising the Oil Ministry.
Samuel Ciszuk, Middle East energy analyst for Global Insight, adds, "This means that it is pay-off time for the majors that have been running training courses for Oil Ministry personnel, reservoir surveys, drawn up work-plans and given general advice during the past years[.] It is clever."
The Bu$h malAdministration has produced a lot of propaganda recently about the Anbar Awakening. Apparently, the surgedemanded by Generalissimo Field Marshal Fred Kagan has worked superbly is solving all our military problems in Iraq, if you listen to the Kagan Klan, or any other never-right media source.
(Glenn Greenwald, a vital source of sanity and keen critic of wingers and their fascistic tendencies had some interesting observations on the inner machinations of the United Sates Kagan Korporation and its linkage to all the wrong people here. Regrettably, he didn’t say much at all about the Korporation’s deep connections to the Likud Party.)
The Bu$hies have spent untold millions of our dollars buying weapons under questionable circumstances and distributing them to Sunni insurgents, as well as additional millions buying them off in order to quiet them down. Since the US Army, under Gen David Petraeus’ allegedly capable administration never bothered to actually count the rifles and pistols they bought, nor bothered to write down the serial numbers, there is some question about just where they all went. (The Yorkshire Ranter has a suggestion about where some of these missing rifles went. Surprise! They never got to Iraq.)
General Petraeus’ lame excuse that it was more important to get the weapons into the field than to account for them is laughable. (“We were kicking them out of helicopters.”)
He [Petraeus] described one case in which U.S. forces flew into the war zone of Najaf at night, their helicopters under fire, and “actually [were] kicking two battalions’ worth of equipment off the ramp and getting out of there while we still could.”
“That type of decision was something that we made at the time because those forces needed those weapons and that equipment,” Petraeus told Colmes. “We weren’t going to stay there in the dark and make guys do a serial-number inventory and sign them up, and that is what happened. We believe those weapons all certainly were given to Iraqi units.”
That is no way to manage a prudent and successful military assistance program, General. Any supply sergeant with two years’ experience with IG inspections would have figured the keen idea of registering the weapons and writing down the serial numbers before loading them onto the slick.
So we’re not really sure just how well the Anbar Sunnis are braced, but were spending lots of cash to turn them into “concerned local citizens”patrolling their own neighborhoods and supposedly fighting off the occasional bandit group masquerading as “al Qaeda in Iraq.” It’s all good, just as long as they’re not killing GIs.
It’s important to remember that these “concerned citizens” are the very people that last week – OK, two months ago – were the resistance that was bitterly contesting Mr Bu$h’s occupation of their country. After expending millions of dollars in buying new super-duper IED-proof vehicles the Bu$h malAdministration wants us to believe they have finally discovered what those who understand COIN warfare have known all along: the real solution to insurgency warfare is political, and not military. You have to bring about conditions that make the insurgent want to lay down his arms. Killing off insurgents (and hapless innocent citizens) does not defeat a resistance.
There is a school of thought in military science that the occupying forces must create a better way of life for the citizens of the occupied country in order to create civil peace. The problem with buying off your rebels is that you must keep on paying them off, month after month after month in order to have civil peace. Since the Bu$h malAdministration has finally manipulated the Maliki government to “request” that the USG occupy Iraq indefinitely, despite any UN decision to no longer authorize occupation under their auspices, we can confidently look forward to bribing the Sunnis of Iraq from now until the oil finally runs out. Because, after all, they asked us to stay. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
I don’t have a lot of experience with this sort of foreign policy. I‘m somewhat familiar with mutual interest partnerships such as NATO and SEATO, but for outright bribery to bring about peace I had to go back and look up that “history” thing that the never-right hasn’t bothered with.
If you’re not familiar with the circumstances, there is a brief explanation of the Barbary Wars here.
The cost of tribute became unsupportable, and the US had to fight a long, painful, and expensive war to defeat the Barbary pirates.
A cynical observer might well conclude that bribing the people who were killing your soldiers just a short time ago might not work, long term, especially so if part of the bargain is to give them more and better armaments. It’s probably unfortunate that the ultimate beneficiaries of all this – Big Oil – won’t have to pay the price of tribute.
But what do I know? I’m just an old brokedown sergeant, and Generalissimo Field Marshal Fred Kagan outranks me.
