Revenge of the Surge

We got through Christmas without having NORAD accidently blow Santa out of the sky, but don't let your guard down yet. While visions of sugarplums danced in our heads, the Pentagon flew another escalation strategy under the radar. On the eve of Christmas Eve, Dexter Filkins of the New York Times reported "Taking a page from the successful experiment in Iraq, American commanders and Afghan leaders are preparing to arm local militias to help in the fight against a resurgent Taliban."

Merry Christmas, fellow citizens. Odds are now almost certain that your country will be in a state of war throughout your lifetimes, and possibly throughout your children's lifetimes as well.

They Lied With Their Boots On

It's hard to be surprised any more when the NYT echoes the Pentagon's G.I. jingo, but the experience of watching the newspaper of record cut and paste phrases like "a page from the successful experiment in Iraq" is aging poorly. From the outset, a key component of the surge strategy was the propaganda piece that would make it sound "successful" regardless of how it went.

As in the principles of war, "objective" is a prime tenet of information operations; but there's a difference between the way objectives work in warfare and how they're used in propaganda. In warfare—theoretically, anyway—the objective is supposed to be straightforward and tangible, and all operations and tactics should support the primary goal. In information operations, the objective, at least the stated one, is so vague and flexible that it doesn't need to have anything at all to do with the actual military operation. In fact, it's best if it doesn't; the less any statement meant for public consumption has to do with reality, the greater freedom of movement the information operator (aka "bull feather merchant" or "BFM") has.

When Bill Kristol pal Fred Kagan and the rest of the neocons at the American Enterprise Institute rammed their surge strategy past the Joint Chiefs' tonsils, the BFMs had to justify escalating the war to the public. Too many brass hats had admitted there was no military solution to the Iraq fiasco, so the "political unification" canard was adopted.

Political unification has proven to be as elusive as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction; with the provincial elections just a stone's throw away, there's talk of a coup to oust Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki. That's been no problem for the BFMs, though; looking ahead, they nested the "security" piece of the puzzle in the original mission statement: establish security in order to allow political unity to come about. Since some measure of decreased violence has been achieved in Iraq, the BFMs can point to it as proof of the surge's success, and be reasonably confident no one will remember that improving security was the task, not the goal. They can also be fairly sure that not too many folks will ask hard questions about how that "security" was achieved.

In his three tours of duty in Iraq, David Petraeus has followed the same operational formula: he hands out a lot of weapons, bribes everybody he gave the weapons to not to use them, and transfers the heck out of Dodge before the time bombs he set blow off his successors' thumbs and noses (Hey, what's this?).

Four months after Petraeus turned over command of a "tamed" Mosul, the city's police chief defected and insurgents overran the city. When Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, his recruits disappeared into the desert night along with about 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols. As commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq, he created "Awakening Councils," groups of former Sunni militants that Filkins says "are credited by American officials as one of the main catalysts behind the steep reduction in violence there." More that 100,000 of these former anti-U.S. guerillas have been armed to armpits and put on the dole so they won't attack Nuri al Maliki's government forces. Creating the Awakening Councils was the single dumbest thing—among a field of highly qualified contenders for the title—that we've done in Iraq, and now, it's one of the most compelling reasons for us to stay there forever: if we leave, the gravy spigot runs dry, and all our beautiful ugliness will melt out the drain pipe when the Sunni gunmen go back to their old line of business.

And thus it is that our catalyst of victory is the machinery of our failure; we've succeeded so well in Iraq that we must stay there always. Permanent occupation of Iraq was the operational and strategic objective all along, of course, even before 9/11, even before young Mr. Bush was selected to head the neoconservative ticket.

But the BFMs are still doing a good job of keeping the system from acquiring that target.

Hell No, They Won't Go

They're also doing a good job of camouflaging what the junta is up to these days. As of December 28, Barack Obama's web site still promises to phase "combat troops" out of Iraq in 16 months. His Secretary of Defense and top generals must not have looked at his web site lately. (I'm sure they've been busy.)

Retired Marine General James L. Jones, the incoming National Security Adviser, and ongoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and legacy Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen are all on record as being opposed to withdrawal timelines. Jones has said a timeline would be "against our national interest." Mullen warned that a deadline would be "dangerous," and Gates objected to the 16-month plan during the presidential campaign.

General Ray Odierno, commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq and boy sidekick to David Petraeus, recently announced that U.S. troops would stay on in Iraqi cities beyond the summer deadline called for in the Status of Forces agreement. Gates, who was on a tour of the region blaming Iran for everything wrong in the world, didn't say boo about Odierno's public defiance of the agreement. That's not surprising. In a recent article Foreign Affairs article, Gates Wrote, "there will continue to be some kind of U.S. advisory and counterterrorism effort in Iraq for years to come." From the tenor of the rest of the piece, it sounded like he meant "years to come after 2011."

The BFM work-around to ignoring international agreements and mandates from the commander in chief is pure magic:

Q: When are armed troops in a combat zone not combat troops?

A: When we call them something else.

Presto, change-o, give them a different name and grind the new president's campaign promises into his eye like a broken whiskey bottle. Maybe the BFM expression for that sort of thing is "following orders from the bottom up."

