McCain on Iraq: Straight Talk, No Chaser

The stall tactic we know as the "surge strategy" has a clear and definable objective. No, it's not to create sufficient security in Iraq for political reconciliation to take place. It's to keep the war's critics at bay until the neoconservatives can slip John McCain into the White House.

Double Talk

On Monday, February 25, while rolling through the highways of Ohio on the Straight Talk Express, McCain told reporters that if he can't convince Americans that the troop escalation in Iraq is working, then, "I lose."

Six seconds later he retracted the statement, saying, "I don't mean that I'll, quote, lose. I mean that it's an important issue in the judgment of the American voters."

Heh. Will he "mean" it when he tells his Secretary of Defense to "Blow the living bejesus out of every one of those sand farmers" or will he just be having a bout of the "grumpies?"

Right after that, McCain said, "It's not often I retract a comment." Great Caesars ghost! The guy's the Barry Bonds of flip-flopping. If he really doesn't think he goes back on what he says very often, what else can't he remember?

Pillow Talk

McCain bet his political farm on the surge and stood fast aboard the Good Ship Bush while the rest of the GOP hopefuls scampered down the ratlines. So far, the gamble has paid off, not because it got him Mr. Bush's backing, but because it bought him the aegis of the neoconservative movement and its Borg-like array of think tank strategy and propaganda wizards.

At this point, McCain's nose is planted so far up the neoconservative agenda it's a wonder he can get enough oxygen to sustain life. His foreign policy advisers include Richard Armitage, Max Boot, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Ralph Peters, Gary Schmitt and R. James Woolsey. Rounding out this august group of warmongers is Henry Kissinger, who knows more than anyone else alive about how to keep America entangled in a self-defeating war in a third world country. If McCain really wants to keep us in Iraq for a century, Kissinger can tell him how to do it.

It's easy to see why the neocons were eager to embrace McCain as a bedfellow. Like Bush, he is malleable, willing to adopt to any policy that kinda/sorta sounds like it conforms to his value set (and as evidenced by McCain's track record, his value set is flexible enough to wrap itself around any philosophy that helps him get elected). And like Bush, McCain is quite capable of espousing the tenets of whatever dogma he's loyal to at the moment although, also like Bush, a lot of what he says makes him sound like he's been sitting on a barstool since breakfast.

Gibberish

Referring to a recent USA Today/Gallup poll, McCain told reporters, “Now the majority of Americans believe the surge is succeeding.” The poll actually stated that 43 percent of Americans think the troop increase is "making the situation there better."

Does McCain really think "better" is a synonym for "succeeding" or that 43 percent of anything is a majority?

"It's generally quiet," McCain said of his recent visit to Iraq with ideological hug buddy Lindsay Graham of South Carolina. McCain based this assessment on an interesting metric: he said he flew over Baghdad and counted "fifty soccer games going on." Given that McCain thinks 50 is less than 43, it's hard to guess how many soccer games he actually saw, but he probably saw more than just a few. Giving aerial tours of the Baghdad soccer scene has become General David Petraeus's PR stunt of choice. He probably figured out finally that it takes a lot fewer troops and helicopters to secure soccer fields and fly VIPs over them than it takes to lock down an outdoor market so the press can take pictures of big shots like McCain and Graham while they buy hand woven rugs for a buck apiece.

Baghdad probably did sound "generally quiet" to McCain. A volcano in eruption sounds quiet when you're watching it from a turning helicopter.

Kool-Aid, Neat

If you want a poll that reflects reality, you survey people living in the middle of it. Had McCain really wanted to know what people who mattered thought of the surge, he might have taken a look at a BBC/ABC/NHK poll of Iraqis taken in fall 2007, shortly before McCain gushed, "We've succeeded militarily" and his neo-confederate Joe Lieberman giddily declared "We are winning." That poll showed that about 70 percent of Iraqis believed security had deteriorated in areas covered by the surge, and that a shocking 60 percent of Iraqis still thought attacks of U.S. forces were justified.

But that reality didn't interest McCain, whose "straight talk" conforms to the neoconservative notion of "truth."

William Kristol's father Irving Kristol, the "godfather" of American neoconservativism, established a hierarchy of truth. "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people," he once said in an interview. "There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy."

It is patently obvious the neoconservative spin merchants have been selling us the Gerber Baby Food variety of truth. The question is: which flavor of the truth is John McCain telling himself?

We might ask the same question of Frederick Kagan, neoconservative warfare expert and chief architect of the surge strategy. Earlier in the Iraq war, Kagan noted that tactical victories which do not produce desired political aims are merely "organized but senseless violence," precisely the condition his escalation gambit has produced.

The military success McCain and others boast of is a house of cards, consisting mainly of an operational pause while Petraeus supplies weapons to everyone he didn't arm when, while training Iraqi forces in 2004 and 2005, he handed out 190,000 free Kalishikovs that disappeared themselves, almost certainly into the hands of insurgents. Petraeus himself has warned that, "Security gains are fragile and still reversible."

More importantly, though, claims that Mr. Bush and his echo chamberlains have made lauding political progress in Iraq are, at best, specious.

As the Center for American Progress aptly notes, the oil revenue sharing bill has not even received a first reading in parliament. The de-Baathification law came up for discussion, but was roundly protested by Shiite members of the legislature. The constitutional review has been delayed for another three months (half of a Friedman unit), the fourth time such a review has been deferred. Promised provincial elections have been postponed indefinitely pending agreement on a law defining relationships between the national and provincial governments.

Petraeus says "There is no lights [sic] at the end of the tunnel" and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker says tensions have heightened between Sunnis and Shiites a the national level, and admits that, "nothing good is coming down the line."

Yet somehow, John McCain manages to tell America with a straight face that the surge is working. Most likely, he has developed what all true neoconservatives possess: his own personal truth fairy who tells him whatever he needs to hear to justify whatever means he employs in pursuit of his political aim. And since his presidential candidacy rides on the all-in commitment he made to Bush's surge strategy, he'll stay on top of that horse until it either reaches the barn or the glue factory.

Or, to couch his mendacity in terms his fellow naval aviators will immediately recognize, that's his story and he's sticking to it.

For a change.

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Jeff Huber's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books, ISBN: 9781601640192) will be available April 1, 2008.

"…a witty, wacky, wildly outrageous novel that skewers just about anything you’d care to name, from military budgets to political machinations to America’s success as the self-appointed guardian of the world…a remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight." — Booklist

Pakistan Bananastan

Pakistan, it appears, has replaced Afghanistan as the world's top Bananastan.

