Obama's Bunt

Barack Obama scored major national security marks with his July 14 New York Times editorial "My Plan for Iraq" and his speech in Washington D.C. on July 15. He deftly addressed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's insistence that the U.S. make deadline-centric plans to end its occupation of Iraq and outlined the core of the coherent foreign policy and national security strategy he'll pursue as president.

I'm not saying Obama parked one out on Waveland Avenue. It's more like he safely bunted his way to first. He has a long way to go, and I'm concerned whether it's humanly possible to graft sanity onto the foreign policy of a country in which, after nearly eight years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the neocons, John McCain is a credible candidate for the presidency.

Obama characterized Maliki's call for us to leave Iraq as an "opportunity" to begin doing just that, and to retarget our focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it should have stayed from the beginning. He correctly identified oil as the commodity that funds terrorism. He aptly compared the effort it will take to fix the global nightmare team Bush has created to the Marshall Plan that resurrected Europe after World War II. Most importantly, he said that his administration "will make it clear that the United States seeks no permanent bases in Iraq."

Hence, with a fell stroke, Obama decisively disavowed both the means and the ends of the neoconservative agenda; but to truly purge American policy of neocon influence, Obama needs to take two more vital measures.

To begin with, he needs to decapitate the neocons' pet general. In his speech, Obama praised David Petraeus for using "new tactics to protect the Iraqi population." Petraeus protected the Iraqi population with the oldest tactic in the book: he bribed the bad guys, giving $216 million to Sunni militias since the surge began and arming them to the teeth. (Please don't ask me how talking to Iran is "appeasement" but bribing Sunni militants isn’t.) Petraeus is a 21st century Miles Gloriosus, a self-promoting humbug in the grand military tradition of Douglas MacArthur, the five-star political operative who abandoned his troops in the Philippines to the Bataan Death March, who hid in Australia until Chester Nimitz's naval forces won the war in the Pacific and then emerged to take credit for the Japanese surrender, and who later snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by goading the Chinese into the Korean War.

Petraeus, the "genius" who "wrote the book" on counterinsurgency, actually had next to nothing to do with producing the Army's new field manual on counterinsurgency operations. FM 3-24 was conceived and developed by a team led by Dr. Conrad Crane at US Army War College in 2004, while Petraeus, then in charge of training Iraqi forces, was in Iraq handing out AK-47 rifles and pistols like Hershey bars, about 190,000 of which lost their way into the hands of Shiite militiamen. The only part of the counterinsurgency manual Petraeus actually wrote was his signature at the bottom of the foreword.

"King David" made his reputation as a counterinsurgency guru following the invasion of Iraq when he was in charge of the occupation of Mosul. Like so many of Petraeus's successes though, his "victory" in Mosul was more a function of his pubic relations panache than of his ability to conduct fourth generation warfare. He left his successor with a time bomb; four months after Petraeus turned over command of Mosul, the police chief he trained defected, and the city became an insurgent stronghold.

"He's the Teflon general," a former U.S. diplomat who served in Iraq has said of Petraeus. "He hasn't been held to account for the fact that all the guys he was supposedly training in 2004 are nowhere to be seen and Mosul basically collapsed after he left."

A consummate flash merchant, Petraeus scored major media moments as operational commander in Iraq by stage managing outdoor market shopping sprees in Baghdad for Bush annointee John McCain, giving the press aerial tours of soccer games, and completely bowling over supposedly grizzled veteran Pentagon correspondents by challenging nineteen year old privates to one-arm push up contests.

Ironically, Petraeus has aggressively supported the Bush administration's unsubstantiated mantra that Iran is arming Shiite militias when the person most certifiably responsible for arming both Shiite and Sunni militants in Iraq is David Petraeus himself.

When Bush and Cheney decided to adapt the surge strategy proposed by Fred Kagan and retired Army General Jack Keane of the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, the natural choice of a commander to execute the strategy was Keane's old protégé Petraeus. At that point, almost all of the other generals were opposed to an escalation in Iraq. Petraeus saw his chance to spurt to the top of the heap, and he took it. For a year and a half he has spared no effort to create the illusion of a pending success in Iraq, lowering casualty rates through temporary and artificial means, leaving a situation essentially a replay of the one he created in Mosul; a lull waiting for the next storm to break.

It's this four-star Zvengali who the Army brought home from a theater of war to preside over its one-star selection board so he could ensure the next generation of generals will be David Petraeus clones, and whose commander in chief (with approval from a still compliant Congress) has promoted to head of Central Command, a post made vacant by the forced retirement of Admiral William Fallon, perhaps the last four-star left on active duty with sufficient strategic acumen and moral courage to object to the administration's Iraq strategy and its push for war with Iran.

If Obama doesn't eviscerate Petraeus within ten minutes of taking his oath of office as president, he'll never wrest control of the military away from the neoconservative cabal.

The other thing Obama needs to do is turn his back on the neocons' Iran narrative. Recently, Obama correctly remarked that Iran spends one percent as much as we do on defense, yet he turned around shortly afterward and said, "Iran is a great threat." That's utter poppycock. Not only is Iran's defense budget a miniscule fraction of ours, our defense budget, in exchange rate terms, is more that twice as big as Iran's entire economy. After more than a year and a half of accusing Iran of being directly responsible for the deaths of American servicemen in Iraq, the administration hasn't produced a shred of proof to back its allegations, and if Iran actually had a nuclear weapons program to suspend in 2003, it was the sort of thing Stan and Kyle could have slapped together from the Junior Scientist kit Eric Cartman's mom bought him for Christmas.

If, as the Bush administration claims, we face no greater challenge from a single country than Iran, we have little to fear from any nation on earth.

And that is the message Obama must embrace if he hopes to liberate America from the militaristic oligarchs who presently own it.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Russ Wellen's interview with Jeff at The Huffington Post and Scholars and Rogues.

The Long War Generals

If you’re not cheating you’re not trying.

--Anonymous U.S. military officer

As a naval aviator pal of mine once remarked, cadets in our military academies spend the summer before their freshman year learning an arcane honor code and spend the next four years learning how to violate it without getting caught. So is it any wonder our general officer corps is populated by Orwell-class doublethinkers who speak doubletalk like it’s their first language?

During the run up to the Iraq invasion, then Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki was the only four-star who had the strength of character to take a public stance against Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to conquer Iraq with a small force, relying on crackpot warfare theories like network-centric operations and shock and awe to make up for insufficient troop strength. Shinseki’s principled stand bought him a one-way ticket to Fort Palooka. Rumsfeld, not satisfied that any of the active duty generals would toe the line sufficiently, brought his old cow tipping buddy Peter Schoomaker out of retirement to replace Shinseki. Rummy had sent an unmistakable message: it was his way or the exit ramp. The remaining generals either fell into lockstep or kept their own counsel, and we got four years of dead-enders in their last throes.

