Neo-connecting the Dots

The information environment has become so polluted that it's now nearly impossible to know whom or what to believe.

Sidney Blumenthal of Salon.com reported yesterday on efforts by the Cheney cabal to use the Israel-Hezbollah conflict to execute the "Clean Break" strategy. "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," was authored in 1996 by, among others, neoconservative luminaries Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser. Written at the request of then incoming Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break" proposed rejection of the Oslo agreements and "weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria."

The neocon "core," eager to apply military force against Syria and Iran, has lambasted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's attempts at diplomacy in the Middle East, accusing her of being "incompetent" and of having "reversed the administration's national security and foreign policy agenda."

One has to wonder if this attack on Rice isn't part of a greater neoconservative stratagem. I certainly agree that she's hapless--at least from appearances--but she's hapless in a way that's channeling events in the Middle East in the direction the neocons want it to go: toward an expansion of the present hostilities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon into a full blown regional conflict.

She's made unreasonable demands of Iran, telling the country the U.S. won't negotiate with it until it halts its energy uranium enrichment program, something it has an "inalienable right" to do under the UN Non-Proliferation Treaty. And her handling of the Israel-Hezbollah situation has been a non-stop string of stumbles and fumbles. She doesn't want a cease-fire one minute, she does want a cease-fire the next. We want Syria to do something about Hezbollah, but we refuse to talk directly to the Syrians about what exactly we want them to do. Rice tries to present herself as an "honest broker" in the Israel-Hezbollah negotiations even though the government she represents has been backing Israel by re-supplying it with precision guided bombs and signal intelligence from the National Security Agency.

But who's really calling the shots on the cease-fire conditions? Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told British Prime Minister Tony Blair that he won't consider a cease-fire until an international peacekeeping force deploys along the Israel-Lebanon and Lebanon-Syria borders. Jean-Marc de La Sabliere, France's ambassador to the UN, has balked at that idea, as well he should have. Putting a peacekeeping force in place before all belligerents concerned have agreed to a cease-fire is textbook insanity. Despite his lack of military experience, Olmert should know that. So should Condi Rice. So should John Bolton. So should Dick Cheney and Richard Perle and Tony Blair and the rest of them.

Once again, we're seeing peace being "negotiated" around impossible conditions.

Conclusion? The people driving the bus are unforgivably incompetent or they're bound and determined to ensure peace doesn't happen. And just maybe they're using Condi Rice, along with Syria and Iran, as the fall guys and gal they can point the finger at when they say, "See? We tried diplomacy and it didn't work."

Lurking at the bottom of the oracle's bowl is the story--one that apparently originated in Aljazeera--that the go ahead for the Israeli operation against Hezbollah was agreed upon by Netenyahu, Likud Knesset member Natan Sharansky and Dick Cheney at an American Enterprise Institute conference held in mid-June.

Speaking of oracle's bowls, Wayne Madsen of Global Research and other media outlets says:

Our Washington sources claim that the U.S.-supported invasions of Gaza and Lebanon and the impending attacks on Syria and Iran represent the suspected event" predicted to take place prior to the November election in the United States and is an attempt to rally the American public around the Bush-Cheney regime during a time of wider war.

I don't know who Wayne Madsen's "Washington sources" are, or if they're any more credible than Sidney Blumenthal's sources. But I do know that what they're telling Madsen and Blumenthal fits in with the rest of the "neo-connect the dots" picture.

I just hope Madsen and Blumenthal aren't being used as part of a broader disinformation campaign. That would fit in with the neo-connect the dots picture too.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Qana: Déjà Vu All Over Again

(Note: this has sparked a heck of a discussion over at Kos. You may want to mosey over there and peruse it.)

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

-- Benjamin Franklin

Israeli shells hit a United Nations UNIFIL compound in the village of Qana, Lebanon killing 230.

Roughly 800 Lebanese civilians had taken refuge in the compound to escape the fighting between the Israeli Defense Force and Hezbollah. 106 of them were killed and roughly the same numbers of them were injured.

Journalist Robert Fisk wrote:

It was a massacre… The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disemboweled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's protection.