You may remember "Afghanistan bananastan" from the 1972 film The Hot Rock, in which thief Robert Redford uses the phrase to put vault guards into a hypnotic trance. Today, a "Bananastan" is (largely by my decree) a South Asian equivalent of a South American Banana Republic. Don't confuse a Bananastan with a Bananaraq, which is a Southwest Asian Banana Republic, or with the Barbecue Republic, which is the United States.

Like a Banana Republic, Pakistan is rife with corruption and has been ruled of late by a puppet (albeit an often uncooperative puppet) of the Barbecue Republic who has run roughshod over his country's constitution and judicial system; which, come to think of it, makes the Bananastan a lot like the Barbecue Republic, too. In many ways, in fact, Pakistan objectifies all that has failed in American foreign policy, and in America itself, over the past seven years and change.

Worst Laid Plans

Preserving and spreading democracy has been the central aim of U.S. foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson was in office. The current administration has taken less than a decade to sabotage the efforts of generations.

Recent elections in the Middle East have transformed terrorist outfits like Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Palestine) and the Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt) into legitimate political parties. No one can readily predict how soon we'll manage to extract ourselves, if ever, from the quagmire all those purple fingers created in Iraq. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the latest Rovewellian reincarnation of Hitler who's president of the "single greatest challenge" to our security, was duly elected to office. And now, the peace loving people of our new top Bananastan have voted their tinhorn's political party out of power, and there's talk among the victors about impeaching the tinhorn. (Did I tell you the Bananastan looks a lot like the Barbecue Republic or what?)

The Bananastan also illustrates the haplessness of the Barbecue Republic's attempts at controlling nuclear weapons proliferation. Pakistan, not Iraq or Iran or even North Korea, is the country most likely to let a nuke creep into the hands of terrorists.

A year ago, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell confessed that our Bananastan is the sanctuary of the tallest Arab ever wanted dead or alive by a U.S. president. Clear back in 2003, former Indian general and terrorism expert K.P.S. Gill said that not only was bin Laden holed up in Pakistan, but that members of Pakistani intelligence knew where he was. Dr. Ajai Sahni, another Indian authority on terrorism, said that the Pakistani army and intelligence service actively facilitated bin Laden's relocation from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

That could explain why the CIA opted to ask forgiveness rather than permission from the Pakistani government for its latest spy-fly-die mission against an al Qaeda operative in that country.

The Spy Who Snuffed Me

On January 29, the CIA killed al Qaeda Leader Abu Laith al-Libi in the Pakastini town of Mir Ali. A "knowledgeable Western official" told CNN that al Libi was "'not far below the importance of the top two al Qaeda leaders'—Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri." The story barely broke the radar horizon. Perhaps we've grown so inured to hearing about al Qaeda number two men meeting instant justice by now that when the target is "below the importance" of a number two, nobody could give a number two less.

As Joby Warrick and Robin Wright of the Washington Post tell the story, the CIA used a "variety of surveillance techniques" to track al Libi to the home of a local Taliban commander. A Predator drone aircraft was flown over the site. Two Hellfire missiles left the Predator and tore into the compound, destroying the main building and the gatehouse, and killing up to 13 inhabitants. Unnamed officials told the Post that the CIA conducted the strike without obtaining the Pakistani government's permission beforehand. Wright and Warrick say reaction to the strike from U.S. and Pakistani leaders has been "muted" because neither side is eager to call attention to an awkward situation.

But there's something a darn sight more awkward about this situation than whether or not the Pakistanis gave prior permission for the operation. Let's make something very clear: foreign governments don't order U.S. forces into combat. The U.S. government does that, and in theory, we have rules about who exactly in the U.S. government is authorized to do it.

Bananastan Shenanigan

A former intelligence officer involved with previous strikes in Pakistan said "In the past, it required getting approval from the highest levels." This time, the drone operators, situated half a world away at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, released the missiles "On orders from CIA officials in McLean [Virginia]."

The "Standing Rules of Engagement for U.S. Forces" defines this and other sorts of offensive operations as acts of national defense, things normally approved of by, at minimum, the four-star officer in charge of the geographic area of responsibility. This strike occurred in Central Command, and it sounds like CENTCOM chief Admiral William Fallon got cut out of the loop.

We can plausibly speculate that the CIA acts as hit man on these missions in order to work around the military chain of command. One can even reasonably argue that the time critical nature of this kind of operation demands a streamlined chain of command. But this is not Spy vs. Spy shtick where we slip the evildoer a designer drug that makes his beard fall out. These are air strikes, overt military operations, something that Congress is supposed to have a say in.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 allows a president to "introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities" for a maximum of 90 days without a declaration of war or a "specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces" from Congress. Mr. Bush had an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) from Congress to invade Iraq. He doesn't have one for Pakistan.

If we want to take an argument for the legality of the Pakistan strikes to the sublime level, we might say that the CIA does not, per se, constitute a "United States Armed Force," and therefore its actions aren't covered by the War Powers Resolution. But how, then, do we justify the Bananastan style shenanigans that have been going on in Somalia? There, we have conducted air strikes not just against al Qaeda "compounds," but against entire villages, and not just with CIA drones carrying a pair of relatively small missiles, but with U.S. Air Force AC-130 gun ships that can rip a town into smithereens in a lot less time than it takes a subsidiary of Halliburton to rebuild one. And there's no AUMF for Somalia either.

If we argue that the Somali strikes are sanctioned by the "blank check" permissions of the AUMF of September 18, 2001 that authorized Mr. Bush "to use all necessary and appropriate force" against anyone or anything that might have had a connection with 9/11 or might ever conceivably be involved with a terrorist plot against the U.S. , then we have a president who can initiate wars whenever and wherever he wants without approval from any other branch of government.

That, fellow citizens, is one of the top three characteristics of a Barbecue Republic. The other two are the executive's ability to a) disappear the Bill of Rights and b) place covert propaganda and disinformation in the domestic media without fear of censure or penalty.

Welcome to your Brave New World Order.

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Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books, ISBN: 9781601640192) will be available April 1, 2008.

"…a witty, wacky, wildly outrageous novel that skewers just about anything you’d care to name, from military budgets to political machinations to America’s success as the self-appointed guardian of the world…a remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight." —Booklist

Defense Budget: Feed the Pig

"Isn't it odd that after a terrorist attack that relied on $2 box-cutters, we are redoubling our pursuit of fantastical weaponry?"

