Richard Perle: the Neoconservative Prince of Darkness and Election Eve (Part I)

Also at Kos

On the eve of the mid-term election, it's important to take a look at the nature of the people who brought American to its present state of dysfunction, and discuss why they're trying so desperately to distance themselves from the administration's Bush-capades.

There seem to be five basic flavors of tail-between-their-legs neocons these days:

1) Those like Francis Fukuyama who now admit the Iraq invasion was a bad idea.

2) Those like Bill Kristol who think the neocon idea of invading Iraq was sound, but Donald Rumsfeld screwed it up.

3) Those like John Bolton who deny that the neoconservative Project for the New American Centrury (PNAC) had anything to do with the plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

4) Those like U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad who hope everybody forgets he was a PNAC neocon.

5) Those like Scooter Libby who hope they don't wind up in prison.

Richard Perle, referred to in Washington circles as The Prince of Darkness, fits into all five of these categories.

In a November 3rd Vanity Fair article, Perle told author David Rose that he wishes he could take back his advocacy for the Iraq invasion.

I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, "Should we go into Iraq?," I think now I probably would have said, "No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists." … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have.

Like so many in the neoconservative core, Perle blames the incompetence of the Bush administration for America's failures in Iraq. As to culpability for a flawed war plan, Perle told Rose, "I had no responsibility for that."

But Perle's selling himself short. When it comes to culpability for the Iraq policy and its subsequent strategic failure, Perle's no slouch. He's a tremendous slouch.

Caddy Shack Policy and Strategy

As neoconservatives go, Perle may well be the leper with the least fingers, and like so many neocons, his decadent history goes back to the Nixon era.

In 1970, while working for Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Perle was caught by in an FBI phone tap sting sharing classified information with someone in the Israeli embassy. In 1983, while serving in a Pentagon job under the Reagan administration, Perle caught heat for accepting a $50,000 payment from an Israeli arms dealer. In 1985, Perle was accused of filling Pentagon positions with members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

In early 1998, he signed the PNAC letters to President Clinton and to then House and Senate Speakers Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott that called for a military overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

While serving as chairman of young Mister Bush's Defense Policy Board in 2002, Perle, along with neocon Bush administration policy shapers Doug Feith and David Wurmser, crafted A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the policy paper written for elements of Israel's neoconservative Likud party that many convincingly argue was the basis of the Jewish state's recent invasion of southern Lebanon.

Perle has a long time association with Dick Cheney, who some have suggested gave the nod to Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu to spring the Israeli Lebanon offensive at a June 2006 American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference in Colorado. (AEI is a neoconservative think tank that preceded the PNAC. Most of the PNACers are or were also members of AEI, and the PNAC offices are locatedin the AEI headquarters building in Washington.)

As chairman of young Mister Bush's Defense Advisory Board, Perle pushed the position that the United Nations had become irrelevant when it came to dealing with Iraq. Perle was also a major sponsor of Ahmed Chalabi, a senior member of the expatriate Iraqi National Congress, the group that promised Perle and the other neocons that it would "restore order" in Iraq after the U.S. was greeted as, in Dick Cheney's words, "liberators."

Shortly before the presidential election in 2004 Perle stepped down as chairman of the Defense Policy Board when allegations arose that he had used his position to profit from his relationship with Global Crossing, an information technology company suspected to have received Department of Defense contracts thanks to Perle's influence.

And now, faced with the strong possibility of losing a GOP majority in Congress, and the specter of real investigations into the origins of our foreign policy fiascos in Iraq and elsewhere, Perle is one of the leading neocons pointing a finger at the Bushketeers and saying, "Hey, it wasn't my fault."

(Part II will examine how Perle and his ilk are trying to save the GOP, the neoconservative movement, and their individual carcasses.)

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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.

China, Russia and Iran: The "Axis of Energy" and the Next World Order

The shape of the Next World Order is starting to gel. Hopefully, America still has a chance to resconfigure the mold before the blob hardens.

From a November 2nd story by Steve Guttermanneocon and Edith M. Lederer of the Associated Press:

Russia and China indicated that they will not support a draft U.N. resolution imposing tough sanctions on Iran for its refusal to halt its nuclear enrichment program.

Shiver me timbers and blow me down. The only person on the planet who didn't see that coming was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. On October 24th, she told conservative radio talk show host Sean Hannity "I think we'll have a Security Council resolution with sanctions against Iran in the next few weeks."

The failure of diplomatic efforts regarding Iran's nuclear program was not only predictable, it was inevitable.

The Last World Order

"New world orders" are nothing new. Pecking orders among nations and civilizations have been evolving since one of Adam and Eve's kids killed the other one. The last world order lasted from the fall of the Berlin Wall until Saddam Hussein's statue came tumbling down in Baghdad, a period of roughly ten years in which America was a more or less benign global hegemon.

As the paper trail of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) illustrates, the neoconservatives were set on invading Iraq years before they and their poster boy George W. Bush came into office. Their goal was to establish an America friendly government in that country and set up a military base of operations in the center of the Middle East from which the U.S. could control the region's oil flow.

Had we been greeted as liberators, as charter PNAC member Dick Cheney predicted, America may well have been able to sustain a thousand-year global empire. Unfortunately, the best laid plans of mice and neocons often go awry, and the non-existent plan for the post hostilities phase went the way of most non-existent plans--to hell in a bucket.

The Lost World Order

America's end zone fumble in Iraq took our eye of the real terrorist threat, but more importantly, it gave our Cold War nemeses the opening they needed to reemerge as major players on the world stage.

