Pen and Sword

Fools and Fanatics and Bull Feather Merchants

2012-01-08T23:40:00.037-05:00

by Jeff Huber

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves…”

Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Public Affairs Victoria Clarke, creator of the
Retired Military Analyst propagansda program:
She'll brainwash you and your little dog too!

When deconstructing the flock of war hawkers who comprise the Pentarchy’s propaganda pantheon, I normally stick to teeing off on the top tier: four-star masters of mendacity like King David Petreaus and ex-Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, DoD civilian lore lords like Victoria Clarke, and trusty echo chamberlains of the mainstream media’s military beat like Michael R. Gordon, Dexter Filkins and the just god-awful Thomas E. Ricks.

But under the elite stratum of Goebbelites skulks a collection of players who range from the triple-A to the sandlot levels, commonly referred to as the “military press,” who need a shot from the long club as well. These bush leaguers don’t enjoy the vast market that the major moguls command. They do, however, have a captive audience among the crowd of fools, fanatics, true believers, ends-justify-means Jesuits, Doublethinkers and outright Cheney-class psychopaths who need to be kept on the straight and narrow warpath so they never examine the absurdities they have subscribed to for, in most cases, their entire lives.

At the top of this pseudo-journalistic underclass are full-color glossy magazines like Joint Force Quarterly (aka JFQ) and Proceedings that you might mistake at first glance for Gentleman’s Quarterly (aka GQ) or Hustler.

A funny thing happened on the way
to the independent forum.

JFQ is the Joint Chiefs chairman’s personal propaganda platform, used to promote the military’s budgetary, doctrinal and political agendas. Then chairman Admiral Mike Mullen famously used it during the 2000 presidential campaign to warn of the adverse affect that a Democrat in the Oval Office would have on the “mission in Iraq,” and he did so in an article with the sublimely ironic title “Military Must Stay Apolitical.” Mullen, the spin-savvy son of a Hollywood press agent, was cunning enough to frame his political message as a wide-spread concern of “the troops,” but after segments of the alternate press threw the bull roar flag at him, Mullen’s keyboard commandos pulled the article from the JFQ website.

The U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, a former pseudo-employer of mine, has for decades billed itself as an “independent forum,” a quizzical claim considering that the Institute’s offices are located on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Academy, and that the magazine’s CEO is a retired vice admiral, and that the editorial board consists of active duty career military officers and NCOs, and that every whole-grain company meme that passes through an admiral’s system and clings to a sheet of paper fertilizes a Proceedings cover story.

Uncle Jimbo (left) and Crush of BLACKFIVE
say "Baghdad blowed up real good!"

In the bottom righthand quadrant of the continuum we have the likes of ex-Army person Uncle Jimbo. Jimbo is the leading luminary of BLACKFIVE, a compendium of comical commentary from a collection of Free Republican G.I. Joe Sixpacks who, like Jimbo, believe that “America is the greatest country to have sprung up here,” and therefore has a manifest mission to blow the lesser countries that have sprung up elsewhere to more smithereens than you can wag a dog at. According to BLACKFIVE’s editorial guidelines, “PTSD” is spelled p-u-s-s-y.

Kitty cornered from the niche BLACKFIVE infests we have the military intelligencia who produce scholarly journals like Orbis and the now defunct Strategic Review, both edited by Professor Mackubin Thomas Owens. Owens is presently an Associate Dean of Academics at the U. S. Naval War College where, during my one year of shore duty in the ‘90s, I drank my way through the graduate curriculum in post-modern imperialism.

Professor Owens:
"No, I don't expect you to do all of the
assigned reading. I expect you to die."

Profiled as a “conservative political figure,” Owens served in the Reagan administration, is a regular contributor to National Review, and is afraid of women in the military. The crowning milestone of Mack’s multitude of warmongering credentials was his co-authorship of the New American Centurions’ September 2000 monograph “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the neoconservative manifesto that outlined the Bush administration’s grand strategy for dominating the world by establishing a central military base of operations in Iraq. It’s little wonder, then, that elevated foreign policy journals like Orbis feature the studied sophistry of full-time war wonks who wage a relentless intellectual battle to preserve the the armed forces, armed conflict and their phony-baloney careers in academia, tank thinkery and the assistant cabinet secretarial pool. Surprisingly, Mack and many other of these high-toned war drummers are Vietnam veterans. They apparently figure that since they had to fight in a stupid war everyone else should too.

Somewhere in the middle of all this mind-bending malevolence lies Military.com. Military.com’s editor-in-chief is retired naval flight officer Ward “Tomcat Guy” Carroll, author of juvenile fiction about juvenile fighter pilots. Ward spent his active duty career lounging in the back seat of F-14 Tomcat fighter jets, drawing cartoons for in-house naval aviation magazines and playing his electric guitar in rock-and-roll bands. His post-Navy efforts as a double-dipping civil servant public affairs operative make him uniquely responsible for the existence of one of the leading killers of U.S. Marines: the V-22 Osprey. Ward was also a pseudo-employer of mine until he spiked one too many of my op-eds when they pulled the noses of his high-powered pals—most notably the detestable Tom Ricks—out of their sockets.

"Tomcat Guy" Ward Carroll with Cheap Trick.
And they say irony is dead.

Bringing me on board was probably Ward’s half-acre attempt at pretending to have a balanced editorial policy, kind of like how FOX News kept Alan Colmes around all those years. But Ward keeps Military.com on the bandwidth by rebroadcasting whatever the Pentagon's reality rangers tell him to in a way that draws in Uncle Jimbo’s audience and one or two other viewers who can read with their mouths closed. A good example is a recent article by staff writer Michael Hoffman titled “Texas Guardsmen Warn of Iranian Influence in Iraq.” It’s an even thinner than usual information attack on Iran that’s dripping in hysterical accusations and arid on supporting evidence.

“Military analysts and Middle East experts have spent years warning about the growing influence of Iran in Iraq,” the piece begins. “A group of Texas National Guardsmen watched it firsthand,” Hoffman tells us, and they came home to share their observations with “congressional lawmakers.”

The unnamed “analysts” and “experts” Hoffman is talking about are Victoria Clarke’s retired military shills like Barry McCaffrey and Jack Jacobs, AIPAC prostitute David Albright, the fear-and-loathers at United Against Nuclear Iran, and the phalanx of other patriotic psychopaths who persistently demonize Iran without producing a parcel of proof to back their claims.

“A group of Texas National Guardsmen,” we discover later in Hoffman’s story, are Major General Eddy Spurgin and Brigadier General William Smith, a pair of career weekend warriors looking to score points with the denizens of inner ring of the five-sided Rätselschloss. We also discover that the “congressional delegation” is Republican Congressman from Texas Mike Conaway who typically grips and grins with returning guardsmen who are stationed in his district.

Paragraphs deep into Hoffman’s dreck we find that Spurgin and Smith are concerned about Iran’s “malign influence” in Iraq. But “the Texas soldiers” presentation to Conaway “didn’t focus solely on advanced military operations out of Iran” because they “didn’t witness” any “brash power displays.” Spurgin and Smith instead spun a scary campfire tale about “how something as simple as groceries allows Iran’s government to gain power in Iraq.”

Sweet mother of pearl. Everyone involved in the fabrication of this story is as phony as a blue dollar bill. Bush crony Conaway is a member of the House Armed Services Committee who gained his military expertise during a two-year Army that he served at Fort Hood, Texas around the same time that young Mr. Bush was AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. The “infantry division” that Spurgin and Smith command exercises “training and readiness oversight” of other Texas Army National Guard units that, like Guard units from every state, perform combat support functions as doctors, mechanics, clerks, cooks, etc. The division’s deployment to Iraq was no doubt vital to the care and feeding of the trigger pullers doing the actual fighting, but how it put Spurgin or Smith in a position to observe Iranian infiltration of Iraq will no doubt remain an unsolved mystery.

Brigadier Smith: Lean, mean, Texas
National Guard fighting machine.

According to General Spurgin’s official bio, he is a conservationist in civilian life, suggesting that his experience in intelligence is limited to unearthing the secrets of preserving wildlife and natural resources. Brigadier Smith’s bio doesn’t say what he does full time, or give any inkling of how he comes to understand the methods by which Iran is using groceries to take over Iraq, though his official photo suggests that he does have a working knowledge of groceries.

Military journalist Mike Hoffman used to make a living as an Air Force intelligence officer. As I’ve noted before, military intelligence is to intelligence what Kenny G is to jazz. Air Force intelligence is to military intelligence what Barry Manilow is to rock and roll. Maybe that explains why Hoffman didn't question any of the intelligence Spurgin and Smith fed him for the article. Maybe it also explains how he wound up being a mildly successful military correspondent. As an intelligence weenie he learned the art of fabricating facts that his warmonger masters wanted to hear, so tapping out hackery--like this cockamamie "report" about a pair of ambitious play-warriors that was transparent excuse to repeat long standing but still unsubstantiated allegations that Iran has been training and arming Iraqi militants to kill American troops--was was a natural transition for him.

As to the question of whether I’m being a big blue martinet for chaining a fistful of minor league news mongers to the whipping post, the answer is not just “no.” It’s one word longer. These Durham bull feather merchants would snap at a chance to move up to The Show faster than you can say “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” They’re every bit as eager and able to peddle death, destruction and human misery in pursuit of personal fame and fortune as their counterparts in the Big Brother Broadcast, and they not only deserve to be regarded with the same degree of disdain and ridicule, they demand it.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Wars of Diminishing Returns

2012-01-03T05:13:00.016-05:00

by Jeff Huber

“We are engaged in a long war…” – Newt Gingrich

“No nation ever profited from a long war” – Sun Tzu

We continue to hurtle further down the slope that leads to the edge of the same cliff that the Athenians and the Romans and the English and the French and the Germans and the Japanese and the Russians drove themselves over. I wrote some years ago that empires have a penchant for becoming footnotes in succeeding empires’ history books because they fail to learn that the military power that brought them to preeminence was insufficient to keep them there.

The United States has arrived at the moment the Romans found themselves in during the reign of Commodus, son of the general and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, the last of Rome’s “Five Good Emperors.” They say the acorn never falls far from the tree, but someone must have come along and kicked Commodus down the hill and over the dale.

Dick Cheney circa 1500.

Commodus was the first in a long line of Roman emperors to consolidate his power by bribing Rome’s elite military forces into supporting him. Eventually, as Renaissance era political science virtuoso Niccolò Machiavelli noted in his seminal work The Art of War, the Praetorian Guard became “insolent and formidable, not only to the Senate but to the emperors themselves” and in time the Guard “put many emperors to death and disposed of the Empire as it pleased.” That, Machiavelli observed, was decisive point that transformed the Romans into the Italians of his day, a pseudo-confederacy of warring principalities that became a low-hanging-fruit target for foreign interlopers.

Like it or not, the history of humanity is the history of its wars. Other stuff happened, sure, stuff that enriched human existence rather than debased it, but none of our man-made beauty would have been created without the man-made horror that accompanied armed conflict. Italy’s Renaissance period that spanned the 14^th to the 17^th century, a flowering of literature, science, art, education and intellectual growth, could not have occurred without the internecine violent conflict that Machiavelli chronicled (and played a large part in fomenting. One could justifiably argue that Machiavelli was Renaissance Italy's moral and political equivalent of Dick Cheney, though old Nick leaves dirty Dick in the dust when it comes to cognition). Conflict is, in fact, the very essence of art, as the core purpose of art is to resolve conflict. You will never witness a superior work of art, be it visual (painting, sculpture and so on), language (plays, movies, books and the like), musical (including the dreck you see on the annual Grammy awards) or social (politics, war, sports) that is not characterized by an underlying tension created by opposing forces.

Like other human societies, the America we know today could not have come to be—for better or for worse—without its unrelenting procession of wars. The birth of our nation was its armed rebellion and revolution against the British. We then fought a line of internal and external wars of establishment, consolidation and expansion. The Spanish American War, in which we enlarged and solidified our sphere of influence in the Pacific and the Caribbean, was the war that announced our intention to be reckoned with as an equal of the Old World powers.

America's intervention in World War I America’s insistence that it would have a say in Europe’s affairs. It also, in retrospect, proved to be a prime example of how war aims, especially the aims of optional wars, are seldom realized and, moreover, usually give way to unintended and unwanted consequences.

Neocon Dick after five centuries
of cryogenic preservation.

I subscribe to the school that says we would have ascended to global hegemony if we had stiff-armed “The Great War” and let the Euros slug it out among themselves until they’d lost their taste for war forever. Then we could have dictated terms by which we fed Europe until it could grow another generation of able-bodied men who could take up the plow again. That would most probably have preempted the need for a Second World War to mop up the unfinished business of the first one, and would likely have also averted the emergence of the Soviet Union and the Cold War and our dirty little third world proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam and, most relevant to us now, the first superpower substitute war in Afghanistan, in which we created a guerilla force adversary to defeat the Soviets as payback for Vietnam that we ourselves are hopelessly, haplessly grappling with today.

But we let ourselves get stuck on our zippers in the First World War when peace didn’t produce the results Woodrow Wilson had envisioned, and immersion in the Second World War was pretty much unavoidable, as was the rest of the follow-on fornicating mess.

Application of military force in World War II established American as a first-magnitude superpower. Since then, however, our investment in war has produced exponentially diminishing returns. Our best-trained, best-equipped military has only been effective as a force-in-being that, like a fleet-in-being, can exert influence on world events through the simple fact of its existence. Our Cold War arsenal clearly deterred another outbreak of general war in Europe and a global nuclear doom Krieg. But every time we committed ourselves to fuzzy pretext land wars against pathetically inferior forces, we managed to shoot our baby makers off.

By the time the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, America had been on a wartime footing for a half-century, and the shadow powers that be had no interest in allowing the country to become that kinder, gentler, shining city on the hill that Big Daddy and The Great Communicator talked about. We’re still on a war economy for the same reasons we’re still in an oil economy and a tobacco economy. War and oil and tobacco are still making large lucre, and it’s a bad business decision to change products when the old product is still turning a pandemic profit.

The trilateral power elite.

That’s largely why the New American Centurions aka the neoconservative cabal were able to so completely gain the support of the Rockefeller trilateralists and whatever other theoretical conspirators we suspect to be the hidden masters of the known universe. In September 2000, the Centurions published a neo-imperialist manifesto titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses that proclaimed, in essence, that American had a global leadership responsibility to single-handedly ensure the survival of warfare as a vibrant, ongoing human institution because nobody else had to the oomph to do it anymore.

Even the neocons must have realized that their stated ambition sounded like so much whack-a-doodle-doo, because they confessed that the American public was unlikely to fall for their shenanigan ideology barring a “new Peal Harbor.” Then 9/11/2001 came along, almost a year to the day after Rebuilding America’s Defenses polluted the information highway, and the neos got just what they were looking for.

The grand-sounding doctrines and strategies we were promised would assure victory in the “new kind of war” we were embarking upon—Shock and Awe and Network Centric Warfare and Counterinsurgency aka COIN and the Revolution in Military Affairs aka RMA and Transformation and the Long War and Persistent Conflict and the rest of the unrefined used horse lunch that the Pentagon and its pet newsmongers have been spoon feeding us for roughly the last decade—have been nothing but one big, red, shiny, fat-assed, expensive failure after the next. Every place we have bombed, boarded, bludgeoned, beheaded and bloodied, from Iraq to the Bananastans to Libya to Somalia to Yemen, looks like a big-city zoo ten minutes after the force-ten earthquake hit it.

Our generals and the sycophant politicians who grovel at their spit-polished feet would have us believe that we now have to dedicate the next 80 years or so into rounding up all the critters we let loose and putting them back in their cages. Well guess what, folks. All them loose critters are making new critters faster than we can give Dick Cheney's pals no-bid contracts to build new cages to put them all in. You cannot win un-winnable wars. The longer you pursue them, the longer it takes to lose them.

We have overreacted to the 9/11 attacks to a degree that must have exceeded Osama bin Laden’s hopes by magnitudes. In exacting revenge for approximately 3,000 American innocents killed in the New York and Washington D.C. guerilla air raids, we have directly caused the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Asians and have destroyed the lives of millions of others. We spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined to wage wars with vaguely identifies adversaries that have no defense budget whatsoever while our economy follows the birds to their summer retreats.

G.I. Shmo

Our military’s officer corps has become a culture of Petraeus worshiping yes-colonels who pine to become yes-generals. The only warriors who count anymore are the bull feather merchant marines who conjure the pro-war propaganda that their echo chamberlains in the media pawn off on us as “news.” Our country has become the abject servant of the American Pentarchy, that cabal of sandbox generals, bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, post-modern Praetorians, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs, Pavlov’s dogs of war, patriotic psychopaths and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed-of permanent American security state a reality. The military-industrial complex that launched our reign as a superpower is about to grind it to a bitter end.

But heck, who wants to look a 19-year old wounded war veteran in what’s left of his face and tell him all that?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Pentagon Propaganda Programmers Pardoned; Pro-War News at Eleven

2011-12-27T09:59:00.017-05:00

by Jeff Huber

The man who was perhaps the last of the true investigative reporters on the Pentarchy beat may have just taken a swan dive into the canvas.

Look at those yo-yos. That's the way you do it.

For years, David Barstow of the New York Times, amid a phalanx of the warmongery’s favorite echo chamberlains, the likes of Michael R. Gordon and Dexter Filkins and the disgraceful Thomas E. Ricks, managed to dig up unpleasant truths about our Whack-a-Doodle Wars on Evil. Even more incredibly, Barstow was able to get the truth to us via the NYT, the propaganda conduit of record that abetted Dick Cheney and his malignant mob in selling the snake-oil intelligence to the American public that led to the invasion of Iraq.

Barstow’s crowing coup against American’s military-media junta was his 2008 expose of the Pentagon’s gray propaganda operation know as the Retired Military Analyst (RMA) program. The RMA was launched by Donald Rumsfeld’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (aka Head Assistant Bull Feather Merchant) Victoria Clarke in early 2002 to recruit “key influentials” to peddle Operation Iraqi Freedom on the Big Brother Broadcast.

RMA was a glad-handing, highway-robbing, war-hawking, hootenanny. Clarke’s spin commandos wined, dined, sipped and supped a gang of retired senior officers who had gone into the defense contracting and tank thinking field, and fed them an endless supply of finely crafted pro-war talking points. The RMAs went on air and a) palmed off said talking points as their own original analyses and b) neglected to mention that they stood to profit from extension and escalation of the war by way of their business connections in the defense industry.

That's "General Evil" to you. I didn't slaughter
my way to the four-star level to be called
"Mister Evil."

Retired Army Colonel Ken Allard, one of the most prominent RMAs who, during his active duty career, taught information warfare at National Defense University, admitted the program was “Psyops [aka ‘psychological operations’] on steroids, a “coherent, active policy.” If you played ball with your information handlers, you thrived. If you didn’t, you got shut out and the news networks lost interest in you. “Night and day,” Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.” (So sad, Ken, but I’d feel a lot sorrier about you getting so wet if you hadn’t jumped up and volunteered right away when Dad asked who wanted to help wash the car.)

Along with Ken Allard, the names that go with the faces on the RMA Wall of Shame include Wayne Downing, Rick Francona, James Marks, Thomas McInerny, Monty Miegs, Bernie Trainor, John Warden, Thomas Wilkerson and Jack Jacobs, the Yoda-like war wonk who has forged a lucrative retirement career out of shamelessly shilling his Vietnam War Medal of Honor. But the most heinous the RMA rangers was retired four-star general Barry McCaffrey, who so brazenly used his military credentials and his Washington insider influence to reap war profits that Barstow described his racket as a “one man’s military-industrial complex.”