The folks who brought us war without end in Iraq are rolling out advance publicity of their planned sequel set in the Bananastans, and nobody, including Barack Obama, seems to notice or care. In propaganda art that's called "desensitizing."

Maybe we used up what was left of our national outrage on the Iran strike that never happened. Or maybe we have this waifish notion that Barack Obama couldn't possibly let a bad thing like Iraq happen again.

Could he?

He sure isn't stepping up to the plate on this Gaza atrocity, is he? Maybe he's waiting to get permission from the Pentagon.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Scott Horton's interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

Son of the Tailor of Mumbai

This is an update of "The Tailor of Mumbai" that I did for Military.com. It includes some (but certainly not all) of the U.S. and foreign press shenanigans that have blossomed since I posted the original piece. One can just imagine the mammal Perry White would birth if he caught Jimmy Olsen pulling stunts like this. Great. Caesar's. Ghost!

My December 10 article "Our Man in Bananastan" discussed how the hasty conclusion that Pakistani militants were behind the terror attack in India sounded like the bogus intelligence described in satiric espionage novels by Graham Greene and John le Carre. The New York Times, following the journalistic standard it established when it helped Dick Cheney sell the Iraq invasion, reported the "facts" of the Mumbai affair as deduced from double secret hearsay.

Recyclable Sources

The Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the Indian attack, according to an unnamed State Department official who was rephrasing what unnamed American and Pakistani authorities had told him; but, unnamed American Embassy officials wouldn’t verify the story for the unnamed State official, nor would unnamed Pakistani officials in Islamabad.

NYT's unnamed source at State also said that his/her/its unnamed sources said that unnamed Pakistani authorities, under pressure from unnamed sources in India, had arrested Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a member of Lashkar. (Don't get the two confused now. "Lakhvi" is they guy; "Lashkar" is the thing.) NYT reported that Lakhvi (the guy) reportedly "masterminded the attacks," but didn't make clear which unnamed sources had leveled that allegation.

An anonymous senior Pakistani official apparently confirmed that Lakhvi had been arrested along with a bunch of other guys who belonged to Lashkar the thing, but the official "later backed away from the assertion."

Another NYT article reported that unnamed American counterterrorism officials in Washington "wanted to see proof that Mr. Lakhvi was actually in custody," but apparently zero officials, named or unnamed, American or Indian or Pakistani, gave a dog's last lunch about seeing proof that Lakhvi the guy or Lashkar the thing actually had anything to do with the Mumbai attacks.

The Washington Post took the Mumbai tale to the next level of incredibility when it published a piece by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke that purported to be expert opinion but read like the beginning of Clarke's next bad spy thriller. Clarke essentially tells us that in order to understand what's really happening in South Asia right now, we have to imagine that the shake and bake scenario he's about to present is true. By the end of the article, the Mumbai incident, like all terror acts, leads to al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden is giving orders to a couple of Taliban characters and a guy from Lashkar the thing and a Pakistani intelligence dude on how they need to get cocked and loaded to defile with the new American president's head.

It took the BBC to report that all of the allegations against Lashkar stemmed from interrogations by the Mumbai police of the surviving member of the terror group, who might not have been a whole lot less dead than his nine former buddies when they shot truth serum in his behind.

Snow Thy Enemy

On December 11, Britain's Times Online reported that the UN Security Council, under pressure from the ubiquitous unnamed sources in India and the U.S., has placed Lakhvi and four other guys in Lashkar on a "terrorist blacklist." I'm dying to find out what kind of list Dean Wormer put them on. Keep in mind that Lakhvi and Lashkar are still only "suspects," still based on the sole evidence of a guy nobody has seen except the Indian police he supposedly confessed to. The UN has also placed sanctions against Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity arm of Lashkar.

On December 17, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said Pakistan has given the U.S. a "very solemn commitment" to disentangle the charitable Jamaat from the evildoing Lashkar. "I think the Pakistani government is being very sincere," Wood said.

Yeah.

Wood also said, "Look, they're (Pakistan) on the front lines of terrorism, as we've said many times before." However many times State has said Pakistan is on the front line of terrorism, I missed all of them. The last time I paid attention to that sort of bull jargon, Iraq was the "central front" in the war on terrorism. I expected the next central front to be Afghanistan, until the last minute to withdraw troops from Iraq came along and the central front shifted back there. I guess with Pakistan in the mix we now have a three front circus. I don't know how Iran fits into all this; maybe it's the enemy at our back. (Oh, watch the Pentagon propaganda fairies steal that one. And those Muslim agitators in Somalia, we'll call them "the enemy below!")

Indian police allegedly questioned two Indian Muslims they claim to have arrested in February during an attack on a police camp in northern India. One of the prisoners, Fahim Ansari, was said to be carrying maps highlighting Mumbai landmarks, several of which were hit in last month's attack, at the time of his arrest. If he were really carrying such maps, you'd think that might have clued in the Indian authorities that some evildoing was headed down the pike for Mumbai, but maybe I'm being too critical. I mean, think how many U.S. authorities had to be a-snooze at the switch for 9/11 to happen.