As the 2006 elections neared, almost everyone at Defense, including Rumsfeld, was talking about lowering public expectations for Iraq and beginning a drawdown of U.S. presence. Narcissus, however, wouldn’t let young Mr. Bush lose a war that could be lost on his successor’s watch. Levers were pulled, wheels turned, somebody shoved a pie in the Iraq Study Group’s face and, voila, out trotted the surge.

For the longest time we thought neoconservative academic Fred Kagan was the chief architect of the surge. Recently, Thomas E. Ricks told us that the real genius behind the Iraq escalation was David Petraeus’s 300 lb. lapdog Ray Odierno. That assertion required a worm-to-butterfly transformation of Odierno, whom Ricks had earlier portrayed as the bull in the china shop who single-handedly fomented the Iraq civil war. Now Odie’s the Desert Ox.

Whoever actually cooked up the surge, the Joint Chiefs and commander in Iraq General George Casey were dead set against it. But then the dope dealing commenced and the four-stars’ objections faded like the Chicago Cubs. The ground service generals were promised a larger Army and Marine Corps, Casey got the Army chief of staff assignment and Admiral Mike Mullen was promised the chairman’s job.

January 2007 was a key month in American history. On the fifth, the American Enterprise Institute published Fred Kagan’s Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq. On January 10, Mr. Bush announced that he would increase U.S. presence in Iraq by 21,000 troops. On the twelfth, at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain endorsed the surge and became the de facto presidential candidate of the neoconservative movement.

January 2007 was also the month David Petraeus assumed command of international forces in Iraq. Tom Ricks kick started the public image campaign to make Petraeus into a five-star deity, describing the general in the media as a “fascinating character” who was “just about the best general in the Army” and, oh yeah, “quite ambitious.” Ricks noted Petraeus’s “very successful first tour in Iraq in 2003-2004,” referring to his command in Mosul, but did not mention how Mosul collapsed after Petraeus left and the bribes he’d been handing out dried up. That January was also the month the Bush administration promised to provide evidence that Iran was providing arms to Iraqi militants. The administration never did prove those accusations, but that didn’t prevent it from repeating them loudly and often.

One of the loudest Iran bashers was Petraeus, who didn’t even pretend to have credible proof Iran was arming Iraqi militants. Reminiscent of the joke about the man beating his wife, Petraeus simply challenged Iran to prove that they had stopped arming Iraqis. Then Irony cleared its throat: in August 2007 a story broke that in 2004, while in charge of training Iraqi security forces, Petraeus had lost track of 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols that couldn’t have walked anywhere but into the hands of the Iraqi militants Iran was supposedly arming. Irony might also mention that as Petraeus was arming the insurgency, Doctor Conrad Crane and others at the Army War College began work on the new counterinsurgency field manual that Ricks and others would later claim Petraeus “wrote.”

Petraeus pursued an aggressive information campaign that promoted the agenda he shared with the neocons to establish a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. His most outrageous publicity stunt was the March 2007 Baghdad shopping spree he staged for McCain and McCain’s office wife Lindsey Graham. At a news conference, McCain, Graham and other Republicans remarked that they could “mix and mingle unfettered” with Iraqis and that the market reminded them of “a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summer time." The next day, the New York Times and other sources revealed that Petraeus had put more than 100 of his troops in harm’s way to provide security for a propaganda demonstration supporting the surge strategy and the McCain candidacy.

Admiral Mullen also tried to tip the election toward the GOP. In a July 2008 Joint Force Quarterly article, Mullen wrote that every day, troops asked him questions like “What if a Democrat wins? What will that do to the mission in Iraq?” (Italics Mullen’s.) The article’s title (Irony winks) was “From the Chairman: Military Must Stay Apolitical.”

Also that month, right after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki agreed with candidate Obama that 16 months would be the right interval for a withdrawal timeline, Mullen warned on FOX News that a withdrawal timeline would be “dangerous.” In his July JFQ article, Mullen wrote that “we [in the military] defend the Constitution” by “obeying the orders of the commander in chief.” He didn’t specify whether he meant obeying all commanders in chief or just the Republican ones, but he didn’t have to. Everybody got the message.

By mid-summer 2008, Petraeus had beaten Admiral William Fallon two out of three falls for control of Central Command, he had hand picked the next generation of Army generals, and young Mr. Bush had announced that his “main man” Petraeus would be the decider of when and if U.S. troops would redeploy from Iraq. Petraeus and his long war generals owned American foreign policy, and they were determined to keep it. Fortunately for them, their best course of action was obvious: they merely had to keep doing what they were doing, which was entrenching America deeper and deeper in to Iraq. If McCain pulled an upset in the election, great, he was already on board. The beauty part was that Obama would have to go along with what the long warriors wanted as well. If he crossed them openly, and things went poorly (which they’re bound to whether Obama follows their advice or not), it would be Obama’s fault for ignoring his generals. Defense secretary Robert Gates turned a nice trick in this vein during a recent interview on Meet the Press. He told David Gregory that the generals would obey the mandate to end the combat mission in Iraq by August 2010, but if they “had had complete say in this matter, they would have preferred that the combat mission not end until the end of 2010.”

Obama played into the long war strategy by insisting he would finish the job in Afghanistan. Now his generals are pushing him into an aimless escalation of that conflict that will likely make us the latest superpower to embalm itself in that part of the world. Nobody in the Pentagon is taking the Iraq Status of Forces agreement’s December 2011 deadline seriously. The ink on the SOF was barely dry when both Mullen and Odierno smirked that “three years is a long time,” and that the situation cold change. Gates claims that Obama himself may force Maliki to renegotiate the agreement. Thanks to Ricks, Odierno is on record as wanting to keep 35,000 or more troops in Iraq through 2015. And if anyone thinks to question the need to sustain these two wars, the long generals can always tell another lie about Iran (like Mullen did recently when he said the Iranians have enough fissile material to make a bomb—they don’t) and claim that our presence in Iraq and the Bananastans is necessary to keep Iran contained.

Our generals are forcing a self-defeating security policy on us for the sake of preserving their institution, which means far more to them than the Constitution they swore to protect or the country they’re supposedly defending. In a finer era of American journalism, editorial pages across the nation would have demanded the forced retirement of every four-star on active duty. Today’s big news media, unfortunately, are either afraid of the Pentagon or in its corner. Congress has been on life support for nearly a decade, and as we have discussed, Obama political constraints are considerable.

It’s up to what few retired or active duty generals of integrity we have left to confront the junta in a very public “have you no sense of decency?” moment.

Unfortunately, that would amount to generals ratting out fellow generals, which would violate their honor code.

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

Iran Ate My Homework. Again.