—Robert Scheer

On February 4, largely evading the media radar like a B-2 (Billion) stealth bomber, the Bush administration proposed to Congress a 2009 Defense budget of $515.4 billion. If approved, this amount, adjusting for inflation, will be the highest defense appropriation since World War II.

This is just the tab for "standard operations." Non-standard operations like the business in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere cost extra, as do defense related activities in departments like Homeland Security, State, Transportation, Energy, Justice and so forth. We can't calculate an exact figure for the total security tab. Doctor Robert Higgs , Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute, said in 2004 that "a well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon's (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it."

What will we get security wise for some indeterminate amount over $1 trillion? According to William Lind, defense analyst and co-author of The Case for Military Reform, "Most of what we're buying is a military museum."

Bringing Home the Bacon

The military we had on 9/11/2001 was the best-trained, best-equipped force in the world. Yet, it did not defend us against the attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. Some time in 2006, U.S. defense spending exceeded that of the rest of the world combined. Today, the best-funded military in history is failing to achieve its country's goals overseas. Though we have battled toe-to-toe with al Qaeda for over six years, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell says the organization "remains the pre-eminent terrorist threat against the United States" and it is "improving the last key aspect of its ability to attack the U.S.: the identification, training, and positioning of operatives for an attack in the homeland."

And all this time you thought we were fighting them over there so we wouldn't have to fight them over here.

Despite bankroll warfare's demonstrated failure, Pavlov's Dogs of War insist we can solve our security woes by throwing more money at them. Neoconservative luminary Frank Gaffney says we need to maintain defense spending at four percent of America's gross domestic product (GDP). Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen agree. By what specific criteria did they arrive at the four percent figure?

Gates, according to his press secretary Geoff Morrell, believes four percent "to be a reasonable price to stay free and protect our interests around the world.” Mullen says of the four percent benchmark, “It’s really important."

That the defense budget should be tied to the GDP has been a neoconservative clarion call for decades. I first heard it while attending the U.S. Naval War College in the 90s, but never once while at the War College did I hear or read of a single war's outcome that was determined by what percentage of their GDPs the belligerents spent on their militaries. If percentage of GDP expended on defense were an accurate predictor of failure or success in armed conflict, 27 other countries could presently kick our keyster in a straight up conventional war, including such military powerhouses as Armenia, Swaziland and Barundi.

The reason war hawks typically give for the need to increase military spending is that our Iraq experience shows we need a bigger Army and Marine Corps. But the Iraq experience really shows that we don't need to fight any more wars like the one we're fighting in Iraq, and wars like the one in Iraq are the only reason we would need a bigger Army and Marine Corps.

Frank Gaffney, on the other hand, believes in security through high tech, high dollar solutions.

Clutching Forks and Knives

Gaffney's name appears on 1997 Statement of Principles of the infamous Project for the New American Century that says "we need to increase defense spending significantly." His name also appears on the PNAC's September 20, 2001 letter to George W. Bush that encouraged the president to remove Saddam Hussein from power by force "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack."
These days, Gaffney is president of the Center for Security Policy which he founded in 1988 and a columnist for the slightly right of Generalissimo Francisco Franco Washington Times.

In a December 2007 Times piece, Gaffney asserted that if we don't continue to feed the Pentagon's insatiable appetite, we'll "leave the armed forces fighting today's wars with yesterday's weapons." Following this line of logic, Gaffney urged additional funding for the F-22 Raptor, which by a gentlemanly margin is the most expensive air-to-air fighter ever built and a weapon platform as vital to today's global security environment as the blunderbuss.

No, Gaffney's not concerned that the Red Sultan and his Flying Carpet Air Shieks will wrest control of the skies from us. He's worried because "countries like Russia and China are demonstrating a determination to field militaries comparable to and capable of inflicting great harm on the best of our armed forces."

Sure, Frank. By and large, what's left of Russia's mighty Cold War arsenal is either leaking radioactivity in the silo, rusting on the flight line, sinking at the pier or burning in Chechnya. The Russians already got their hats handed to them in one arms race with the U.S. They aren't inclined to take up another one.

What's more, China isn't likely to launch a campaign to challenge our military industrial air superiority complex. The vast majority of China's fighter jets are Jian-7s and -8s, aircraft patterned after the Mig-17 Fishbed which the Soviets introduced in 1956.

You may not be shocked to learn that the boards of directors and advisers of Gaffney's Center for Security Policy are typically populated with executive officers of Lockheed Martin, the primary contractor for the F-22 project. The CSP boards also include executives from defense companies involved with the Star Wars missile defense system that doesn't work, a system that Gaffney also aggressively advocates.

Don't jump to the conclusion that we have a conflict of interests going on here. Gaffney and his cronies, all loyal patriots, are merely concerned for our country's security.

And the F-22 Raptor and Star Wars will be, after all, America's first, last and only line of defense when the Borg invade.

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Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books, ISBN: 9781601640192) will be available April 1, 2008.

"…a witty, wacky, wildly outrageous novel that skewers just about anything you’d care to name, from military budgets to political machinations to America’s success as the self-appointed guardian of the world…a remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight."

—Booklist

John McCain and the Forever War

"I have wounds to show you…"

—William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Coriolanus

In his January 28 State of the Union address, George W. Bush told Congress, America and the world that "The surge is working" and "al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq."

Mr. Bush must not have been watching NBC six days earlier when his "main man" in Iraq General David Petraeus said that, "there is no light at the end of the tunnel that we're seeing." And one has to wonder how Mr. Bush, if forced to, would square al Qaeda being "on the run" with the February 5 statement by his Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell that al Qaeda "remains the pre-eminent terrorist threat against the United States" and that he is "increasingly concerned" that al Qaeda in Iraq "may shift resources to mounting more attacks outside of Iraq.”

Mr. Bush would likely be mystified as a prehistoric man watching a rocket launch to know what the chief architect of his surge strategy had to say concerning whether or not it is "working." In the fall of 2003, when the Iraq situation was just beginning to unravel, neoconservative warfare guru Frederick Kagan wrote that combat which does not achieve the political objectives of an armed conflict—precisely the condition we have in Iraq—is merely "organized but senseless violence."

One may have grown inured by now to Mr. Bush's web of denial and delusion regarding his woebegone war in Iraq. One should be alarmed, however, that the evident GOP nominee to replace Mr. Bush appears content to extend America's policy of senseless global violence into the next century.

