Iraq: Go Longer, Die Harder

On Tuesday, Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) introduced legislation that would make most of the Iraq Study Group's 79 recommendations official U.S. policy. Six other senators, among them three Republicans, signed on as co-sponsors of he bill.

Many observers are calling this bill repudiation by GOP legislators of Mr. Bush's Iraq strategy, but it's more accurate to describe it as another blank check.

Go Long to Get Along

Lee Hamilton, co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) said in a telephone interview last week with Anne Flaherty of the Associated Press that he's not surprised that Washington is warming up to the group's recommendations. "If you're going to get out of Iraq, you have to make the primary mission training the Iraqis," Hamilton said.

But it doesn't sound like the Republicans backing Senator Alexander's bill are designed to "get out of Iraq."

"The president needs bipartisan support if the United States is to sustain a long-term position in Iraq," Alexander says, adding that the message he's trying to send Mr. Bush is "Let's see if we can agree on an entire approach so you can have the kind of support you need."

The kind of support Mr. Bush needs is the kind that never runs out. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said on Tuesday that there is no "end game" in sight for Iraq. In an interview with NPR, Crocker said, "I think that in the U.S., we're looking at Iraq right now as though it were the last half of a three-reel movie. I think for Iraqis, it's a five-reel movie and they are still in the first half of it."

The first half of it? Hell, we may not be halfway through the first reel of it.

The bill Alexander and others are proposing has the look and feel of a maneuver to make it look like legislators are standing up to Bush when, in fact, they're rolling over for him.

The Long War

In February 2006, while still under the iron leadership of Donald Rumsfeld, the Department of Defense released a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) that introduced the "long war" concept. Ann Scott Tyson of the Washington Post described it as "…a new 20-year defense strategy that envisions U.S. troops deployed, often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism and other nontraditional threats."

But at the time of the QDR, even the Defense Department admitted that it didn't know what the global security situation would look like in 20 years. Ryan Henry, undersecretary of defense for defense policy said, "Things get very fuzzy past the five-year point."

The five-year point? America is so bollixed up in Iraq now that things get fuzzy past the five eye-blink point, but that hardly matters.

Texas friends of the president told columnist Georgie Ann Geyer that Bush clearly intends to set things up in Iraq so his successor cannot avoid "our country's destiny."

Administration luminaries like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are endorsing something called the "Korean model," a vision for maintaining a decades long military presence in Iraq. America has maintained a significant troop presence in South Korea for over 50 years. We currently have about 30,000 troops there.

The Korean model for Iraq is another example of the Bush administration's application of false analogies. As Fred Kaplan of Slate aptly explains:

…in no meaningful way are these two wars, or these two countries, remotely similar. In no way does one experience, or set of lessons, shed light on the other. In Iraq, no border divides friend from foe; no clear concept defines who is friend and foe. To say that Iraq might follow "a Korean model"--if the word model means anything--is absurd.

And as Jonathan Alter of Newsweek correctly observes:

The only two reasons to station troops in the Middle East for half a century are protecting oil supplies (reflecting a pessimistic view of energy independence) outside the normal channels of trade and diplomacy, and projecting raw military power. These are the imperial aims of an empire.

They were also the aims of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the neoconservative think tank that began pushing for an Iraq invasion in the late 90s.

The dreams of megalomaniacs die harder than a Bruce Willis character. The neocons wanted to enlarge the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East to control the oil flow and protect Israel, and to simultaneously block our old Cold War adversaries from influencing the region and the balance of the world's energy supply. They're still marching us down that slope. If we let them drive us down that slope much further, we won't have good options for reversing course, and may very well find ourselves, a half-century from now, trying to figure out how to extract our troops from somebody else's civil war.

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

War Talk

The Bush administration has replaced some of its featured soloists, but its tune hasn't changed.

During an unannounced visit to Kabul on Monday, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the campaign to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan is "absolutely winnable." "It is a very long undertaking," Gates added, but he's "convinced that the US and our partners will be here for as long as it takes to ensure victory."

It's been a nearly six-year undertaking so far, and as with Iraq, "victory" is a concept difficult to define. In the same press conference, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the war against the Taliban had been largely won already. "The Taliban were defeated in one and a half months when they were ruling the country," he said, referring to the U.S. led coalition campaign in late 2001.

Will any of these guys ever talk straight with us?

The Old Bull Game

There's something to be said for the power of positive thinking, but the Bush administration has pushed the "glass half full" theory into the realm of utter, abject denial. From Donald Rumsfeld's "dead enders" to Dick Cheney's "last throes," the strategies in both Iraq and Afghanistan have amounted to our civilian and military leadership planting its collective head firmly in a sand dune. Most of us by now have read Ron Susskind's anecdote about the Bush staffer who claimed ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

But the reality of the Bush administration is even more bizarre than that. From what we've observed of the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush, and others, they seem to believe that they can create a sunny day by simply proclaiming "let there be light."

This latest joint statement by Gates and Karzai reflects the same magnitude of delusion. If the situation in Afghanistan is "definitely winnable," why hasn't it been won yet? If we defeated the Taliban five and a half years ago, why do we need to defeat them again?