But one also has to wonder what Ansari was doing with maps of the next big terror job in his pocket while he and his buds were shagging the Indian police camp. Come to think of it, Indian authorities supposedly identified all those dead guys who pulled the Mumbai job from I.D.s they were carrying. If ten twenty-something year old guys were smart enough to sneak into the largest city of a nuclear power and hold its entire law enforcement and military establishment at bay for days, how could they be dumb enough to carry their wallets with them? Is that a Lashkar thing, a way make sure the authorities can trace their suicide commandos back to them? If so, why are the Lashkar guys denying they had anything to do with the Mumbai incident?

Pakistani news group Dawn claims to have visited the Pakistani hometown of the alleged suspect Indian police are holding and spoken to his father, who allegedly admits the alleged suspect is his son. India's The Hindu claims Pakistani authorities have cordoned off the town so no one can confirm Dawn's story.

Dawn and other Pakistani news outlets claim that the FBI, after interrogating the surviving Mumbai attacker, cleared Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) organization of any involvement in the attack. As best one can tell, the Pakistani media's source for this story was Efrem Zimbalist Jr. An earlier story by Pakistan's The Nation claimed that the FBI, along with India's intelligence agency and Israel, were "hatching" a conspiracy to destabilize the ISI.

Then there's the scoop from India's Times Now about this guy they identify as "Sabauddin" who is the "alleged Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) finance[r] in India." The alleged financer Sabauddin is alleged to be the guy Indian authorities arrested in February along with that Fahim Ansari guy who was allegedly carrying maps of the Mumbai terror sites while he and Sabauddin supposedly shagged the police station in northern India. One has to wonder why LeT allowed its financer to go on a field job; maybe it was like in Twelve O'clock High where the chaplain and the admin officer sneak aboard a B-17 for a raid over Germany and General Savage doesn’t find out until afterwards.

The only thing we can say for sure regarding this unholy narrative is that both India and Pakistan are incompetent and crooked, that their news media are every bit as untrustworthy as ours, and that we'll never get to the bottom of the story.

But that doesn't matter. What matters is that we have "upheaval" in South Asia that constitutes "clear and present" security concerns to us in North America and which demands that we pour more troops into the Banastans and keep them there until things become less up-heaved, which they never will be as long as we're there heaving our weight around.

The Tailor of Mumbai

My December 10 article "Our Man in Bananastan" discussed how the hasty conclusion that Pakistani militants were behind the terror attack in India sounded like the bogus intelligence described in satiric espionage novels by Graham Greene and John le Carre. The New York Times, following the journalistic standard it established when it helped Dick Cheney sell the Iraq invasion, reported the "facts" of the Mumbai affair as deduced from double secret hearsay.

Recyclable Sources

The Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the Indian attack, according to an unnamed State Department official who was paraphrasing what unnamed American and Pakistani authorities had told him, but, unnamed American Embassy officials wouldn’t verify the story for the unnamed State official, nor would unnamed Pakistani officials in Islamabad.

NYT's unnamed source at State also said that his/her/its unnamed sources said that unnamed Pakistani authorities, under pressure from unnamed sources in India, had arrested Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a member of Lashkar. (Don't get the two confused now. "Lakhvi" is they guy; "Lashkar" is the thing.) NYT reported that Lakhvi (the guy) reportedly "masterminded the attacks," but didn't make clear which unnamed sources had leveled that allegation.

An anonymous senior Pakistani official apparently confirmed that Lakhvi had been arrested along with a bunch of other guys who belonged to Lashkar the thing, but the official "later backed away from the assertion."

Another NYT article reported that unnamed American counterterrorism officials in Washington "wanted to see proof that Mr. Lakhvi was actually in custody," but apparently zero officials, named or unnamed, American or Indian or Pakistani, gave a dog's last lunch about seeing proof that Lakhvi the guy or Lashkar the thing actually had anything to do with the Mumbai attacks.

The Washington Post took the Mumbai tale to the next level of incredibility when it published a piece by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke that purported to be expert opinion but read like the beginning of Clarke's next bad spy thriller. Clarke essentially tells us that in order to understand what's really happening in Southern Asia right now, we have to imagine that the shake and bake scenario he's about to present is true. By the end of the article, the Mumbai incident, like all terror acts, leads to al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden is giving orders to a couple of Taliban characters and a guy from Lashkar the thing and a Pakistani intelligence dude on how they need to get cocked and loaded to defile with the new American president's head.

It took the BBC to report that all of the allegations against Lashkar stemmed from interrogations by the Mumbai police of the surviving member of the terror group, who might not have been a whole lot less dead than his nine former buddies when they shot truth serum in his behind.

Snow Thy Enemy

On December 11, Times Online reported that the UN Security Council, under pressure from the ubiquitous unnamed sources in India and the U.S., has placed Lakhvi and four other guys in Lashkar on a "terrorist blacklist." I'm dying to find out what kind of list Dean Wormer put them on. Keep in mind that Lakhvi and the Lashkar are still only "suspects," still based on the sole evidence of a guy nobody has seen except the Indian police he supposedly confessed to. The UN has also placed sanctions against Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity arm of Lashkar. One wonders what the Security Council will do to the Iranian Red Crescent for trying to sneak food into the Gaza strip for Palestinians who have been reduced to eating grass and painkillers.