By the time the U.S. sprang Operation Iraqi Freedom on the world, China, Russian and Iran had already formed an energy partnership that included assistance from the two larger powers in helping Iran develop an independent nuclear energy program. The jury is still out on whether or not Iran seeks to develop nuclear weapons, but the weapons aren't the key to that country's aim to become a dominant regional power. The more Iran can fuel its industrial growth with nuclear energy, the more of its oil it can sell to jumpstart its economic growth. What's more, as the rest of the world weans itself from oil dependency, Iran will become the portal through which the rest of the Middle East makes the transition to nuclear power and creates an industrial base to replace its petroleum revenues.

At that point, the "axis of energy" (which now includes Venezuela) will have all but shouldered the western nations out of the Middle East, and America won't have a friendly shoulder to cry on because the other western nations will have crawled between the sheets with the axis of energy.

The Next World Order

America's best chance to emerge in the Next World Order as a nominal "first among nations" is to coax Iran and Venezuela away from China and Russia, but the Bush administration's foreign policy is leading to the exact opposite result.

Condi Rice's offer of direct U.S. negotiations with Iran on the condition that Iran suspend its enrichment program was a non-starter from the outset. Iran has a right to develop a nuclear energy program, and has consistently refused to surrender that right. Forcing the issue in the UN Security Council was always a non-starter as well, because China and Russia were never likely to slap meaningful sanctions on their best little buddy in the Gulf region.

Unilateral sanctions imposed by the U.S. aren't likely to make a rial's bit of difference to Iran. They have enough customers to buy all the oil they can pull out of the ground. The U.S. doesn't have a viable military option for Iran, and even if it did, unilateral attacks on Iran based on no other justification than Dick Cheney's say so that they want to develop a bomb would permanently eliminate what little is left of America's credibility in the world.

That brings us to the elephant in the middle of the living room that nobody wants to talk about. The real justification to "stay the course" of our botched Iraq strategy is that it's the only option we have left to salvage our botched Iran policy.

Young Mister Bush began hinting at this back in August of 2005. During a World War II commemoration speech he gave at Naval Air Station North Island, Bush said, "If Zarqawi and [Osama] bin Laden gain control of Iraq…they'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions."

As with most of Mister Bush's public statements, there's a ton of bunk in this one. If the U.S. leaves Iraq, al Qaeda isn't likely to gain control of it, or even major portions of it. Even if it did, al Qaeda doesn't have wherewithal to operate Iraq's oil fields.

But Iran and its partners China and Russia do.

And the folks most likely to gain control of Iraq's oil fields are its Shia political parties and their associated militias, who would be happy as camels in an oasis to invite Iran's friends to run Iraq's oil operations.

The Elephants in the Living Room

Through their delusional and incompetent foreign policy, the administration's neoconservatives (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith, Bolton, etc.) have painted America into a corner, and the only solution they offer is to keep painting. This is false limited choice rhetoric that argues we've gone so far down their crooked path that there's no finding our way back.

That's not true. Yes, undoing the Bush administration damage will be a daunting, perhaps Herculean task, but it not only can be accomplished, it must be accomplished, and the way to accomplish it lies somewhere between "stay the course" and "cut and run."

At the end of the day, we'll likely do something that combines John Murtha's proposal of redeploying to the periphery, focusing whatever troop strength we leave in-country in Baghdad, and a sea change in our diplomatic efforts with Iran and Syria. And the sooner that day comes, the better.

But that day won't come any time soon if we leave the elephants in charge of Congress next week. Neoconservative rule has already put America's ship of state bow down in a sand dune. Two more years of it, and the United States will have guaranteed its fate as a footnote in a Mandarin language history book.

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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.

Related articles:

The Next World Order series.

Rumsfeld: Spinning Wars versus Winning Wars

I've often said that if the dime store field marshals in charge of our woebegone war in Iraq had put the same effort into winning it that they put into spinning it, they wouldn't have to spin it.

So it's little surprise to me that as the White House brings in former Secretary of State James Baker to patch together a new Iraq strategy, our current Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld is cooking up a new public relations campaign to defend his old Iraq strategy. From an October 30 Associated Press story by Lolita C. Baldor:

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is buttressing its public relations staff and starting an operation akin to a political campaign war room as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld faces intensifying criticism over the Iraq war.

In a memo obtained by the Associated Press, Dorrance Smith, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, said new teams of people will "develop messages" for the 24-hour news cycle and "correct the record."

Rumsfeld is concerned, as always, that the U.S. media isn't reporting enough "good news." Let's "correct the record" on this "good news" poppycock. There's not enough good news in the entire New Testament to offset the disaster Rumsfeld has been singularly responsible for creating in Iraq. No nation goes to war for the purpose of painting schoolhouses, and turning on someone's electricity three years after you put it out of commission is not a measure of "success."

Rummy's also "deeply troubled" that terrorist groups have been successful at "manipulating the media" to influence westerners. "That's the thing that keeps me up at night," Rummy says.

I can think of a lot of things that ought to keep Rummy up at night, most notably the deeply troubling prospect of what's waiting for him in the afterlife. But what terrorist manipulation of the western media is he talking about? All those pro-bin Laden infomercials featuring that cute al Qaeda Gecko?

According to AP's Baldor, Pentagon spokesman Eric Ruff wouldn't say what the costs of the new public relations program might be, but construction has already begun on the Pentagon's outer "E" ring to accommodate new hires. Whatever the program winds up costing the taxpayers, some of its expenditures will go to financing "surrogate" programs that finance high-level politicians and "interest groups" to travel and speak on behalf of pro-war GOP candidates. That means a slice of the defense budget will go toward financing Republican election campaigns. Will the Federal Elections Commission raise any objections to this? I doubt it. FEC Chairman Michael E. Toner is a former General Counsel of the Republican National Committee and was a General Counsel of the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. And, oh, yeah, he's also been a "quest commentator" on Fox News.

