Bin Laden: Dead and Loving It

May 24, 2011

by  Jeff Huber

Count Bin Laden meets his
72 wirgins.

Alexander the Great, eat your heart out.  Et tu, Julius Caesar.  The same goes for you, Charlemagne.  Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden is the greatest military and political strategist in human history, bar none. 

Neither Alexander nor Caesar nor Charlemagne managed, as bin Laden has, to lure the best-trained, best-equipped military of the world’s all-time mightiest nation in a series of inescapable goat-rope entanglements without so much as an army or a navy or an air force of his own.  Moreover, humanity’s other great conquerors’ achievements barely lasted beyond their lifetimes.  Alexander’s empire, which stretched from modern-day Turkey and Egypt to the border of India, collapsed almost immediately upon his death, reputedly caused by poisoning, at age 32.

Big Julie’s wet impeachment sent Rome on a long tumble that led to its fall when the military that had created it took control of it and sold it to the Barbarians they were supposedly protecting it from.     

Navy Seal Charlie Sheen puts
a silver bullet right between
the fangs.

Charlemagne managed to organize the barbarians into a single European empire, but when he died in 814 CE his realm split up into France and Germany, and you know what sorts of trouble those two caused until the 20^th century when two world wars and an upstart country in the new world put the kibosh on their escapades.  

The upstart United States went on to consolidate its gains in the Cold War when the “Evil Empire” succumbed with a whimper, and became the first truly global hegemon.  The American warmongery was lost at sea.  How could they possibly continue to coerce Congress into continued cash caisson and gravy boat and wild blue budget defense spending?  

Now, some folks said he looked like
Zubin Mehta...

Along came a fantastic new superhero of the neoconservative movement and no, I’m sorry to disappoint you Frank Zappa fans, it was not Studebaker Hoch.  It was Bill Kristol, the slow-witted son of the “godfather of neoconservatism” Irving Kristol.  Bill’s brain, Robert Kagan, whose even plumper brother Freddie is said by some to have been the “godfather of the Iraq surge,” talked Bill into forming a tank thinkery called the Project for the New American Century, and the rest, as they say, is the history of yet another empire that took a swan dive off a cliff in the Khyber Pass. 

Bob Kagan gathered a kennel of the world’s most rabid right wing war wonks like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld who got down to work—or rather the glittering young Stepford Republicans who do their work for them got down to work—and cranked out a forest’s-worth of letters and statements and publications and reports about what American needed to do.

One such literary masterpiece was their 1997 Statement of Principles, a harangue that principally stated that even though America’s leadership had produced an era of global peace and prosperity unknown in any previous age, America’s foreign policy was “adrift.” 

To correct the alarming global trend toward a post-modern renaissance, the New American Centurions insisted that, “we [Americans] need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global 
responsibilities,” and that, “we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”  By “our principles,” of course, they meant good old conservative principles rooted in the grand traditions of cross burning, lynching and brainwashing poor white people into thinking cake is a super food.

Then in ’98 they wrote a letter to President Pants demanding that we (Americans) invade Iraq before Iraq invaded us or somebody just like them did.  I was wrapping up my naval career at the time, and though I correctly diagnosed the New Centurions as a flock of crackpots suffering from Cold War withdrawal, I unwisely dismissed them as a harmless flock of crackpots suffering from Cold War withdrawal.  By Sept. 2000 it looked like their handpicked finger puppet and his master Dick Cheney might actually gain the White House, and the Centurions bared their fangs with their Neoconservative manifesto, Rebuilding America’s Defenses.

RAD revealed the center of gravity of the oncoming administration’s foreign policy: global domination through military occupation.  Invasion of Iraq was a key first phase of the neocon strategy.  It had nothing to do with terrorism, or with weapons of mass destruction, or even with getting even with our long-time former ally Saddam Hussein.  Ending Hussein’s regime was merely a convenient excuse to establish a permanent military base of operation in the center of the oil rich Gulf region. 

But the Centurions admitted that the American public wouldn’t go along with a scheme as crazy as theirs without some sort of “new Pearl Harbor.”  I turned in my retirement request right about that time, thinking that if I were a maniac bound and determined to outdo Bill Kristol’s maniacs, I’d give the crazy bastards exactly what they were looking for. 

I don’t know if Osama bin Laden had the same thought, but he might as well have, because he couldn’t have picked a better stratagem than the 9/11 attacks to goad us into becoming the victim of our own military/industrial establishment, the one that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us in 1961 would take over if we didn't stay on guard against it.

Those of us who hoped young Mr. Obama’s election would mean an end to the unwarranted influence of the American Pentarchy have been sorely disappointed.  The promised withdrawal deadlines for Iraq and the Bananastans have vanished like a twenty-dollar tip, and we’re bombing Libya into so many smithereens that it will take Dick Cheney’s Halliburton pals forever and a day to put it back together again. 

The strategic genius of Osama bin Laden has turned our once great Republic into a militaristic oligarchy that will ruin us, just as the Praetorians ruined Rome.   The only things I can see stopping that from happening are a) if Denny Kucinich takes the Democratic nomination and the White House in 2012 and has a filibuster-proof congressional majority backing him or b) if the Vulcans reveal themselves to us and give their matter/anti-matter technology. 

