Obama promised to make ending the war in Iraq his first act in office. Then he did what he could to avoid ending it. Forced by Bush and Maliki and the Iraqis to remove troops, he's keeping troops nearby and filling bases with mercenaries, while expanding ground and drone wars around the region and claiming the power to make war anywhere he likes, including having already done so in Libya. Nonetheless a hearty band of Obama-Right-Or-Wrongers planned a rally in Chicago to praise the president for . . . well, for something or other.
The rally was sponsored by Marilyn Katz and Carl Davidson and "Chicagoans Against War in Iraq," and was promoted as a big national event. I heard about the planning here in Virginia. Among the 30 speakers were the president of the Cook County Board Toni Preckwinkle, Alderman Joe Moore, and Tom Hayden. But an email report I've just been forwarded says the audience was "5-10," and "Dozens and dozens of prepared placards that said 'yes we can' were in a box, untouched."
Obama was in full campaign mode of course, although he says he was at Ft. Bragg this morning, to Welcome Home the troops from Iraq as our occupation of that country comes to an end. Of course, if you believe that shit I have some wonderful coastal property to sell you here in the San Joaquin Valley which btw is hours from the coast.
Meanwhile Stephen Hadley was bullshitting the masses on Andrea Mitchells’ show shortly thereafter about what the end of our occupation means to Iraq. Hadley,who served under The Shrub, is now hanging his hat at the US Institute of Peace. I find his ‘new job’ incredibly fucking hypocritical, but more on Hadley later.
Back to The Big O and his speechifying this morning. He had, as his backdrop, dozens of soldiers in their military garb applauding as if on cue. I changed the channel before he was finished, I must be honest with you. So, from the MSNBC writeup, here is one of his memorable quotes from this morning..try not to toss your cookies as you read it:
They tell us we're dropping about $10 billion a month in Afghanistan so we can catch that Bin Laden guy...but eventually, we're gonna catch him, and as soon as we do you can imagine that folks will be wondering why we're still over there - and I gotta tell ya, I'm one of those people.
I mean, we're over here talking about how we're so broke that we have no choice but to cut a couple of billion from heat assistance for the poor, and a billion-and-a-half from the Social Security operations budget, and money from food stamps and childcare assistance and tornado forecasting in Alabama...but every single month, just as regular as clockwork, we seem to be able to find another $10 billion to spend in Afghanistan, even as we have an economy that could badly use another round of truly productive stimulus.
And I don't think y'all even realize just how much money $10 billion really is - but today we're gonna see if we can't fix that with a bit of a thought exercise.
Imagine if we set up a program that took that Afghanistan money and spent it right here at home for a year or two - and it was spent in the form of a lottery, where we stimulate the larger economy, help fix the mortgage crisis, and create a more energy-independent nation, all at the same time.
I got all we need except a catchy name; with that in mind let's move on to the description of how the Happy Super Fun Day Peace Lotto Stimulus Thingy works.
I'm offering the following to fill out on last week's very brief diary (see P.S. 2 for a belated explanation in reaction to the execution of the original).
... The Karzai regime has appointed a commission to investigate a US air strike that killed 31 Afghans last Friday. While occupation spokesmen claimed that all those who died were "insurgents," local residents demonstrated against what they charged was the slaughter of innocent men, women and children, and now the local governor has acknowledged that roughly half of the victims were civilians.
Meanwhile, the US military and the Central Intelligence Agency have dramatically escalated their shadowy war on the other side of the border in Pakistan. According to the New York Times, the number of missile strikes by pilotless drone aircraft has been doubled, with at least 21 having been conducted so far this month. ...
According to Pakistani authorities, 708 people were killed in 51 drone strikes in 2009, and another 600 or more have died in the 75 such strikes carried out so far this year. This adds up to more than 1,300 slaughtered since Obama entered the White House. The overwhelming majority of the victims - referred to vaguely by officials and the media as "suspected militants" - are civilians, including women and children.
I read a piece last night by Jason Linkins at Huff Post in which he describes the experience of CNN correspondent Michael Ware and Ware's difficulty in dealing with the memory of the death of a presumably innocent young Iraqi shot execution style by US troops in 2007.
Mr Ware tells of the alleged incident he says he witnessed and filmed in 2007 when working for US news giant CNN, but claims the network decided the footage was too graphic to go to air.
He alleges that a teenager in a remote Iraqi village run by the militant Islamist group, al-Qaeda was carrying a weapon to protect himself.
"(The boy) approached the house we were in and the (US) soldiers who were watching our backs, one of them put a bullet right in the back of his head. Unfortunately it didn't kill him," he tells Australian Story.
"We all spent the next 20 minutes listening to his tortured breath as he died."
Ware left CNN last spring after being denied extended time off when apparently suffering from PTSD from his experiences. I respected Ware's work as a corespondent and wish him well. I also know that he has an important story to tell when the time is right.
Thousands of our kids, if they come home at all, are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan physically wounded and carrying the enormous weight of the emotional baggage picked up during their experience of war. This is nothing new, we brought back the same cargo from Vietnam, Korea and WW2. All wars provide their participants with a dismal tide of dark memories, the material of a lifetime of tortured nightmares.
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Before I had a chance to finish my first cup of coffee this morning I was swatted with the news (from Al Jazeera) that Iraq says we "must stay until 2020."
This shocking news came from Lieutenant General Babaker Zerbari and therein lies the crux of the problem. Zerbari is a Lieutenant General and Iraq's most senior military officer.
