The Mainstream Media Kiss Up

I’m not sure what NYT's David Sanger is up to with this "news analysis."

It took a thousand days after he ordered the invasion of Iraq for President Bush to describe in considerable detail his strategy for transforming the country and the region, and to lay out the benchmarks that he said Wednesday would lead to "complete victory."

Yet in four recent speeches and an accompanying strategy document he has made his case, some of his aides concede, just as his ability to control events in Iraq may be about to erode.

I listened to all four speeches and I read the strategy document. Mister Bush did not give us considerable detail, or benchmarks, or a strategy. He gave us a rehash of the same piffle he's been blowing up America's skirt and threw in some extra buzz phrases. He certainly hasn't "made his case," and when did he ever have "control" of events in Iraq? What's left to erode? And, hey, are we ever going to get a precise definition of what "complete victory" is?

More "analysis" from Sanger:

In the speeches, Mr. Bush has been cautiously optimistic. He has acknowledged, however, that almost nothing in Iraq has gone according to plan in these past 33 months.

Nothing's gone according to plan because there hasn't been a plan. We've been fumbling around in Iraq since the phony baloney scene the Army psyops staged when Hussein's statue came toppling down.

Sanger tells us that many administration officials have taken of their rose colored glasses.

One senior White House official, insisting on anonymity because he is not authorized to talk about Iraq, said last week that in meetings "we've talked about the possibility that the new Iraqi government will see no advantage in putting its security forces out on the street quickly" if they think the result will be the departure of American firepower.

Some officials have the opposite fear, that a new Iraqi government will ask the Americans to leave too quickly.

All agree, however, that over the next year the American ability to shape the Iraqi battleground will gradually decline.

I won't go into a lecture here on what it means to "shape a battlefield." Suffice it to say that we haven't been doing it in Iraq for the past two years. And if anybody in the White House or the Pentagon thinks we have been, it's no wonder the conflict turned into such a tar pit for U.S. forces.

Sanger continues:

If it [by "it" I assume Sanger means the "American ability to shape the battlefield"] declines because a new Iraqi government - even a factious, argumentative one - takes shape, the president will be able to declare before the midterm elections that the great gamble of his presidency has paid off, and troops may begin to come home.

Come on, Sanger, let's quit mincing words. What you're really saying is that in a best-case scenario, a factious, argumentative Iraqi government will emerge, Mister Bush will declare "complete victory," and bring the troops home in time to save the Republican Party from being slaughtered in the November '06 elections.

If it declines because the country spins out of control, because terror groups and insurgents still roam, because holding elections turned out to be easier than forging compromises, then Mr. Bush could be back doing next year what he has done over the past two weeks: explaining what went wrong, and why invading the country turned out to be a lot easier than remaking it. (Italics mine).

Q: At what point in the past two weeks did Mister Bush explain what went wrong or why invading the country turned out to be a lot easier than remaking it?

A: At no point did he explain either of those things.

Q: Why are Sanger and others in the mainstream media telling us that Mister Bush gave us a detailed strategy and explained things when anybody who's been potty trained knows he didn't?

a) They're idiots.

b) They think we're idiots.

c) They--especially the New York Times--know they're culpable for helping us get into the Iraq fiasco.

d) They want to seem fair and balanced so they don't lose further circulation/audience share to Fox News, A.M. talk radio, and the rest of the right wing media.

e) All of the above.

Let's Keep Lying!

Update: Double Shame! Triple Shame!

Journo-swine David E. Sanger

The detestable David E. Sanger co-wrote a New York Times story posted on Tuesday afternoon titled “U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward Nuclear Device.”

The story began: “United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on Tuesday that they say makes a ‘credible’ case that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ and that the project may still be under way.”  Sanger and side boy William J. Broad go on to sketch an ominous picture of the IAEA’s findings which pretty much seem to condemn Iran until you get clear to the first sentence of paragraph bloody twelve, which reads:

The report corroborates the conclusion of a much-debated classified National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003.