It’s little wonder that McCaffrey stood head and haunches above the rest of the retired war panderers. During his active duty days, he was one of the most malevolent military men to ever sport a service dress uniform. If the military had a real judiciary instead of its Uniform Code of Marsupial Justice*, McCaffrey would have been convicted of capital felonies after the first Gulf War for the Massacre at Rumalia during which McCaffrey disobeyed direct orders to commit the premeditated mass murder of retreating Iraqi soldiers during a declared ceasefire. (According to a colleague, McCaffrey exhorted his subordinate commanders over the radio to find a way for him to “go kill all of those bastards.”) Army investigators later exonerated McCaffrey of wrongdoing, just as Pentagon investigators later exonerated everyone at the Pentagon involved in the RMA Program.

What a bitter sample of uneven-handedness it was that Barstow had to be the one to write the Christmas Eve NYT story titled “Pentagon Finds No Fault in Ties to TV Analysts.” One has to wonder if Barstow volunteered to write the story or if the onerous task was crammed past his tonsils by the NYT’s war-worshiping editorial staff. Whatever the case, irony, if it were still alive in the collective American consciousness, would have savored the way that Barstow told the story. If this was his last round, at least he went out fighting.

Hi. I'm Jack Jacobs. Aren't I cuddly?
Do you like my Medal of Honor?
Then please buy more of the wars I sell
here on NBC so I can make more
money from them. And don't forget to
SUPPORT THE TROOPS!

You’re not far into the story before you realize that the title should have read “Pentagon Finds No Fault with Itself in Ties to TV Analysts.” It turns out that the recently completed two-year Pentagon inspector general (aka IG) inquiry is the second such inquiry into the RMA shenanigans Barstow tells us. The IG’s office issued an earlier report, in 2009, that exonerated Pentagon Public Affairs and the RMAs and everyone else involved in the RMA program after it interviewed Pentagon Public Affairs personnel and RMAs and everyone else involved in the RMA program.

Shortly after 2009 report hit the streets, someone in the IG office who was senior to whoever had put it on the streets pulled it back off the streets, saying that it was so riddled with inaccuracies and flaws that none of its conclusions could be relied upon. Later that year a second report was ordered, the one just released.

The investigators who conjured the second report claimed that they could not find sufficient documentation to determine the program's strategy, objectives or intent. So the “investigation” consisted of interviews with former Rumsfeld public affairs aids, including Victoria Clarke, who created and ran the RMA program. From those interviews the “investigators” concluded that the “outreach activities were intended to serve as an open information exchange with credible third-party subject-matter experts” who could “explain military issues, actions and strategies to the American public.”

Though Barstow did not offer an authorial judgment statement on the second IG report’s conclusion, a slow child can see that it is the exact equivalent of a police chief pulling over a visibly, audibly and aromatically obviously intoxicated mayor, asking him if he has been drinking, and letting him drive away when he answers “No.” The second IG RMA investigation has not been recalled, so whoever spiked the first one must have retired and been replaced by a, ah, less principled officer who more suitably conforms to the military's Petraeus-era standards of ethics.

I didn't make my
first billion until
after I was a general.

Lamentably, much of the American population’s cognizant skills have fallen far beneath the level of a slow child’s. So when standard citizens see the likes of McCaffrey and Jacobs appearing on NBC as military analysts (yes, they’re baaaaaaaaaack), it won’t occur to them that these are the same retired bums who have been lying to them about our Woebegone Wars all along. Or if they do remember anything about the RMA scandal, one of their FOX News aficionado chums will chime in with “Nah, they had two big investigations of those guys, went on for four years, didn’t find nothin’ on ‘em. It was all bull roar.”

*The UCMJ is the justice system that sent retarded Army Private Lynndie England to jail over prison abuse while Donald Rumsfeld, chief architect of the prisoner abuse program, retired high on the dole in his mansion on the eastern shore, the one next to Dick Cheney’s multi-million dollar monstrosity.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Moving to Wednesdays

2011-12-26T09:47:00.000-05:00

I completed the first draft of Sandbox Generals on 21 December. Now it's time to take an operational pause for the cause and wait for a better sun angle before I re-attack and revise. In the meantime, I'll be filling the psychic space with a number of other projects, among which will be mounting a slightly more fully developed version of the weekly P.S. column that I'll post on Wednesdays instead of Tuesdays, beginning on Wednesday 28 December.

I hope you're enjoying your holidays.

J

Newt the Impaler

2011-12-19T19:12:00.003-05:00

By Jeff Huber

Newt circa 1465.

President Newt Gingrich (shudder) is likely to have a foreign policy as draconian as his domestic policies were during his reign of terror as House Speaker. Newt’s cockamamie “Contract with America” that, if successful, would have impaled the nation’s middle and poor working classes ala Vlad Tepes, the real life model for Bram Stokers Dracula, long before young Messrs. Bush and Obama ever got a chance to. While Newt’s domestic agenda channels Marie Antoinette’s infamous “Let the eat cake” decree, his attitude toward the rest of the planet can be best summarized as “Let them eat shrapnel”—the “them” in that statement being people who are Muslim and living anywhere within a B-2 bomber’s combat range of Jerusalem or American Israel Public Affair Committee (AIPAC) headquarters on H Street in Washington D.C., which pretty much includes all people who are Muslim.

At the top of Newt’s wrong-color, wrong-creed, wrong-color target list are the Palestinians, who Newt claims are an “invented people.”

When criticized by his fellow GOP presidential hopefuls for his remark, Newt responded that what he said was “historically true” and “factually correct.” That’s only the case if we view the term “true” in the context of Steven Colbert’s “truthiness” rubric, and if by “factually correct” we’re referring to the kinds of fabricated facts that conform to the sort of political correctness that resonates with Newt’s prospective rabid right voter base whose “conservative values” are rooted in cherished traditions like cross burnings and lynchings. (I'm in persistent wonderment at how American bigots who once hated Jews became I-Stand-with-Israelites once they were programmed to hate Muslims instead.)

The “invented people” meme was invented by AIPAC bull feather merchants to refute Palestinian claims of a right to a homeland. AIPAC’s tank thinkers haven’t bothered to clarify who exactly they think invented the Palestinian people. I’m guessing it wasn’t Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein or Mel Brooks’ either.

It doesn’t take a historian, either a real one or a fake one like Newt, to realize that the people who invented the Palestinian people were other Palestinian people, and that Palestinian people have been making replicas of themselves since before the days of old testament references to Palestine. If ever there were an invented people, it would be Americans like Newt whose ancestors, at the time that Old Testament Palestinians were making babies in Palestine, were making babies somewhere other than in America.

Speaker Newt seduces an intern.

But that kind of clear thinking doesn’t interest a phony intellectual like Newt, who dedicates his acumen not to the acquisition of truth but to the acquisition of power. And one of the best ways for Newt to acquire the kind of power he’s running for now is to align himself with whatever malignant purposes Israel would have him pursue, and to appeal to a fearful and hateful voter base.

In that light, Newt’s stance toward Iran is hardly surprising. Newt says we face a protracted ideological struggle with the Muslim world that will resemble he Cold War, and he casts Iran in the role of the old Soviet Union.

Just shuck my jive, will you Newt? Newt reminds me of a hard drinking retired Vietnam era Army veteran of my acquaintance who we’ll call Johnny Shiloh. About seven Budweisers into lunch not long ago, the subject of refusing to hold diplomatic talks with Iran came up, and well, Johnny came to life and said the best story he ever heard on that there situation was about the hunter who ran into a bear in the woods.

The bear says, hey, don’t shoot, now. All I want is a full stomach and all you want is a bear coat. So why don’t you put that gun down and we’ll talk, and I’m sure we can come up with a solution that will give us both what we want.

So sure enough, Johnny said, the hunter put his gun down and the bear got a full belly and the hunter got a bear coat. Johnny slapped his knee, and said, “Yep, best story on that subject I ever heard,” several times.

I said, “Johnny, in your story, the hunter is the United States and the bear is Iran, right?”

Johnny, taking a slug of Bud, shook his head hesitantly, figuring I was maybe about to shoot his allegory full of large caliber holes. “Now Iran’s military budget is less than one percent the size of ours," I continued. "In fact, our total defense related expenditures exceed Iran’s entire Gross Domestic Product. Iran can’t project conventional power more than a stone’s throw from its borders and regardless of what Israel and its UN Stoogette Susan Rice bullied the International Atomic Energy Agency into saying in its latest report, Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program.

Newt's lighter side.

So if Iran is the bear in this story, I told, Johnny, it’s not even a teddy bear. It’s more of a gummy bear. And how on earth, I asked Johnny to explain, did the hunter manage to get himself swallowed by a gummy bear?

Johnny took another slurp of Bud suds and said, “Best story I heard yet on the subject.”

By comparing Iran to the Soviet Bear, Newt is crafting a comparison every bit as asinine as Johnny Shiloh’s metaphor. Yet people throughout the country are taking Newt seriously.

It may be that America is finally ready for the Full Newt Monty. He brings out the very worst in the very worst element of the American body politic.

So there’s an excellent chance he’ll win the GOP nomination.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Dumb, Dumber and Doonesbury

2011-12-12T09:56:00.025-05:00

by Jeff Huber

I’ve been mourning the lamentable state of the anti-war movement lately, especially the portion of it populated by the political left, a great percentage of whom appear to be more concerned with the slaughter of baby seals than with the slaughter of baby humans. And why wouldn’t they be? We’ve actually seen more images in our warmongering mainstream media of ice floe carnage than we’ve seen of the carnage of armed conflict. Nobody in the deep-pockets pocket of the Pentarchy really cares if liberals manage to curb baby seal hunting. There’s not that much money in it.

Must remember...this is my shoulder,
this is my elbow, this is my shoulder...

To be fair, a considerable number of liberals have enough angst left over for a healthy hand-wringing or two about those pesky old wars after they’re done saving a) wild animals from hunters so they can be killed by other wild animals instead and b) trees that were grown for the specific purpose of being cut down and used in construction. Lamentably, though, the few progressives who have the staying power to protest the uniquely American brand of man’s inhumanity to man can seldom discriminate between their shoulders and their elbows.

Doubly disconcerting is that so many of these feckless war protesters are high-profile humorists, comedians, satirists and other makers of malcontent merriness who enjoy the uncritical adoration of The Huffington Post’s circulation, especially of those callow-eyed progressive cadets of Generations X, Y, and now even Z (nine-year olds who can’t stay up to watch Stewart and Colbert can catch them on reruns the next day).

Case in point is Doonsebury cartoonist Garry Trudeau who, as friend of Pen and Sword J.P. White recently suggested, is living proof that one doesn’t have to be especially funny to be a commercially successful humorist, especially when said humorist attended Yale like Trudeau did. As our present president and his immediate predecessor have proven, you don’t need talent to succeed in your chosen field if you have Ivy League credentials.

When it comes to our woebegone Wars on Evil, Trudeau’s heart generally seems to be in the right place, but he has a penchant for letting his head hobble off to some cozy cranny where it’s isolated from the light of day and breathable air, like it appears to have done when Garry penned his 7 December strip in which a junior U.S. Army officer concedes that the omnipresent evildoers in Iraq are still able to bring the fight to us thanks to “a little help from Iran.”

I don’t dig trolling into other people’s web sites, but this couldn’t go unchallenged. Here’s what I left in Garry’s “Blowback” inbox:

What a crushing disappointment to see in your 7 Dec. strip that you too have chugged the propaganda that blames Iran for our failures in Iraq. The recent IAEA report was the latest piece of kangaroo courtliness to accuse Iran of malfeasance—this time in regard to its nuclear program—and support the charge with pure poppycock.

The loop-tape allegations that Iran has armed and trained Shiite Iraqi rebels have never been substantiated. The only verifiable outside aid and comfort to Shiite militiamen was the training and weapons then Lt. Gen. David Petraeus gave to Iraqi security force recruits—predominantly Shiites—who disappeared into the night with 190,000 AK-47s and other combat gear.

Shame on you, Garry, for allowing yourself to become one of the warmongery’s leading echo chamberlains.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)

Someone named “Editor” posted my comment, and added the following curious caveat: “This seems a good occasion to remind readers that if GBT shared the beliefs of all of his characters, he would be deeply schizophrenic.”

Holy non-rebuttal. Knowing it was a waste of effort, I further submitted this:

Satirists, perhaps more so than other literary figures, present a worldview of moral judgments, and owe it to their audience to indicate when their characters’ actions and words reflect their vision of the truth and when they do not. Mark Twain knew exactly how to do this. Garry does some of the time. This time he did nothing to indicate that his character’s “with a little help from Iran” was intended with any degree of sardonicism.

...and dumber...

That submission hasn’t been blessed for live bandwidth at the Doonesbury site. Maybe they have a one-per-disgruntled-customer policy. Something that did make the cut, however, was an attempted disproval of my original post by one Dean Mitchell that began: “The evidence of Iranian involvement has been continuous, with lots of reporting.” If you click on the “lots” and “reporting” links of Mr. Mitchell’s sentence, you’ll discover what kind of “evidence” he considers convincing.

The “lots” link, as I noted in my second, unpublished Blowback submission, leads to “a story with Iran allegations penned by Michael R. Gordon, one the Pentarchy's very favorite echo chamberlains. I'm sure [Mr. Mitchell] had no idea that Gordon was one of the journo-cads who helped Dick Cheney's mob pull the Nigergate hoax on us that led to the invasion of Iraq, and has been a go-to war propaganda conduit to this day.”

...and BlackFive's Uncle Jimbo

The “reporting” link leads to a July 2011 piece from Britain’s right-wing The Telegraph that features the standard laundry list of unsubstantiated charges against Iran straight from the mouth of then Joint Chiefs chairman and Bull Feather Merchant Marine Corps Commandant Mike Mullen.

It’s downright horrifying to reflect that not only are the likes of Mr. Mitchell gullible enough to guzzle undiluted war propaganda from the likes of Gordon and Mullen but, apparently, the likes of progressive icon Garry Trudeau are too!

Jesus, Mary and Curly Joe DeRita. With anti-war liberals like these, who needs Pavlov’s Dogs of War like bathetic BlackFive pundit Uncle Jimbo?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Open Letter to Gary Trudeau

2011-12-07T19:11:00.001-05:00

7 Dec. 2011

What a crushing disappointment to see in your 7 Dec. strip that you too have chugged the propaganda that blames Iran for ourfailures in Iraq. The recent IAEA report was thelatest piece of kangaroo courtliness to accuse Iran of malfeasance—this time inregard to its nuclear program—and support the charge with pure poppycock.

The loop-tape allegations that Iran has armed and trainedShiite Iraqi rebels havenever been substantiated. The onlyverifiable outside aid and comfort to Shiite militiamen was the training andweapons then Lt. Gen. David Petraeus gave to Iraqi security force recruits—predominantlyShiites—who disappeared into the night with 190,000 AK-47s and other combatgear.

Shame on you, Gary, for allowing yourself tobecome one of the warmongery’s leading echo chamberlains.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)

All Aboard for Zombieland!

2011-12-05T20:03:00.001-05:00

by Jeff Huber

Elder Lady, a long-time friend of Pen and Sword anda keen observer of the sorry scene playing out across our country and theworld, recently shared this quote from British author John le Carré:

"Godappointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. Godappointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy and anyonewho wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) withthe enemy, and d) a terrorist."

-- Published in The London Times,15 Jan. 2003

Nine years after le Carre published thatstatement, America and its snippy Britishlap dog are imposing all newand improved set of draconian sanctions on Iran that, the political theorygoes, will coerce Iran into doing things that the old shopworn set of draconiansanctions failed to make Iran do.

American Diplomacy: It's code for "war."

The pretext for this latest round of “diplomatic”preparations for all out war on Iran was the recent International Atomic Energy Agency report
that said Iraq might still have a nuclear weapons program. The report, which has been thoroughly refutedin every forum except the war wagging mainstream media, was based on hearsay evidence from “member nations” thatcould only have been Israel, the UK and the US, and on the activities of a“nuclear scientist” who turns out not to have been a nuclear scientist at allbut a pioneer in the field of nanodiamond technology that is use forindustrial and medical purposes.

Iranian Students stormed the British Embassy inTehran, the Brits closed the embassy and hauled scones, and now we don’t evenhave second-hand diplomatic lines of communication with Iran. Still, the bull feather merchant marines who spin our foreign policy shenanigans can replay the Team Cheney meme that said "we tried diplomacy and it didn't work," even if said diplomacy consisted of refusing to speak directly to parties we were punishing with sanctions until they agreed to pre-conditions that no country in its right national mind would agree to. (In the case of Iran, we insisted that they give up their UN guaranteed right to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. What a surprise that they passed on the offer. Telling the Iranians they could have a nuclear energy industry if they got their nuclear fuel from us was like telling them they could have an auto industry as long as they made their cars in Detroit and called them Buicks.)

I’ve delineated many times how possession of nuclear weapons would be, for the Iranians, theequivalent a doomsday device thatwould spell doom for the entire ancient Persian race. I only know of one group of people crazyenough to take those sorts of risks in the name of acquiring more power,and that group of people is the group of people who led us down the Long War path that began in Iraq and that is about to intersect with the road to ruin.

Who's your worst nightmare now?

It is perhaps because of the state of the economyand because our our body politic has become such a FOX News driven menagerie that the American public continues to allow its government to slaughter hundreds of thousands ofinnocents overseas over…what? Certainlynot 9/11. The evildoer young Mr. Bush swore to bring in dead or alive is sleeping with the whales. Certainly not to preempt aninvasion of our soil. Despite what Mr. Bush’s speechwriters told us, the oceans still protect us from that sort ofthing. Nobody has the kind of army orair force or navy required to invade and occupy us the way we’ve made anational pastime out of doing to everyone who is a supposed threat to us, and nobody ever will have that kind of military force.

We have gone from a mighty nation dedicated to becomeRonald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” to a global bad guy; a global badguy who is about to dwarf the malignant accomplishments of every global bad guywho came before us. As le Carré putit in 2003, “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, butthis is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay ofPigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.”

Countless sages of eastern and western cultureshave noted that human events have a way of leveling themselves in thesame manner that nature does. Actionsproduce opposite but equal reactions among societies just as they do in thephysical universe. As one popular volumeof spiritual guidance admonishes us, “ye shall reap as ye shall sow,” and as weused to say in the Navy, “What goes around comes around.”

The 2012 Tea Party Convention.

The longer we as a nation stay on this neoconservative, post-modern imperialist crazy-train joy ride, the further we’re going tofall when China calls in our debt or the tea baggers turn the country into Zombieland or a space ship lands and aguy who looks like Michael Rennie steps out of it and tells us to pack our bags for a one-way trip to oblivion.

Say goodbye to hegemony.

My biggest concern regarding our inability tocorrect our behavior before God, nature or Mr. Spock’s relatives correct it forus is that the anti-war movement has been hijacked by paleo-conservative libertarians whodon’t want to pay for roads because they don’t think we need roads and by latter-dayhippies who are more interested in legalizing pot than in putting an end to self-defeating wars.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) isauthor of the critically lauded novel BathtubAdmirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Fog and Friction are Stranger than Fiction

2011-11-28T08:41:00.001-05:00

That unnamed "senior
Pantagon official" you're
heard so much from.

by Jeff Huber

I took a long enough oxygen break from the novelproject (Sandbox Generals) this week tocatch a whiff of the story about how we bombedthe smithereens out of some of our little Paki pals. At least 25 of the Central Asianbuggers shuffled off to party with however many virgins it isnon-terrorist Muslims shuffle off to when they shuffle off. One thing you can be sure of is that none ofthe non-Muslims who shuffled them off the face of the planet could give agnat’s eyelash less where the Hajis hi-hoed to or how many hoes they had whenthey got there.

