Like Iraq, Like Afghanistan: When Will the Bleeding Stop?

Also at Kos.

We've known for years that the Iraqi police we've been training can't be trusted. The force is infiltrated by militia members who have formed death squads, and in some instances, Iraqi police have aided in attacks on U.S. troops.

Now James Glanz and David Rhode of the New York Times reveal a similar situation in Afghanistan:

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department has found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone.

In its most significant finding, the report said that no effective field training program had been established in Afghanistan, at least in part because of a slow, ineffectual start and understaffing.

A couple of things here: 1) the Taliban didn't fall very far or very hard, because they've made a major comeback, and 2) I bet we can all guess who all those missing policemen and equipment are with now. Will the Bush administration establish a bipartisan blue ribbon committee to come up with the same conclusion the rest of us have?

"Experts" say that the U.S. has made the same mistakes training the Afghan police forces that it made training Iraqi police. That's not surprising, considering that the U.S. hired the same contracting company to train police in both countries. DynCorp, based in Virginia, has received $1.6 billion for its training and security work in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last three fiscal years.

Founded in 1946 by World War II veterans looking to cash in on their military contacts, DynCorp has a colorful history as one of the world's premier mercenary organizations. Today, according to a report by CorpWatch:

[A]rmed DynCorp employees make up the core of the police force in Bosnia. DynCorp troops protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai, while DynCorp planes and pilots fly the defoliation missions over the coca crops in Colombia. Back home in the United States Dyncorp is in charge of the border posts between the US and Mexico, many of the Pentagon's weapons-testing ranges and the entire Air Force One fleet of presidential planes and helicopters. The company also reviews security clearance applications of military and civilian personnel for the Navy.

Like most of our fine defense contracting outfits, DynCorp is a long time player in the political back-scratching game. The Center for Public Integrity has statistics on DynCorp's awarded defense contracts and political contributions from 1998 to 2003. Dyncorp received over $4.1 trillion in defense contracts during that period, a nice return for just over $315,000 in campaign contributions, 71 percent of which (shock, awe) went to Republican candidates and organizations.

Stand Up, Stand Down, Sit Down, Fall Down

DynCorp is hardly alone in America's war profiteering industry, but they are notably responsible among defense contractors for the failure of "stand up, stand down," which young Mister Bush declared to be the keystone of our Iraq strategy back in June of 2005.

Given that "standing up" was such a critical factor in our strategy, and that so much of the responsibility for executing that strategy was placed on DynCorp, you might think someone in the U.S. government would have kept an eye on what they were doing, but no.

From the NYT piece by Glanz and Rhode:

The [Pentagon/State Department] report does not suggest that DynCorp held any responsibility for the program’s failures, but former Afghan officials and several American policing experts who have examined DynCorp’s training on the ground say that the company is partly to blame for long delays and that the use of private contractors for training should be reviewed. Afghan officials have complained about the high cost of the advisers and have said that some have too little experience…

But there was plenty of covering from State Department officials. Howard J. Krongard, inspector general at the State Department…

…acknowledged the seriousness of the report’s criticisms. But he said in a statement in answer to questions about the report that in the face of obstacles like largely illiterate recruits, low pay and corruption, the program was “generally well conceived and well executed.”

What? What? The program to train Afghan police is an abysmal failure, but it was “generally well conceived and well executed?” How much longer are we to believe that Bush appointed inspectors general and doing any actual inspecting?

The report says that management of the DynCorp contract by United States government officials in Afghanistan has fallen into a state of disarray; conflicting military and civilian bureaucracies could not even find a copy of the contract to clarify for auditors exactly what it called for.

They can't find a copy of the contract? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What the…

Or why should we expect that inspectors general have any authority whatsoever to actually inspect any government spending? Lurita Alexis Doan, the new Bush appointee to head the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) who is (more shock and awe) a former government contractor, wants to cut $5 million from the GSA inspector general's budget. The GSA oversees more than $56 billion in annual contract awards to Defense and Homeland Security Department contractors.

And I hope you be too shocked or awed to know that GSA oversees defense contracts awarded out to DynCorp.

Doesn't that just make you want to put your hand over your heart and salute the flag?

To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what your country is doing to you, and how far up it's doing it, and how many gauze pads will it take to stop the bleeding once it's done doing it, assuming you can ever make it stop doing it to you.

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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.

Monday Preview: Fools, Fanatics and Iraq Lessons Learned

What I've feared the most about our woebegone war in Iraq is coming to pass. We're learning nothing from the experience, and we're taking our "lessons" from people who are trying to make excuses for their mistakes.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Paul Bremer, who was young Mister Bush's pick to head the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, has written a new afterword to his book on what went wrong with Operation Iraqi Freedom.