It's Everybody's Fault But Rummy's

Rumsfeld not only blames the "liberal media" for his abject failures in Iraq, he's putting tire marks on the backs of his own public relations people, who he doesn't think have been getting "the message" out as quickly or effectively as the terrorists have. "If I were grading I would say we probably deserve a 'D' or a 'D-plus' as a country as to how well we're doing in the battle of ideas that's taking place in the world today," he says.

That puts the Pentagon spin machine's performance at selling the war one grade higher than Rummy's performance as Secretary of Defense. Given his abject failure at running the war, he ought to kiss the very ground his public relations people crawl on for the job they've managed to pull off. Lipstick can only do so much to pretty up a pig, and calling horse manure "chocolate ice cream" doesn't change the way it tastes or smells.

Speaking of Chocolate Ice Cream…

Wednesday afternoon, young Mister Bush announced that old Messrs Cheney and Rumsfeld will stay on in their present posts throughout the course of Bush's remaining term. That's loyalty for you, huh? Dubya doesn't change horses in the middle of the stream, even if they're dead. Maybe he figures that hanging on to a pair of bloated corpses is his best bet to get back ashore without drowning his legacy.

The state of America today is such that we tolerate irresponsible, unaccountable behavior from our highest national officers that we wouldn't put up with from our children. If little Johnny gets caught shoplifting a pack of baseball cards and trys to blame it on store security for catching him, he spends some time in his room. If little Donny takes a nation to war and screws it up and blames the media for saying he screwed it up, he gets to spend two more years as a cabinet secretary. Too bad for little Johnny that he doesn't have unlimited access to tax payer dollars to bail himself out of trouble like little Donny does.

Little Donny is 74 years old now. Wouldn't you think he's reached an age where he should be held responsible for his actions, even if he still throws temper tantrums like he did when he was little Johnny's age?

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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.

My Democratic Congress Wish List (Part II)

(The second of a two part series. Part I covered impeachments, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and the Patriot Act. Part II addresses FISA, Iraq, and more.)

6. Legislate treaty abrogation.

Article II of the Constitution requires two thirds of the Senate to ratify all treaties, but nothing in the Constitution or U.S. Code addresses treaty abrogation. This administration has unitarily abrogated at least three ratified treaties--the Geneva Convention, The UN Convention Against Torture and the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty. One can also reasonably argue that the 2005 U.S.-India nuclear agreement was a violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

The treaty ratification process is meaningless if the executive can single-handedly reverse it with a snap of the fingers, and treaties themselves are completely hollow if the other parties know we're not at all serious about keeping them.

The Senate must play a role in any treaty abrogation. Abrogation by a simple majority is not sufficient. We've seen how a Senate ruled by the sitting president's party becomes a rubber stamp. I propose that the same two thirds supermajority necessary to ratify a treaty be required to abrogate it.

I'm not sure if simple legislation would be sufficient to impose abrogation guidelines. It might be, since the Constitution doesn't allows the two legislative houses to make their own rules. But if Congress itself decides a formal constitutional amendment is the way to go, then I say go for it. Pursuing a treaty abrogation amendment beats the living spit out of pushing for one that bans gay marriage or allows Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for president.

7. Bring the hammer down on FISA.

Let's leave the matter of data mining aside for a moment. I have yet to hear a single coherent argument that says the requirement to get a 72 hour retroactive warrant to spy on the phone calls of U.S citizens and permanent residents hampers the president's ability to protect America from terrorism. I don't care how long or cumbersome the FISA applications may be. They're mostly boilerplate, and they're on a word processing template. If the Justice Department needs more lawyers to fill the things out, they can hire more. There's no shortage of lawyers in Washington D.C. who know how to fill in the blanks of a Microsoft Word document.

What's the point of a retroactive warrant? It's all about keeping Big Brother honest. If he never has to answer to anybody about which Americans he's spying on and why, then he can spy on any American he wants for any reason he wants. And once he has the power to do that, you can bet a life's worth of phone bills that he'll abuse it.

8. Enact real federal election reform.

Nobody in Congress is likely to go for this, but these steps could truly reform the congressional campaign contribution process:

-- No more corporate contributions.

-- No private contributions from outside the state or district in which the election is being held.

-- Strict limits on PAC and Political Party spending in any state or Congressional district.

A change to the nature of the Electoral College could profoundly change presidential campaign spending strategies. If we trash the state-by-state "winner take all" electoral rules and make each state's electoral votes proportional to its popular vote, then individual states turn from red or blue to lighter and darker shades of purple. Party and PAC budgeters could no longer target "battleground states" because every state would be a battleground.

Please note that my Electoral College reform plan does not shift presidential elections to a purely "popular vote." The state-by-state proportion of electors would remain the same as it is now, so the vote of an individual in a small northeastern state would still count for three or four times the vote of an individual in a heavily populated western state. Still, though individual votes wouldn't all carry the same weight, they'd all count. Hopefully, that would bring more people to the polls who otherwise would have stayed home because they figured their minority vote wouldn't have mattered.

9. Enact real energy policy reform.

Yeah, we're addicted to foreign oil all right, Mister Bush. But as long as your Uncle Dick's big oil cronies dictate U.S. energy policy, we'll stay addicted for as long as those big oil cronies can make big money on foreign oil. This administration isn't going to do much about energy reform except talk about it to fool the proles into thinking they actually want to do something about it. Energy is the coin of power in the Next World Order. As long as we need foreign oil to run our country, we will to go to war to control the flow of it.

If there were ever a good reason to justify using the Constitution's commerce clause to dictate conditions to private enterprise, forcing the U.S. energy industry to rehabilitate our oil Jones is it.

