Enduring Blunder

President Obama has committed 17,000 additional troops to Operation Enduring Freedom, our misadventure in Afghanistan. His generals don’t know what to do with those troops when they get there; they’re not even sure what troops to send. Someone on Obama’s sprawling national security team should have told him it’s a bad, bad idea to send troops into a combat zone without a well-defined task and purpose. Ronald Reagan’s 1983 end zone fumble in Beirut should serve as a shining example of that maxim, but today’s defense hierarchy isn’t keen on learning from the past. Neocon luminary Fred Kagan, chief architect of the surge strategy, taught military history at West Point for a decade, which shows you how little regard the Army has for the subject.

The Keystone Kollege of Armed Konflict Knowledge that all our generals seem to have attended doesn’t place much importance on coherent strategy making, either.

Who’s on First?

As investigative historian Gareth Porter revealed recently, Obama was willing to go along with the full 30,000 troop escalation monty for Afghanistan until the Joint Chiefs admitted they didn’t have an end game in mind and General David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, couldn’t tell him what he planned to do with the extra troops. Back in the day, all those four-stars would have kept smoke grenades handy so they’d have something to blow up the boss’s skirt if he asked a hard question. Things changed over the last eight years. McKiernan must have made the sound of one jaw dropping when he heard a commander in chief ask “why?” Talk about shock and awe.

Defense secretary Robert Gates and his rear echelon commandos have been working on an Afghanistan strategy for dog years and still haven’t hit the dartboard. One segment of the security brain trust thinks the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the Taliban. Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen says the Afghan people are "the real centers of gravity." Senator John Kerry says the center of gravity in Afghanistan is in Pakistan. Let’s hope Obama stays mindful of Kerry’s track record vis-à-vis winning strategies.

Like most military matters, the center of gravity concept is broadly misunderstood, especially among the military’s top brass. Clausewitz dictated that the center of gravity must be “the point against which all our energies should be directed.” For his admonition to have any meaning, centers of gravity must be related to our objectives. Hence, the enemy center of gravity is the main obstacle between us and our goal and is the thing we must defeat, destroy, annihilate, deceive, bypass, sucker punch, pacify, erode, eradicate, and otherwise put the whammy on in order to achieve victory. Once we formulate a reasonably concrete and achievable goal, the center of gravity becomes relatively easy to identify.

Unfortunately, the “concrete and reasonable goal” factor has been AWOL since the neoconservative movement turned U.S. foreign policy into a radical equation.

We won’t make western democracies out of either of our Bananastans. We won’t eliminate corruption in them. We won’t stem opium production. If we effect regime change we’ll just be swapping out puppets. It’s too late to keep them from becoming failed states because they already are. We might make things so Afghan girls can go to school, but that’s a cockamamie reason for a bankrupt hegemon to wage war, especially given that half the kids in urban America don’t finish 12^th grade.

Young Mr. Obama has said he wants to ensure that Afghanistan—and by extension Pakistan—"cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States." That at least reflects a legitimate U.S. security goal, which is more than you can say for any of the gas his generals have been passing off as strategic acumen. Unfortunately, as objectives go, it’s so unrealistic as to be downright hallucinatory. If you can launch an attack on the United States from atop the Himalayas along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, you can launch one from any spot on the surface of the earth, or buried beneath it, or floating above it.

We can’t draft enough people to occupy that much territory.

We Don’t Know

We don’t know the enemy. The term “Taliban” describes an array of groups with different leaders. Warlords and drug lords are a whole separate power paradigm: some are aligned with one Taliban or another, some aren’t. The line between good guys and bad guys in the Bananastans is wafer thin; the official governments and their agencies are hardly more than sanctioned gang bangers. Then there’s the average Joe Bananastan who’s just fed up with the U.S. air strikes on all the weddings he goes to. And, oh yeah, none of those people had anything to do with 9/11.

Air strikes have, however, “heightened the threat” of al Qaeda “to Pakistan as the group disperses its cells [there] and fights to maintain its sanctuaries.” That’s according to the New York Times, the newspaper of record whose sources for that factoid were “senior analysts and officials of Pakistan’s main spy service” who “spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency’s policy.”

Great. Caesar’s. Ghost. Anonymous Pakistani intelligence officials are to reliable sources what Pig Latin is to Latin. Equally unreliable and equally anonymous CIA officials recently told NPR that their airstrikes in Pakistan have “decimated” al Qaeda leadership and that they now foresee a "complete al-Qaida defeat" in the region. That’s a remarkable conclusion considering that the CIA’s best sources of intelligence on Pakistan are Pakistani intelligence officials. It doesn’t take a bloodhound to sniff two separate agendas here.

Despite knowing nothing about ourselves and even less about the enemy—Sun Tzu’s recipe for disaster a la king—Obama is going ahead with the Bananastan escalation his feckless generals and defense secretary have recommended. Obama says “the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan demands urgent attention and swift action.” He probably feels pressured to shoot first and think later, but that’s never a good idea. I’m not a world-class military historian, but I’m a fair one, and I know of no instance in war where doing nothing proved to be an inferior course of action to doing something stupid.

The closest thing we have to legitimate security concerns in the Bananastans are that evildoers might get control of Pakistan’s nukes and the oil pipeline that runs through Afghanistan. There’s a very simple military solution to both of those problems: blow up the nukes and blow up the pipeline. Blowing stuff up is the one thing Obama’s generals know how to do real good.

In a March 6 interview with the New York Times, Mr. Obama said he is considering a plan to “reach out” to moderate elements of the Taliban. That’s a fantastic idea, and the best possible way to reach out would be to have our troops line up and shake the hand of each and every one of those mother’s sons and then climb on a plane for home.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Mission Accomplished Indefinitely

[They] were not fighting this perpetual war for victory, they were fighting to keep a state of emergency always present as the surest guarantee of authoritarianism.

-- George Orwell, 1984

It looks like the fat lady will become a Victoria’s Secret model before she sings the finale of our woebegone war in Iraq. On Friday Feb. 27, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, young Mr. Obama announced that, “by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.” We can speculate till the troops come home why Obama chose to make this announcement on a Marine Corps base as opposed to, say, on an aircraft carrier, but it’s a dead cert that the mission will be no more accomplished by August 2010 than it was in May 2003.

