Peace Poofters en Regalia

by Jeff Huber

An interview with a segment of the foreign media brought home to me why the peace movement has completely lost whatever traction it may have had.

The call came: could I tape and interview about the recent atrocity in Afghanistan.  Which one? I said.  Wait, we’ll send you the story, they replied.  So I got a link in the email and clicked and up popped a story at the web site of the UK’s Daily Mail. 

 

The phone rang again.  Yes, I got the link and found the story.  Could I be ready to tape the interview in five minutes?  No, I needed at least half an hour to read the story and see what else has been written about the incident before I cared to go on record with any sort of opinion about it.  The news babe at the other end seemed disappointed by that, but okay, she’d call back in a half hour. 

“U.S. bombing wipes out  Afghan village from map,” read the Daily Mail headline (the headline has since been changed to “The Afghan village that’s been wiped from the map - with 25 tons of coalition bombs”).   

Wikipedia says the Daily Mail was Britain’s first daily newspaper aimed at the “lower-middle-class market.”  According to a December 2004 survey, Wikipedia tells us, 53% of Daily Mail readers voted for the Conservative Party, compared to 21% for Labour and 17% for the Liberal Democrats.  Wikipedia also informs us that Science writer Ben Goldacre of The Guardian has described the Daily Mail as "the home of the scare story."

So we can tentatively surmise that the Daily Mail is at best as credible as FOX News.  A lot of people say as much about Wikipedia, but a lot of the people who say that aren’t happy with what Wikipedia says about them.  Moreover, authors of Wikipedia articles tend to cite their sources—the article on the Daily Mail has 73 footnotes, the vast majority of them hyperlinked.

The author of the Daily Mirror story, Lewis Bazwell, cited zero sources, at least zero sources who have any real knowledge of what actually happened to the Afghan village—Tarok Kolache, a small settlement in Kandahar—that the U.S. bombing reportedly obliterated. 

“After two attempts at clearing the village led to casualties on both sides,” Bazwell writes, “Lieutenant Colonel David Flynn, commander of the Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th gave the order to pulverise the village.”  Bazwell tells us that Flynn’s unit employed a mine clearing charge that “hammered a route into the centre of Tarok Kolache using rocket-propelled explosives.”  The destruction “escalated” Bazwell goes on to say, “with ’49,200lbs of ordnance’ dropped on the village via air strikes and ground-launched rockets, which saw it swiftly blown off the face of the earth.”

The quotes around “49,200lbs of ordnance” make it sound like Bazwell is citing some reliable source verbatim, but he doesn't say who or what that source is.  And characterizing the mine clearing system in question as having “rocket propelled explosives” is misleading. 

Bazwell does identify two sources by name, but not to support anything he’s presented as fact.  One source is Erica Gaston, who says “I think this property destruction has likely reset the clock on any nascent positive impressions.”  Erica is an Afghanistan based “researcher” for the Open Society Institute.  There’s no telling from the article where her knowledge of “this property destruction” came from.  Odds are that her source was Bazwell. 

Bazwell’s other source is Paula Broadwell, a “West Point graduate” who wrote that Lt. Col. Flynn’s men were “terrified to go back into the pomegranate orchards to continue clearing [the area]; it seemed like certain death.”  Ms. Broadwell wrote the comment in a blog run by formerly credible Pentagon correspondent Tom Ricks, who years ago became senior media concubine for David Petraeus.  According to Ricks, Broadwell is a “friend of the blog” who is “knocking around Afghanistan, checking out operations and visiting some West Point buddies.”  So Broadwell is an amateur journalist working with pseudo-journalist Ricks whose credibility is on par with Bazwell’s.  (She might be the source of the “49,000lbs of ordnance” statement, but it’s hard to say, and if so, where did she get that number?)

Bazwell stuffs a mountain of a straw man when he states that “General David Petraeus has reportedly told his commanders to follow the destructive model seen in Tarok Kolache,” but only offers inferential evidence that Petraeus said anything of the sort.  (“Inferential evidence” generally involves taking a third party’s words out of context, trimming them to suit your purposes, and then planting them in a fourth party’s mouth.)

The piece’s piece of resistance is a before and after picture of the village, which may not have been photo shopped, but if the Daily Mail is above photo-shopping a picture like that to support its agenda or sell bandwidth I’m a monkey’s weight-loss coach. 

So I google “Afghan Village wiped out” and everything that pops up, included a blurb in Wired, cites the Mail story, so Bazwell and The Mail have created a lovely echo chamber out of skewing a report originally made by a hobbyist (Broadwell) and supported by a picture that might have come from the Disney animation studio for all we know.  

The foreign news babe calls back and she asks me what I have to say about the latest U.S. atrocities in Afghanistan.  I read her the riot act about giving credence to an incredible news story and tell her that she and the rest of the international have enough legitimate complaints to make against U.S. policy and strategy and tactical execution in the Bananastans without mucking around in crap of this kind.  So she asks if I’m saying there are more important war crimes to investigate than this one, and I do an Ozzy Osborne number on her head.  I suspect the interview never aired.

Now, there’s a one-in-a-thousand chance that Bazwell’s Mail story is a hundred-percent true and it just sounds like a lie because Bazwell and his outlet are so used to lying they don’t know how to sound like they’re not.  The problem is that every cock-and-bull story like this that goes around the circuit makes every responsibly reported and legitimate story in this vein sound like cock-and-bull roar too. 

So if the stupid bloody peace poofters who ring their hands and cry like rivers over every war atrocity fable that crawls out of the polluted information swamp really want to help the peace movement, they should just shut the f*ck up.  

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is the author of the critically applauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a satire on America’s rise to global dominance. 

Everybody’s a Comedian

by Jeff Huber

Few people abuse power and authority worst than an executive officer (XO) of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier who is a bully and a bigot and a mean spirited egotist.  I’m not sure if Capt. Owen Honors, the former XO of the carrier USS Enterprise who just got the deep six as the ship’s commanding officer (CO), was one of those, but he displayed most of the symptoms. 

I wasn’t sure if the affair of Honors (heh) was worth disbursing a thousand words on until I saw Jon Stewart’s Daily Show take on it.  As is often the case, funny man Stewart didn’t quite grasp the matter’s gravity, and when Stewart doesn't get something, his Generation X, Y, Z, etc. fan base doesn’t get it either. 