The verdict is still out on Robert Gates. At times, he seems to be the much-needed change from his predecessor Rumsfeld. Too often, though, he comes across as a Rummy-class bull feather artist. Recently, Gates signed on to what Mr. Bush described as a Korean Model for Iraq. It's downright frightening that a sitting Secretary of Defense might actually think the Korean and Iraq situations are analogous. As Jim Lobe of the International Press Service notes:

The Korea analogy has spurred some consternation among analysts here for a variety of reasons, not least because when Iraqis have been surveyed on their views about permanent military bases in their country, the response -- except among the minority Kurdish population--has been overwhelmingly negative…

…experts also reject the notion that the situation in Iraq, where U.S. forces find themselves in the middle of a number of internal sectarian conflicts, bears any relation to that of South Korea, where a minimum to 30,000 U.S. troops have been deployed as a "trip-wire" along the demilitarised zone to deter North Korean forces on the other side for more than 50 years.

"(The analogy) is either a gross over-simplification to try to reassure people (the administration) has a long-term plan, or it's just silly," said ret. Lt. Gen. Donald Kerrick, a former deputy national security adviser who served two tours of duty in South Korea.

Crazy Like a Fox?

There's good reason to believe, though, that the Korean Model is a screen to mask the Bush administration's real motives. Retired Lieutenant General John Johns says, "I can't take seriously that they would compare the Korea situation with Iraq. What bothers me is that it's an umbrella for staying the course." Johns adds, "…our original plans called for 13 permanent military bases, and the grand scheme was to deploy large numbers of troops there to exercise military hegemony over the Middle East… That still is in the back of the mind of President Bush and some of his advisers."

"Some of his advisers" would be the Dick Cheney led group of neoconservative ideologues who still populate the administration or who, like Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol, influence Bush foreign policy from the neocon think tank and media network.

The neoconservatives made their agenda quite clear in their September 2000 manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses. They wanted to increase the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East in order to protect Israel and ensure a steady flow of oil from the region. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a vital component of their policy, but he was really just a convenient excuse to justify their actions. They admitted that it would take a "new Pearl Harbor" to sell their scheme to the American public and the rest of the world, and they got their Pearl Harbor on September 11, 2001.

Since that time, the neocons have established a track record of unmitigated disasters, but that doesn't worry them a bit. Like the monster in a horror movie serial, the dreams of megalomaniacs never quite die. You've hopefully noticed that the Bush administration has consistently ignored all calls to disavow intentions of setting up permanent military bases in Iraq. It's already building the permanent bases, along with that Superdome of a U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and it has no intention of giving them up.

So don't kid yourself into thinking our Iraq aims will change on Mr. Bush's watch. "Victory" in Iraq involves creating conditions that support our permanent presence there. When we've established that, we might actually go back to Afghanistan and focus on that terrorism thing.

Operation Déjà Vu

David S. Cloud and Damien Cave of the New York Times report that the push in Baghdad isn't measuring up. A U.S. assessment, completed in May, showed that American and Iraqi troops control less than one third of the city's neighborhoods, far short of the projected goal.

Brigadier General Vincent K. Brooks, the deputy commander of the U.S. division in charge of Baghdad, says that Iraqi security forces are a major cause of the lack of progress. Iraqis were expected to man checkpoints and conduct patrols. But, as we have seen so often in the past, Iraq hasn't delivered all the forces they promised, and in some cases, the forces that did show up have performed poorly. As a result, American commanders have been forced to clear some portions of the city multiple times.

The "surge" has turned into Operation Déjà Vu.

Try, Try Again

Once again, we've tried a new strategy in Iraq, but the pattern hasn't changed. We go into an area and the bad guys lie low or run away. We leave the area--or turn it over to Iraqis--and the bad guys come back. Significant portions of the Iraqi forces committed to an operation don't show up. The ones who do show up are unreliable and/or untrustworthy.

In an interview, General Brooks said, "we were way too optimistic." Planners originally expected most Baghdad neighborhoods to be under control by July, but now estimate that the objective can't be reached until September, when U.S. commander in Iraq General David Petraeus is scheduled to make a progress report to Congress. Lieutenant General Raymond T. Odierno, the number two commander in Iraq, says he never considered the July goal to be a realistic one. He too says fall is a more reasonable benchmark for establishing order in Iraq's capital, but that will depend on Iraqi forces making significant progress in the coming months.

But "significant progress" by Iraqi forces is a proven unrealistic expectation. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki says he has a fear of the Iraqi Army conducting a coup, and one senior Iraqi police commander estimates that fifty percent of his recruits belong to the militias.

To illustrate just how bad the police situation is, Cloud and Cave relate this confrontation between U.S. battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Frank and Baghdad police officials.

At a weekly meeting where military commanders and police chiefs sit around a horseshoe-shaped conference table at one of the American bases, Capt. Adel Fakry, the Ameel police commander, complained that American soldiers on patrol were showing “distrust” toward his officers.

“The reason there is distrust,” Colonel Frank responded, his voice rising, “is because I have a video of six Iraqi officers placing a bomb against my soldiers, and they came from your station.”

There had been “some mistakes,” Captain Fakry responded, looking taken aback by the confrontation. Not all of the six officers were from his station, he added before ending the conversation by flipping open his cellphone and making a call while the meeting continued.

Some mistakes. Not all of the six officers were from his station.

Brother.

Franks's experience was hardly an isolated incident. In March, U.S. troops discovered a group of Iraqis dressed in police uniforms setting up an armor piercing roadside bomb near a Baghdad bridge, using police vehicles to provide cover. The American troops killed two of the bombers, and discovered that one of them had a badge that granted him wide access to the Green Zone.

With allies like these, who needs enemies?

Arms and the Bad Man

Scott Cannon of the McClatchy Newspapers informs us that:

The U.S. military in Iraq has begun issuing American M-16 rifles to some Iraq troops in exchange for their AK-47 rifles, the cheap and sturdy weapon that currently hangs from the shoulder of virtually every Iraqi soldier, police officer, insurgent and militiaman.