10. Oh, yeah. Iraq.

General George Casey, U.S. commander in Iraq, recently said Iraqi forces will be ready to take over security responsibilities in 12 to 18 months. That sounds remarkably similar to what he was saying 12 to 18 months ago. In fact, the whole Iraq fiasco is starting to sound like a kid at bedtime saying, "Five more minutes, Dad," over and over and over and over…

We turn one corner after another; we stumble from one final throe to the next. Malarky Maliki tells our troops what they can or can't do in his country, and if his troops don't want to participate in a "joint" operation he approves of, he let's them stay behind while our guys get killed and maimed doing his dirty work for him. He insists we can't impose any deadlines on his government and that mouth breathing president of ours goes along and says, Yeah, that's right, we can't push deadlines on no sovereign nation like Iraq.

So our sovereign nation can't tell that sovereign nation when to get its sovereignty together, but that sovereign nation can tell ours what we can or can't do with our troops and when they can or can't leave that sovereign nation? Malaki's done nothing but screw up, yet we're letting him call all the shots and Bush is kissing his keyster.

I don't want timelines, or benchmarks, or even deadlines. I want ultimatums. We need to tell Malaki we're leaving in six months and if he doesn't like that, we'll leave right now.

Bush won't do that. Congress can and must.

Honorable Mention

My priorities are for a Democratic Congress to restore the legislature's checks and balances over the executive branch and turn our Barbecue Republic back into a real one. But I would also like to see a number of other legislations enacted early in a Democratic "contract with America."

-- Raise the minimum wage. If we allow American citizens to work for slave wages, we're making them slaves. Hasn't that been illegal for over a century now? Didn't we fight a civil war over that issue?

-- Repeal Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. If one percent of the population owns 38 percent of the wealth and 100 percent of the politicians, does it not seem fair that they should bear the brunt of the tax burden?

-- Slash and burn defense acquisition. The U.S. presently spends as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Where's the payoff on the investment? Our military didn't defend us against the 9/11 attacks and it isn't accomplishing our national aims overseas. The major Mobil/Exxon stockholders wouldn't put up with that kind of return, and their patron saint Dick Cheney wouldn't expect them to.

-- Slash and burn Homeland Security. They're doing a heck of a lousy job, aren't they? We'd be safer without them.

-- Expand AmericaCorps to fill the gaps in Social Security care of disabled Americans. Take the money needed to support the project out of the defense budget. Put the money to a use that actually helps Americans.

-- Trash the school voucher program and fix public education. We can fluff school financing the same way we can solve darn near all of our other problems. Lose a B-2 bomber. Lose an aircraft carrier. Lose a wing of F-22s. We'll never miss them. They don't make a dinar's worth of never mind to Ahmed the car bomber.

These are my thoughts on the subject of federal government change at the moment. I look forward to hearing yours.

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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.

My Democratic Congress Wish List (Part II)

(The second of a two part series. Part I covered impeachments, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and the Patriot Act. Part II addresses FISA, Iraq, and more.)

6. Legislate treaty abrogation.

Article II of the Constitution requires two thirds of the Senate to ratify all treaties, but nothing in the Constitution or U.S. Code addresses treaty abrogation. This administration has unitarily abrogated at least three ratified treaties--the Geneva Convention, The UN Convention Against Torture and the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty. One can also reasonably argue that the 2005 U.S.-India nuclear agreement was a violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

The treaty ratification process is meaningless if the executive can single-handedly reverse it with a snap of the fingers, and treaties themselves are completely hollow if the other parties know we're not at all serious about keeping them.

The Senate must play a role in any treaty abrogation. Abrogation by a simple majority is not sufficient. We've seen how a Senate ruled by the sitting president's party becomes a rubber stamp. I propose that the same two thirds supermajority necessary to ratify a treaty be required to abrogate it.

I'm not sure if simple legislation would be sufficient to impose abrogation guidelines. It might be, since the Constitution doesn't allows the two legislative houses to make their own rules. But if Congress itself decides a formal constitutional amendment is the way to go, then I say go for it. Pursuing a treaty abrogation amendment beats the living spit out of pushing for one that bans gay marriage or allows Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for president.

7. Bring the hammer down on FISA.

Let's leave the matter of data mining aside for a moment. I have yet to hear a single coherent argument that says the requirement to get a 72 hour retroactive warrant to spy on the phone calls of U.S citizens and permanent residents hampers the president's ability to protect America from terrorism. I don't care how long or cumbersome the FISA applications may be. They're mostly boilerplate, and they're on a word processing template. If the Justice Department needs more lawyers to fill the things out, they can hire more. There's no shortage of lawyers in Washington D.C. who know how to fill in the blanks of a Microsoft Word document.

What's the point of a retroactive warrant? It's all about keeping Big Brother honest. If he never has to answer to anybody about which Americans he's spying on and why, then he can spy on any American he wants for any reason he wants. And once he has the power to do that, you can bet a life's worth of phone bills that he'll abuse it.

8. Enact real federal election reform.

Nobody in Congress is likely to go for this, but these steps could truly reform the congressional campaign contribution process:

-- No more corporate contributions.

-- No private contributions from outside the state or district in which the election is being held.

-- Strict limits on PAC and Political Party spending in any state or Congressional district.

A change to the nature of the Electoral College could profoundly change presidential campaign spending strategies. If we trash the state-by-state "winner take all" electoral rules and make each state's electoral votes proportional to its popular vote, then individual states turn from red or blue to lighter and darker shades of purple. Party and PAC budgeters could no longer target "battleground states" because every state would be a battleground.

Please note that my Electoral College reform plan does not shift presidential elections to a purely "popular vote." The state-by-state proportion of electors would remain the same as it is now, so the vote of an individual in a small northeastern state would still count for three or four times the vote of an individual in a heavily populated western state. Still, though individual votes wouldn't all carry the same weight, they'd all count. Hopefully, that would bring more people to the polls who otherwise would have stayed home because they figured their minority vote wouldn't have mattered.