Neocons and Theocons

Before he dropped out of the race, Mitt Romney's foreign policy platform seemed to have something to do with using his personal wealth to bribe the rest of the world into doing what we want it to. Mike Huckabee's global agenda appears to involve praying for our enemies before having God and/or Chuck Norris smite them.

John McCain promises more war. He is "fine" with us spending another 100 years in Iraq. Maybe he was joking when he said that; but what kind of joke is that for a presidential candidate to be making? A regular Bob Hope, that John McCain is.

McCain was foursquare behind the surge in Iraq from the get go. That's how he became the official unofficial Bush sanctioned candidate to succeed the unitary throne. Back in November, McCain said "We've succeeded militarily." McCain must not have gotten the memo from Fred Kagan.

Straight Talk, No Chaser

The surge strategy was never meant to be anything more than a stall tactic, a ruse to keep a lid on political discontent over the mishandling of Iraq until a) our commitment there became a crack too tight for any Democratic president to wriggle out of or b) Team Bush could get John McCain elected and preserve the neoconservative initiative for war everlasting against post-modern extremism, emboldened Islamo-fabulism, or whatever magical realism happens to be available.

John McCain was highly critical of Donald Rumsfeld's conduct of the Iraq war. "We are paying a very heavy price for the mismanagement—that's the kindest word I can give you—of Donald Rumsfeld, of this war," he said. He also said, "Donald Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history."

McCain didn't say those things at the time Rumsfeld actually was mismanaging the war and being one of the worst SECDEFs in history. When Rumsfeld resigned from being such a bad defense secretary shortly after the 2006 elections, McCain said that Rumsfeld "deserves Americans' respect and gratitude for his many years of public service." Did he honestly think Rumsfeld deserved our esteem and thanks for being a worst ever wartime Secretary of Defense, or was that just another example of McCain's celebrated sense of humor?

It didn't sound like McCain was kidding during the 2000 GOP nomination race when he censured the Republican Party—and Mr. Bush—for pandering to the Christian right. He went so far as to characterize Jerry Falwell as an "agent of intolerance," and said the ideas of Falwell and his fellow televangelist Pat Robertson were "not good for the Republican Party."

By 2006, as the next Republican nomination race left the gate, Falwell had apparently become far more tolerable to McCain, who gave that year's commencement speech at Falwell's Freedom University. On Meet the Press afterwards, McCain explained that he now believed "the Christian Right has a major role to play in the Republican Party." That role, clearly, was to support McCain for the nomination and not some theocon like Romney or Huckabee.

In 2001 and 2003, he was a vociferous opponent of Mr. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. Today, McCain promises to make them permanent, and Mr. Bush has praised him for it.

Here all this time I thought flip-flopping was something only Democratic presidential candidates did. Maybe it's a Vietnam vet thing, huh?

'Swounds!

Coriolanus, Shakespeare's patrician war hero of ancient Rome, obliterates his honor and integrity when he succumbs to his political ambition and displays his war wounds to the plebians in exchange for their votes. John McCain's conduct as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton rivaled the bravery and moral character of any hero of myth or history you care to name; but the character presently running for president is not the same John McCain.

In a recent Newsweek profile of McCain, Evan Thomas wrote that the Senator "bridles at anyone or anything that impugns his honor." So far, however, the party most responsible for impugning McCain's honor has been McCain himself.

It was in an October debate that McCain first trotted out his cheesy one liner "I was tied up at the time" to explain his absence from the original Woodstock concert. I hoped that he would try to put this moment behind him, and let everyone forget how he had dumbed down the McCain sense of humor to tickle ditto head tastes, but no. McCain is so proud of this scripted ad lib that he turned it into a television ad that he now proudly features on his campaign website.

Worse yet is the image of a freshly tortured Lieutenant McCain that the Senator featured in his Christmas ad. This too would have been better swept under the rug, but he continues to feature this graphic in his media campaign. I'm frankly embarrassed for the guy, that he seems oblivious to the fact that he's making a spectacle of something so deserving of tacit reverence, and anyone concerned for his dignity and the dignity of all American POWs, living and departed, should be embarrassed too.

Worst of all is McCain's insistence that having been a prisoner of war for five plus years taught him something about when and why and how to conduct a war. It didn't. McCain's rhetoric indicates he doesn't know any more about the subject than does his ideological soul mate Joe Lieberman, and you forget more about the art of war every time you blow your nose than Joe Lieberman will ever learn.

McCain's war talk consists of the same Rovewellian boo noise we hear from the rest of Bush's echo chamberlains. He cautions that if we withdraw from Iraq, we'll fall into isolationism, which means that his idea of being engaged with the rest of the world is to invade and occupy it. He warns that victory in Iraq is essential because defeat will lead to bigger fiasco that the one we've already created.

Let's get something straight. The terms "victory" and "defeat" long ago lost any relevance to the situation in Iraq and the so-called war on terror. "Defeat" would entail our troops dropping their weapons, throwing up their hands, and allowing the evil ones to cut their heads off on videotape while one of Osama bin Laden's thousand-and-one number two men holds up a sign in the background that reads "Jihad Accomplished." "Victory" would involve bin Laden signing articles of surrender on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln while latter day American Caesar David Petraeus looks on.

McCain either knows this, and knows he's pitching us a bale of humbug, or he suffers from an even worse case of arrested cognition that Bush has.

Many of us, including and especially me, share McCain's self-confessed "many failings;" but many of us including me aren't running for president. McCain is a slob. He has no patience for detail. He is vindictive. He is a hypocrite, a fawner and a panderer who loudly condemns the practices of fawning and pandering. Newsweek's Thomas relates that as an "angry toddler," McCain would hold his breath until he passed out, a habit his parents tried to cure him of by dropping him in a tub of ice water. Today, he's a perpetually f-bombing temper tantrum with a 71 year-old life support system. McCain won't outgrow that sort of thing once he's in the Oval Office.

In some ways, I can admire those traits in McCain, and I rather hope Congress always has a "Senator Hothead" or three to shake things up when they need shaking.

But as president of the United States, John McCain would be the most dangerous human being of the face of the earth.

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Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books, ISBN: 9781601640192) will be available April 1, 2008.

"…a witty, wacky, wildly outrageous novel that skewers just about anything you’d care to name, from military budgets to political machinations to America’s success as the self-appointed guardian of the world…a remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight."

—Booklist

Blooper Tuesday

We live in historic times, and very few examples from history can fail to resonate in some way with current events. I found retracing of the Battle of Yorktown with Steve especially relevant.

