Somalia: jammed off the radar

I posed a question yesterday: under what authority did we conducted air strikes in southern Somalia last Sunday? The best answer I've found so far is this (as reported in the San Jose Mercury News):

The transitional government endorsed the U.S. operations against the Islamists.

``The U.S. has the right to defend itself and bomb terrorists they say are responsible for the bombing of their embassies,'' President Abdullahi Yusuf said in the Somalian capital, Mogadishu.

The embassies Yusuf referred to were the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which were bombed in 1998. The bombings are thought to have been planned by senior al-Qaeda leader Fazul Abdullah Muhammad, who was an intended target of the U.S. air strikes. No one has confirmed whether Muhammad or any other al-Qaeda members were killed in the strikes.

The strikes were part of an air-land-sea operation against al-Qaeda conducted by the U.S., Kenya, Ethiopia and the transitional Somali government. A press release at the Department of Defense says that U.S. Navy ships off the coast will stop vessels and search them for al-Qaeda terrorists attempting to leave Somalia.

According to the Boston Globe, a U.S. military official said that U.S. special forces accompanied Ethiopian troops into Somalia two weeks ago.

I suppose it's legal for U.S. ships to conduct maritime intercept operations in territorial waters at a host nation's invitation (generally speaking, "territorial waters" extend to 25 nautical miles from a country's coastline), just as I'm pretty sure it's legal for special forces to enter a country with that country's permission. And U.S. Standing Rules of Engagement allow U.S. forces the right to defend themselves in all circumstances.

But an air strike is an offensive combat operation, and authority for that sort of thing has to come from the top of the chain of command.

War Powers

The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in September 2001 states:

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

It doesn't sound as if the al-Qaeda terrorists targeted in Somalia are suspected of having had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks.

The War Powers Act of 1973 was a joint resolution passed by the legislature…

…to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicate by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations.

The Act also states that:

The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situation where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances.

Did Mr. Bush consult with Congress before ordering the air strikes in Somalia? No one I know of has answered that question. As far as I can tell, no one has even asked it.

The War Powers Act limits a president's authority to commit U.S. forces to combat to 60 days without a declaration of war or specific authorization from Congress. Will Mr. Bush wait 60 days and the go to Congress and say, "Hey, y'all mind if I keep doing this?"

The Somalia issue has been jammed off the radar by anticipation of Mr. Bush's impending "new way forward" announcement on the Iraq strategy. The timing of the Somali air strikes may be coincidental, but figure the odds of that being the case.

As I said yesterday, I hope that someone somewhere has worked out all the constitutional and statutory concerns regarding our Somali operations, and I hope that someone isn't Alberto Gonzales.

If Mr. Bush has decided he has the authority to bomb any city, town or village in the world that he thinks a terrorist may be hiding in, the United States of America has become the world's leading rogue nation.

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

What Are We Doing In Somalia?

I had several reactions to the Monday strike in Somalia by a AC-130 gunship against members of al-Qaeda.

My first thought was: yeah, that's the way you go after terrorists. Cultivate intelligence, isolate the target, and then call in special ops forces to prosecute it.

But as I read the accounts in the Washington Post and the New York Times, one word jumped out at me.

The targets of this air strike were "suspected" al Qaeda members.

The Post says the operation "may" have hit a senior terrorist figure.

Reuters reported "A U.S. attack plane killed many people with barrages of gunfire in a remote Somali village occupied by Islamists thought to be hiding at least one al Qaeda suspect," and that "…an AC-130 plane rained gunfire on the desolate southern village of Hayo."

A senior source told Reuters "I understand there are so many dead bodies and animals in the village."

We can't, of course, put together an accurate picture of what actually happened based on early media reports, but from what we think we know, perhaps we should ask the question:

Did we just blow a whole village to smithereens to get at targets we think are al-Qaeda members and whom we may or may not have hit?

MSNBC reports that further air strikes were conducted in Somalia on Tuesday, and multiple news outlets state that the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower has deployed to the area.

What are we doing?

We may have become numb to the reality of using air strikes to summarily execute individuals we "suspect" of being bad guys. No matter what kind of "precision" weapons we use to conduct these strikes, the likelihood is that they will kill someone other than the intended targets. Moreover, we've seen numerous instances of similar operations in which the intended targets turn out not to have been at the site at the time we struck it. And even when we do hit the intended targets, we're summarily executing them without trial.