"The biggest obstacle [to progress] has been the failure to provide adequate security for the Iraqi people," writes Mr. Bremer.

Really? Let's get something straight here. The only legitimate purpose of government is to provide security for its people. Bremer is a career diplomat who earned an advanced degree in political studies. You'd think he'd have understood that when, under his care, Iraq's security situation went to hell in a coal car.

Another "lessons learned on Iraq" book writer is Larry Diamond, a "democracy expert" who was a senior adviser to Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. Diamond wrote "If we learn from our mistakes, our next engagement to help rebuild a collapsed state might have a more successful outcome."

No, Larry. If we learn from our mistakes, we won't collapse any more states that we have to rebuild.

You may not be surprised to learn that Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, which is part of the network of neoconservative think tanks that include the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Heritage Foundation, and Bill Kristol's infamous Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The people writing the lessons learned on the Iraq disaster are the very people who created it, and who have a vital stake in rewriting history before anybody figures out they're the ones responsible for one of history's most profound fiascos.

Weekly Standard publisher and PNAC founder William Kristol, whose father Irving is considered to be the founder of American neoconservatism, has called on numerous occasions to send more ground troops into Iraq, even though he has no knowledge of warfare, much less the kind of warfare he helped create in Iraq. Here's a perfect example from an article he recently co-authored for the Washington Post of just how sans-a-clue Kristol is about his favorite form of national power:

The bottom line is this: More U.S. troops in Iraq would improve our chances of winning a decisive battle at a decisive moment. This means the ability to succeed in Iraq is, to some significant degree, within our control. The president should therefore order a substantial surge in overall troop levels in Iraq, with the additional forces focused on securing Baghdad.

Insurgent forces, especially successful ones like the ones we face in Iraq, don't engage in decisive battles with superior, conventional military units. That's Asymmetric Warfare 101 stuff. It doesn't surprise me that Kristol doesn't know that, but why anybody still listens to Kristol or any of his cronies in the Big Brother Broadcast Network is a mystery mini-series to me.

But listen they do. Conservatives and liberals alike are pushing for a U.S. force structure shift that would increase the size of our ground forces, but why would they want to do that?

Back to the bogus lessons learned from Iraq. Proponents of establishing a larger ground force base their arguments on the principle that we needed--or need--a larger ground force to "win" in Iraq. But the real lesson from Iraq is that invade-and-occupy wars are counterproductive.

So why would we want to pursue a force strategy that supports a grand strategy of pursuing further counterproductive wars?

Pavlov's Dogs of War

Don't think for a lightning bug's blink that our Iraq experience has taught the neoconservatives anything.

In a recent piece for The Australian, Joshua Muravchi, who lo-and-behold is a "resident scholar" with the American Enterprise Institute, says "Neo-conservatism isn't dead, it's the only viable option." And that "the neo-con strategy of trying to transform the Middle East, however blemished, remains without alternative."

The neo-con strategy remains without alternative.

Oh my stars and stripes.

Fools and fanatics. Absurdities and atrocities. Are the imbeciles putting us on, or do they really mean it?

More to the point: will we ever learn to ignore the absurdities of fools and fanatics, or will we continue to act like imbeciles and commit their atrocities for them?

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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 Whatchamacallit War in Iraq

From the Brave New World Dictionary:

civil war: n. whatever the Bush administration says a civil war is. Or isn't.

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When is a bribe not a bribe?

When you call it something else.

On Wolf Blitzer's Late Edition Sunday morning, Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, discussed the proposed of "paying" cooperative Iraqi politicians. But we're not talking about offering "bribes" Khalilzad says. We're offering to, uh, you know, "level the playing field."

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When is a lie not a lie?

When you call it something else.

We now know that young Bush was preparing to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense even as he told America and the rest of the world that Rummy would be around for the rest of the administration's term.

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, making the Sunday political gab show rounds, stuck to the company line that Bush wasn't lying; he just didn't want considerations over the war to affect the elections.

So what was all of Bush's campaign trail "Defeat-ocrats" talk about?

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When is a civil war not a civil war?

When you call it something else.

Within hours of NBC's announcement that the network now considers the situation in Iraq to be a civil war, Bush and his echo chamberlains hit the airways to blame all the violence in that country on al-Qaeda. Even though our own military admits that al-Qaeda in Iraq is responsible for only a small fraction of the attacks. Even though the Pentagon has all but abandoned efforts to retake the province of al-Anbar, al-Qaeda's only strong hold. Even though Joint Chiefs chairman General Peter Pace wants to take U.S. troops out of al-Anbar where they're actually fighting terrorists and put them in Baghdad, where they'll be smack dab in the middle of the whatchamacallit.