This move is supposed to be a "vote of confidence" in Iraqi troops. It's really a vote of non-confidence. The ubiquitous AK-47 and its ammunition have been disappearing from Iraqi armories like pies from Aunt Polly's windowsill.

As Cannon notes, the Iraq Study Group report from late last year stated "there are ample reports of Iraqi police officers participating in training in order to obtain a weapon, uniform, and ammunition for use in sectarian violence." A 2006 audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction concluded that only two percent of the serial numbers of weapons the U.S. legally transferred into Iraq--ranging from pistols to rocker launchers--were recorded.

Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst with the Center for Defense Information, says that "The United States has no idea what happened to the majority of weapons it brought into the country." But we do know, she says, that, "…these weapons, in conjunction with the millions already in the country left from Saddam's era, are being used to perpetuate the violence and continued instability throughout Iraq."

So much for blaming Iran and Syria for arming Iraq's militants--we've been doing it ourselves. Giving Iraqi troops harder-to-traffic M-16s won't stem the tide of arms transfers to the bad guys. It's a fitness report bullet for some staffer that won't amount to a gob of spit in the Chesapeake Bay.

It's little wonder we won't have Baghdad secured by July. Or by September. Or by next September, or the September after that…

But don't worry. Homeland Security is keeping us safe. The JFK plot was foiled and Paris Hilton is in jail.

Surge Dirge

As the "surge" progresses, Iraqi insurgents use increasingly lethal weapons and tactics, according to Ann Scott Tyson and John Ward Anderson of the Washington Post. What's more, the insurgents are focusing their efforts on U.S. troops.

"It is very clear that the number of attacks against U.S. forces is up," says Major General James E. Simmons, deputy commander for operations in Iraq. Interestingly enough, attacks against Iraqi security forces have declined. "The attacks are being directed at us and not against other people," Simmons says.

Which means that by putting more troops in Iraq, we're providing the insurgents with more of their favorite targets, and they're obliging by successfully attacking us.

Wearing the Bullseye

The 127 U.S. fatalities in May made it the third deadliest month for American forces since the 2003 invasion. As with the other two deadliest months--April and November of 2004--the main cause of the May's death toll has been a large-scale offensive U.S. operation.

Force protection is an important principle of war, but it's not the overriding principle. If you have to expose some or all of your force to risk of attrition to accomplish vital objectives, that's just the way it goes. But a good rule of thumb says that if the force's primary mission becomes conducting operations in order to protect itself, that force is putting itself in harm's way for the sake of being in harm's way.

That's the position we found ourselves in during the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and it's a situation we're approaching now in Iraq. The "new" counterinsurgency strategy is placing thousands of extra American troops at risk in small outposts in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. The Baghdad piece of the surge strategy was designed to create "hearts and minds" contact with locals as U.S. troops secured the neighborhoods, but events seem to have pushed that strategy in a different direction.

In early May, the Washington Post reported that U.S. forces were turning their Baghdad outposts into mini-fortresses.

To guard against bombs, mortar fire and other threats, U.S. commanders are adding fortifications to the outposts, setting them farther back from traffic and arming them with antitank weapons capable of stopping suicide bombers driving armored vehicles. U.S. troops maintain the advantage of living in the neighborhoods they are asked to protect, but the need to safeguard themselves from attack means more walls between them and civilians…

…[Captain Frank] Fisher, 37, of Dryden, Mich., said that by living in Sadr City he can respond much faster to incidents than if he stayed on a large outlying military base, as U.S. forces did in the past. "We hear a boom somewhere in the city and within minutes or seconds I can get an indication of where that explosion happened," Fisher said. "Every time I step out of the base I'm in my own battle space. It pays big rewards when people see you in their neighborhood every day," he said.

But what are the people in the neighborhoods really seeing? From Captain Fisher's description, they're seeing U.S. troops protect themselves behind concrete walls, only coming out to protect the neighborhoods after the neighborhoods have already been attacked, and then retreating back to their reinforced sanctuaries, leaving the locals vulnerable to further attacks.

Good News?

Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, number two U.S. commander in Iraq, points to "good news" in Anbar province as evidence that the surge is working. Attacks in Anbar have been cut in half, he says, and almost 18,000 enemy fighters have been captured this year. I'd like to know how Odierno is counting numbers of attacks In Anbar, and who exactly these 18,000 "enemy fighters" are. Sorry to sound so skeptical, but we've heard this kind of happy talk before only to find out that the military has pulled a Max Bialystock with the numbers to "produce" successes out of failures.

As to whether Iraqi forces are ready to stand up, well, the news on that front doesn't inspire a 76-trombone salute. The infusion of more U.S. troops into Anbar and Baghdad has pushed the violence into the so-called "outer belts," most notably the Diyala province, a once stable area that has turned volatile. Iraqi forces in Diyala were once considered among the best of the Iraq, but in the face of increasing challenges, they appear to be sitting down on the job. In May, the commander of an Iraqi division was relieved for taking heavy-handed measures against Diyala's Sunni population. The commander supposedly has ties to the Shiite controlled Badr Brigade.

On May 30, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told CBS News that he fears a coup by the Iraqi Army, and one senior police commander says that fifty percent of his recruits belong to the militias.

Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey oversees training and equipping of Iraqi forces. In a telephone interview with Chicago Tribune reporters and editors, Dempsey said, "Militia infiltration of the security forces is less of a problem. The larger problem is the influence militias have on the security force."