9. Enact real energy policy reform.

Yeah, we're addicted to foreign oil all right, Mister Bush. But as long as your Uncle Dick's big oil cronies dictate U.S. energy policy, we'll stay addicted for as long as those big oil cronies can make big money on foreign oil. This administration isn't going to do much about energy reform except talk about it to fool the proles into thinking they actually want to do something about it. Energy is the coin of power in the Next World Order. As long as we need foreign oil to run our country, we will to go to war to control the flow of it.

If there were ever a good reason to justify using the Constitution's commerce clause to dictate conditions to private enterprise, forcing the U.S. energy industry to rehabilitate our oil Jones is it.

10. Oh, yeah. Iraq.

General George Casey, U.S. commander in Iraq, recently said Iraqi forces will be ready to take over security responsibilities in 12 to 18 months. That sounds remarkably similar to what he was saying 12 to 18 months ago. In fact, the whole Iraq fiasco is starting to sound like a kid at bedtime saying, "Five more minutes, Dad," over and over and over and over…

We turn one corner after another; we stumble from one final throe to the next. Malarky Maliki tells our troops what they can or can't do in his country, and if his troops don't want to participate in a "joint" operation he approves of, he let's them stay behind while our guys get killed and maimed doing his dirty work for him. He insists we can't impose any deadlines on his government and that mouth breathing president of ours goes along and says, Yeah, that's right, we can't push deadlines on no sovereign nation like Iraq.

So our sovereign nation can't tell that sovereign nation when to get its sovereignty together, but that sovereign nation can tell ours what we can or can't do with our troops and when they can or can't leave that sovereign nation? Malaki's done nothing but screw up, yet we're letting him call all the shots and Bush is kissing his keyster.

I don't want timelines, or benchmarks, or even deadlines. I want ultimatums. We need to tell Malaki we're leaving in six months and if he doesn't like that, we'll leave right now.

Bush won't do that. Congress can and must.

Honorable Mention

My priorities are for a Democratic Congress to restore the legislature's checks and balances over the executive branch and turn our Barbecue Republic back into a real one. But I would also like to see a number of other legislations enacted early in a Democratic "contract with America."

-- Raise the minimum wage. If we allow American citizens to work for slave wages, we're making them slaves. Hasn't that been illegal for over a century now? Didn't we fight a civil war over that issue?

-- Repeal Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. If one percent of the population owns 38 percent of the wealth and 100 percent of the politicians, does it not seem fair that they should bear the brunt of the tax burden?

-- Slash and burn defense acquisition. The U.S. presently spends as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Where's the payoff on the investment? Our military didn't defend us against the 9/11 attacks and it isn't accomplishing our national aims overseas. The major Mobil/Exxon stockholders wouldn't put up with that kind of return, and their patron saint Dick Cheney wouldn't expect them to.

-- Slash and burn Homeland Security. They're doing a heck of a lousy job, aren't they? We'd be safer without them.

-- Expand AmericaCorps to fill the gaps in Social Security care of disabled Americans. Take the money needed to support the project out of the defense budget. Put the money to a use that actually helps Americans.

-- Trash the school voucher program and fix public education. We can fluff school financing the same way we can solve darn near all of our other problems. Lose a B-2 bomber. Lose an aircraft carrier. Lose a wing of F-22s. We'll never miss them. They don't make a dinar's worth of never mind to Ahmed the car bomber.

These are my thoughts on the subject of federal government change at the moment. I look forward to hearing yours.

#

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

My Democratic Congress Wish List (Part I)

If the Democrats manage to win one or both houses of Congress come November, I hope they don't blow the victory by getting bogged down in political window dressing. Here's my "top ten" wish list of what I want to see a Democratic controlled Congress accomplish in its first six months months.

1. Fix the Patriot Act or axe it.

Does any one person in this country know what the Patriot Act actually says? The original version passed by the House--HR 361 RDS--is a compendium of changes to other laws, and updates to the Act are a compendium of changes to the original. It would take the work required of a doctoral thesis to hunt down the true implications of the Act on individual rights. We shouldn't have laws so complex that the average citizen can't understand them. If our elected representatives can't produce a version of the Act that the rest of us can understand, that means they don't understand it either, in which case what the hell were they doing when they voted for it?

If they can't produce a simplified version of the Patriot that they and their constituents can readily absorb, then they should repeal the thing entirely.

2. Impeach Donald Rumsfeld.

Article I of the Constitution gives the House of Representatives the "sole power of impeachment" and the Senate the "sole power to try all impeachments." Judgments in impeachment cases "shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States."

That's good enough for the likes of Rumsfeld. There's no need to put him in a cell and chain him to the ceiling, and break his legs, and water board him, and sic attack dogs on him, and put a woman's panties on his head, and lock him in a cold room, and cover him in feces, and put him in a dog pile naked with the rest of his neocon cronies, and force him to pleasure himself, and rape him with a Chemlite. All that and much more is waiting for him in the next world.

Article II states that, "The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."

Among Rumsfeld's many sins, treason and bribery might be difficult to justify in impeachment proceedings. Being an arrogant jerk isn't necessarily treasonous. Firing any general who doesn't agree with you and promoting every general who does isn't necessarily bribery. But any Secretary of Defense who goes to war without a post-hostilities plan, as Rumsfeld did, has committed a crime as high as a crime of office can get.

3. Impeach Alberto Gonzales.

What Rumsfeld did to the Iraq Gonzales did to the Constitution. As both White House Counsel and Attorney General, Gonzales was a key player in creating a virtually unchecked executive branch of government. Almost every extra-constitutional stunt Bush has pulled was done on "authority" of a legal position written by or under the supervision of Gonzales.

One might argue that you can't impeach someone for doing his job, but lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee--as Gonzales did regarding the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program--isn't part of anybody's job description. It's a high crime called "perjury."