Great.  Caesars.  Ghost.  What unadulterated, shameless journalistic humbuggery.  That should have been the story’s lead sentence.  It alone refutes everything else in the piece and every other syllable of the last four years of bull roar that’s been flung at Iran about its nuclear intentions.  Sanger and Broad included it to cover their little reporter rumps when the rest of the story proves to be tripe, but they buried it where nobody would read it so as not to displease their sources in the Pentarchy* and hence put their careers with the phony-baloney Newspaper of Record at risk.

Sanger and Broad and the rest of the warmongering mainstream media simply cannot start burning in hell soon enough. They simply cannot.  

*The Pentarchy is that cabal of sandbox generals, bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs, Pavlov’s dogs of war, patriotic psychopaths and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed-of permanent American security state a reality. 

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.

Hey, I Know What. Let's Lie Some More about Iran.

8 Nov 2011

by Jeff Huber

The Pentarchy* continues to blow smoke about Iran despite its long-standing inability to produce a smoking gun. 

In a 3 November piece for the Middle East Research and Information Project titled “Debunking the Iran ‘Terror Plot,’” my colleague Gareth Porter knocked the bottom out of what little credibility was left of assertions that elements of Iran’s QODs force were behind a plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador and commit other tawdry terrorisms.

Hey, Abbott!  

A still image from Abbot and Costello
Meet the FBI.

The FBI’s cock-eyed case was a keystone caper from creation to conclusion.  A narcotics seller turned DEA informant was dope-dealing his way out of a long prison sentence by dangling a hook in front an Iranian-American named Mansour J. “Scarface” Arbabsiar, a middle-aged alcoholic shipwreck best known for his unreliability, his slovenliness, his business and relationship failures and his limited ability to discriminate between perception and reality. 

A brigade of Jack Bauer wannabes in DEA, the FBI and other Justice Department booby hatcheries decided to make their careers by trumping up a fairy tale of evil deeds and the evil doers who do them for their equally career-minded bosses.  The next thing you knew we had a Tailor of Panama/Our Man in Havana scenario where a head of state, in this case young Mr. Obama, made a draconian foreign policy commitment based on the fabrications of subordinates who were blindingly over-ambitious and dazzlingly under-competent. 

The Scarface farce may has dipped back beneath the radar for now, the companion piece of the latest Iran scare stratagem has roared to the forefront.  While Mr. Obama was telling us that he knew for sure the Iranian government was up to infamous infamies because a dope dealer said that an aging drunk said so (and that was good enough for him), he also sprang the news that UN inspectors had new proof that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, though he didn’t say what that proof was, just like he doesn’t elaborate on the legal arguments he says support his unitary decisions to suspend the Constitution.

Keystone Kondi Klaims the Persians Puke a Peck of Split Pea Soup

Possessed by Dick Cheney or just stoned?

Over the weekend, the usual echo chamberlains launched the second wave of disingenuous accusations regarding Iran’s nuclear intentions.  Ghoulish Condi Rice, one of the most persistent political herpes strains gifted to us by the Bush administration, made an appearance on ABC’s This Week to blab about how Team Obama is undoing all the beautiful wickedness she helped Dark Lord Cheney accomplish during the two-term Bush disaster.  As ever, Condi’s eyes stubbornly focused on a point somewhere above the camera and far, far away, as if somewhere in the sub-language labyrinth of her cognizance she realizes just how full of used horse lunch she is. 

On the subject of Iran, Condi quacked her standard loco litany of invective, stating that, “It’s trying to get a nuclear weapon.”  Condi didn’t offer any proof of her statement, and This Week host Christiane Amanpour, a once credible Middle East correspondent, didn’t push her for any.  It was Amanpour, in fact, who fed Condi her Iran-bash straight line by saying that this week the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is "about to reveal, apparently, more details showing, apparently, that Iran is trying to weaponize.” (My italics).  Christiane had apparently been reading the apparently unrevised anti-Iran propaganda her print colleagues had polluted the information environment with. 

Fredrick Dahl of Reuters filed a Sunday piece that leads with “The U.N. nuclear watchdog is expected this week to issue its most detailed report yet on research in Iran seen as geared to developing atomic bombs.”  Only near the end of the story does Dahl admit that the report "is not believed to contain an explicit assessment that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons capability” and that a reliable source says the report is unlikely to contain any "smoking guns."   