The Whatchamacallit War

"All battles are won or lost before they are fought."

-- Sun Tzu

Mission accomplished. Dead enders. Henny Penny. Turning corners. Last throes. Purple fingers. Cut and run. We'll win unless we quit…

If you could win wars by spinning them, we would have won the war in Iraq before we even started it. Lamentably, the pre-war spin all but guaranteed defeat. The Iraq invasion was sold to the American public on fuzzy pretexts, designed on flawed assumptions about the post-combat political environment, and sustained on glittering Rovewellian generalities.

More than ever, the administration's eleventh hour war talk is sounding like after-midnight bar talk. Senator Jon Kyle (R-Arizona) told Blitzer on Sunday that we have to come up with a way to "win" in Iraq. There is no way to win in Iraq. There may be a way to make the best of a bad situation, but we won't find a way to do that as long as likes of Kyle keep pushing bunker mentality bunk-ola on the American public.

According to Michael R. Gordon and David S. Cloud of the Washington Post, Donald Rumsfeld submitted a memo to Bush two days before he resigned that said "In my view it is time for a major adjustment” and that “Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.”

Well no kidding. It sure was nice of Rummy to make a deathbed confession. He must be starting to sweat about what's waiting for him in the next life.

But to his credit, Rumsfeld's memo contained a number of pragmatic options, the best of which is to redeploy U.S. forces from "vulnerable positions" in Baghdad and elsewhere to Kuwait and safer areas of Iraq. Which is what Congressman John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania) called for more than a year ago.

What both Rumsfeld and Murtha have proposed is what we will inevitably do. How much more time will pass before whatchamacallhim decides to do 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.

Iraq: More Bush Bunker Bunk

Former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card says we don't want to leave a safe haven in Iraq for al-Qaeda terrorists. He repeated that meme several times on MSNBC Friday morning.

Riddle me this, Andy. If we're so concerned about Iraq becoming a haven for al-Qaeda, why is Joint Chiefs chairman Peter Pace talking about pulling U.S. troops our of al-Anbar province, which is under control of al-Qaeda in Iraq and moving them to Baghdad?

MSNBC's anchor lady didn't bother to ask Card that question, nor did she push back when Card trotted out standard wheeze about it being "a different world since 9/11" two or three times.

Three and a half years into America's finest fiasco, administration types are still feeding us the same lame set of talking points from Karl Rove's bunk bunker and mainstream media types are still letting them get away with it.

Faith Based Warfare

Card's comments about al-Qaeda echo the assertions of Pace and young Mister Bush himself that al-Qaeda is responsible for the sectarian violence in Iraq.

If that's the case, al-Qaeda in Iraq is the "enemy" center of gravity, and you don't need a graduate degree in war knowledge from a war college to know that defeating the bad guys' center of gravity is the key to winning a war. So why does Pace want to pull troops away from fighting the enemy center of gravity and divert them to Baghdad where they'll be trapped in the middle of, well, let's call it "civil sectarian violence?"

As I mentioned a few days ago, a lesson I learned as a career military officer is that when the top brass say and do things that don't make sense, it means that they're 1) idiots, 2) losing their grip, 3) congenital jerks, 4) hiding their real agendas or 5) influenced by some combination of any or all of the other four.

If Pace and Bush really believe al Qaeda in Iraq is the center of gravity but choose not to confront it, they're not in their right minds. I've heard that Pace is at heart a good guy, but ample evidence indicates that Bush is a congenital jerk. The overwhelming burden of proof also tells us that Bush is a master of hiding his real agenda.

But regardless of what's really going on in the hearts and minds of our Commander in Chief and his top general, neither of them is making sense, and that's something to be very, very concerned about.

Warfare by Committee

If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, Iraq is a war being run by a coalition of middle school student councils.

On the flight home from Mister Bush's awkward talks in Jordan with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley told the gaggle on Air Force One that the recommendations of the "bipartisan" Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq would not be taken as "sacrosanct."

According to Robin Wright of the Washington Post, Bush is likely to take a sanctimonious attitude toward any advice he receives.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Jordan yesterday that Bush plans to receive the report of the Iraq Study Group on Wednesday, then hear more from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his own policy review team. "Then I think he'll set out a direction that adjusts our policy to be appropriate to the circumstances that the Iraqis now face," Rice told reporters traveling with her.