Capt. Honors (right) leads a
damage control party.

Many of these candidates for adulthood are in the military and they don’t see what the big deal was with the skits Honors aired on the ship’s TV station four years ago.  Heck, you see professional comedians like Jon Stewart do those kinds of things all the time.  The painfully obvious distinction they fail to make is that comedians like Jon Stewart aren’t executive officers of nuclear aircraft carriers.  And, oh yeah, from the looks of the video that’s been crisscrossing the information highway the past few weeks, Capt. Honors is no comedian.

In a more unfocused than usual segment on his Jan. 5 program, Stewart attempted a send-up of, well, one isn’t sure just who the satiric target was—Honors or the Navy or Navy brass or maybe the sad state of American humor in the major media.  Stewart’s bit, well, it bit, but he was on the mark in noting that Honors’ skits totally chewed it, man, and they mostly consisted of jokes stolen from Caddy Shack.  Honors at one point in the infamous video notes that professional comedians get a lot of laughs from dropping the f-bomb, so he and his zany band of merry maritime players do a bit where they drop the f-bomb a lot, almost as much as Stewart has taken to dropping it lately when his facial and vocal mugging fail to cover for the weak material he and his fleet of writers crank out.  In all, Honors’ comedic efforts were on par with the dreck we saw in the heinous Porky’s films and only barely superior to what Saturday Night Live has been shoveling at us for the past several years.  

But were XO Honors’ bad skits unfunny enough to warrant that CO Honors be fired four years after they aired?  Stewart implied that Honors was relieved of command for having tried to improve crew morale.  I’m not sure if Stewart’s understanding of the issue is that shallow (sure, John, and Hitler was just trying to improve the Germans’ morale).  But we can be reasonably confident that Stewart is unaware that XO Movie Night has been a tradition of most Navy aircraft carriers for decades—since 1981 that I personally know of.  And it’s a dead cert that Stewart doesn’t realized that Honors is one of the first, if not the first, CO of a U.S. aircraft carrier to get reassigned to Naval Air Station Palooka over the skits he put on as XO of a U.S. aircraft carrier. 

Some who are critical of the decision to relieve Honors say it reflected the Navy’s overzealous sense of political correctness in the touchy-feely 21^st century.  Let me tell you something.  In the late 80s, before we had women on Navy ships and things at sea were still as salty as a Philly pretzel, I did an unflattering impersonation of a Filipino officer in a skit on ship’s TV.  That skit darn near kept Lieutenant Huber from becoming Lieutenant Commander Huber.  If I had pulled one of the stunts Honors pulled week after week on his XO Theater, I would have been flown home from the middle of a deployment that day, not four years from that day. 

In his video, XO Honors makes what must be intended as a joke about how the CO and the admiral knew nothing about his little ship’s TV skits.  Ha.  Ha.  There’s no way the top brass on that sip couldn’t have known about Honors’ shenanigans, and they clearly approved of them if only tacitly.  I don’t even care to know who the CO and the admiral were, but it would be interesting to find out if they’re still on active duty and why nobody is grilling them about the Honors escapade.  That the Navy did nothing about Honors’ programs until the Virginian-Pilot did an expose on them four years after the fact reveals everything you need to really know about how seriously the service’s top leadership takes the Navy’s phony-baloney “core values.”  That Honors would likely have risen far higher than he did if the Pilot had not blown the whistle on him also tells you tomes about the Navy’s institutional atmosphere.

I’m perfectly willing to grant for the sake of argument that while there isn’t a funny bone in Honors’ body, there isn’t a mean spirited one either, and that he honestly thought everyone on board the ship understood that he was just fooling around.  But on a ship that big, much of the crew, especially the younger sailors who couldn’t know The Big XO very well, would likely think he’s as mean as Jon Stewart is when he has his Daily Show crew punk perfectly sincere little people who big-shot comedians like Stewart shouldn’t be picking on (what’s the point of telling truth to the powerless, Jon?)  If Honors thought the whole crew would perceive his slurs and obscenities in their intended jolly context, then he suffers from a clownish inability to make sound judgments. 

But given what we’ve seen of top military leadership throughout the New American Century’s Long War on Evil, being a clown who makes poor judgments qualifies one for accelerated promotion to the four-star level.  So yeah, why fire Honors? 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is the author of the critically applauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a satire on America’s rise to global dominance. 

Uncle Bob and Bullseye Barbie and The Daily Show

by Jeff Huber

I’ve tentatively concluded that people who do destructive things in this world fall somewhere on a continuum that contains “true believers” at one pole and “bad apples” at the other.  In between, in no particular order, come the likes of Jesuits, Doublethinkers, sociopaths, lunatics and blind rats.  For the time being, we’ll call this continuum the “Malevolence Syndrome.” 

People at the extremes are one way or the other.  True believers, say the kinds of Catholics who have no qualms whatsoever about protecting a pedophile priest, are the kinds of fanatics who, though otherwise sane enough to roam the streets, will believe whatever madness their masters tell them is true. 

Bad apples are the closest things to evil that can exist in this world, and maybe in the next one as well.  I’m enough of a Taoist to refuse to label human beings “evil,” not even Dick Cheney.  Labeling people as “evil” grants them, at least in the mind of the person applying the label, extra-natural powers that they do not possess. 

Any time you hear political leaders and their spin physicians refer to adversaries as “evil ones” or “evildoers” or call a competing regime an “evil empire” or an “axis of evil,” those leaders are trying to frighten you into going along with shenanigans you wouldn’t otherwise tolerate.  If there’s a hint of anything remotely resembling evil in bad apples, it’s that unlike most of us, they don’t fear retribution for their actions, even in the afterlife.  Dick Cheney, in fact, relishes his prospects for descending straight to the ninth level of hell upon his demise, immediately taking over as Satan’s number two man and re-shaping perdition from the bottom up.  Maybe when Bill Kristol joins him in the beyond they’ll collaborate in forming a Project for the New American Hell. 