A gram of war truth that managed to sneak underthe radarscopes of the Pentarchy’s echo chamberlains at the NewYork Times was a November 24 story by Andrew E. Kramer about how manyIraqi widows and fatherless children nine years of war in that country havecreated. A UN report states that at thepeak of sectarian violence in 2006, nearly 100 women were widowed everyday.

I grow increasingly appalled at the number ofpeople, most of whom likely consider themselves God-fearing Christians, continue to support our overseas armed abominations. Sure, we can look down our noses at thenon-sentient masses who are hooked on a study diet of Fox News, Rabid Radio andthe rest of the Big Brother Broadcast, but they aren’t the only ones passively supporting our national atrocities. Allthose liberals camped out across the country because they’re mad at the richcould long ago have stopped our psychotic hegemony in Iraqand the Bananastans and Libya and in all the 120 or so other places wherewe’re freeing peace-loving peoples of all creeds and colors and nationalitiesby relieving them of the burden of existence.

The Times,our newspaper of revised record, identified the parties who parted the Pakistani patriots from this mortal coil as “NATO aircraft" that “killed at least 25 soldiers in strikes against two [Pakistani] militaryposts.” Two major things are wrong withthis take of the story.

The first is that "NATO" is propaganda peddler code for "US." The combatant commander of NATO is, always was and always will be an American four-star and hence NATO's commander in chief is and always was and always will be the President of the United States. Pointing a blood-stained finger at NATO every time one of our cockamamie conflicts turns another corner for the worse illustrates our psychopathic refusal to bear responsibility for our actions.

Second, "NATO aircraft" are kind of like guns. NATO aircraft don’t kill people. People flying in NATO aircraft killpeople. This business of making war morepalatable by framing its human toll in terms of remotely controlledviolence needs to end. People in mannedNATO aircraft and/or people flying UAVs over Kabul from air conditioned bunkersin Nevada are hands-on killing their victims as surely as the special ops catswho snipe at alleged evildoers from a thousand yards away or skewer them atsomething less than arm’s length with a high-tech Ka-bar they bought at the“tactical store” just outside the front gate at Joint Expeditionary Base LittleCreek.

We have met the barbarians, and they are us.

The more we’ve managed to depersonalize the horrorsof war, the more palatable war has become. Donald Rumsfeld used to cry like awet wicked witch about how all the “terrible images” the mainstream mediawere showing us were turning popular opinion against his Morassin Mesopotamia. That dose of minddetergent flowed through the BBB until everyone, even a majority of the self-proclaimedcognoscenti who should have knownbetter, believed that they had in fact seen all sorts of grisly war zone violence in the popular electronic and tree-centric media. In reality nobody had seen anything remotely close to the sorts of apocalyptic horror that we have created in the name of the “9/11” meme. We have killed wellover 50 brown and yellow overseas people for every American who died in theTwin Towers and Pentagon air strikes that the multi-billion dollar NorthAmerican Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)failed to defend us against (because, I’ve always suspected, they had alreadytweaked their radars to track Santa’ssleigh and weren’t looking that closely at jumbo jets veering off theirassigned courses and altitudes and on hot vectors for national landmarks).

But they’re brown and yellow people we’re killing,and they’re halfway across the world, and our gutless wonder press has gonebelly up for bull feather merchant marines like Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan,warriors whose full time mission it is to wage information operations againstthe American people, culling us into believing that ou fundamentalsecurity hinges upon our support of an exorbitant war against enemies whohave no armies or navies or air forces or even a defense budget.

The likes of General Jeff in this man’s military,along with their trusty little TomRicks wannabe helpers in the woefully misnamed fourth estate, also have theprogrammed masses believing that military leaders like “King” David Petraeusactually know something about the art of war when, as the latest bottom burpwith the Pakistanis clearly illustrates, they don’t know their helmets fromtheir mess kits from the things that mark their skivvies.

"That was close!" says "Revoltin'" John Bolton.

One doesn't need a PhD in post-Clausewitzean beboptheory to understand the truth of Sun Tzu’s caution that “No nation everprofited from a long war.” But what didthe tank thinkers at the Pentagon cook up as their overarching post-9/11 strategy? TheLong War and the Eraof Persistent Conflict. Clausewitzadmonished that all actions in war should contribute to the war’s political aim. But the onlypolitical aim the Long War seems to further is to make itself as long aspossible, possibly forever or until Dick Cheney and John Bolton and the rest ofthe New American Centurions draw a “Get Out of Hell Free” card, which evercomes first.

The Clausewitzean concept of criticalvulnerabilities is something the military artist is supposed to identify orcreate in the adversary, allowing friendly forces to attack the tragic flaw in anenemy’s armor and causing him to collapse with relatively minor own-forceexpense and effort. Throughout our persistently conflicted LongWar, we have take pains to create vulnerabilities in our own armor. Especially notable among these right now isour reliance on a line of supply that runs through Pakistan, a country that isas much of an enemy as it is an ally, and one that we consistentlydouble-dog-dare to shut down our flow of war material into our primary theater of operations. If the guys running the Bungle in Bananastanhad been in charge of the Normandy invasion, they would have routed Alliedsupply lines through German occupied Poland.

I abandoned earlier treatments of Sandbox Generals because every time Idreamt up some incredibly stupid stunt for Prince Albert and Fix Felon and therest of the Pentarchs to pull, their real life counterparts would pullsomething incredibly dumber. Itseemed, at first effort (and second and third effort as well, in this case),impossible to write a farce that burlesques real life events that are themselves parodies of human political behavior.

But then I recalled how it occurred to me oncethat the most accurate film portrayal of the American west was probably Blazing Saddles. That gave me the measure of the problem,and I hope to have the current draft-in-progress completed in time for the Baby Jeebus to previewit, or Baby New Year at the latest.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) isauthor of the critically lauded novel BathtubAdmirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Holiday Haitus Humbuggery and Book Leave

2011-11-21T06:21:00.001-05:00

By Jeff Huber

I’ll be putting the column on the back burner forthe rest of the year in hopes of completing the first draft of Sandbox Generals by Baby JeebusDay. In lieu of an actual essay thatrequires disciplined and organized thought and writing, I’ll be posting aheadline or two that’s caught my eye lately and something form thework-in-progress that covers the territory.

This week I came upon thisstory about the V-22 Osprey, the lean, mean Marine killing machine thateven Dark Lord Cheney couldn’t put to death. Even Big Dick can’t fight Daddy Warbucks.

A comment on the budgetimpasse: I used to maintain that thedifference between Republicans and Libertarians is that Republicans wantsomeone else to pay for the roads and Libertarians don’t think we needroads. The gap seems to have narrowed tothe width of a gnat’s eyelash toward the Libertarian ideal.

How dare he say those true
things about me? Curses!

When it comes to the defense budget, though, warspending is like Jell-o: there’s alwaysroom for it. Heck, war’s our biggest jobcreator! And on that note, please giveyour consideration to the following public service preview:

Unknown to just aboutanyone besides the inner Centurion circle—which included Buzz, which meant Jackknew about it too—was that one of the first things Fix unfarkled, once he foundhimself in the human skin-upholstered seat of power at the head of thepetrified round table in the Voodoo Hunker Bunker at the bottom of the holebeneath the White House, was to get rid of most of that expensive crap likestealth bombers and aircraft carriers and flying submarines and SCUBA tanks andpretend like he hadn’t gotten rid of them.

Fix got that idea from histrusty but unwitting adviser Jack, who had suggested in his WinstonSmith.comcolumn that the only way to get the Pentarchy to scrap most of its arsenalwould be to do allow it to do so in secret while continuing to charge itsmaintenance and operating costs on the tax payers’ revolving charge accountwith China. The way weapons acquisitionworked, Jack explained, was that once the arms industry had a contract to buildfantastical killing machines, it put the Government in a conundrum, a pickle, ajam, a fait accompli, a Catch-22 ifyou will.

As soon as the industry gota contract to make X numbers of Death Doodads for Y dollars per copy, itrevised the Death Doodad’s cost estimate to reflect, say, the rising price ofsuntan oil at Ipanema Beach in Brazil, vacation spot for the thousands ofBrazilian workers who grew and harvested the bananas that the riveters whoriveted the wings and rudders and keels and tires on the Death Doodad in NorthButtplug, South Dakota peeled and sliced and placed on top of their children’s’bowls of breakfast cereal every morning. As per federal regulations regarding compensation of employees of firmsunder federal contract to provide goods and services relating to nationalsecurity, the inflated bananas necessitated a raise in said employees cost ofliving allowances (COLAs). The COLAincrease, by law, had to be a set percentage of the annual earnings of theemployees, and the increase had to apply to all employees of the company undercontract whether that employee worked directly on the Death Doodad or not. Otherwise an employee might be unfairlypunished by being transferred from riveting the Death Doodad to screwing rubbernipples to the tops of baby bottles, thus losing income needed to buy his orher children food sufficiently nourishing to compensate for the ketchup soupand baked bean burgers they were eating at school.

I'm afraid we've experienced cost
overruns with the Death Doodad.
Darn the bad luck!

The riveters receivedsufficient extra pay to purchase the pricier bananas. That alone wouldn’t have had that much effecton the per-copy cost of the Death Doodad. Things got expensive as the COLA percentage increase was applied to thecompensation packages of the chief executive officers and finance officers andoperating officers and administrative officers and training officers and safetyofficers and human resource officers and horoscope officers and presidents andexecutive vice presidents and vice presidents and executive assistant vicepresidents and so on. When the smokefinally cleared, a half-percent increase in the cost of Brazilian bananas couldjack the per-copy cost of X Death Doodad from Z bazillion simoleons to 2Zbazillion or even 3Z.

And if Congress didn’t playalong and pass the 2 or 3Z appropriation, the contracting company’s chiefpropaganda officers, most of whom by Sandbox Generals day had been trained byFlip or one of Flip’s protégés, launched an ad campaign on the Big BrotherBroadcast decrying that Congress was taking the bananas off of the cereal ofthe children of honest American Death Doodad Riveters.

As soon as the defensecontracting company got the new appropriation for the Death Doodad, itsresearchers discovered that the Doodad didn’t do what it was designed to do ifit didn’t have a Destruction Dealie attached to it. Destruction Dealies wouldn’t have been socostly except that they had to be made from non-stainless steel, an alloy thatcould only be manufactured by a process specially invented that took thechromium out of stainless steel. And no,steel that hadn’t been turned into stainless steel wouldn’t do for reasonshaving to do with aerospace-age chemistry highly classified (heh!).

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) isauthor of the critically lauded novel BathtubAdmirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Letting Israel Lead Us Around by the Potty Wand

2011-11-14T10:18:00.001-05:00

by Jeff Huber

Mitt Romney and 51 percent
of his constituency.

The best political joke of the election season sofar has been MittRomney’s assertion that we should let Israel dictate our Middle EastPolicy. Jesus at the temple, Mitt; catchup. Israel has had undue influence onour policies in that part of the world since its inception in 1948. Since the neocon/Likudnik cabal came intopower with the pseudo-election of young Mr. Bush in 2002, Israel has beenleading our Middle East policy around the potty wand.

The latest evidence of our abject obedience toIsrael's interests was the latest two-prong offensive against Iran, the most recentoperation in a long propaganda campaign aimed at turning the Persian state into a post-modern incarnation of the Evil Soviet Empire.

Phase one of Operation PersianPoppycock was a Keystone Kop caper cooked up by the DEA and the FBI thattook a drug dealer looking to ditch hard jail time and an alcoholicwife-abusing dead beat and framed them as key conspirators in a IranianQuds Force scheme to blow a big shot Saudi and an Israeli Embassy to smithereens. Even though the warmonger friendly New York Times and Washington Post did their very best topeddle the pathetic plot to the proletariat, the story was quickly dismissed bythe cognizant majority as bunkermentality bunkum.

The IAEA Report on Iraq

Less probal to thinking was the grandscale deception the Pentarchy's bull feather merchant marines conducted regarding accusations about Iran’s nuclear intentionscentered on the release of the recentreport of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This canard too was supported by thewarmongery’s select echo chamberlains, most notably the deplorable David E.Sanger of the New York Times and theirredeemable Job Warwick of the WashingtonPost, both of whom tumbled tokeses over teakettles to cite the most irresponsible and incendiary sourcesavailable on the subject of Iran’s nuclear program, including fake nuclearweapons shaman and prominent AIPAC prostitute David Albright.

IsraeliPrime Minister Bebe Netanyahu, who French President Nicholas Sarkozyrecently had the moral spine to call a liar in front of U.S. President Barack Obama, tookadvantage of the mainstream bullhorn to criticize the IAEA report because “onlythings that could be proven were written” in it, but, “in reality there aremany other things that we see." Inreality one needs a microscope and a fertile imagination to see anything provablewhatsoever in the IAEA report.

I cannot tell a lie. Know what
I mean? Eh? Know what I mean?
Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.
Say no more.

The crux of the report’s allegations that Iran mayyet be working toward building a nuclear weapon rest on itsclaim that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for anuclear weapon. But as my colleagueGareth Porter quickly pointed out, the scientist, identifiedin news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist atall. Danilenko, as research of opensource documents revealed, has specialized for his entire career in the production of detonationnanodiamonds, which are diamondparticles used for industrial and medical purposes including the treatment of cancer. Iran, coincidentally, has been endeavoring to establish a nanodiamond industry. Maybe that's the next plank in our Iran policy: they can have a nanodiamond industry as long as they buy their nanodiamonds from us.

The IAEA could easily have researched the materials that Porter researchedand arrived at the same conclusions that he reached. Considering the report’s predictablyprofound impact on international relations, one might think that the IAEA wouldhave to taken as much trouble as Porter took to get its facts straight. But one would be sadly mistaken, and one shouldbe furious to find that the IAEA chose instead to use unchallenged informationfed to it by an undisclosed “member nation,” much in the same manner that theNew York Times and Washington Post repeat pro-war propaganda channeledthough it by unnamed “senior officials.” I can’t say for sure what that member nation’s identity might be, butI’d bet a dollar of my own money that its first initial stands for “Israel.” You never know, though. The member nation’s first initial might also stand for “United.”

Not shockingly, neither the New York Times nor the WashingtonPost nor any of the rest of the mainstream news foppery has bothered totake the trouble to break the news that their breaking news about the IAEAreport was pure unadulterated bull roar.

This monkey business of accusing Iran ofeverything from killing our soldiers in Iraq to building nukes to getting dairygoats pregnant without providing a scrap of credible evidence to back the accusations up hasbeen going on since at least 2007 when Mr. Bush’s bunch was looking forexcuses to extend the War on Evil in Iraq indefinitely with a “surge”escalation. If a tenth of shenanigansthe Pentarchy has charged Iran with being up to were true, there would be noexcuse on earth for not having bombed the entire Persian race into the carrierpigeon mode by now.

Yet Ministerof Peace Leon Panetta wasted little time in calling a news conference andcautioning, oh, no, no, we don’t want to bomb Iran, that might bring on“unintended consequences,” yepper, yup, yup, yo! It must be that Uncle Leo has reached the age where he's worried about the destination of his immortal soul.

Iran is not a military threat to anyone—exceptpossibly to itself if it ever were to acquire nuclear weapons. Nukes in the hands of Iran would be thethird-world equivalent of a doomsday machine, and as Doctor Strangeloveadmonished the Soviet Ambassador in the eponymous film by Stanley Kubrick, adoomsday machine doesn’t serve its purpose unless you tell everyone that youhave it. Once Iran were to announce itspossession of a nuclear arsenal, Fork-Tongued Bebe would have his flying circus turn Iran into a parking lot for our permanent occupation forces in Iraq andthe Bananastans.

Despite plain evidence that our Iran policy is the epitome of rogue hegemony, we continue to demonize Iran in accordance with the dictates of the Israelis, who could populate the world’s museums with thegalleries' worth of U.S. politicians it has purchased over the years. I have suggested that if we really want tovouchsafe Israel’s security we should make it the 51^st state. But Israel isn’t likely to go along withthat. As I mentioned a moment ago, theydon’t need formal legislative representation here because they already own ourCongress, and if they become a state they’ll have to pay our taxes and obey ourlaws.

Israel has a much better deal the way things arenow.

Commander Jeff Huber,U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals,a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Hooray for Gareth Porter!

2011-11-10T20:27:00.001-05:00

My pal Gareth socked a walk-off four-bagger withhis investigative piece on the latest journo-jive on Iran. The titletells it all: "IAEA’s ‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons."

Kinda shakes your faith in the NewYork Times and the Washington Post, doesn't it? (Heh.)

You might also want to read theanalysis of the cooked IAEA report at Moon of Alabama.

I'll have further choiceobservations to make on the affair in next Tuesday's column.

Ciao, hounds, and remember:warmongers aren't just right-wing nut cases anymore.

Jeff

...And Keep Lying Some More...

2011-11-09T09:51:00.001-05:00

By this morning the Sanger/Broad bull roar piece on the IAEA report had been altered, and the remarks about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate were promoted to paragraph six. The key sentence now reads:

The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...

You can see the IAEA report in the raw here. If you can get past the Guardian's incendiary intro and manage to merely skim the report from head to tail, you'll come away with the strong impression that it's loaded with he said/she said allegations that clearly came from the U.S. and Israel, not from actual scientific inspection.

The ongoing campaign to bully the UN into going along with the anti-Iran strategy seems to have established a permanent base camp in the New York headquarters. When the neocons and likudniks read the IAEA report their lips must have been moving. It occurs to me that liberal dog of war Susan Rice, our Ambassador to the UN, is accomplishing things that Revoltin' John Bolton only dreamed of.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is authorof the critically lauded novel BathtubAdmirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Let's Keep Lying!

2011-11-08T20:36:00.000-05:00

Update: Double Shame! Triple Shame!

Journo-swine David E. Sanger

The detestable David E. Sanger co-wrote a New York Times story posted on Tuesday afternoon titled “U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward Nuclear Device.”

The story began: “United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on Tuesday that they say makes a ‘credible’ case that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ and that the project may still be under way.” Sanger and side boy William J. Broad go on to sketch an ominous picture of the IAEA’s findings which pretty much seem to condemn Iran until you get clear to the first sentence of paragraph bloody twelve, which reads:

The report corroborates the conclusion of a much-debated classified National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003.

Great. Caesars. Ghost. What unadulterated, shameless journalistic humbuggery. That should have been the story’s lead sentence. It alone refutes everything else in the piece and every other syllable of the last four years of bull roar that’s been flung at Iran about its nuclear intentions. Sanger and Broad included it to cover their little reporter rumps when the rest of the story proves to be tripe, but they buried it where nobody would read it so as not to displease their sources in the Pentarchy* and hence put their careers with the phony-baloney Newspaper of Record at risk.

Sanger and Broad and the rest of the warmongering mainstream media simply cannot start burning in hell soon enough. They simply cannot.

*The Pentarchy is that cabal of sandbox generals, bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs, Pavlov’s dogs of war, patriotic psychopaths and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed-of permanent American security state a reality.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Hey, I Know What. Let's Lie Some More about Iran.

2011-11-07T15:42:00.001-05:00

8 Nov 2011

by Jeff Huber

The Pentarchy* continues to blow smoke about Irandespite its long-standing inability to produce a smoking gun.

In a 3 November piece for the Middle East Researchand Information Project titled “Debunkingthe Iran ‘Terror Plot,’” my colleague Gareth Porter knockedthe bottom out of what little credibility was left of assertions that elementsof Iran’s QODs force were behind a plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador andcommit other tawdry terrorisms.

Hey, Abbott!

A still image from Abbot and Costello
Meet the FBI.