Dahl notes that although U.S. intelligence agencies stated outright in a 2007 intelligence assessment that Iran had stopped whatever nuclear weapons program it may have had in 2003, “Many conservative experts criticized the 2007 findings as inaccurate and naïve.”  Dahl doesn't mention that those “conservative experts” are the very same ones who cooked the intelligence on Iraq.  Dahl also states that, “U.S. intelligence agencies now believe Iranian leaders have resumed closed-door debates over the last four years about whether to build a nuclear bomb.”  Not until his next paragraph do we learn that “U.S. intelligence agencies” consist of Peter Crail of the Arms Control Association, a subsidiary of the ASAN Institute for Policy Studies, a neoconservative tank thinkery that schmoozes Donald Rumsfeld and other prominent warlords of our Era of Persistent Conflict. 

But the unlimited weight class winner of the Thomas E. Ricks Journalistic Warmongering Award in last Sunday’s round of Iran-related media mendacity was Joby Warwich of the Washington Post.  His headline proclaimed “IAEA says foreign expertise has brought Iran to threshold of nuclear capability,”  and his first sentence warned, “Intelligence provided to U.N. nuclear officials shows that Iran’s government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon.”

Self-designated UN weapons inspector
David Albright. 

You have to actually read the whole story carefully to glean that nobody actually knows what the IAEA report actually says, and that Warwick’s only actual knowledge of the report’s content actually comes from a PowerPoint presentation on it given by David Albright, who Warwick describes as “a former U.N. weapons inspector who has reviewed the intelligence files” but who is actually a posturing AIPAC propaganda peddler who likely had nothing at all to do with the IAEA inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities.

R.I.P. Shame  

You hear plenty of talk these days about the decline in American morality, and you mostly hear it from the kind of people who chug the Kool-Aid and snort the glue they get from rabid radio and FOX News.  At blame for the decline of our national virtue, according to the self-appointed keepers of our national ethos, are the standard scapegoats: MTV, web porn, liberal judges, Rachel Maddow and so on.  

What nobody seems willing to own up to is that the most immoral acts committed in the New American Century have been the lies that the hegemon’s leaders told that world that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents and the abject suffering of untold millions more.  That the lies that support unjust wars keep getting told, and that so many people in our leading institutions continue to help spread them, is the utterly condemning fact of contemporary American culture. 

We haven’t had a firm foothold on the moral high ground since Pearl Harbor.  We started slipping down the slope around the time of the Dresden massacre.  At this point we’re so from being Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” that I doubt we’ll ever gain the wisdom and enlightenment that we should have possessed before we ascended to the role of sole global superpower.

Update: Double Shame! Triple Shame!

Journo-swine David E. Sanger

The detestable David E. Sanger co-wrote a New York Times story posted on Tuesday afternoon titled “U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward Nuclear Device.”

The story began: “United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on Tuesday that they say makes a ‘credible’ case that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ and that the project may still be under way.”  Sanger and sidekick William J. Broad go on to sketch an ominous picture of the IAEA’s findings which pretty much seem to condemn Iran until you get clear to the first sentence of paragraph bloody twelve, which reads:

The report corroborates the conclusion of a much-debated classified National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003.

Great.  Caesars.  Ghost.  What unadulterated, shameless journalistic humbuggery.  That should have been the story’s lead sentence.  It alone refutes everything else in the piece and every other syllable of the last four years of bull roar that’s been flung at Iran about its nuclear intentions.  Sanger and Broad included it to cover their little reporter bottoms when the rest of the story proves to be tripe, but they buried it where nobody would read it so as not to displease their sources in the Pentarchy and hence put their careers with the Newspaper of Record at risk.

Sanger and Broad and the rest of the warmongering mainstream media simply cannot start burning in hell soon enough. They simply cannot.  

Quadruple Shame!


By this morning the Sanger/Broad bull roar piece on the IAEA report had been altered, and the remarks about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate were promoted to paragraph six.  The key sentence now reads:

The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...

You can see the IAEA report in the raw here.   If you can get past the Guardian's incendiary intro and manage to merely skim the report from head to tail, you'll come away with the strong impression that it's loaded with he said/she said allegations that clearly came from the U.S. and Israel, not from actual scientific inspection.