That a three-star general could make a statement like that to a major U.S. news outlet with a straight face gives you an idea of the intellectual bankruptcy of U.S. military leadership. Iraq's security forces aren't infiltrated; they're just influenced, so it's okay. All we have to do now is find them a commander who isn't a militia infiltrator and won't influence them.

Then all we'll need to do is put a handful of American generals in charge of Iraq who know the difference between spinning wars and winning them.

Do we have any of those left?

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

Dick Cheney and the Crazies

It would be silly if it weren't so deadly serious.

On June 1, in a news conference in Madrid, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured the world that “The President of the United States has made it clear that we are on a course that is a diplomatic course. That policy is supported by all of the members of the cabinet, and by the vice president of the United States.”

Helene Cooper of the New York Times tells us that Rice's statements came on the heels of reports that Dick Cheney staffers are saying that Cheney thinks diplomacy with Iran is pointless, and is trying to convince Mr. Bush to bomb it.

According to Cooper, a senior Bush administration official denies there is a deep separation between Rice and Cheney. "But," the official said, “the vice president is not necessarily responsible for every single thing that comes out of the mouth of every single member of his staff."

Uh, huh. Cheney staffers run around leaking things they're not supposed to? That doesn't sound likely to me. Steven C. Clemons of The Washington Note says that one Cheney aide admits "Cheney himself is frustrated with President Bush and believes, much like Richard Perle, that Bush is making a disastrous mistake by aligning himself with the policy course that Condoleezza Rice, [Secretary of Defense] Bob Gates, [CIA Director] Michael Hayden and [Director of National Intelligence Mike] McConnell have sculpted."

Cooper of the Times says interviews with members of Cheney's staff confirm the broad outlines of Clemons's story, and that some of the most hawkish statements came from David Wurmser, who is presently Cheney's principle deputy assistant for national security affairs.

In a BBC interview broadcast on June 1, Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said “You do not want to give additional argument to new crazies who say, ‘let’s go and bomb Iran.’“

It's not difficult to figure out who ElBaradei was referring to as "crazies." The term seems to be gaining in popularity. Reportedly, new Central Command chief Admiral William Fallon told a confidant that an attack on Iran "will not happen on my watch" and that "There are several of us trying to put the crazies back in the box."

Western European officials share ElBaradei's concerns. “We fully believe that Foggy Bottom [U.S. State Department] is committed to the diplomatic track,” one of them says. “But there’s some concern about the vice president’s office.”

All Roads Lead to the Crazies

Journalists like Seymour Hersh and Larisa Alexandrovna have been warning for some time that Dick Cheney's shadow government has pushing for a strike on Iran for some time.

It looks more each day like a shift in the balance of power within the administration has occurred. With Cheney's firm ally Donald Rumsfeld gone, and with new Secretary of Defense seeming to side with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Cheney's death grip on U.S. foreign policy may have indeed waned. If true, that could be a good thing. But at this point in the Bush II regime, unfortunately, foreign policy is so smothered with Dick Cheney's fingerprints that that it may be impossible to wipe clean.

Cheney's imprimatur on the Lebanon/Israeli conflict and on the Iran situation may have permanently destroyed Rice's ability to be regarded as an honest broker. Anyone dealing with Rice has good reason to suspect that any deal she brokers will be backdoor vetoed by Cheney. What's more, diplomatic measures taken in the pre-Gates days severely limit Rice's freedom of action.

The best example of this is the pre-condition set on direct talks with Iran about its nuclear program. By demanding that it suspend all uranium enrichment activities before direct talks can take place, we made Iran an offer it couldn't accept. The U.N. Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty guarantees Iran's right to pursue peaceful nuclear technologies as an "inalienable right." By denying Iran this right, we essentially broke a treaty (yet again) to which we are signatory.

The effects of this sort of thing spiral. Russia and China, Iran's senior "axis of energy" partners, have yet another excuse to ignore treaties whenever it suits them. Last week, Russia tested two new offensive missiles in response to U.S. plans to deploy missile defense systems in central and eastern Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin said of the missile tests "It wasn't us who initiated a new round of arms race," and criticized the U.S. and NATO members for not ratifying an amended version of the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty that limits the deployment of heavy non-nuclear weapons.

"We have signed and ratified the CFE and are fully implementing it. We have pulled out all our heavy weapons from the European part of Russia," Putin said. "What about our partners? They are filling eastern Europe with new weapons… What we are supposed to do? We can't just sit back."

I certainly don't aim to paint Russia, China or Iran as the "good guys" in our present foreign policy dilemmas. But we started the ball rolling with the Bush administration's unilateral abrogation of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Convention on Torture and other treaties, and when treaties become "just another piece of paper," the very fabric of international relations will unravel.

And that appears to be precisely what Dick Cheney and his crazies have been trying to accomplish all along.

Note: Cheney sideman John Bolton is famously known for having said, "It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law."

Like Cheney, Bolton has a weak grasp of the U.S. Constitution, Article VI of which states:

This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land.

Iraq: Let's Bribe Our Way Out

In November 2006, Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said Iraqi forces would be ready to assume control of security in his country by June 2007. On May 30, 2007, Maliki told CBS News that he fears the possibility of a coup by the Iraqi Army.

Maliki also told CBS that his government is running the show in Iraq. "The Americans don't order us to do this or not to do that," he said. "On the contrary, we're the ones who tell them to do this and don't do that."

What in the wide world of sports are we doing in that country?

We're supposedly trying to train an Iraqi security force to do its own fighting, but we wind up doing their fighting for them because if Iraqi forces say they don't want to fight a particular fight, they don't have to fight it. Iraqi police forces are still apparently rife with militia members who form death squads off duty. One Iraqi police station commander says that "Fifty percent of the recruits belong to the militias. They come here to collect information on the other sects."