That's standard Condi gargle noise that means nothing's going to change.

Including the nonsense we'll continue to hear from the Rovewellians on why it hasn't.

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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.

Iraq: More Dubya Talk

Also at Kos.

The "meeting of the mindless" has taken place in Jordan, and young Mister Bush has declared that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is "the right guy for Iraq" and that "We're going to stay in Iraq to get the job done so long as the government wants us there."

Guess what. The Iraqi government is going to want us there as long as al-Maliki is the government. That's why he's the "right guy."

Bush and Maliki have agreed to speed up the process of training Iraqi troops, but won't set a timetable for doing that.

Guess what. If there's no timetable for training up Iraqi troops, they won't get trained up.

Mister Bush says the training of Iraqi troops is "evolving from ground zero."

Guess what. Iraqi troop training was at ground zero three years ago. With no timetable for bringing them up to ground one, they'll be at ground zero three years from now.

Guess what else. It doesn't matter how fast Iraqi troops "stand up" because they'll still insist on sitting down on the job. Time and time and time again, Iraq's army has refused to participate in operations because its soldiers don't want to fight other Iraqis, and its police force is more corrupt than Chicago's cops were during the Al Capone era.

When asked by reporters when he expects the transfer of responsibility to Iraqi forces to take place, Bush said, "As soon as possible… I've been asked about timetables ever since we got into this. All the timetables mean is a timetable for withdrawal… All that does is set people up for unrealistic expectations."

"Unrealistic expectations" is the most realistic thing Bush has said in six years. It's unrealistic to expect that Maliki can deliver a political solution in Iraq, and it's unrealistic to think that Bush has any intention of ever pulling troops out of Iraq.

And the sad reality is that the longer Bush and his coterie of yes men are in charge of America, and the longer they're able to molest the Middle East situation, the more impossible it will be to ever extract ourselves from it.

Which means everything's going according to plan, I'd guess.

Guess Again

In case you haven't noticed, the big media have been running the next round of Iran boo noise lately. Everything going wrong in Iraq is Iran's fault. Iran is training and arming the Shiite militias.

It's a funny thing, though. The real problem in Iraq, according to Bush, is al-Qaeda, which is "fomenting" all the sectarian violence, even though the Pentagon says that al-Qaeda only represents a tiny fraction of the "enemy" forces in Iraq.

But here's an even funnier thing. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Peter Pace, who also says al-Qaeda is the main culprit in Iraq, is pulling troops out of the al-Anbar province, al-Qaeda in Iraq's base of operations, and putting them in Baghdad, smack in the middle of the civil war between Shiites and Muslims that both Bush and Pace deny is occurring. A recent Marine Corps intelligence assessment said that the battle for al-Anbar is unwinnable without a major infusion of more troops in the region. You'd think that Pace, a Marine himself, might pay heed to that report, and might suggest that rather than take troops out of Anbar to reinforce Baghdad, we should take troops out of Baghdad to reinforce Anbar.

But no. That makes way too much sense for the Pentagon to suggest it, and our Pumpkin Eater JCS chairman isn't about to recommend something to our Commander in Chief that he doesn't want to hear.

Because, you see, if we were to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq, well, then we wouldn't have an excuse to stick around in Iraq to try and put down a civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites. At the same time, if we don't make it look like the Shiites are the bad guys, or at least some of them, because then we can't blame Iran for being behind all the sectarian violence. Because the Iranians are Shiites, see, and they're the main instigators in all this.

Yeah, Maliki is a Shiite too, but he's our kind of Shiite, the kind that wants us to stick around in Iraq so those al-Qaeda sympathizing Sunnis don't try to take Iraq over from those Iran sympathizing Shiites, who are those Shiites other than Maliki. Except that Maliki is talking to the Iranians, but that makes no never mind, because the Iranian Shiites are Persians, see, and the Iraqi Shiites are Arabs, and Arabs and Persians don't like each other even if they're both Shiites.

And besides, the Iranians are friends with al-Qaeda even though the Iranians are Persians and Shiites and al-Qaeda is an Arab Sunni outfit.

Does everybody get the picture now?

Anybody's Guess

Alas America. We had so much potential, after the fall of the Soviet Union, to lead the world into an unprecedented age of peace and prosperity, and look what happened. Our political leaders are ideological mouth breathers and our military leaders are moral cowards content to let their troops get chewed up in a senseless war for which there is no military solution.