Obama also said in his speech that 35,000 to 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq after August 2010. Re-label them trainers, force protectors or whatever you like, the troops that stay behind will be combat troops. They won’t be training Iraqi security forces to peel potatoes, nor will they be protecting the day care facility for children of single Iraqi soldiers.

What’s more, the enabling trainers are likely to be in Iraq past the December 2011 deadline called for by the Status of Forces agreement. Key Pentagon figures who have voiced opposition to any sort of withdrawal timeline include defense secretary Robert Gates, who may be the only civilian officer holder in Washington who understands less about warfare than Joe Lieberman. Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen has said a deadline for withdrawal would be “dangerous,” and National Security Adviser James Jones, a retired Marine general, cautioned that a timeline to leave Iraq would be "against our national interest." General David Petraeus, as always, has avoided saying much on the subject that might stick to his body armor. Petraeus’s sidekick Ray Odierno, though, says he wants to keep at least 35,000 troops in Iraq through 2015, and the once credible Tom Ricks has echoed this metric over every major information outlet in America.

Both Odierno and Mullen kick started the “a lot can happen in three years” chant as soon as the Status of Forces agreement was signed. It’s evident that no one in the Pentagon considers the SOF and its 2011 benchmark a done deal, and why should they? They’re used to discarding treaties—the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention on Torture—like day-old candy wrappers. The SOF isn’t even a treaty. The Senate never ratified it, so how hard could it be to abnegate?

Time Bandits

The main vector of the warmongery’s timeline argument is that successful military operations can’t be conducted with time constraints. This flies in the face of reality, of course; if military operations didn’t have D-Days and H-Hours, the Normandy invasion would still be on hold.

Gates is probably unaware of this; he is quite possibly the only civilian officer holder in Washington who knows less about warfare than Joe Lieberman. Mullen and Odierno and Jones either a) know that timelines are essential to military operations and are lying or b) they’re as ignorant of the basic tenets of their profession as Gates and Lieberman are. It’s entirely possible that both a) and b) are true.

Ricks himself admits that Petraeus’s task was never to produce a victory in Iraq. He simply needed time, “to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” In other words, Petraeus needed time to fake us out of demanding a timeline.

Mullen and Gates were both circumspect message managers on last Sunday’s political gab show circuit. On CNN, Mullen said he is “comfortable” with Obama’s withdrawal schedule, but also said he is confident the president will be “flexible” with the timetable if conditions on the ground change. On NBC, Gates admitted that the troops remaining in Iraq will still be in harm’s way, “but at a very different level than in the past,” which is Newspeak for “the troops remaining in Iraq will still be in harm’s way.” Sounding eerily like Mullen, Gates noted that Obama has said he “retains the flexibility and the authority to change a plan or adjust it if he thinks it's in the national security [interest] of the United States.” Gates and Mullen both gave the impression that renegotiating the Status of Forces agreement would be along the same order of difficulty as getting a pizza delivered from Domino’s.

Both men also stressed the importance of following the advice of the military commander on the scene, who is now Ray Odierno. Thanks to a two-inch thick make-over by Ricks, Odierno has transformed from the raging ox who did nothing right in post-invasion Iraq to the military genius singularly responsible for the surge, so when he says he needs 35,000 troops in Iraq until at least 2015, gee, who’s to say he’s wrong? And oh, Gates made a point of confiding to David Gregory (with the rest of the world listening in) that “if the commanders had had complete say in this matter that, that they would have preferred that, that the combat mission not end until the end of 2010.” So anything that goes wrong after August happened because Obama didn’t listen to Ray of Arabia.

For the moment, Ricks is the chief propagandist of the Iraq Forever movement, but he has capable help from the likes of neocon luminaries Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollock. In a Feb. 25 New York Times op-ed piece, O’Hanlon and Pollock baldly assert “The mission ceased to be a ‘war of choice’ the moment American forces crossed the border in March 2003. Now we have no choice but to see Iraq through to stability.” This is akin to saying that once we board an airplane, we have no choice but to ride it until it runs out of gas and crashes into the sea. Wahoos like O’Hanlon and Pollock never admit that there is a broad menu of sane alternatives to what they propose, the best of which amount to taking control of the airplane, returning to the airport and landing safely.

One hopes that Obama can resist the pressure from the lunatic right to perpetuate the counterproductive occupation of Iraq, but it’s important to note that in his Camp Lejeune speech, he said, “I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.”

Even in the Newspeak Dictionary, you could drive the entire Army and Marine Corps through the distance between intend and shall.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Obama's Bananastan

If you know neither your enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

--Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu maintained that proper planning secures victory before the battle begins. Carl von Clausewitz insisted that war must focus on the political aim. How is it, then, that we are about to put more troops into a war we know is unwinnable and have no coherent objective for them to pursue?

President Obama announced on Feb. 17 that he will send 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. That’s just over half of the 30,000 troop escalation that’s been discussed in recent months. Gen. David McKiernan, top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, says he needs another 10,000 troops on top on the 17,000 Obama has promised on top of the 32,000 already in Afghanistan. McKiernan says the pending escalation won’t be a “temporary force uplift.” He thinks we need to keep 60,000 troops in Afghanistan for the next three to four years. “We’ve got to put them in the right places,” he says; but he doesn’t appear to know where those places are.

As foreign policy analyst Gareth Porter tells us, Obama was ready to support the full 30,000 troop escalation, endorsed by Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Central Command head Gen. David Petraeus. A hunch must have told Obama to ask one more question, because he called McKiernan directly and asked him how he planned to use those additional 30,000 troops. McKiernan couldn’t give him a straight answer.

Obama’s hunch must have generated in a Jan. 28 meeting with the Joint Chiefs and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. According to NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, Obama asked his service chiefs “What is the end game” in Afghanistan? His service chiefs replied, “Frankly, we don’t have one.”

In a related story, journalist Robert Dreyfuss reports that Danielle Pietka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, worries that Afghanistan is a "war that we may walk away from.” This remark came at a Feb. 28 meeting of AEI, the neoconservatives’ home think tank. Tom Donnelly, AEI’s top analyst and former deputy executive director of the infamous Project for the New American Century, hammered the Obama team for "the dumbing down of Afghanistan strategy," which is a phrase he appears to have stolen from fellow AEI and PNAC luminary Gary Schmitt. It’s hard to tell whether Donnelly and Schmitt know that their chambermaids Gates, Mullen, Petraeus and Kiernan, not team Obama, are the ones pushing for an escalation without knowing what they’re escalating to or what to do with the escalators. They don’t even know which escalators to send. According to the Washington Post, nobody has even decided what kinds of forces to deploy.