It's little wonder that top U.S. military leaders in Iraq now doubt whether Maliki's government can meet the political goals outlined by Mr. Bush in January by the time General David Petraeus reports on the "surge" to Congress in September. Some of Patraeus's advisers say those goals were never realistic in the first place.

The New York Times and other media sources suggest that the White House, already doubtful of any timely decisive outcome of the surge plan, are looking at alternate strategies, one of which may involve cutting back on mission goals in Iraq and reducing force levels there.

All Their Beautiful Ugliness

At the first hint that the administration might already be disenchanted with the escalation strategy, neoconservative Bobbsey Twins Bill Kristol and Fred Kagan redeployed to their citadel to defend it. In the latest issue of The Weekly Standard, Kristol and Kagan decry that while Mr. Bush in on the course of "what looks to be a winning strategy," some in the Bush administration "continue to toy with exit strategies and diplomatic strategies that imperil the victory strategy the president has embraced."

That victory strategy, of course, being the one that Kagan proposed in January and that Kristol endorsed.

"With congressional obstruction on hold," Kristol and Kagan assert in their latest article, referring to the passage of the war funding bill, "The Bush administration…can move ahead with policies that deal with reality."

Bush administration policies that deal with reality? Which one of the Sunshine Boys came up with that gem?

The reality Kristol and Kagan cite to bolster the validity of their escalation strategy is that "foreign fighters are flowing into Iraq to kill Iraqis and Americans… And the reality is that Iran and Syria are enemies [of the United States, they presumably meant, not of each other]."

This assertion flies in the face of Kagan's January statement in support of his escalation plan engaging Iraq's neighbors would fail because "the basic causes of violence and sources of manpower and resources for the warring sides come from within Iraq."

Still, Kagan and Kristol are dead set against diplomacy with Iraq's neighbors. "[T]he State Department toys with fantasy diplomatic solutions based on overtures toward Iran and Syria," they write, followed by unsubstantiated claims about "policy decisions in Tehran and Damascus to defeat us in Iraq."

But Syria and Iran aren't "the major threat to progress since the president began pursuing the right strategy in January." Oh, no. The major threat has been "congressional battles calling into doubt our commitment to winning." Supported by congressional Republicans, Kagan and Kristol say, Mr. Bush has "beaten back" that threat. Now, Bush "needs to deal with his own administration, which has not made up its collective mind to support the president's strategy wholeheartedly." If all of Bush's advisers and cabinet members don't get on board, they'll send mixed messages that will "undermine the efforts of our commanders in the field."

And there you have it, all in one nice neo-package. The Kagan/Kristol solution is the only one that will work, and it will only work if everybody else gets behind it.

The Winning Strategy?

In May the surge produced the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Iraq in two and a half years. Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, the number two American commander in Iraq, says that four fifths of the militants now fighting U.S. forces may be ready to join Iraq's political process. To that end, military officials are seeking local ceasefire agreements with militant cells.

Any local ceasefires will likely involve the exchange of many, many dead presidents. We will, in essence, be paying militants not to attack us any more, but that's probably cheaper that continuing to fight with them. And heck, if we can get those local militants to stop fighting, maybe we can bribe the Iraqi police to stop killing their countrymen, and bribe the Iraqi Army to not overthrow Malaki's government.

Then all we'll have to do is bribe Maliki into giving us permission to leave.

What do you reckon it would take to get Kristol and Kagan to buy off on that idea?

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

Podhoretz Begs Bush to Bomb Iran

Leading neoconservative Norman Podhoretz wants George W. Bush to bomb Iran. In a May 30 Wall Street Journal, he writes "I hope and pray that President Bush will do it."

Podhoretz sees the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan as "theaters that have been opened up in the early stages of a protracted global struggle," and sees Iran as another front in what he describes as "World War IV." And to throw in the standard dose of fear factor to support his arguments, he compares today's Iran to Nazi Germany in 1938.

A Hatful of Hitlers

We had one Hitler in the 20th century. In this century, to hear the likes of Podhoretz tell it, we've already had three of them. Osama bin Laden became the new Hitler after 9/11. Saddam Hussein took the Hitler mantle during the propaganda campaign that led to the Iraq invasion. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad turned into Hitler right about the time the Bush administration figured that, oops, we've hosed up this Iraq thing, time to start making Americans afraid of somebody else.

The anti-Semitic angle aside, what makes Hitler such a convenient boogey man to compare Middle East bad guys too is the 1938 Munich Agreement, which gave the Sudetenland to Germany to satisfy Hitler's desire for Lebensraum (living space). Many credit this appeasement as having emboldened Hitler to invade Poland and France a year later. Podhoretz and others argue that if we appease rather than attack Iran, we'll embolden that country to undertake further aggressive actions.

This Germany/Iran analogy is bunker mentality bunk for several reasons.

First, Ahmadinejad doesn’t hold the kind of absolute power that Hitler had in Nazi Germany. Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i holds the real power in Iran, and unlike Hitler, he has a track record of behaving like a rational actor.

Next, the balance of military power today looks nothing like it did in 1938. Then, Hitler had the most modern and mobile military in Europe. Having invested its military capital in a static defense system of fortifications--the Maginot Line--France was incapable of running Hitler out of the Sudetenland, and Britain's only realistic way to access the continent was to come through France. The only way France or Britain could engage Hitler on the continent was for Hitler to invade France, and we all know how things went for France and Britain when he finally did.

