While I was taking a week off to celebrate Memorial Day the story broke about "King David" Petraeus secretly giving himself authority back in September 2009 to start a war anywhere from the Horn of Africa to the Bananastans*. His secret directive allows him to bury America in another quagmire any time his black little heart desires without so much as a yes-you-may from the commander in chief or Congress. In a May 25 article, New York Times Pentagon stenographer Mark Mazzetti, to whom "military officials" showed the "secret" directive Petraeus had written, noted that "the precise operations that the directive authorizes are unclear" and that the order "does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries."
Mazzetti doubtless inserted the weasel wordiness at the behest of his buddies at Petraeus' Central Command headquarters, whom he allowed to censor his exposé on them as a professional courtesy (he's a nice, polite boy, that Mazzetti). The "precise operations that the directive authorizes" are whatever Petraeus decides he wants them to be at any given moment. That's why he didn't limit himself by clarifying what he was or wasn't authorizing. You don't fill in an amount when you write yourself a blank check.
As for the order not authorizing "offensive strikes," any incursion of U.S. forces into a country without that country's permission is an offensive action, one that the target countries should justifiably defend themselves against. Of course, the way the Mazzettis of the media spin things for the warmongery, once the penetrated country defends itself it becomes the aggressor, and our forces defend themselves by calling in air support and yahoo, Major Kong, we got us another war of necessity.
Mazzetti notes that spokesmodels for the Pentagon and the White House "declined to comment for this article." No doubt they're hoping The Oil Slick that Ate America will bury the story of how "Teflon General" Petraeus wholly devoured the legislative and executive branches of our government and got away with it.
On Memorial Day, remember the fallen victims of every war. Remember America's fallen soldiers, remember their names, remember their families, remember the loved ones they left behind. But above all else, remember how the blood, death, and fire of war are unleashed, remember why they are unleashed, remember who does the unleashing, who glorifies it, and who profits from it.
The process is always the same. It exploits human weakness, triggers the tribal instincts within us, incites anger, and forges it into hatred. The politicians claim a dangerous enemy is determined to destroy the homeland, they talk about patriotism, they talk about God, they talk about the greatness of their nation, the glory of their culture, the sanctity of their ideology or religion. They say the enemy is evil and deserves destruction. The flags are waved and the guns are loaded. The generals are summoned and given their orders. And then the killing begins.
When I was a young man I carried me pack,
And I lived the free life of the rover,
From the Murray's green basin to the dusty outback,
I waltzed my Matilda all over.
Then in 1915 my country said: Son,
It's time to stop rambling, there's work to be done,
So they gave me a tin hat and they gave me a gun,
And they sent me away to the war . . . . . .
There's work to be done.
That's what America's young men were told. In 1950. In 1965. In 1989 and 1991 and 2001. There was work to be done at the 38th Parallel. There was work to be done in the Mekong Valley. There was work to be done in Panama. There was work to be done in Baghdad and Kabul and Kandahar. That's what they were told.
Then the politicians gave them a tin hat, and gave them a gun.
As a student at Boise State University, I was lucky enough to take classes from a gifted professor who had a friendship with Seymour Hersh. Mr. Hersh gave a lecture at our school that year, and, the morning before, spoke with the thirty or so students in my class directly. Our discussion was mainly about the recent revelations, brought to light by Mr. Hersh himself, about the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib. I recall thinking, at the time, that Mr. Hersh's legacy of bringing the most intimate horrors of war to the public's eye was a testament to his tenacity as a reporter, but not to any increase in the brutality of America's wars. Mr. Hersh, who would have still gone down in history a journalistic icon if he'd retired after breaking the story of the Mai Lai massacre, continues to bring us the sad news of our own war crimes, this time on your watch.
I am greatly saddened to report the following . . .
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says that US forces in Afghanistan are carrying out what he referred to as "battlefield executions" of prisoners.
"One of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan," Hersh said during a discussion at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference last month in Geneva, where he was also the keynote speaker. "They're being executed on the battlefield."
The Pentagon's lame-excuse directorate has a new reason why we're not winning our woeful war on -ism.