On October 19, 1781, Charles Lord Cornwallis surrendered his forces to General George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, marking the end of America's struggle for independence. Britain's defeat in this battle was partly the result of a lengthy campaign that involved skilled application of guerillas tactics by the Americans and a brilliant joint and combined force operation conducted by American and French land and maritime forces. It also came about because of the pitiable foreign policies of King George of England and the arrogance and incompetence of his titled general officers.

Whatever line may have once demarked American foreign policies from domestic ones has vanished, probably forever. We cannot possibly address our internal woes effectively without some sort of workable solution to the overseas fiasco our Unitary George has created, but I'm somewhat pessimistic that the majority of our leading presidential hopefuls can provide that solution.

John McCain gives the promise of more war, even though war has devolved over the Bush decade into a degenerative tool of foreign policy. All Mitt Romney seems offer is a chance bribe the rest of the world into cooperating with us from his personal fortune, but even his pockets aren't deep enough to pull off a stunt like that. As best I can tell, the crux of Mike Huckabee's foreign policy plan involves having Chuck Norris beat up anybody who doesn't do what we tell them to, and I fear Hillary Clinton will still be explaining how she didn't really vote for the war in Iraq she voted for even as she explains how she didn’t really promise to get us out of it.

That leaves one viable candidate who might have a chance of hauling us out of the sand trap we've hooked our way into. So far, Barack Obama's taste in foreign policy advisers (like Zbigniew Brzezinski) seems impeccable. Let's just hope we never hear of him hunkering down with the likes of Bill Kristol and Fred Kagan.

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Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.

The Big Schmooze in the Hormuz

I said a few weeks ago that the January 6 incident between U.S. and Iranian naval forces in the Strait of Hormuz might tell us more about the nature of today's news reporting than about the prospects for war and peace in the Middle East. It's now apparent that the affair was emblematic of America's post-modern Orwellian (Rovewellian) information environment.

Unreliable Sources

Initial media reports of the encounter were enough to make you wish you'd salted away an extra month's worth of beef jerky in the backyard fallout shelter.

A senior military correspondent with the Associated Press said that "an Iranian fleet of boats" had "charged at and threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy" transiting the Strait of Hormuz. According to the senior correspondent, Fifth Fleet Commander Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff said in a January 7 press teleconference that the Iranian fleet "fled as American commanders were preparing to open fire."

A Rupert Murdoch newspaper reported that an unnamed "Pentagon official said that US forces were 'literally' on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats," and that another Pentagon official (or maybe the same one) said "It is the most serious provocation of this sort that we’ve seen yet."

An echo chamberlain with the Big Brother News Network squalled, "Was this a mistake not to blow these other Iranian speedboats out of the water? […] Why did we not destroy these speedboats? [...] We had an opportunity to send a message to a nation that has been needling us for 20 years."

Subsequent saner accounts revealed that the "Iranian fleet" consisted of five speedboats of the size that haul sunburned water skiers across American lakes in the summer. The official transcript of the Cosgriff press conference showed that the admiral had not said that American commanders were preparing to open fire, but that he had heard that story reported "on the news."

We discovered that the threats to blow up the U.S. ships broadcast over a VHF bridge-to-bridge radio circuit had almost certainly been part of the standard heckling from untraceable sources that American combatant vessels have heard in the Persian Gulf for more than two decades. The skipper of one of the U.S. ships involved said, “We gave them the opportunity to break off, so that we didn’t have to go the ultimate, which would have been deadly force.” That's a far cry from "preparing to open fire."

Something worth noticing happened between our Navy and the Iranians in the Gulf, all right, but it was merely an upsmanship shenanigan of the kind that has occurred in those waters many times since the Tanker War ended in 1988, and was hardly "the most serious provocation of this sort that we’ve seen yet."

So where did all the alarmist disinformation come from?

Minister of Truth

On January 15, investigative historian Gareth Porter blew the lid off the mystery of who had "disassembled" about the Hormuz incident. Bryan Whitman, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, had held a separate briefing for the Pentagon press corps. Most of what he said was off the record, meaning he could not be directly quoted (when you read quotes from an "unnamed official" in a news story, it's generally propaganda that the initiators don't want traced back to their bosses). In an apparent slip up, a reporter for one major outlet revealed Whitman as the source of the "about to fire" rhetoric.

That the story of the Hormuz incident got "cooked" at the Pentagon reminds one of the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) established under then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shortly after September 11 in order to support the war on terror through information operations, including disinformation and other forms of black propaganda. Officially, Rumsfeld shut down the OSI amid outrage over the news that it would feed false stories to the foreign press, but in a November 2002 media briefing, he made it clear that it would live on in function if not form, saying " if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have."

War Is Sell

The Pentagon and the right wing media weren't the only ones who spun the Hormuz incident all across the information highway.

The military affairs fictioneer with the big online magazine generated a Chariot-of-the-Gods argument to explain why the U.S. and Iranian videotapes of the encounter were so different—they were tapes of two separate events! (The term "Chariot-of-the-Gods argument" derives from the book by Erich von Daniken that says since we can't easily explain who made all those weird giant patterns out in the desert, it must have been ancient astronauts.)

The fictioneer credited his counterpart with the blog of the newspaper that once actually guarded the Constitution from unitary executives like Richard Nixon for inspiring the "two tapes" theory. The counterpart accused the Iranians of "mendacity" without making any attempt to prove that they were actually lying about anything.

The old gray mare (she ain't what she used to be) that gave us Judith Miller and the Niger yellowcake hoax ran an article that compared the Hormuz affair to an incident that happened during a fictional 2002 war game that was mainly conducted by imaginary forces on battlefields in cyberspace in which Iranian small boats notionally sank an entire U.S. naval task force in the Persian Gulf. To make the analogy even more preposterous, in the game, the U.S. and Iran were in a state of declared conflict, which they are not in the real world despite the best efforts of Dick Cheney and his Iranian Directorate.

The same big eastern paper ran an unsolicited editorial by a Marine Corps reservist and Pentagon employee who suggested that a proper step to take against Iranian to deter small boat harassment might be to bomb two Iranian islands in the Gulf. The author is not part of a larger propaganda machine; he was simply relating his own experiences and opinions. But the fact that an opinion piece from an obscure government employee ran in the paper of record as well as other national and international news outlets gives you an idea how willing the major media are to whip Pavlov's Dogs of War into a slathering bloodlust.