Don't expect any recommendations of the Baker Commission to make a tinker's dam worth of difference in the Middle East Bush-mania, and if you think the newly elected Democratic Congress will be able to rein Bush in, guess again.

The only way we can turn this pathetic situation around is to impeach both Bush and that Thing/King Pin/Penguin looking bastard Dick Cheney, and ash can every careerist four-star military officer who went bottoms-up for them.

If you think that's going to happen in the next two years, guess again.

Watch for more "official leaks" that encourage us to support spreading the Gulf region lunacy into Iran and Syria. And guess who will be behind them. (Hint: he's already been mentioned in this article, and is an old neocon buddy of Dan Quayle.)

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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's Iraq: Son of Stay the Course

Also at Kos.

Young Mister Bush has rejected the description of the situation in Iraq as a "civil war." Can you believe it?

In a NATO summit speech in Latvia on Tuesday, he rejected the "pessimistic" assessments of his Middle East policy and vowed not to pull U.S. troops from Iraq until they accomplish the mission there.

How does he plan to accomplish the mission? By golly, he's going to break down and ask for advice from a trusted expert--Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. From the Washington Post:

Previewing the message he will carry with him Wednesday to Amman, Jordan, where he is scheduled to meet Maliki, Bush said he would ask the Iraqi leader, "What do we need to do to succeed? What is your strategy in dealing with the sectarian violence?"

It's no surprise to me that Bush would turn for advice to the one head of state who's a bigger screw up than he is. Maliki's 24 point reconciliation plan, which he introduced back in June, has gone over like a lead zeppelin. Shia cleric and Mahdi Army leader Muqtada al-Sadr, once Malaki's main political ally, has publicly denounced the government and labeled Iraq's Sunnis as "terrorists." Asking Maliki for sound strategic advice is like trying to get milk from a bullfrog.

The next thing you know, Bush will seek marriage counseling from Pamela Anderson.

Tom Ricks, military correspondent with the Washington Post and author of Fiasco, revealed Tuesday on MSNBC that there's talk in the Pentagon of dropping the support of the reconciliation policy and throwing in with the Shiites. As crazy as that sounds, it makes a lot more sense than what we're doing now. Positioning troops in the middle of a multi-sided civil war and expecting their mere "presence" to accomplish anything defies wisdom learned from millennia of military history.

But which Shias do we side with? Al-Sadr has declared that "I am an enemy of America and America is my enemy until the last day of judgment." That doesn’t sound like the kind of talk old Dead or Alive Dubya is likely to cotton up to.

So if we throw our weight behind Maliki, we'll have to fight al-Sadr's followers as well as the Sunnis. And since Maliki is making coo noise with Iran and Syria, crawling in the sack with him will mean that we're rubbing bellies with the "axis of evil" as well.

Measures of Effectiveness

"Measures of effectiveness" (MOEs) are traditional metrics by which military planners and staffers determine the progress of a war. The best Iraq MOEs the Pentagon can come up with are things like "numbers of schools painted" and "total pieces of candy handed out to Iraqi kids."

Iraq has eclipsed Vietnam as the most incompetently run war in U.S. history. It's not a foreign policy pursuit of America's interests. It's a manhood measuring contest between Bush and the rest of the world, and he refuses to accept that he's coming up short.

Son of Stay the Course

Bush wants to win, but he doesn’t want to win in the Anbar province, which of course, means General Peter Pace (Joint Chiefs chairman), General John Abizaid (head of Central Command) and General George Casey (Iraq theater commander) don't either.

Sunni dominated al-Anbar is the main base of operations for al-Qaeda in Iraq. A recent Marine Corp intelligence assessment concluded that without a massive input of more troops, the situation there is "unwinnable."

Pace wants to move the U.S. troops in Anbar to Baghdad and turn Anbar over to Iraqi troops. Abizaid and Casey don't want to put any more U.S. troops in Iraq.

So in the "central front" of our war on terror, the Pentagon wants to abandon an entire province to the only actual terrorists in the country and place more U.S. troops into the central front of the Iraqi civil war.

The casual observer might think it would make more sense to take the troops in Baghdad out of the middle of the civil war and use them to reinforce the troops in Anbar to fight the terrorists, especially when Mister Bush claims that the violence in Iraq is "fomented in my opinion because of these attacks by al-Qaida causing people to seek reprisal."

We're not fighting them over there so we, uh…er…uhm…

With each passing day, it appears more and more that this war is being run by Porky Pig and the rest of the Loony Tunes.

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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.

Iraq: A Civil War by Any Other Name

NBC now says Iraq is in a civil war. I guess that makes it official. But don't think for a second that the poppycock rhetoric regarding Iraq will end any time soon, just because the major news agencies are calling it what it really is. Finally.