The country of Afghanistan is currently divided into two parts: the south and east, which have seen a resurgent Taliban and thus are quite dangerous, and the north and west, which are much quieter.
The dangerous part of Afghanistan is occupied by troops from the US, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands. Principally centered in Helmand province, there is a daily grind of patrol, ambush by IED, rifle and RPG. There are constant casualties, although not on the level of Iraq.
In the north and western parts of Afghanistan, occupied by NATO forces of Germany, Spain and Italy, it’s rather calm, and the daily patrolling is not resisted as fiercely. Reconstruction and improvement efforts continue apace, and there seem to be real signs of progress.
Man, those Germans sure have it easy. Remember when they used to be the most frightening army in the world? Why aren’t they out in the south and east, kicking ass?
Thus whines Roger Cohen in an Op-Ed in today’s NY Times.
Remember the Wehrmacht? It was a formidable fighting force. The modern German army, the Bundeswehr, is also very effective. Thing is, it is reluctant to fight or even place itself in danger.
Given history, that may seem just fine. The United States helped frame the institutions of today’s Germany precisely to guarantee peace over war. But in Afghanistan, where 3,200 Germans serve in a hard-pressed NATO force, a touch of “Bundesmacht” would be welcome.
Yes, incredibly enough, Mr Cohen yearns for the days of blitzkrieg and Panzer Vorwärts!, armored monsters crashing through village walls, machine gunning any human being standing up, and all to the stirring strains of “Ich hatt’ einen Kamerad” or perhaps the “Panzerlied.”
Mr Cohen describes the divided areas of tactical responsibility as:
“The split gives a rough guide to parts of the world that still see military force as inextricable from international security and others that are now functionally pacifist.”
I spent a little bit of time rubbing shoulders with the Bundesheer, and they seemed quite prepared to kick the Scheisse out of the Red Army juggernaut if it ever crossed the Inter German Border. There was no lack of patriotic motivation for that fight. That was more than 30 years ago, and perhaps a new generation doesn’t feel as martial as Mr Cohen requires them to be.
“In Afghanistan, NATO solidarity collapses at the point of danger,” said Julian Lindley-French, a military expert at the Netherlands Defense Academy. “There’s no point planning robust operations worldwide if the burden is not shared. A lot of the German troops are little more than heavily armed traffic cops.”
I can almost hear Mr Lindley-French sniffing in disdain. Those heavily-armed traffic cops were assigned to the north by the ground commander at the time, who was an American.
I suppose it would be useless to point out that NATO became involved in Afghanistan on behalf of the UN Security Council after Mr Bu$h decided “What the hell. I’ve got the troops over here, thanks to 9/11. Now I might just as well knock off Iraq, as my buddies at PNAC and Big Oil want me to”? It would probably not matter to Mr Cohen that NATO was convinced, inveigled and bribed to pick up the slack in Afghanistan when the bulk of the US Army was busy conquering Iraq’s oil deposits.
Mr Cohen might be surprised, if he had taken the time to more thoroughly research his opinion, to learn that NATO got involved in the south in the place of a US-led mission that had seen quite a bit of fighting:
On July 31 NATO will take control of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan's volatile south, where six British soldiers were killed in the last month. This will be the most demanding operation ever undertaken by the alliance in in [sic] its 58-year-old history, and an important test for its relevance in a post cold-war world. The NATO commander, British Lieut. General David Richards, sat down with TIME's Aryn Baker in the garden at his headquarters in Kabul for a conversation about his new responsibilities.
Prior to this point, NATO had operated as the ISAF and its contribution in Afghanistan had mainly been in the area surrounding the capital Kabul. An October 2003 resolution (requested by the US) extended ISAF responsibility throughout Afghanistan.
So, NATO apparently took over a bad area which had seen combat, and US and British deaths, and now it’s calm. (Well, if you had “heavily armed traffic cops” in your town wouldn’t you behave?) And so Mr Cohen wants Germany to take over the south and east which is heavily contested by the Taliban, who had a good long rest in Pakistan’s Waziristan, thanks to US refusal to close the gap at Tora Bora in 2001. It seems to me that Mr Cohen is resorting to name calling and taunts to persuade the Germans to finish the job the “A” team blew six years ago.
[W]ith the Taliban regrouping, and support for it still arriving from Pakistani border areas, security has become inseparable from eliminating insurgents. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the American commander of the NATO force, said “thousands” of Taliban had been killed this year; other officers put the figure around 5,000.