At the AEI hobnob, Fred Kagan—who was thought to be the principle architect of the surge until publicist Tom Ricks said the real architect was Petraeus’s pet ox Ray Odierno—expressed concern that the Obama administration is trying to “define success down.” One wonders what Kagan means by that since nobody at AEI, including him, has defined what success in Afghanistan would be at all. Schmitt slams the administration for bandying buzzwords like “realism,” “attainable,” and “end game.” How dare they?

According to Dreyfuss, Kagan hopes President Obama isn’t listening to any of that slacker talk about realistic goals. Kagan hopes Obama listens to Petraeus.

Petraeus is the guy who bribed everybody in Mosul, which went to heck in a handcar when he left. As general in charge of training Iraqi security forces, Petraeus armed the Shiite militias before he left. As top commander in Iraq, he bribed and armed all the Sunni militias before he left. Now Iraq is a more dangerous place than it was before we invaded, so we can never leave or things will go back to the way they were under Saddam Hussein, and while things were better then, to go back to the way things were would be unacceptable after the hard work and sacrifice we’ve put in to make things the way they are now. As theater commander, Petraeus wants to repeat his “successful experiment” in Iraq by bribing and arming Afghan militias so we can never leave there either.

Yeah, Petraeus is just the guy we want Obama to listen to. Thanks for the tip, Freddie.

Obama should stop listening to whoever told him to commit 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Going along halfway with a stupid idea is twice as stupid as taking it hook, line and sinker. And Obama should rendition whoever told him it would be a good idea to step up the air strikes in Pakistan. What, we weren’t pushing enough locals into the arms of the militants as it was?

Our military’s senior officers are either unforgivably ignorant of the basic tenets of their profession or they’ve pawned their integrity for enduring job security through the “persistent conflict” of the “long war.” Whichever is the case, it’s time for a Stalin-esque purge of the Department of Defense. Every officer from the full bird level up should be ordered to submit a request to retire, and all DoD civilians with the word “secretary” in their titles need to submit a letter of resignation. Don’t worry that the folks next in line aren’t ready for greater responsibility. Ike was a light colonel when World War II broke out.

Note to the commander in chief: the people who tell you this is a bad idea are the ones you need to push out the hatch first.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

American Caesar's Ghost

We are witnessing what a military takeover of a superpower looks like in the new American century. David Pertraeus became the most dangerous American general since Douglas MacArthur when George W. Bush announced that his “main man” would decide when, how and if an Iraq troop drawdown would occur, giving Petraeus unilateral control of U.S. foreign policy. In the summer of 2008, when then candidate Barack Obama started talking about a 16-month withdrawal deadline and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said that sounded about right, you could almost hear Petraeus screeching What a world! What a world! from Baghdad to Washington. If you listened closely, you also heard the propaganda campaign to sell America on an endless occupation of Iraq click into high gear.

On February 2, foreign policy analyst Gareth Porter revealed that in a January 21 meeting, Petraeus, Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were unable to dislocate President Obama from his 16-month redeployment policy. Porter also reported that a group of senior retired officers were preparing to support Petraeus, General Ray Odierno and their allies by mobilizing public opinion against Obama's decision. I estimated that support to be part of the larger information campaign that was an integrated effort of the surge strategy from the outset.

D-Day of the latest phase of that information campaign arrived on February 8 when Pulitzer Prize winning Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks launched a series of TV interviews and Washington Post articles to promote his new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. It’s not pleasant to call Ricks out for prostituting his credentials, but you can’t sleep in a general’s tent for years the way Ricks has and pretend not to be a camp follower. Ricks has become for Petraeus what Ned Buntline was to Buffalo Bill Cody: his official legend maker.

In his 2005 book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Ricks painted Petraeus as the only division commander who got it right in post-invasion Iraq. By January 2007, when Petraeus became the new commander of forces in Iraq, Ricks described him in an interview as a “force of nature,” and recalling the sight of the general doing one-arm push ups with teenage privates sent Ricks into a breathless arrhythmia. With The Gamble, Ricks promotes Petraeus to five-star deity. Both Brainiac and action figure, Super Dave defies the establishment and changes the course of mighty strategies to save America from the agony of defeat in Iraq. He’s got a PhD from Princeton, he wears Kevlar, he’s a complicated man—but no one understands him but Tom Ricks, can you dig it? By the time you finish The Gamble, you’ll pray on your knees that Dave Petraeus runs for president in 2012.

Ricks used a crate of lipstick to make Petraeus’s sidekick, General Ray Odierno, look presentable in The Gamble. He savaged Odie in Fiasco: ox-like Odierno is “confused by criticism” that his 4^th Infantry Division, the “worst outfit” in theater at handling prisoners and civilians, is a virtual corps of “recruiting sergeants” for the insurgency. Odierno himself denies an insurgency is in progress, and is the epitome of the dysfunctional leader who doesn’t want to hear the “bad stuff.” But in The Gamble, Odierno has experienced an “awakening.” It is Odierno, more than anyone else, who is responsible for the surge’s success. “White House aides and others in Washington…had nothing to do with developing” the way the surge was executed. Odierno made all those decisions. You can trust Ricks on that score because he got the information straight from source: Odierno.

In fact, almost the entirety of Ricks’s surge saga is told from the perspective of Petraeus, Odierno and the rest of the surgin’ safari. If Ricks picks up another Pulitzer for The Gamble, the inscription should read “best stenography.” Petraeus and Odierno are assisted by crafty retired Army general Jack Keane. Big Jack wields his mighty influence to break down the doors of the Washington bureaucracy, and helps his protégés maneuver around their chain of command to place their surge concept before young Mr. Bush himself. The three wise warriors vanquish a host of fakes, liars, fumblers and meanies, and put their enlightened counterinsurgency scheme to work in Iraq, so gosh, we can’t just give up now that things are going so good. Well, better. Sort of.