But what are the odds of either of those things happening?

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

Air Libya

May 17, 2001

By Jeff Huber

America’s trade deficit continues to grow, but the good news is that our one viable export shows no sign of going into a slump.  Among our biggest little trading buddies, our Long War on Evil is a hotter selling game than Call of Duty, Gears of War and Tom Clancy’s Insurance Selling Geek Patrol combined. 

Our “days not weeks” of military involvement in Libya have turned into months.  Now the Brits want to sign us on for a commitment that will keep us backing that show longer than The Fantasticks ran off-Broadway (i.e., 42 years).  These would be the same pet bulldogs who begged on their hind legs to take the car ride to Iraq and the Bananastans with us and who extradited our nemesis Julian Assange to Sweden for “questioning” about sexual behavior that by Swedish standards is the equivalent of kissing your prom date on the cheek.

Gen. Sir David Richards
orders infrastructure
raid on Tripoli.

Subsequent to the coalition’s inability to bomb Colonel Moammar Gadhafi into the great game beyond, Britain’s top military commander Gen. Sir David Richards (harrumph) says Gadhafi could remain “clinging to power” unless NATO steps up its bombing operation to include Libya’s infrastructure. 

Next to the importance of air-to-air fighters to maintaining air superiority, the strategic importance of infrastructure bombing is airpower theory’s most elaborate and cynical hoax.  Since the beginning of air warfare, the preponderance of combat air kills came from air defense artillery (aka ADA), which today consists of surface-to-air missiles (aka SAMs) and anti-air artillery (aka AAA, pronounced “triple A”).  The $350 million-a-pop F-22 Raptor is about as effective at ruling the sky as the bi-winged box kites fighter pilots flew during “the war to end all wars” (aka "the great war" aka World War I).  Long after the 8^th Air Force had shot the Luftwaffe down in flames in "the good war" (aka World War II), Colonel Hogans and Sergeant Kinchloes were still parachuting into Luftstalags thanks to flak “so thick you could walk on it.”

Snoopy patrols no-fly zone
over Libya.

In our decade of enforcing the northern and southern thou-shalt-not-fly zones aka no-fly zones aka NFZs over Iraq, we never quite established air supremacy because of the Iraqis’ uncanny ability to sneak new SAM sites into the NFZs right under the noses of our spy satellites.  We scored a tactical victory or two by bombing one or two or three of the SAM sites, of which maybe half were cardboard decoys placed in the NFZs to defile with our heads. 

Sadam Hussein’s air-to-air fighters mostly stayed out of the NFZs, mainly because so few of them were able to stay off the ground.  But if they had managed to get off the ground and into the no-fly airspace they wouldn’t have been a threat to the Kurd and Shia populations we supposedly established the zone to protect in the first place because the Shia population lived on the ground and air-to-air fighters aren’t geared to attack ground targets. 

The only confirmed kills of the Iran no-fly fiasco were the two U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters that two U.S. Air Force F-16 Falcon fighters shot down by mistake over the northern NFZ.  The true ignominy of The Blackhawk Downer was that the AWACS controllers who were hundreds of miles away swung in the wind over it and the fighter pilots who actually saw the Blackhawks and shot them down without getting a better look at them skated away on the thin ice of the warrior ethos.  This was in keeping with the Uniform Code of Marsupial Justice (aka UCMJ) tradition later reflected when the person who took the big fall for the Abu Ghraib disgrace was a pregnant retarded corporal.

It was in the grand tradition of tragic American post-World War II strategy-policy mismatches that a decade of no-fly zones over Iraq failed to unseat a dictator who was once our ally and who we now realize, after we’ve tinkled away most of another decade in a no-win war of occupation, that we should have left in place.  I got a morbid case of the mission creeps the second I heard young Mr. Obama had signed on to enforce a wafer-thin NFZ over Libya for the purpose of protecting Libyan civilians from their dictator who we'd be better off leaving in place, knowing full well that once the creeps in charge got their noses in Gadhafi's tent they would escalate the mission.

And so it came to pass.  The NFZ defensive counter air (aka DCA) mission turned into a close air support (aka CAS) mission, which in turn became an interdiction (aka INT) mission, which morphed into a leadership assassination mission (aka ASS).  Then the ASS killed a lot of the Libyan civilians we were supposed to be protecting but failed to kill Gadhafi, just as the ASS in Iraq killed a lot of Iraqi civilians but not Saddam Hussein.

RAF Bomber Command and
U.S. 8th Air Force
liberate civilian population of Dresden.

Now General Sir Fopping Popinjay wants to expand the air mission to encompass good old-fashioned strategic bombing against the dreaded enemy infrastructure.  Strategic bombing (aka “shock and awe” in Newspeak), the core tenet of air power theory, has not once caused an enemy to capitulate or effected a regime change, not in either World War nor Korea nor Vietnam nor the Balkans nor Iraq nor the Bananastans nor no place.  Never.  The only ones who feel the effect of infrastructure bombing are the civilians whose welfare we pretend to be so concerned for.