On December 17, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said Pakistan has given the U.S. a "very solemn commitment" to disentangle the charitable Jamaat from the evildoing Lashkar. "I think the Pakistani government is being very sincere," Wood said.

Yeah.

Wood also said, "Look, they're (Pakistan) on the front lines of terrorism, as we've said many times before." However many times State has said Pakistan is on the front line of terrorism, I missed all of them. The last time I paid attention to that sort of bull jargon, Iraq was the "central front" in the war on terrorism. I expected the next central front to be Afghanistan, until the last minute to withdraw troops from Iraq came along and the central front shifted back there. I guess with Pakistan in the mix we now have a three front circus. I don't know how Iran fits into all this; maybe it's the enemy at our back. (Oh, watch the Pentagon propaganda fairies steal that one. And those Muslim agitators in Somalia, we'll call them "the enemy below!")

Indian police are going to question two Indian Muslims the arrested in February over an attack on a police camp in northern India. One of the prisoners, Fahim Ansari, was said to be carrying maps highlighting Mumbai landmarks, several of which were hit in last month's attack, at the time of his arrest. If he were really carrying such maps, you'd think that might have clued in the Indian authorities that some evildoing was headed down the pike for Mumbai, but maybe I'm being too critical. I mean, think how many U.S. authorities had to be snoozing at the switch for 9/11 to happen.

But one also has to wonder what Ansari was doing with a map of the next big terror job in his pocket while he and his buds were shagging the Indian police camp. Come to think of it, Indian authorities supposedly identified all those dead guys who pulled the Mumbai job from I.D.s they were carrying. If ten twenty-something guys were smart enough to sneak into the capital city of a nuclear power and hold its entire law enforcement and military establishment at bay for days, how could they be dumb enough to carry their wallets with them? Is that a Lashkar thing, a way make sure the authorities can trace their suicide commandos back to them? If so, why are the Lashkar guys denying they had anything to do with the Mumbai incident?

Since Pakistan's government says it's cooperating with "requests" by the U.S. and India to investigate the matter, that means it isn't; and since it insists its Inter-Service Intelligence directorate isn't linked up with Lashkar, that means it is; and since it says it will abide by UN sanctions against Jamaat-ud-Dawa, that means it won't.

The only thing we can say for sure regarding this unholy narrative is that both India and Pakistan are incompetent and crooked, and that we'll never get to the bottom of the story.

But that doesn't matter. What matters is that we have "upheaval" in the region that constitutes "clear and present" security concerns and demands that we pour more troops into the region and keep them there until things become less up-heaved, which they never will, at least not as long as we're there heaving our weight around.

By the way, I still can't figure out if they actually arrested Lakhvi or not, and I haven't run across any reports that Indian authorities have arrested any Hindu militants.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Scott Horton's interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

Iran Ate My Caliphate

by Jeff Huber

Last week, at a meeting of his country's ruling party, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak accused Iran of "trying to devour the Arab states." Don't worry, Hosni. Iran won't eat you. It can't. It can't sit on you either. It's too far away.

What led Mubarak to say such a mean thing about Iran? Well, it seems that a bunch of Iranian students shouted a bunch of mean things at the Egyptian embassy in Tehran, including their apparently genuine wish that someone would hang Mubarak. The Iranian students shouted mean things about Mubarak because Egypt wouldn't let the Iranian Red Crescent sneak around Israel's blockade of the Gaza strip and deliver food and supplies to Palestinians, who have been reduced to eating grass.

So Iran wasn't trying to eat Arabs; it was trying to feed them. Gee, how did Mubarak get that story all backwards?

Mr. Congeniality

If there's a big blue meanie in this scenario, it's Mubarak, who for two years running has made Parade magazine's "World's Worst Dictators" list. Mubarak has stayed in power in Egypt for over a quarter century through military rule, torture, emergency law, rigged elections, and keeping his nose planted in Israel's tohkes (and, by extension, America's as well).

But if he says the Iranians are up to no good, the no goodniks, that's good enough for us, because we've had years of Dick Cheney and his Iran Directorate telling us how bad Iran is.

Though they have yet to prove any of their allegations, the Cheney Gang has most of the world believing the Iranians are responsible for arming militants in Iraq. The world, mostly because of the mainstream media's indolence, is largely unconscious that the party most responsible for handing out free guns to Iraqi yahooligans is General David Petraeus. Nor is the world especially cognizant that the reductions in violence that Petraeus so merrily takes credit for are actually the result of Iran brokering a peace agreement between Shiite factions headed by cleric Muqtada al Sadr and Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki.

The preponderance of the world believes Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program, despite decisive statements by U.S. intelligence agencies that they abandoned their program in fall of 2003. The Russians didn't begin building Iran's first reactor until fall of 2002, so whatever nuclear program Iran had must have been the kind of thing a bunch of Revolutionary Guard colonels drew on the back of a napkin on a rainy afternoon Fort Farsi Officers' Club. That U.S. intelligence granted the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program at all was almost certainly a result of pressure from Lord Cheney's leg breakers.

The world perceives that Iran instigated Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon because of allegations like the one made by the Israeli cabinet that Lebanon had become infested with "Iranian-sponsored terrorist enclaves of murder." This perception endures despite the discoverable big block facts in the Lebanon conflict: the Israelis were the ones who blew the bejesus out of southern Lebanon, and the Persian Iranians were the ones who came in afterward and offer aid to injured and homeless Arabs despite attempts by the nice guy Arabs in Turkey and Saudi to stop them.