26 July 2011

by Jeff Huber

“Uncle Leo” Panetta, our newly coroneted Secretary of Defense, wasted little time in leaping face-first onto the blame Iraq bandwagon.  On 9 July he stated that weapons supplied by Iran had become a “tremendous concern” in Iraq in recent weeks.  “We’re seeing more of those weapons going in from Iran, and they’ve really hurt us,” Panetta puled. 

Panetta, Mullen and Jeffrey agree
on the threat from Iran.

Panetta wasn’t flying solo on this propaganda raid; he had two loyal echo chamberlains on his wing.  As New York Times Pentagon camp follower Elisabeth Bumbler dutifully relayed from her uniformed handlers, “Mr. Panetta is the third top American official to raise an alarm about Iranian influence in Iraq in recent days.”  The other two top officials were Joint Chiefs potentate Mike Mullen and ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey.  Mutt and Jeff say they have “forensic evidence” to back their claims, though neither they nor Uncle Leo mentioned what that forensic evidence might be.  Whatever they’re referring to, historical evidence indicates we’ll never see it. 

The Pentarchy’s bull feather merchant marines have been shooting poisoned information arrows at Iran at regular intervals since around the time young Mr. Bush stiff armed that Iraq Study Group surrender stuff and went instead with the neocons’ surge strategy.  Freddie Kagan, The American Enterprise Institute’s warlord Fauntleroy, published the surge manifesto Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq in January 2007. 

Within a month Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times published “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says.”  Gordon had made his bones with the Bush/Cheney regime when he and Judith Miller helped them execute the Nigergate hoax that duped the nation into nodding along with their pet invasion of Iraq.  In their 8 Sept. 2002 article “Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” Gordon and Miller supported their assertion that Hussein was seeking yellowcake from Niger by citing anonymous “officials” a jaw-dislocating 30 times.  The documents that comprised the “smoking gun” were later proven to be poorly fabricated forgeries. 

In making the case that Iran was producing the roadside bombs that were killing so many Americans in Iraq in his 2007 story, Gordon referenced “interviews” with “civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies” who “provided specific details to support” a claim that Iran was providing “’lethal support’ to Shiite militants in Iraq.”  Gordon didn’t name any of these officials, or quote them directly or, for that matter, relay any of those specific details they provided other than to state that said details were likely to be revealed later. 

Looks Iranian to me.

Then-ambassador to Iraq and charter New American Centurion Zalmay Khalilzad promised to pony up proof of the allegations outlined by Gordon.  The military trotted out some of its very best PowerPoint palaver for a select audience of embedded media trustees, in which some sad sack major looking to become a sad sack light colonel said the shaped roadside bomb charges being discussed could only have come from Iran.  After the brief the major allowed as how, well, yeah, um, actually, the stuff in the bombs could have been bought at any Radio Shack.  (But Iran people still suck, okay?)

My colleague Gareth Porter correctly noted in Sept. 2007 that the Bush/Cheney administration “has not come forward with a single piece of concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government has been involved in the training, arming or advising of Iraqi Shiite militias.”  To this day, the only existing evidence of an outside party supplying weapons to Shiite militias points directly at “King David” Petraeus who, as commander in charge of training Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, handed out 190,000 (that’s right, one hundred and ninety thousand) AK-47s that vanished like cookies at an AA meeting.   

Porter has also exposed allegations that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons as fatuous.  In early 2010 he published a numbers of articles that revealed the files contained on the “smoking laptop” computer that described Iran’s work on a “nuclear trigger” were as blatantly bogus as the blue-dollar-bill forgeries that “proved” Hussein was buying yellowcake uranium powder from Niger.  But thanks to neocon-backed brainwash breweries like United Against Nuclear Iran (aka UANI), lysergic visions of an Iranian made mushroom cloud over Jerusalem persist. 

An article in last Thursday’s New York Times by Michael Gordon soul mate David E. Sanger badgered us with bull roar about how some development or other means Iran is getting closer to having bomb-grade material because the “United Nations Security Council” has “evidence” of something completely unrelated, and “international nuclear inspectors and American officials” say “evidence” points to something else entirely, and an “Iran expert” at a right-wing think tank says “The evidence is there that they are accelerating” but he doesn’t say what the evidence is or what exactly it says "they" are accelerating. 

Trying to reverse engineer the thought process behind the latest manifestations of the warmongery is always perilous work.  The main assumption involved—i.e., that there is a thought process of any kind behind anything those yahooligans do—is manifestly flawed.  Strategies crafted by neocon tank thinkers resemble model airplanes assembled with sledgehammers.  More than anything, war wonk schemes remind one of ice hockey’s bullyboy dump-and-chase tactic.  Such methods are unsightly and uncreative and brutish, but if you simply keep pounding away at the opposition with them you’ll eventually prevail over things like art and science and reason and, most of all, humanity. 

Why fling the puck into Iran’s end again now?  Partly because that’s how dump-and-chase works; you keep doing it.  Partly because the neocon men need somebody to blame for the recent uptick in U.S. casualties in Iraq, somebody for Americans to get mad at so they don’t stop and think things like Hey, didn’t we end combat operations there a while back?  The war mongrels also need to keep Iran good and boog-ified to justify the coming atomization of our withdrawal timelines from Iraq and the Bananastans.  (Gotta keep the Persian Peril isolated!)  

Iranian Air Force C-22 flying carpet bomber.

The threat Iran poses to the Centurions’ agenda has little to do with that country’s military power or warlike intentions.  Iran can’t project enough conventional force to pout about beyond its borders or the Persian Gulf, and for Iran to strike another country, especially Israel, with a nuclear weapon would be like the entire Persian race mumbling into the barrel of a .44 Magnum.  Iran only becomes a problem when it develops a truly self-sustaining nuclear energy program and it, along with its big buddies Russian and China, wrestles control of the global energy strategy away from Dick Cheney’s pals.  But even control of our most precious commodity is a mere chip, something to contend for that will sustain the great game that has been played by the powerful and corrupt since Winston Churchill molested Muslim geography after World War I. 

In a kinder, gentler, saner America the body politic would have dismissed all this boo noise about Iran a long time ago.  Lamentably, we live in an age when anything Bill O’Reilly says, no matter how asinine or bizarre it is, becomes incontrovertible fact if Sean Hannity says it too. 

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.  

The COIN Myth

The U.S. military’s fabled counterinsurgency field manual (FM 3-24) is an authoritative-sounding 281-page volume of balderdash. Even the legend of its origin is a fabrication. Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of forces in Iraq and now in charge of Central Command, supposedly "wrote the book," but the book was actually hammered together from plagiarized material in 2004 by Dr. Conrad Crane and others at the Army War College.

This was during the time frame that "King David" Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, a tour during which he lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols and other combat equipment that without question wound up in the hands of militants. The part of the manual Petraeus "wrote" was his signature on the manual’s endorsement letter when he was in command of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center in 2006.