The FBI’s cock-eyed case was a keystone caper from creation to conclusion. A narcotics seller turned DEA informant wasdope-dealing his way out of a long prison sentence by dangling a hook in frontan Iranian-American named Mansour J. “Scarface” Arbabsiar, a middle-agedalcoholic shipwreck best known for his unreliability, his slovenliness, hisbusiness and relationship failures and his limited ability to discriminatebetween perception and reality.

A brigade of Jack Bauer wannabes in DEA, the FBI and other Justice Department booby hatcheriesdecided to make their careers by trumping up a fairy tale of evil deeds and theevil doers who do them for their equally career-minded bosses. The next thing you knew we had a Tailor of Panama/Our Man in Havana scenario where a head of state, in this caseyoung Mr. Obama, made a draconian foreign policy commitment based on thefabrications of subordinates who were blindingly over-ambitious and dazzlinglyunder-competent.

The Scarface farce may has dipped back beneath the radar for now, the companion piece ofthe latest Iran scare stratagem has roared to the forefront. While Mr. Obama was telling us that he knew forsure the Iranian government was up to infamous infamies because a dope dealer said that an agingdrunk said so (and that was good enough for him), he also sprang the news that UNinspectors had new proof that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, though hedidn’t say what that proof was, just like he doesn’t elaborate on the legalarguments he says support his unitary decisions to suspend the Constitution.

Keystone Kondi Klaims the Persians Puke a Peck of Split Pea Soup

Possessed by Dick Cheney or just stoned?

Over the weekend, the usual echo chamberlainslaunched the second wave of disingenuous accusations regarding Iran’s nuclearintentions. Ghoulish CondiRice, one of the most persistent political herpes strains gifted to us bythe Bush administration, made an appearance on ABC’s This Week to blab about how Team Obama is undoing all the beautifulwickedness she helped Dark Lord Cheney accomplish during the two-term Bushdisaster. As ever, Condi’s eyesstubbornly focused on a point somewhere above the camera and far, far away, asif somewhere in the sub-language labyrinth of her cognizance she realizes justhow full of used horse lunch she is.

On the subject of Iran, Condi quacked her standardloco litany of invective, stating that, “It’s trying to get a nuclearweapon.” Condi didn’t offer any proof ofher statement, and This Week hostChristiane Amanpour, a once credible Middle East correspondent, didn’t push herfor any. It was Amanpour, in fact, whofed Condi her Iran-bash straight line by saying that this week the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is "about to reveal, apparently, more details showing, apparently, that Iran is trying toweaponize.” (My italics). Christiane had apparently been reading the apparently unrevised anti-Iran propaganda her print colleagues had polluted the informationenvironment with.

FredrickDahl of Reuters filed a Sunday piece that leads with “The U.N. nuclearwatchdog is expected this week to issue its most detailed report yet onresearch in Iran seen as gearedto developing atomic bombs.” Only near the end of the story does Dahl admit that the report "is not believed tocontain an explicit assessment that Iran is developing a nuclear weaponscapability” and that a reliable source says the report is unlikely to contain any "smoking guns."

Dahl notes that although U.S. intelligenceagencies stated outright in a 2007 intelligence assessment that Iran hadstopped whatever nuclear weapons program it may have had in 2003, “Manyconservative experts criticized the 2007 findings as inaccurate and naïve.” Dahl doesn't mention that those “conservativeexperts” are the very same ones who cooked the intelligence on Iraq. Dahl also states that, “U.S. intelligenceagencies now believe Iranian leaders have resumed closed-door debates over thelast four years about whether to build a nuclear bomb.” Not until his next paragraph do we learn that “U.S. intelligence agencies” consist of Peter Crail of theArms Control Association, a subsidiary of the ASAN Institute for Policy Studies,a neoconservative tank thinkery that schmoozes Donald Rumsfeld and other prominent warlords of our Era of Persistent Conflict.

But the unlimited weight class winner of the Thomas E. Ricks Journalistic Warmongering Award in lastSunday’s round of Iran-related media mendacity was Joby Warwich of the Washington Post. His headline proclaimed “IAEA says foreign expertise has brought Iran to threshold of nuclearcapability,” and his first sentence warned, “Intelligenceprovided to U.N. nuclear officials shows that Iran’s government has masteredthe critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon.”

Self-designated UN weapons inspector
David Albright.

You haveto actually read the whole story carefully to glean that nobody actually knows what theIAEA report actually says, and that Warwick’s only actual knowledge of the report’scontent actually comes from a PowerPoint presentation on it given by David Albright,who Warwick describes as “a former U.N. weapons inspector who has reviewed theintelligence files” but who is actually a posturing AIPAC propagandapeddler who likely had nothing at all to do with the IAEA inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities.

R.I.P. Shame

You hearplenty of talk these days about the decline in American morality, and youmostly hear it from the kind of people who chug the Kool-Aid and snort the gluethey get from rabid radio and FOX News. At blame for the decline of our national virtue, according to theself-appointed keepers of our national ethos, are the standard scapegoats: MTV,web porn, liberal judges, Rachel Maddow and so on.

Whatnobody seems willing to own up to is that the most immoral acts committed inthe NewAmerican Century have been the lies that the hegemon’s leaders told that worldthat led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents and the abject suffering ofuntold millions more. That the lies thatsupport unjust wars keep getting told, and that so many people in our leadinginstitutions continue to help spread them, is the utterly condemning fact ofcontemporary American culture.

We haven’thad a firm foothold on the moral high ground since Pearl Harbor. We started slipping down the slope around thetime of the Dresden massacre. At this point we’re sofrom being Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” that I doubt we’ll evergain the wisdom and enlightenment that we should have possessed before weascended to the role of sole global superpower.

Update: Double Shame! Triple Shame!

Journo-swine David E. Sanger

Thedetestable David E.Sanger co-wrote a NewYork Times story posted onTuesday afternoon titled “U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward NuclearDevice.”

The storybegan: “United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence onTuesday that they say makes a ‘credible’ case that ‘Iranhas carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ andthat the project may still be under way.” Sanger and sidekick William J. Broad go on to sketch an ominous pictureof the IAEA’s findings which pretty much seem to condemn Iran until you getclear to the first sentence of paragraph bloody twelve, which reads:

Thereport corroborates the conclusion of a much-debated classified NationalIntelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highlyfocused effort to build a bomb in late 2003.

Great. Caesars. Ghost. What unadulterated,shameless journalistic humbuggery. Thatshould have been the story’s leadsentence. It alone refuteseverything else in the piece and every other syllable of the last four years ofbull roar that’s been flung at Iran about its nuclear intentions. Sanger and Broad included it to cover theirlittle reporter bottoms when the rest of the story proves to be tripe, but theyburied it where nobody would read it so as not to displease their sources in thePentarchy and hence put their careers with the Newspaper of Record at risk.

Sanger andBroad and the rest of the warmongering mainstream media simply cannot startburning in hell soon enough. They simply cannot.

Quadruple Shame!

By this morning the Sanger/Broad bull roar piece on the IAEA report had been altered, and the remarks about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate were promoted to paragraph six. The key sentence now reads:

The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...

More Update: Hooray for Gareth Porter!

My pal Gareth socked a walk-off four-bagger withhis investigative piece on the latest journo-jive on Iran. The titletells it all: "IAEA’s‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons."

Kinda shakes your faith in the New YorkTimes and the Washington Post, doesn't it? (Heh.)

You might also want to read the analysis of thecooked IAEA report at Moonof Alabama.

I'll have further choice observations to make onthe affair in next Tuesday's column.

Ciao, hounds, and remember: warmongers aren't justright-wing nut cases anymore. Susan Rice is even word than Condi Rice was.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Get Over It Getting Over Over There

2011-10-31T20:55:00.000-04:00

1 Nov 2011

by Jeff Huber

The about face happened even fasterthan I thought it would. Only twoFridays ago young Mr. Obama announced that the lastAmerican soldier would leave Iraq by the end of this year.

The last soldier, that is, except for the Marinecontingent we’ll leave behind at the embassy/fortress we built inBaghdad. But Marines aren’t in the Army,so they’re not technically soldiers are they? That's why they call them "Marines," isn't it? And the mutant CIA ninjas we’re leaving behind aren’t soldierseither, so they don’t count. And theheavy brigade of Blackwater mobsters we’re leaving behind under the control ofState Department clerks, they don’t count as soldiers, either.

Some undetermined number of“advisers” we’ll leave behind even though the Status of Forces Agreement says we can't will be special force types, but lots ofthem will be Navy SEALs, who aren’t soldiers because they're sailors. Some of the advisers we leave behind willbe Army Green Berets, who are soldiers if you want to be a stickler about it. But their operational chain ofcommand goes through the Unified Combatant Command called U.S. SpecialOperations Command aka USSOCOM (pronounced “U.S. so calm”). But SOCOM (for short) has its own budget justlike one of the uniformed services (i.e., Army, Navy, Air Tunes) so it’s kindof a separate uniformed service itself.

SOCOM, even operates under different laws andlegislative oversight procedures than the rest of the armed services do, so it can do things that mere mortal soldiers and sailors and Marines can't do. SOCOM is like the CIA in that regard, but the CIA, which isn't part of the Department of Defense at all, operates undera different set of laws and oversights than SOCOM, so that if some dirty deedneeds doing that SOCOM doesn't have the legal dope deal to deal with, then the CIA can deal with itinstead (and vice versa). In casesome totally rat's-fundament-filthy dirty deed needs doing that neither the CIA nor SOCOM can do thenit gets done by mercenaries like the Blackwater gunsels we’re leaving behind atthe embassy in Baghdad, whose activities overseas aren’t governed by any laws of God or man.

"Fabios of Fortune" can wear
their hair much longer than their
military counterparts are allowed to.

There’s bound to be talk sooner or later, if thereisn’t already, about how this system of having three separate dirty deed doingdirectorates is inefficient and costly, and that we should just pour the SOCOM and CIA appropriations directly into ourBlackwater thug budget. That way, not only can ourdirty deed doers commit atrocities with impunity; they canpitch national treasure into the wind to their black little hearts' delight.

The counterargument to completely outsourcing ourdirty deeds, and it’s a good one, says that if we ax the CIA and SOCOMin favor of commercial thuggery, we’ll eliminate the commercial thugs industry's training program. Pretty soon we won’thave anybody qualified to do dirty deeds for hire, sort of like how we’d soonrun out of airline pilots if we shot down militaryaviation.

But the counter-counter argument says that we can just pay Blackwater to recruit and train goons forus. This counter-counter approach offersseveral strategic advantages over the present system.

For starters, we ditch the cumbersome requirementto track the money used for training because once we turn it over to Blackwaterit falls into a black hole, the same way that we’re now saying the $6.6 billionwe thought maybe we left on the seat of a Baghdad bus is “found” becausewe discovered it was “transferred” to the Central Bank of Iraq. Where that $6.6 billion was transferred fromthere is irrelevant, by Jupiter; we’ve got a phony-baloney receipt for it andthat’s all that counts.

Next, we don’t have to apply the same entrance qualificationstandards to our Blackwater trainees that we require of our militaryenlistees. That lets us recruithoodlums straight from the hood, where they’ll come to us with prior experience of firearms and lethal violence and an innate disdain for law and order.

Best of all, if we recruit criminal ruffians andtrain them to operate outside the limits of decent restraint from the get-gothen we don’t have the problem of reprogramming military and CIA snake snackers,who have been conditioned to pay at least a modicum of attention to legallimits, as they transition to the privatesector.

The Senate Armed Services Select Committee

But for the time being we’re stuck withfuddy-duddy CIA and SOCOM, some of whose activities do, in fact, have to endurelegislative scrutiny. That’s okay,though. The congressional scrutinizers who scrutinize them get on select scrutiny committees the same way one gets adopted into theSoprano family. You’re the new kid onthe block and somebody does you a big favor and gets you on a selectcommittee. They feed you a few dirtysecrets and let you approve of things that it isn’t legal for you to approveof, and the next thing you know you’re a bona fide law breaking lawmaker, amade member of the Pentarchy, and you’re knocking back ice-cold shots of Stoliwith Revoltin' John Bolton ringside at the Bada-Bing.

So anything the Pentarchy wants from you you’repretty much going to approve, just like you won’t ever again put up a fussabout it when a president bypasses Congress completely and startsa war on the authority of his Ambassador to the UN, the way Bombardier Barry startedthe lollapalooza in Libya.

And don’t worry that something might crop up inthe Middle East that SOCO or CIA can’t carry out once the “soldiers” leave Iraq,because the soldiers aren’t going very far. As prominentPentagon propagandist TomShanker of the New York Timesannounced this past Saturday, the Obama administration plans to replace thesoldiers in Iraq with soldiers in Kuwait. This, Shanker tells us, is in casethey need to “respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a militaryconfrontation with Iran.”

This Shanker cat has got to be
jiving me, man.

Man-oh-Manischewitz. What an irredeemable line of unlimited weightclass bull roar. Security in Iraqcollapsed in 2003 when we invaded the place and it hasn't recovered to this day. As for a military confrontationwith Iran, Iran can’t project land or air power any further than any othercountry in that region, which is about three miles from its border. The only potential military confrontation wemight have with Iran is the one we instigate on the next set of fabricated andunsupported accusations that no one in the three pillars or fourth estate of our failed experiment in government will question because everyone in them is part ofthe war mob, a mob for which there is no witness protection program because thepeople who would protect you are the very people you’d be witnessing against.

Our country, fellow citizens, is captive in theclutch of warmongers and the fearful fools who follow them.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)writes at Pen and Sword.Jeff's novel BathtubAdmirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to globaldominance, is on sale now.

Fat Ladies, Promises and Iraq

2011-10-24T21:32:00.000-04:00

25 October 2011

By Jeff Huber

Please don’t be duped into thinking that young Mr.Obama’s “troopswill be home for the holidays” announcement last Friday really means that theproverbial plump soprano has crooned the coda of our Wagnerian Iliad in Iraq:the troops’ journey home is likely to resemble the one in The Odyssey that dragged on for ten years or so after the Trojan War ended. Also don’t fallinto the perception traps that might lead you to think Obama is beginning tokeep his last set of campaign promises just in time to cook up some new ones,or that he’s finally gotten control of his New Praetorian Generals or of theNew Centurion Pentarchy.

And whatever you do, don’t buy the lysergicassertion that Obama’s announcement heralds the beginning of the end of our LongWar aka Era of PersistentConflict aka the Global War on Terrorism (aka GWOT) aka the Global StruggleAgainst Violent Extremism (aka GSAVE)War on Evil (aka WOE). No, Americanswill still be consuming pro-war bull feather merchandising when Gen Y ispuling like a herd of kittens about Gen Z’s reluctance to buy intoSocial Security and Public Health Care.

CIA Director Petraeus was just kidding
back when he said he'd get us
out of Iraq (hah!).

It’s worth noting that Mr. O didn’t specify which holidays of which year the troops would be home from Iraq by. One doesn't like to think that our wartimeleaders would play us with that level of weasel wordplay, but you neverknow. Obama might be following thesuccessful example of his fair-haired step-general DavePetraeus who, back in summer of 2007, told the House Foreign AffairsCommittee that his objective as Supreme Sultan of the Surgin’ Safari in Sumariawas to create “conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage." King David didn't say if he was aiming toallow out soldiers to disengage in this American Centuryor the next one. We know from Petraeus consecratorand camp concubine ThomasE. Ricks that the general’s real intention was “not to bring the war to aclose” but to con the American people into sticking with it even longer.

Here we are four years and lunch money after the surge with an Iraq that’s as up for grabs as it ever was, and John Boehner isexpressing concerns that a full withdrawal from Iraq could “jeopardize” the“gains” we’ve achieved. Holy mackerel,Sapphire. Where do we find such tanning bed bimbos? That’s like Jonah worryingif the whale can get by on an empty stomach.

Obama’s “withdrawal” from Iraq doesn't just leavethe back door open; it leaves the front of the building blown off. There’s still a “possibility” that we’llleave an unspecified number of “trainers” behind to “advise” Iraqi troops. Military advisers have a way of making likebunnies, folks. We didn’t end theVietnam War by putting advisers in country. That’s how we started theVietnam War. There will also, of coursebe a Marine security contingent at our embassy in Baghdad. That’s standard procedure in the capitol ofevery nation that still sucks up to us.

What’s not standard procedure about our embassy inBaghdad—a compound the size of Vatican City that looks like the fortress in The Guns ofNavarone—is that in addition to the Marines it will also be infested bywhat Mark Landler of the New York Times describes as “4,000 to 5,000 private StateDepartment security contractors” (aka Blackwaterhoodlums) “as well as a significant[my italics] CIA presence.” You startadding on the soldiers of ill-gotten fortune that Exxon and Halliburton and KBRand the rest of the war buckaroos will bring with them and pretty soon you’retalking about a force the equivalent of a U.S. Army division (the embassymercenary corps alone is brigade size).

Lawyers, Guns and Hillary

The “advisers” will be special force phantoms who,along with the CIA spooks, operate outside of any chain ofcommand you can define with a wire diagram. The mercenaries, once they’reabroad, run amok unrestrained by any written or unwritten laws of God orman. The only authority they’reconcerned about is the one that signs their paychecks, who in this case is ourwarmongering Secretary of State. CruellaClinton can now commit our nation to war without the consent of Congress or thejudiciary or even the commander in chief whenever she gets the notion, which puts her on equal footing withour UNAmbassador Susie Rice, who started our whackadoodle-do in Libya by carpingthe Security Council into passing a bombs-away resolution.

No, the fat lady isn’t singing in Iraq. She hasn’t even sprayed her throat yet.

Claims that Obama’s non-withdrawalannouncement show he’s living up to campaign promises to shut the Iraq WOE down are as legitimate as bluemoney. The deadline to haul heinie outof Iraq at the end of this year was in the status of forces agreement the Bush regime signed onto when the UN mandate ran out. Obama is semi-bringingthe troops home because his Pentarchs couldn’t bully the Iraqi government intogranting indefinite legal immunity to whatever troops we decided to leavebehind. If an agreement to leave troopsin place had been reached, Obama would have gone slut-puppy for it just likehe’s done with everything else his velvet junta generals have ordered him todo.

We've got to drop all those leftover bombs on somebody!

In no way have the Pentagon brass hats given up onmaintaining a permanent presence in Iraq. Senior sanctioned leakers are feeding the Tom Ricks wannabe echochamberlains tag lines about how we'll have to get by with a “smallerfootprint” to administer “training” and “guidance,” and to provide Iraq withair defense from, uh, the Kurdish Air Force, I guess. But, hey, you know, if we leave peoplebehind to do that stuff we’ll need additional security personnel to protectthem, and we’ll need additional support personnel to cook food and make bedsand fix stopped up toilets for the additional security personnel, and thenwe’ll need extra additional security personnel to provide security for theadditional security personnel’s additional support personnel, and then we’llneed extra additional support personnel to support the extra additional security personnel, and so on and so on and so on.

But aside from that, everybody is coming home.

With Moammar "The Ram" Gadhafi
gone, who's next?

Any talk that Obama’s homecoming address is anothersign that he’s reining in our warhorses is pure reconstituted horselunch. We no sooner get done havingthose images of Moammar Gadhafi looking like Mickey Roark at the end of The Wrestler jammed in our eyes like pencils than PopsMcCain starts howling about how now we can start bombing the living Christour Lord and Savior out of Syria!

Remember thinking the warmongery was kaput when McCain lost the election?

THIS JUST IN: TURKISH TANKS ENTER NORTHERN IRAQ.

Hi ho!

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)writes at Pen and Sword.Jeff's novel BathtubAdmirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to globaldominance, is on sale now.