I’m not endorsing this position, but an argument can be made that these sorts of air strikes are the equivalent of walking into a restaurant with a machine gun and blowing everybody away in hopes that you'll rub out a mob boss.

Under what legal authority are we conducting these kinds of strikes?

Is this the sort of thing we can justify under the Authorization for Use of Military Force that Congress passed in September 2001? The Somali government reportedly gave its approval for U.S. air strikes in that country--but does that make it okay?

We have to accept that our war on terror is going to involve ugly acts that we otherwise would prefer not to dirty our hands with. I just hope that someone, somewhere has worked out how these operations jibe with U.S. and international law.

And I hope that someone isn't Alberto Gonzales.

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

Ch-ch-ch-Cheney Still Cooking the Intelligence

I'll have more on this later in the week, but for now, read this Raw Story piece by Larisa Alexandrovna.

The nomination of retired Vice Admiral John Michael "Mike" McConnell to be Director of National Intelligence is part of an effort by the Vice President to tighten the Administration’s grip on domestic intelligence and grease the wheels for a more aggressive stance towards Iran, current and former intelligence officials believe…

“McConnell will go along with whatever [Cheney tells him to do] and make sure that no objective [National Intelligence Estimate on Iran] comes out,” one former senior intelligence officer said…

… President Reagan’s Director of Intelligence Programs for the National Security Council from 1984-1987 and onetime CIA counterterror chief Vincent Cannistraro called the nomination “a disaster.”

…“McConnell’s not an effective manager,” said former CIA officer Larry Johnson. “He will be likely to acquiesce to White House pressure on issues.”
Johnson called McConnell “Rummyesque.”

Hi ho!

(Apologies to Larisa for using a tad more than "fair use" copy. I hope she and Raw Story will understand and approve.)

You might also want to visit or revisit my article from Friday on why Navy Admiral William Fallon has been named to take over Central Command.

Neocon Nation: Ignoring Sun Tzu

Also at Kos

Lieutenant General Raymond T. Ordierno, who took over as operational commander in Iraq last month, says that even with additional American troops deployed to Iraq it may take "two or three years" for U.S. and Iraqi forces to turn the tide in that country.

John F. Burns of the New York Times reports that "In his first lengthy meeting with reporters, General Odierno, 52, struck a cautious note about American prospects, saying much will depend on whether commanders can show enough progress to stem eroding support in the United States for the war."

I’m of two minds about Odierno's comment.

On one hand, I'm encouraged to see that Odierno understands that support of the American electorate is necessary to persist in a war that seems to have little hope of achieving an end state that U.S. political leaders have consistently been unable to describe in a coherent manner. On the other hand, I'm concerned that Odierno is falling into the standard disclaimer mode of blaming lack of public support for the failures of the military and its commanders to achieve our foreign policy objectives.

Since the fall of Saigon, military pundits in and out of uniform have tried to lay blame for America's defeat in Vietnam on hippies, the "liberal" press and a limp wrested Democratically controlled Congress. The truth is that we lost Vietnam in Vietnam, thanks to bad generals and politicians who started a bad war for bad reasons and ran it badly for over a decade. Similarly, we're not presently losing our so-called "war" on terror on the home front. We're losing it in two third world sinkholes called Iraq and Afghanistan.

Wisdom of Ages

The ancient Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu said "Every battle is won before it is ever fought."

Sun Tzu also said "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."

And: "When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength."

And: "If the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain."

And: "Contributing to maintain an army at a distance causes the people to be impoverished."

And: "In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them."

And: "It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on."

And: "In war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory."

I reckon you get the idea.

We lost this "war" before we started it. The neoconservative cabal headed by Bill Kristol that goaded us into it had no experience of war, didn't know how to conduct one, shattered and destroyed and turned loose the Iraqi Army without considering the consequences of doing so, and underestimated the cost of war. Their misadventure has dulled our weapons, and we're still pursuing an indefinable "victory" after the fact of having fought first and not achieved it.

Kristol and his neo-conspirators seduced us into a distant war that is straining the resources of the state, and yet they seem to have convinced young Mr. Bush into taking steps to prolong it even further.

Our ship of state is bow down in a sand dune. It's time for us to relieve the conning officers who continue to order "full speed ahead."

And it's way past time for us to stop letting them blame us for their failures.

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

The Once and Future Neocons Take Back Middle East Policy

Also at Kos.

It looks like the escalation is on. David E. Sanger reports in Sunday's New York Times that Mr. Bush's new strategy for Iraq will include a rapid influx of up to 20,000 additional U.S. troops. Sanger says U.S. officials report that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is on board with the plan.