There’s nothing new in the military about generals taking credit for the hard work of underlings, of course, especially when the general in question is a fast-rising self-promotion genius like "Teflon General" Petraeus. And plagiarism is so common in military publications that it’s the norm, not the exception. Like I used to say in my active-duty days, if you really think the brass want you to think out of the box, you’re out of your mind. Military doctrine is loaded with copy-and-paste palaver that goes back decades, sometimes more than a century, reflecting the expert perspective of experts who died so long ago that nobody can tell you who they were. That way, nobody swings in the wind for having an original idea that doesn’t work out.

That’s much of the reason we nearly always execute tactics and strategies that apply to wars other than the ones we’re actually fighting. Our present counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine is a perfect example. It is inadequate in many ways, but four aspects of it are particularly at odds with today’s conditions on the ground.

Bastard Stepchildren

The COIN manual states, "The primary objective of any COIN operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government."

We have clearly failed to meet this objective in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and we’re not likely to achieve it in either country unless we stick around with a six-digit troop presence long enough to influence the local gene pools.

Iraq’s Shi’ite-controlled government, led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, is a catastrophe. As Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team chief Col. Timothy Reese recently noted, "The ineffectiveness and corruption of [Iraqi government] ministries is the stuff of legend." The anti-corruption campaign is a farce, nothing more than a Maliki campaign tool. Iraq’s government is failing to improve its electrical infrastructure and its oil industry. There has no progress in resolving the Kirkuk situation. Sunni militiamen are not being transitioned into government service as promised. Sunni reconciliation is "probably going backwards." Political violence and intimidation is "rampant in the civilian community as well as military and legal institutions." A recent study by Transparency International rates Iraq as the fifth most corrupt country in the world. That makes it almost as corrupt as Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is the second most corrupt country in the world, surpassed in this category only by Somalia, a country that can hardly be said to have a government at all. Though Afghan President Hamid Karzai held on to power by stealing two elections, the Obama administration tripped all over itself in declaring him the "legitimate" leader of Pakistan. Karzai is a former warlord who has blood ties to the Afghan opium industry. Obama has told Karzai better clean up his act, to begin a "new chapter," but if our president really believes Karzai’s going to change, he needs to step away from the hookah.

Army Training, Sir

The COIN manual emphasizes the need to use host nation forces in a variety of roles, either as the "hold" force in a clear, hold, and build strategy; as part of a "combined force"; or as the main force supported in a "limited" degree by U.S. forces. The problem with the theory is that it assumes a certain level of competence and integrity, or at least a potential to become competent and integral, on the part of the host nation forces, virtues we see little of in the security forces of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Col. Reese notes of Iraq’s army that, "If there ever was a window where the seeds of a professional military culture could have been implanted, it is now long past." Corruption in the officer corps, he says, is "rampant," as are cronyism and nepotism. Laziness is "endemic," and lack of initiative is "legion." Reese describes the "ineffectiveness" of Iraq’s army and national police force as "near total."

Mohammed Hussein, the Iraqi head of the newsroom of the New York Times Baghdad bureau, laments, "Some will probably say that the government got rid of the sectarian violence … [but] after six years we have the same results as if there were still a sectarian war going on: Iraqis are being killed in cold blood."

Worse news: it looks like Iraq’s police and army have been infiltrated by militants. Maliki himself revealed that more than 45 members of his security forces were involved in the December Baghdad bombings that killed 112 people.

Speaking of untrustworthy, Afghan forces are a full-blown Wild West show. In a recent confrontation between Afghan and Western troops, an Afghan soldier, who was refused access to a landing pad where a helicopter was about to set down, raised his rifle and started squeezing the trigger, wounding two Italian soldiers and killing an American Army combat medic. When U.S. company commanders meet with their Afghan counterparts, they wear body armor and helmet, and an armed security detail tags along.

David Wood of Politics Daily describes numerous other accounts of Afghan forces attacking and killing or wounding U.S. and NATO forces.

When it comes to combat, the Taliban routinely kick the uniformed Afghan forces’ teeth in. The hapless Afghan army commanders complain that the police are on the Taliban’s payroll. The police and the Taliban are "from the same area" says Gen. Abdul Rahman Rahmani. "They collude with each other."

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, says that mission success “will require trust-based, expanded partnering" with the Afghan army and police force.

It sounds like Stan the Man needs to step away from the hookah, too.

In Part II: The search for intelligent life in our intelligence apparatus.

Open Letter to Gary Trudeau

7 Dec. 2011

What a crushing disappointment to see in your 7 Dec. strip that you too have chugged the propaganda that blames Iran for our failures in Iraq.  The recent IAEA report was the latest piece of kangaroo courtliness to accuse Iran of malfeasance—this time in regard to its nuclear program—and support the charge with pure poppycock. 

The loop-tape allegations that Iran has armed and trained Shiite Iraqi rebels have never been substantiated.  The only verifiable outside aid and comfort to Shiite militiamen was the training and weapons then Lt. Gen. David Petraeus gave to Iraqi security force recruits—predominantly Shiites—who disappeared into the night with 190,000 AK-47s and other combat gear. 

Shame on you, Gary, for allowing yourself to become one of the warmongery’s leading echo chamberlains.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)  

Iraq Event Horizon

event horizon: the boundary of a black hole beyond which nothing can escape from within it

-- Merriam-Webster Online

After five years and change of turned corners and dead enders and last throes, is it possible that we're approaching an event horizon in our Middle East miasma? Stuff seems to happen faster than anyone can deny it occurred these days, and from the sound of things, it won't be too long before we're committed to getting out of Iraq in smart fashion or sucked into staying there until kingdom come.

The New American Decade

It hardly seems possible, but it was over ten years ago—January 26, 1998 to be exact—that Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century (PNAC) wrote their infamous letter to President Bill Clinton demanding that he invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein. Clinton blew them off. Whether that was an act of wisdom on his part or he was simply occupied with more pressing matters we'll never know.

The PNAC was undeterred, however, and in September 2000 it published the neoconservative manifesto Rebuilding America's Defenses, which called for America to secure global peace through military occupation of the entire planet. The PNAC was notably interested in using the "unresolved conflict with Iraq" as a fuzzy pretext to increase our military footprint heart of the Middle East. The PNACers knew, though, that it would be difficult to get America go to along with their yahooliganism "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event." On September 11, 2001, they got the "new Pearl Harbor" they were looking for.