In his book, his Post columns and his interviews, Ricks manages to run through the gamut of neocon talking points on why we still need to stay the course, a compendium of doublethink mantras that in real-speak boil down to “Buy our war or we’ll shoot this soldier’s dog” and “Don’t forget to be afraid of Iran.” At the same time, remarkably, Ricks generates a mountain of fog in an attempt to cover the neocons’ tracks.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Ricks absolved the neocons, saying they get “too much credit and too much blame” for Iraq. Nothing was the neocons fault, really. It was that mean old Dick Cheney who duped the public into supporting the war, and that grouchy old Donald Rumsfeld who ran the war so badly. Never mind that Cheney and Rumsfeld were charter members of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon think tank that first publicly called for an invasion of Iraq in early 1998. Ricks makes a single passing mention of the PNAC in The Gamble. That’s a stunning omission when you consider that along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Scooter Libby, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage and many other PNACers also held key positions on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy team. Eliot Cohen is a featured player in The Gamble, a key figure in the selling of the surge and, according to Ricks, the man who told Bush he should make Petraeus the top commander in Iraq. Not once does Ricks note that Cohen is a luminary in the neoconservative constellation and that, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, he was a founding member of the PNAC.

Also noteworthy is Ricks’s glaring omission of any reference to Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the September 2000 PNAC manifesto that delineated the foreign policy the Bush administration would adopt in whole. Unfinished issues from Desert Storm, it said, provided the “immediate justification” for an invasion of Iraq, but the need to establish a large, permanent military footprint in the geostrategic heart of the oil rich Gulf region transcended “the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” 9/11 gave the neocons the “new Pearl Harbor” they needed to launch their scheme, and the rest is history—as rewritten by the likes of Tom Ricks, who is now abetting them in pursuit of their original purpose.

As is the case with all revisionists, you’ll find grains of truth along the path of Ricks’s narrative, just as you’ll find grain in every pile of horse manure. The only honest thing you’ll find picking through Ricks’s prose, though, is the insanity behind the argument for staying in Iraq.

The real secret of Petraeus’s “success” at counterinsurgency is payola. As commander of the 101^st Airborne in Mosul, “he bought everybody off.” The enemy “was just biding its time and building capacity, waiting him out.” When Petraeus left Mosul, it went up for grabs. As top commander in Iraq, Petraeus bought everybody off again, making “a lot of deals with shady guys” who are “just laying low,” so we can never leave, or the whole country will go up for grabs like Mosul did.

Odds are things will be worse if we leave than they were under Hussein, Ricks told NBC’s Chris Matthews. Hussein was a toothless tyrant, but now that Petraeus has “armed everybody to the teeth” it's too dangerous to get out. We’ve made the Iraqi security forces strong enough that they might attempt a coup if we're not there to stop them. The surge may have averted a civil war, but one colonel tells Ricks he doesn’t think “the Iraqi civil war has been fought yet,” so we have to stick around so we don't miss all the fun. As Iraq becomes more secure, it moves backwards. There’s a “long-term trend toward increasing authoritarianism,” so we have to stay in Iraq so things don’t go back to the way they were under Hussein even though, as Ricks just told us, things were better under Hussein than they are now.

Ricks says the surge is a strategic failure because it didn’t bring about the unification government it was supposed to produce. But that’s okay, because an analyst Ricks knows says “power sharing is always a prelude to violence,” so we have to stay in Iraq to make sure we don’t achieve our strategic objective, which will be easy because “the whole notion of democracy and representative government in Iraq” was “absolutely ludicrous" from the get go.

If you’re thinking Petraeus was plotting all along to create a situation we couldn’t extract ourselves from, you’re right. As Ricks notes, Petraeus needed time “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.”

Even Ricks seems uncertain that we’ve seen genuine progress; maybe we’ve actually just “poured more gas on the fire,” he says, and even though the surge is a failure, its “attitude is right” so it was “the right step to take,” and we should continue to support U.S. presence in Iraq because we’ll be there a long time whether we support it or not.

As Ricks explained to David Gregory on Meet the Press, Petraeus and his henchmen have Obama over a barrel. If Obama continues to stand up to them, they’ll accuse him of betraying the troops because of a campaign promise he made to get the peace poofter vote. If things go the way Ricks predicts, the president will fold, the military oligarchy will consolidate its hold on American political power, and the neocons will live to make other people’s sons fight another day because they conned Tom Ricks into covering for them.

How sad it is to see that Thomas E. Ricks, dean of the Pentagon beat, has been pants down, bent-over-the-table seduced by the neoconservative cabal. He is as mad as they are, and as madly in love with their eternal crusade in the Middle East as he is with David Petraeus.

UPDATE: Ward Carroll of Military.com, where I have contributed a weekly column for nearly three years, refused to run this essay.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Tom Ricks and the Neocons

Parts I, II and III of the “Ministry of Truth and Peace” series discussed how Pentagon propaganda operations represent the confluence of Big Oil, Big War, Big Bucks, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze in the new American century. Part IV examines how General David Petraeus and his followers are waging unrestricted information warfare on President Barack Obama’s foreign policy mandate.

Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks has become the center of gravity in the U.S. military’s information war on the American public.

On February 2, policy analyst Gareth Porter reported that General David Petreus, General Ray Odierno, retired Army general Jack Keane and others were preparing a campaign to mobilize public opinion against President Barack Obama’s pledge to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 16 months. Keane co-authored, with fellow American Enterprise Institute neoconservative Frederick Kagan, “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” the January 2007 study that outlined the Iraq surge strategy.

The onset of the information campaign came close behind Porter’s forecast. On Sunday, February 8, Tom Ricks captured the airways and the headlines, appearing on Meet the Press as the first of his two part series on the stratagem behind the surge strategy appeared in the Washington Post. Ricks’s new book on the surge hits the shelves, not surprisingly, on Tuesday February 10.

Ricks gives us an astonishing insider’s look at the machinations behind the campaign to force a “long war” of indefinite occupation on Mr. Obama. Some of Ricks’s narrative sounds wholly credible, some reeks of Orwellian fabrication, and none of it constitutes objective reporting.

In his Sunday piece, “The Dissenter Who Changed the War,” Ricks paints a doubtful portrait of Ray Odierno as the “true father” of the surge strategy. It was Odierno taking all the risks, Ricks assures us, “bypassing his superiors” like General George Casey “to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military” to make the case for escalating the Iraq war.

Odierno may well have gone around his chain of command; that was standard operating procedure in the Bush years. But given the cast of Machiavellians in this three-ring kabuki, it’s unlikely that big Ray was the kingpin. Odierno more suitably fits the profile of fall guy; he’s been the one making public statements about how the military will stay in Iraq longer than 16 months whether the commander in chief likes it or not, something that would earn a less politically connected officer administrative punishment at the very least. Petraeus has been, as always, circumspect on this subject. You’ll have to look very hard to find a written record of an insubordinate syllable passing Petraeus’s lips at any moment in his career. If Petraeus wants to trash a superior, he’s the type to have somebody like his pet ox Odierno do it for him.