[…]

In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey-haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child.

Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive…has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese will forgive this massacre.

Israel immediately expressed regret for the incident, saying that Hezbollah rocket positions were the intended target, not the UN compound. Israel's Prime Minister said, "We did not know that several hundred people were concentrated in that camp. It came to us as a bitter surprise."

The IDF's chief of staff said, "I don't see any mistake in judgment… We fought Hezbollah there [in Qana], and when they fire on us, we will fire at them to defend ourselves… I don't know any other rules of the game, either for the army or for civilians…"

A U.S. State Department spokesman said, "Hezbollah [is] using civilians as cover. That's a despicable thing to do, an evil thing."

Amnesty International later conducted an on-site investigation of the incident and concluded that, "the IDF intentionally attacked the UN compound, although the motives for doing so remain unclear. The IDF have failed to substantiate their claim that the attack was a mistake. Even if they were to do so they would still bear responsibility for killing so many civilians by taking the risk to launch an attack so close to the UN compound."

Human Rights Watch concurred. "The decision of those who planned the attack to choose a mix of high-explosive artillery shells that included deadly anti-personnel shells designed to maximize injuries on the ground — and the sustained firing of such shells, without warning, in close proximity to a large concentration of civilians — violated a key principle of international humanitarian law."

Osama bin Laden, head of al Qaeda, cited the Qana incident as a justification for his policy against the United States.

This should all sound familiar to you, but not because it's something that happened last week. What I've just described happened back in the spring of 1996.

And you should find it incredulous that Olmert, Bush, Cheney, Bolton and the rest of the neocons think the results of a prolonged Israeli assault on Lebanon will turn out any better this time than they did a decade ago.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Last week, young Mister Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki agreed to enhance security in Baghdad by moving at least 4,000 additional U.S. troops and 4,000 additional Iraqi troops to the city. According to the New York Times, there are now 9,000 American troops, 8,500 Iraqi soldiers and 34,500 Iraqi police officers deployed in Iraq's capital city. That makes for an overall security force of 52,000 in a single city. Compare that to the Chicago Police Department, whose roughly 13,600 officers keep peace in America's third most populous city of 2.8 million.

No, you can't equate the security situation in Chicago with the one in Baghdad. But the disparity in the size of their peacekeeping forces should give you some perspective on the size of the security problem in Baghdad. And according to NYT's Kirk Semple, today's Baghdad is still making the Chicago of the Al Capone era look like a Garden of Eden.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 1 — Two separate attacks aimed at Iraqi soldiers killed at least 28 people today and wounded at least 34, officials said, as American and Iraqi generals continued to shift troops to Baghdad as part of their retooled strategy to roll back surging violence in the capital.

[…]

According to statistics from the Iraqi government and collated by the United Nations, an average of more than 100 civilians of day were killed in June, many in the capital.

Much of the recent violence has been driven by sectarian death squads, including Sunni insurgents seeking to topple the national government and stealth Shiite militiamen operating under the cover of Iraq’s Shiite-controlled security forces.

These "Shiite-controlled security forces" would include the 43,000 Iraqi's and police that those 9,000 American troops are now operating with in Baghdad.

Where are the Untouchables of yesteryear?

The Other Central Front

In the other "central front" of the so-called Global War on Terror, approximately 10,000 Israeli troops pushed into Lebanon yesterday.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose military service to his country rivals that of Dick Cheney, said of the expanding Israeli operation that, “We are at the beginning of a political process that in the end will bring a cease-fire under entirely different conditions than before… “This [Hezbollah] threat will not be what it was… Never will they be able to threaten this people they fired missiles at. This people will defeat them.”
One has to suspect that Olmert and Cheney tug at the same brand of bourbon when they go quail hunting or pull their countries into war. If this little conflict eliminates the threat of Hezbollah to Israel, cheddar cheese is a cure for constipation.

What a shame it is that the neoconservatives in power in both America and Israel are creating a situation from which whoever gets tagged with cleaning up their mess can only do so by gorging themselves on roast crow in front of the international community.