On March 19, 2003 young Mr. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, justified by "slam dunk" evidence that Saddam Hussein had an active weapons of mass destruction program and was probably at least sort of involved in the 9/11 attacks. Shortly after the invasion commenced, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced, "We know where the WMD are." On April 9 the Army staged the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad, and on May 1 the Navy staged Mr. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" ceremony onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Later that year, Mr. Bush declared, "We found the weapons of mass destruction" even though the CIA knew we hadn't. When violence began to flare, Rumsfeld said, "stuff happens." Time passed and stuff kept happening. Rummy blamed the trouble on "pockets of dead enders." Bush said, "Bring 'em on." They came.

In January 2004 the CIA said that the "stuff" was turning into a civil war. Bush said the CIA was "just guessing" about that civil war stuff. 2004 was also the year Lieutenant General David Petraeus took over training Iraqi forces and started handing out AK-47s like they were soccer balls. About 190,000 of the weapons disappeared themselves into the hands of Shiite militiamen. In October of 2004 the CIA concluded that Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of WMD at the time of the U.S. invasion and had not begun any program to produce them.

2005 was a banner year for our woebegone war in Iraq. Dick Cheney declared the insurgency was in its "last throes." Mr. Bush said that "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand d`own." In November, the administration unveiled its new Victory in Iraq strategy. Lipstick neocon Joe Lieberman said Mr. Bush had turned a corner in Iraq.

On February 2, 2006 Rumsfeld said he did not believe Iraq would be a long war. On February 4, 2006 the Washington Post published an article titled "Ability to Wage 'Long War' Is Key To Pentagon Plan." On May 1 of that year, the third anniversary of "Mission Accomplished," Mr. Bush said the war had reached "a turning point" (mission accomplished again!). On August 19 Operation Iraq Freedom surpassed World War II in length. On August 21, Mr. Bush said, “We’re not leaving [Iraq] so long as I’m the president.” That day, he also admitted that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. On August 29 Donald Rumsfeld called Iraq war critics "quitters." On November 8 he resigned as Secretary of Defense.

Also that year, Senator Arlen Specter admitted that Iraq was in a state of civil war. In November, the Pentagon began planning an escalation strategy that became known as "The Surge" and alternately as "Son of Stay the Course."

Bush announced the surge in January 2007. In February David Petraeus took over as the top U.S. military officer in Iraq and began handing out arms and bribe money to Sunni militants. Having armed, trained and funded both sides of Iraq's civil war, Petraeus proceeded to echo the administration in blaming Iran for arming, training and funding militants in Iraq.

Hello, I Must Be Going

The pace picked up. Dick Cheney started trying really hard to pick a war with Iran. New Defense Secretary Bill Gates got Admiral William Fallon installed as head of Central Command to keep Petraeus under control. Fallon let everybody know he thought Petraeus was an a** kissing little chicken s***, and that Dick Cheney was crazy, and that the surge was stupid because we needed those extra troops to get things in Pakistan and Afghanistan under control, and that he wouldn't let a war with Iran happen on his watch, so he got fired. Bush nominated the a** kissing little chicken s*** to take Fallon's place, and the a** kissing little chicken s***s in the Senate confirmed him.

Bush and Cheney said it would be appeasement to talk directly to the Iran about things unless they gave up their inalienable right to develop nuclear power, but they didn't mention how they'd characterize the bribes Petraeus was handing out to Sunni militants in Iraq. Democratic candidate for president Barack Obama said he'd talk to Iran without ridiculous preconditions, and his opponent, Senator John McCain, said that just showed how ridiculous Obama's notions of foreign policy were, that offering to negotiate without making ridiculous preconditions would only lead to negotiations. McCain's supporters said that showed how McCain had more foreign policy savvy than Obama.

Obama also said he'd withdraw troops from Iraq in 16 months. McCain said he might keep them there for fifty, a hundred, a thousand or a million years. Obama, like Fallon, said that we need to pull troops out of Iraq to focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Suddenly, in early July, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said any status of forces agreement would have to contain a timeline for U.S. troops to leave Iraq, and later he said that he liked Obama's plan to have American G.I.s home in 16 months, and brother, did the stuff hit the fan after that!

People tried to say that Maliki hadn't said what he said, that he'd been mistranslated, or that he'd been snot slinging drunk when he said those things, or that he'd been possessed by aliens or demons when he said them, and what have you, but everybody pretty much got the message.

The neocons ramped up to full spin, trying to swing momentum back in their direction. Young Mr. Bush agreed to set a "time horizon" with Maliki, and the a** kissing little chicken s***, sensing the wind shift, allowed as how, yeah, maybe he should look at starting to bribe bad guys in the bananastans now, seeing as how well that had worked for him in Iraq.

Some in the warmonger camp were devastated, though. One high ranking ex former retired administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the silliness involved, said that upon hearing the news of a departure timeline Joe Lieberman cried like a girl and Lindsay Graham fainted dead away in his closet.

It's tempting to conclude that we've crossed the event horizon in the Middle East, that the end of the Iraq war has begun and it's too late for team Bush to start a war with Iran. Remember, however, that the neocons still have Karl (The Brain) Rove and Dick (The Dick) Cheney on their side, and the only neocon bastard more devious than either of those two is Lucifer (The Archangel).

It may be that we'll never quite cross the event horizon in Iraq, that if anything happens at all, it will happen with a whimper so soft that we won't know if we stayed or went, because the neocons will have cooked up some new and improved fiasco that once again has us so distracted we can't tell whether we're coming or going.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Russ Wellen's interview with Jeff at The Huffington Post and Scholars and Rogues.

Dumb, Dumber and Doonesbury

by Jeff Huber

I’ve been mourning the lamentable state of the anti-war movement lately, especially the portion of it populated by the political left, a great percentage of whom appear to be more concerned with the slaughter of baby seals than with the slaughter of baby humans.  And why wouldn’t they be?  We’ve actually seen more images in our warmongering mainstream media of ice floe carnage than we’ve seen of the carnage of armed conflict.  Nobody in the deep-pockets pocket of the Pentarchy really cares if liberals manage to curb baby seal hunting.  There’s not that much money in it. 

Must remember...this is my shoulder,
this is my elbow, this is my shoulder...

To be fair, a considerable number of liberals have enough angst left over for a healthy hand-wringing or two about those pesky old wars after they’re done saving a) wild animals from hunters so they can be killed by other wild animals instead and b) trees that were grown for the specific purpose of being cut down and used in construction.  Lamentably, though, the few progressives who have the staying power to protest the uniquely American brand of man’s inhumanity to man can seldom discriminate between their shoulders and their elbows. 

Doubly disconcerting is that so many of these feckless war protesters are high-profile humorists, comedians, satirists and other makers of malcontent merriness who enjoy the uncritical adoration of The Huffington Post’s circulation, especially of those callow-eyed progressive cadets of Generations X, Y, and now even Z (nine-year olds who can’t stay up to watch Stewart and Colbert can catch them on reruns the next day).  