The "Blame Cell," in its various ad hoc and formal manifestations, has been successfully warding off culpability for the Defense Department's failures since the Korean War. Our services' graduate-level war college programs wax operatic about the brilliance of Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur's amphibious invasion of the Inchon Peninsula that cut off the North Koreans' lines of communication and forced them to retreat back above the 38th parallel.
But nobody at our citadels of war knowledge dares mention that El Supremo swiftly afterward snatched oops from the jaws of hurray by continuing to push up the peninsula and scaring the Chinese into joining in on the fun. Nor do our war scholars dwell on how many American boys were ground into hamburger in the ensuing trench warfare that went on for three years before the warring sides agreed to call it a draw. And no one responsible for preserving the military's mythos openly discusses how Dugout Doug spent most of World War II sitting on his sharply creased rear end in Australia and then took the credit for winning the war in the Pacific that rightly belonged to Adm. Chester Nimitz.
Even more Orwellian is the crying noise the five-sided playpen and its military-industrial-congressional complex allies make to this day about Vietnam. We could have won in Vietnam, the narrative goes, if only the liberal media and the long-haired freaky people had given the military brass more time and more resources. Never mind that we gave military brass over a decade and, at one point, a surge of over a half-million troops to "get the job done."
Like most sound tenets of military art, the concepts of "objective" and "measures of effectiveness" have been corrupted by America's present military leadership.
At his Senate confirmation hearing in June 2009, then-Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal promised the Armed Services Committee he would execute a "holistic" strategy in Afghanistan, and that "the measure of effectiveness will not be the number of enemy killed, it will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence." In the first three months of 2010, deaths of Afghan civilians at the hands of NATO troops more than doubled over the record posted during the same period last year by Gen. David McKiernan, who was unceremoniously transferred to Fort Palooka to make room for "King David" Petraeus protégé McChrystal.
McChrystal also stated at his Senate hearing that his definition of "success" would be "a complete elimination of al-Qaeda" from Afghanistan and Pakistan. In October 2009, National Security Adviser James Jones said that al-Qaeda in Afghanistan had been contained and that fewer than 100 members remained in the country. You'd think that, with all his air strikes and night commando raids that have been "accidentally" killing all these civilians, McChrystal could have eliminated 100 contained bad guys by now, but he hasn't. According to U.S. military intelligence, there are fewer than 300 al-Qaediers in Pakistan. Between us and our little buddies in the Afghan and Pakistani security forces, we outnumber al-Qaeda exponentially, yet we can't put them away: They're harder to kill off than Freddy Krueger.
The latest bunker mentality bunk to emanate from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is that he has too many civilian contractors hoofing around on his turf. Back in June 2009, a "civilian surge" was a key component of his strategy. What made him change his mind?
Maybe his attitude adjustment has something to do with the recent announcement that five former Blackwater employees, including former president Gary Jackson and former vice-presidents William M. Mathews Jr. and Ana Bundy, have been indicted on charges of illegally obtaining automatic weapons and then lying about it. Also indicted was former Blackwater general counsel Andrew Howell. Some general counsel he turned out to be: Your honor, my clients maintain that the weapons in question only become automatic after their triggers are held in the firing position for a specified interval, therefore...
Mercenary icon Blackwater has been in legal extremis for some time. The five Blackwater Barts who went to trial in a U.S. district court for slaughtering Iraqi civilians in a 2007 incident recently got off, but only on a technicality; the prosecutor, Kenneth Kohl, did a header from the high board into the canvas by basing his case on evidence he knew would be thrown out.
The short version of an old joke about U.S. defense spending goes like this:
An overweight nuclear submarine skipper baffles the congressional defense appropriations subcommittees with a line of technical gobbledygook Einstein wouldn't understand, and the subcommittees give the Navy whatever it wants. A short, bald fighter pilot feeds the subcommittees a ration of dwarfed egotism and threatens to defile their daughters, and the subcommittees give the Air Force whatever it wants. Then a fit, ruggedly handsome infantry officer tells the subcommittees in modest, straightforward language what he needs to win the wars they send him off to fight, and the subcommittees give the Army nothing.
That was back before counterinsurgency became the (ahem) COIN of the realm.