The Persian Paranoia Ploy

2011-10-17T21:40:00.000-04:00

18 Oct. 2011

by Jeff Huber

I thought about calling this essay “The Boys Who Cried Iran,’” but that title had a cross-purpose parallel problem. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” parallel is that the townspeople eventually ignore the boy’s false alarms. It seems, on the other hand, that we the people will never tire of hearing the “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” mantra.

The Iranians vant to
drink your blood!

This time around, the Pentarchy’s bull feather merchants have manage to cull a confluence of Persian Peril Paranoia with our by now Pavlovian terror of terrorism. An Iranian-American used-car salesman is accused of being the key figure in an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. and to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Scary, huh kids?

The used-car salesman in question is 56 year-old Mansour J. Arbabsiar (aka “Scarface), whose apprehension by the FBI was in keeping with the legendary Homeland Security sting operations that netted the Dirty Bomber who turned out to be too retarded to make a dirty bomb, and the Panty Bomber whose panty bomb didn’t even put third-degree burns on his party favor, and the Times Square Screw Up who locked himself out of his bomb car and his getaway car andhis apartment.

Scarface, if that really is his international underground terrorist cabal code name, is a 30 year resident of Texas, a state renowned for another Justice Department fiasco of fame that unfolded in the town of Waco, a travesty during which Janet Reno’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) hooligans immolated 76 lonesome losers whose heinous crime was allowing themselves to be brainwashed by cult leader David Koresh. Scarface Arbabsiar inhabited Texas for three decades during which he racked up a string of failed businesses, a covey of angry creditors, and a furious former spouse who sought a protective order against him. His friends describe him as “perennially disheveled” and “hopelessly disorganized.” His socks never matched and he constantly lost his keys and cell phone. A rival used-car salesman described Arbabisiar as “worthless.”

Mansour J. Arbabsiar was a mark so perfect for a pre-election propaganda con game that the fool infested FBI couldn’t have overlooked him if they were wearing two blindfolds instead of the single one that was their standard issue in the years that led up to the 9/11 attacks.

Attorney General Holder and senior Justice Dept. Staff

At the uber-helm of this cockamamie caper was Attorney General Eric Holder, who is to Barack Obama’s Justice Department what Ford Sterling was to Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops: the chief buffoon. It was no doubt coincidence, it just had to have been, that the Scarface assassination scare story hit the mainstream fire hose the day after Holder was subpoenaed to do some ‘splainin’ to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious, a gun-walking campaign that should have been dubbed “Faster and Funnier.” In the course of groping though an investigation trying to trace firearms from American gun dealers to Mexican drug gangs, Holder’s ATF-ups managed to lose track of 1,400 to 2,000 guns that migrated into the mitts of the Mexican drug gangsters they were trying to keep guns from migrating into the mitts of.

I’d characterize Faster and Funnier as a Petraeus-class fumble, but that would be incredibly unfair to Holder and the ATF. When then three-star general David Petraeus let U.S supplied guns tiptoe into the hands of Shiite militiamen, he didn’t just hand over a couple thousand of the things. Petraeus gave away 190,000 of the things, more than enough to arm 10 United States Army infantry divisions. Funny how the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee never subpoenaed King David to explain how that happened. It must have been an oversight on their part (heh).

It's the old "They can't
be that stupid so they
must be that stupid" ploy.

According to the Runyonesque scenario Holder and Company spin, the case just happened to fall together when some Defense Enforcement Agency Dunderhead had a chance meeting with Johnny Scars and a pair of Iran’s elite Quds Force baddies who just happened to be operating on American soil in plain sight of every federal, state and local law enforcement official and intelligence agent in the great state of Texas. Our best intelligence (double heh) alleges that officials at the highest levels of Iran’s government pulled stunts that prompted Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East and author of several books on Iran, said there was “sloppiness about the case that defies belief.” “Sloppy” is a kind euphemism. According to Holder’s Heroes, top Iranian leaders left a paper and electronic trail leading back to themselves that Inspector Clousseau could have followed.

But incredulity is by no means grounds among the Obama inner-war party for stiff-arming a chance to pacify the Pentarchy with the citizenry marching on Wall Street and an election on the horizon. State Secretary Cruella Clinton said of the case “The idea that they [the Iranians, I guess she means] would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador, nobody could make that up, right?” Wake up and smell the napalm, Hillary. Remember the whoppers Big Dick Cheney and his Delaware Destroyers fabricated about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his ties al Qaeda and his connections to 9/11 that got us into the Iraq quagmire that you voted for? Conjuring incredible tales so the American public will let you bomb or invade other countries is neocon de rigueur. If you ain’t lyin’ they ain’t buyin’, that’s the warmongery’s motto when it comes to constructing a casus belli from hydrogen molecules.

Holder's argument that top Iranian government officials were involved in a plot to hire Mexican Drug runners to assassinate a Saudi diplomat and bomb an Israeli embassy has more holes in it than Scientology dogma. But that’s okay because young Mr. Obama said in a 13 October press conference that, “the facts are there for all to see,” though he failed to mention what any of those facts are or where any of us might go to see them.

When Holder's Iranian/Mexican assassination/bomb plot accusations began generating guffaws globally, Obama’s spin physicians switched to another cherished wolf cry. Favored Pentarchy echo chamberlain David E. Sanger of the New York Times relays to us that “President Obama is pressing United Nations nuclear inspectors to release classified intelligence information showing that Iran is designing and experimenting with nuclear weapons technology.” If you crawl between the gutters in this puff piece you pick up that the “classified intelligence information” they’re talking about is the so-called “smoking laptop” documents that were proven to be forgeries five freaking years ago.

But young Mr. Obama’s story is that Iran wants to kill Saudis and Israelis and they’ll do it with hired banditos or nukes or trick-or-treaters or whatever it takes, and he’s sticking to it, and he’ll get away with this used mare's oats mendacity because beating war drums appeases the neocons and today's liberals are too vaginal to stand up to him.

Where do we find such candidates?

Why do we elect such men to the highest office in our land? Oh, that’s right. The choice was him and Bazooka Joe or Grampaw Pettibone and Patriotic Barbie. The difference between the two tickets doesn’t seem so clear in the rearview mirror, does it? This Obama person who promised to put the brakes on the neocon agenda is starting to make Barry Goldwater look like a peace pansy.

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.

Bananastan-iversary!

2011-10-09T16:52:00.001-04:00

11 Oct. 2011

by Jeff Huber

Last week marked the tenth anniversary of our Waron Evil (aka WOE) in the Bananastans, those Central Asian banana republics ofPakistan and Afghanistan. If you’reconfused as to which of the two Bananastans we’re at war with, don'tworry. You’re in good company, some ofwhich resides in the National Security Council and much of which dwells in thePentagon and even more of which infests Congress.

Technically speaking, we aren’t at war with eithercountry, even though we’ve been in the process of blowing both of them topiecemeal smithereens for over a decade now. Then again, strictly speaking, constitutionally speaking, we aren’t atwar with any country, since we haven’t formally declared war against anybodysince back in the early forties. Thatwar, the last war Congress declared, World War II, was actually two wars, one against Imperial Japan and oneagainst Nazi Germany. We didn’t declarewar against Nazi Germany, by they way, but we didn’t have to. Nazi Germany declared war against us after wedeclared war against Imperial Japan. Butthat was good enough to constitute a Constitutional war according to the Marquess ofQueensbury or CharlesGoren or whoever was authorized to make up the rules of warfare back beforethere was a UN to make things up.

Japanese foreign affairs minister Moramu Shigemitzu
formally declares "Uncle-san!"

The wars against Germany and Japan were over by the late 1940s. We know theyended because Germany and Japan signed formal surrender documents. The German and Japanese people went along withthose surrenders because they were signed by heads of state of the governmentsthat existed in Germany and Japan at the time they surrendered. Another nation formally surrendering to us isanother thing that hasn’t happened since the 1940s, and is a very large part ofthe reason that we haven’t actually won a war since then. We declared victory in Vietnam after we gotour heinie handed to us there and went home, and the uneasy peace between the Koreas isthe product of a cease-fire that has lasted more-or-less successfully for ahalf-century and tool-booth tokens.

Even though we haven’t declared any wars since the1940s, we are presently involved in roughly 120of them, give or take, around the world. The legitimizing pretext for some of those wars is the Authorization forUse of Military Force aka AUMF thatour Congress persons passed almost unanimously a week after the 9/11/2001attacks without thinking about what theywere doing. The pre-ramble to the 9/18/2001 AUMF says that “thePresident has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter andprevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.” The 9/18/2001 AUMF is often referred to as “the blankcheck” that allowed young Mr. Bush to do whatever hoodoo he had to in order to keep themevildoers from doing their evil whenever his neoconmasters decided he needed to do it.

The 9/18/2001 AUMF as well as the 10/16/2002 AUMF thatgave Mr. Bush and his puppeteers permission to invade Iraq are provisions ofthe War Powers Resolutionof 1973, which says that a president can only employ troops in combatoverseas beyond 60 days unless Congress “has declared war or has enacted aspecific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces.” Bush administration Federalist Societylawyers, most notably JohnYoo (aka Yoo Manchu), argued that Bush didn’t need a separate AUMF toinvade Iraq because the original AUMF allowed it, plus a pile of other pony plop about how international law allows you to conduct preemptive self defense evenif you don’t really need to, because, hey, how can you know for sure that youdon't need to defend yourself from another country unless you invade the placeand toss it to find out? Huh? You tell me.

In retrospect, the Bush machine's threats to bypassthe legislature appear to have been a stratagem to gulling our KeystoneKongress into demanding a chance to vote for the Iraq invasion, and then letting them votefor it so they couldn’t hold the executive branch responsible if it turnedout that we invaded another country on fuzzy pretexts (which turned out to be the case).

The 9/18/2001 AUMF and the self-defense mantrahave been the bulwark of “legal” justification for the triple-digits worth ofthird world wars we’re now waging—with one major exception. Even the best and brightest warmongers in youngMr. Obama’s administration couldn’t claim that Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was aterror threat. He had, in fact,renounced jihadist terrorism in general and al Qaeda specifically. And they couldn’t say we had to preemptivelydefend ourselves against Gaddafi because he had voluntarily ash canned whateversort of Our Gang weapons of mass destruction program he might have had. They couldn’t even say the Gadaffi’s regimewas illegitimate because young Mr. Bush recognized it in return for Gadaffiash canning his WMD and renouncing al Qaeda.

So Susie Rice, the liberal warmonger who young Mr.Obama hand-picked to succeed neoconwarmongers John Bolton and Zalmay Khalilzad as our Ambassador to the UN,crammed a resolution past the Security Council’s tonsils to establish a no-flyzone to protect the freedom loving peoples of Libya from their mean olddictator Gaddafi (who the UN had also recognized as a legitimate head of state). That quickly turned into an extensive bombingcampaign ala the Kosovo Konflict to run mean old Gadaffi out of office andreplace him with a bunch of hoodlums who can't decide among themselves whois in charge of them.

The Obama warmongers’ UN gambit accomplishedsomething even Yoo Manchu didn’t manage to pull off: stiff-arm the War PowersAct and Congress completely from the business of starting wars. They got away with what the Bush camp couldn't consummate because liberals get the vapors when a conservatives start pointless,ill-advised wars, but when a fellow liberal does such things, well, liberals,you know how they are, they have to hold a vagina dialogue before they actuallydo anything and, except for the very few of them who still have a spine like DennyKucinich, they’ll go along with whatever young Mr. Obama wants because theydon’t want to see him get his progressive pants pulled down by some tea-baggingbobble head come 11/6/2012.

That explains why liberals couldn't seem to give abat’s eyelash less about the recent revelation by the British press (our pressdoesn’t reveal things any more) that Obama is initiatingwars on individuals, including American citizens like US born citizen Anwaral-Awlaki, by authority of a secret panel within his National SecurityCouncil.

"We don't
want to rush
into getting
out of wars!"

And maybe it’s not all that shocking to discoverthat a secret panel is committing America to wars against individuals, sincewe’ve cut Congress out of the picture anyway and since we don’t actually fightwars against countries anymore. The original enemy in the Bananastans Woe was Osama bin Laden, supposedly, and the WOE in Iraq was against Saddam Hussein. That both of those enemies are now dead doesnot, of course, mean that the wars we've stopped fighting wars agains them, or that we're even in the process of ending them. GeneralJohn Allen, who just replaced King David Petraeus as the four-star bullfeather merchant in charge of the Bananastans, says we’re going to be there fora “long time” beyond the notional 2014 troop withdrawal date.

“The plan is to win,” General Allensays. If that’s the case, inhabitants ofthe Next American Century will still be waging an undeclared war in theBananastans against an enemy who will never surrender because the Next American Centurions, like us,won’t be able to figure out who exactly that enemy is.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)writes at Pen and Sword.Jeff's novel BathtubAdmirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to globaldominance, is on sale now.

Extort the Troops!

2011-10-03T07:15:00.001-04:00

4 Oct. 2011

by Jeff Huber

I was plenty riled when Walgreens tried to shameme into doing my patriotic duty by contributing a dollar to send a Reese’sPeanut Butter Cup to one of our troops overseas. “Don’t you want to support the troops?” theMcJobette at the cash register asked me.

I’d been waiting in line for several minutes topay for two dollars and something worth of something or other because all ofthe people in front me who didn’t believe in the 21^st Century who hadtaken the time to write checks for a few dollars worth of something else, so Iwas maybe more annoyed than I might otherwise have been. Whatever the case, I decided to use the timeI would have taken to write a check for two dollars if I wrote checks and something togive Ms. McJob and the people in line behind me animpromptu lecture on wartime economics.

Praise the Lord and pass the chocolate.

Since 9/11, I explained, every American who wasn’teither too poor or too rich to pay taxes had “supported” the troops to the tuneof well over $5 trillion, and the actual figure was probably closer to $10trillion. If $5 or $10 trillion wasn’tenough to buy the troops all the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Mars Bars andGummy Bears and Jujubes they could possibly hold then me kicking in an extracouple of bucks at Walgreens wasn’t going to help to keep their candy cache combat capable.

The McJobstress gave me a baleful look and said,“So you don’t want to support the troops?” Some guy in line behind me wearing a biker T-shirt and a ponytail muttered“f*****g liberal” as he reached for his checkbook.

This war's for you.

Cashing in on our War on Evil is hardly a newthing. I was sitting in a localtap-and-trough the first time I saw the Anheuser Bush “Coming Home” commercial,the one where troops returning from the war walk through an airport terminal toa standing ovation from the civilians who are waiting around to board for their delayedflights. I shook my head andasked the bartender to replace my Budweiser with a Coors. She asked why, and I said that if the Budweiser peoplewanted to use the war to sell beer they’d have to sell it to somebody besidesme.

That’s when Virginia Beach legend “Drunk Dave” priedhis nose from the bar and said, “Aw, man, they’re not trying to sell beer,they’re just trying to show their patriotic spirit.” This is the same Drunk Dave who once claimedthat he got a balanced view on politics because he listened to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

To gain even further perspective on the events ofthe day, Drunk Dave often tunes in to G. Gordon Liddy’s program. Dave is especially fond of the G. Man’sbumper music, most often war tinged, patriotic, twangy jingles by the likes ofthe abominable Toby Keith about how it’s the American way to put a boot ineverybody’s bottom and sell a lot of records about it.

One of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, thatthe anti-war movement has less traction than a curling stone is that it’s notonly the defense industry parasites who are knocking down big war bucks. It’s everybody. One can’t pass a single merchandising venuein my area without bumping against some sort of trooper-dooper sales gimmick. Granted, I live in an area (Hampton Roads)that contains the densest military population in the country, but given theadvertising I see on what little television I watch it appears that MadisonAvenue has cast its “support the troops” net from coast to coast.

It’s the American way, I suppose, to usewhatever’s available to gull one’s fellow citizens into buying fecal matter theyprobably don’t need, and why should war be any different from, say, body odoror erectile dysfunction? After all, exploitinghuman misery and suffering has always been a core tenet of capitalism, hasn’tit? (Especially when the political right gets its way and eliminates allgovernment regulation, eh?)

One might even be willing to grant that making money on war is downright virtuous, up to a point. Unfortunately, the hideous truth at the core of “support the troops” commercialism is that it supports the neocons' Orwellian doctrine of “Long War” (aka “Persistent Conflict”). Had irony not gone the way of truth, justice and honor during young Mr. Bush’s administration, it would delight at Persistent Conflict’s key internal contradiction: in order to keep the Long War going as long as possible, it must be fought in such a manner as to generate an infinite supply of enemies. Thus does the Long War doctrine defeat any rational claims that they contribute to our national security, yet national security is the fallback rationale for persisting in the Long War.

And Irony would turn positively giddy over thesign that as of this weekend hangs behind the cash register of my corner7-Eleven:

U.S. ArmedForces

We Don’tStart Wars

We FinishThem

Support theTroops

Jesus on a jet ski, there’s not trace oftruth in that entire slog of slogans.

We dostart wars. We supposedly invadedAfghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks even though none of its mastermindsor hijackers were actually from Afghanistan. We kicked the closest thing Afghanistan has ever known to a legitimategovernment out of power and replaced it with a gang of hoodlums and drugdealers who now constitute the secondmost corrupt government on the face of the earth.

We supposedly invaded Iraq because of SaddamHussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his role in 9/11 via his ties to alQaeda. None of these justificationsturned out to be true. We replacedHussein with a gang of hoodlums who now constitute the fourth most corruptgovernment on the face of the earth.

We instigated the bombing of Libya to remove ahead of state who we legitimized by recognizing his government and replace himwith a gang of hoodlums who promise to surpass Somalia as the country with themost corrupt government on the face of the earth.

Billionsof American tax dollars financed the efforts of U.S. “non-profit” groupsthat fomented the Arab Spring movement that has set the Middle East afire, acircumstance that will abet the Long War policy goal of creating aninexhaustible supply of maniacs fighting among themselves to become even worse tyrants than the ones they deposed.

We’re presently mired in 120wars throughout the globe, all of which we started or are involved in byour own choosing. And we’ll never "finish" any of them because their very nature inhibits them from ever ending. The only way we'll ever walk away from them is to just get up and walk away.

Can we blame the “U.S. Armed Forces” for havingstarted these unending wars? You betyour bippy, we can. Oh, the “troops”aren’t to blame. It was the Pentagonbrass who helped Dirty Dick Cheney and Dandy Don Rumsfeld cook the intelligence and manufacture the propaganda that got us stuck by the zipper in Iraq. And the felonious four-stars—David Petraeus, RichardMyers, Pete Pace, George Casey, Mike Mullen and Ray Odierno, just to name thetop row on the wall of the pogues’ gallery—havebeen as thick with the military-industrial warmongery as ticks on a wild dogwhen it comes to peddling pro-war propaganda designed to obliterate withdrawal timelines.

These Colors Can't Think

The troops, for the most part a captive audienceof Armed Forces media and their true-believing superiors, have been brainwashedeven worse than the rest of the nation. A2006 Zogby poll showedthat almost 90 percent of American troops serving in Iraq thought the war therewas retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s role in 9/11.

Lying to the troops, and exhorting them to finishwars that cannot be won, and exploiting them for thebenefit war profiteers cannot in any way be defined as “supporting”them.

But try telling that to the likes of Lady McJob orDrunk Dave or the yahooligan who posted the Bush Coming Home commercial onYouTube and called it “Probably the best commercial ever made.”