But a strategic bombing campaign in Libya will serve four main purposes.  1) It will give MacArthur-esque demagogues like General Sir Fop ‘n’ Pop (as his adoring troops so lovingly call him) a bigger fiefdom to fo-fum over, 2) it will give NATO increasingly phony-baloney but nonetheless convincing reasons to continue its existence, 3) it will open the floodgates for corrupt contractors from the participating allied countries to make a fortune in a half-hearted attempt to rebuild the infrastructure we just spent a fortune bombing to smithereens. 

And, oh yeah, 4) it will keep the Russians’ mitts off Libya’s oil, which we now know, thanks to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, was the real reason Susie Rice and the rest of Obama's war mongrels instigated the UN resolution to molest Libya in the first place. 

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

Bin Laden's Funniest Home Videos

May 10, 2011

by Jeff Huber

Pseudo-comedian Bob Saget never had a better narrative to work with:

Bob: Okay, here’s Osama at home.  He’s going for the remote.  What’s that he’s saying to one of his sixty-seven kids? 

Bob as Osama, Sr.: Step out of the way.  I cannot see the images of myself with you in the way. 

Bob as Osama, Jr.: Daddy hug!  Daddy hug!

Bob as Osama, Sr.: No Daddy hug, you unholy spawn of an indolent wife. 

Osama, Jr.: Daddy hug!

Osama, Sr.: Take this, you whoreson!   (Bob makes gunshot sound)

Osama, Jr.: (Gasping, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth) I love you, Daddy! (Osama, Jr. dies).

Osama, Sr.: Someone come take this garbage away immediately!

(Five young women dressed in I Dream of Jeanie get ups scurry into the room, scoop up Junior and exit, wailing.)

Bob slash Osama, Sr.: And stop that infernal racket, you disgusting houris.  I have to concentrate!

(Osama views videos of himself while Saget provides the internal monologue)

Osama, Sr:  Yes, I can destroy the infidels in a holy global jihad.  I am good enough, I am smart enough, and doggone it, people predisposed to martyrdom like me!

The bin Laden home video hysteria was but one piece of the demonization campaign revived by the Pentarchy’s bull feather merchants upon their target’s demise.  Labeling an enemy as “evil” is a powerful propaganda weapon that most often turns back on you like a runaway torpedo.  Invoking “evil,” like subscribing to any other intangible, leads to muddled, superstitious thinking, and that inevitably leads to defeat. 

"My fellow jihadists..."

Lamentably, in contemporary America, even the supposedly sharpest, most skeptical minds in the public for a have fallen into this trap.  John Stewart of The Daily Show has taken to calling bin Laden “the world’s most evil man,” and it doesn’t sound to me like he’s kidding when he says that sort of thing.  Firebrand Maureen Dowd lapsed into mouth-breathing insentience with a May 7 ditz diatribe titled “Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil” in which she justified the killing of bin Laden by characterizing the al Qaeda leader as a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response.

Neither Mo Dowd nor anyone else needs to justify killing bin Laden.  But calling him evil because he killed thousands of Americans with a shoestring operation that should have been stopped by our law enforcement agencies long before any hijackers boarded an airplane is a masterpiece of rationalistic moralizing. 

Bin Laden is responsible for the death of thousands all right, but he did so with a new twist on an old, old tactic called an “air raid” as the first strike of a war that he openly declared a good five years before Sept. 11, 2001.  The last time we bothered to actually declare war before we attacked was in 1941.

Those “thousands” of Americans he killed as part of an act of declared war seem like a paltry casualty count compared to the tens and probably hundreds of thousands of innocents we have killed and maimed and the untold millions of lives we have destroyed since we had him pinned down at Tora Bora in Dec. 2001 (we only let him get away out of kindness, I suppose).  Killing him finally, after nearly a decade doesn’t redeem the swath of destruction we created between then and now.

And calling him “evil” carries no more or less moral weight than he and his followers and the rest of the world that wishes we’d take a flying tackle at a rolling donut calling us “the great Satan.”  In war, no matter whose side you’re on, you’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys, and God loves you and He hates them to pieces like meeces.  Adolph Hitler believed God was on his side, as did Benito Mussolini.  The Japanese believed that God was on their side because, heck, they believed their emperor was God, so who else’s side would God be on? (Heh!)

We killed a lot of Japanese and German civilians from the air in World War II, most notably at Nagasaki and Hiroshima and Dresden.  Many argue that the A-bomb attacks on Japan were necessary, but in truth they were only necessary to terminate the war with an unconditional surrender.  If we had offered the Japanese surrender on the terms we would up giving them anyway, they likely would have cut the bushido and thrown their hands up.   Apologists for the annihilation of Dresden note that the city was a vital German military and an economic target.  So…what kinds of targets were the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers? 

Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden is, in my considered opinion, humanity’s all-time greatest military and political mastermind.  With no navy or air force or army or even a defense budget he has managed to entangle the best-trained, best-equipped ever military of history’s mightiest nation in a self-defeating war that it can never win. 