Wow – I wish we could kill 5,000 al Qaeda in Iraq. I’m having a problem imagining the Taliban fielding what is effectively the better part of a division of fighters. A cautious observer might well wonder about whether we’re using Viet Nam rules in Afghanistan, too.
Some of this counterinsurgency toll is the work of U.S. and other special forces in the separate American-run Operation Enduring Freedom — the more secret of the Afghan campaigns. Still, NATO is at war here.
That, however, is a fact Europeans are reluctant to accept, just as the link between slaughter in Madrid, London or Amsterdam and the Afghan-Pakistani terror nexus seems unconvincing to many Europeans floating on an Iraq-comforted wave of moral smugness.
I’d recommend Mr Cohen talk with some Europeans. That “smugness” is more likely an unwillingness to walk where Americans have been because there’s doo-doo all over the ground.
This morning’s NY Timespoints out the obvious: Mr Bu$h’s ego-war is damned expensive.
President Bush waited until he had vetoed a relatively inexpensive children’s health insurance bill before asking for tens of billions of dollars more for his misadventure in Iraq. The cynicism of that maneuver is only slightly less shameful than the president’s distorted priorities. Despite a pretense of fiscal prudence, Mr. Bush keeps throwing money at his war, regardless of the cost in blood, treasure or children’s health care.
Mr. Bush is threatening to veto most of the 12 domestic spending bills now before Congress because Democrats want to provide $22 billion more than the $933 billion he has requested. His argument? Something about the president’s responsibility to rein in lawmakers’ “temptation to overspend.”
This from a leader who turns federal surpluses into deficits, believes that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars can be financed on a separate set of books with borrowed money, and keeps having to go back to Congress for “emergency funding” because he cannot or will not tell the truth about what it is costing to fight these wars.[emph added]
Well, I can’t think of much to add, actually. This is like reading the Times of pre-1993 when the paper actually acted like a responsible public entity.
The Bu$h malAdministration elected to fight a war in Iraq despite the lack of logic to support that. In fact, we’ve seen that Mr Bu$h was actually determined to attack Iran in 1999, which is not surprising, since his brother JEB! joined up as a charter member of PNAC in 1996. A lot of people have accused PNAC of being war-mongers. Not true. They’re bat-shit crazy war-mongers. The original manifesto was clear: all of the Middle East must be “transformed” into a “lake of democracy” so that the little boat USS United States could cruise effortlessly and easily on its unrolled waters. There’s hardly a nation in the world that has achieved democracy without violence, and they planned for violence in the Middle East, picking Iraq as their starting point. They judged correctly that it was the central point in the region and massive military power could be exercised from there in order to assure that all the other countries thought “correctly,” as our old friends in the USSR described it.
Mr. Bush has said most of the new money would go for “day-to-day” military operations and “basic needs” like bullets, body armor and mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, which are designed to withstand bomb attacks, a rising threat to American forces in Iraq. The troops need safer vehicles and better armor, but it is beyond our ken why Mr. Bush could not cover this in his original budget submission, unless he wanted to confuse the public and limit Congressional oversight.
Actually, not all that money is going for “day-to-day” operations, as we’ll see in another commentary. [ed: below] Some part of this demand – because that is what it is when Mr Bu$h tells Congress to cough up some more of our grandchildren’s future – is going to MRAPs because the Iraqi resistance has discovered a really terrific way of fighting the occupation. IEDs have killed off quite a few American soldiers, and wounded many more. I can‘t help think that if there really is a heaven and hell Sam Adams is nudging Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee and Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion in the ribs and saying, “Don’t you wish we’d had something like that? Ah! How we could have slaughtered the English with them! We’d have been free years sooner.”
We’ll have more about MRAPs in another commentary. [ed: below]
Mr Bu$h is determined that not one soldier leave Iraq unless he is replaced by another, because his famous gut tells him this is the proper way to deliver the Middle East to the bat-shit crazy war-mongers of PNAC. Plus, it’s damned good for his best friends, the defense industry, and big corporations, including Big Oil.
Ironically enough, taming all the Arab countries, and turning them into either outright satraps or Western-aligned “democracies” is exactly what Oded Yinon described in the mid-80s in his “Strategy for a Greater Israel” in the Middle East. But I’m not allowed to suggest that our foreign and military policy is being run from Tel Aviv, because that would be anti-Semitic.