It's quite clear that the key players in Mr. Bush's new/reorganized security team: Robert Gates, John Negroponte, Michael McConnell, Lieutenant General David Patraeus and Admiral William Fallon are on board with the escalation as well.

It's also clear who is influencing Mr. Bush's policy. From a Saturday opinion piece in The Nation:

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol walked into the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) yesterday with a big grin on his face, as if to say "they're listening to me again!"

Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld, Bolton and other architects of the war in
Iraq may be gone, but the neoconservatives' stature inside the Bush Administration has hardly diminished. The same people that sold us the war, often under false pretenses, are now leading proponents of escalating the conflict by sending tens of thousands of additional troops.

An event at AEI yesterday brought together the intellectual progenitors of escalation: military historian Fred Kagan, retired General Jack Keane and Senators John McCain and
Joe Lieberman. The focus was not on how to clean up the neocons' mess, but on how to deepen it.

"The surge must be substantial and it must be sustained," McCain told a packed room.

Opening a Third Front

If Bush is following Kristol's lead on Iraq, it's a good bet he's listening to Kristol's desires for the U.S. to confront Iran as well. No doubt, Bush also appreciates Kristol's unique ability to use the media to "sell" war-centric policies to the public.

The Sunday Times recently reported that military sources say Israel will employ tactical nuclear weapons against Iran if it doesn't give up its uranium enrichment program.

Larisa Alexandrovna asks a number of pertinent questions regarding the Sunday Times article. Is the story true? Was it leaked by someone concerned about Israel's intentions? Or was it planted as part of a propaganda/psychological operation, and if so, who planted it and for what purpose?

Whatever the answers to those questions might be, given the Rovewellian pollution of our contemporary information environment, it is hardly paranoid to suspect that someone in Bill Kristol's circle is behind the story, especially when we consider that The Times is part of Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire, as is The Weekly Standard, which is edited by Kristol, and Fox News, where Kristol appears as a regular commentator.

The Right Tool for the Right Job

Many were surprised when Bush named Navy Admiral William "Fox" Fallon to replace General John Abizaid as head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). At first blush, it seemed unusual to place a Navy man in charge of an area of responsibility (AOR) in which two ground wars are taking place. But the CENTCOM AOR also includes Iran, and any military confrontation with Iran will be a major maritime and air operation. A naval flight officer, Fallon's credentials as a maritime and air power expert, his combat experience, and his record as a force commander at the three and four-star level, are unmatched. What's more, from what I've observed and heard about him, he possesses a super-human intellectual capacity. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that he still remembers the serial number on his baby spoon.

So it I were Mr. Bush, and was determined to press forward with Bill Kristol's neoconservative agenda, Fallon is the exact guy I'd put in the CENTCOM billet.

The Ides of February or March or April

If Mr. Bush decides to escalate and expand his Middle East war, all the key senior players and all the forces necessary for him to do so should be in place by mid-winter or early spring.

The majority of Congress and the public seem to be against such a move, but Mr. Bush doesn't appear to be listening to the legislature or the people. He appears to be marching to the beat of a drummer named William Kristol.

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Related articles:

Navy Admiral Goes to CENTCOM (by Jeff)

Smoke, Mirrors and War Powers (by Jeff)

Wars and Empires (by Jeff)

BYOT Leakage or Conscience Leakage? (by Larisa Alexandrovna)

Hersh: U.S. mulls nuclear option for Iran (CNN)

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

Navy Admiral Goes to CENTCOM: Be Very Afraid

Also at Kos.

The "new way forward" team is taking shape. Robert Gates is in as Secretary of Defense. John Negroponte will move from Director of National Intelligence to Assistant Secretary of State. Retired Vice Admiral Michael McConnell will take Negroponte's old job as DNI. Raw Story reports that Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the former day-to-day commander in Iraq, to replace General George Casey as the overall commander of U.S. forces in that country.

The news that has everyone a bit agog is that the head of Central Command, General John Abizaid, will be relieved by Admiral William J. Fallon.

ABC reports that "Fallon, who is in the Navy, is currently head of Pacific Command; he will be overseeing two ground wars, so the appointment is highly unusual."

I think ABC is missing the point.

It seems highly unusual for a navy admiral to take charge of CENTCOM until you consider two interrelated things. First is that Bush needs a senior four-star in the CENTCOM job who hasn't gone on record as opposing additional troops in Iraq. Second is that Fallon's CENTCOM area of responsibility will include Iran.