And it’s a war that we’ll never stop until we can somehow grow out of the asinine notion that name-calling makes for sound strategy. 

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

Bin Laden: Hang 'Em High Comedy

May 3, 2011

by Jeff Huber

Osama bin Laden’s reported death marks a transition in America’s Long War on Evil from vulgar burlesque to Plautus-class high farce.  And the appointments of Leon Panetta and David Petraeus to take over the Department of Defense and the CIA respectively all but assures that the show will go on longer than The Producers ran on Broadway. 

Hang 'Em High Comedy

A new screenplay by Noel Voltaire

 Opening scene:

My fellow Americans...

Dwayne Johnson as President Barry “The Rock” Warbomber broadcasts a Sunday night address from the White House. 

Warbomber:  Today, at my direction, a small team of Americans carried out an operation with extraordinary courage and capability during which they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body…

Cut to:

Mel Brooks as Joe B. Average sits at his breakfast table the next morning, drinking his coffee and watching the rebroadcast of Warbomer’s speech.  As Warbomber says, “they killed bin Laden and took custody of his body,” Mel nods approvingly, then glances at the front page of his New York Times. 

Cut to:

You've got to be
drecking me!

Close up of text on front-page story that reads:  “American officials said bin Laden resisted and was shot in the head. He was later buried at sea.”

Cut to:

Mel Brooks does spectacular coffee spit-take into his copy of the New York Times, wipes his mouth and mutters: Meshugah!

Cut to:

A large, well appointed office in the inner ring of the Pentacle.  Clint Eastwood as newly appointed CIA chief David Petraeus stands tall in front of Pat Hingle as defense secretary Leon Panetta.  Facially, Buddy Hackett would have been a better casting choice for Panetta and Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Reubens would have been the spitting image of Petraeus, but neither of them were in Hang ‘Em High, the western we're spoofing just now.

I aimed low, but I shot him in the head.

Eastwood as Petraeus is dressed in black battle dress utilities and jump boots.  Pinned above his left blouse pocket are a Navy Seal badge, an Army infantryman’s rifle, silver Air Force Jump Wings, gold naval aviator wings and twenty rows of ribbon decorations.  On the shoulder of his left sleeve are a Ranger tab and a Special Forces tab.  Above his right blouse pocket is an oversized nametag that reads “David Petraeus, Ph.D, Director, CIA.  On his head Clint wears a black campaign “fishing” hat similar to the one worn he wore in the combat scenes of Heartbreak Hill that recalls the cowboy hats he wore in spaghetti westerns like Hang ‘Em High.   A Blackwater logo is displayed on top of the back of his BDU blouse, and the bottom reads “This Space Available.” 

You did WHAT with the body?

Hingle slash Panetta stands to confront Eastwood slash Petraus, his face twisting in consternation the way Buddy Hackett’s did the first time Herbie the Volkswagen spoke to him in the Disney film The Love Bug.

Panetta:  What do you have to say for yourself, Super Dave?

Petraeus:  Well, we aimed low, but we hit him in the head.  Then as we were taking DNA samples to positively identify the body, we accidentally buried it at sea. 

Panetta:  Well, things happen: frog of war and all that.

Did I mention that
it smelled really,
really bad?

Petraeus: That’s “fog” of war, sir.

Panetta:  Oh, yeah.  Well.  I’ll get the hang of this soldier patois eventually…

Petreaus: That's “military jargon,” sir.

Panetta:  You’re right, you’re right.  No, no, it goes “Your left, your left, your left, right, left.” Right?

Petraeus: Yes, sir. That’s very good...

                                #

The official line is that they tossed bin Laden’s corpse over the side because Muslim law demands a quick burial, but it sounds more like they were following the Sicilian tradition of ditching the stiff where nobody will ever find it.  Conspiracy theories are flying through the info-sphere like bats in a blimp hangar.  One attempt to quash the naysayers is a press release that says the CIA'S facial recognition technology has identified bin Laden's face with 95% certainty.  That recognition technology must be dynamite if it can recognize the face of a guy who just got his head blown off. 

I’m inclined to believe that however badly they botched the message line of this operation, they really did bag old Evil Eyes.  If they said they bagged them and they really didn’t, he'd have a video of himself out the next day on al Jazeera holding up a copy of the New York Times with the headline about his demise on the front page.  I’m pretty sure the “Chess Masters,” as psuedo-journalist Robert Dreyfuss once laughably called Obama’s national security team, aren't quite that stupid.  But you won’t find me betting a house payment on that because, after, they’re the bozos who okayed putting the body in bed with the fishes before anybody could independently confirm its identity.

The cement shoes gambit gives a certain amount of credence to the theory that whatever DNA evidence the Pentarchs finally produce came from the corpse that’s been on ice since the CIA/Navy Seals/Green Berets/Blackwater whacked bin Laden in the early days of the Obama regime.  This theory goes on to postulate that they kept Binnie's death a secret so they could spring it on us when Obama needed a boost in his approval ratings.  No comment on that angle from me just yet.  