In the good old days, the Cold War days, the Army's main function was to get slaughtered in the Fulda Gap while the Navy and Air Force deep struck the Soviets into surrendering. The "blue" services dominated the defense budget with high tech, big-ticket weapons designed to defeat the Soviets' maritime forces and air defenses. That the Soviets' maritime forces and air defenses didn't work worth a pig's wings didn't matter; their mere existence served as a sufficient stratagem to keep us in a wartime economy for over a half century.
To amend a line made immortal by Walt Kelly, creator of the comic strip Pogo, we have met the evildoers and they are us. It would be nice to think that we managed to change the vector of American foreign policy with the 2008 elections, but the New American Century is still afloat and running full steam ahead. All we've done is trade Rumsfeldian arrogance for McChrystalline oiliness.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld derided his critics as "Henny Pennys" who saw the sky falling every time they pulled their heads out of their heinies. Rumsfeld was, of course, an abject disaster, a micromanaging bully who single-handedly ensured the Iraq excursion would turn into a cluster bomb by threatening, according to Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, who was one of the original Iraqi Freedom planners, to "fire the next person" who suggested the military needed to plan an endgame for the war. As obvious a calamity as he was from the outset to discerning observers, Rummy managed to hang on to the SecDef slot for nearly six years, partly by surrounding himself with sycophants and cronies, partly by bullying the wimpy mainstream media, but mainly through the sponsorship of the then most powerful public figure on earth, his old pal Dick Cheney. Rumsfeld was so firmly entrenched in the top Pentagon spot that he only tasted Kiwi Parade Gloss after the GOP took a paddling in the 2006 election.
Soldiers committing savagery you never even have to see
Handicapped by feeling he has to argue inside the manufactured 'frustrated do-gooder' image of President Obama, rapper Lowkey nonetheless -- in Obama Nation -- above speaks some 'never allowed in the mainstream media' truths about what U.S. and other Western 'colonial policing' soldiers actually do for a living. Their job has two parts: to kill and maim peasants trying to take their countries back from Western invaders and their treasonous puppets, and to kill and maim anyone nearby or slightly suspected of being peasants trying to take their countries back from Western invaders and their treasonous puppets. If there were a God, what would she/he say when one of these Western/U.S. killers for no damn good reason asks for admission to Heaven? 'You poor thing, come right in and make yourself at home'?
It's shameful enough for the country that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined to hire mercenaries to fight its woebegone wars; the mercenaries we hire are hooligans who we kicked out of our overpriced military.
As Tim McGlone of The Virginian-Pilot reported on March 8, two Blackwater "workers" - Christopher Drotleff of Virginia Beach and Justin Cannon of Texas - got themselves escorted to the front gate with other-than-honorable discharges shoved up their pockets over a shopping list of infractions. Drotleff and Cannon are now ex-workers of Blackwater because in May 2009 they shot three unarmed Afghan civilians, which, to be fair to Drotleff and Cannon, is a relatively small number of unarmed civilians to shoot by Blackwater standards, and what's more, only two of them were killed, for cripes' sake. The third civilian was just wounded and is probably grateful to still be alive.
Not surprisingly, Blackwater didn't have either of these hooligan's military records on file even though they were required to by contractual agreement. The contract also required Blackwater to review the hooligans' records before hiring them, which Blackwater probably did, and that's probably why the records weren't on file, so Blackwater could plead ignorance when the hooligans pulled a stunt like shooting unarmed Afghan civilians.
Drotleff and Cannon's boss at Blackwater was no altar boy either. Johnnie Walker (supposedly that really is his name) was a two-fisted, double-barreled, heat-seeking disaster. A senior Blackwater executive wrote an internal memo that said Walker's management at Camp Alamo in Kabul "cultivated an environment that indirectly" led to the May shootings, and he described Walker as "an exceptionally ineffective" manager who habitually blew off meetings with Department of Defense and NATO officials. The Blackwater executive also mentioned that Johnnie Walker was a Hemingway-class drinker and characterized him as having "no regard for policies, rules, or adherence to regulations in country."
Local military brass weren't enamored of Walker's Wild West show. Maj. Gen. Richard P. Formica at one point wrote a memo to the Camp Alamo's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Brian Redmon, demanding that he get the Blackwater cowboys under control, but there wasn't much Redmon could do about them. The mercenaries weren't in his chain of command, and they weren't subject to discipline under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Redmon wrote to his superiors asking for clarification as to just what his responsibilities regarding the Blackwater workers were, but he never heard back.