The ongoing campaign to bully the UN into going along with the anti-Iran strategy seems to have established a permanent base camp in the New York headquarters.  When the neocons and likudniks read the IAEA report their lips must have been moving.  It occurs to me that liberal dog of war Susan Rice, our Ambassador to the UN, is accomplishing things that Revoltin' John Bolton only dreamed of. 

More Update: Hooray for Gareth Porter!

My pal Gareth socked a walk-off four-bagger with his investigative piece on the latest journo-jive on Iran.  The title tells it all: "IAEA’s ‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons."

Kinda shakes your faith in the New York Times and the Washington Post, doesn't it? (Heh.)

You might also want to read the analysis of the cooked IAEA report at Moon of Alabama.

I'll have further choice observations to make on the affair in next Tuesday's column.

Ciao, hounds, and remember: warmongers aren't just right-wing nut cases anymore.  Susan Rice is even word than Condi Rice was.  

*The Pentarchy is that cabal of sandbox generals, bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs, Pavlov’s dogs of war, patriotic psychopaths and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed-of permanent American security state a reality. 

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.

Worst Commander in Chief Ever

Calling Mr. Bush the "worst commander in chief ever" brings wails of outrage from certain corners, but the sobriquet is a fairly easy one to justify. Bush is, after all, the first U.S. president to lead the country into two failed wars. And make no mistake--regardless of how they turn out, our excursions in Afghanistan and Iraq have failed. That the "best-trained, best-equipped" military force in history is mired in two third-world sand bunkers sends a clear message that America's days of being able to dictate global affairs through use of armed conflict are over for good.

Keep in mind that the Bush administration didn't necessarily embark on two bad wars purposely. It launched one good war--Afghanistan--that went bad when the administration left the job unfinished and diverted assets and national energies to the bad war in Iraq.

Jewels of Denial

In the Sunday August 12 New York Times, David Rhode and David E. Sanger related how the administration snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Afghanistan.

In "How a ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad," Rhode and Sanger write that after the early success of the 2001 war, "American intelligence agencies had reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat." Two years after the Taliban fell to American-led coalition forces, "the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan had long since moved on to the next war, in Iraq."

Troops were diverted, intelligence-gathering resources like predator unmanned aerial vehicles were diverted, reconstruction funds were diverted. "We were economizing in Afghanistan," a former senior official of Central Command told Rhode and Sanger. “We’re simply in a world of limited resources, and those resources are in Iraq,” the former official added. “Anyone who tells you differently is blowing smoke.”

And guess who's trying to tell us differently.

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who was National Security Advisor at the time of the virtual abandonment of the Afghanistan effort, says, “I don’t buy the argument that Afghanistan was starved of resources.”

National Security Adviser Steven J. Hadley, who was Rice's deputy during the first Bush term of office, insists that there was no diversion of resources from Afghanistan.

Robert D. Blackwill, who was in charge of both Afghanistan and Iraq policy at the National Security Council, claims that "…where we find ourselves now may have been close to inevitable, whether the U.S. went into Iraq or not.”

And they wonder why people make fun of them.

The Rear View Mirror

Given the unnatural disaster that our foreign policy under the Bush II administration has been, it's little wonder that the likes of Condi Rice and Steven Hadley still display such Rumsfeldian denial about it. For years now, administration stalwarts and supporters have been erasing their history faster than they can accuse their political opposition of rewriting it. These days, many argue that we have to stop looking backward, and quit playing the blame game, and concentrate on the future. If you take a look at who's saying that, though, you'll notice it's mostly a) members of the administration, b) Republicans who have been Bush liegemen all along, c) conspicuous neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and d) Democrats who voted for the war in Iraq and consistently cave when its time to vote on bills that might reign the administration in.

We need to take a good look at what's happened on Bush's watch for a number of reasons. First and foremost among them is that Bush is still in power, and despite the departures of the likes of Scooter Libby and Donald Rumsfeld and now Karl Rove, a hell of a lot of the folks who brought us our fiasco in the Middle East are still on the job. They can still do a whole bunch of damage and they have plenty of time to do it.