A conflict with Iran would be a naval and air operation. Fallon is a naval flight officer. He flew combat missions in Vietnam, commanded an A-6 Intruder squadron, a carrier air wing and an aircraft carrier. As a three-star, he commanded Second Fleet and Strike Force Atlantic. He presently heads U.S. Pacific Command. His resume also includes duty in numerous joint and Navy staff billets, including Deputy Director for Operations with Joint Task Force Southwest Asia in Riyahd, Saudi Arabia.

If anybody knows how to run a maritime and air operation against Iran, it's "Fox" Fallon.

No Check, No Balances

The legislature's options for keeping Mr. Bush from sending more troops to Iraq is limited, but if he decides to unilaterally attack Iran, there's virtually nothing Congress can do to stop him.

Bush and his legal beagle Alberto Gonzales could probably claim that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) from September 2001 gives the executive power to exert armed force against Iran, especially given the echo chamber's recent rhetoric about Iran being responsible for the violence in Iraq. And if you've been listening closely enough, you've heard the subliminal message associating Iran with the 9/11 attacks.

But Bush and Gonzales have a fallback position that's darn near bulletproof. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 gives a president up to 90 days to commit forces to combat without permission from Congress. Ironically, the resolution was passed in the wake of the Vietnam conflict to prevent a president from waging extended conflicts without a declaration of war or "specific statutory authorization" from Congress, but today it gives Bush all the ammunition he needs to start a war with Iran (or anyone else, for that matter) on his own say so.

It's doubtful the Supreme Court could stop him; and even more doubtful that it would if it could.

The only chance of checking whatever aggressive ambitions Bush may have on Iran would be a passive coup by the senior members of the administration's civilian and military security team through a group resignation, and hoping for that is, well, hopeless. After the latest round of musical deck chairs is complete, everybody still on board will have signed on to the program in blood (somebody else's, of course).

What's even more frightening is that the escalation strategy--that includes more troops in Iraq, an expansion of the military and use of armed force against Iran--comes from the core neoconservative cabal headed by Bill Kristol and supported by Dick Cheney that got us into our Middle East miasma in the first place.

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

Bush Administration: New Names, Same Old Games

Also at Kos.

Mr. Bush has claimed the authority to tap telephones and open mail without court orders in order to gather the intelligence he needs to conduct the war on terrorism. However, it seems intelligence isn't important enough to require that someone be in charge of it. From Thursday's New York Times:

John D. Negroponte, whom President Bush installed less than two years ago as the first Director of National Intelligence (DNI), will soon leave his post to become the State Department’s second-ranking official, administration officials said Wednesday.

Mr. Negroponte will fill a critical job that has been vacant for months, and he is expected to play a leading role in shaping policy in Iraq. But his transfer is another blow to an intelligence community that has seen little continuity at the top since the departure of George J. Tenet in 2004 as director of central intelligence.

The leading candidate to replace Negroponte in the top intelligence spot is J. Michael McConnell, a retired vice admiral who formerly headed the National Security Agency and was head of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Colin Powell.

The move will be a demotion for Negroponte and a promotion for McConnell. Negroponte will be stepping down from a cabinet level position and McConnell will be stepping up to one. It's uncertain why Negroponte agreed to the switch, but on the surface, it seems to be a change for the better. Negroponte is, after all, a career diplomat, and McConnell is a career intelligence officer. It could be a good thing, for once, to have people in key Bush administration positions who are actually qualified to fill them.

But there's more to this story than meets the eye.

Neo-connecting the Dots (Again)

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the neoconservative stranglehold on U.S. policy under Mr. Bush have been greatly exaggerated.

Admiral McConnell worked closely with new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates when Gates was CIA director under Bush the elder. Both of those men worked closely with Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense under Big Daddy during Gulf War I.

John Negroponte was young Mr. Bush's first Ambassador to the United Nations. He was appointed as U.S. ambassador to Iraq in 2004, right about the time most of us started figuring out that the situation in that country was headed south on a runaway train. Like Secretary of Defense Gates, Negroponte is thought to have been a key co-conspirator in the Reagan era Iran/Contra scandal. Negroponte was U.S. Ambassador to Honduras at the time.

As Director of National Intelligence, Negroponte reportedly blocked the publication of a CIA National Intelligence Estimate that described the situation in Iraq as a "civil war" long before NBC and the rest of the mainstream media committed to using that label.