Jesuits, like the order of lawyer-priests who cooked up the arguments that justified the Spanish Inquisition, can fabricate a means-justify-ends scenario to rationalize any course of action they care to take.  Orwellian Doublethinkers are capable of simultaneously holding diametrically opposed beliefs.  Sociopaths lack consciences and don’t feel normal emotions, but unlike bad apples they do fear the consequences of their actions and unlike true believers they’re crafty enough not to get talked into doing things that will get them into trouble.  Lunatics are easily manipulated crazy people and blind rats carry baggage that causes errors in their moral vision, that blinding baggage usually being an ego the size of John McCain’s. 

Young Mr. Bush’s dwarf-star psyche pretty much covered the entirety of the malevolence spectrum short of qualifying his as a truly bad apple, which as we’ve noted was a role aptly filled in that administration by Big Dick.

A major mitigating aspect that plays into macro-antisocial behavior is one that I call the “family factor,” and it’s a close relative of the Jesuit phenomenon.  The family factor says that one may justify sins both venial and mortal if as long as they somehow dovetail into the rubric of taking care of one’s family.  This explains the behavior of so many or our high-profile news stenographers and spokesmodels.  They could refuse to copy or read verbatim the propagandistic pap our ministries of truth feed them, but then where would the mortgage payment on the dream house come from, or the Ivy League tuition?  I’m willing to guess that at least ninety percent of the world’s misery is a direct result of the general public going along with the mad schemes of megalomaniacs because of the family factor. 

Sociopathy seems to be the dominant trait in the public behavior of Uncle Bob Gates, our Secretary of Peace.  A bureaucratic-savant milquetoast, Gates has risen to the highest levels of the American power paradigm by massaging subordinates and superiors alike in all the right places, taking credit for the accomplishments of those more talented than he is and delegating blame for his transgressions to bystanders whose self-preservation instincts are inferior to his.

Gates has garnered hosannas for his performance as head of our “defense” department, but what he’s actually done is allow his corps of loose-cannon generals run amok, bombing the bejesus out of Muslim weddings and performing other deeds of derring destruction that will ensure have a steady enough supply of bad guys to sustain the Pentarchy’s cherished Long War in perpetuity.  Gates had also solicited laurels for his shows-of-effort at trimming the defense budget.  His headline grabbing “decision” to close the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia will have had about as much impact on the deficit as flushing your toilet has on the ocean temperature off the coast of Peru, and that’s assuming the Command ever really closes.   His recently announced plan for $78 billion of proposed cuts over five years won’t survive five weeks of Congressional molesting and he knows it. 

Then there’s Gates’ whackadoo promise that he will find $100 billion in savings if Congress gives the money back to the military for “modernization.”  Jesus, Mary and Curly Joe.  That’s like picking up a group of addicts at rehab, handing them the money they’ve saved by being off drugs, and then dropping them off in front of a crack house.

That Gates will parachute from a high-flying career as a betrayer of the public trust into a platinum sunset typifies the polluted moral environment that produced the recent escapade where the Crosshair Kid, twenty-something lunatic, opened fire on an elected Democrat and a liberal judge and more than a dozen other people who had the poor sense to be seen in public in Arizona with an elected Democratic and a liberal judge.  

We get Bullseye Barbie protesting that noooooooo, the animations on her web site of crosshairs aimed at Democrats in close political races couldn’t possibly have motivated that kind of behavior.  Then we get Barbie’s Tea Bag co-quack Glen Beck ranting on the air about how, nooooooo, neither Barbie nor he nor anyone else on rabid radio or FOX News ever imagined they could incite such violence, even though Beck himself is celebrated for having said on the air that he was thinking about killing liberal film maker Michael Moore.

But what upset me most about this incident was national ass Jon Stewart coming out on his Daily Show Monday night and talking about how nooooo, the right-wing media hate merchants can’t be held responsible for things like what happened with the Crosshair Kid.  They’ve just been funnin’ around for the last decade or so with all that hat and violence talk.  Nobody ever takes them seriously, do they? 

I don’t think Stewarts’ a bad apple, but he displays numerous symptoms of Malevolence Syndrome, particularly Jesuit traits, Double-thought patterns, family factoring and a self-image bigger than McCain and Joe Biden’s egos put together. 

Unfortunately for the future of American ethics, Generation X, which will someday become America’s adult population, has adopted Stewart as its combination Mark Twain and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.  Wise up, kids.  Don’t let the little man with the cable comedy program flick your moral compass.  He’s not that wise, and he’s more concerned  in getting yuks than he is with the welfare of humankind. 

One other thing to keep in mind about Stewart: when you have as many writers as he has and you have to mug as much as he does to get laughs from the sympathetic audience that staggers off the street and into his studio like the one he plays to every night, you’re not that funny either. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is the author of the critically applauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a satire on America’s rise to global dominance. 

The Yellow Peril Goes Ballistic

by Jeff Huber

The U.S. Navy, in its latest stab at fabricating a veneer of relevance in the War on Evil era, is going to general quarters over developments in China.  Or at least it’s trying to make us, and more importantly Congress, think there’s a real and present peril percolating. 

The klaxon is sounding in a series of press releases camouflaged as news stories and planted throughout the Pentarchy friendly news media—which these days is every news outlet with a budget bigger than the price of an Oldsmobile—about how “China is moving closer to deploying a ballistic missile designed to sink an aircraft carrier.”

Providing the main testimonial piece of this information campaign is no less an authority than Adm. Robert Willard, head of U.S. Pacific Command.  That sounds pretty impressive.  After all, being PACOM makes him a direct descendent of Adm. Chester Nimitz, the officer who commanded allied forces to victory in the Pacific during World War II and who was, in many opinions including mine, the last four-star American officer who was worth following.  But the shine fades from Willard’s stars the second you find out he’s an old F-14 Tomcat fighter pilot. 

I’m loathe to pigeonhole people, but decades of working closely with Tomcat Divas taught me the hard way that you want to get to know one of those guys pretty well before you loan him money or let him drive your daughter to school.  Plus, fighter pilots, who ostensibly fly air superiority aircraft, only really concern themselves about superiority over the airspace within about a 20-mile radius of wherever they happen to be flying.  So I’m hesitant to bow before Willard’s credentials and you should be too.  