Director David H. Petraeus
(official CIA photo) 

The normal nabobs are nattering up sinful amounts of bandwidth agonizing over what bin Laden’s death means vis-à-vis the War on Evil.  My take is that it mainly lets young Mr. Obama keep young Mr. Bush’s wars—as well as whatever new ones he can twist open on top of his Libya travesty—going indefinitely and still be able to boast that he finished the “dead or alive” job for his predecessor.  Other than that, bagging bin Laden won't have any more effect than bagging Hussein did.  

As for Panetta and Petraeus: putting them in their new jobs adheres to the Sun Tzuian principle of keeping your friends close and historic weasels like those two even closer.  Obama has given the okay for things torture-wise, assassination-wise and otherwise that might actually have gotten old “Mission Accomplished” impeached, and Panetta and Petraeus were in on it so they know where all the bodies are buried.

Except, of course, for the one that right about now is sitting down to dinner with Jonah.

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

Easter on My Kiester

Apr. 26, 2011

By Jeff Huber

Okay, last week was the week before Easter weekend and this time I really, really was going to take a break from writing the column.  Like I said the previous week, when I was going to take a break but didn’t, my column hasn’t put a pot hole on our toll road to eternal armed conflict, and it isn’t likely to when both the mainstream and mean-stream (aka FOX News, rabid ration, etc.) media are 100 percent behind it. 

On the other hand, it’s difficult not to note the events that, with each passing week, sink our nation and the world even deeper into a perma-conflict quagmire.

Gen. David Petraeus

Evidence continues to limn the emerging reality that we’ll never get the job done in the Bananastans but we’ll never stop trying.  As I commented last week, Bananastans theater-of-war commander “King” David Petraeus has resurrected body count as a key measure of success in our central Asian conflicts.  Body count first became a loser’s delusional sign of victory during the ‘Nam travesty, and its emergence in the ‘Raq and now the ‘Nanners indicates that Teflon Dave fully plans to succeed where the hooligans who ran the ‘Nam failed: he intends to manipulate Americans into supporting the Pentarchy’s Long War—a perpetual state of unwarranted and self-defeating armed conflict—by achieving the media’s unconditional surrender of its traditional function as the fourth estate of our ersatz republic. 

(If you need convincing evidence that the U.S. no longer functions as a majority-ruled Republic, simply note how the Tea Bag Bolsheviks have managed to dominate all aspects of our political structure even though there are fewer of them in this country than there are Rosicrucians.)

At one point King David tried to make a show of using the number of native troops trained to take over their countries’ security duties as a measure of effectiveness.  It’s turned out to be as hollow a standard as Lyndon Johnson’s promise that we’d get them Vietnamese boys up and fighting for themselves instead of having American boys doing their fighting for them. Petraeus’s initiatives to arm Iraqi and Afghan locals, in and out of uniform, have been an American taxpayer funded program for funneling weapons directly into the hands of the very hooligans we’re supposed to be fighting.

And the latest indicator that Afghan boys will never be able to let the American boys stop doing their fighting for them was the repeat debacle in Kandahar where Taliban fighters sprang 475 of their biggest, best-est buddies from Sarposa Prison.  They managed to sneak these guys out through a tunnel over a four-and-a-half hour period without drawing the attention of the prison guards.  That sounds like an astounding feat until you consider that the best way to keep Afghan prison guards from discovering something is to tell them where not to look for it. 

It’s embarrassing to note that the Taliban have liberated their cohorts from this prison before, and even more abashing that the Sarposa escapes are just two examples of the many instances where militants have broken their comrades out of prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And it’s little wonder, then, that the warmongery’s bull feather merchants are power-leaking the scoop about how plans are underway for us to stay in Asia well beyond the deadlines set by invisible-ink agreements and campaign promises that were as sincere as a promise of a Tuesday payment for today’s hamburger.  Heck, the host-nation hillbillies can’t even secure a freaking prison; we have to stay!

Sen. Lindsay Graham on
the Easter edition of
FOX News Sunday

We’ll never leave Libya either.  John McCain’s office wife Lindsey Graham made the rounds of the Easter Sunday political gas bag-athons, celebrating the most important of all Christian holidays by demanding that Americans drop more bombs on Muslims.  Lindsey thinks we should ignore the UN mandate on Libya, meaning he doesn't think we should allow it to limit our actions. 

Now, a lot of liberal warmongers are claiming the UN mandate is what makes our Libya lunacy legal, even though it wholly bypasses our constitutional and legal requirements for congressional approval of sustained armed conflict overseas.  Lady Lindsey apparently doesn’t think we need any institutional approval whatsoever to blow remote parts of the world to smithereens beyond his opinion that we need to do it.

And don’t think we can extract ourselves from Libya because we’re currently only fighting from the air.  Lindsay’s lover man McCain says we need to put boots on the ground right now.  Also appearing Sunday with the gold-dust twins was the third moving part of the ménage, Joe Lieberman, who’s for any kind of war as long as it makes the other two bedfellows happy. 

Program note:  I’ll be working like a navvy (aka “laborer”) this spring and summer to complete the initial draft of Sandbox Generals.  To facilitate that goal, I’ll be moving the weekly Pen and Sword column post time to noon Eastern on Tuesdays. 