Commander JeffHuber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (KunatiBooks), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Click and Clack and Play War

2011-09-26T22:10:00.000-04:00

27 Sep. 2011

by Jeff Huber

I’ve said for some time that the biggestcasualty of our woebegone Ism Wars may be our national cognizance. The lines between intelligence, news, gossip,rumor and brainwash have faded like a hangover at happy hour, and the gap between reality and perception has neverbeen greater. Big Media has been thedutiful echo chamberlain for Big War for so long that it may never again be possiblefor Americans, by now hopelessly addicted to the slime from their TV sets, to clearly conceptualize the causes and consequences of ourfist-first foreign policy.

Leon Panetta and Mike Mullen
testify before the Senate.

During an INFOWARopportunity last week, Leon “Uncle Leo” Panetta and Mike “Moon” Mullen,the Pentarchy’s Click and Clack, told the SenateArmed Services Clodhoppers that the recent attacks on the U.S. embassy inAfghanistan were the evildoing of a terror networks relationship with theintelligence service of Pakistan.

Senator Lindsey Graham
has always relied on the kindness
of campaign contributors in
the defense industry.

Mullen, the son of a Hollywood publicity agent,followed standard operating procedure andweasel wordsmithed his way out of presenting anything anyone could call,strictly speaking, a “lie.” He toldBlanche Graham and Joe Liebfraumilch and Senator Ex-Prisoner of War that the Hagqani terrorist network “acts as” a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’sInternal Services Intelligence Agency aka “ISI.” You can drive the flat earth theory throughthat kind of wiggle room.

Mullen didn’t offer any proof to back his claimsother than to cite “credible intelligence.” Hey, Abbott. At what point since9/11 have we had “credible” intelligence, civilian or military, in thiscountry? U.S. intelligence is tointelligence what McDonalds is to food. Our intelligence consists of bribing or beating sources into telling uswhat we want to hear and/or weaving facts out of air molecules and selling themto Congress and the public in packages designed by Mullen’s bull-feather merchant marines.

Mullen is invoking a variation on Don Rumsfeld’s one-percent doctrine. If one percent of anythingthe likes of Mullen says is true—and one can reasonably infer that yes,Pakistan’s ISI is up to things they’d rather we didn't know about—then we haveto buy the other 99 per-cent of their message too. It’s kind of like the colossus cosmeticscompany that only allows retailers to carry its top-of-the-line products ifsaid retailers also display said colossus cosmetics company’s crud-ola. We only have one military, and if we don'tallow it to defend us from the 99 percent of our enemies that they manufacture, they won’t protect usfrom the one percent that are real.

Uncle Leo hurled a healthy helping of hamana hem-and-haw onto the heap about how “we should put as much pressure as we can”on Pakistan, and then he cut to the chase and said that if Congress forces thePentagon to cut its budget it will cause “catastrophic damage to themilitary.” Uncle Leo didn’t bother toexplain what “catastrophic damage” meant any more than Moon troubled himself toclarify what a “veritable arm” might be or how it might “act as” anything.

When you take a fire hose to Click and Clack's cockamamie presentations,you get "we need more money so we can continue to send American troops to thirdworld countries that pose no genuine threat to us to act as targets for ourenemies there who increase in number every day we keep American troops in theircountries." Neither Click nor Clack nor anyone in Congress nor the newspapers bother to point out the obvious truth that thee enemies who are killing our troops would stop being enemies the moment we took our troops out of theircountry. The only way they can kill ourtroops is if we deliver our troops to their doorstep. Despite what young Mr. Bush's spin physicians used to tell us, the only way they can fight us over here is if they manage to jump or swim across the oceans.

Let's play war!

Panetta and Mullen are engaged in something Iidentified in BathtubAdmirals as “play war.” Intelligenceweenies tell bathtub admirals and sandbox generals what they want to hear sothey can play war, and fight among themselves for control of the toy ships andtanks and airplanes and melting plastic soldiers, and to see who can suck up tothe bedroom politicians the most and become master of the known universe (aka“become King David Petraeus”). Play warassumes many guises, from stacked “battle experiments” whose purpose is toprove the need for the newest and costliest weapons systems to wars againstcountries that don’t have militaries to toys and games that the warmongeryfashions to make war seem no more real than reality televisionprogramming.

The latest play war toy to surface in the “realworld” is something called the “ObamaKills Osama” (aka “OKO”) action figurine. It was supposedly cooked up by some kooks in China to commemorate the 10^thanniversary of 9/11. The figurine is cheesy to the point of obscenity. The keyboard commandos who populateMilitary.com object to the figurine, but not because of its repellant portrayalof violence. They don’t like it becauseit gives Obama credit for killing bin Laden, and not SEAL Team Six. The repellent violence part they actually kind of like.

On that note, here is a snippet from the work in progress on Sandbox Generals:

Calling the “enemy” World Wide Evil (aka WWE) wasFlip’s idea and he stole it from World Wide Entertainment, the fakeprofessional wrestling franchise. The subconscious association Flip created exploited Americans' latent tendency to think of war the same way they thought of professionalwrestling: as an entertainment. The maindifference between the two was that though Americans knew professionalwrestling was fake they managed to sufficiently suspend their disbelief torespond to it emotionally as if it were real. Americans knew that war, on the other hand, was real, but they tended toregard it as entertainment, and attached little emotion at all to it. Even graphic pictures of babies horriblyburned by sulfur bombs seldom moved Americans, whose minds had come to equatethe war violence they observed in the news with the special effects they saw inmovies and television and video games.

We have met the barbarians, and they are us.

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.

Fraud, Waste, and Standard Operating Procedure

2011-09-18T22:32:00.002-04:00

20 Sep. 2011

By Jeff Huber

I’m not sure what made me think that taking timeoff to work on Sandbox Generals, (the sequel to Bathtub Admirals)would get me away from fixating on current headlines. Last Saturday thethousands of days late and billions of dollars short New York Timeseditorial board ran an editorial excoriating “Runaway Spending on War Contractors.”

I owe it all to
Michael R. Gordon and
Judith Miller of the
New York Times.

“Tales of waste, fraud and mayhem by privatecontractors have been commonplace during 10 years of military operations inAfghanistan and Iraq,” the editorial they tell us. “Now a Congressionalstudy commission has put a ‘conservative’ estimate on waste of between $31billion and $60 billion in the $206 billion paid to contractors since the startof the two wars.” The rag-of-record’s editors also note that according tothe study, “Excessive reliance on badly supervised private contractorsindulging ‘vast amounts of spending for no benefit’ is the heart of theproblem.”

Psst. New York Times. The heartof the problem is that Saddam Hussein wasn't trying to get yellowcake from Niger like you said he wasback in 2002. Are we supposed to get all het up by your editorial about contractorsmaking big war bucks thanks to the propaganda you fed the country?

Lamentably, we’ve been in a wartime economy sincethe Second World War on Evil, and even though that book-of-matches approach tofiscal policy is finally turning our fingers into Chicken McNuggets, there’s noalternative strategy that anyone is likely to implement. Redirect all ofthat defense spending into domestic infrastructure project jobs that can’t besent offshore because the workers have to be here to work on theinfrastructure? What for? We’re still making money pig knuckle overham hock on war. Retooling an industry to make a new product when the oldproduct is still profitable is a bad business decision. Why do you thinkwe’re still consuming oil and tobacco fumes?

Here’s a sneak preview from this week’s labors on Generals, an Orwellian screed on howthings got the way they are. Be advised, this is a rough draft (!!!).

The WWEIII (The Third World War on Evil, aka the Cold War on Evil akathe CWoE) everybody agreed to plan for but never have after everybody agreednot to blow up the world with nukes first centered on a WWEI style trench warwith tanks in the middle of Europe. But the action in the center ring wasactually just a sideshow to justify the air and naval hootenannies that wouldbreak out like herpes everywhere else in the world.

That was the war the Navy and the Air Force would fight, a peripheralwar that actually had little to do with the stated Evil Empire objective ofexpanding its client state buffer to include Western Europe so as to ensure nomore Hitlers or Napoleons would come along and destroy their armies andcountries in a vain attempt to capture Moscow again. Jack supposed thatmade the objective of us Americans and our little NATO (“Not A TrueOrganization,” according to Jack) buddies was to ensure that another Hitler orNapoleon did come along and try to wreck the world in anattempt to capture Moscow. That didn’t make any sense, Jack ceded, untilyou considered that the objective of global thermo nuclear-war between the ESSR(Empire of Semi-Socialist Republics) countries and the loose league of Americancustomer states was to destroy the world before the other guys did.

While the high-tech conventional war was peripheral to the opposingphysical objectives of expanding or limiting Russia’s European real estateholdings, the war’s overall strategic objective quickly evolved into aneconomic one, a contest to which of the two diametrically smoke-and-mirroreconomic systems could outlast the other. So seeing which economic systemcould develop and field and maintain the most outlandishly exorbitant air andsea weapon systems that would never actually be used for their designed purposebecame the modus of combat in what Jack came to know of as “play war.”

Both sides of the CWoE justified lavishing precious national wealth onextravagant weaponry by using it in the dirty little third world proxy warsthey suckered each other into from time to time, in Korea and Vietnam andBananastan and elsewhere, but pricey mayhem machines had little affect on theoutcomes of these teakettle conflicts. Third world wars were dumb soldierintensive affairs that mainly required low-dollar carbon-based air-breathingweapon systems largely procured from the lower and middle classes by means ofconscription or the lure of stable employment with benefits.

A key factor of top-drawer air and naval gizmology was not merely thatit was expensive to produce, although it most certainly was. The beautypart, the piece of resistance of all this, was that however much any givenpiece of this high-tech crap cost to make, it was boatloads more expensive tomaintain, and the older it got, the more it cost to keep in operation. Better yet was that the more a given gizmo cost to make and maintain, thelonger it was expected to last, which made it even magnitudes more to make andoodles more to keep operating. So if a flying submarine cost a butt-zillionHoudinis to make, it cost ten butt-zillion Houdinis to keep flying and divingfor the thirty years it was supposed to last, at which time it would becomeeligible for a life extension overhaul that would screw it up so bad it wouldneed two or three follow-on overhauls to fix the first one. By the timethe damn thing was finally turned into a museum in some coastal Podunk thatneeded a tourist attraction, the flying sub will have cost an amount roughlyequivalent to what the Gross National Product was in the year it was built.

The Evil Empiricals followed the same general force strategy vectorbut in a somewhat different manner. Their working class enlisted stiffswho maintained their gear weren’t nearly as well educated as our working classenlisted stiffs, so they built stuff three or four times as solid as it neededto be, realizing that when it broke it was broke-dick and nobody was going tofix it. Hence, rather than spend more Carnacs trying to fix broke-dickstuff they just made new stuff.

A by-product of that practice was that our intelligence weenies couldsay with a fair amount of accuracy (for a change) that they had a lot morestuff than we had, and we could turn that information around to justifybuilding more expensive stuff to give ourselves the so called “technology edge”to bridge the “numerical superiority gap,” two buzz phrases that Flip oftenwished he’d been old enough to have originally stolen them from whoever theirreal originator had stolen them from. It didn’t matter that their numericalsuperiority gap was a de facto hoax since more than 99 percent of their gearwas rusting on the flight line, sinking at the pier, or burning inChechnya.

That’s not to say that our gear was all immaculate and purring like afat tomcat getting its dick scratched. Throughout our careers, when Jackand I went on play war deployments overseas, we were lucky if half of the jetsin our air wing were fully mission capable (aka FMC)—i.e., they flew and alltheir radars and weapons and so on worked like they were supposed to—at anygiven time. Squadron skippers typically reported a 75 percent FMC ratebecause reporting anything lower was like sinking the teeth of their careersinto the chewy end of a shotgun barrel. Maintenance supervisors knew thisand ensured that by the end of any given day the paperwork would reflect a 75percent FMC rate, even if the spare parts that would make a given aircraft FMCweren’t onboard the ship and wouldn’t arrive for weeks if ever.

It must have been some time around the VWoE (Vietnam War on Evil) thatair wing maintenance officers and ship supply corps gonifs cut the dope dealwhere as long as a part was on order everyone would pretend like it was on handwhether it was or not, thus making both the maintenance and supply pukes lookgood without actually having to do their jobs. Squadron skippers lookedthe other way because phantom parting made them look good, and air wingcommanders looked the other way because it made them look good too, and thesame thing held true all the way up the chain of command. And there waslittle fear that anyone would ever blow the whistle because everybody was in onthe scam.

Postscript: Monday morning the PPPP(Pentarchy’s Primary Propaganda Platform) trotted out the crown jewel of theinformation campaign to preserve the defense budget. “Retiree Benefits for the Military Could Face Cuts”reads the headline of a Times story that says if the Pentagonhas to face fiscal reductions, the burden will fall on retirees, whose benefitsthe bull feather merchant marines are now calling a “social program.”

The military’s spin physicians’main assumption is that we can keep our present and future wars going with“support the troops” brainwash while we cut back on the support we promised thetroops of our past wars. That won’t hurt recruiting as long as theeconomy makes joining the military our nation’s most attractive careeroption. If irony were alive and with us it would smirk at the factthat the head-sex fiends who cook up this scare tactic strategy will themselvesget screwed if retiree benefit cuts come to pass.

Mind you now, if we cut retireebenefits we’ll still have flying submarines, and stealth airplanes that are tooexpensive to actually use in wartime because they’ll shoot themselves down overenemy territory due to design flaws, and multi-billion dollar bomber dronesthat fly halfway across the world from mega-billion dollar aircraft carriersthat are already halfway across the world.

JLH

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy(Retired) writes at Pen and Sword.Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (KunatiBooks), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Postcard from the Beachhead

2011-09-12T23:06:00.003-04:00

by Jeff Huber

13 Sep. 2011

Aloha, y’all:

The great thing about living at a beach is how much it simplifies one’s late summer vacation travel arrangements. You don't have to go anywhere to take a vacation. And you don't really have to quit working to take one either.

Wake me when the
war is over.

Shady and I are enjoying the last of the summer sun here at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, though I’m still full steam ahead working on finishing the current draft of Sandbox Generals (we’re just now getting to the point in the narrative where Fix Felon regains the throne of the Pentarchy by eating King David alive, lending credence to protagonist Jack Hogan’s long held suspicion that Fix is, in fact, an undead mother groper).

And of course I’m keeping up with our woebegone wars—12 of them at last count. I see over the weekend where Uncle Leo is foursquare behind keeping three or four thousand troops in Iraq beyond the year-end deadline. Pentagon echo chamberlain Eric Schmitt of the New York Times tells us that Uncle Leo’s plan keeps considerably fewer troops in Iraq than “proposals presented at the Pentagon in recent weeks by the senior American commander in Iraq, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, to keep as many as 14,000 to 18,000 troops there.”

You sure have to wonder how Schmitt got that quote from Austin, and why he might stenograph it for us when he already got the “official” word from the “boss” that the “Pentagon” only wants to keep three or four thousand troops after the deadline. Maybe if we only keep three or four thousand troops in harm’s way for the hopeless cause of supporting a corrupt government, it won’t seem so bad. After all, that general man wanted to keep lots, lots more, didn’t he?

Oh, but then if we don't give the general as many troops as he wanted and things don’t go well, it will be somebody or other’s fault for not listening to what his generals said, won’t it?

Our goal in the Arab world
is Peace without
Humidity.

One also has to wonder what prompted Schmitt to write that the proposal to keep troops in Iraq until brown cows give chocolate milk reflects “the tension between Mr. Obama’s promise to bring all American forces home and the widely held view among commanders that Iraq is not yet able to provide for its own security.” Schmitt doesn’t bother to mention that Iraq is not yet able to provide for its own security in spite (because?) of the fact the man in charge of training Iraqi security forces clear back in 2004 and 2005 was none other than our own, our very own Teflon General, "King" David Petraeus.

Schmitt also doesn’t bother to pose the question of why, if miracle worker Petraeus’s Surgin’ Safari in Sumaria was so rootin’-tootin’-high-falutin' successful then how’s come we still gotta leave us troops there to get blowed up? And Schmitt ponder the puzzler that if seven years weren’t enough for the Iraqis to get their own security act together, how many years will it take them? (As many years as there are left?)

Schmitt makes the vanishing Iraq deadline sound like news. It’s nothing of the sort. The Pentarchy started its hell-no-we-won’t-go media campaign the second Candidate Obama made his 16-month withdrawal promise and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said why, sure, that sounded kosher to him. Joint Chiefs Chairperson Mike Mullen went so far as to write an article in the summer of 2008 for Joint Force Quarterly, his personal glossy propaganda rag, that warned of the danger that a Democrat in the White House would pose to the mission in Iraq.

And General Lloyd J. “Harrumph” Austin III’s proposal to keep 14 to 18 thousand troops in Iraq for an unspecified amount of time rhymes with General Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno’s statement in early 2009 (via the "dean" of the Pentagon press prostitution ring Tommy Ricks) that he wanted to see 30,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq until 2004 or 2005. Or so.

Troop Tent Trollop Tommy was also the bull feather merchant chosen to throw a brass gauntlet in young Mr. Obama’s face in an early 2009 episode of Meet the Press, when he laid out the case to NBC fop David Gregory that Obama will have betrayed the troops if he withdraws them from Iraq against the generals’ wished because of a darn old campaign promise.

“Cave Man” Obama took a ten count vis-à-vis the New American Praetorians’ agenda a long time ago. He won’t start standing up to them now. Stand by to support the troops to your grave. And theirs.

I'll be posting here sporadically through the fall as I wrap up Sandbox Generals. It's fun but taxing work. Think 1984 meets Blazing Saddles.

Ciao, hounds!

Jeff

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.

Operational Pause for the Cause

2011-09-05T12:54:00.000-04:00

Happy End of Summer!

I’m celebrating Labor Day this year by making it the first day of my summer vacation which, if I’m going to take one, I need to get cracking, don’t I?

Wake me when the next war
is over.

Catch you after the equinox. Hopefully we won’t have started a fourth war by then. Well, a fifth war, if you count Yemen as being a war already. Which it is, when you get right down to it. Then again, we’re also at war in Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria. So here’s hoping we’re don’t start a how ever many-eth war it would be if we start a new one before fall officially starts.

And what would the rush be? It’s not like we need new wars to replace the ones we already have. Out withdrawal “deadlines” for Iraq and the Bananastans are more fictional than Sergeant Fury and His Howling Commandos, though not nearly so well written, drawn or inked.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Shock and Awe and Daylight Precision Bull Roar

2011-08-29T15:28:00.006-04:00

30 Aug. 2011

by Jeff Huber

Parts I and II of “Post-Clasuwitzean Bebop in the New American Century” outlined the pathetic state of today’s American military intellect. Part III describes how Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare evolved from fundamentally flawed air power theory.

COIN (aka counterinsurgency) is the latest in a panorama of war dogmas that promise a new and better way to fight armed conflicts. But COIN is actually a degenerative development in warfare philosophies, a return to manpower-intensive operations that high-dollar gizmos of destruction were supposed to have made obsolete.

The collision between soldier-centric and gadget-driven conflicts began in the American Civil War and reached critical mass during World War I. Napoleonic infantry tactics designed to break through lines of sword and musket defenders withered in the face of machine gun fire. More than 10 million military personnel were killed in World War I and total military casualties topped 38 million, an unimaginable horror to Europeans who thought their races were far to civilized to ever allow such carnage to occur. Little did they know at the time that they’d only seen a preliminary bout—total World War II deaths alone exceeded 60 million.

The birth of air power theory.

World War I was combat airpower’s debutante ball. Much ado was made (and still is) of the magnificent men in their flying machines derring that do that they did so well in the skies above the pathetic mud knockers slogging it out below. But as a a senior U.S. Air Force officer once confessed to his airpower elective seminar at the U.S. Naval War College, “World War I did more for air power than air power did for World War I.” What ended the trench war of attrition stalemate in that conflict was the late influx of American bodies that ensured the Central Powers would bleed white before Allied Powers did. The flying circuses were sideshow performers.