The neoconservative mind control program has evolved far beyond anything the old Office of Strategic Influence could have achieved. It is as ubiquitous and dispersed as al Qaeda. It has spread past its original base of truth ministries like the ISO and the Iranian Directorate, think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, private propaganda contractors like Lincoln Group and the Rendon Group, media savvy American Caesars like General David Petraeus and unabashed media proponents of American military hegemony like William Kristol's Weekly Standard.

The neocons have successfully recruited the able services of mainstream media publishers and producers who have pillaged the truth for the sake of ever increasing plunder margins, journalists who gleefully trade their integrity for access to the halls of power, dime store strategists who write pro-war letters to editors who are eager to print them, and full time Pentagon correspondents who would more gainfully be employed as gossip columnists.

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Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.

The Schmooze in Hormuz

I've been studying the incident in the Strait of Hormuz of early January between U.S. and Iranian naval forces, and am more convinced than ever that it was blown out of proportion by an administration friendly media with urging from the remnants of Donald Rumsfeld's Office of Strategic Influence (aka Ministry of Truth).

Later this week, I'll have some thoughts on how I think the executive branch's disinformation network operates today, how the Hormuz affair fits into the grand strategy, and what all of it portends for whoever succeeds young Mr. Bush in the Oval Office.

Best,

Jeff

Who Wants To Be a Commander in Chief?

All you have to do to sound smart in a right wing bar is start every sentence with "Neal Boortz says…" and all it takes to be a political wit is to say "Hillary" out loud.

I for one am fatigued of hearing earnest discussion by the professional and sandlot punditry alike about whether or not Hillary forgave Bill for Monica because it was a good career move, or if she faked crying like a girl on camera, or if she can take it like a man, and of hearing her blamed for every societal ill from inflation to illegal immigration to fluoridation (Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream!) and just about everything else. I'd really like the discussion about Hillary to focus on whether or not she'd make a good president.

I happen to think she wouldn't make a good president at all, but not because I'm afraid she might show a little too much cleavage at her inauguration. I'm convinced she would make a wholly inadequate commander in chief of our military, and after two terms of Bush the younger, that's something we simply cannot endure.

Next!

As I said a few weeks ago, I view our current presidential race as a cattle call audition for the role of commander in chief. The trick to wading through a slate of candidates the size of this one is to begin by eliminating everyone who's obviously not right for the part.

From the top, I can scratch the leading GOP hopefuls, the holy trinity of theocons who hope to exploit misdirected religious fervor to support their neoconservative foreign policies. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were conspicuous Christian Soldiers from the get go. John McCain joined their ranks when he aired the Christmas ad that Mel Gibson could have directed, the one showing young Lieutenant McCain, tortured prisoner of war, looking like You-Know-Who after they pulled Him down off the you-know-what.

But even if we take the Messiah handle away from him, McCain comes up short in the CINC department. Yes, he's been on the Senate Armed Services Committee forever, but being on the SASC doesn’t make one competent on security matters. Joe Lieberman has been on the committee for donkey's years too, and what he understands about military art you wouldn't notice if he stuck it under your right eyelid. Moreover, everyone must (or at least should) admire and respect McCain's heroism in the service of our country, but let's face it; being a prisoner of war doesn’t teach anybody how to run one.

But McCain's chief flaw as a prospective war chief is that he was foursquare in favor of Mr. Bush's Iraq surge strategy, and what's more, he thinks it's working. That makes him an even poorer choice for commander in chief than Hillary.

Clausewitz 101

Based on her January 13 appearance on Meet the Press, Hillary (or one of her staffers) seems to understand Clausewitz's admonition that "The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes." I'm not convinced, though, that a cursory understanding of On War will be sufficient for Hillary to keep Pavlov's Dogs of War in their cages. I'm especially uncertain whether she has what it takes to get Trumanesque with a MacArthur class American Caesar like General David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq.

In the December 13th interview, Tim Russert posed a hypothetical: If Petraeus reports to Congress in March and "says the surge is working, that reconciliation started in a big way yesterday when the Iraqi parliament said that former members of the Saddam government can participate in new government, don't pull 35,000 troops out now, keep them there for at least the remainder of the year, would you be open to that?"

Hillary shot back, "No, and here's why, Tim." She continued strongly for a time, asserting that the surge was "explained and rationalized as giving the Iraqi government space and time to make the hard decisions that they needed to make." But then she wobbled off into kinda/sorta country, mentioning how 2007 was the "deadliest year for American troops" and "that the large part of the reason that we're seeing the Iraqi government do anything is because time is running out" and yada, yada, blah, blah, wimp, wimp, wimp.

What she should have done immediately was mulch Russert from his hairline to his Adam's apple for asking such a stupid question, and told him the issue of extending the surge was irrelevant because the 35.000 extra troops will be all home by this summer come hell or Hezbollah. That was in the plan when the surge began in January 2007. It can't last any longer without doing seed corn damage to the Army.

Then she should have ripped Russert a new exit ramp for suggesting that allowing minor government clerks to go back to work constituted a "big way" toward political reconciliation.

Last but not least, she should have told Russert—and the rest of the world—that as president she wouldn’t let David Petraeus dictate Iraq policy any more than Harry Truman let Douglas MacArthur call the shots in Korea.

But she didn't do any of those things. What's more, when Russert challenged her on her 2002 vote approving the Iraq invasion, Clinton gave her standard non-answer: "I made it very clear that my vote was not a vote for preemptive war. I said that on the floor, I said it consistently after that. It was a vote to put inspectors back in to determine what threat Saddam Hussein did in fact pose."

Let's take a look at what the bill actually said. Its title was "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq. Do you think it's possible Hillary didn't read that part of it, or that she misread it, and thought it said "Resolution to Authorize Putting Inspectors Back In?"

Then there's the part of the bill called "authorization" that says "The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq."

How on earth does Hillary think she didn't vote for the war? Was it a matter of what her definition of "authorize" was? If so, that goes beyond Clintonesque. It's downright Bushwacky.

No matter how vehemently she denies it, Hillary bought the Bush team's narrative on Iraq back in 2002, and now she's vested in their Iran fable.

At the November 2007 Democratic candidates' debate in Las Vegas, she tried to bully a young Iraq War veteran into agreeing that "the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has assisted the militias and others in killing our Americans and in maiming them." In a February 2007 address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), she echoed the administration's boo noise about Iran's nuclear program, and emphasized the "urgency to the necessity to doing everything we can to deny nuclear weapons to Iran."

The claims about Iranian culpability in attacks on American G.I.s started about the same time as the surge, and the administration has yet to provide a stick of credible proof to back those accusations. And we don't need to do anything at all to deny nuclear weapons to Iran because, as we all know now thanks to the latest National Intelligence Estimate, it denied them to itself.