Which, no doubt, is a key component of the neocons' recovery strategy.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Jerusalem Post: U.S. Urges Attack on Syria

No, this doesn't come from the Conspiracy Free Press. It's from Sunday's Jerusalem Post:

[Israeli] Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria.

Did they get those indications before or after Condoleezza Rice gave her piano recital at the annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations dinner in Kuala Lumpur? If this is true, it sure goes a long way in explaining why the U.S. refuses to call for an immediate cease-fire.


Last week, at a press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, young Mister Bush said, "My message to Syria is: Become an active participant in the neighborhood for peace."

What kind of game is being played here?

In recent years, The Jerusalem Post has been considered a conservative paper and has supported Israel's right-wing Likud party. It's not unimaginable that Israeli Defense officials would use a conservative leaning media outlet to sound an "official unofficial" leak. And the leak could be a piece of disinformation, or it could be true. Given the Bush administration's tactical track record, this could have been a Rovewellian caper designed to put a scare on Syria.

Whatever the case, the word is out, and if it's in The Jerusalem Post it's on the Muslim street. Whether the assertion is true or not, it's highly believable, and the reaction is what anyone might expect.

English Aljazeera reports that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad announced Monday that his army has taken an increased state of readiness.

As Steven Leser of OpEdNews.com says, "The game of brinksmanship going on in the Middle East right now defies any semblance of logic." For all appearances, the aim of U.S. "diplomatic" efforts is to goad Syria and Iran into a full-scale regional war, and the Bush administration is doing nothing to change that perception to the contrary. Weekly Standard publisher and founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) Bill Kristol has called for the U.S. to use the Israel-Hezbollah conflict as an excuse to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. Two weeks ago on Fox News, Kristol predicted that the people of Iran would embrace "the right use of targeted military force." This sounds eerily like Kristol's crony and fellow PNACer Dick Cheney said about the Iraqis greeting us as "liberators."

James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute, describes the administration's present handling of the Middle East situation as "criminal negligence." I'll agree with the "criminal" part. I'm not so sure the administration is being "negligent" though.

Despite the background chatter about a falling out within the neoconservative cabal, the core group is still hanging together. The likes of Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle and Dick Cheney still wield power and influence over the Bush administration, and there's little question that they'd like to see the U.S. take military action against Iran.

Rumors continue to spread that Cheney "approved" Israel's operation against Lebanon in a mid-June meeting with former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud Knesset member Natan Sharansky at an American Enterprise Institute conference in Colorado. The source of this story appears to have been a July 26 Aljazeera story titled "Israeli invasion of Lebanon planned by neocons in June (2006)," but that story seems to have been removed from the Aljazeera web site.

This Just In

Javad Zarif, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, has rejected the Security Council resolution calling for Iran to suspend its nuclear activities. Zarif continued to insist that Iran only wants nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. "Mr President, the people and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran are determined to exercise the inalienable right to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, and to build on their own scientific advances in developing various peaceful aspects of this technology," he said.

To date, no one has produced a shred of tangible evidence that Zarif isn't telling the truth about his country's peaceful nuclear intentions, or tried to refute his assertion that Iran has an "inalienable right" to develop its own nuclear energy program (it's guaranteed in Article IV of the UN Nonproliferation Treaty).

But that makes no never mind to the likes of Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, John Bolton, and the rest of the crowd that suckered us into invading Iraq. Incredibly, they're pulling the same neocon job on us again, most of us can see it coming, and none of us can do a whole lot about it.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

The Mother of All Quagmires

The situations in Lebanon and Iraq continue to deteriorate. The two wars have become mutually destabilizing, and threaten to expand into a full-blown regional armed conflict, and the actions of the United States seem designed to guarantee that they do.

Iraqi leaders are condemning Israels attack on Qana, Lebanon that reportedly killed at least 56 civilians. Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a Shia, has accused Israel of carrying out "massacres." President Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, called the Qana attack a "crime" and also called for an immediate halt to the fighting. Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, also a Sunni Kurd, said the events in Lebanon will "undoubtedly" impact Iraq.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's leading cleric, called for an immediate ceasefire as well and said, "Islamic nations will not forgive the entities that hinder a ceasefire." One of those nations, of course, is the one that's currently occupying al-Sistani's country.