Best,

J 

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

Death Takes a Tax Holiday

April 19, 2011

by Jeff Huber

Today's Republicans would only free
the slaves if it meant they could
raid their pension fund.

I just noticed that my writing regular anti-war columns for the past six years hasn’t ended wars.  So it won’t make a pile of beans or a hill of bullets if take a week off to finish my taxes, I reckon.  The deadline was moved back to April 18 this year; something to do with something called “Emancipation Day” which is the day on which African slaves in the District of Columbia were set free.  Since it’s a holiday in the district, the IRS takes a day off.  I’m not sure how they managed to turn a local holiday into a federal holiday, and a three-day federal holiday at that, but who’s complaining?

I’m guessing the District slaves were freed on the April 18 that came in the last year of the American Civil War (to wit: 1865), which means we have the Civil War to thank for the extension of this year’s filing deadline.

Which proves once again the assertion of the neo-confluence that good things come from war!

In counterpoint: The fact of the Civil War also says other-than-flattering volumes about our country that we had to fight a war among ourselves to end an institution like slavery.  It says even more that when you compare a map of the pre-Civil War slave-versus-free states and territories to a contemporary red state-blue state map, they look darn near identical.

Will Rogers would say that today's
Democrats have their heads
up their mascot. 

As I’ve noted in the past, Jivin’ Joe Lieberman’s statement about how his sense of history says wars either end in victory or defeat goes go show how senseless Joe’s sense of history is.  Wars seldom achieve the intended objectives of their aggressors and seldom really end. 

And living in the south for the last 15 years suggests to me that the American Civil War will never be over. 

Catch you next week.

Jeff

P.S.  I managed to file before the Apr. 18 deadline, and had some time to do a little research on where my tax dollars are going.  You know that $38 billion that supposedly got cut out of the budget?  It doesn't even cover the tab for six-months worth of the Bungle in Bananastan.  

There’s probably nothing Pumpkin Tan and the Tea Baggers can force Congress to do regarding reducing the debt that will come close to the effect of China’s runaway inflation.  There’s nothing like having debt dollars turn into blown-up pennies. 

JLH

P.P.S.  One of the Hampton Roads Hillbillies at the local Bud Lite and well drinks trough remarked that the dad blamed Emancipation Day bull BM was more proof that the euphemistic slurs for Americans of African heritage were taking over the country.  I asked him to consider that no group has more influence over domestic politics than the Tea Baggers, and that there are considerably fewer of them than of the aforementioned euphemisms.  Moreover, I elucidated, the percentage of blacks among the membership of the Tea Party, expressed in a round figure, is zero. 

J

P.P.P.S.  Wasn't I taking a week off from column writing?

J

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

Warbama

April 12, 2011

by Jeff Huber

Young Mr. Bush was the first U.S. president to stick his successor with not one but two unwinnable no-exit wars.  Young Mr. Obama is going for the hat trick, and he may qualify as an ace before his tenure expires.

The Pentagon press corp

As is so often the case, my friend Gareth Porter of Interpress Service scooped the mainstream media’s reporting on the Iraqi fire drill with his Apr. 6 story “Maliki's Doubts Threaten Post-2011 Troop Presence Plan.”  Obama has given his approval to a Pentagon plan to station U.S. combat troops in Iraq beyond the pledged Dec. 2011 deadline for complete withdrawal of American forces from that country, Porter reveals.  But, but, but… A “senior Iraqi intelligence official” says that, “Obama insisted that it could only happen if Maliki requested it.”  This high-level Iraqi spy also says that since our strategic strong-arming stooge in Egypt Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign in Feb., Obama is now convinced more than ever that he cannot afford to get labeled as the limp-wristed liberal who “lost” Iraq. 

I wouldn’t presume to vouch for one Gareth’s sources, including this “senior Iraqi intelligence official,” but about the only way I’d doubt any part of this story would be if it came from a senior American intelligence official.  It’s been plain as a wicked witch’s wart that Obama has afraid of the Pentarchy and its stranglehold on the news media since the day he asked Bush’s Purple Gang (Uncle Bob Gates, King David Petraeus, Moon Mullin, Desert Ox Odierno, etc.) to stick around. 

If the evidence before our eyes weren’t sufficient, on Apr. 7, the day after Porter’s story hit the street, Uncle Bob himself told AP and the rest of the Pentagon steno corps that Warbama will keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the agreed final withdrawal date of Dec. 31, 2011 if the Iraqi government asks for them to stay.  But Uncle Bob’s Apr. 7 confession was hardly breaking news either.   

We can easily trace the Pentagon’s information campaign to desensitize the American public to an extended U.S. stay in Iraq to Jul. 2009, when the military’s bull feather merchants released the story that Iraqi PM Nuri al Maliki would likely ask the U.S. forces to stick around past 2011 to pick up the slack for the congenitally incompetent and corrupt Iraqi security forces.  The neo-concordant, war worshiping Washington Times noted that despite the deadline contained in the Status of Forces Agreement, “Pentagon officials and U.S. diplomats privately have left open the prospect that the Iraqi government may seek to renegotiate the terms of the agreement.”  So the December 31, 2011 exit date was bogus as a blue dollar bill from the get go. 