Today, the U.S. spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined. Even though it has a pesky coastal navy, Iran's military is a comparative flyspeck. It cannot project power much beyond its borders or the Persian Gulf, and if it ever came down to a no-holds barred showdown between them and us, they would lose large. It is ludicrous to characterize a sole superpower's decision to talk to a minor power rather than to attack it as "appeasement."

MAD vs. SAD

Iran has consistently claimed that it has no ambitions to produce nuclear weapons, and despite concerted efforts by Dick Cheney and others, no one has been able to prove Iran's claim to be false. But if Iran gets itself a fistful of nukes, Podhoretz says, the Mutually Assured Destruction deterrence of the Cold War won't work. To back up this assertion, he quotes noted Islamic world expert Bernard Lewis:

MAD, mutual assured destruction, [was effective] right through the cold war. Both sides had nuclear weapons. Neither side used them, because both sides knew the other would retaliate in kind. This will not work with a religious fanatic [like Ahmadinejad]. For him, mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already that [Iran's leaders] do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. In the final scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill large numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights.

I won't pretend to have Lewis's background and experience when it comes to understanding the Islamic mind, but it sounds like Lewis is losing his, and I'm not alone in coming to that conclusion. Of Lewis's 2002 book What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, Juan Cole wrote: "How a profoundly learned and highly respected historian, whose career spans some sixty years, could produce such a hodgepodge of muddled thinking, inaccurate assertions and one-sided punditry is a profound mystery."

For Iran to use nukes, either directly or through a proxy terrorist group wouldn’t be a case of mutually assured destruction. It would be self-assured destruction. Iran couldn't possibly do as much damage to the U.S. or its allies as the U.S. and its allies could do to Iran. I question Lewis's assertion that Iran's leaders "do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers," but I completely reject the notion that Iran would risk a successful nuclear attack or New York or Chicago at the price of losing all of its people, all of its cities, all of its industries and all of its culture.

Islamofabulism

Podhoretz describes Iran as the "main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11." He also says that Iran is "the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism's weapon of choice."

The neoconservative propaganda campaign to subliminally connect Iran with 9/11 is fairly new, and is no more substantiated than earlier claims of a connection between Iraq and 9/11. Calling Iran the "main sponsor of terrorism" conveniently ignores the fact that most of the 9/11 attackers were Sunni Arabs from Saudi Arabia, not Shiite Persians from Iran. It also stiff-arms the reality that al Qaeda, supposedly the biggest bad guys in our war on terror, are still comfy-cozy in their feathered nests in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Podhoretz also says that Ahmadinejad "wishes to dominate the greater Middle East, and thereby to control the oilfields of the region and the flow of oil out of it through the Persian Gulf."

Well, Ahmadinejad may wish to control the Middle East, but making that wish come true will take a heck of a lot more than blowing out candles on his birthday cake. The notion that the non-head of a Persian Shiite state can "dominate" the largely Arab Sunni Middle East defies the laws of probability. Liberal Buddhist Dennis Kucinich has a better chance of becoming president of the United States.

Iran is most certainly an emerging regional power that we must learn to deal with, but not in the way Podhoretz wants us to. The best move we could make would be to become Iran's big energy partner, elbowing China and Russia out of the picture.

But that would require real diplomacy, which means it won't happen on Bush's watch.

Iraq: Go Big, Go Long, Go Fish

Mr. Bush got his way on the war funding bill--sort of. He won a "victory" when Congress passed the bill stripped of the timeline restrictions contained in an earlier version. But his victory over the budget didn't give him a victory in Iraq. It's unlikely that the "surge" strategy will give him a victory in Iraq either. Bush and his inner circle seem to have realized this, finally.

Having largely dismissed the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) in favor of the escalation strategy proposed by neoconservative "military theorist" Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, Bush now appears to be backpedaling. At a Rose Garden press conference on 24 May, Mr. Bush indicated that he might be amenable to yet another change in strategy. On several occasions, he noted that he now likes the recommendations of the ISG. Why the reversal? Is Mr. Bush changing the story to reflect "conditions on the ground," or is he buying time until he can make conditions on the ground fit the story?

The Never Ending Story

Bush's victory over the war-funding bill was, in fact, only a partial one. The popular opinion lately is that the Democrats caved. They didn't really. The bill does have a deadline--September 30, 2007. That's when the present war appropriation ends. It's also when General David Petraeus, U.S. commander in Iraq, is scheduled to give Congress a briefing on the progress of the "surge" plan.

As things look now, Petraeus won't have anything to show Congress come September except the spit shine on his heinie. Barring divine intervention, which hasn't been abundant in this war to date, all Petraeus will be able to say is yeah, well, things look better on the ground in some places but worse in others, and the Iraqi Parliament has made progress in some areas but the political situation still basically, uh, sucks.

A May 29 Los Angeles Times story stated that U.S. military leaders in Iraq doubt whether the political goals Mr. Bush laid out when he announced the troop buildup earlier this year will be met by the end of summer. Even Frederick Kagan, the American Enterprise Institute neoconservative who proposed the buildup, says the military will have few political accomplishments to report by September.Some advisers to Petraeus say it was never realistic to expect the Iraqi government to agree on its most divisive issues by then. And security in Baghdad is still a distant goal.

So advisers are putting together a collection of "smaller achievements" they consider to be signs of progress that Petraeus can use to convince Congress that the surge has been a success even though it failed to accomplish its primary goals.

Mission accomplished again!