Though Israel promised to halt air strikes for 48 hours, it resumed bombing in southern Lebanon on Monday. Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz told his parliament that "It's forbidden to agree to an immediate cease-fire" and "Israel will expand and strengthen its activities against the Hezbollah."

Condoleeza Rice, having failed to accomplish anything of substance during her piano concert tour of the Middle East is headed for home, which is just as well. If we'd wanted to a musician to broker a peace, we should have sent Bono.

But guess who's not coming home. 3,700 troops of the 172nd Stryker Brigade have been extended in the Iraq theater of war for another 120 days. On Friday, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that U.S. troop levels increased last week from 127,000 to 132,000. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Iraqi has "agreed" to a joint US-Iraq military operation involving 75 thousand troops to regain control of Baghdad. Apparently, it's a concern in some circles that 75 thousand troops won't be enough to get the job done.

Uncle Bunker

The promise of a stable, democratized Middle East the neoconservatives made when they seduced America into supporting an invasion of Iraq has turned into the mother of all quagmires. It's tempting to dismiss the actions of the Bush administration as the fumbling of incompetent ideologues, but there's reason to suspect that things in the Middle East are going exactly as planned. This from Stephen Lendman of the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center:

On July 26, Aljazeerah reported a story headlined - "Israeli invasion of Lebanon planned by neocons in June (2006)." It was done at a June 17 and 18 meeting at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference in Beaver Creek, Colorado at which former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud Knesset member Natan Sharansky met with US Vice President Dick Cheney. The purpose was to discuss the planned and impending Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invasions of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Cheney was thoroughly briefed and approved the coming assaults--before Hamas' capture of an IDF soldier on June 25 or Hezbollah's capturing of two others in an exchange first reported as occurring in Israel and now believed to have happened inside Lebanon after IDF forces illegally entered the country.

Following the Colorado meeting, Netanyahu returned to Israel for a special "Ex-Prime Ministers" meeting in which he conveyed the message of US support to carry out the "Clean Break" policy officially ending all past peace accords including Oslo. At the meeting in Israel in addition to Binyamin Netanyahu were current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres.

Okay. This comes to us from a liberal U.S. publication quoting information put out by a Muslim news service. But given what we've seen of the Bush administration so far, how far-fetched does the notion of Uncle Dick giving a thumbs-up for the Israelis to expand the scope of hostilities in the Middle East really seem?

Lendman also describes how the "Clean Break" policy intends to expand the scope of Middle Eastern armed conflict to Syria and Iran, something that jibes with the overtones of the Bush administration's rhetoric over the past weeks.

This Just In

Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert just announced that "there will be no ceasefire." There's no way of knowing whether Dick Cheney blessed this statement, but Cheney and Olmert sure have a lot in common. Both of these political leaders had "better things to do" in their youths than fight in their countries' wars, but they're enthusiastic about committing their countries' youths to a never-ending war now.

And frighteningly, there seems to be no way to stop them from doing it.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

The Karl Rove Playbook Quiz

I normally don't care to make paste and posts, but I’m making an exception here. Can you guess the book the following quotes came from, and who the author was?

--To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses? It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.

-- It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.

-- All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.

-- The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.

-- The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.

-- But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.

Click here for the answer.

Bonus Question

Some of you may find this image amusing. For 5 million Pen and Sword quiz points, which of these guys actually wrote a book and which of them never actually read one? (Hint: look at which one of those guys is breathing through his mouth.)

Support the troops.

With us or against us.

Fighting them over there…

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

R.I.P. Moral Clarity

It's fruitless to make moral judgments about the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, or about any of the wars going on the world today. There are no "good guys" or "bad guys" any more. There are no good wars, just bad situations. There is no such thing as "winning" a war; armed conflict is a lose-lose proposition.