Second, they've spawned follow on generations of young neoconservative Republicans who believe--like Cheney, Rumsfeld and other neophytes of the political right during the Nixon era did--that "we would have succeeded if only…" Believe me, the neo-conservative movement has more lives than the monster in a summer horror film franchise, and they'll be back.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to remember the consequences of the philosophy that America's first, best destiny in the post-Soviet era was to make itself into a post-modern Roman Empire. In a September 2005 article, I wrote "Empires rise, empires fall. Some land softly, some crash into the back pages of other civilizations' history books. Almost without exception, empires that ended badly failed to understand that the military power that established them was not, in itself, sufficient to sustain them."

It seems I'm not the only one who worries that America will repeat the mistakes of hegemons of the past. David Walker, the United States Comptroller General, is concerned that the United States, like the Roman Republic and other organizations that failed to adapt "may not survive."

In a speech in Chicago last week, Walker, who heads the non-partisan Government Accounting Office, noted "striking similarities" between today's America and Rome in its final days: “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government."

"In my view," he said, "it's time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time."

I'm in wholehearted agreement with Mr. Walker on that score, and there's no better history to learn from than the history of America's past six years. If investigation of that history leads to a few more members of the Bush administration spending time in the big house, so be it. And while I have no expectation that the worst commander in chief ever will be impeached and convicted, if that were to happen, I wouldn't mind it one bit.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available on March 1, 2008.

Bash, Bash, Bash--Bash, Bash Iran

Iran has agreed to a draft agreement to send reactor-grade, low-enriched uranium to Russia for further refining in order to produce medical isotopes. That’s good news, a major step in Iran’s willingness to make its nuclear program wholly transparent and assure the world it has no interest in making nuclear weapons. You wouldn’t think that, though, to look at a New York Times article on the story by David E. Sanger.

“Iran Deal Would Slow Making of Nuclear Bombs” blares the headline. According to Sanger, the draft deal “would delay the country’s ability to build a nuclear weapon for about a year.” That’s blatantly contrary to what our intelligence sources have said; if Iran wanted to, and that’s a gigantic if, it couldn’t build a bomb before 2015. And, of course, both our intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency tell us they see no sign of a nuclear weapons program in Iran.

It doesn’t take a professor of literature to figure out that you can’t “slow” the making of nuclear bombs if you’re not making any. But journalism, at least the kind being practiced by Sanger in this article, isn’t exactly literature. His “delay for about a year” line should have read, “delay for another year, pushing the earliest possible date Tehran could build a bomb to 2016.”

But that would be getting the facts straight.

Israel’s ynet news takes things a step further: “Israel Official: Bomb Threat Still Alive.” An unnamed official said, "The expected deal takes care of Iran's openly available uranium which it enriches for seemingly civilian aims, while it continues to secretly enrich uranium for military aims.” No proof was given and none, apparently, was asked for.

It seems that all journalism is tabloid journalism now. Everyone has been access poisoned. Anyone will print anything their unnamed, official sources tell them. Misinformation, disinformation, covert propaganda, it all gets poured into our mainstream media under the guise of “news.”

I get a kick out of looking through archives of the claptrap that has been published about Iran. A January 2007 story in the New York Sun by notorious right-leaning journo Eli Lake titled “Iran’s Secret Plan for Mayhem” repeated claims that Iran was supporting both Shiite and Sunni sides in Iraq’s civil war. This was all based on knowledge gained from ubiquitous “officials.” The only person cited by name said he didn’t really know anything.

January 2007 was when the Iran bashing campaign began in earnest, likely fueled by Dick Cheney’s Iranian directorate. No claims made about Iran’s activities in Iraq or its ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons have been proven, yet the accusations persist and make into the news, and tend to be accepted as fact.

I’m not willing to paint the Iranians as Clintonian Democrats. Their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, could stand to tape his lips together, and the recent furor over his re-election makes one wonder if his country is any less corrupt than Ohio or Florida. Still, the evidence to support the accusations of all the horrible things they have supposedly been up to just isn’t there.

Eileen McGann of the conservative CNS News wrote an Oct. 22 piece called “Iran Cons Hillary.” McGann says, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has fallen for Iran's line that it is not developing nuclear weapons, but only wants the ability to develop one to achieve its place in the sun among the great nations of the earth.”