Dr. Erickson and
Mr. Peabody

Flying wing on Willard’s “expert testimony” is Dr. Andrew Erickson, a Boy Sherman with a PhD in war from Princeton who’s presently an associate professor in the Strategic Research Department at the United States Naval War College.  Dr. Erickson, who speaks Chinese and looks 12-years old, is a Fellow in the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, an Associate in Research at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, a Fellow in the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program, and a bunch of other things that qualify his as the very model of a major modern neocon. 

The Hindenburg falls prey to
a Chinese surface-to-air
missile.

Together, Adm. Willard and Dr. Erickson have generated enough gas over the latest China revelation to float a fleet of Hindenburgs.  Willard’s public affairs commandos told AP and the rest of the free world’s press to tell us that Willard told “Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper that he believed the Chinese anti-ship ballistic missile program had achieved ‘initial operational capability,’ meaning that a workable design had been settled on and was being further developed.”

The propaganda ruse of telling the press that you “believe” something became common practice during young Mr. Bush’s administration, and Bush and Big Dick and the rest of the war mongrels used it extensively to make claims that couldn’t be proven or, better yet, were patently untrue.  But by saying they “believed” something to be true, they couldn’t be called out for lying when it turned out not to be.

I must have heard wrong.

Applying the “initial operational capability” label to China’s carrier killing kahuna implies that the thing is deployed in the fleet and is ready to start killing carriers today.  By the U.S. military’s definition, initial operational capability is “attained when some units and/or organizations in the force structure scheduled to receive a system 1) have received it and 2) have the ability to employ and maintain it.”  We apparently apply lower criteria to other militaries—out of kindness, I suppose.  Those poor kids, they just can’t be expected to keep pace with us, can they?

 

But Willard doesn't exactly mean that the carrier killer is either “operational” or “capable” per se, initially or officially or otherwise.  Because AP says that Willard says that, “years of tests are probably still needed before the missile can be fully deployed.”  Or at least that’s what he believes. 

I find it hard to believe that Willard’s recent announcement means that China’s carrier killing missile is any more operational or capable than it was back in March of this year, when prodigy Erickson reported in Wired that Willard had told Congress that China was “developing and testing” it.  Erickson gushed that Willard’s testimony was the “first official confirmation” that China’s carrier killer program had advanced to the actual testing stage. 

That’s a bit confusing in light of a report from by the United States Naval Institute, the Navy’s long-time go-to propaganda mule, that said “information” from “Chinese sources” indicated the system was “operational” back in March of 2009.   

None of this explains how much more “operational” China’s carrier killer ballistic missile is than it was back in the 90s when I first heard about it, and when many of us had a little chuckle speculating as to what sort of con artist had made the Chinese believe they could make a ballistic missile capable of going 900 miles and sinking a moving aircraft carrier.  Since the missile we’re talking about, the Dong Feng 21, is designed to carry a conventional warhead, it would have to hit a carrier on the skin to do any appreciable damage.  Without atoms running amok on impact, a near miss is as good as a mile—or 900 of them.  The thing might as well blow up on the launch pad for all the good it’s likely to do the Chinese. 

Willard’s spin physicians say the missile “would be a game-changer in the Asian security environment.”  Don’t think for a microsecond that the use of the word “would” was accidental.  One would believe that the missile would probably be a game-changer if it would ever actually become operational or ever actually work.

Navy Public Affairs Office mascot "Bully"

The steaming pile of recycled oats that the likes of Willard and Ericson are trying to feed us implies that carriers and their escorts are defenseless against ballistic missiles like the Dong Feng 21, but the fact is that the The Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System (Aegis BMD) is already up and running—whether you believe it is or not.  21 of our cruisers and destroyers already have BMD capability and more will be refitted with the technology.  We actually have more sea-deployable defense against the new-fangled ballistic missile than we have against old-fangled ship killers like cruise missiles and torpedoes and mines.  Against the old gizmology our ships are still essentially helpless, despite having had decades to develop effective measures to counter it. 

So the only “game” the Chinese ballistic missile has changed is the old bull game the Navy keeps playing to make it sound like it needs more money to keep its increasingly extraneous fleet from becoming a trillion-or-so dollars’ worth of sitting ducks.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is the author of the critically applauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a satire on America’s rise to global dominance. 

Home for Christmas

I’m taking a break from the column to enjoy the holidays, making up for all the ones I spent at sea.   Next week we’ll explore a host of war mongrel shenanigans, including an AP report on UN kibitzer to Afghanistan Staffan de Mistura’s revalation who says that the Taliban know they can’t win, they just won’t admit it publicly.  AP doesn’t mention when or where the Taliban admitted it to de Mistura, nor do they speculate on whether de Mistura knows that King David Petraeus has admitted that we can’t win. 

Ho, ho, ho, huh?

I'd like to think that someday, somehow, we'll be able to bring a lot of our service persons home for the holidays and all the other days too  by putting a stop to the insanity of the Pentarchy's Long War.

Peace,

Jeff

Send in the Strategy Clowns

by Jeff Huber

Perhaps nothing signals how bogus the Obama administration’s latest review of its own strategy in the Bananastans more than the Dec. 14 announcement by White House spokesmodel Robert Gibbs that there will be no change to the strategy. 

The administration bull feather merchants said the same thing when Obama transferred “Bananas” Stan McChrystal to Civilian Command for shooting off his mouth (and other body parts) in front of journalist Michael Hastings of the Rolling Stone about what colossal buffoons National Security Adviser James Jones and special Bananastans envoy Richard Holbrooke and the rest of Obama’s security team were (and, with the exception of the recently deceased Holbrooke, still are).  McChrystal’s insubordination was unacceptable, we were told, but the strategy he was using was perfectly sound.  

As wrong as McChrystal was about everything else, he was dead on about Jones and the rest of Obama’s strategy clowns.  They are colossal buffoons, and the strategy they keep telling us doesn’t need fixing is the biggest butt-trumpet of a war plan since the Maginot Line, the massive border defense system that took the French two decades to build and Hitler’s army two days to defeat.

The Bananastan strategy became official when it hit the war-cozy New York Times in March 2009.   The psychedelic “White Paper of the Interagency Policy Group’s Report on U.S. Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan” was a five-star hallucination from beginning to end.  “The United States has a vital national security interest” in the Bananastans, it told us.  Why?  Because, “In Pakistan, al Qaeda and other groups of jihadist terrorists are planning new terror attacks” against the U.S. homeland as well as the homelands of some of our allies who we still pretend to care about.