A lot of high-powered defenders of Israel gobbled up bandwidth on the political talk shows today condemning Hezbollah for hiding itself among Lebanon's civilian population. Yeah, that's despicable, but guess what. That's the sort of thing guerilla style militias do. It's been that way since Clausewitz was a corporal and for a heck of a long time before that. If you're going to go after guerilla groups like these, you're going to have to carve your way through their human shield.

Maybe that's necessary in some situations. Maybe it's necessary for the Israelis to be doing that now. But necessary or no, it's not a "good" thing, and in the long run, it won't make Israel any more secure and it certainly won't stabilize the Middle East. You can safely bet your home equity that for every Hezbollah fighter the Israelis eliminate, they're creating at least two more, and every day that the conflict goes on adds a decade or so to the state of Muslim-western animosities.

In an earlier age, having the strongest nation in the world as an ally was an asset. Today, in Israel's case, it's a pair of cement shoes. Whatever moral high ground the Jewish state may claim in its present conflict is refuted by its connection to the United States. The nation that rose from a great depression to save the world from dictatorship, Fascism, and Stalinist totalitarianism is now viewed by much of the world that it saved as a mirror image of the evils it defeated. The hapless "negotiating into a fan" diplomacy Condoleezza Rice is presently conducting lends credence to the suspicion that the Bush administration is not only bound and determined to light off World War III (or IV or V or VI, however you're counting these things), but to ensure that it never burns out.

I like to think that the country I spent my adult life "defending" is not the same thing as its present government that has transformed America from a "the land of the free" into the home of liars, hypocrites and incompetent bullies. But living in a red state, I'm too often reminded that our government is, to a large extent, a reflection of the people who put it in office.

I ran into a Virginia hillbilly at a local watering hole yesterday whom I knew from happy hours of yesteryear and hadn't seen in a while. The first words out of his mouth were, "How bout them Jew boys mopping up on all them rag heads for us, huh? I'm glad as hell that colored gal ain't trying to stop them."

The Virginian then proceeded to throw a coin into the jukebox and play Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American."

When he came back to the bar, I asked him what he thought about a country western singer making money on war and human misery.

"What do you mean?" he said.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

War is Peace, Instability is Progress, Failure is Success

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

-- Mark Twain

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

-- Benjamin Franklin

Dubya Talk

Call it cognitive dissonance, semantic illness or loony tune logic; the Bush administration is infected with a form of insanity for which there seems to be no viable cure.

For a long time, I dismissed much of the administration's self contradictory rhetoric as garden-variety political blather. But I started getting worried back in summer of 2005 when young Mister Bush said of the terrorists, "I think they're losing. That's why they're still fighting."

By this line of reasoning, the second the terrorists stop fighting they'll have "won." I was willing to dismiss Bush's statement as just another one of those dopey things that belly flop off the guy's tongue when his handlers let him off his leash until I caught this snippet a week or so later from an interview between Bill O'Reilly and retired Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney:

O'Reilley: Insurgent attacks on a daily basis have almost doubled from 2004 to 2005. What does that say?

McInerney: It says that the terrorists, the insurgents, are fighting even harder because they know they are losing.

That's when it hit me. This "still fighting because they're losing" business wasn't just some misstatement that belly-flopped its way off the end of Mister Bush's tongue. It was a carefully crafted talking point invented at a conservative think tank and blessed by Karl Rove for distribution to the administration's anointed echo chamberlains.

And I realized that the core essence of the neoconservative cabal is out-and-out March Hare madness.

Mad Dogs, Englishmen and Neocons

The "fighting because they're losing" mantra is still a centerpiece of this administration's mala-propaganda. As conservative commentator George Will noted on July 18th, Condoleezza Rice's arguments against calling for an immediate cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon make, "instability, no matter how pandemic or lethal, necessarily a sign of progress."

In other words, Rice asserts that the longer the fighting goes on, the better the prospects are for a permanent peace. That's more than a bit like saying the longer you live beyond your means by charging your lifestyle to a credit card, the sooner you'll get out of debt.

At a Friday White House press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mister Bush said he hoped to turn the Israel-Hezbollah crisis into "moment of opportunity and a chance for broader change in the region."