Case in point is Doonsebury cartoonist Garry Trudeau who, as friend of Pen and Sword J.P. White recently suggested, is living proof that one doesn’t have to be especially funny to be a commercially successful humorist, especially when said humorist attended Yale like Trudeau did.  As our present president and his immediate predecessor have proven, you don’t need talent to succeed in your chosen field if you have Ivy League credentials.    

When it comes to our woebegone Wars on Evil, Trudeau’s heart generally seems to be in the right place, but he has a penchant for letting his head hobble off to some cozy cranny where it’s isolated from the light of day and breathable air, like it appears to have done when Garry penned his 7 December strip in which a junior U.S. Army officer concedes that the omnipresent evildoers in Iraq are still able to bring the fight to us thanks to “a little help from Iran.”

I don’t dig trolling into other people’s web sites, but this couldn’t go unchallenged.  Here’s what I left in Garry’s “Blowback” inbox:

What a crushing disappointment to see in your 7 Dec. strip that you too have chugged the propaganda that blames Iran for our failures in Iraq.  The recent IAEA report was the latest piece of kangaroo courtliness to accuse Iran of malfeasance—this time in regard to its nuclear program—and support the charge with pure poppycock. 

The loop-tape allegations that Iran has armed and trained Shiite Iraqi rebels have never been substantiated.  The only verifiable outside aid and comfort to Shiite militiamen was the training and weapons then Lt. Gen. David Petraeus gave to Iraqi security force recruits—predominantly Shiites—who disappeared into the night with 190,000 AK-47s and other combat gear. 

Shame on you, Garry, for allowing yourself to become one of the warmongery’s leading echo chamberlains. 

 Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)     

Someone named “Editor” posted my comment, and added the following curious caveat: “This seems a good occasion to remind readers that if GBT shared the beliefs of all of his characters, he would be deeply schizophrenic.”

Holy non-rebuttal.  Knowing it was a waste of effort, I further submitted this:

Satirists, perhaps more so than other literary figures, present a worldview of moral judgments, and owe it to their audience to indicate when their characters’ actions and words reflect their vision of the truth and when they do not.  Mark Twain knew exactly how to do this.  Garry does some of the time.  This time he did nothing to indicate that his character’s “with a little help from Iran” was intended with any degree of sardonicism.

...and dumber...

That submission hasn’t been blessed for live bandwidth at the Doonesbury site.  Maybe they have a one-per-disgruntled-customer policy.  Something that did make the cut, however, was an attempted disproval of my original post by one Dean Mitchell that began: “The evidence of Iranian involvement has been continuous, with lots of reporting.”  If you click on the “lots” and “reporting” links of Mr. Mitchell’s sentence, you’ll discover what kind of “evidence” he considers convincing. 

The “lots” link, as I noted in my second, unpublished Blowback submission, leads to “a story with Iran allegations penned by Michael R. Gordon, one the Pentarchy's very favorite echo chamberlains.  I'm sure [Mr. Mitchell] had no idea that Gordon was one of the journo-cads who helped Dick Cheney's mob pull the Nigergate hoax on us that led to the invasion of Iraq, and has been a go-to war propaganda conduit to this day.” 

...and BlackFive's Uncle Jimbo

The “reporting” link leads to a July 2011 piece from Britain’s right-wing The Telegraph that features the standard laundry list of unsubstantiated charges against Iran straight from the mouth of then Joint Chiefs chairman and Bull Feather Merchant Marine Corps Commandant Mike Mullen. 

It’s downright horrifying to reflect that not only are the likes of Mr. Mitchell gullible enough to guzzle undiluted war propaganda from the likes of Gordon and Mullen but, apparently, the likes of progressive icon Garry Trudeau are too!

Jesus, Mary and Curly Joe DeRita.  With anti-war liberals like these, who needs Pavlov’s Dogs of War like bathetic BlackFive pundit Uncle Jimbo?

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. 

  

Another Surgin' Safari

Devotees of President Obama’s plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan hope to repeat the "success" of our surge in Iraq. That’s likely to prove easier to accomplish than even the most rabid Afghanistan surge proponent dares to hope.

The Iraq surge was already in motion in January 2007, when Bush and Cheney flipped off the Iraq Study Group and decided to escalate the war with David Petraeus, the "Teflon General," at the helm of the operation. A shameless self-promoter, "King David" created the illusion of a successful surge by lowering violence statistics through his usual method of operation: hand out weapons to the bad guys, bribe the bad guys not to use the weapons, and pretend to be shocked, shocked when the bad guys take the bribes and use the weapons anyway.

Petraeus’ personal stenographer, former journalist Thomas E. Ricks, admits that Petraeus misled Congress and the public into thinking he was trying to end the war when he was in fact laying "the groundwork for a much more prolonged engagement in Iraq."

Three years after the surge began, violence shows no signs of disappearing. Holiday attacks were especially brutal. Mosul Mayor Zuhair Muhsen al-Aaraji escaped an assassination attempt on Christmas Eve. (Mosul is the town Petraeus supposedly "tamed" during his first tour in Iraq. Within weeks after he left and the graft well ran dry, Mosul went up for grabs and has been a trouble spot ever since.)

Also on Dec. 24, as the Shi’ite religious festival of Ashura approached, five attacks killed at least 19 people and wounded over 100. The Iraqi government was quick to blame al-Qaeda in Iraq, but I’ll bet you a shiny new Ohio quarter that the Sunni-based Awakening movement that Petraeus armed and funded had more than a little something to do with the attacks.

On Christmas Day, a roadside bomb killed six Shi’ites during a religious ceremony in Baghdad. In several parts of the country, fights broke out between Christians and Shi’ites over competing religious decorations.

Many Iraqi Christians were afraid to make any public celebration of Christmas. Midnight mass had to be observed in daylight. A bomb exploded near a historic Christian church in Mosul on Dec. 23, killing two people and wounding five. Security around Christian churches was the heaviest it has been since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.

On Dec. 22, a series of coordinated car bombings killed 112 people in Baghdad. This was the third coordinated attack on Baghdad in four months; the bombs struck areas near justice buildings, a Finance Ministry office, and a police checkpoint, symbols of government authority all under tight security after the earlier bomb attacks.

On Oct. 18, a roadside bombing and other attacks killed 10 U.S. troops, making it the deadliest day for American forces in 10 months. (We have, by the way, spent over $14 billion on programs to defeat roadside bombs and other improvised explosive devices [IEDs] and have yet to find a solution. The Army’s Joint IED Defeat Organization [JEIDDO] rather symbolizes our entire war on terror: mind-numbing amounts of treasure poured down a rabbit hole to no avail.)

Iraqi security forces have proven unable to provide the security necessary to keep the peace. That should come as no surprise: the man in charge of training them in 2004 and 2005 was Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who, in that capacity, lost track of over 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols that without question found their way into the hands of militia groups. This happened while the staff at the U.S. Army War College was assembling the new field manual on counterinsurgency operations that Petraeus later took credit for writing, a myth that Ricks and other media sycophants helped propagate.