And now the Persian Shiite Iranians are the ones trying to help Sunni Palestinian Arabs in Gaza who the Israelis are starving, and it's Egyptian Sunni Arab Mubarak who's assisting Israel and who's trying to paint Iran as the bad guy.

Welcome to your Brave New World Order, fellow citizens. Black is white, up is down, scumbags rule, humanitarian works are acts of aggression and so say the round heeled news media.

Witness this statement from January 2008 by the British Telegraph: "Iran is known to use humanitarian aid to further its political aims around the region."

Stunning humbuggery. Simply stunning.

And everybody knows, of course, that the Iranians want to get their mitts on nuclear weapons so they can blow Israel off the map because that's what their president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said. Well, actually, nobody knows that because that's not what Ahmadinejad said. He was actually quoting the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and according to Professor Juan Cole and other Farsi speaking commentators, Ahmadinejad's exact words were "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

But everybody says he said he wants to nuke Israel off the face of the earth, and what everybody says is what passes for gospel truth in our Rovewellian age.

Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons or a program to make any. It may or may not have ballistic missiles that will reach Israel, but without nuclear warheads, ballistic missiles are little more than multi-million dollar popguns. Iran's army can't project power more than ten miles beyond its borders, Iran's air force can't fly to the other side of the Persian Gulf, and its bathtub navy, while an effective coastal and choke point denial force, couldn't go toe-to-to with the Somali pirates because it would sink of natural causes before it got halfway to Africa.

Iran can't do much to our troops in Iraq. If—and this is a big if—they manage to talk the Shiite militias into throwing themselves against the fence in an all out assault on our forces, so what? You couldn't ask for a better opportunity to wipe out the Shiite militias. You hear speculation that Iran might mobilize Hamas and Hezbollah against our Iraq enclaves, but what would they use to mobilize them? Flying carpets?

A lot of folks also believe the talk that Iran might incite the rest of the Middle East into a full-blown major regional conflict, but how on earth are the Middle Eastern nations going to fight each other? The past 50 years or so have clearly demonstrated that none of them can successfully project conventional military power into any of their neighbors' territories, much less any other countries in the area. Iran's maritime forces might be able to close the Strait of Hormuz briefly, and could very well pull our Navy's pants around its ankles in broad daylight, but Iran would only do that if we attacked it for no real reason.

And as we've discussed, we have no real reason to attack Iran. We have no real reason to demonize them the way we have been either, except that making a boogie man out of the Persians is the best thing the warmongery has left to justify staying in Iraq, something they seem intent on doing despite the agreement young Mr. Bush just signed that says we'll leave.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Scott Horton's interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

Our Man in Bananastan

by Jeff Huber

Truth is truly stranger than fiction. Graham Greene's 1958 spy novel Our Man in Havana told a tragicomic tale of false intelligence crafted to suit the needs of a political agenda. John le Carre's 1996 The Tailor of Panama repeated the theme.

Ahmed Chalabi was Dick Cheney's real life man of the hour when it came time to shake and bake the intelligence on Iraq, and the Dark Lord and his neocon chamberlains are still trying to fabricate a casus belli for Iran. The Persian Ploy may be running up against a term limit, but there's all the time in the world left to slip on the Bananastan peel. Heck, western superpowers have been flinging themselves down that slope for centuries.

At this point in the American experiment, U.S. intelligence is to intelligence what Kenny G is to jazz. After nearly a decade of getting gang-buggered over the kitchen table by the minions of the Office of the Vice President, our spy agencies have no more credibility than our sacked and pillaged mainstream press. In fact, the lines between intelligence and news and popular entertainment have virtually vanished. As evidence of this, witness Exhibit A: "Plans of Attack," by intelligence analyst, counterterrorism expert, news commentator and novelist Richard A. Clarke.

Thriller

The bare bones reality of the terrorist attack on Mumbai, India was incredible to begin with: 10 kids in their twenties managed to hold the law enforcement and military establishment of a nuclear power at bay for days. The Indians have their own Hindu terrorist cells, but it would be embarrassing to admit they got their pants pulled down by a gang of homegrown yahooligans, so they immediately accused Pakistani yahooligans. If it turns out they blamed Muslim evildoers for doing evil that Hindu evildoers did, that's okay. They did the same thing in September and got away with it.

America's newspaper of record, the New York Times, did everything it could to prop up India's accusations. A December 8 story said that unnamed Pakistani authorities, under pressure from unspecified sources in India and the U.S., raided a camp run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group suspected of carrying out the Mumbai attack, and arrested Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who "masterminded the attack." This information came from an unnamed State Department official in Washington, who was repeating what unnamed American and Pakistani authorities had apparently told him. But, the unnamed State official said, unnamed American Embassy officials wouldn't verify the story, nor would unnamed Pakistani officials in Islamabad, who were presumably different unnamed Pakistani officials from the unnamed Pakistani authorities who told the story to the unnamed State official in the first place.