There’s nothing like basing strategy and policy on a delusional premise.  Just look at how well that worked for us in Iraq.  We have no idea if al Qaeda or any other terrorists are planning new terror attacks on anybody, much less whether they’re doing so in Pakistan.  Our intelligence in that part of the world, by which I mean all of Asia and Africa, is like a chain letter racket: its inherent design dictates that whoever is at the far end of the chain gets crushed against a cliff and flung down a bottomless chasm. 

Throughout our misanthropic misadventures in the War on Ism, we’ve stepped from one Pungi trap to the next to the next because our intelligence is based on bribing or beating whatever locals we can get our hooks on into telling us what we want to hear.  Want to get rid of your worst enemies?  Tell the Americans they’re al Qaeda number two men.   But don't tell them right away, I mean, don’t take the first wad of bills they flash at you.  Hold out for at least twice the original offer. 

This business of King David Petraeus negotiating with a “high-ranking Taliban leader” who turned out to be an imposter was the stuff of a Doonesbury episode (I’m pretty insured it inspired the story line where The Red Rascal aka Jeff Redfern gives a $5 million bribe to someone who claims to be Karzai but isn’t).  That our intelligence is bad enough to let a four-star theater commander get suckered into dropping his pants in front of a glory hole like that shocks even me, who’s never been remotely impressed by the caliber of U.S. intelligence, military or otherwise.  I’m convinced at this point that our intelligence agencies are training their operatives with the same two-step method the Navy used in my day to produce qualified hospital corpsmen: watch a qualified instructor perform a procedure once and you’re qualified to perform it unsupervised.  Then you perform the procedure unsupervised once and you’re a qualified instructor. 

Our best intelligence estimates guess there are maybe a few hundred al Qaeda in the Bananastans, and that they’re probably hiding in some cave town in the Pakistan’s SWAT valley.  They’ve apparently been hiding out there for close to a decade.  Pentarchy stenographers Mark Mazetti and Dexter Filkins of the Times report that unnamed “senior military commanders” are “pushing for an expanded campaign of Special Operations ground raids across the border into Pakistan’s tribal areas.”  Oh, boy.  How many new evildoers will they create when they slaughter everybody except the bad guys they’re supposed to be going after?

Gen. David Petraeus

The “progress” that Obama’s Bozos boast of in the latest strategy review refers to the scorched earth operation Petraeus is running in Kandahar, where he and his troops are laying villages to waste like James Earl Jones and his hooligans did in the original Conan the Barbarian.  Remember the look on little Conan’s face when Jones lopped off his mommy’s head with his daddy’s sword?  I’ll be back!  The beauty part is that Petraeus can’t justify reenacting Sherman’s March to the Sea in Kandahar as being necessary to defeat al Qaeda because what little there is of al Qaeda isn’t in bloody Kandahar.  But Petraeus quit having to justify anything he does a long time ago. 

Given how successful Obama’s national security Kadiddlehoppers think Petraeus’s grand mal massacre in Kandahar is going, the next thing we should try is carpet-bombing every square inch of Afghanistan and Pakistan for a solid month or two.  We might accidentally kill all the bad guys along with the entire civilian population, and then we’d have a tough time cooking up an excuse for occupying that part of the world for a generation or two.  But, that’s how wars go; once in a while you have to take risks.

One of several problems in our present national security environment is that the people who draw up strategies are professional war wonks.  War wonks typically have no military experience or any other background that makes them any more qualified to run a war than a Navy hospital corpsman is.  And war wonks come in two flavors: they’re either the neocon schlemiels who led us into our national pratfall or they’re Democrats who are so afraid of losing their jobs to the neocons that they do whatever they think the neocons would do if the neocons already had their jobs.   Whatever lesser evil we stick in the Oval Office will always be surrounded by advisers for whom inextricable wars equal job security.

So stick that in your peace pipe and blow bubbles with it. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is the author of the critically applauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a satire on America’s rise to global dominance.       

Wiki bin Laden

Julian Assange, founder and commander in chief of Wikileaks, appears to have replaced Iran, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the rest of the world’s wily evildoers as the number-one threat to U.S. security.  In fact, we seem to be at war with Assange and his network of allies, a network that seems to be growing faster than the roster terrorists we’re creating with our ham-fisted war on terrorism.

According to the Pentarchy-pliant New York Times, we’re witnessing the start of a “cyberwar” against “hundreds of Internet activists” who have “mounted retaliatory attacks” on Web sites that they deem “hostile” to Wikileaks and Assange.  From the sound and fury the war mongrels are channeling through the media, you’d think Assange had supplanted Osama bin Laden as American’s most-wanted boogey man.  

What's all this, then?

The national security noise generators would have us think that the only real difference between Assange and bin Laden is that we have Assange in custody.  Well, our British lapdogs have him in custody.  If you could call Assange’s arrest a capture.  He turned himself in.  But you can safely bet a shiny decimal tuppence that half of Scotland Yard put itself in for the George Cross the second Assange walked through the front door of his local bobby shop.  

According to the U.K.’s Guardian, British District Judge Howard Riddle refused Assange bail on the grounds that he “might fail to surrender.”  Um.  Riddle me this, Judge: why are you worried Assange won’t surrender when he just, like, did?

Assange’s incarceration supposedly has nothing to do with Wikileaks’ recent dump of embarrassing State Department documents.  It’s all about a Swedish warrant for his arrest on charges by two women of sexual misconduct.  One might wonder how any sort of sexual behavior could be viewed as “misconduct” in Sweden, but fortunately we have Swedish attorney Gemma Lindfield, an “experienced extradition practicioner,” to explain things for us. 

The first complainant, “Miss A,” accused Assange of “using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner.”  I hadn’t heard that Sweden outlawed the missionary position, but I guess the Swedes can’t have it getting out that anyone in their country is having plain old vanilla envelope sex. . 

Defending their integrity

Miss A also alleges that Assange "sexually molested" her without a condom when it was her "express wish" one should be used.  How often does something like that happen in Sweden?  Just about never, huh?  Wouldn’t that be your guess?  And I bet when something like that does happen, the Swedish Bikini Team threatens to go on strike until the Swedish justice system sets things right. 