Interwar air power advocates like Billy Mitchell, Giulio Duhet and Hugh Trenchard pandered the “strategic bombing” doctrine that advocated use of bomber aircraft to defeat enemy states by destroying their economic infrastructure and their publics’ will to wage war rather than battling their armies and navies. To this day the goal of air power psychopathy is to make all other forms of warfare obsolete and to redirect the budgets of armies and navies into air services’ coffers.

Strategic bombing theory suffered from a number of famously flawed assumptions. First among them is the dictum that “the bomber will always get through,” a maniacal mantra first mouthed by Sir Stanley Baldwin in the late 1920s that promised bombers would always be able to defeat air defenses and destroy enemy cities. That philosophy alone had sufficient holes to guarantee that air power would never live up to its hype.

Let's make that, "The bomber will sometimes
get through."

The 8^th Air Force bombing campaigns in Europe gave us a veritable entertainment franchise chronicling the adventures of bomber crews shot down over Nazi Germany who spent the duration of the war trying to escape from a Luft Stalag. What would post-modern life be without our fond memories of Steve McQueen bouncing his baseball against the wall of the “cooler,” or of William Holden organizing mouse races, or of Bob Crane threatening to pull some stunt that would get Werner Klemperer transferred to the Russian front?

The preponderance of Allied air casualties came about as a result of the daylight precision bombing concept, which was itself flawed in multiple respects. The most incongruous of these flaws was the assumption that heavily armed B-17 flying fortresses would be as able to defend themselves against enemy fighters during the day as well as they could at night, a notion spawned in an era when fighter aircraft were strictly visual combatants and did not fly at night. Daylight precision bombing also assumed that the B-17s’ super-duper Norden bombsights could consistently put bombs on their assigned targets. That assumption blithely ignored easily anticipated probabilities like changes in wind direction between the bomber and the target, clouds and fog and haze obscuring the targets, bombardiers not recognizing the target, and so on.

The public's will to wage war.

“Conventional” strategic bombing did manage to destroy cities in World War II, Dresden and Tokyo being two of the most horrifying examples. But this type of bombing—also called “terror bombing”—failed to destroy the publics’ will to wage war. In fact, the publics’ will is seldom a factor in totalitarian nations like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, or even in so-called liberal democracies like today’s America where state-of-the-art propaganda distributed through the mass media has seduced the public into a state of bovine torpor. The only known instances of successful terror bombing were the 9/11 attacks that goaded malleable Americans into going along with ill-advised invasions of countries that had nothing to do with the attacks.

Asserting that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war in the Pacific is like saying that Julius Caesar died from a massive injection of tetanus bacteria. The Japanese had already been defeated through a years-long series of horrible land and naval campaigns. A very good argument, and one that I subscribe to, says that Hirohito would have forced his government to surrender without the need for atomic operations if we had communicated to him via back channels that he could stick around as emperor, which was what we apparently planned to do all along. (Please note that the argument over whether the nuclear option was necessary with Japan is a separate issue from whether or not nuking the two Japanese cities was moral or legal. If I'd been in President Truman’s shoes and thought that dropping the nukes would save a single G.I.'s life, I would have dropped them too.)

Air power made its greatest contribution to the war in Europe when General Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, supreme commander of the European Theater of Operations, ordered the 8^th Air Force to switch its priorities from strategic bombing to operational support of the Normandy Invasion and the subsequent land offensives that led to the defeat of the Wehrmacht, which Ike correctly identified as the German’s center of gravity.

In instance after instance since World War II, airpower’s useful contributions have consisted not of independent, strategic bombing but of strikes in support of ground and naval operations. We’ve seen that as recently as our Libyan lark; strikes against infrastructure and regime “target sets” had little impact. It was only when air power was used in support of rebel offensives that balls started dropping into pockets.

Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare are little more than a 21^st century take on strategic bombing theory. GPS guided munitions replace the Norden bombsight and computers replace the bombardiers, but the strategic effect remains nil.

Next: A COINfederacy of Dunces

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Reports of my demise...

2011-08-29T09:05:00.001-04:00

...are as accurate as the hysteria the media created and continue to fan about Tropical Punch Irene. I'm posting from Starbucks. Tomorrow's column may be a bit late.

Here's something I submitted to the Vagina-Pilot this morning:

"After days of media manufactured hysteria, Irene was a tropical storm at worst by the time she reached Hampton Roads. Yet Irene caused our three-ring power company to leave upwards of a half-million of us in the dark for extended periods. My densely populated Virginia Beach neighborhood was without power until the wee hours of Monday morning.

"You’re doing a heck of a job, Dominion. Will a single head roll over our power giant’s dismal failure during a weather event that should barely have stressed it? Probably not. The exec responsible for this fiasco is no doubt the same character who’s in charge of implementing our next rate hike.

"There is, of course, plenty of shame to go around in Irene’s wake. As of sunrise on Monday, Cox Communication still hadn’t restored communication to my neighborhood.

"Don’t you just love monopolies?"

J

All that Clausewitz Jazz

2011-08-22T09:30:00.006-04:00

23 August 2011

by Jeff Huber

Part two of “Post-Clausewitzean Bebop in the New American Century” reprises themes from some of my older foreign policy routines. Lamentably, if you’re old enough to read this, their pertinence will persist through your lifetime and probably your grandchildren’s as well.

War Wizards

If you think that what generals and war wags say in the media only sounds like gibberish to you because you have no military experience, you’re wrong. It sounds like gibberish because it is gibberish.

Analysts, scholars, old soldiers who won’t fade away and other gee-wizards who claim to be versed in the military arts and sciences agree on the importance of the Clausewitzean center of gravity concept, but none of them agree on what a center of gravity is. An Air Force pilot will tell you the center of gravity is anything he can drop a bomb on, so you need to buy him a lot of $2 billion bombers so he can bomb all the centers of gravity. A naval aviator will tell you the center of gravity is always the aircraft carrier; a Navy SEAL will tell you the center of gravity is always him. A Marine major will tell you there can only be one center of gravity but that’s because Marines can only remember one thing at a time. An intelligence officer will tell you the center of gravity is a secret, and if you ask an Army general what a center of gravity is he’ll start breathing through his mouth.

The center of gravity concept is a lot simpler than Pavlov's dogs of war would like you to believe. “The point against which all our energies should be directed,” as Clausewitz described it, should be directly tied to our objective, the prime determinant of all acts of war. Without a clearly defined objective, war is loosely orchestrated but pointless violence—a description that, not surprisingly, precisely defines our present armed shenanigans in Libya, Iraq, the Bananastans and elsewhere.

Our center of gravity is the thing that can achieve our objective and the enemy’s center of gravity will be the thing that can thwart us from achieving it. The purpose of tying what we call centers of gravity to objectives is what keeps us focused on the objective. When we start prosecuting “centers of gravity” that don’t directly relate to our purpose we get in big trouble.

Will the real center of gravity please stand up?

Not surprisingly, “floating” centers of gravity, and a printer’s plethora of them, have become a trademark of our Long War on Ism. Since 9/11, centers of gravity identified by America’s war wisenheimers have included Saddam Hussein, his Republican Guard, his air defense system, his command and control system, Baghdad, his sons (Hoodoo and Voodoo? I forget), his weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, his ties to al Qaeda that didn’t exist either, al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda in Pakistan, al Qaeda in Yemen, al Qaeda in general, Shiite militias, Sunni militias, militia leaders, militia leaders’ followers, the Iraqi people, the Afghan people, the American people, the Pakistani people, the supply lines that run through Pakistan, Pakistan itself, Iran, the news media, world opinion, Congress and the poppy crop.

You don't need to be an expert in all that Clausewitz jazz to figure that centers of gravity are like priorities; if everything is a priority there really are no priorities. Warfare wisenheimers who tell you otherwise are whistling out their fat dumb toot chutes. A good 90 percent of the people you see pawning themselves off in the media as experts on the art of war don’t know a center of gravity from their elbows and, more horribly, the tank thinkers who actually cook up our war fighting doctrines don’t either. All any of these yahooligans know of Clausewitz consists of bite-size buzz phraseology passed down from one generation of clueless combat theorist to the next, and most of them think Sun Tzu’s prime directive is to “Baffle them with bullroar.”

Our New American Century’s strategic brain trust has produced three major post-modern military doctrines: Shock and Awe, Network Centric Warfare and COIN (aka “counterinsurgency”). Shock and Awe and Network Centric Warfare are related military “transformation” dogmas that promise to scare and/or confuse the enemy into submission with a top-dollar concoction of Buck Rogers gadgetry and magical mystery mantras like “full spectrum dominance” and “rapid dominance” and “information dominance” and “dominant battlefield awareness” and “dominant maneuvers” and the “net-centric collaboration” of a “self-synchronized” and robust "network of networks" that produces a “shared situational awareness” as a systemic element of its “organizational behavior.”

Fred Kagan can't stomach
Shock and Awe, but COIN?
Yummmmmm!

Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare were the cornerstones of our blitz on Baghdad in Operation Iraqi Freedom lo those many years ago. All they netted us were sticker shock and a good-old-boy network-of-networks that still knocks down big war bucks selling us fecal weapons systems that have proven utterly ineffective at promoting the national security. Even neocon warlord Fauntleroy Fred Kagan, bastard stepfather of the Iraq surge, admits that these two space-age “warfare theories” have succeeded in combat but failed in war. In an August 2003 Policy Review article titled “War and Aftermath” Freddie warned us to “beware technology that disconnects war from politics” and confessed that neither Network-Centric Warfare nor Shock and Awe “provides a reliable recipe for translating the destruction of the enemy’s ability to continue to fight into the accomplishment of the political objectives of the conflict.”

It was mighty big of Freddie to tell us that the Pentagon had screwed up the great idea he and his fellow neocon-men had to invade Iraq, but he actually had a hidden agenda: namely, to further engulf us in ever-deepening quagmires through the a counter revolution in military affairs dogma called COIN, which has proven to be the biggest lie that martial masterminds have told us since they said air power would make war itself obsolete.

Next: Warlord Fauntleroy, King Rat and the Desert Ox.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Post-Clausewitzean Bebop in the New American Century

2011-08-15T10:38:00.008-04:00

16 Aug. 2011

by Jeff Huber

This is the first part of an extended essay on post-modern American imperialism.

A 21st century sound bite summarizing the work of 19^th century Prussian philosopher Carl von Clausewitz says that war is the pursuit of policy goals through violence. And the nutshell version of the ancient Chinese martial sage Sun Tzu admonishes us to charge downhill, not uphill. How ironic it is, then, that in the neoconservative age, history’s most powerful nation pursues a policy of persistent violence for no reason that one could imagine a rational nation might pursue, and does so with strategies that consistently charge uphill when downhill alternatives abound. Even more of a wry puzzle is that the nation that spends more on weaponry and its supporting gizmology than the rest of the world combined is locked in a seemingly eternal stalemate with adversaries who have no defense budget whatsoever.

Let them eat merde.

History is rife with examples of empires that became footnotes in later empires’ histories because they lacked the wisdom to understand that the might of arms that brought them to glory was insufficient alone to sustain them, and that the inability to adeptly exercise other forms of power would turn their military prowess into the vulnerability that would prove their downfall.

To deliberately misquote Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes mighty often. The present point in our American saga resonates of the sick wet sound of imperial titans of yore flopping belly first on their own swords. Two of the most pertinent case studies in this regard are the Napoleonic and Roman Empires.

From 1789 to 1799 the French staged a bloody revolution to establish a republic and free themselves of an oppressive absolute monarchy that had reigned for centuries. Within five years they had placed themselves under the rule of a warlord emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. In the name of preserving the French democracy he had already snuffed, Napoleon set about conquering all of Europe. Napoleon ruled his extended domain with brass-knuckled brutality, imposing draconian economic sanctions and other “soft power” measures designed, it seems in retrospect, to compel his satellite states to revolt against him and his puppets.

Napoleon made a Théâtre de l'Absurde display of diplomatic attempts to keep things going the way he liked, but he wasn’t any good at it. As a Naval War College professor once put it, Napoleon liked to do what he was good at, which was shoot all the horses and then put on his lead boots and start kicking. Napoleon kept kicking until his dead ponies finally reached up and bit him in the âne. The universal animus held against the French is a direct result of Napoleon’s fist-first foreign policies; to this day the French make the Germans seem cuddly in comparison.

As empire builders are wont to do, Napoleon over reached his financial and military limits. Casual history buffs know of his final defeat in 1815 by Britain’s Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. But what really undermined Napoleon’s hegemony was the Peninsular War (1807-1814), the counterinsurgency quagmire he stumbled into on The Iberian Peninsula. With help from Britain, Spain and Portugal were able to conduct a guerilla warfare campaign against French occupation that eroded Napoleon’s resources and led to his ultimate downfall.

12 years of Napoleonic Wars left an unstable Europe, and a France that was long on arrogance but short on anything to be arrogant about and that would need to be bailed out of two world wars by an upstart nation on another continent.

The ancient Romans punted away their republic for a “dictator in perpetuity” named Julius Caesar, a self-promoting wartime general whose victories had made Rome a global power. Caesar met an untimely end when he collided with a legislature’s worth of vintage Italian cutlery, but his adopted son Augustus carried on the line of “unitary executives” and the Romans continued to live by the sword until they died from it. Rome’s military, especially the Praetorian Guard, became the empire’s predominant political faction. As renaissance political scientist Niccolò Machiavelli noted, the Praetorians became “insolent and formidable, not only to the senate but to the emperors themselves.”

No emperor could survive, much less rule, without the allegiance and support of the Praetorian Guard and the Legions. If the Guard didn't like an emperor, they whacked the guy. Though the Senate continued to be an equal branch of government in name it was really just a vehicle through which emperors exercised an autocratic power that was, in fact, the bidding of the military.

Dick Cheney institutionalizes
American "cement shoes"
diplomacy.

The military’s financial shenanigans wrecked Rome’s economy, and infighting among segments of the Guard and Legions led to the break-up of the empire. By Machiavelli’s day, Italy was a surly collection of warring principalities whose exploits resembled, not altogether surprisingly, a season summary of The Sopranos. Lack of political unity and the unholy meddling of the Catholic Church in state affairs transformed once mighty Italy into the court jester of the international stage. Upon learning that Italy had thrown in with Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill quipped, “It’s only fair. We had to have them in the last war.”

The New American Centurions, the neoconservatives, aim to ensure U.S. domination of the world through military occupation and persistent low-level armed conflict. They manipulate the support of a largely passive population through a combination of fear of the ubiquitous “them,” myopic patriotism and religious fervor—a propaganda cocktail of stars-and-stripes-and-Jesus-versus-the-evildoers-forever. Our legislature has ceded virtually every one of its powers—except the ones that allow its members to draw salaries, benefits and retirements—to a unitary executive, and the conservatively slanted Supreme Court is all too happy to help construct a post-modern America that is a republic in name only, a thinly disguised autocracy in which the executives are every bit the handmaiden of their country's warmonger as Roman emperors were.

Our lavish martial expenditures—by some credible analyses total military related spending accounts for more than half of the federal budget—have our world’s largest economy heading nose first for the bottom of the pool. What little diplomacy we practice is of the “make them an offer they can’t accept” variety. We insist on negotiating conditions that no one in their right minds would accept, then we say we tried diplomacy and it didn’t work and we revert back to Plan A.

Neocon military strategist
Fred Kagan

Armed force is the only foreign policy tool we know how to use, and its effectiveness has diminished through the vanishing point and emerged on the counterproductive scale. Our military endeavors not only can’t defeat our enemies, they actually create more enemies. We conduct our wars according to doctrines like Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare and COIN (aka Counterinsurgency) that can best described as post-Clausewitzean bebop theory, strategies so convoluted and self-contradicting that the lysergically inspired brainiacs who conjured them up can’t even explain them to each other. Today’s American cannons of armed conflict are guidelines not to win wars, but to insure that then never end.

If America avoids fading away into history’s appendix of asterisk items, it will only be because the rest of the world realizes that we are too big to fail: If we perish from the face of the earth, who will buy everybody else’s exports?

Next: All that Clausewitz Jazz

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Bumbling in Bananastan

2011-08-08T19:24:00.005-04:00

9 Aug 2011

by Jeff Huber

The combat deaths of 30 special operations troops on 6 August should have told the country loud and clear that our woebegone Long War on whatever and whomever it is we're fighting is a travesty that needs to end now. Unfortunately, in today's polluted information environment, the incident is being used to peddle the Pentarchy's agenda for Orwellian persistent conflict.

A team of Army Rangers dropped into some remote Palookaville to snatch some alleged low-level Taliban im-potentate, and they ran into resistance their intelligence officer probably forgot to tell them to expect. Forty minutes or so into the firefight a Chinook helicopter carrying Navy Seals flew in to bail their Ranger pals out of a jam and somebody the intelligence officer probably didn’t know about popped shot down the Chinook with a rocket grenade, killing the all of the SEALs and the aircrew as well.

Ranger and Seal outfits are highly trained and custom-armed units of young Adonises genetically disposed to war. Unleashed in a village someplace to run amok and do something you can brag about and/or have to cover up later, these war dogs are fierce, they are dazzling, they are undefeatable. Piled into a helicopter they become a low/slow flying duck begging to get bagged by turban togged rock rancher armed with a weapon that the poorest people on earth can afford to own. (36 percent of Afghans live below the poverty line, and we’re not talking about the U.S. poverty line. Afghanistan’s per capita GDP is $900. That’s right: nine hundred dollars. Per person. Per year. Those people couldn’t buy a bag of potato chips at a Junior Market in Detroit.)

The 6 August incident shouldn’t have surprised anybody, even the intelligence weenies. The first time We the People heard about troopers in helicopters getting whacked in Bananastan by bottle-rocket technology was back in 2002. We heard about it again in 2005, and in 2007, and in 2008, and in 2009, and in 2010. The only greater threat to troops in helicopters than rocket propelled grenades are the helicopters themselves, which have a penchant for shooting themselves down due to mechanical failures, weather, pilot error, and the animus of the gremlins that inhabit them. Incredibly, we’re now hearing that subsequent to the 6 August incident, the Pentagon brass is examining the wisdom of landing helicopters like the Chinook in battle zones. Why do you reckon the Pentagon brass is just now scratching its collective hat on the subject? Maybe the Pentagon intelligence officers weren’t briefing them on all those other shoot downs over the years. Tsk, tsk.

Worse than the insanity of continuing to pursue a proven failed tactic is that said tactic—vertical assault on targets chosen by the most inept intelligence apparatus in the history of warfare—is the cornerstone of an even more profoundly failed grand strategy. As Jonathan S. Landay and Hashim Shukoor of McClatchy report, the SEALS who died on 6 August were operating in a valley where frequent U.S.-led night raids like the one the SEALS were reinforcing are driving the locals into the arms of the Taliban. No strategy can be more self-defeating than one in which attacks against enemies provide them with aid and comfort.

Lamentably, McClatchy is just about the last of the mainstream news outlets willing to tell the ugly truth about our disingenuous wars. The rest of big media is scrambling to see who can put the most pro-war spin on the affair. A 6 August New York Times story by ace Pentagon echo chamberlain Thom Shanker noted that the Taliban claimed responsibility for the “attack,” and that the “attack” came during a “surge of violence” that has “accompanied the beginning of a drawdown of American and NATO troops.” That’s a remarkable statement considering that we were the ones doing the attacking in this scenario, and that the only “surge of violence” it seems to have been part of is the one in which we’re using commando units to blow the smithereens out of remote villages in hopes of bagging Taliban non-coms who are as important to the insurgent war effort as The Good Soldier Schweik was to Kaiser Wilhelm’s general staff.