On December 9, the NYT noted that "Mr. Lakhvi has been described as the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks," but didn't say who has described him as the mastermind or why. NYT also said that unnamed American counterterrorism officials in Washington "wanted to see proof that Mr. Lakhvi was actually in custody," but it made no mention of American officials wanting to see any proof that Mr. Lakhvi actually had anything to do with the Mumbai attacks.

Bollywood

I had to look to the BBC to discover the source of the accusations against Pakistan: "Indian authorities." Mumbai police are the ones who say the attackers were Lashkar-e-Taiba, but "They did not say how this was known."

One of the attackers survived and was questioned. "Some media reports have suggested that truth serum may be used as part of his interrogation," the BBC said. It sounds like ventriloquism might have been part of the interrogation too; photographs of the dead bodies of the other nine guys were "too graphic to show." The guy they took the rubber hose to must have been in lovely shape.

So, the "news" story we got from the NYT was a double secret anonymous hearsay rumor based on alleged testimony taken from a coerced deathbed confession that may or may not have been post dated. Don't get mad at the NYT though. Their scum baggage was nothing compared to the stunt the Washington Post pulled.

The Hunt for Red Herring

WaPo had the good grace to put Clarke's "analysis" of the Mumbai massacre in the opinion section, but it belonged in the book section plainly labeled as bad fiction. It was screed of incontinent narrative interrupted by tumescent dialogue that sounded like something out of a badly dubbed foreign film. I kept expecting one of the characters to strike a belligerent pose and bark, "Our kung fu is stronger than your tai chi!"

"The network" of terrorists groups, Clarke warns, "is approaching 2009 with a specific agenda. So, too, is the incoming leadership of the network's chief enemy, the United States." To understand how the two sides think, we must "imagine two hypothetical meetings in which each side plots its terrorism agenda for 2009."

Jesus, Larry and Curly; to understand what's really going on, we have to make stuff up?

"A half-dozen bearded and robed men are sitting on rugs in a circle," Clarke writes. "As the titular leader of the movement, Osama bin Laden opens the meeting."

Aha! I wondered how long it would take before al Qaeda became the culprit in the Mumbai incident.

"'I recall well how you often met with me in Afghanistan during the war against the godless Soviets,' bin Laden says. 'I remember how you helped us set up our training camps there in the 1990s, and how you provided us with safe haven here in Pakistan when we left Afghanistan after our 'planes operation' brought down the towers in 2001.'"

Ahmed, your son, the doctor who became a terrorist after the infidels dropped bombs on his wedding, is at the door.

It goes on like that, and Muhammad Omar of the Taliban is at the meeting, and Hakimullah Mehsud of the other Taliban is there too, as is a representative from Pakistani intelligence, and bin Laden's "short, squat" (as opposed to "tall, squat") lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, who says, "Soon, the Pakistani army will leave the Afghan border. Thanks be to God, and to Lashkar-e-Taiba."

Great. Caesar's. Ghost.

The scenario Clarke paints in the situation room of the West Wing is equally purple. High-level hobnobgoblins sit around and go hamana hamana until somebody from the National Counterterrorism Center says: "We could see al-Qaeda attacks in 2009 on the Arabian Peninsula, in Europe, even here at home. But of course, we have no actionable intelligence pointing to a specific plot."

We could see flying pigs repair the Hubble telescope in 2009. We could see a lot of things, but the thing we won't likely see is any coherent intelligence analysis on the terrorists. Sure, Clarke is the biggest flake in the cereal bowl, but keep in mind that he was one of the top guys in his field for decades. He's retired now, but think how many of the folks still at the wheel are just like him.

There's a chance that Clarke and the rumor mill press are right about the Mumbai incident and its probable fall out, but so what? Jeane Dixon predicted thousands of things every year; the odds were certain that one them would come true.

Soothsaying is fine as a checkout line amusement, but it's a heck of a thing to shape foreign policy around.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Scott Horton's interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

Queer Eye for the G.I.

by Jeff Huber

William S. Lind, co-creator of the Fourth Generation Warfare concept and director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism, says a lot of smart things about national security, but he doesn't say any of them about the issue of gays and women in the military. My admittedly limited experience of the gay lifestyle hasn't endeared me to it: my older male dog humps my younger male dog, my younger male dog humps my leg, and I pay all the bills; an arrangement, come to think of it, not so different from my experience of marriage. So I don't, so to speak, have a dog in the fight over whether gays or women should be "allowed" to serve in the military, but Lind makes such a cock and bull argument against it I feel obliged to apologize on behalf of the entire heterosexual male community.

In a pair of recent opinion pieces, Lind asserts that we shouldn't let women and gays in the armed services because if we do, "men who want to prove they are real men will not join."

Lind's relative manliness doesn't necessarily add to or subtract from his opinion's validity, but unnamed sources who knew him when assure me that the closest he ever came to wearing a uniform was dressing his G.I. Joe doll in one.

Gays and Dolls

As one might expect a social conservative to do, Lind laces his positions with a number of intellectual subterfuges, not the least of which is filing gay men and women in the same pigeon hole. The go-to argument against women serving in the military is that they are, on average, smaller and weaker than their male counterparts and they can get pregnant, a consideration that doesn't apply to gay men.