One can only conclude that Hillary is a closet neocon or that she's so afraid of being cast as weak on security that she'll give them whatever they want to keep them from calling her a girly girl on AM radio and Fox News.

In either case, I'm sorry, Senator, but you didn't pass the audition. Next Democrat, please, and remember everyone, we're only seeing singing CINCs today. If you're a dancing CINC, you need to come back tomorrow.

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Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.

The Dogs of Holy War

Balboa found the Pacific, and on the trail one day
He met some friendly Indians whom he was told were gay
Soooooooooooooo
He had them torn apart by dogs on religious grounds they say
The great nations of Europe were quite holy in their way

--Randy Newman, "The Great Nations of Europe"

I managed to catch just enough of a replay of the recent ABC GOP presidential debate to hear Fred Thompson say that we won in Afghanistan. I made the sound of one jaw dropping: not so much over what Thompson said, but because not one of the other candidates batted an eyelash.

They didn't contradict Thompson, or take him to task for being senile, or roll their eyes and make one of those "Grandpa smells funny again" faces. I have to conclude that they all think we won in Afghanistan, or that they know better but don't want to admit that we're actually still there and still losing. In either case, this episode illustrates one of the major reasons we don't want any of the Republicans currently running for president as our next commander in chief. They're either disconnected from foreign policy realities or they refuse to recognize the ones they don't like.

We've had enough of that sort of thing.

Another thing we don't need any more of is faith based foreign policy, and it looks more and more as if that's what the GOP front-runners plan on if they grab the brass ring.

God Is My National Security Adviser

Iowa Caucus winner Mike Huckabee says God intervened in the race on his behalf. Then again, Huck also swears on a stack of you-know-whats that the crucifix appearing behind his head in his Christmas ad just happened by accident, so you can pretty much figure anything Huck says is jive.

The New Hampshire victor and "Comeback Codger" John McCain ran a Christmas ad that dramatized the oft-told story about the guard at the Hanoi Hilton who stood next to a battered Lieutenant McCain on Christmas morning and etched a cross in the dirt with his toe. Taken out of its political context, this story is about bravery, cruelty and compassion. As a piece of pandering to the pre-sentient segment of the religious right, its message is slightly subtler but as unmistakable as Huckabee's: Like Christ, John McCain too was tortured.

Mitt Romney, who took the silver in both Iowa and New Hampshire, gave a pre-Christmas speech on December 6 in which he told America that "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." Mitt's grasp of history is as firm as his issue positions are consistent. Freedom and religion have often been practiced independently of each other. Think of how many societies have sought solace from tyranny in their religions (e.g., "Render unto Caesar…").

Mitt said that, "It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions." Apparently, to Mitt's analytical mind, those moral convictions aren't contained in "the creed of conversion by conquest" practiced by "radical Islamists [who] do their preaching not by reason or example, but in the coercion of minds and the shedding of blood."

Mitt doesn’t mention, and possibly isn't aware, that the shedding of blood in our present nightmare in the Middle East was caused by a messianic Evangelical Christian who invaded another country halfway across the world because God told him to.

It's important to point out here that while Mitt pointed his finger at "radical" Islamists, there is really no distinction in neoconservative dogma between radical Islam and any other sort of Islam. Listen to talk radio luminary Neal Boortz wax wacky on the subject some time. He'll remind you of the insane Colonel Kurtz, rotting in his lair at the mouth of the Nung River, gasping, "Kill them all." Deriding any effort to separate Islam the religion from global terrism is one of Big Brother Media's major initiatives, as a recent Washington Times piece written by Diana West illustrates. The article, titled "Foul Play," ridicules initiatives in the Pentagon to parse "Islam" from "jihad" as politically correct appeasement. West makes the standard weekly comparison of the Muslim evil doers to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, blithely skipping over the kind-of-critical detail about how the Nazis and Soviets were honest to goodness peer competitors, whereas today's evil ones don't have a formal army or an air force or a navy or a country or a gross domestic product or even a pot to plant in.

Onward Christian Soldiers

If you think nobody who matters is taking this fear and loathing of Islam talk seriously, think again. Boortz, who refers to Islam as "a deadly virus," has one of the most loyal fan bases in the broadcast media. (If you want to go highbrow in a political debate at a right wing bar, you cite Neal Boortz instead of Rush Limbaugh.) Evangelist Jerry Falwell says the prophet Muhammad was a terrorist. Pat Robertson of 700 Club fame denies that Islam is a religion at all. Rather, "It is a worldwide political movement meant on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law." So make no mistake; the message says that history is leading up to an apocalyptic showdown with the Jews and Christians on one side and the Muslims on the other, and the talk radio/Fox News crowd is eating it up like hotcakes.

One member of this hate speech audience is a retired Army officer I've been acquainted with for some years. Norm (we'll call him) is the kind of Christian conservative who makes an annual production number out of condemning the War on Christmas but who probably hasn't seen the inside of a church since the Cuban Missile Crisis. A couple of Christmases ago, while holding court in one of his favorite watering holes and discussing the war on terror, Norm offered the considered opinion that if we had to slaughter every man, woman and child of the Muslim persuasion to keep America safe, he was sure Jesus Christ would approve. A lot of heads at the bar nodded in agreement.

We can't simply dismiss yahooligans like this because they vote. They get to vote, of course, because they, like the children of some of them there immigrants they don't like, were born here.

The Dogs of Holy War

It's sad to say, but the history of humanity is largely the history of its wars, and the armed conflicts of western civilization more often than not involved clashes of religious ideologies.

The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) that ended Greece's reign as a hegemon pitted a society of Athena's followers against a cult of Ares worshipers. The Crusades waged by Christian Europe against Muslims, pagans, Orthodox Christians, Gnostics, Shamanists, Buddhists, Hussites, political enemies of the pope, etc. drug on for centuries. Subsequent conflicts among the great nations of Europe involved Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and Orthodox Christians crashing into each other and/or persecuting Jews and/or buggering heathens in the third world. This led to World Wars I and II, and then the Cold War, which was an ideological struggle between the Judeo/Christian west and the Evil Empire of Godless Communists complete with proxy wars that featured more buggering of third world heathens.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution insisted on separation of church and state for a number of reasons. Premier among them was to prevent a self-proclaimed unitary executive from exploiting misplaced religious fervor to wage unnecessary and ill-advised wars. That the leading candidates of what has become America's War Party would fall all over each other invoking God and Islamo-fabulism as the pillars of their foreign policy platforms is not unexpected, but it is disheartening to watch the country Abraham Lincoln called mankind's "last best hope" devolve into a postmodern incarnation of the old world at its worst (Excuse me, great nations coming through…).