Just about any dictionary you pick up defines "civil war" as a war between opposing groups within a country. So unless you deny that what's been going on in Iraq for the past few years is a "war," how can you deny that the war going on in Iraq is a civil war? Young Mister Bush says we're in a war. That's how he justifies treating the Constitution like a sanitary grooming item. And he says Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, so if there's a war in Iraq, it’s a civil war, right?

That's not how the White House sees it, but the White House defines everything by their Brave New World Dictionary, so words mean whatever they want them to mean. The Bush administration takes its rhetorical cues from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which the Black Knight, having had all four limbs hacked off at the trunk in mortal combat, roars, "'Tis but a flesh wound."

All but the most autistic segment of the right wing base know what this semantic lap dance is about. There's general agreement that U.S. troops shouldn't be stuck in the middle of a civil war, and if there's a civil war in Iraq, logic dictates that we should get out troops out of there. So all this Rovewellian jive about what to call the war is a last ditch effort to justify an unjustifiable policy and strategy.

Parsing Wars

Even so called "authorities" who now sign on to the civil war term continue to parse the situation.

Retired Army four-star Wayne Downing, one of MSNBC's military "experts," allowed as how, yes, it's a civil war, even though he's been avoiding use of that term for quite a while because it's so, well, politically charged and such. But when asked if the U.S. should take sides with either the Sunnis or the Shias, he said that no, we don't want to do that.

That was a remarkable piece of dissembling.

Nothing about war is cut and dried, but a pretty good rule of thumb is that when you step into the middle of somebody else's war, you have two basic mission options: peacekeeping and peace enforcement.

In a peacekeeping mission, you're a neutral honest broker. You're simply standing between the belligerents to keep catcalling contests from becoming major conflagrations. Peacekeeping requires a number of things, not the least of which are that the belligerents have to actually want peace and their leadership needs to have control of their forces. It's clear that in Iraq, the belligerents have no interest in achieving a lasting peace any time in the near future and none of the belligerent faction leaders seem to have a tight control of their fighters.

In peace enforcement, you pick a side and fight for it. In many ways, that amounts to acting as a mercenary force for whoever's side you take, which is more or less what we've been doing for Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

This peacekeeping/peace enforcement distinction is not advanced astrophysics. It's war college 101 stuff. The notion that Downing, a retired four-star who once led U.S. Special Operations Command could not know it defies believability.

Bunker Bunk

Here's something I learned during my military career that they didn't teach at the war colleges. When the big brass do or say things that don't make sense, it usually means that 1) they're idiots, 2) they're going off the deep end, 3) they're congenital jerks, 4) they have a hidden agenda or 5) some combination of the other four. If you've never had any military experience, you've probably noticed the same phenomenon in the civilian work force.

I don't care to speculate on where Downing's coming from when he says things like "yeah, it's a civil war but we shouldn't take sides" because it doesn't really matter where he's coming from. What matters is that a "leading authority" like him will go on national television and feed the American public a line of bunker mentality bunk, and that the news network he's feeding it through will pay him to do it.

And there's no need to single out Downing as the main culprit in the bunk blowing wars. 90 percent of the people you see or hear or read in the media want to set off a pack of matches in your shoe. Sometimes their bias is obvious. Just about everybody knows what the likes of Ann Coulter are up to. When the media trot out a pair of left/right, he said/she said pundits to have a political pillow fight, we pretty much know what we're seeing--a freak show put on by highly compensated freaks for the purpose of stealing ratings from the freak shows on the other media outlets.

But other times, the bias is disguised as "critical" analysis from an "honest" broker. Dan Goure is a perfect example of this. MSNBC regularly features him as an expert on everything from the war to the economy to global warming without notifying the audience that Goure is a card carrying neocon who goes on camera with a pocketful of talking points crafted by the right wing think tank network.

Then you have the types you don't know what to make of like retired Army Major General John Batiste. Batiste was one of the 12 angry generals who called for Rumsfeld's resignation, so you want to think he's a "good guy." But his consistent opinion, as expressed in a recent op-ed piece he authored, is that "victory will require sacrifice" and that we should "mobilize the United States" in order to achieve that victory. Like most "Go Big, Go Long, Go Broke" advocates, Batiste fails to define what exactly "victory" might consist of, except to say that it will require "leadership" and that it's "non-negotiable."

I'm willing to accept that Batiste is speaking from the heart and stating what he truly believes, but that makes no never mind. Believing the moon is made of green cheese doesn't make it so, no matter how many glittering emotional generalities you throw into your argument that says it is.