The most telling part of Ricks’s version of the surge genesis is what it omits. Ricks makes no mention of the American Enterprise Institute, or of Fred Kagan, or of the neoconservative movement’s role in selling the surge to the public, an effort spearheaded by Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, FOX News, the New York Times, AEI and the Project for the New American Century.

On Sunday’s Meet the Press and in his Monday Post article, Ricks describes with often horrifying candor how Petraeus set out to pave the way for a “long war” that would last well beyond the Bush presidency. Petraeus needed time “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” That the surge has, as Ricks acknowledges, “failed politically,” is of little consequence.

The generals’ gambit, as Ricks explained it to David Gregory on Meet the Press, is “they feel they have made huge sacrifices, that they have had friends die and sons bleed, and that they don't want to throw that all away on the—you know, because some guy said on the campaign trail, ‘We're going to get all these guys out.’”

Thus did Ricks, wearing the beard of an impartial journalist, deliver the ultimatum for Petraeus, Odierno, Keane, Kristol, and the rest of the warmongery. Obama can either accede to the their goal, which is and always has been a permanent military occupation of Iraq, or be vilified as the wimp who betrayed the troops because of a campaign promise he made to get the peace pansy vote.

Ricks saved the punch line for the end of his interview with Gregory. “Iran has…its fingers throughout the Iraqi government. This is something that General Odierno mentioned several months ago and got in some trouble for, for talking about so publicly. Iran really does worry me in, in this situation.”

The Petraeus gang has been stacking the deck around the Iran card since the surge was unveiled in January 2007, leveling one accusation after the next against the Shiite Persian state to frame it as the point defense rationale for staying in Iraq. They haven’t proven a single allegation in all that time, but most Americans, numb by now from the constant bombardment of messages demonizing Iran, have accepted them as gospel truth. And, hey, if Tom Ricks is worried about Iran, shouldn’t the rest of us be worried about it too?

I knew Ricks had fallen like a schoolgirl for Petraeus when, in an April 2007 interview for NPR, he described the general as “a force of nature” and gushed, “He’s famous, for example, for his one-armed push-up contest against privates. You know—challenging a guy half his age to one-arm push-ups. But basically Petraeus [is determined] he’ll do one more than the other guy will, no matter how many the other guy does.”

Ricks was once the respected dean of the Pentagon beat. As of Sunday, he displaced Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times as chief echo chamberlain of the neoconservative junta. One can’t help suspect Ricks is at the top of the list to become Minister of Truth and Peace in the Petraeus administration. He has all the qualifications.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

War and Piece of the Action

Parts I and II of the "Ministry of Truth and Peace" series described the Pentagon propaganda program that the Department of Defense inspector general didn't judge to be a propaganda program because he couldn't find a definition of "propaganda." Part III examines how one retired military media analyst made a killing from our woebegone war on terror.

Retired military media analysts aided the Pentagon's propaganda campaign in support of the Bush administration's wars for a variety of reasons. The analyst with the broadest motivations was undoubtedly retired Army four-star Barry McCaffrey, who exemplified the confluence of Big War, Big Bucks, Big Message, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze in the new American century.

In a November 2009 New York Times profile of McCaffrey, reporter David Barstow described him as "a force in Washington’s power elite." That's putting it politely: it's understatement to call McCaffrey a great white military-industrial-media shark. His use of access and influence to pursue personal profit from war was singularly predatory.

McCaffrey was an early advocate of the Iraq invasion. He was board member of the now-defunct Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group of influential neoconservative tank thinkers with ties to the George W. Bush administration and the now infamous Project for the New American Century. He started BR McCaffrey Associates in 2001 to "build linkages" between government officials and contractors. McCaffrey was also one of more than 75 media military "experts" recruited into the Pentagon's Retired Military Analyst program, initiated in 2002 to help sell the public on the Iraq War. One of the analysts, retired Army colonel Ken Allard, called the program "PSYOPS [psychological operations] on steroids."

McCaffrey began his career as a media analyst for NBC shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Just prior to that, he had become a key member of the advisory council of Veritas Capital, a small player looking to grow in the defense sector. Veritas gave advisers like McCaffrey board membership in its military companies, along with profit sharing and revenue stakes. McCaffrey, like so many of the power elite, had much to gain from what the Pentagon would later refer to as the "long war."

In his first months on the air, McCaffrey called for increases in defense spending to fight the war on terrorism. He specifically touted the virtue of high tech weapons like precision munitions and unmanned aircraft supported by defense companies in the Veritas portfolio. He called the C-17 military cargo aircraft—also a source of Veritas contracts—a "national treasure."

McCaffrey had early doubts about the Iraq war plan; he was one of many observers who thought the invasion force was too small. But on NBC, he assured viewers that the war would be brief, telling Brian Williams “These people are going to come apart in 21 days or less.” Years afterward, McCaffrey claimed he knew the post invasion planning was a disaster. “They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war,” he said. But before the invasion, he waxed ecstatic on NBC with Pentagon talking points about the “astonishing amount” of postwar planning.

Days before the invasion, when Tom Brokaw asked “What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?” McCaffrey answered, “Well, I don’t think I have any real serious ones.”

In March 2003, shortly after the war began, McCaffrey shouted on MSNBC, "Thank God for the Abrams tank and…the Bradley fighting vehicle." That same month, Integrated Defense Technologies, a Veritas company, received more than $14 million in contracts relating to the Abrams and the Bradley.

In spring of 2007, a small defense company called Defense Solutions hired McCaffrey as a consultant. Four days later, McCaffrey wrote a letter to then commander of U.S. forces in Iraq General David Petraeus recommending the bid by Defense Solutions to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles. McCaffrey didn't his connection with Defense Solutions or his letter to Petraeus the next month when he told Congress that it should immediately buy a large number of armored vehicles for Iraq and criticized a Pentagon plan to use armored vehicles provided by a Defense Solutions competitor.