The best summary of the "success" of the Iraq surge came in the form of a July memorandum from Army Col. Timothy Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Advisory Team, titled "It’s Time for the U.S. to Declare Victory and Go Home."

Reese describes the "ineffectiveness and corruption" of the Iraqi government as "the stuff of legend." The so-called anti-corruption initiative is merely a campaign tool for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki’s government is taking "no rational steps" to improve the country’s infrastructure or oil exploration. Sunni reconciliation is "at best at a standstill and probably going backwards." The Kurdish situation "continues to fester." Political violence and intimidation is "rampant."

There is no possibility of implanting a "professional military culture" in Iraq’s security forces. Corruption in the officer corps is "widespread." Enlisted men are neglected and mistreated. Cronyism and nepotism are "rampant." Laziness is "endemic." Lack of initiative is "legion." Iraq’s security force’s "near total ineffectiveness" prevents it from becoming self-sustaining.

Gen. Ray "Desert Ox" Odierno, Petraeus’ handpicked successor as overall commander in Iraq who Ricks laughably claims was the real brain behind the Iraq surge, calls Reese’s concerns mere "tactical issues."

Gen. Stan "The Man" McChrystal, whom Petraeus handpicked to command in Af-Pak, has been charged with leading a successful surge in that theater of operations. Given the corruption that exists in the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the incompetence and corruption in their militaries, and the seemingly uncontrollable levels of violence in both countries, I’d say McChrystal is well on his way to surpassing the accomplishments of Petraeus and Odierno by a wide margin.

In fact, I see no reason why President Barack Obama shouldn’t fly aboard an aircraft carrier tomorrow and declare "mission accomplished" in Af-Pak.

The Persian Ploy

A 5 July story by David Sanger of the New York Times typifies how completely our mainstream media have been bulldozed by the warmongery’s propaganda machine. “Despite Crisis, Policy on Iran Is Engagement” states that “the accelerating crackdown on opposition leaders in Iran” will not deter the Obama administration from “seeking to engage the country’s top leadership in direct negotiations.”

We don’t have a clue what’s actually going on in Iran. Is there a crackdown on opposition leaders, or merely a major operation underway to quell extreme civil unrest? A 6 July Los Angeles Times headline declared, “Iran’s Revolutionary Guard takes command.” (LAT later changed the web headline to “Iran's Revolutionary Guard acknowledges taking a bigger role in nation's security.”)

The first paragraph explains that the Revolutionary Guard has taken over its nation’s security, which is its job, which is the reason it was formed in the first place. The twelfth paragraph of the story reads, “The Basiji militia…is also said to be mobilizing to crack down on the demonstrators.” The NYT normally sources this kind of inflammatory, irresponsible statement to unnamed “officials.” The LAT didn’t bother to source this story to anybody; it even used passive voice.

Very little of the media’s reporting on Iran is fact based. As journalist Gareth Porter recently noted, both the Bush and Obama administrations have charged Iran with giving aid to the Taliban but neither have offered no evidence to support their allegations.

The Pentagon’s top weasel wordsmiths have led the misinformation parade.

In an April press conference, Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen said, in reference to Iranian authorities, "We’re seeing some evidence that they’re supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan." When pressed to explain what “some evidence” consisted of, Mullen backed down and admitted there was no "constant stream of arms supply at this point," and he was basing his charge on evidence from “some time ago.”

In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in April, General David Petraeus said, "In Afghanistan, Iran appears to have hedged its longstanding public support for the Karzai government by providing opportunistic support to the Taliban." Appears to have hedged? Providing opportunistic support? Ooh, that sounds bad, but what in the wide world of sports and leisure does it mean?

That’s the same kind of unsupported innuendo Petraeus used to accuse Iran of funneling weapons into Iraq. Accusing Iran of stepping up the flow of weapons into Iraq in September 2007, he said, "It appears that that is increasing and we do not see a sign of that abating." You can’t see a sign of something abating if it was never happening in the first place. The only party ever proven to have provided weapons to insurgents in Iraq is Petraeus himself. In August 2007, the Government Accountability Office reported that about 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols distributed to Iraqi security force trainees vanished in 2004 and 2005, when Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces.

Petraeus is the most shameless, self-serving general we’ve had since “Dugout Doug” MacArthur. Petraeus’s worst piece of Socratic skullduggery regarding Iran also came in September 2007. Just after the GAO had fingered him as the individual most responsible for arming the insurgency, Petraeus accused the Iranians of everything from arming Iraqi militants to assassinating Iraqi politicians. He challenged the Iranians to “show me” his charges were false. That was a Machiavellian ploy worthy of the first bona fide arch villain of the third millennium, Dick Cheney. The young Mr. Bush administration promised to prove its allegations of Iran’s support of the Iraq insurgency in January 2007, when it also announced the surge strategy. It never did, and most of those allegations have been discredited.

Cheney’s Iranian Directorate manufactured intelligence on Iran in much the same way that his Office of Special Plans cooked the intelligence that “justified” the invasion of Iraq. Cheney was, and still is, on the leading edge of the long war oligarchy’s effort to convince the world that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. Cheney attempted to alter the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran to reflect his hard line stance on Iran’s nuclear program. He howled like the Wolf Man when the report was published stating that Iran had halted its nuclear program in the fall of 2003. He and his allies continue to tout the “Iran’s relentless drive for a nuclear weapon” mantra, and the media continue to echo it for them.

Having a fistful of nuclear weapons would paint a Bullseye on Iran’s back. Nukes are a deterrence weapon. The problem with deterrent weapons is that by the time you use them, they’ve already failed to stop whatever they were supposed to deter. The second Iran used a nuke on one of its neighbors, the U.S. or Israel would virtually obliterate the entire Persian race in retaliation. Possessing nuclear weapons would actually destroy Iran’s national security, as they would justify a massive preemptive strike by vastly superior powers.

Cheney’s disinformation machine has created almost universal belief that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that he would use nuclear weapons to “wipe Israel off the face of the map,” but as Professor Juan Cole has pointed out, Ahmadinejad said nothing of the kind. Ahmadinejad's exact quote was, "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Cole explains that Ahmadinejad simply expressed the desire that the Israeli government would disappear as the Shah of Iran’s regime collapsed in 1979.

Iran has never attacked another country in its 74-year existence. It is incapable of projecting conventional land power more than a few miles from its borders; its air and naval power cannot operate significantly beyond the Persian Gulf. Iran’s defense budget is less than one percent the size of ours.

After the electoral shenanigans in Ohio and Florida that led to two ruinous terms for the Bush/Cheney regime, what business do we have condemning the results of any election held in another country?