We send Lieutenant Generals out for coffee and donuts in the morning. We have Bird Colonels sharpening pencils and Major Generals escorting defense lobbyists to strip clubs.
"What is missing [in psychopaths], in other words, are the very qualities that allow a human being to live in social harmony."[
-- Robert Hare
America's ruling elite have become extremely and increasingly destructive to social values both at home and abroad, to a degree one must recognize as both criminal and pathological.
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 counterinsurgency (COIN) marches into the expanding ranks of failed U.S. military doctrines, the military-industrial-congressional complex casts about for a new raison d'être. Since manpower-centric, generational occupations of broken countries we can't fix have finally fallen out of favor as our foreign policy tool of choice, the American warmongery is back to championing a high-price, high-tech force posture reminiscent of the Cold War days.
The "China Shop," my label for an ad hoc cell within the neoconservative think-tankery, is consuming swaths of bandwidth in an attempt to make Americans believe an expanded, modernized Chinese navy is about to grab control of the world's oceans and make us all work in laundries and restaurants for sub-minimum wages or something equally implausible but nonetheless horrifying to the rank and file of the insentient Right. A May 20 article by Human Events columnist Robert McGinnis warns us of "China's High Seas Aggression." A Wall Street Journal op-ed piece from the same date by Michael Auslin of the infamous American Enterprise Institute sends chills up our spine with haunting tales of "Asia's Troubled Waters." An ad placeholder at Military.com's Defense Tech blubbers, "It's Springtime for China's Blue Water Navy." Swim away! Swim away!
At the heart of this latest wave of Sinophobia is a pair of recent articles by U.S. Navy Commander James Kraska, a judge advocate general (AKA "lawyer") who frames himself as the next coming of Ray Spruance. Kraska is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), one of the oldest right-wing think-tanks in the country. Contributors to FPRI publications constitute a pogues gallery of neoconservatism: Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Donald and Fred Kagan, James Woolsey, and more. Kraska is also on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College, which is a de facto neocon think-tank. (Professor Mackubin Thomas Owens, an associate dean of academics at the college, was co-author of the neocon manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses. He is a regular National Reviewonline contributor and is also, by sheer coincidence I'm sure, a senior fellow at FPRI.)
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."
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.
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'?
President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for a worldwide war against al-Qaida two days before Sept. 11 but did not have the chance before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, U.S. and foreign sources told NBC News.
The document, a formal National Security Presidential Directive, amounted to a "game plan to remove al-Qaida from the face of the earth," one of the sources told NBC News' Jim Miklaszewski.
The plan dealt with all aspects of a war against al-Qaida, ranging from diplomatic initiatives to military operations in Afghanistan, the sources said on condition of anonymity.
In many respects, the directive, as described to NBC News, outlined essentially the same war plan that the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon put into action after the Sept. 11 attacks. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly to the attacks because it simply had to pull the plans "off the shelf," Miklaszewski said.
One of the biggest stories to go down the old "Memory Hole" from the Bush years was this:
How in 2004 tons (literally tons!) of shrink-wrapped $100 bills -- over 2 Billion dollars worth -- were loaded on pallets into a C-130 airliner and flown to Iraq, where they were handed out to "contractors" from the backs of pickup trucks. They literally looted the NY Fed and handed it out on the streets of Iraq.
I wrote about it at Dailykos back when that place was decent:
Quote:
WASHINGTON -- It weighed 28 tons and took up as much room as 74 washing machines. It was $2.4 billion in $100 bills, and Baghdad needed it ASAP.
The initial request from U.S. officials in charge of Iraq required the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to decide whether it could open its vault on a Sunday, a day banks aren't usually open.
"Just when you think you've seen it all," read one e-mail from an exasperated Fed official.
"Pocket change," said another e-mail.
Then, when the shipment date changed, officials had to scramble to line up U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo planes to hold the money. They did, and the $2,401,600,000 was delivered to Baghdad on June 22, 2004.
It was the largest one-time cash transfer in the history of the New York Fed."
And where did it all go? It was given away, handed out from the back of pickup trucks and stuffed into the duffelbags of "contractors"
Where did the money come from? The New York Federal Reserve.
And who was in charge of the New York Federal Reserve when this occurred?
Why our good little ol' Timmy Geithner, that's who.
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.
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.)
The U.S. military's fabled counterinsurgency field manual (FM 3-24) is an authoritative-sounding 281-page volume of balderdash. Even the legend of its origin is a fabrication. Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of forces in Iraq and now in charge of Central Command, supposedly "wrote the book," but the book was actually hammered together from plagiarized material in 2004 by Dr. Conrad Crane and others at the Army War College.
This was during the time frame that "King David" Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, a tour during which he lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols and other combat equipment that without question wound up in the hands of militants. The part of the manual Petraeus "wrote" was his signature on the manual's endorsement letter when he was in command of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center in 2006.
There's nothing new in the military about generals taking credit for the hard work of underlings, of course, especially when the general in question is a fast-rising self-promotion genius like "Teflon General" Petraeus. And plagiarism is so common in military publications that it's the norm, not the exception. Like I used to say in my active-duty days, if you really think the brass want you to think out of the box, you're out of your mind. Military doctrine is loaded with copy-and-paste palaver that goes back decades, sometimes more than a century, reflecting the expert perspective of experts who died so long ago that nobody can tell you who they were. That way, nobody swings in the wind for having an original idea that doesn't work out.
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