Miss A also charged that Assange “deliberately molested” her "in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity."  Jesus in a hoop skirt.  This is starting to remind me of a joke I heard in the Navy about the blind Buddhist monk the Siamese geishas.  It sounds to me like Miss A got her watertight integrity violated and she’s mad as a herd of homeless hornets because she’d been saving it for Mr. Right.  

The other complainant, “Miss W,” charges that Assange had sex with her without wearing a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home.  Hm.  Now, if she was asleep, how did she know…  And how did Assange get into her Stockholm home while she was asleep if he didn’t have his own…

And hey, do you suppose Miss A and Miss W filed charges against Assange before or after they found out about each other? 

Oh, never mind.  I shouldn’t make light of this.  Judge Riddle says these are “serious allegations.”  I guess he’s never heard of this kind of behavior happening in England.  It’s probably never come before his bench in all the time he’s been sleeping on it. 

Assange told City of Westminster magistrates that he intends to fight extradition to Sweden, setting the stage for what promises to be a long legal battle.  Maybe long enough for some Pentagon or Justice Department legal beagle to cook up something of substance to charge Assange with.  Every high-profile war mongrel in Congress and the executive branch is howling about how Assange’s release of thousands of “classified” documents “jeopardizes U.S. national security.”  But the truth is that nothing Assange has revealed or ever will reveal could violate the integrity of our national security the way our government’s senior leadership has ravaged it.

Assange didn’t cook the intelligence on Iraq like Big Dick Cheney and His Beltway Destroyers did, and Assange didn’t funnel pro-war propaganda into the public ear the way the New York Times did, and he didn’t stand in front of the United Nations with cameras rolling and present “hard” intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction that he knew damn good and well was used dog lunch the way Colin Powell did.  Assange didn’t sucker us into going along with extending the war in Iraq the way David Petraeus did, and he didn’t roll over like a slut-puppy for his generals and escalate the unwinnable war in Afghanistan the way Barack Obama did.

The people putting our troops in danger are the same yahooligans who are crying a river of crocodile tears because they look like fools in the Wiki-leaked documents Assange released.  Our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (aka Suzy Strident) says Assange’s leaks are an “attack of U.S. foreign policy interests,” yet few people in the history of our country have done more harm to our foreign policy interests than Hillary.  Hillary makes Condi Rice seem marginally competent in comparison, and to make Condi seem even that good, man, you have to totally suck to the point where it’s unfathomable how bad you totally suck.  

  

Twenty years ago, or maybe even ten, whoever is feeding Assange his material would have taken it to the New York Times or the Washington Post.  Alas, those outlets, as well as the vast majority of the rest of our “pink” press, have taken a nose dive on the job and they’ll never get back up.

So here’s to the information warriors who have engaged in cyber-combat with Amazon and the credit card companies and the rest of the deep-pocketed slobs who have used their clout to try to stifle the closest remaining thing we have to a fourth estate.

What a shame that the only journalistic watchdog America has left resides in stodgy old sexually repressed Sweden.  

THIS JUST IN: HE'S FREE!

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is the author of the critically applauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a satire on America’s rise to global dominance.     

Pots and Kettles and Wikileak

by Jeff Huber

Among the gourmet morsels contained in the latest Wikileaks release was a cable written a year ago by Secretary of Screech Hillary Clinton.  In the cable, Hillary accused several Arab states, most of them our supposed allies, of funding terrorism.  She says citizens of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are the primary funders of al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas and other outfits that her hapless State Department classifies as “foreign terrorist organizations.”  The Mossad, Israel’s assignation bureau, isn’t on that list for some reason.  Neither are the CIA or Blackwater or the Ku Klux Klan, but they’re all based in America so they don’t qualify as foreign terrorist groups.  

Go ahead, pull it!

Suzy Strident is especially cross with the Saudis because terror groups raise “millions” of dollars each year from Saudi sources.  Christ in a CARE package, Hillary.  You’re dragging a cheese grater across the faces of the closest things we have to friends in that part of the world over millions of dollars?  What, you’re like Dr. Evil and just woke up from three decades in cryogenic preservation and you think millions of dollars are worth getting worked up about?   

Hillary says in her little cable that Saudi contributors are the main source of terror funding around the world.  Mother of Moe, Curly and Shemp, lady, how many billions do you suppose have made their way from collection plates in Boston to the Irish Republican Army’s war chest over the past couple of centuries?  

I wish only to speak with The Red Rascal.

But the money private American citizens blow to arm Irish hoodlums isn’t a shot of Jamesons in the ocean compared to the tens of billions, quite possibly hundreds of billions that the United States government steam shovels into the hands of the same band of Muslim merry men that Hillary says gets all its money from the Saudis and a few other Arab states. 

There’s no telling exactly how much of every dollar we piddle into Afghanistan and Iraq ends up in the hands of the people we’re supposedly fighting, but it’s enough to float several third world nation’s economies and more than enough to sink ours.  King David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency “genius,” has been passing out stacks of greenbacks and cases of weapons to camel banditos for years now.  Iraq still looks like a carpet-bombed animal park and the Bananastans are so bonkers that our best hope for a peaceful solution there is probably Gary Trudeau’s Red Rascal (aka Jeff Redfern).  

Oh.  God.  Shut.   Up.  

Thank God for Wikileaks.  Hillary has been playing FAG (Foreign Affairs Groupie) Hag to bureaucratic bimbo Bob Gates, the undisputed master of the delicate balance between sucking up to his superiors and appeasing his subordinates, since young Mr. Obama made the bad judgment of nominating her for the State Post.  Of course, you wouldn’t get that impression of her from big media.  The way they treat Hill the Pill and Uncle Bob, you’d think you should take them seriously. News outlets like the Washington Post, the paper that saved the Constitution from Richard Milhous Nixon, have become the de facto propaganda arm of the American warmongery.  It’s a wonder anybody bothers to watch Fox News or listen to Rush anymore.  Old habits die hard, I guess. 