Iran has never said anything like that. Iran has consistently denied that it wants any part of nuclear weapons. That makes a certain amount of sense. Owning a nuke paints a bull’s eye on Iran’s back, and they’d never be able to use a nuke without suffering retaliation massive enough to end the Persian race.

McGann also commits numerous inaccuracies about levels of uranium enrichment, and she makes wild interrogative accusations: “Why does Iran want enriched fuel?” She asks. Nobody on the bash-Iran team wants to admit that a self-sufficient nuclear-power industry is the only strategic advantage Iran will have in the post-peak oil age. But McGann and her like insist there’s only one reason to enrich uranium, and that’s to have a bomb.

McGann paints a worst-case scenario where Iran pretends to go along with inspections until it gets its uranium back from the Russians, then kicks everybody out and builds a bomb. That gets us back to the bull’s eye counterpoint. If they kick out inspectors again, they are cooked.

There’s one bright note: the BBC notes that senior Israeli and Iranian officials met during the non-proliferation talks in Sept. in Cairo, Egypt. Well, both sides attended panel discussions. I guess that’s almost like talking together, but if you’ve ever been in a panel discussion, you know it’s not really a discussion.

Then again, we’re not really having a discussion about Iran. It’s all scare talk that makes very little sense, and next to none of it is true. I just read an Oct. 21 article in the far-right Family Security Matters that’s so crazy I won’t insert a text link to it. It’s only worth mentioning because it cites a book by some nut bar that says Iran’s plan for the United States includes “nuclear devastation, followed by the establishment of Islamic sharia law.”

To think that some people shovel down this horse plop like it’s chocolate ice cream. Iran could no sooner pull a stunt like that than they could colonize Saturn.

Uh, oh. I can see the next headline: Officials say Iran Will Bomb American and Israel with Nuclear Weapons Based on Saturn!

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.

How to Lose Two Wars Without Really Trying

Last week, Afghanistan's upper house of Parliament recommended that the government begin peace talks with the Taliban and that foreign forces in the country cease all offensive operations. As written, the bill is unlikely to pass, but the fact that it's been proposed at all tells you how far south things have gone in what was once the "crown jewel" in our so-called war on terror.

Why would Afghanistan's Parliament bite the hand that created it? Civilian deaths, of course.

Hearts, Minds and Other Body Parts

Carlotta Gall and David E. Sanger of the New York Times report that "Scores of civilian deaths over the past months from heavy American and allied reliance on air strikes to battle Taliban insurgents are threatening popular support for the Afghan government and creating severe strains within the NATO alliance."

Many "collateral damage" deaths are the result of an over reliance on airpower to compensate for lack of ground troops in theater. As one senior NATO official said, “Without air, we’d need hundreds of thousands of troops.”

Is this starting to sound like another war we happen to be fighting right now? It should. And so should this. According to Gall and Sanger, American officials also "contend that the key to reducing casualties is training more Afghan soldiers and police officers."

Like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Afghan President Hamid Karzai attempted to institute an amnesty program to contain the threats to his government. In Karzai's case, the program targeted the Taliban, and showed some signs of success until Afghanistan's ballooning drug trade helped the Taliban ranks to swell.

In Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi forces, supposedly working together, actually operate under separate chains of command. In Afghanistan, NATO is supposedly in charge, but U.S. special forces and counterterrorism units operate separately from the NATO command, and U.S. and NATO commanders have never fully agreed on a strategy for fighting the war. This too is reminiscent of the situation in Iraq, where the coalition strategy has changed as often as the reasons we supposedly invaded the country in the first place.

As in Iraq, we're looking for military fixes to problems in Afghanistan that require political solutions. We're seen as occupiers in both countries, we can't control the borders of either country and the overwhelming sentiment in both countries is that the sooner we leave, the better. After years of nation building (four in Iraq, five in Afghanistan), nobody seriously considers either country to have a "sovereign" government. Victory is not in sight in either country; there's not even a recognizable concept of what "victory" might be.

How did the country that saved humanity in two world wars and a global cold war put itself in such a mess?