The bottom line: don't be tricked into thinking that all the recent Bush administration senior personnel moves represent some kind of "new deal." It's just a reshuffle of the same deck, and it's still stacked.

All the Vice President's Men

Despite his efforts to keep a low profile lately, all roads of U.S. policy still conspicuously lead to the office of Dick "Kingpin" Cheney, and if you want to know what Cheney's agenda is, you need look no further than whatever his neo-conspirator William Kristol has to say.

Kristol was a founder of the Project for the New American Century, which was, in essence, a working group subsidiary of the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank. Kristol also founded the neoconservative Weekly Standard , and is a prominent on-air pundit with Rupert Murdoch's right wing cable news channel Fox News. Kristol's father Irving is considered to be the "godfather" of American neoconservatism.

Bill Kristol and his neocon network are the ones behind the proposal to increase troop levels in Iraq, and to boost the overall personnel end strength of U.S. ground forces. Bill Kristol also promotes a U.S. military attack on Iran.

Bill Kristol's close neoconservative associates include Dick Cheney, who was a charter member of the PNAC, as was current Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, who will now work closely with Mr. Negroponte on the Middle East situation.

The people in charge of getting us out of the merde are the same ones now in charge of getting us out of it.

The cable news channels are carrying footage of the "takeover" of Congress by the Democrats today, but don't get too excited about their ability to rein in the Bush administration. The same fools and fanatics still drive the horses.

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

Bush: The "All But" Decider

Also at Kos.

NBC's Jim Miklashevski reported Wednesday morning that Mr. Bush has "all but decided" to send about 20,000 more troops to Iraq. One has to wonder what he's "all but" still mulling over. Maybe he's starting to wonder if any of his advisers know what they're talking about. I know I would be, if I were Bush.

For a darn long time, he told us he would send more troops to Iraq if his commanders in the field said they needed them. His commanders in the field, most notably Central Command chief General John Abizaid and Iraq theater commander General George Casey, insisted for years that they didn't need more troops. Now Abizaid and Casey are both boarding the train for Palookaville, making way for generals to be determined who will tell Mr. Bush that they do need more troops in Iraq.

Dubya, Can You Hear Me?

For years, the neoconservative anvil choir told us that if we set "timelines" for leaving Iraq, the evildoers would lie low and wait until we left. George Casey proposed what became known as the "stand up/stand down" strategy, and spoke about the possibility of a near term troop draw down, the violence in Iraq actually increased.

Now, the neocon cabal headed by Bill Kristol argues that a short-term surge of troops in Iraq won't work because it will only drive the militants in Iraq into hiding until the ebb subsides, so the troop up-tick should be considered a long term strategy.

So which is it now, Mr. Kristol? Fewer troops will lead to more violence, but more troops will lead to less violence? What are those extra troops supposed to do? Be less violent than the troops who are already there? If that's the case, why not instead send over a couple brigades of Hare Krishnas to pass out copies of the Bhagavad-gita in Sadr City and at the Baghdad Airport? If a bunch of Krishnas get blown up, no one will care, right?

The November elections sent Mr. Bush a loud message that the country has finally had it with his foreign policy and his handing of the war. Mr. Bush interpreted that message as a signal that America was sick and tired of partisan bickering. What Mr. Bush missed was that the election results signaled American was tired of him, and the rubber stamp GOP congress that rolled over for him like a Vegas hooker and let Bill Kristol's neo-conspirators, with the capable help of Dick Cheney, form a shadow government that drives U.S. policy outside the control of the legislature and the electorate.

If Mr. Bush manages to push his escalation plan through Congress, our cherished republic will have "all but" gone the way of the carrier pigeon.

But many will argue that our cherished republic has all but gone that way already.

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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.

MSNBC Says Bush Will Escalate

They say the Bush Iraq plan for Iraq will include sending 20,000 additional troops to the war torn country. They say Bush will speak later today.

Iraq: Casey Strikes Out, Bush Can't Define Victory

Also at Kos.

An old adage states that you don't really understand something unless you can explain it to someone else. Not surprisingly, Mr. Bush still insists on achieving "victory" in Iraq, but also still fails to describe what that victory might look like.

A Tuesday New York Times story titled "Chaos Overran Iraq Plan in '06, Bush Team Says" reveals that Bush is concerned that General George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, has become more fixated on withdrawal from Iraq than victory. As recently as last Friday, Casey continued to caution against an expansion of America's military role. “The longer we in the U.S. forces continue to bear the main burden of Iraq’s security, it lengthens the time that the government of Iraq has to take the hard decisions about reconciliation and dealing with the militias,” he said. “And the other thing is that they can continue to blame us for all of Iraq’s problems, which are at base their problems.”