NBC's Jack Jacobs says elite combat
units are too valuable to risk in combat.

On 8 August, NBC Nightly News spokesmodel Brian Williams trotted out Retired Colonel War Hero who questioned why high command used “tier one” troops on a target that wasn't that important. I guess Colonel Hero figures if we’re going to throw troops away on paltry missions we should throw away the everyday, disposable troops, not the high-price ones we keep for special company. Then Embedded NBC echo chamberlain Richard Engel slipped in the money mantra about how Afghanistan is getting more dangerous because we’re drawing down (we aren’t yet, actually) and the Afghans aren’t ready to take over (they never will be).

Then Williams brought on NBC’s senior Pentagon bobblehead Jim Mxyzptlk who repeated the five or so words his Pentagon handlers wrote specially for Jim so he could repeat them verbatim on camera. (I can’t see Jim on NBC Nightly News without flashing on John Cleese as a footballer in the Monty Python sketch where he tells interviewer Eric Idle, “Hello, Brian, I’m openin’ a boutique!”).

Repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell
provides opportunity to form
disposable combat teams.

I thought Jim's one-line soliloquy would be the end of the torture, but it was just getting started. Next came video of the Monday morning’s Today freak show featuring the wife of one of the guys who got killed, crying about how her SEAL loved his country. Mother Mary at the foot of the cross, man. Remember when the rabid right had a fit over how insensitive PBS was being when it ran a roster of that week’s war dead against a backdrop of silence? I beseech the craven idol I worship to someday locate my mitts across the trachea of the Chief of Naval Information (aka CHINFO) cretin who arranged to put that SEAL’s widow on national television days after her husband was killed in action.

But making a spectacle of the warrior’s wailing widow for propaganda purposes was a ray of decorum compared to the obscenity NBC and the other networks committed by running footage of our newly inserted defense secretary Leon Panetta’s public statement on the affair. At the Special Operations Command ceremony in Florida, Panetta said of the latest commando casualties that we, “must pledge to them and to their families that we will never cease fighting for the cause for which they gave their lives, the cause of a secure and safer America."

NBC's Brian Williams
and Jim Miklasewski.

Holy peyote, Uncle Leo. Even Don Rumsfeld knew that our War on Evil was making more evildoers, not a secure and safer America. What the 30 special ops troopers gave their lives for on 6 August was the continued creation of conditions that ensure perpetual low-level conflict in support of the neoconservative goal of world domination through military force.

Now let’s see some CHINFO bull feather merchant get that widow back on the Today show and have her tell us how proud she is that her husband died for the cause of putting American combat boots on every square inch of the globe from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Mt. Everest.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Saturday Night Libya

2011-08-01T21:48:00.005-04:00

2 August 2011

by Jeff Huber

Operation Unified Protector, our woebegone war in Libya, has become the only major undertaking of the developed world worse conceived and executed than the present manifestation of Saturday Night Live. OUP and SNL both consist of a large number of people combining misdirected efforts to produce an abysmal farce. SNL, however, has a couple of things going for it: it is not responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, and even thought it is a major pollutant of the information environment, its very existence is not illegal.

The latest news of our burlesque in North Africa comes to us by way of a 30 July New York Times story titled, “NATO Strikes at Libyan State TV.” Insider knowledge gives me a unique perspective from which to appreciate the monumental absurdity of that headline, but the eyebrows of even the most casual observers are likely to collide as they wonder to themselves, You mean they’re just now getting around to doing that?

Air Marshall Lord Basil Fawlty scrubs
tomorrow's Unified Protector target list.

It was clear back in May, already months into young Mr. Obama’s “days not weeks” Libyan lark, that his euro-stooge NATO commanders announced they were “broadening” their target list to include Libya’s infrastructure. Otherwise, claimed Britain’s Sir General David “Harrumph” Richards, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi would “cling to power.” Before directing air strikes at infrastructure, NATO had already bombed Qaddafi’s “command and control” centers.

Every air war gets run by a different set of air-power theorists called “targeteers” who are trained, among other things, in how to choose what kinds of targets to bomb in order to achieve a campaign’s strategic and political goals. When Unified Protector was still just “Odyssey Dawn,” a thou-shalt-not-fly zone you probably heard about and a naval blockade nobody cared about, the only legitimate targets were stuff like surface-to-air missile sites and navy bases. That was when the only stated goal was to protect the freedom-loving people of Libya from their freedom-hating dictator. Then, in April 2011, Obama for all practical purposes admitted that regime change had been the objective all along, at which point the target list should have broadened exponentially.

There is no such thing as uniformity in military jargon. Depending on when any given set of any given air operation’s targeteers went to any given target college, different kinds of targets and missions will be called different things. One war’s “interdiction” is another war’s “strategic strike,” just as “command and control” targets can fold into the “infrastructure” target set and then morph into “regime” targets.

But whatever you want to call a regime’s mother-effing state-controlled television and radio stations, the mother-effing mother-effers doing the mother-effing targeteering should bomb the mother-effing monkey mucous out of them in the first fifteen mother-effing minutes of the mother-effing war. It’s next to impossible to believe that these mother-effers were too mother-effing dumb to do that. Talk about theater of the absurd meets film noir. They ought to call the talking chimps running this one-buttock operation The Gang that Couldn’t Bomb Straight.

We’re justified to a certain extent in snickering up our sleeves at the French fire drill our little NATO buddies have created. But we have to remember that NATO actually stands for “The United States and a handful of mostly white schmoes who speak in Romance and Germanic tongues.” The top military commander of NATO is always a U.S. four-star who only takes legal orders from two dudes: America’s secretary of defense and its president. Accountability for this fiasco rolls all the way to the top of the pile.

Of course, it’s comical to invoke the term “legal” in any discussion of our Libyan involvement. In waging it without so much as a by-your-wink-and-nod from Congress, Bombardier Barry has flushed both the Constitution and its freckled stepchild, the War Powers Resolution of 1973, clear down the Potomac, out the Chesapeake Bay and into the Atlantic. Progressive popinjay Juan Cole says the Libyan sock-hop is legit because it’s mandated by a UN resolution, an aegis that he characterizes as the “gold standard for military intervention.” Jesus in a G-string, where do we find such eggheads?

Fops like Cole argue that because the Senate ratified the U.N. Charter it became, as per Article VI of the Constitution, the “supreme law of the land.” Such assertions leave the law-of-the-land clause out of context; it actually appears at the end of a litany that reads “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the…” One can easily show that this order conveys an intended precedence hierarchy: in cases where any of the three may conflict, the Constitution trumps the laws of the United States, which in turn trump treaties. To suggest otherwise is to declare the Constitution an instrument of March hare insanity, a legal framework that says the legislature can legally pass laws that demolish the very framework that legitimizes the legislature and makes its laws legal.

Article I of the Constitution clearly assigns the preponderance of foreign policy powers to the legislature: the powers to ratify treaties, to confirm ambassadors, to regulate international commerce and the military, and to declare war. And it is the legislature, not the executive branch, that the Constitution grants powers to “repel invasion.” So everybody who talks about a president’s “constitutional prerogative” to conduct foreign policy or defend the country is feeding you a line of bull roar. Claims of unitary presidential powers you typically hear from Rolex-sporting prevaricators with degrees in jurisprudence stem from the Federalist Papers, documents that are not the Constitution, nor an amendment to the Constitution, nor an annex nor an addendum nor an attachment to it.

The Federalist Papers were written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Monroe, three landed cats who didn’t believe democratic government was such a keen idea and who wanted the president to be a sort of dress-down Friday king that they could easily control, which is pretty much what today’s Federalists want. Federalist notions on the subject of presidential powers contrast sharply with those of Founders like Jefferson and Washington and Adams.

The UN charter itself has numerous codicils regarding nations going to war on the Security Council’s say so, most notably its numerous references to “special agreements” that essentially grant that no country has to go to war for the UN unless it really, really wants to. Moreover, since the U.S. is a permanent member of the Security Council, we can veto any resolution that calls for war, so the UN isn’t going to ask us to fight a war unless it’s a war we crammed down the UN’s throat the way we did with the present cluster bomb in Libya.

So what Cole and fools like him are asserting when they call a UN resolution for war the “gold standard” is that warmongering lunatics like John Bolton and Susie Rice can vote us into any old conflict anytime they want to and the rest of us have to go along with it because the Constitution says we do.

That respected American intellectuals actually think that way and are taken seriously could be the basis of a wholly hilarious SNL sketch if it weren’t so utterly terrifying. I think that we might have, in a decade or so, grown back the toes we shot off with our antics in Iraq and the Bananastans. But I’m afraid this Libya business will prove to be the whimper our republic went out with.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Iran Ate My Homework. Again.

2011-07-25T18:15:00.009-04:00

26 July 2011

by Jeff Huber

“Uncle Leo” Panetta, our newly coroneted Secretary of Defense, wasted little time in leaping face-first onto the blame Iraq bandwagon. On 9 July he stated that weapons supplied by Iran had become a “tremendous concern” in Iraq in recent weeks. “We’re seeing more of those weapons going in from Iran, and they’ve really hurt us,” Panetta puled.

Panetta, Mullen and Jeffrey agree
on the threat from Iran.

Panetta wasn’t flying solo on this propaganda raid; he had two loyal echo chamberlains on his wing. As New York Times Pentagon camp follower Elisabeth Bumbler dutifully relayed from her uniformed handlers, “Mr. Panetta is the third top American official to raise an alarm about Iranian influence in Iraq in recent days.” The other two top officials were Joint Chiefs potentate Mike Mullen and ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey. Mutt and Jeff say they have “forensic evidence” to back their claims, though neither they nor Uncle Leo mentioned what that forensic evidence might be. Whatever they’re referring to, historical evidence indicates we’ll never see it.

The Pentarchy’s bull feather merchant marines have been shooting poisoned information arrows at Iran at regular intervals since around the time young Mr. Bush stiff armed that Iraq Study Group surrender stuff and went instead with the neocons’ surge strategy. Freddie Kagan, The American Enterprise Institute’s warlord Fauntleroy, published the surge manifesto Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq in January 2007.

Within a month Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times published “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says.” Gordon had made his bones with the Bush/Cheney regime when he and Judith Miller helped them execute the Nigergate hoax that duped the nation into nodding along with their pet invasion of Iraq. In their 8 Sept. 2002 article “Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” Gordon and Miller supported their assertion that Hussein was seeking yellowcake from Niger by citing anonymous “officials” a jaw-dislocating 30 times. The documents that comprised the “smoking gun” were later proven to be poorly fabricated forgeries.

In making the case that Iran was producing the roadside bombs that were killing so many Americans in Iraq in his 2007 story, Gordon referenced “interviews” with “civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies” who “provided specific details to support” a claim that Iran was providing “’lethal support’ to Shiite militants in Iraq.” Gordon didn’t name any of these officials, or quote them directly or, for that matter, relay any of those specific details they provided other than to state that said details were likely to be revealed later.

Looks Iranian to me.

Then-ambassador to Iraq and charter New American Centurion Zalmay Khalilzad promised to pony up proof of the allegations outlined by Gordon. The military trotted out some of its very best PowerPoint palaver for a select audience of embedded media trustees, in which some sad sack major looking to become a sad sack light colonel said the shaped roadside bomb charges being discussed could only have come from Iran. After the brief the major allowed as how, well, yeah, um, actually, the stuff in the bombs could have been bought at any Radio Shack. (But Iran people still suck, okay?)

My colleague Gareth Porter correctly noted in Sept. 2007 that the Bush/Cheney administration “has not come forward with a single piece of concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government has been involved in the training, arming or advising of Iraqi Shiite militias.” To this day, the only existing evidence of an outside party supplying weapons to Shiite militias points directly at “King David” Petraeus who, as commander in charge of training Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, handed out 190,000 (that’s right, one hundred and ninety thousand) AK-47s that vanished like cookies at an AA meeting.

Porter has also exposed allegations that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons as fatuous. In early 2010 he published a numbers of articles that revealed the files contained on the “smoking laptop” computer that described Iran’s work on a “nuclear trigger” were as blatantly bogus as the blue-dollar-bill forgeries that “proved” Hussein was buying yellowcake uranium powder from Niger. But thanks to neocon-backed brainwash breweries like United Against Nuclear Iran (aka UANI), lysergic visions of an Iranian made mushroom cloud over Jerusalem persist.

An article in last Thursday’s New York Times by Michael Gordon soul mate David E. Sanger badgered us with bull roar about how some development or other means Iran is getting closer to having bomb-grade material because the “United Nations Security Council” has “evidence” of something completely unrelated, and “international nuclear inspectors and American officials” say “evidence” points to something else entirely, and an “Iran expert” at a right-wing think tank says “The evidence is there that they are accelerating” but he doesn’t say what the evidence is or what exactly it says "they" are accelerating.

Trying to reverse engineer the thought process behind the latest manifestations of the warmongery is always perilous work. The main assumption involved—i.e., that there is a thought process of any kind behind anything those yahooligans do—is manifestly flawed. Strategies crafted by neocon tank thinkers resemble model airplanes assembled with sledgehammers. More than anything, war wonk schemes remind one of ice hockey’s bullyboy dump-and-chase tactic. Such methods are unsightly and uncreative and brutish, but if you simply keep pounding away at the opposition with them you’ll eventually prevail over things like art and science and reason and, most of all, humanity.

Why fling the puck into Iran’s end again now? Partly because that’s how dump-and-chase works; you keep doing it. Partly because the neocon men need somebody to blame for the recent uptick in U.S. casualties in Iraq, somebody for Americans to get mad at so they don’t stop and think things like Hey, didn’t we end combat operations there a while back? The war mongrels also need to keep Iran good and boog-ified to justify the coming atomization of our withdrawal timelines from Iraq and the Bananastans. (Gotta keep the Persian Peril isolated!)

Iranian Air Force C-22 flying carpet bomber.

The threat Iran poses to the Centurions’ agenda has little to do with that country’s military power or warlike intentions. Iran can’t project enough conventional force to pout about beyond its borders or the Persian Gulf, and for Iran to strike another country, especially Israel, with a nuclear weapon would be like the entire Persian race mumbling into the barrel of a .44 Magnum. Iran only becomes a problem when it develops a truly self-sustaining nuclear energy program and it, along with its big buddies Russian and China, wrestles control of the global energy strategy away from Dick Cheney’s pals. But even control of our most precious commodity is a mere chip, something to contend for that will sustain the great game that has been played by the powerful and corrupt since Winston Churchill molested Muslim geography after World War I.

In a kinder, gentler, saner America the body politic would have dismissed all this boo noise about Iran a long time ago. Lamentably, we live in an age when anything Bill O’Reilly says, no matter how asinine or bizarre it is, becomes incontrovertible fact if Sean Hannity says it too.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Panetta's an Idiot, What the Frick Can He Tell You?

2011-07-18T20:10:00.010-04:00

19 July 2011

by Jeff Huber

Buddy Hackett impersonator Leon Panetta, who just stepped into Uncle Bob Gates’ vacated billet in America’s Pentarchy, has set a new benchmark in ethnic humor. He spent his first greet-and-grip trip abroad grinding his heel into his tinkle tool, saying more stupid things per minute of media exposure than George W. Bush ever did, and shrugged it all off in an MSNBC interview with “I’m Italian, what the frick can I tell you?”

"Beats the shipoopi out of me."

Tell me you’re not really the frickin’ Secretary of Defense, Uncle Leo. Moe, Larry and the Holy Ghost. Where do we find such bureaucratic twits?

Panetta began his government career as an Army intelligence officer during Lyndon Johnson’s surge in the Vietnam War. Military intelligence is to both the military and intelligence what McDonald’s is to food. Officers in combat branches have to be able to fly airplanes or drive ships or lead frightened young men in desperate attacks against machine gun nests. The only requirement for becoming an intelligence officer is to never know what the hell you’re talking about. Panetta was discharged after a two-year tour as a first lieutenant and awarded an Army Commendation Medal, a medal normally given to junior enlisted and officer personnel for not getting caught masturbating in the middle of the parade ground at high noon. (Fair disclosure: in the course of my career I received six Navy Commendation Medals, which shows you how good I was at not getting caught).

Uncle Leo didn’t claw his way to the top of the warmongery by the sheer inertia of his lack of competence in military and intelligence matters alone. He was a political prodigy. In high school Panetta joined JSA (aka Junior Statesmen of America aka Junior State of America). He was vice president of the student body as a junior and as a senior he was president. He graduated from Santa Clara University in 1960 magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. In 1963 he got his Juris Doctor from Santa Clara School of Law.

There’s no mention of Panetta having served in Vietnam, and you can bet a shiny new District of Columbia quarter that we would have heard about it if he had. It isn’t clear where exactly Panetta did serve, but I’d be willing to double down that he got himself stationed in Washington, just like a lot of wannabe politicos getting their military service block checked on their way to bigger and more malevolent things. It’s a tried and true career path that continues to be beaten by ambitious youth eager to acquire the creeping corruption that accompanies the incremental accumulation of power.

Why did law school graduate Panetta become an Army intelligence officer instead of an Army JAG? It’s hard to say for sure, but in Washington lawyers are as common as call girls. If you’re a Washington lawyer with an ultra top-secret security clearance from your days in military intelligence, on the other hand, you defecate 24-karat ingots.

In 1966, newly discharged First Lt. Panetta cashed in his credentials on a job as legislative aid to the Senate minority whip, and before he could say “Jimmy Hoffa poured into a pond of poached piranhas” three times, he knew where all the bodies were burid and he was a made guy. The higher and higher up the ladder the mob kicked him, they more they could trust him to keep their secrets because he had as much blood on his hands as anybody else.

After Panetta rode this gravy train through a series of appointed positions, he switched parties in 1971 and was elected to nine terms as a congressman. (He reportedly claimed to have left the Republican Party because it had moved away from political the center. Heh. The Republican Party hasn’t been in sliding distance of the political center since it was against slavery.)

Uncle Leo left the legislature to become Bill Clinton’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. Panetta had worked budget issues in Congress, though one can hardly imagine that he ever dirtied his hands on a spreadsheet. Possessing actual skills involved with areas one works in is for the servant classes, not for high rollers like Panetta. But his fluency in the Big Schmooze made him a natural to move up as Clinton’s White House chief of Staff, where no asset is more valuable than knowing how to deploy elbows and trim the sails to catch the prevailing winds.

Eyebrows collided with hairlines, however, when young Mr. Obama nominated Panetta to head the CIA, and his elevation to defense secretary popped optical organs out of their orbits. Talk about trading one empty hat for another. It was telling that at his defense post confirmation hearing, Uncle Leo predicted that the next Pearl Harbor could be a cyber attack. Clue in, Leon. We’ve already had cyber attacks, on the Pentagon itself no less.

So it’s little wonder that Uncle Leo devoured his feet during his first, uh, trip abroad. Oddly, though, his witless comments rang of a certain savant veracity. We may snicker that he told the troops they were in Iraq because of 9/11, but why else was he going to say they were there? Because their last commander in chief lied to the entire world to justify an invasion that had been on the neocon agenda since the late nineties, and because their present commander in chief is too much of a weakling to put an end to the “strategic mistake” like he pledged he would? And how else could Panetta justify telling the troops that they’ll have to continue to fight and die for a strategic mistake as soon as the Iraqis get off the dime and ask us to stay like he wants them to?

As to Panetta’s comment to the embedded war beat press that despite promises from the White House we’ll keep 70,000 troops in Afghanistan until 2004, I don’t see what the furor is all about. This White House hasn’t kept any of its frickin’ war promises yet. Why start now and set a bad precedent?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.