These incidents were not lapses of judgment; they were emblematic of McCaffrey's standard operating procedure, a behavior that any sane, intelligent adult can see is both unethical and immoral. Yet McCaffrey's apologists, under his employ or otherwise, are quick to defend his honor. "His motive is pure," says his publicist Robert Weiner. “It is national interest.” In this regard, McCaffrey is like every other megalomaniac; what's good for him is good for his country, the world, the solar system, the universe and whatever awaits us in the afterlife.

Other McCaffrey supporters excuse his mendacity by pointing to his criticism of the way former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld conducted the war, but that's like forgiving all mortal transgressions because the sinner condemns the way Satan runs hell.

One Pentagon correspondent, an "old friend" of the former general, admonishes us to "remember that McCaffrey is one of the most highly decorated combat Soldiers ever to wear general’s stars, with two awards of the Distinguished Service Cross and three Purple Hearts for wounds he suffered in the Vietnam War."

How sad it is to see heroism become, like patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Ministry of Truth and Peace (Part II)

Part I described how the Pentagon's use of retired military media analysts to funnel propaganda through the mainstream media fit into a larger operation aimed at rewriting history as it happened.

On January 16, the Friday before Barack Obama's inauguration, the Defense Department inspector general released the report of an investigation of the Pentagon's Retired Military Analyst program. The report stated that, "the evidence in this case was insufficient to conclude" that the program had "violated statutory prohibitions on publicity or propaganda," because "the definition of propaganda in this context remains unclear."

Miriam-Webster OnLine defines propaganda as "the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person." In April 2008, an in-depth investigation by the New York Times revealed that the RMA program had employed retired military officers in a "campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance."

So all that really remains unclear in this context is why the I.G. didn't look up the definition of "propaganda." Maybe that was outside the scope of his investigation.

Sock Puppets

"Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand," by David Barstow was a watershed story for the New York Times, the paper that, more than any other mainstream media outlet, had allowed the Bush administration to use it as a conduit for the false propaganda that convinced the country of the need to invade Iraq. Where Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller cited unnamed "officials" nearly 30 times in their September 2002 article that fraudulently asserted Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons technology, Barstow's investigative report was an exemplar of cold fact and attributed testimony.

Retired Army colonel Ken Allard, an NBC analyst, called the RMA program a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he told Barstow.

Barstow referenced internal Pentagon documents that "repeatedly refer to the military analysts as 'message force multipliers' or 'surrogates' who could be counted on to deliver administration 'themes and messages' to millions of Americans 'in the form of their own opinions.'"

Don Myer, aide to assistant secretary of defense for public affairs Torie Clarke, told Barstow that a strategic decision was made in 2002 to use the analysts as the main focus of the public relations push to argue the case for war with Iraq. Another Clarke aid, Brent T. Krueger, said the idea was to have the analysts be in effect “writing the op-ed” for the war.

In all, the program recruited more than 75 retired officers, all of them cleared by Donald Rumsfeld, the largest contingent of whom, not surprisingly, worked for FOX News.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Krueger told Barstow. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over… You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

The Pentagon "armed its analysts with talking points" and expected to hear them echoed in the media. Former Green Beret and FOX News analyst Robert S. Bevelacqua admitted, “It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ”

Ironically, White House spokesmodel Brian Whitman told Barstow it is “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

It would have been incredible to think that in another American century, but not in this one. Up until the very end of the Rumsfeld reign, the Pentagon kept its analysts on a short leash the same way it manipulated the rest of the media, by granting access to those who played ball and denying access to those who refused to.

I Cannot Tell a Lie, Unless…

Retired army general and FOX News commentator Paul E. Vallely confessed to Barstow that when the Pentagon flew him and other retired military analysts to Iraq in 2003, he immediately saw that "things were going south." On returning home, however, Vallely told Fox anchor Alan Colmes "You can't believe the progress."

Vallely's mendacity was in part motivated by his belief in the hallucination that the U.S. lost the Vietnam War because of unfavorable press coverage. Vallely and others of his generation have ingrained this mantra on younger military personnel to the point where it is now an indelible part of the American military ethos; it never occurs to any of them that with deployments of up to a half million troops and all the material support a force could possibly want over a span of more than a decade, the country couldn’t have supported the war any more than it did, and that it wasn’t bad press that caused the war to be lost, it was the lost war that caused the bad press.

Delusional as he is, we might grant Vallely virtue points for sincerity. Other analysts, though, were in the game for the money, a lot more money than the per-appearance fees they got from the news networks. Most of them were connected to military contractors and stood to profit from the war they were promoting.

Part III will describe how the Retired Military Analyst program served as a confluence of Big War, Big Message, Big Bucks, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Ministry of Truth and Peace

It's fitting that as young Mr. Bush exited the world stage, the military pardoned itself for lying about his woebegone wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. A report released on January 16 by the Pentagon's inspector general stated, "we found the evidence insufficient to conclude that RMA (retired military analysts) outreach activities were improper," and concluded that further investigation into the matter "was not warranted."

The RMA program flew under the radar until an April 2008 New York Times article revealed that the Pentagon had recruited media military analysts for a "campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance." The article discomfited the Pentagon I.G. office into launching an investigation of the RMA program—nearly six years after it had been initiated. The I.G. report, posted on the Pentagon's web site the Friday before the inauguration so everyone would be sure to notice it, explained, "the evidence in this case was insufficient to conclude" that RMA activities "violated statutory prohibitions on publicity or propaganda," but conceded that the judgment had been difficult to arrive at because "the definition of propaganda in this context remains unclear."

So it all depends what your definition of "propaganda" is. I feel the I.G.'s pain, don't you?

Rewriting Military History

I first started hearing the expression "we're losing the public affairs war" about the time of Desert Storm, when the Air Force was grabbing the headlines for winning the air battle and Navy carrier participation got piddled into the footnotes.

Time passed. During the 1999 Kosovo War, my ship, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, entertained more members of the foreign press than the number of combat sorties she launched. As a wartime operations officer of a U.S. Navy flagship, my number one concern was to make sure each and every one of those reporters got on and off the ship safely and received a triple dose of gee whiz by watching flight operations from Vulture's Row high atop the ship's island.