Among the worst Orwellian deceptions being exposed by the Pentagon's Marjah offensive is the ludicrous notion that we're fighting a war in Afghanistan in order to protect Afghan civilians. The recent U.S. Special Forces air strike in the Marjah area that killed 27 or more civilians, including four women and a child, is a prime example of a cognitive disconnect that has been endemic in U.S. military operations throughout our misnamed war on terrorism.
The Feb. 21 air strike occurred in an area under Dutch control. The Dutch are durn-burnit het up about that, because the day before, the Dutch government collapsed over an initiative to extend the deployment of the country's 2,000 troops in Afghanistan. (We could learn something from the Dutch on how to throw a peace movement, couldn't we?)
A Dutch Defense Ministry spokesmodel, who talked to the press at the Hague on what the New York Times described as "customary anonymity," said it wasn't any Dutch boy who called in that air strike. The Dutch Defense Dude wouldn't say who did call in the air strike, and unidentified NATO officials didn't say who ordered the strike in either. Sadly, it's just possible that nobody knows who called in the air strike. If that's the case, though, the operations types running the show over there are bigger screw-ups than I thought they were, and I already thought they were colossal screw-ups.
Kabul - Afghanistan on Monday announced a ban on news coverage showing Taliban attacks, saying such images embolden the Islamist militants, who have launched strikes around the country as NATO forces seize their southern strongholds. . . .
It's becoming apparent to the foreign policy wonks in the Obama administration that the goose in Afghanistan is cooked. Now it's only a matter of talking themselves into sticking a fork in it. The "great dilemma of this war," as the New York Times calls it, is "whether to reconcile with the men who sheltered Osama bin Laden and who still have close ties to al-Qaeda." That option is considered to be "rife with political risk at home" which means the neocons and their pals in the right-wing hate chorus will flay Obama alive if he takes it.
The reconciliation option would also entail making nice with Taliban leader Mohammed Omar, the sleazebag we kicked out of power in 2001 so we could put sleazebag Hamid Karzai in his place. According to Transparency International, Karzai runs one of the most corrupt governments in the world, second only to Somalia, which, since it doesn't really have a government, shouldn't really count.
Karzai plans to hold a "grand assembly" of Afghan bigwigs to discuss his plan to negotiate with the Taliban. Omar says secret talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban have not taken place, which means they probably have. The Taliban have previously said they won't accept any kind of deal with Karzai unless foreign troops leave Afghanistan first, which they (we) almost certainly won't do.
The first thing to go out the window when an aggressive, warlike nation starts a war (other than the truth) is whatever cultural understanding may have existed before.
For instance: what was the American pop culture 1960's view of middle eastern culture? Belly dance and music, beautiful architecture, snake charming, funny hats. Even children's story's like Ali Baba.
Conversely, what was the 1960's view of Vietnam? Sub human dirty gooks.
Today, there's a piece in the NYT about the beautiful ancient art of Vietnam, which surely never would have occured in the war years:
Before we blew up all the minarets in Bagdad, it was necessary to remove them as objects of beauty, as expressions of humanity -- we had to remove the ME from our cultural radar. How many American children today know about Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves? And how many worry about hook nosed terrorists?
To know a culture --even a Mickey Mouse pale imitation of the real thing -- is to understand the humanity, that there are real children, real families there at the other end of the gun-sights; different from us, yes, but real nonetheless.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His most recent books are Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008) and Mosaic Orpheus (poetry, 2009).
This is part one of an interview in which Scott talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war and is not just a bureaucratic cabal inside Washington, but rather is solidly grounded in and supported by a wide coalition of forces in society, and about the need for a new kind of American foreign policy.
SCOTT: I think I have talked about the deep state. I prefer now just to talk about deep politics, that there are things which we just don't face in our society, things we're not willing to talk about. With respect to Afghanistan, one of the things that we don't want to face and talk about is the presence of drug trafficking in the plans of the CIA for controlling remote areas of this world. And when you have a number of facts which are not being talked about, our politics becomes more and more like an iceberg, in which the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what's going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all. And that's the part that I call deep politics. The phrase "deep state" is a bit dangerous, 'cause it might make people think that there's a secret Pentagon and a secret White House, it's nothing like that. It's more this matter of the mindset that I'm talking about.