In July, Wikileaks posted 90,000 documents that The Guardian described as “a devastating portrait of the war in Afghanistan.”   Today, you’re hard pressed to find a mirror of the Wikileaks site that hasn’t been shut down under pressure from our anal-retentive government (they can pry into our secrets but we can’t know theirs).  But you can tune into ABC’s Good Morning America and watch the vaginal George Stephanopoulos embed his nose half-way up Dave Petraeus’s colon, and see footage of all the wonderful things going on in Afghanistan thanks to the magnificent work of our troops (“It was enough to make me want to jump on a plane and visit the place,” a friend reported).  

Wikileaks honcho Julian Assange is under attack from all corners.  Even mug-mogul Jon Stewart has attacked Assange, illustrating once again that underneath his hip exterior, Stewart’s low-comedy act is about getting cheap laughs, not seeking the truth.  Stewart, a master of appearing informed by memorizing a handful of factoids his staff spoon-feeds him, has illustrated once again that he seldom understands what he’s talking about.

The Christian Science Monitor suggests that Assange may already be under indictment by a secret U.S. grand jury for his latest round of leaks.   If the Feds manage to bag Assange and render him to the states for trial, watch our media fail to rise in defense of the freedom of the press it so long ago abnegated.

Assange has been arrested by our British lapdogs on a Swedish warrant that charges him with sexual misconduct toward former female Wikileak employees.  Funny how that timed out, isn’t it?  If there is anything to these allegations, though, I’m not sure what they say about Assange other than that he’s eminently qualified to serve as a justice on our Supreme Court.  

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is the author of the critically applauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a satire on America’s rise to global dominance.   

Gizmo Wars

by Jeff Huber

According to the New York Times, the U.S. Army says “War would be a lot safer if only more of it were fought by robots.”

Safer for whom, Army? 

It apparently hasn’t occurred to the mavens of the Pentarchy, and likely never will, that the only way to make war a lot safer is to fight a lot less of it.  None of the anointed warfare wizards will bother to bring that tidbit to the national attention, that’s for sure.

Don't shoot it, Honey!  It's cute!

John Dyer, a retired vice-admiral who is now chief operation officer of iRobot (yes, that really is his company’s name) says “One of the great arguments for armed robots is they can fire second.”  Dyer’s pseudo-logic blithely ignores the one might have more than ample reason for shooting first at an armed robot.  If an armed robot with a foreign flag painted on its arm were patrolling my block, I’d be inclined to do a little more than write a defamatory tone poem about it. 

iRobot makes those cute home cleaning gizmos, Roomba the robotic vacuum cleaner and Scooba the robotic floor scrubber.  The Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System (MAARS), made by QinetiQ North America, is every bit as adorable as its domestic counterparts, maybe even more so.  MAARS is the size of a lawn mower, has tank treads, carries a video camera and a big honking machine gun and has a domed cylinder thingy toward the back that looks just like that peppy little R2D2 character from Star Wars.  The coolest thing of all about MAARS is that it’s remotely operated by technicians through “wireless video-game-style controllers.”

Army Special Forces units have bought six of the MAARS robots.  I guess that makes six soldiers who aren’t at this moment playing Call of Duty: Black Ops. 

Arguments that say remote operators will kill fewer civilians than on-scene soldiers presently kill are specious at best.  The notion that one can gain a superior map of reality from a remote video camera is sillier than the belief that coffee can sober you up.  But at least one theorist argues that we won’t have to rely on human decision making to conduct wars any more.

War wonk John Arquilla of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School says, “A lot of people fear artificial intelligence.”  Arquilla, an avid proponent of death by gizmo and, thinks an organizational structure “that skillfully blends humans and intelligent machines” is “the key to the mastery of 21st-century military affairs.”  Mastery of military affairs will only be achieved by developing intelligent humans to skillfully run them, not by fabricating “intelligent” machines to execute them.  But if by “mastery of military affairs” Arquilla means consummate skill at chumping the American public into going along with self-defeating, ever expanding wars throughout the New American Century and well into the next one, then he’s probably right.

Arquilla is part of the network-centric warfare cabal, that coven of brainiacs (most of them connected to the Navy) who evangelize the virtues of warfare through a “system of systems” that is really no more than a good-old-boy network of networks designed to sell cyber-age crap to the Department of Defense. 

Like fanatics who championed the spear and then the arrow and then artillery and then air power and so forth, Arquilla and his net-eccentrics fervently believe their new “way” is the “tao,” the long awaited arrival of the ultimate, universal reality in human conflict.  In an article from last spring in war porn glossy Foreign Policy, Arquilla promises that “netwar” (his streamlined version of the network-centric warfare buzz label) will “save untold amounts of blood and treasure” in future conflicts.  That makes you want to go out and start a few more wars doesn’t it?  Heck, if they cost less and none of the good guys get killed in them, we can’t afford not to have more wars, can we?

Arquilla’s arguments have a certain attraction, though.  He very correctly notes that “The U.S. military has exhausted itself in the repeated deployments since the 9/11 attacks” because “It has a chronic ‘scaling problem,’ making it unable to pursue smaller tasks with smaller numbers.” 

But he doesn't make the case that we can get by with smaller numbers.  He says that our present adversaries prevail because they are “networked” and present us with overwhelming numbers.  We could overcome the vast, networked enemy, his reasoning follows, if only we become networked ourselves and approach the problem with smaller numbers.

If we’re being out-networked it’s not because the ism soldiers have better communication technology than we have.  What the ism-ers are networking with is the 21^st century equivalent of smoke signals.  No matter what kind of technology they buy off the shelf it can’t possibly be any better than the technology we can buy off the shelf, and we can buy a heck of a lot more of it than they can.

The kind of war Arquilla envisions is the same worldwide circle competition we’re engaged in now: an ever-widening effort to subjugate the rest of the world by occupying every square inch of it.   All he really wants to do is con civilian and military leaders into letting their computers make their decisions and replace all the soldiers with robots that are ten times more charming than that Arnold on Green Acres and ever so much more deadly. 

But wait: if we inhabit the world with that many killer robots, won’t that run into even more money than we’re spending on our self-immolating wars now?  Well, that’ll be okay, I guess.  As long as War Widgets Inc. is tossing seven figure bonuses at its executives and keeping the stockholders happy, that’s all that matters. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is the author of the critically applauded Bathtub Admirals, a satire on America’s rise to global dominance.  