With a "moment of opportunity" like that, who needs a lack of options? Heck, if you look around at Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere, we have more moments of opportunity than we can shake a big stick at. Things have never looked rosier for the New American Century!

Do the so-called leaders of the English-speaking world really swallow their own road apple rhetoric, or are they just putting us on? Do they really think following the same failed policies will produce different results, or they insane enough to think that the wisdom of ages doesn't apply to them? Or have they fallen head over heels for the Machiavellian notion that power is its own objective, and that any ends that preserve power for them and their inner circles justify any means that will preserve that power?

It really doesn't matter what they're thinking or not thinking any more. We need to vote them back to their own private Idahos before they jack our entire planet into the next solar system.

Who do we replace them with? Right now, I don't really care, but I'll tell you this. It will be a cold day in whatever corner in hell that Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of them wind up sharing before I vote for a Republican again.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Malaki's Malarky

I've been browsing reviews of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's speech before Congress on Tuesday, looking for something in his remarks I could sympathize with or support. I haven't found anything like that yet.

From Kate Zernike of the New York Times:

Addressing a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq described his country as the “front line” in the fight against terrorism and vowed to make Iraq an “active player” in the security and stability of the Middle East.

Iraq isn't the "front line" in the fight against terrorism. It's the front line in the Iraqi civil war. Iraq as an "active player" in the security and stability of the Middle East? Iraq is the major factor in the chaos of the Gulf region. For Malaki to stand in front of the U.S. Congress and say his country will be a big dog in the process of stabilizing the Middle East was a Cheney-class piece of delusional chutzpah.

“Iraqis are your allies in the war on terror,” Maliki said. Yeah, and Italians were Hitler's allies in World War II. Look how that worked out for Hitler.

Aping his sponsor George W. Bush, Maliki invoked 9/11 and said that Americans and Iraqis are united in a "common struggle." There's a grain of truth to that. Iraqis and Americans are both struggling to find a way to get Americans out of Iraq.

Ten minutes into his speech, Maliki was interrupted by a protester who chanted, “Iraqis want the troops to leave! Bring them home now!” House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois) ordered the Capitol Police to remove the protester. He let Maliki stay and finish his speech. That gives you a clear example of where GOP priorities lie: first amendment rights extend to an Iraqi, but not to an American citizen. I'd guess that the NSA isn't allowed to monitor Maliki's phone calls either.

“Iraq will not forget those who stood with her and continue to stand with her in times of need,” Malaki said.

Baloney. The second Malaki thinks his government is secure, he'll tell us to pack our hats and gear and take a hike.

The most offensive part of Maliki's speech was his admonition for America not to abandon Iraq like it did after the first Iraq War. “Let 1991 never be repeated,” he said, “for history will be most unforgiving.”

Kiss my keyster, Mister Maliki. Everything going on in Iraq now is our fault because the elder Bush didn't thump Hussein out of his palace the first time? How have things worked out since young Mister Bush came back and "finished the job" for you?

Malaki's Mercenaries

Malaki asked for more foreign aid for fledgling Iraqi companies, complaining that much of the financial aid from America and other countries had been diverted to "security companies." "Security companies" is a not-so-subtle euphemism for "mercenaries," who have been hired to do dirty work that Iraqis themselves don't want to do because they don't want to fight other Iraqis.

That reality is, in fact, a major reason that U.S. troops aren't able to "stand down" in Iraq. Iraqi troops don't want to "stand up" and fight for their own country. America's military itself has become a de facto mercenary force that's propping up Malaki's government on the American taxpayers' dime because Malaki can't convince his own people to support the very government they supposedly elected into office.

And this son of a Shiite has the audacity to stand in front of Congress and lay a guilt trip on the American people about not removing Hussein from power after we kicked him out of Kuwait?

Please.

Malaki's sense of responsibility is every bit as childish as that of the Bush administration. Everything that goes wrong is somebody else's fault, and somebody else needs to pick up the tab to fix it.

For years, we heard Rovewellian claims of having "turned the corner" in Iraq. Now, creeping into the rhetoric, is the "last chance" gambit. How long will we listen to them play that saw?