It seems the Decider is fed up with that kind of talk. Casey was scheduled to leave Iraq this summer. Now, it appears he will be relieved in February or March. My guess is that Casey's departure will coincide with the launch of the escalation strategy.

A Plan to Stop Not Winning

It's a relief of a sort to see that Mr. Bush has finally decided to shake up his war council and change his "course" in Iraq. How he's going about it, though, I don't find encouraging. It sounds entirely too much to me like the head moguls firmly in charge (HMFICs, in military parlance) are still putting the cart before the horse. From the Times:

As security efforts in Baghdad faltered [in 2006], a confidential briefing on possible “end states” in Iraq was prepared by officials under the command of Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarielli, who until a few weeks ago led the day-to-day operations in Iraq. It suggested the dark vision of a divided nation that haunts the administration.

There are no absolutes in the art of warfare, but a pretty good rule of thumb says that you should determine desired end states at the beginning of the war planning process. That's not just freshman level war college wisdom. It's Life 101. You can't build a plan for anything if you don't start out with an objective, even if it's only a tentative one. But from the looks of things, nobody was considering an end state for Iraq until sometime last year, which was about three years too late.

Most students of war will tell you that "victory" consists of achieving the desired end state, or coming very close to it. "A free, stable, independent Iraq" is not a coherent objective statement; it's a glittering generality, so vague as to be meaningless. And yet, according to the Times…

Mr. Bush still insists on talking about victory, even if his own advisers differ about how to define it. “It’s a word the American people understand,” he told members of the Iraq Study Group who came to see him at the White House in November, according to two commission members who attended. “And if I start to change it, it will look like I’m beginning to change my policy.”

Ahem. This American person doesn't understand a thing Mr. Bush is talking about. Wasn't all this "new way forward" business supposed to be about changing the policy? Or was it about changing the strategy to support the old policy. Or was it about changing the tactics to support the old strategy?

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how you change the tactics or the strategy if they support a policy described by a word that even Bush's own advisers can't define.

Fog, Friction and Chaos

The Bush team admits that "chaos" overran the Iraq plan in '06. I'm not sure they realize that chaos is the same thing that overran the plans in '05, '04 and '03. Once we let the cats out of the corral after the fall of Saddam Hussein's statue, there was no rounding them up again. Failure to plan for a post major hostilities stage guaranteed a breakout of insurgent/guerilla style warfare, and the only ones really any good at fighting that kind of war are insurgents and guerillas. The best way for a conventional force to win wars of that nature is to stop them before they start, and we blew that chance years ago.

Now we're in a conflict that makes Vietnam look simple in comparison. Yes, we faced a shapeless irregular force, but the Vietcong were a semi-organized force that fit into the command and control structure of the "other" side in a two-sided war. The bog down in Iraq has more sides than a geodesic dome.

All indications are that Mr. Bush is about to inject tens thousand or more American troops into this Hobbesian environment, based largely on the proposals of Fred Kagan. A prominent member of both the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century. Fred Kagan has become the military affairs "guru" of the neoconservative movement, which despite its proven track record of failure, still appears to be the dominant influence on the Bush administration's foreign policy.

It's telling that Kagan, who spent a decade as a professor of military history at West Point, would propose additional troops to improve the "security" environment in Iraq without delineating what side, or sides, those forces should ally themselves with. With early mentorship from the likes of Kagan, it's little wonder that today's Army office corps is an intellectual wasteland.

Please don't let anybody convince you that our troops are engaged in a "peacekeeping" mission in Iraq. "Peacekeeping" is only possible when the belligerents involved are serious about keeping peace. That, quite obviously, is not the case in Iraq.

The other term for "peace" operations is "peace enforcement," a euphamism for "taking sides in a war," which is what we're doing and not doing now, and will be doing and not doing more of if we throw more troops into Iraq's deadly circle quirk.

For America to spend more blood and treasure in a vain attempt to "win" a war in a nation that's at war with itself through a "change of course" that's a change in name only meets Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Franklin might have added that continuing to heed counsel from sources that have consistently given you bad advice is the epitome of bull goose lunacy. If Mr. Bush heeds the neocons' advice to escalate the war in Iraq, he'll be a hands down favorite to win the People's Choice "Biggest Lunatic in Human History" award.

Which will be quite an accomplishment, given the competition in his category.

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