The Program and the Players

On 26 May, the New York Times and other news sources announced that the administration is developing contingency plans for reducing U.S. forces in Iraq by as much as half in 2008. While the reports are probably true, they may not mean a whole lot. I'm confident planning is also being done to sustain troop levels at their present levels for as long as possible. Lt. General Ray Odierno, the number two commander in Iraq, says any withdrawal of troops was not advisable until December "at a minimum." Odierno, who has lobbied for extending the troop increase, notes that units are in place or available to extend the "surge" into April of next year.

Within the administration, Cheney and his side men may argue that merely starting a troop drawdown will embolden al-Qaeda and militia groups that have recently gone underground. Odeirno and Petraeus seem to prefer sticking with the escalation. CNN reports that Petraeus was not involved in the troop reduction discussions. It's tough to say where Secretary of Defense Bob Gates stands. He was a member of the IGS for a time, but he almost had to know, when he took the SecDef job, that Bush was going to stiff arm the IGS recommendations.

Rumors of power realignments within the administration abound. One hears that Cheney continues to fall out of favor, and that Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have informally allied to oppose him. But every time Cheney seems to have retired to an undisclosed country club he reemerges, nasty and snarly as ever.

Whispered leaks suggest that a segment of the active duty flag officer community have tacitly threatened to turn in their walking papers if the White House doesn't start listening to them and ignoring think tank neocons like Fred Kagan. But these are just whispers.

Mr. Bush himself gives the appearance of flip-flopping on Iraq. For years he stuck by Donald Rumsfeld's insistence that no more troops were needed in Iraq, and on the eve of the November election, indicate that Rummy would stay on the job throughout the remainder of the Bush term. When the election results became official, Rummy was out, the ISG recommendations were shelved, and Kagan's troop escalation was in. Now, amid concerns expressed by congressional Republicans that the Iraq war could devastate the GOP come November 2008, Bush gives indications that he's leaning back toward the ISG's policy and strategy tenets--tenets like engaging diplomatically with Iraq's neighbors and focusing U.S. troop efforts on training Iraqi troops that Kagan said "will fail."

One theory says that Mr. Bush intends to stall for as much time as he can to ensure that the Iraq war isn't "lost" on his watch, and intends to let the next guy clean up the mess. Another theory posits that Mr. Bush has promised Republican legislators and presidential hopefuls that by hook or by crook, he'll ensure that the Iraq issue is off the table come election time. We can't really know what will happen until it happens, and even then we'll have reason to wonder what really happened.

Even the people in charge of making things happen won't really know what happened because, as the past four years have clearly illustrated, they never really knew what they were doing. And as recent developments indicate, they still don't.

The Wolf Who Cried "Media"

Paul Wolfowitz, a leading architect of our war in Iraq, is blaming his departure from the World Bank on the standard neoconservative scapegoat--the media.

In an interview with the BBC on Monday, Wolfowitz denied that his decision to leave was caused by a lack of support of the bank's employees. From the Associated Press:

"I think it tells us more about the media than about the bank and I'll leave it at that," he told the British Broadcasting Corp. "People were reacting to a whole string of inaccurate statements and by the time we got to anything approximating accuracy the passions were around the bend."

Wolfowitz said that he was pleased the bank's board accepted that he had acted ethically, and in good faith in his handling of a generous compensation package for his girlfriend and bank employee Shaha Riza in 2005.

The bank's board accepted that he had acted ethically? That's an interesting conclusion. On May 17, ABC News reported that "An internal panel tasked with investigating the lucrative pay and promotion package Wolfowitz arranged in 2005 for girlfriend Shaha Riza found him guilty of breaking bank rules."

The New York Times said that the board's decision to accept Wolfowitz's claim that his mistakes were made in good faith and " what he believed were the best interests of the institution" followed four days after the investigative committee found he had broken his contract by breaking ethical and governing rules.

Somewhere between the internal panel's investigation and the statement by the bank's board, a lot of legs must have been broken (Dick Cheney was, as you might guess, pulling strings for Wolfowitz from behind an undisclosed curtain) . From the Times:

By all accounts, the terms of Mr. Wolfowitz’s exoneration left a bitter taste with most of the 24 board members, who represent major donor countries, as well as clusters of smaller donor and recipient countries. Most had wanted to adopt the findings of the special board committee that determined he had acted unethically on the matter of Ms. Riza.

Neo-Paths

It's entirely possible that Wolfowitz honestly believes he did nothing wrong, and that the media really are to blame for his demise at the World Bank. He may have genuinely believed in the myth that Iraqi could use its oil to "finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." or that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda could not have executed the 9/11 attacks without help from Saddam Hussein, or the dozens of other delusional positions he has espoused off and on over the past several years.

I find it particularly revolting that in December 2002 he said of the looming Iraq invasion that, “I do know, emphatically, that it's not a war for oil,” when asked in June 2003 why nuclear power North Korea was being treated differently than Iraq, Wolfowitz said, "The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

And of course there's the Wolfowitz admission from May 2003 that when it came to justifying the Iraq invasion, the Bush administration "settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

That "the one reason everyone could agree on" turned out to be a false one likely had little effect on Wolfowitz's conscience. Heck by the time anyone thought to question the fuzzy pretexts of Wolfie's war, "People were reacting to a whole string of inaccurate statements and by the time we got to anything approximating accuracy the passions were around the bend."

Fuzzy Pretexts

Wolfowitz told the World Bank's investigative committee that he really didn't have a choice but to give his girlfriend a raise. See, Ms. Riza had been a World Bank employee for eight years when Wolfie was named bank president in 2005. Riza was also a vocal women's rights advocate. There's not a darn thing wrong with that, of course, unless you use as an excuse to commit extortion.