JAY: When you described the war machine, you use the words "drug-corrupted war machine," and everyone knows that Afghanistan is now the manufacturer of the majority of the world's heroin, but it doesn't ever get talked about as a policy issue or as an underlying driving force in this struggle for all sides. So talk about this.
SCOTT: Well, I would say, actually, it has become talked about in the last year, with the beginning of Obama's campaign. You know, when Bush first went in in 2001, they had a list of the main refineries, and they were never touched, because America's coalition for developing local support in Afghanistan was made up very largely of warlords who were involved in the drug traffic. Our principal ally was going to be [Ahmad Shah] Massoud, and there was a big debate in Washington, before we went into Afghanistan, whether to make him an ally or not, because they knew he was involved in the drug traffic. Well, he was in fact assassinated, just a day or two before 9/11. But the Northern Alliance, which was the only faction in Afghanistan in that year that was growing poppy, they were our allies. And if you look at almost any newspaper story about drugs in Afghanistan, it's going to be talking about the Taliban. But the Taliban are getting at most about a tenth of the revenues that are being raised by opium and heroin in Afghanistan, and the vast majority of it is going to the big warlords who essentially make up, to this day, the coalition that are supporting [Hamid] Karzai in Kabul.
Parts I and II discussed how our counterinsurgency doctrine's requirements for a reliable host-nation government, a reliable host-nation security force, and reliable intelligence are impossible to achieve in our present wars. The third and final part of the series focuses on the futility of counterinsurgency itself as a tool of U.S. foreign policy.
Our counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan were doomed by incompetent and corrupt host-nation governments and security forces and an inability to produce reliable intelligence about cultures we have little or no understanding of. Of even greater concern, though, is that our COIN efforts have little or nothing to do with our national security objective of protecting the homeland from terrorism.
A Case of the Creeps
"Mission creep" is the incremental expansion of a project or mission beyond its original goals until the mission concludes in catastrophic failure.
The flimsy excuses we were given by the Bush/Cheney administration for the invasion of Iraq were the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program (he didn't have one) and the not so subtle implication that he was involved in the 9/11 attacks. (He wasn't. Among the Americans who still fall hook, line, and sinker for the 9/11 ploy is Fox News commentator and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.)
Part I noted that two key requirements of our counterinsurgency doctrine - a legitimate host-nation government and a competent, trustworthy host-nation security force - will never be accomplished in Iraq or Afghanistan. Part II will illustrate the lack of reliable intelligence in our woebegone wars.
The counterintelligence field manual that Gen. David Petraeus supposedly wrote but really didn't says, "Counterinsurgency (COIN) is an intelligence-driven endeavor." That's bad news for us, because our intelligence systems in both Iraq and Afghanistan can best be described as The Man from U.N.C.L.E. meets Inspector Clouseau.
The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) recently published a report titled Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan. The authors, who include Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, deputy chief of staff for intelligence in Afghanistan, tell us that the intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan "is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate in."
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, says, "Our senior leaders - the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, Congress, the president of the United States - are not getting the right information to make decisions with."
(Edger, you are a FPer for a reason, dear. That means use it :) - promoted by Diane G)
Zbigniew Brzezinski,
The Grand Chessboard:
"For America the chief gepolitical prize is Eurasia... America's global primacy is directly dependant on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained."
"About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in it's enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources."
"America's withdrawal from the world or because of the sudden emergence of a successful rival - would produce massive international instability. It would prompt global anarchy."
"The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role."
The Real News Network's Paul Jay interviews Zbigniew Brzezinski, former member of the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State from 1966 to 1968, chairman of the Humphrey Foreign Policy Task Force in the 1968 presidential campaign, director of the Trilateral Commission from 1973 to 1976, and principal foreign policy adviser to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential campaign.
From 1977 to 1981, Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. He was also a member of the President's Chemical Warfare Commission (1985), the National Security Council-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (1987-1988), and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1987-1989). In 1988, he was co-chairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force, and in 2004, he was co-chairman of a Council on Foreign Relations task force that issued the report Iran: Time for a New Approach.
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Zbigniew Brzezinski,