The only thing we know Iran to be “guilty” of is its ambition to develop a nuclear energy industry and become a major political and economic force in the Gulf region.

Could someone explain to me again why the Obama administration shouldn’t engage Iran’s top leadership in direct negotiations, or why it would possibly need an excuse for doing so?

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

Long Warfare Theory

“No nation ever profited from a long war.”

- Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu’s immortal The Art of War translates into a shade over 10,000 words of American English, roughly 40 pages of aphoristic wisdom presented in language that probably 75 percent of public-school third-graders could understand. One hundred percent of our military officers should understand it, but they don’t, partly because fewer than 10 percent of them have read it.

The single-mantra version of Sun Tzu’s philosophy is “charge downhill, not uphill.”* You’d think that even cadets at West Point and Annapolis and Colorado Springs who graduate at the bottoms of their classes could retain such a short and sweet maxim and comprehend its gist. Yet the history of war is choked with case studies of generals who paid the consequences of attacking uphill when they had every opportunity in the world not to. Perhaps the most celebrated example of this was the Battle of Gettysburg, where Robert E. Lee insisted, despite the strong objection of his deputy James Longstreet, on attacking up not just one hill, but three of them (Little Round Top, Culp’s Hill, and Cemetery Hill).

The drubbing Lee invited on himself at Gettysburg was the turning point of the Civil War and the beginning of the end of the Confederacy. That Lee continues to be our most revered and respected general despite having lost both a war and a country by violating the most common gem of military wisdom should tell us something about the kind of reverence and respect we show generals, especially the Long War hooligans we have now.

A comparison between Lee and David Petraeus is as unavoidable as it is ludicrous. If we rate Lee, his singular lack of judgment at Gettysburg and all, as a 10, Petraeus weighs in somewhere to the right of the decimal point, and maybe to the right of zero.

Petraeus is a bull-feather merchant who gained primacy in the U.S. officer corps through sheer genius for self-promotion and wizardry at public relations. Though he is celebrated as our “best general” and enjoys a reputation as the military genius who “wrote the book” on counterinsurgency, he has in fact been singularly and purposefully responsible for entangling us in a long war that he himself admits cannot be won but that we will likely continue to fight for at least another generation.

Bob Woodward’s latest book-length spin surgery, titled Obama’s War, quotes Petraeus as saying “I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. … This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.” Petraeus supposedly blurted this and other uncomfortable revelations to Woodward “after a glass of wine on an airplane.” If Petraeus’s tongue can be yanked that loose with a single glass of wine, the guy’s as much of a drinker as he is a general. Maybe that explains a few things, like how the 190,000 AK-47s he handed out to Iraqi security force recruits vanished like a wallet on a New York City sidewalk and wound up in the hands of militants.

If, as prominent warmonger Lindsey Graham suggests, King David Petraeus is “our best hope,” our ship of state is already on a bow-first vector for the ocean floor. Lamentably, the state of American military wisdom is so pitiable that Petraeus may in fact be the sharpest utensil in a drawer otherwise inhabited by spoons.

This is, in part, because of a lack of intellectual integrity in our so-called war college system, the most prestigious icon of which is the U.S. Naval War College (NWC) in Newport, R.I. NWC is home of the annual Global War Game, the template from which all other U.S. military warfare simulations are modeled. Lamentably, NWC war gaming hasn’t been a legitimate test bench for actual war since the 1930s, when the likes of Chester Nimitz and Ray Spruance devised War Plan Orange to defeat the Japanese in the Pacific. During the Cold War, the Global game was rigged to “prove” that the U.S. Navy would only lose a handful of aircraft carriers in a toe-to-toe slugfest with the Russkies. After the Berlin Wall went Humpty Dumpty, the Global game turned into a venue for validating whatever cockamamie doctrines and weapons systems the three-star in charge of the college wanted to verify.

Arthur Cebrowski, president of NWC from 1998 to 2001, used the Global game – and every other war game he could influence – to promote his pet “littoral combat ship” project, a key component of his project to transform the Navy into a worldwide Coast Guard. After retiring from active duty, Cebrowski became his pal Don Rumsfeld’s czar of military transformation, a platform from which he propelled his network-centric warfare concept past everyone’s tonsils. NCW (not to be confused with NWC, mind you) became the new truth among the defense intelligentsia. Cebrowski declared it to be “an entirely new theory of warfare,” one that involved a “system of systems” and that turned “complexity” into a decisive principle of warfare. Cebrowski himself confessed that NCW itself was too complex to define, but that whatever it was, it made all previous thought about the art of war obsolete.

NCW critics correctly guessed that Cebrowski was displaying symptoms of a decades-old dose of the bends. Indeed, NCW has never panned out to be anything more than net-eccentric rapture designed to help a good-old-boy network of networks sell pricey hardware like the littoral combat ship to Congress.

Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade of the National Defense University developed an NCW competitor doctrine now known far and wide as Shock and Awe. One can most accurately understand Shock and Awe by picturing John Candy and Joe Flaherty of the old Second City Television show sitting in front of a flickering TV screen and chortling, “That Baghdad blowed up good, blowed up real good.” Shock and Awe looked real good on cable news until we discovered Operation Iraqi Freedom hadn’t given us anything but sticker shock and buyer’s remorse.

But the most virulent warfare theory to infest our New American Century to date has been the Army and Marine Corps’ “new” counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, as manifested in “the book,” Field Manual 3-24. Contrary to the details of his manufactured legend, the only part of FM 3-24 that Petraeus actually wrote was his signature on the cover page. Maybe he did that so everybody would have an autographed copy. The book’s real authors were a team from the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., who plagiarized much of its material from older doctrines like the ones that worked out so ducky in Vietnam.

COIN doctrine suffers from a fatal internal fallacy. A successful counterinsurgency, the field manual insists, requires a legitimate host government that is in control of an effective security force. But major insurgencies do not occur in states that have a legitimate government and a functional security apparatus. Attempting to create those two entities in a country where they don’t already exist but an insurgency already does is futile, as proven by our experiences in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

America’s finest military minds (heh) have committed the best-trained, best-equipped armed force in history to an unending, ruinous war against an enemy that doesn’t have a single tank or airplane or ship and is led by a handful of cave dwellers who don’t even have a fort to fart in.

We have to give Lee credit for one thing: in charging uphill at Gettysburg, he was at least trying to gain a decisive victory because he knew his country didn’t have the strategic depth to fight a long war. Petraeus and his extended entourage in academia and defense think tank-dom not only want to charge straight up every hill they encounter, they want to make absolutely certain that their Long War lasts long enough to accomplish what Lee could not: the collapse of the Union.

*The Lionel Giles translation reads, “It is a military axiom not to advance uphill against the enemy, nor to oppose him when he comes downhill.”

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com.