If you think that gay men are intrinsically less physically capable than their heterosexual counterparts, and you want to take a trip to the emergency room, I invite you to walk up to a homosexual member of the American Ballet Theater and call him a faggot. I doubt if there's a segment of the population more physically prepared for direct placement into elite commando training than male dancers. (There are such things as heterosexual male dancers, by the way, and they generally don't lack for the companionship of women who wouldn’t give either Lind or me the time of day).

But there's more required of a fighter than physical toughness, according to Lind. "Throughout history," he prates, "some armies have fought a lot harder than others. The specific reasons vary widely, but one way or another they all come down to human factors." The most important human factor, Lind assures us, "is that men fight to prove they are real men." Their membership in fighting organizations is a "badge of honor" that says, "We're not sissies or pansies. We are men who fight, serving alongside other men who fight." An infusion of sissies and pansies among the company of real men, Lind warns, could damage "military unit cohesion."

Mr. Lind has a selective sense of military history and/or a blind notch in his Doppler gay-dar.

As a carrier skipper I served with said when President Bill Clinton enacted the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, "Sailors have been rubbing heinies since Sinbad reported to boot camp." Soldiers have been sharing pup tents just as long.

The ancient Greeks believed that physical love between soldiers improved morale, bravery and overall battle efficiency. Plato, the philosophical father of the American political right, considered it utter stupidity to ban physical relationships between soldiers. "Wherever, therefore, it has been established that it is shameful to be involved in sexual relationships with men," he wrote, "this is due to evil on the part of the rulers, and to cowardice in the part of the governed."

In a song honoring the Lelantine War, Plato's pupil Aristotle wrote that, "love…thrives side by side with courage."

The Roman historian Plutarch noted that tribal ties were of little value "when dangers press, but a band cemented by friendship grounded upon love is never to be broken."

Lind cautions that gay and straight men can't mix in "very close quarters" without "serous friction." I've got news for Lind: gay and straight men have been mixing in very close quarters in the American military without serious friction since forever, including those World War II John Wayne types that conservatives like Lind have such a school girl crush on.

They're queer, Bill. They're here, Bill. Now drop and give me fifty pushups (heh).

G.I. Jane

The notion of women serving in the military is hardly new either. Plato favored it. He wrote in Republic that women must be taught the "art of war, which they must practice like men."

"Is she capable of sharing either wholly or partially in the actions of men, or not at all?" he asked. "And is the art of war one of those arts in which she can or can not share?" Then "let [women] share in the toils of war and the defense of their country… Only in the distribution of labors the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same."

Lind's specific objection to letting women serve is that they might be allowed into "ground combat arms." I'm not sure what he means by that. Women are and will be assigned to war zones in combat support capacities. So what? He may suppose that women inherently lack the "right stuff" for combat, but those Israeli Security Force babes who pull the trigger on those remote control machine guns along the Gaza Strip don't appear to be lacking anything in the killer instinct department. If Lind is worried that women will elbow their way into Delta Force, he is, in Plato's words, "plucking a fruit of unripe wisdom." I don't know of anyone who is seriously trying to make women into commandos, or of anyone who would take the notion seriously. Maybe Lind is confusing that movie where Demi Moore becomes a Navy SEAL with reality. Confusion about reality is, after all, a leading occupational hazard of conservatism.

I don't claim that integrating women in the military has been a tribulation-free experience. In my day, the incidence of young single sailor girls getting themselves pregnant to get out of duties they didn't care for was completely out of hand. We developed a pretty good solution though; all the single mommy strikers got discharged and sent home.

I've also known a fair number of female officers who benefitted from reverse discrimination, but not nearly as many as the number of male officers I knew who got where they got thanks to Uncle Admiral or Governor Grandpa or a godfather who had a village in the old country named after him. And never forget that whatever wartime leadership qualities George S. Patton possessed that allowed him to get away with his vainglorious shenanigans, he was also one of the richest dudes in the Army.

Lind's bottom line isn't that women and homosexuals serving in the military will impair America's war making capability. He's concerned about "cultural Marxism," which is a code phrase narrow shouldered white male bigots intone when they sense that cultural Darwinism is about to bust them another pay grade or two down the social pyramid. By Lind's criteria, emancipation was cultural Marxism, as was the ban on feeding Christians to lions.

There may be good arguments for barring women and gays from military service, but Lind doesn't make them, and I haven't heard any that make an ounce more sense than his do.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Scott Horton's interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

Shiver Me Neocons

by Jeff Huber

It was only a matter of time before Long Bill Kristol and his scurvy dogs of war used piracy as an excuse to goad young Mr. Bush into invading one last country before the door hits him. In the latest gurgitation of the Weekly Standard, Bill suggests that the best thing young Mr. Bush can do in his final days as commander in chief is send the Marines into Somalia to deep six those pesky buccaneers. Now: if we can't identify and capture pirates while they're plundering ships on the bounding main, I'd like to know how the yo-ho-ho Bill thinks the Marines can tell the pirates from the rest of the poor starving Somalis once they go ashore.

Bill also remarks how Bush can do the nation a service "by reminding Americans of our successes fighting the war on terror." One wonders if Bill is no fooling unaware that terrorists are on the verge of a sparking war between two nuclear powers, or that a congressionally mandated task force has reported that "it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013," or that, according to the respected analysts at the Rand Corporation, Mr. Bush's pursuit of a military-centric counter-terror strategy "has not undermined al Qaeda" and that the terrorist group "has remained a strong and competent organization."