On March 1 of 2011, NPR reported that Uncle Bob had told Congress that talks to extend the deadline were ongoing.  This was the same Uncle Bob who weeks earlier told a bunch of crew cut kids at West Point that, “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.”  Well I guess so, Bob, considering that any defense secretary in the foreseeable future will be stuck with the Asian and Middle East quagmires you helped us sink us into even deeper.

A recent sign that the Bungle in the Bananastans is on track for an extended engagement: body count is back as the theater commander Dave Petraeus’s metric of choice.  Forget all that jazz about counterinsurgency and the real measure of effectiveness being the number of civilian lives saved.  We were slaughtering way too many civilians, possibly even more than the supposed bad guys, for that measure to have any traction.  No when in doubt, King David and his court fall back on the good old reliable body count score keeping from Vietnam days.  And why not?  Sure, body count is a worthless statistic in determining the success of war, but it sounds good.  Heck, it sounded good enough to keep the Vietnam war going for eight years after presidential candidate Richard Nixon vowed he’d end the war.  Shoot, if we had the same news media then that we have now, we’d still be turning the corner in Vietnam. 

King David was sent to Afghanistan, we were told, to repeat the magic he performed in Iraq.  Well, he’s doing just that.  His objective as commander of Iraq, as his head hagiographer Thomas E. Ricks oafishly admitted “was 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.”  Dave’s putting on the same illusion act in the Bananastans, so our present wars will reach the “generational” status they were designed for in the Pentagon’s Long War doctrine.  Yet how often do you hear the news media talk about how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are “winding down”? 

Gen Ham sez:
"It's clobberin' time!"

This Libya shenanigan that was going to last “days not weeks” is about to turn into months going on years.  Gen. Carter Ham, the head of Africa Command who looks like the product of an unsanctioned joining of Ray Odierno and The Thing, says we may send ground troops to Libya.  Nobody expects the latest background noise about a ceasefire to amount to anything, and now that he’s leaned out this far, Obama can’t afford to leave Libya with Gadhafi still in power.  There would be no end to John McCain’s girlfriend Lindsey Graham going on the Sunday gab-athons and chanting breathlessly, in his very best Blanche Dubois impersonation, “I just wish we had a real commander in chief who really knew how to be a real leader of the free world.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham

I highly doubt that Obama’s done making new wars yet.  Cutting Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh at the hip joints was an unsurpassed piece of what-the-hell-manship that leaves more possibilities than ever for Bill Kristol and his New American Centurions to foment military intervention there.  And don’t forget about Iran.  Candidate Obama agreed in principle to an AIPAC sponsored position paper that said America would go to war with Iran to defend Israel.  One of the campaign staffers who signed Obama up for that program was former Clinton administration warmonger Susan Rice, who in her present job as Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations was the driving force behind the UN resolution to bomb the Botox out of Gadhafi. 

Now that Rice has established a loophole for Obama to take the country to war without formal approval of Congress as required by the War Powers Act of 1973 and that quaint little document called the United States Constitution, it will be no problem at all to start the genocide of the Persian culture through air power on the sole say-do of McCain’s other side-squeeze Joe Lieberman. 

Won’t that be the perfect grace note for Joe to end his career in the Senate on?

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

Warmongers: They're not Just Neocons Anymore

by Jeff Huber

Apr. 5, 2011

Between 800 and a thousand people were slaughtered in the Ivory Coast on March 29 as the town of Duekoue became caught up in the post-electoral violence devouring that country.  Progressive icon Juan Cole hasn’t called for support of the rebels in the Ivory Coast through U.S. military action.

Thousands gathered in Damascus, Syria on Sunday Apr. 3 to mourn the deaths of those killed protesting against the rule of Syrian President Bashir al-Assad.  Juan Cole has not called for liberals to demand a U.S. military intervention in support of Syrian rebels.

What, me know what I'm
talking about?

Fred Bridgeland of Scotland’s Sunday Herald posits that the Ivory Coast is the next Rwanda.  In 1944, the civil war in Rwanda led to the murder of between half-a-million and a million people.  President Bill Clinton did not did not intervene militarily in that war, and as best as I can tell Juan Cole did not criticize him for it.  Juan Cole also hasn’t called for use of armed force in the ongoing civil war in Darfur.  The most visible lefty to push for U.S. action in Darfur has been actor George Clooney, and I never got the impression he was expecting us to go in and kick the door down there. I think Clooney was looking for something along the lines of Yo, Danny Ocean wants we should help out the Watusis or whatever the hell they are.  What say we knock over another casino and give them half the take? 

Juan Cole didn’t call for military intervention to help rebels oust dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt’s erupting civil war, he’s not calling for a bombardment in support of Jordan’s germinating civil war, nor did he ask for a blockade of the terror of the civil war in Tunisia.  And, of course, Cole didn’t call for U.S. invasions in reaction to the civil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  That's largely because Cole was protesting the U.S. invasions that caused those civil wars in the first place.