So stand by for more palaver about how we should stick with Stay the Course or whatever Son of Stay the Course turns out to be. But mark my words: if we keep our troops in the middle of whatever synonym for "disaster" you care to describe the situation in Iraq with, they'll either help one side commit genocide on the other or get ground into grit in the middle of it.

Here's something else I learned, long before I joined the military. We were playing volleyball in high school gym class, and two guys got into a fistfight. Being a varsity football player and the biggest kid in the class, I stepped into the middle of it, trying to break it up, and got socked in the face three times. I never threw a punch back at either of the other two guys.

I wound up going to the principal's office. The other two guys didn't.

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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.

Iraq: Winners Know When to Quit, Losers Don't

Contrary to what you've probably heard your whole life, winners do quit, and they know when to do it. Losers don't know when to quit digging. The "experts" agree that the only solution to the Iraq situation is a political one, and the prospects for a political solution are vanishing like a blind dowager's silverware.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Shia cleric and militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr has pushed the plunger on his threat to abandon support of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Malaki:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Followers of the militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr took over state-run television Saturday to denounce the Iraqi government, label Sunnis "terrorists" and issue what appeared to many viewers as a call to arms…

…Al-Maliki's administration acknowledged it was powerless to interrupt the pro-Sadr program on the official Iraqiya channel, during which Sadr City residents shouted, "There is no government! There is no state!"

… Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia now controls wide swaths of the capital, his politicians are the backbone of the Cabinet, and his followers deeply entrenched in the Iraqi security forces. Sectarian violence has spun so rapidly out of control since the Sadr City blasts, however, that it's not clear whether even al-Sadr has the authority - or the will - to stop the cycle of bloodshed.

If al-Maliki makes it to Jordan this week for his meeting with young Mister Bush, I'll be surprised if he ever goes back to Iraq.

Go Big, Go Long, Go Forever

The talk on alternative Iraq strategies is turning nuttier than a pecan factory. As the political situation unravels like a cheap acrylic sweater, politicians and pundits continue to discuss the pros and cons of proposed military courses of action.

Some still argue for a reduced troop presence in Iraq, but what could fewer troops accomplish that the number of troops we have there now can't?

Then we have the "Go Bigots," whose ranks have been joined by former Army major general and vocal Rumsfeld critic John Batiste. In a Milwaukee Journal Sentinal op-ed piece, Batiste says, "Iraq is a failed state created by the United States. Our senior leadership did this to Iraq, ourselves and our allies."

But, Batiste maintains…

Failure [in Iraq] would injure the U.S. in ways that we cannot fathom, and, in the end, it would cost far more than it would to save Iraq…

…it is not too late, however. Victory is non-negotiable, and we must finish what we started in Iraq with new leadership and a new strategy. We no longer can fight this war on the cheap.

We're spending $2 billion a week on this war (that our government admits to), and Batiste calls that fighting "on the cheap?" What "new leadership" is Batiste referring to? Al-Sadr? What did we start in Iraq that Batiste thinks we can finish? The answer to that, it seems, is the end of the world as we know it, because the key component of the strategy he proposes is the stuff of a neoconservative masturbatory fantasy.

Put our government on a wartime footing. Consider alternative ways to finance the war with rationing programs and fuel surcharges. Our leaders need to step up and explain the "what, why, how long and what it will cost" to each and every one of us.

Properly resource our great military in force structure and dollars. Our high-performing Army and Marine Corps are far too small for our national strategy. They are at a breaking point, and they no longer are in a position to respond to other worldwide contingencies. Indeed, a draft may be required to win a protracted war on terror.

In other words, Batiste believes that the solution to a problem for which there is no military solution is to mobilize the country to support expanded military action. Batiste is as Mad Hatter crazy as Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, John Bolton, and the rest of the neoconservative cabal that got us into this goat rope.

I can't say for certain what Batiste's motivation is for proposing such a "war without end" scheme, but it's interesting to note that he's now president of Klein Steel Service of Rochester, New York, a company that, among other things, does contract work for the Department of Defense.

Go Stupid

On CNN's Sunday political show Late Edition, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said that sure, America could mobilize and "win" in Iraq, but that "common sense indicates it's not worth it."

Zbig is right; it's not worth it. Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply in contemporary America. It's entirely too possible that the neocon bull feather merchants who want to expand the war will get their way by appealing to the politically autistic segment of the U.S. population's childish sense of virility. They'll exhort the Big Brother Broadcast audience to show the "resolve" to do for the Iraqis what the Iraqis don't have the resolve to do for themselves. Which is, of course, the kind of resolve it takes to stick your private parts into a wood chipper to show your "friends" how tough you are.