One would hope that given the enormous influence he wields, Bill is at least partially cognizant of the world around him, that he just talks that way because he's a master of Socratic dialectic* who recites gibberish until people agree with him so he shuts up.

But then, if you've ever seen him talk on John Stewart's show, you've probably concluded that Bill is dumber than a quarry. The only thing he has going for him as a spokesmodel of the neocon agenda is that his looks don't break TV cameras. If the mongers sent somebody like surge architect Fred Kagan on The Daily Show, the kids in Stewart's audience might vomit (Eugh, gross!) or maybe even cry (Please don't let him sit on us!).

Unnamed officials assure me that the cadets used to react that way whenever Fred gave lectures at West Point.

War and B'gar

Seemingly aware of his limitations, Long Bill normally delegates the hardcore humbuggery required of any given subject to one of his more gifted mateys, and the pirate issue is no exception. Seth Cropsey's "To the Shores of Tripoli…" is a standard neocon compendium of fuzzy premises and fear and loathing and the sort of logic that insists ear is to hearing as nose is to face.

The first thing that struck me about the piece was Cropsey's apparent alarm over the estimated $30 million ransom money the Somali pirates raked in this year. Cropsey must have shared a cryogenic chamber with Dr. Evil. We're chaffing $10 freaking billion into Iraq every month, which isn't a pismire compared to the $7 freaking trillion we're going to spend trying to fix the freaking economy, and Cropsey wants to send the Marines ashore for $30 measly million that didn't even belong to us?

Only slightly less ludicrous is Cropsey's admonition that "Americans ought to know the limits of relying on naval power alone to stop piracy as a result of the nation's experience in the Barbary Coast wars." Comparing the present Somali pirate situation to our Barbary Coast wars of the early nineteenth century is as tidy an apples-to-elephants analogy as you'll ever find. Thomas Jefferson's America hadn't expanded much beyond the eastern seaboard, it didn't have the world's largest economy, it hadn't won two hot world wars and a cold one, or lost any dirty little third world wars in Asia; it didn't spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined, or have a nuclear arsenal that could destroy the planet between lunch and happy hour, etc., etc., etc.

Thomas Jefferson's America also didn't possess a couple fistfuls of fixed wing aircraft carrier strike groups, two of which, with their E-2 Hawkeye surveillance aircraft and the rest of their air wings, could turn the whole Indian Ocean into a no-pirate zone faster than you can say "Avast." Yeah, at first blush it's overkill to use more than $10 billion worth of carrier and air wing and escorts to stop a few measly millions worth of piracy, but what else do the carrier groups have to do right now: bomb Muslim weddings in the Bananastans? Heck, the Navy's got cruise missile equipped nuclear submarines to bomb Muslim weddings with.

And if it ever happens that the nuclear submarines can't bomb Muslim weddings any more because, oh, what…because they run out of fuel when the Iranians go and gobble up the whole world's supply of uranium, say, well we have a whole separate service branch that pick up the Muslim wedding bombing slack. It's called the Air Force, which has these really, really expensive things called, oddly enough, bombers.

Cropsey doesn't mention anything about that in his article. He was deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, so there's an excellent chance he knows nothing whatsoever about naval warfare or U.S. naval capabilities. Then again, he could be protecting the phony baloney defense budget. If he came right out and said the Navy hasn't been doing what it should because its been doing what the Air Force should be doing but isn't, people might start to ask why the hell we have either one of them.

Plus, if the Navy can solve the pirate problem, there's no need to get our land forces tangled up in another pointless quagmire, which Cropsey admits a Somali invasion would be. "Somalia's descent into turmoil began almost two decades ago," he writes, and is "unlikely to be reversed" by military intervention.

But that doesn't matter, Cropsey admonishes. We should rely on the Marines and not the Navy to tackle the pirate challenge because "The reference in the Marine hymn is to 'the shores of Tripoli,' not to its bays or littoral or coastal estuaries."

And as if the article weren't already sufficiently stunning, Cropsey closes with the neocons' favorite propaganda ploy, the taunt. Failing to hit the beaches of North Africa "will increase the jihadists' contempt for us." Psst. Ahmed over there just called you a booger nose. What are you going to do about it??

Thanks for the info, Crops. Oh, did Ahmed tell you your fly is open?

It's well and good to have a good laugh at Kristol's unholy crew of blobs, buffoons and bull feather merchants. They not only deserve ridicule, they demand it. It is vital to the continued health of our nation that we lay bare the absurdities inherent in the neoconservative philosophy early and often and forever.

But it's also imperative to remember that this collection of ideological sideshow amusements steered our ship of state and dictated the fates of nations for eight years, and that some of the people in Barack Obama's national security team still take them seriously.

Scary, huh Jim Boy?

*In Book VII of Republic, Plato's Socrates describes "the hymn of dialectic" as "the discovery of the absolute by light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense," i.e., superior logic is thinking that's totally divorced from reality. Now you know why some folks call Plato "the first neocon."

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Scott Horton's interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.