When Wolfie came to the bank, the bank's ethics committee determined that Riza needed to leave in order to avoid a conflict of interest. Riza agreed to accept an "external assignment" to the U.S. State Department, even though through some unexplained stratagem, she stayed on the World Bank payroll. And through yet another unexplained bit of maneuvering, her income jumped from $133,000 to $193,590 in just two years. As a State Department employee on the World Bank payroll, Riza was making more that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made before taxes.

Why would Wolfie go so far out of his way to help out his girlfriend? He was trying to keep Riza from filing a lawsuit against the World Bank. "The irony of my working to ensure women's participation and rights through the work of the World Bank and [was] stripped of my own rights by this same institution," Riza wrote in a statement to the bank's investigating panel. "I was ready to pursue legal remedies. & I only acquiesced to signing the agreement so as not to cause turmoil at the bank."

According to the investigating panel, Wolfie tried to hide Riza's "deal" from the bank's top legal and ethics officials. (For a more detailed description of these events, see "World Bank's Former Top Lawyer Says Wolfowitz Spurned His Legal Advice" at Law.com.)

As part of his exit deal, Wolfie managed to wrangle himself an extra year's salary before he leaves at the end of June. Something just under 400 grand, no big deal to a guy like Wolfie, really. He's got plenty of ill-gotten loot stashed away, and come July, barring any other job offer, he'll join his pal John Bolton as a six-figure compensated senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Bolton and Wolfowitz, there's a pair, huh? If there is a God, those two will see a lot of each other in the afterlife. And they'll no doubt spend eternity blaming their sins on the media.

My Memorial Day

PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

-- Carl Sandburg

In my 21 years as a naval flight officer, I never knew anyone who died in combat.

A classmate from Aviation Officer Candidate School was in the right seat of a P-3 Orion when the guy in the left seat flew the plane into a mountain in the Philippines.

On the first day of my first cruise on the USS Ranger, a young enlisted guy got blown off the flight deck by jet blast from an A-7 Corsair preparing to taxi to the catapult. We never found the young enlisted guy, but months later, while we were in port at Subic Bay, divers working over the side on the hull found pieces of his flight deck cranial helmet wedged into the hub of one of the ship's propellers.

Later that cruise, we had an engineering main space fire that took all day to put out. Six of the ship's engineers managed to flee the conflagration in their workspace through the escape trunk, but they neglected to don the emergency breathing devices available to them at several places along their egress route. By the time they made it to the safety of the hangar bay, they had inhaled so much smoke that their red blood cells could no longer bond with oxygen molecules. The docs laid them in stretchers on one of the aircraft elevators, where they peacefully suffocated under a clear Pacific Ocean sky.

During my first Mediterranean Sea cruise, an S-3 Viking shot off the catapult, went nose down, and flew to the bottom of the ocean. We never found the S-3 or its three crewmembers. Not long after that, an H-3 helicopter returning from shore simply disappeared over deep water halfway back to the ship. We never found those guys either.

Later on that cruise, an F/A-18 Hornet pilot flying a training mission in Oman turned left when he should have turned right, and crashed into the wall of Star Wars Canyon. We couldn't find enough of him to send home to his parents.

On my second Mediterranean cruise, we saw combat action in both Kosovo and Iraq. I think we flew over 3,000 combat sorties with no casualties to air or ground crew. After all the shooting and bombing were over, some machinist's mate on one of our destroyers was doing a routing maintenance job when the piece of power equipment he was working with flew apart, and part of it flew through his head. Circumstances led me to share a helicopter ride from the fleet into Bahrain with this young sailor. I was in a passenger seat, wearing a flight suit. He was in the back of the plane, wearing a body bag.

Later that deployment, as we were returning home, a young sailor was killed in a bizarre accident involving a test fire of one of our ship's anti-aircraft batteries. I was in the ship's dimly lit combat direction center, looking at radar displays, when I heard over a headset that one of our flight deck observers had been cut in half by a piece of the wire used to tow the airborne target.

A young lieutenant commander did a bang up job in a ground billet for me on that cruise while going through a messy divorce. He fell into a good relationship with another officer during that tour, and he was thrilled when he got orders to return to flight duty. He positively beamed when he spoke at the farewell luncheon we threw for him.

The next I heard of him was almost a year later, after I had retired. An e-mail from a shipmate said that the young lieutenant commander had disappeared, along with his airplane and the rest of its crew, in the vicinity of Puerto Rico during a naval exercise. Never found: no lieutenant commander, no airplane, no fellow crewmembers. Somebody in the old crowd let his girlfriend know what had happened. I was glad it didn't have to be me.

When it comes to direct experience with fallen comrades, I got off pretty easy. Great wartime leaders like Dwight Eisenhower and Chester Nimitz lost millions of men and women under their commands--sometimes tens of thousands in a single day. One war story says that after one of the big island battles of World War II, Nimitz was so distraught over the number of Marine casualties that he briefly considered resigning and turning control of the entire Pacific war effort over to Douglas McArthur.

Over the past two weeks, I've read a lot of op-ed pieces on the meaning of Memorial Day. Many of these editorials pretend to decry using the holiday as a platform for political speech, but are, in fact, flimsy pretexts for supporting Mr. Bush's war in Iraq and attacking people who are opposed to it. Simply put, these kinds of diatribes are not about sacrifice--they're about glorifying wars, past, present and future. They're political speech flimsily disguised as non-political speech.

To hell with all that. My Memorial Day is about the thoughts I've already shared with you, and in three quotes from Dwight Eisenhower I'd also like to leave you with.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.