NATO (Need Afghanistan, Terminated Otherwise)

Young Mr. Obama’s attendance of the recent NATO summit in Lisbon reaffirms that he has succeeded young Mr. Bush as the faithful doormat of the global Pentarchy.  Counterinsurgency (COIN) crackpot David Kilcullen, senior shaman to both “King” David Petraeus and “Bananas” Stan McChrystal, admitted back in Sept. 2009 that a key reason for staying the course in the Bananastans is to preserve the NATO alliance.  Kilcullen also confessed that the counter-terror mission wasn’t “at the top of my list” of reasons to stay.

The compliant press has been referring to the “NATO mission” in the Bananastans since Rolling Stone and other outlets spilled the beans about American G.I.s saying that ISAF, the acronym for International Security Assistance Force, actually stood for “I Suck At Fighting.”  Pretty soon word will get around that NATO stands for “Need Afghanistan, Terminated Otherwise.”

For all his gas regarding COIN, Kilcullen seems to understand full well that the war-fighting doctrinal is doomed to fail in the Bananastans because successful COIN operations require a legitimate, competent host government that has control of loyal, competent security forces.  Afghanistan will never have either of those commodities.  Pakistan won’t either.  Pakistan has more-or-less competent security forces, but they’re hardly loyal to their government.  Their government is loyal to them—if it knows what’s good for it.  But look on the bright side.  Having a government that’s controlled by its military gives Pakistan a lot in common with us. 

On a coincidental note, a military gaining control of its executive and legislative branches of government is precisely what caused the downfall of Rome.  Don’t take my word for it: ask Renaissance era political genius Niccolo Machiavelli.  In his The Art of War, Machiavelli notes that Rome jumped the shark when the Praetorian guard “became insolent and formidable, not only to the Senate but to the emperors themselves.”  It’s clear as the warning on a pack of cigarettes that Obama doesn’t have the inseminators it would take to stand up to his Long War generals or their sponsors in Congress.

Kilcullen likely also realizes that COIN doctrine is little more than cover strategy for its authors’ real purpose, which is to extend the wartime economy we’ve been on since World War II indefinitely by making “persistent conflict” the permanent global reality.  Part of the reason the Pentarchy never gives us a coherent list of war objectives is the danger that they might accidentally achieve one or more of them.  Then they’d need to make more excuses to keep our troops, and our country, enmeshed in counterproductive wars.  Oh, they could come up with the excuses, don’t get me wrong.  It would just entail extra work, effort that could more efficiently be aimed making more tea baggers who will support the dismantling of the New Deal even though they’re the ones who will suffer from said dismantling.  (Those zombies are direct descendants of the poor dumb white bastards who fought for the plantation owners’ right to own slave during the Civil War).

As to our little NATO buddies, well, they’re pretty much on the same Long War program except they’re not spending the kind of money on defense that we are.  The Brits are lopping defense programs like tumors in a colon.  But that’s okay.  As long as we have war mongrels like John McCain and Jon Kyl and Joe Bob Lieberman in Congress, we’ll pick up whatever slack the Brits create.  We’ll just keep borrowing money from the Chinese to spend on our military until they call in the loan.  Then we’ll take the military we’ve been building with China bucks and declare war on the little bastards.  Well, we won’t declare war.  That would be in keeping with our Constitution.  What the Pentarchs will probably do is pressure Obama or whichever political tart is in the oval office at the time into invoking the September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Forces (AUMF).  As you may recall, that was the near unanimous decree from Congress that the U.S. president could blow the smithereens out of whoever he wanted to blow to smithereens if he thought the prospective smitheree had any sort of potential connection to terrorism. 

We charged the Panty Bomber and the Times Square Screw Up with attacking America with weapons of mass destruction even though neither of their bombs, even if they’d gone off, would have burned their sausages crisp enough to serve with scrambled eggs.  So making a connection between the Chinese and terrorism should be easier than falling off of a backless barstool.  I mean, we’re afraid of them, right?  So if they terrify us, it logically follows that…

One of the ways we and our NATO side boys will keep the war going is by creating more of the enemy than we can ever possibly kill or capture.  We manage that by killing a lot of the civilians we pretend to be trying to protect.  Our latest strategy for protecting civilians will involve killing them with tanks.   

We’ve send a contingent of M1 Abrams tanks to Afghanistan for the Marines to build schools and roads and hand our soccer balls with.  The tanks will have a dual use purpose of killing bad guys, whoever we happen to decide the bad guys happen to be on any given day.  According to a November 19 Pentagon press release run as a news story in the New York Times, the M1s “will allow ground forces to target insurgents from a greater distance - and with more of a lethal punch - than is possible from any other U.S. military vehicle.”

That statement is untrue on two main counts, perhaps the most obvious being that lots of U.S. military vehicles can and have delivered more lethal punches from greater distances than any tank will ever be able to: A B-2 bomber or a carrier air wing or even a pismire CIA drone can outdistance a tank without having to gas up for the next mission.  And don’t believe for a minute that a tank can out-kaboom a strategic bomber or a flat top’s worth of strike-fighters. 

The subtler but more significant deceit in that propaganda statement is “will allow ground forces to target insurgents.”  The tanks won’t allow anybody to target insurgents any better than anything else we’ve targeted insurgents with.  That’s partly because our intelligence in that part of the world had, does, and always will suck.  We get information by beating or bribing people into telling us what we want to hear.  “No, effendi, I am telling you, it just looks like a Muslim wedding chapel.  It is actually a terrorist training camp in disguise!”

An even bigger problem is that we can’t separate the “enemy” from the local civilians because the bad guys are locals too. 

But the biggest lie of all is the notion that we can strike at anyone “surgically” with “precision” standoff weapons.  For a standoff weapon to do the kind of job we need done, it would have to be able to sneak into town unnoticed, pick the lock of the front doors of the targets’ homes, sneak up behind said targets, pick their pockets and check their picture I.D.s, and then disable the targets with the “sleeper hold” made popular by Great Depression era professional wrestler Jim “The Golden Greek” Londos. 

Short of developing something like that, all we’re doing by sending more weapons to the Bananastans is tightening the chokehold we’ve managed to lock ourselves into.  But that bodes well for the future of NATO, which is banking on the Bananastans bunkum to justify its phony-baloney existence for at least as long as the Cold War did.