4. Repeal the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

By passing this bill, Congress handed Mister Bush dictatorial powers. If it's ever challenged in the Supreme Court, there's a fair chance it will be declared unconstitutional, but you never know with this Supreme Court. And why put everybody through the bother, time and expense of a lengthy court procedure? Just strike the bill down.

5. Revise the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

The War Powers Resolution allows a president to commit troops to combat for up to 90 days before he has to get statutory authorization or a declaration of war from Congress. As this administration has illustrated, that's entirely too much latitude for an executive with a war-centric foreign policy to have.

I'd like to strip all authority for a president to commit troops to combat overseas, but given our global presence, I just don't think that's realistic. Things will happen in the future that require immediate military action by the executive, but in 90 days, a president like the one we have now could start a full-scale world war from which we might never extract ourselves.

Shrink that three-month window down to two weeks. That gives a president sufficient time to respond to a no-notice crisis that requires a short duration air operation, an embassy evacuation, and so on. But if he wants to do anything that might conceivably take longer than fourteen days, he'll have to go to Congress first. So if this president decides he wants to start doing blockade ops against Korea or Iran, he'll have to get a buy in from the legislature.

And oh, the new resolution has to contain language that prevents a president from going around Congress by acting under authority of a UN resolution. UN resolutions are fine and dandy, but they aren't a substitute for legislation by Congress.

(Part II will discuss treaties, election reform, Iraq and more.)

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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.

A Tonkin Gulf in the Arabian Gulf?

Also posted at Kos. Stop by and recommend if you like.

I'm not yet convinced that a war with Iran or Korea is inevitable, but I don't dismiss the possibility that at the highest levels of the White House, such wars are already a done deal.

Daniel Ellsburg is among the latest high profile political figures to suggest that we may soon see a replay of the Tonkin Gulf incident. Ellsburg is the former State Department official who "leaked" the so-called Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. Among other things, the Papers implied that LBJ used exaggerated reports of engagements in the Tonkin Gulf between U.S. and North Vietnamese naval forces to justify pre-planned expansion of air and ground operations in Vietnam. Ellsburg and others fear that the current U.S. naval "build up" in the Arabian Gulf region could produce a déjà vu all over again situation. I think that's entirely too possible, and am also concerned that the same sort of thing could happen with North Korea.

Rules of Engagement and War Powers

Americans should be aware of two key war fighting doctrine documents, both of which are unclassified and available through official government sources.

First of these is the Standing Rules of Engagement for US Forces, last updated in January of 2000. The key concept--or "prime directive," if you will--of the SROE is the Inherent Right of Self Defense:

A commander has the authority and obligation to use all necessary means available and to take all appropriate actions to defend that commander's unit and other US forces in the vicinity from a hostile act or demonstration of hostile intent. Neither these rules, nor the supplemental measures activated to augment these rules, limit this inherent right and obligation. At all times, the requirements of necessity and proportionality, as amplified in these SROE, will form the basis for the judgment of the on-scene commander (OSC) or individual as to what constitutes an appropriate response to a particular hostile act or demonstration of hostile intent.

The Inherent Right of Self Defense exists under all circumstances--peacetime, wartime and in-between time, and no other directed constraints or limitations restrict that right. Embedded in the Self Defense doctrine are four key terms.

-- Necessity. Exists when a hostile act occurs or when a force or
terrorist(s) exhibits hostile intent.


-- Proportionality. Force used to counter a hostile act or
demonstrated hostile intent must be reasonable in intensity, duration, and magnitude to the perceived or demonstrated threat based on all facts known to the commander at the time.

-- Hostile Act. An attack or other use of force against the United
States, US forces, and, in certain circumstances, US nationals, their
property, US commercial assets, and/or other designated non-US forces,
foreign nationals and their property. It is also force used directly to
preclude or impede the mission and/or duties of US forces, including the
recovery of US personnel and vital US Government property.


-- Hostile Intent. The threat of imminent use of force against the United States, US forces, and in certain circumstances, US nationals, their property, US commercial assets, and/or other designated non-US forces, foreign nationals and their property. Also, the threat of force to preclude or impede the mission and/or duties of US forces, including the recovery of US personnel or vital USG property.

Where Things Get Tricky

Commanders and individuals are not only expected to respond proportionally when attacked, they have an obligation to do so when "the threat of imminent force exists."

Say you're in command of a U.S. Navy missile destroyer steaming in international waters off the coast of Iran or North Korea or wherever conducting blockade operations. Tensions between the U.S. and the target country are high. It's the middle of the night. You have no fixed wing or helicopter air cover. A group of three surface contacts in formation pop up on the edge of your radar horizon, coming from the direction of a known enemy port that harbors patrol boats and steaming straight toward you at flank speed. Given that innocent merchant ships don't leave port in formation at flank speed, you know these three ships have to be military patrol boats. Given the range of modern surface-to-surface weapons, you know you're already within range of theirs. You can also reasonably assume it's a given that they have you targeted; otherwise they wouldn't be steaming straight toward you at flank speed. And given the capabilities of modern surface-to-surface missiles versus your missile defense systems, it's a given that if they shoot off a volley of six or more missiles at your ship, one or more of them will hit it.

How long do you wait before you decide it's "necessary" to do it to them before they do it to you, and your ship, and the 200 plus members of your crew?

And what measure of "proportionality" does it take to do what's necessary short of whacking the patrol boats with your own surface-to-surface missiles?

Where Things Get Trickier

So you pop off some surface-to-surface missiles of your own and sink the three patrol boats, and report the engagement to higher authority. National Command Authority (NCA, which is the President and the Secretary of Defense) uses this incident as an excuse to unleash a larger, pre-planned operation against the enemy.

When the smoke clears, the enemy claims that the three patrol boats were merely getting underway at flank speed in response to an SOS plea from a small merchant ship that was wallowing off of coastal waters.