The American public needs to tell Messrs Maliki and Bush that we've heard "last chance" for the last time.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

Wars and Attrition in the Next World Order

The argument has been around for years. That America can now fight wars without suffering high casualty levels makes it too easy for us to engage in unnecessary wars. There's something to that philosophy. If we were absorbing casualties in Iraq at the rate we suffered them in World War II, million person marches on Washington would likely be a familiar occurrence.

However, the idea of increased own force casualties being a good thing contains a number of profoundly flawed assumptions, the main one of which is that suffering attrition is either an effective or efficient way to conduct warfare. Like George S. Patton said, "Nobody ever won a war by dying for his country."

Munitions and Attritions

It's almost unanimously accepted that World War II was a magnificent victory of free peoples over fascism, imperialism, and dictatorial regimes. But that victory came at a cost. By some counts, 62 million people perished in the war, and roughly 60 percent of the casualties were civilians. What's more, 80 percent of the war deaths occurred on the Allied side. That kind of friendly attrition may have been a necessary price to win "the good war", but few will seriously argue that suffering an unfavorable 8 to 2 attrition ratio is a "good" way to conduct armed conflict.

What's more, to discuss the contemporary security environment in the context of World War II is to compare apples and elephants. To start with, the global balance of military power has completely changed. Today, the United States spends as much on armed force as the rest of the world combined. Things were quite a bit different when Hitler unilaterally annexed the Sudetenland and conducted his blitzkrieg invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain has suffered much criticism over the decades for "appeasing" Hitler as Nazi Germany's aggressive tendencies emerged. But in truth, neither the British nor the French were in much of a position to deter or block Hitler militarily.

Britain and France were still recovering from the fiscal and human cost of World War I. Over the objections of Charles de Gaulle and others on the French general staff, the French had decided to forgo the expense of creating a mobile, air power supported force like the one Hitler was developing and opted instead to invest in the Maginot Line, a static, defensive system of steel and cement fortresses that spanned the trench warfare front of World War I. Britain, an island nation and a traditional sea power, did not have the kind of land forces necessary to deploy to the continent and fight a moving, offensive ground war on its own.

America, still mired in the great depression, was in no position to stop either Japanese or German aggression in the early stages. It's eventual decisive role in defeating the Axis Powers required a complete mobilization of industry and a comprehensive draft of able bodied citizens into military service. That took a considerable amount of time. Two and a half years of full time war production and elapsed between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) and the U.S. led D-Day invasion of Europe (June 6, 1944). Victor in Europe (VE Day) didn't occur until May of 1945, and Victory over Japan (VJ Day) came about in August of that year.

Much of the rationale behind today's standing, rapidly deployable, all volunteer force revolves around avoiding three key deficiencies in our World War II experience.

1) Maintain sufficient force to deter not only major conflict, but to economically deter other nations from developing the kinds of standing force required to defeat ours.

2) Maintain a high technology force that can defeat any other conventional force in "major combat" operations rapidly and decisively.

3) Maintain a force that can quickly redeploy from major combat operations, reconstitute, and be prepared to engage in other major conflicts overseas.

Thinking With the Wrong Head

World War II America may have brought itself out of an economic depression by putting itself on a wartime footing, but that's not a solution to today's fiscal conundrums. America has been on a wartime footing ever since, and the military industrial complex is no longer an economic engine. It's a gaping hole in our national purse. Pundits and scholars who argue otherwise do so under the motivation of six figure salaries and generous neoconservative think tank stipends.

So no, high casualty, high attrition wars won't make America stronger, or make us seem stronger in the eyes in the rest of the world.

A long-standing argument of many of our "war intellectuals" says that a willingness to sustain attrition illustrates our "resolve" to the rest of the world.

Pardon me if you've heard this before, but getting in a bar fight over a girl you just met shows "resolve." Waking up in jail the next morning with a black eye and two broken ribs shows how stupid you are.

One would like to think that the mightiest nation in human history would be wise enough to wield its power without needing barroom attrition to keep it from throwing its fists foolishly.

One would like to think that, anyway.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.