The sooner we adopt some variation of Jack Murtha's redeployment to the periphery plan, the better off we'll be.

Getting back to the "winners and losers" theme: winners know how to cut their losses; losers know how to cut off their genitals.

Or as Kenny Rogers put it, "You've got to know when to fold."

Afterbrow

Within an hour of posting this article on Pen and Sword, I got several visits from http://www.kleinsteel.com/exch...-know-when-to-quit-losers.html.

When I tried to backtrack to these links, I ran into a password firewall.

The front page of kleinsteel.com says, "Please bear with us as we transition to our new website. Our Product Database will be available soon."

I can't shake the image of Rowan and Martin's Laugh In comedian Arte Johnson, in his Nazi soldier's uniform, rising up from behind a potted palm, sucking on a cigarette, and saying, "Verrry interesting!"

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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.

Iraq: Worster to Worsterer in Sadr City

Worsterer: from the San Jose Mercury News:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Followers of the militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr took over state-run television Saturday to denounce the Iraqi government, label Sunnis "terrorists" and issue what appeared to many viewers as a call to arms.

The two-hour broadcast from a community gathering in the heart of the Shiite militia stronghold of Sadr City included three members of al-Sadr's parliamentary bloc, who took questions from outraged residents demanding revenge for a series of car bombings that killed some 200 people Thursday.

Meanwhile, on Meet the Press, pundits argued whether or not what's going on in Iraq is a "civil war."

A quagmire by any other name...

Iraq and a Hard Place: Al Sadr Tells Maliki Don't Meet With Bush

It continues to go from worst to worster.

The security situation in Iraq is so bad that young Mister Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki had to schedule a meeting in another country to talk about it. Then Shiite cleric and militia leader Muqtada al Sadr warned through an intermediary that if "Mr. Prime Minister does not cancel his meeting with Bush the criminal in Jordan, we will suspend our membership at the Council of Deputies (parliament) and government."

Al Sadr's political bloc blames U.S. troops for the Thursday bombings in Sadr City that killed more than 200. Al Sadr follower Qusai Abdul-Wahab said, "…occupation forces are fully responsible for these acts, and we call for the withdrawal of occupation forces or setting a timetable for their withdrawal."

Al Sadr's bloc in Iraq's parliament is Maliki's main source of political support within the country. Bush is Maliki's main source of political support outside the country. Maliki's between a rock and a hard place--whatever choice he makes his goose is cooked. I say we make the choice for him.

Him or Me

Al Sadr's group blames the U.S. troops for failing to provide security in Sadr City. So they want us to leave? Then let's leave. Much has been made of a Pentagon group's three proposed Iraq options with the jingo jive names of "Go Big," "Go Long" and "Go Home." I think it's time for a fourth option: "Go Fish."

If Maliki can't survive politically without al Sadr's support, and al Sadr wants us to leave, then the best thing we can do for Maliki is to give al Sadr what he wants.

The excuses for staying the course are wearing thin. Iraqi forces won't stand up as long as we're there. Pro war politicians and pundits warn that our departure could trigger full scale civil war that might spread throughout the region, but I have yet to hear a coherent argument that indicates our presence is doing anything to prevent that.

If al Sadr wants to blame our presence for the violence in his country, let's see him try and blame it on our absence.

If we withdraw, "they" won't follow us "here" because they don't have a way to get from "there" to here.

We never really wanted a "free and independent" Iraq. We wanted a submissive client state in which we could establish a permanent military base of operations in the center of the Gulf region to control the flow of Middle East oil. The only justification for staying the course is to take off the mask, openly admit our true war aims (everybody already knows them anyway), and tell the world, "Nope, we're not going anywhere."

That would also involve discarding the pretense of recognizing Iraqi sovereignty. Maliki's government would almost certainly fall, and we'd need to set up some form of praetorian occupation authority that would have to run the country for years--perhaps decades.

And, oh yeah, to build up a military that could support such an occupation authority for that length of time, we'd have to institute a draft.

The time has come for faux Evangelical Christian Bush to have a "come to Jesus" moment. Do you think our 60 year-old president is grown up enough yet to play "truth or consequences?" I doubt it. Sonny never had to pass a test he couldn't cheat on, and he almost certainly believes Karl and Uncle Dick's boys can come up with a way for him to spin out of yet another failure.

Stand by. The worstest is yet to come.

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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.