Then it sucks to be you. The National Command Authority has high cover for unleashing its pre-planned offensive operation, and you wind up in the bottom of the dumpster.

Where Things Get Trickiest

I'm just saying…

If you are the destroyer skipper who the NCA used to justify their hidden war agenda, you might think that Congress had some sort of power to reign them in. But you'd be wrong.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973, originally intended to restrict presidential authority to start another Vietnam, actually does the exact opposite. It gives a president up to 90 days to conduct full-scale wars overseas without so much as a by your leave from Congress or anybody. And three months into any war in which the U.S. has suffered combat casualties, is it likely that any Congress would pull the plug on it?

Tricky Dick's Progeny

You'd like to think that the Bush administration chicken hawks aren't hatter-class mad enough to pull the kind of stunt I've just described, but consider the stunts they've already pulled on Iraq.

Richard Nixon protégés Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are still in power, and anyone who doesn't suffer from autism knows there's no skullduggery they're not above.

Acorns and trees, and all that.

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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.

Bush: More Dubya Talk on Iraq

If the people running our woebegone war in Iraq were as good at running the war as they are at spinning it, they wouldn't have to spin it.

Young Mister Bush's Wednesday morning press briefing in the East Room , touted by MSNBC's Rita Crosby as a "sober assessment" about the Iraq situation, was the same pile of bull feathers we've been hearing since the "fall" of Baghdad. If that was a "sober assessment," I want some of whatever Bush and Rita are drinking.

Shifty Tactics

"As the enemy shifts tactics, we are shifting our tactics as well," Mister Bush said in his prepared speech, as though that were something to brag about. Whenever you're shifting tactics to adapt to your enemy's, your enemy has the initiative, and if the key to your strategy is reacting to the enemy's tactics, you have no strategy. If you have no coherent strategy, no amount of "faith based" policy will bring you "victory" or "get the job done," regardless of how adamantly you refuse to define what "victory" or "the job" is.

Hence the major fallacy in Bush's remark, "Our commanders on the ground are constantly adjusting our tactics to stay ahead of our enemies." But no, Mister Bush, they're not staying ahead of our enemies. Our latest "crackdown" in Baghdad is a bust and al Qaeda linked gunmen in Ramadi have declared the city part of a separate Islamic state.

"Americans have no intention of taking sides in a sectarian struggle or standing in the crossfire between rival factions," Mister Bush said. And yet that's exactly what American troops are doing. The best of intentions are always trumped by reality. But we wouldn't expect Mister Bush to take no never mind of that "reality" stuff.

"Some of the Iraqi security forces have performed below expectations," he said. No, Mister Bush, all of the Iraqi forces have performed below expectations. They've either refused to fight other Iraqis or have formed death squads who are not answerable to the central Iraqi government.

"We learned some key lessons from that early phase in the war," Bush said. Where's the evidence of our having learned anything?

"As General Casey reported yesterday in Iraq, the men and women of the armed forces have never lost a battle in over three years in the war." Is it possible the neither Casey nor Bush understand what a frank admission of failure this statement is? U.S. troops have won a thousand battles yet they're losing the war.

Perhaps this misunderstanding of the difference between tactics and strategy is what led Mister Bush to say, “I know many Americans are not satisfied with the situation in Iraq; I’m not satisfied, either,” despite the fact that the Secretary of Defense and the key generals in charge of the unsatisfactory situation are still in place and Bush gives no indication that he'll remove them.

Also still in place is U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Kahlilzad, a charter member of the Project for the New American Century that formulated the Iraq invasion policy in the late 90s. According to Bush, Kahlilzad has laid out a "new" three step strategic approach:

First, we're working with political and religious leaders across Iraq, urging them to take steps to restrain their followers and stop sectarian violence.

Second, we're helping Iraqi leaders to complete work on a national compact to resolve the most difficult issues dividing their country. The new Iraqi government has condemned violence from all quarters and agreed to a schedule for resolving issues such as disarming illegal militias and death squads, sharing oil revenues, amending the Iraqi constitution and reforming the de-Baathification process.

Third, we are reaching out to Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan, asking them to support the Iraqi government's efforts to persuade Sunni insurgents to lay down their arms and accept national reconciliation.

There is nothing new in any of this. It hasn't worked in the past and it isn't working now.

Explaining why Mister Bush chose Wednesday to give a major address on the war, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said, “It’s important for the president’s voice to be heard in his own words.”

I agree with that. It's important for everyone to hear just how clueless their commander in chief is when it comes to conducting armed conflict. Bush and his sidemen still seem to believe that the same kinds of glittering generalities and talking points that win elections can win wars. They're wrong of course, but then winning the next election has always been more important to them than winning the current war.

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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 Talk: Mad Dogs and Generals and Iraq

It's embarrassing to realize how long the neoconservatives have been able to double talk their way around their falsehoods and fumbles in Iraq. We've heard daily changing rationales for invading the country, of corners turned, purple fingers raised, real progress and last throes. Any mention of quagmires, insurgencies and civil was has been dismissed as "Henny Penny sky is falling" talk. Critics of the war and its conduct are called "defeatists," "cowards" and worse.

Since the White House Information Group (WHIG) formed in summer of 2002 to sell the invasion, we've heard noting but untruths and denials about this woebegone war, and the deluge of bunker mentality bunk shows no sign of abating.

Praying the Course

The rhetoric of most of our senior-most active duty military officers has been delusional to date, but lately it's broken the threshold of bull-goose lunacy.

On October 19, Joint Chiefs chairman General Peter Pace told an audience in Florida that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "…leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country."

If Rumsfeld is doing what the Lord tells him to, the Lord has it in for the United States of America.