What the air wing did over the beach didn't matter; the targets they bombed were mainly plywood decoys. I didn't have to worry about defending the ship, either. Bad Guy's Navy was sinking at the pier. We never did accomplish our original objective, which had something to do with keeping Bad Guy Milosevic from cleansing his ethnics, who were the good guys in this particular war because then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said they were. Milosevic cleansed as many ethnics as he wanted to before he quit and everyone left him alone, a technique the Israelis later exploited to great effect in Lebanon and Gaza. None of our guys got killed in combat. In fact, the biggest friendly casualties of the war were the careers of most of the flag and general officers involved, some of whom retired in disgust, and some who just got caught taking their pants off in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong company, a trait they shared with their commander in chief, who unlike them managed to keep his job for a few more years.

In all, the Kosovo Conflict was a perfect play war to end the 20^th century with.

Boondoggle or no, we came home to heroes' welcomes, and our carrier was hailed as a keystone of the greatest naval and air victory ever won under the command of a clueless Army general. The carrier Navy held onto its slab of the defense budget, and lived to play war in a new American century.

Bull Feather Merchants

The Kosovo War was a watershed conflict in that it illustrated—or should have illustrated—that the efficacy of American military power was nearing the terminus of its collision course with a brick wall. No one could really say the Kosovo War had defended America or had protected its interests overseas or had even protected innocents abroad because the good guys in the conflict were no better than the bad guys. At that point in history, the military's full time mission shifted to self-preservation, and the purpose of the relatively new "information warfare" specialty went from supporting armed conflicts to fabricating convincing arguments for having them.

Shortly after 9/11, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established the Office of Strategic Influence, an information warfare directorate with "a broad mission ranging from 'black' campaigns that use[d] disinformation and other covert activities to 'white' public affairs that rely on truthful news releases," according to its chief, Air Force one star Simon P. Worden. Protests arose when the Pentagon announced that the OSI would "provide news items, possibly even false ones." Rumsfeld shut down OSI to quell the controversy. Well, he sort of shut it down. "You can have the [OSI] name," he said at a press conference, "but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have."

Before it skulked out the servants' door, OSI spawned a number of truth sub-ministries within DoD, one of which was the Retired Military Analyst program.

Part II will analyze RMA as a microcosm of the Pentagon's propaganda campaign to protect and defend the military industrial complex.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Obama's Strategic Wasteland

In December 2008, Joe Klein of Time magazine called the war in Afghanistan an "aimless absurdity." Our new president is onboard with committing 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, despite the fact that the Pentagon isn't certain what to tell the additional troops to do there or even what kind of troops it wants to send. According to the Washington Post, "the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like 'surge' of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years."

So why are they executing an Iraq-like "surge" of forces?

No, After You…

One senior U.S. military commander told the Post "We have no strategic plan. We never had one." He was referring to the Bush administration's Afghanistan program, but he might as well have been talking about Iraq and Iran and every other tentacle of Bush era foreign policy. The senior commander also said that Obama's first order of business will be to "explain to the American people what the mission is" in Afghanistan. Obama will be hard pressed to explain what the mission is if he doesn't have a strategy.

A December New York Times article stated that "Taking a page from the successful experiment in Iraq, American commanders and Afghan leaders are preparing to arm local militias to help in the fight against a resurgent Taliban." Arming local militias was only part of the "successful" experiment in Iraq. The larger part of the experiment involved bribing militias not to use the arms we gave them, a course of action that has further cemented the ostensible necessity for U.S. troops to stay in that country well beyond Obama's promised 16 month deadline. The surge has been so successful that, after two years, it's still in effect; we have several thousand more troops in Iraq than we did when the surge began in January 2007, and it still hasn't produced its stated purpose of political unification. Maybe that's okay. Objectives seem to have gone the way of the foreign policies of yesteryear.

The hero of the Iraq surge, General David Petraeus, is now in charge of Central Command, the area of responsibility that encompasses Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In a November press conference at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, Petraeus said that, "an overall effort is essential," but declined to give details on what the effort might consist of.

Antonio Giustozzi, an Afghanistan expert at the London School of Economics, puts it bluntly: "In the end, I believe it will boil down to bribing people into joining militias." He cautions, "How military effective [this is] going to be remains to be seen."

Bribing militias to fight the Taliban won't be effective at all if the Pentagon decides not to fight the Taliban. As analyst Gareth Porter notes, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his rear echelon military functionaries have already had months to develop a new strategy, and the bottle is still spinning. Some officers have suggested we shift from killing the Taliban to protecting the population (from the Taliban, I'm guessing). Other proposed strategies include offering the Taliban protection from international forces in Afghanistan if they agree to undertake peace negotiations, and many believe the only solution is to offer a share of political power to the Taliban, in which case—arguably, at least—we might not want to kill them at all.

Then, as in Iraq, we'll have to stick around forever to make sure the militias we paid to kill the Taliban don't kill them or turn on us. Of course, they probably won't kill the Taliban if we don't pay them to, and they pretty much can't kill the Taliban if we don't arm them, and they can't turn on us if we leave; but what kind of strategy would that be?

Throw Soldiers at It

For all the machinations of the Bush administration, its standard operating procedure was quite simple, more of a tactic than a strategy. The closest analogy to it I can think of is ice hockey's dump-and-chase play. Hockey teams with overwhelming speed and size don't bother with coordinated maneuvers; they simply sling the puck into the opponent's zone, skate after it, knock the other guys into the boards and try to slide the puck to an open teammate in front of the net. If the tactic doesn't work, they just do it again, and again, and again. If the opponent scores, the dump-and-chase team shakes it off and goes back to dumping and chasing and never stops doing it.

It's not long before all the dump-and-chase team knows how to do is dump and chase, and after a time it's too late for them to relearn how to skate and pass and play as a team. The U.S. has been playing dump-and-chase since the end of World War II. The stronger and bigger and faster we got relative to everyone else, the more we played dump-and-chase, and the less effective armed force became as a tool of foreign policy. Rather than reexamine the efficacy of our methods, we merely invested in an ever more powerful but increasingly impotent military.

So it is that we invaded Iraq on fuzzy pretexts with no idea of what we'd do after we "won," without even a way of determining we'd accomplished our mission other than hanging a sign behind our commander in chief that said we had.

We're about to escalate yet another enigmatic war with no particular purpose in mind. Mr. Obama says Afghanistan is now the "central front on terror." The central front has moved from Afghanistan to Iraq to Iran to Syria to North Korea to Pakistan and back to Afghanistan again. That's a boatload of central fronts for a war that doesn't have any front lines. I can't wait to hear who Obama says the latest incarnation of Hitler is.