If we're not very careful, our politicians will deliver unto us a brave new world of war everlasting with victory just around the corner forever and ever, amen. And if you really think more theo-conservative doctrine can solve our present cornucopia of foreign policy fiascos, please consider this: mankind has been praying for peace for as long as it has been fighting wars, which is about as long as there has been a mankind.

All that praying for peace hasn't done a fat lot of good, has it?

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Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.

Iran Aweigh (Again)

The story of the incident between U.S. and Iranian naval forces in the Strait of Hormuz Monday morning may tell us more about the nature of today's news reporting than about the prospects for war and peace in the Middle East.

Veteran military reporter Robert Burns's account of the incident for the Associated Press opened with a bang:

An Iranian fleet of boats charged at and threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy passing near Iranian waters and then fled as American commanders were preparing to open fire.

The lead paragraph by Andrew Grey of Reuters sounded eerily similar:

Iranian boats aggressively approached three U.S. Naval ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a main shipping route for Gulf oil, at the weekend and threatened that the ships would explode, U.S. officials said on Monday.

Even more alarming was the top of the article in The Australian:

A Pentagon official said that US forces were "literally" on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats as they passed through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, and had moved to man their guns when the Iranians turned and sped away.

A Confederacy of Dissemblers

What we know of the incident so far comes from official and mostly unnamed sources who were nowhere in the vicinity of the Strait, and comes filtered through journalists who often don't seem to know what they're talking about. Much of the reportage is also conspicuously contradictory.

The Australian's statement that "U.S. forces were 'literally' on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats" and "had moved to man their guns when the Iranians turned and sped away" is a prime example of every flaw in the narrative. If U.S. forces were just then moving to man their guns as the Iranians turned and sped away, they were closer to the verge of sleep than of firing on anybody. Those guns, almost certainly 50 caliber machine guns placed on the American ships' weather decks, were either manned when the ships set condition Zebra prior to entering the Strait or those skippers will be handing their command pins over to the three-star in command of Fifth Fleet by the end of next week. It's disheartening but not unexpected that the reporter didn't know that, that some source in the Navy told him the story that way, and that despite the deliberate artificial tension in the narrative, nobody in the scenario was on the verge of firing on anybody else: literally, figuratively or conceivably.

That consideration certainly should have crossed the mind of an experienced hand like Robert Burns, but his comment that the Iranians "fled as American commanders were preparing to open fire" was on the same order of disingenuousness. Burns attributed the remark to Vice Admiral Kevin J. Cosgriff, the Fifth Fleet commander, but he doesn't quote Cosgriff directly, which gives him a license to (ahem) dramatize a bit. Speaking of drama, Burns's term "Iranian fleet" is hardly anything anyone with the least experience of naval matters would use to describe what the Iranians actually sent into the Strait, which was a squadron of five speedboats.

And when I say "speedboat," folks, I'm not talking about a small frigate, or even something the size of PT 109. I'm talking about the kind of boat you see on American lakes every summer pulling sunburned water skiers around. These Iranian boats are typically armed with a single high caliber machine gun, which is, to put it placidly, a darn sight less weaponry than U.S. combatant ships carry. It sounds to me like the "white box-like objects" the speedboats dropped into the water were Little Rascals technology simulations of mines, painted a bright color for the express purpose of ensuring the Americans saw them and steered around them.

Scary, Huh Kids?

The Australian quotes an unnamed "Pentagon official" as saying that "It is the most serious provocation of this sort that we’ve seen yet." The paper recounts the claim of a "Pentagon spokesman" that the Iranian boats were operating at "distances and speeds that showed reckless and dangerous intent – reckless, dangerous and potentially hostile intent". The Australian identified the spokesman as one Bryan Whitman, but it didn't mention what Bryan Whitman does in the Pentagon or how he came to be a spokesman for it.

It happens that one Bryan Whitman is the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, which makes him part of the Office of Strategic Influence (AKA Ministry of Truth) apparatus that Donald Rumsfeld established to support his wars through misinformation, disinformation, and psychological operations. One of Whitman's most notable contributions to the cause was his attempted whitewashing of the Pentagon's Jessica Lynch hoax.

And from whom are we getting the cockamamie account of the U.S. ships preparing to fire just as the Iranians turned and high tailed it? Reuters' Andrew Gray pretty much coughed up a confession: "Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said after the Iranian threats a U.S. captain was in the process of ordering sailors to open fire when the Iranian boats moved away."

Pentagon officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Jesus, Larry and Curly. How long will the big media allow these yahooligans to use it as a propaganda venue?

According to Burns, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini played down the incident, calling it, "…something normal that takes place every now and then for each party." And Defense Secretary Robert Gates allowed as how there had been two or three similar incidents—"maybe not quite as dramatic"—over the past year, but he offered no details.

So who knows what exactly happened in the Strait Monday morning? I sure don't, but I'll tell you something I do know. U.S. and Iranian naval units have been playing patty cake in the Strait and the Persian Gulf with each other since the tanker wars of the 1980s. I can't count offhand how many times I ran the Strait of Hormuz scenario during the 90s, in tabletop experiments, computer simulations, live play exercises and real world operations. The skippers and crews of the American warships had to have been prepared for what they saw on Monday. Granted, when it's really you transiting the real Straits with five real Iranian speedboats making a run at you, that's a bona fide pucker patrol; and it appears that the U.S. crews conducted every step of the operation by the letter.

Still, back in my day, we called that sort of thing "free training." After all the helmets and fire hoses were put away, we reckoned we'd had a jolly old time, trading love taps with gloves and headgear on, and suspected that the other guys considered the whole thing to be good clean fun too.

So like Bhutto's assassination, the Turks bombing of the Kurds, and other recent fiascos, Monday's incident in the Strait of Hormuz was worth noting as yet another example of how far American policy has run adrift under the Bush administration's stewardship.

But it was nothing to take to your backyard fallout shelter over.

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Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.

" A profane and hilarious parody of the post–Cold War navy…Populated by outrageous characters and fueled with pompous outrage, Huber’s irreverent broadside will pummel the funny bone of anyone who’s served." -- Publishers Weekly

"A witty, wacky, wildly outrageous novel that skewers just about anything you’d care to name…a remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight." -- Booklist