Pace's remarks came at a change of command ceremony at which Admiral James Stavridis took the helm of U.S. Southern Command. Stavridis, whose last job was serving as a senior aide to Rumsfeld, said of his boss that, "He comes to work everyday with a single-minded focus to make this country safe… We're lucky as a nation that he continues to serve with such passion and such integrity and such determination and such brilliance."

It's nice of Rumsfeld to come to work every day, and I'll buy the part about him being "single minded," but "brilliant?" As a charter member of the Project for the New American Century. Rumsfeld was a key player in formulating the Bush administration's Iraq policy, and as Secretary of State, he has been singularly responsible for the micro-mismanagement of it. Rumsfeld's the one who canned former Army chief Eric Shinseki for warning that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to secure post-war Iraq and who threatened to "fire the next person" who talked about the need for a postwar plan.

And it's thanks to Rumsfeld's single-minded intransigence that more than three years after the fall of Baghdad, the Bush administration appears to have finally decided it's time for a new course in Iraq.

Straying the Course

Now that former Secretary of State James Baker says "stay the course" is not a viable strategy, young Mister Bush and his echo chamberlains are claiming that it was never the strategy at all.

Over the weekend, White House Counsel Dan Bartlett told CBS that the administration has never had a "stay the course" strategy for Iraq. Mister Bush himself told ABC's George Stephanopolus "We've never been stay the course."

This kind of horse feathering is so self-satirizing you can't come up with a punch line to top it.

And still it continues.

At a Monday press conference on October 23, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said that Mister Bush had stopped using the "stay the course" mantra because it "gave the wrong impression about what was going on."

No one in the press corps bothered to ask what was new about Mister Bush giving the American public a wrong impression, but one reporter had the temerity to ask, "Is the President responsible for the fact people think it's stay the course since he's, in fact, described it that way himself?"

Snow's answer: "No."

Tuesday, during an MSNBC interview with Tim Russert, Wicked Witch of the West Wing and former WHIG member Mary Matalin gave a convoluted explanation of how the White House was both changing things in Iraq and keeping them the same. Her cockamamie explanation of how tactics were changing though the strategy wasn't showed she doesn’t know the difference between a tactic and a strategy and a broomstick other than the talking points she gets from Dick Cheney's office.

A change in tactics, no matter how good those tactics may be, is for naught if the fundamental strategy they serve is still profoundly flawed. You can win a thousand battles, etc.

And no amount of spin can make up for a failed strategy that our political and military leaders continue to cling to.

Rovewellian media choirboy Tucker Carlson recently gave one of the best defenses of the neoconservative noise machine I've heard in quite some time. Speaking of the Pat Tillman friendly fire death story cover up, he said, "Let me speak on behalf of everyone who's ever told a lie. Telling the truth is really hard."

To paraphrase Huey Lewis, "The old boy may be barely breathing, but the heart of irony is still beating."

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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

Wherefore Iraq?

“No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”

-- Carl von Clausewitz

More than three years into our Iraq misadventure, the Bush administration has yet to give us a clear explanation of why we invaded that country and what we hoped to accomplish by it. I in no way believe that they were as fuzzy on their war aims as they appear to have been, and as they appear to be now.

The paper trail of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) makes it quite clear that the neoconservatives were determined to remove Saddam Hussein from power by military means years before the 2000 election. While the PNAC at various times cited weapons of mass destruction and protection of Israel as motivations for an invasion of Iraq, the real aim was to establish an expanded military footprint in the Middle East in order to control the flow of the region's oil, thereby giving the U.S. a virtual stranglehold on global energy and the global economy. Hussein himself was less of an immediate threat than a convenient excuse to execute the plan. From the PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses published in September of 2000:

The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. (Page 14.)

The neocons were realistic enough at the time to know American's wouldn't support their imperialistic vision absent something like "a new Pearl Harbor."

The 9/11 attacks of 2001 gave PNACers like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and others--by then in control of the reigning administration--the Pearl Harbor they needed, and they proceeded to pop the lid on the neocon can of spank.

It's important to note that prior to the 9/11 attacks, PNAC literature made little to no mention of Osama Bin Laden, his al Qaeda network, of Hezbollah or Hamas or of terrorism in general.

Would Have, Could Have, Should Have

That 9/11 was easily traceable to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization, operating out of Afghanistan, must have given the neocons by then in power joy beyond their wildest dreams. They had to take time to build a firmer case for invading Iraq based on the attacks, but already had more justification than they needed to go into Afghanistan.

While Afghanistan has little to no energy or economic assets, its physical position offered a profound geo-strategic lever to the neoconservative's strategy for sewing up the Middle East region and its oil reserves. Had we managed to establish permanent military bases and stable U.S. compliant governments in both Afghanistan and Iraq, while simultaneously bringing Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi to leash, America would have had a lock on both the center and the periphery of the Islamic part of the world. Iran would have been isolated and surrounded, and we may have been able to elbow an emerging China and a re-emerging Russia out of the Middle East and Africa forever.

With physical control of the balance of the world's fuel and mineral resources, the U.S. could have commanded the cooperation of Western Europe and South America. Isolated, China and Russia would have had little choice but to play along with a semi-permanent U.S. hegemony as well, and the neoconservative dream would have been realized.

Alas

The "victory" the neoconservatives envisioned is now unachievable, and has given our peer competitors a critical vulnerability to exploit. Our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown our military's decisive edge in symmetrical combat to be impotent at accomplishing our national aims. The neocons may have been "clear in their minds" what they wanted to achieve and how they intended to achieve it, but they were wrong.

China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela, through superior strategies, have sat on the sidelines and watched the U.S. bang its helmet into the wall and shoot itself in the foot. Our adversaries play a sophisticated game of contract bridge with a full deck while we continue to play the child's game of war with a handful of deuces.

No nation in its senses, however powerful, ought to be doing that.

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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.