Cole has, however and famously, exhorted the liberals of our nation to back young Mr. Obama's insertion of force into the civil war in Libya.  In Cole's March 27 “An Open Letter to the Left on Libya,” an all-time low-water mark in liberal intellectualism, he presents arguments for war in Libya that make Bill Kristol’s asylum of neoconservative New American Centurions (think Dan Quayle) sound positively lucid. 

The UN sanctioned Obama’s war in Libya, Cole argues, and although the neocons love war they hate the UN, plus they didn’t vote for Obama, so if you back Obama’s UN endorsed war in Libya that will show the neocons, huh?  Oh, yeah, and the Neocons are always using humanitarian intervention as an excuse to go to war, and we liberals can’t let them be the only ones who do that, so let’s get behind Obama’s UN endorsed humanitarian intervention and, boy, that’ll really steal those old neocons’ thunder, won’t it?  That’ll grind glass in their eye, all right. 

It's okay if the Israelis do it.

Cole kinda-sorta argues that the humanitarian crisis in Libya is worse than it is (or was) in the Ivory Coast or Syria or Rwanda or Syria or Egypt or wherever, but he kinda-sorta doesn’t make his case.  And in any case, Cole kinda-sorta never explains why he didn’t call for U.S. military intervention when the Israelis were firebombing mommies and babies in Gaza City with white phosphorous shells.

In a March 30 rebuttal to Glen Greenwald’s rebuttal of his cockamamie Open Letter, Cole opens with “Iraq was an illegal war, for no pressing national interest and with no [United Nations Security Council] authorization,” an authorization Cole defends with the lysergic assertion that “a UN Security Council resolution is the gold standard for military intervention.”  What despicable Tommyrot. 

Nations have been going to war—legally or otherwise—since long before there was a UN or anything remotely like it.  The very fabric of international relations recognizes that political leaders have the right and responsibility to employ policies and strategies, including wars, that are in the best interests of their nations, and even the UN charter recognizes that member countries have the right to exercise the right of self-defense through use of armed force.

What makes a war illegal or illegal, especially when we’re talking about the United States, really has nothing to do with international agreements like the UN charter that member nations can back out of whenever they please.  What matters in the U.S. is that we enter into war in accord with our own laws.  Messrs. Bush and Cheney and their neocon supporters exploited the War Powers Resolution of 1973 to get themselves a pair of Authorizations for Use of Military Force  (AUMFs) from Congress that allowed a president to Invade Iraq and pretty much any place else he cared to as long as he did so in the name of fighting a terror-related ism.  So the Iraq war is as legal as wars get in the post-World War II undeclared war era.  

A pretty sound argument says that when you get right down to it, an AUMF is a perfectly legit substitute for a formal declaration of war.  But Obama can't slip his little Libya war under the umbrella of the existing AUMFs because Libya doesn't present a terror connection.  In fact, military intervention in Libya doesn't even pass the national self-defense test.  Hence, it is Obama’s little field trip to Libya, and not the lamentable quagmire in Iraq, that is the brazenly illegal conflict.  

This is foreign policy 101 stuff that ivory tower twits like Juan Cole (who is a history professor at the University of Michigan) ought to have down cold before they go shooting their mouths off about armed conflicts and the fates of nations.   

The piece of resistance in Juan’s Open Letter was his boldface assertion that “Libya 2011 is not like Iraq 2003 in any way.”  Oh, really?  Let’s run a quick comparison.  U.S. intervenes militarily against ruthless dictator.  Check.  Said ruthless dictator is conducting military operations against his people to suppress insurrection.  Check.  After having been previously spanked by U.S. armed force, said ruthless dictator is now a toothless tiger who poses no threat to his neighbors or to the Unites States.  Check.  Said ruthless dictator has no weapons of mass destruction or ties to al Qaeda.  Check.  The list goes on.

Picking on Cole is fun and easy, partly because he’s such an intellectual phony and partly because he’s inflated himself into a Biden-esque gasbag.  But Cole is merely a symptom of a larger malignancy growing in political left.  The progressives’ moral high ground in matters of war and peace began eroding when young Mr. Obama invited young Mr. Bush’s top five-sided funny farmers—Uncle Bob Gates, Moon Mullen, King David, Desert Ox Odierno, etc.—to stick around.  Things continued rolling downhill with the addition of liberal warmongers like Cruella Clinton and Susan Rice to the team.  Then Obama let King David and the rest of the general assembly bully him into escalating the bungle in the Bananastans.  The promise of withdrawal from Iraq is vanishing like ethics in the banking industry, and oh, lo and behold, we’ve reversed our position in Yemen now.  It seems our boy, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh, just got himself put on our spit list, and now he’s the same kind of totalitarian dictator that Saddam Hussein was and Muamar Kadhafi still is (for the time being, anyway).  Nothing good is going to come of this, believe you me. 

I hate to be the one to spring this on the left on the occasion of Obama officially launching his re-election campaign, but if the Democrats want to hold on to their claim of being the party of the Great Enlightenment movement that founders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin espoused, they need to change their top leadership by Nov. 2012. 

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