Obama says he wants to make sure Afghanistan "cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States." Nobody can actually launch an attack on much of anything from the mountains of Afghanistan. You can plan an attack from there, but you can plan an attack on the United States from a picnic blanket spread out in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And oh yeah, the Taliban, whether we decide to kill them or not, had nothing to do with 9/11, and have no interest in being party to a second one, and wouldn't be fighting us if we hadn't pitched a tent city in their front yard.

I hope young Mr. Obama thinks good and hard before he decides to send more G.I.s to risk life and limb in a third world wasteland for no coherent reason. I grew sick from watching the last commander in chief treat our troops like hockey pucks.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Farewell Follies

In a parting gesture, young Mr. Bush gave us the opportunity to laugh him off the world stage, perhaps the only fitting way to celebrate the end of his tragic reign of pratfalls. On January 12, Shuckin' and jivin' and smirkin' and quirkin', Bush gave his farewell press conference. Part sulk, part self-affirmation, part psychotic outburst, his antics before the White House press corps were high farce that could have been penned by Moliere or Aristophanes.

The only mistake he made with Hurricane Katrina was not landing Air Force One in New Orleans or Baton Rouge. He's thought "long and hard" about that one, and when asked what has be done about Katrina's aftermath three and a half years after the fact, he replied, "Well, more people need to get in their houses."

Bush's only flub with Iraq was hanging the "Mission Accomplished" sign from the aircraft carrier. Some of his rhetoric, he admitted, "has been a mistake." Everything else that went wrong on his watch was the fault of Congress, or of "certain quarters in Europe" that blame "every Middle Eastern problem on Israel" (as opposed to Iran), and that try to be popular by "joining the International Criminal Court" and "accepting Kyoto." Mr. Bush felt Kyoto was a "flawed treaty," presumably every bit as flawed as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, and the United Nations Convention Against Torture and other treaties that people in certain quarters join in order to be popular. Our moral standing, says Mr. Bush, "may be damaged amongst some of the elite," but for the likes of Joe the Plumber, America still provides "great hope."

Did I Mention 9/11?

Though more tightly scripted than the press conference, Mr. Bush's formal farewell address on January 15 was every bit as absurd. The opening remarks included "gratitude" for Dick Cheney, a sentiment both hilarious and horrifying. Once the throat clearing was out of the way, Bush cut to the chase: His thoughts returned "to the first night I addressed you from this house—September the 11th, 2001. That morning, terrorists took nearly 3,000 lives in the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor."

Ah, yes, the "new Pearl Harbor" young Bush's neoconservative masters needed in order to justify an invasion of Iraq.

Mr. Bush evoked vignettes of himself standing tall as our leader after the terrorist attacks: with rescue workers in the rubble of the World Trade Center, with "brave souls who charged through smoke-filled corridors at the Pentagon" and with "husbands and wives whose loved ones became heroes aboard Flight 93."

My unforgettable image of Bush after 9/11 is his "What, me president?" moment, sitting in a classroom among small children, making the sound of one jaw dropping and holding My Pet Goat in his lap.

"As the years passed, most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11." But not Mr. Bush: he had to spend seven grueling years finding someone else to blame it on, and recruiting scapegoats for the two disastrous wars he recklessly led us into.

Mr. Bush intoned his single tangible achievement: "America has gone more than seven years without another terrorist attack on our soil." This, in Mr. Bush's mind, is the point defense of his legacy, the sole irrefutable fact of his efforts "to do everything in my power to keep us safe."

That we haven't been attacked again is most probably the result of a regulation change for the people who serve in acronym and tri-graph agencies like NORAD, JFCOM, FAA, FBI, NSA and the other domestic security agencies whose job it was to prevent 9/11 from happening in the first place—they now have to drink coffee while on duty and sleep on their own time.

That the 9/11 attacks occurred at all was a breathtaking study in institutional Onanism, a compendium of dysfunctional leadership, organization and communication. Nobody taking a paycheck to defend this country needed a whole new cabinet department or a Patriot Act or illegal wiretapping to prevent 9/11. They just needed to do their jobs like they were supposed to, something that was, and has continued to be, all but impossible during the crony-driven Bush regime.

Mr. Bush thinks he has "taken the fight to the terrorists" in Iraq and Afghanistan, that he's done so "with strong allies" at his side, and that his two campaigns have been successful. Almost without exception, the adversaries we have created during our expeditions in the Middle East had nothing to do with 9/11 and wouldn't be fighting us at all if we hadn't pitched a tent in their back yard. The closest thing we have to allies now are the European countries that contributed troops to the effort to bail us out in Afghanistan, and they only did that as a last gasp effort to save NATO, whose reason for existance crumbled along with the Berlin Wall.

Mr. Bush's victorious surge in Iraq has left us with a dead man's switch in our hands. His "main man," General David Petraeus, bought an uneasy peace by bribing militiamen not to use the weapons he gave them. Now we have to stick around forever to make sure the payola gets to the right warlords or the country will go up for grabs again. And we're about to embark on Son of Surge, deploying 30,000 additional troops to "repeat the success" and pay off crooked Afghan chieftains.

"Our nation is safer than it was seven years ago," according to Mr. Bush, but global terror has skyrocketed since 9/11, and as Bush himself admits, "the gravest threat to our people remains another terrorist attack."

Mr. Bush took "decisive measures to safeguard our economy" in the closing days of his regime, but it was the interminable days before them that doubled our national debt as we pursued self-defeating wars that were entirely avoidable.

There has been "no higher honor" for Mr. Bush than serving as our military's commander in chief, but there has been no greater shame than the way in which he abused his stewardship of our troops: sending them into appalling wars, neglecting them when they came home wounded, and exploiting them for his own political gain.

At his press conference, Mr. Bush said that the thing he worried about most was "the Constitution of the United States." Thanks to him, the rest of us have to worry whether it will ever be restored.

Throughout his tenure as president, Mr. Bush had "the best interests of our country in mind. I have followed my conscience and done what I thought was right."

Bush's conscience is that of a spoiled, rich ne'er do well whose daddy bought him a set of values in the person of Billy Graham for his 40^th birthday. People like Bush never have to pass a test they can't cheat on or commit a sin they can't make someone else burn for. Bush and his kind make moral decisions by paying someone to tell them whatever they did was the right thing.

And so Mr. Bush—part Macbeth, part Richard III, part Lear, but all fool—has taken his curtain call.

It's too bad we didn't give him the hook a long, long time ago.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.