Strategies and Tragedies

The "terrorists"--whoever exactly they are--do not have a navy or an air force, or anything that by modern standards resembles a proper army. Potential state adversaries who do have formal military forces (Iran, for instance) wouldn't stand a chance against us in a no-holds-barred conventional war. The U.S. now spends as much or more on defense as rest of the world combined, yet our military might does not effectively defend our shores (9/11) or achieve our national aims overseas (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.).

A popular adage says that America consistently plans to fight the last war. It's more accurate to say that America consistently plans to fight the last world war. Thanks largely to what Dwight Eisenhower referred to as the "unwarranted influence" of the military industrial complex, America spent over a half century developing an armed force designed to fight a high tech analogue of World War II. Arguably, building and maintaining such a force deterred such a war from breaking out. Unfortunately, in the process of suppressing another full-scale global conflict, our force became woefully inadequate to fight and win the sorts of wars we presently find ourselves engaged in.

Force structure, however, isn't the primary problem. After all, even though Afghanistan and Iraq wound up seeming quite similar, they were initially two very different kinds of wars. Afghanistan was a war fought against mostly guerilla style forces, Iraq began as a conventional war against an organized army. Moreover, both campaigns were initially quite successful. That they both deteriorated into cat stampedes reflects a lack of imagination and poor understanding of the basic tenets of warfare on the part of U.S. military leadership. Entirely too many officers today are so fascinated with tactics and technology that they do not understand the connection between success in combat and achieving a war's political aims.

More importantly, however, U.S. political leaders need to learn that warfare is losing its efficacy as a tool of national power. When you've already beaten everybody up once, and you've become as strong as everybody else combined, what's the use of beating everybody up again? Yes, it's always good to have a "big stick" to back your diplomatic, economic and other "soft" power measures, but you can't just rub a cheese grater across somebody's face every time you don't get your way.

That's not behaving like a sole superpower. It's acting like one of the Three Stooges.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword.

The Once and Future Neocons Take Back Middle East Policy

Also at Kos.

It looks like the escalation is on. David E. Sanger reports in Sunday's New York Times that Mr. Bush's new strategy for Iraq will include a rapid influx of up to 20,000 additional U.S. troops. Sanger says U.S. officials report that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is on board with the plan.

It's quite clear that the key players in Mr. Bush's new/reorganized security team: Robert Gates, John Negroponte, Michael McConnell, Lieutenant General David Patraeus and Admiral William Fallon are on board with the escalation as well.

It's also clear who is influencing Mr. Bush's policy. From a Saturday opinion piece in The Nation:

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol walked into the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) yesterday with a big grin on his face, as if to say "they're listening to me again!"

Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld, Bolton and other architects of the war in
Iraq may be gone, but the neoconservatives' stature inside the Bush Administration has hardly diminished. The same people that sold us the war, often under false pretenses, are now leading proponents of escalating the conflict by sending tens of thousands of additional troops.

An event at AEI yesterday brought together the intellectual progenitors of escalation: military historian Fred Kagan, retired General Jack Keane and Senators John McCain and
Joe Lieberman. The focus was not on how to clean up the neocons' mess, but on how to deepen it.

"The surge must be substantial and it must be sustained," McCain told a packed room.

Opening a Third Front

If Bush is following Kristol's lead on Iraq, it's a good bet he's listening to Kristol's desires for the U.S. to confront Iran as well. No doubt, Bush also appreciates Kristol's unique ability to use the media to "sell" war-centric policies to the public.

The Sunday Times recently reported that military sources say Israel will employ tactical nuclear weapons against Iran if it doesn't give up its uranium enrichment program.

Larisa Alexandrovna asks a number of pertinent questions regarding the Sunday Times article. Is the story true? Was it leaked by someone concerned about Israel's intentions? Or was it planted as part of a propaganda/psychological operation, and if so, who planted it and for what purpose?

Whatever the answers to those questions might be, given the Rovewellian pollution of our contemporary information environment, it is hardly paranoid to suspect that someone in Bill Kristol's circle is behind the story, especially when we consider that The Times is part of Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire, as is The Weekly Standard, which is edited by Kristol, and Fox News, where Kristol appears as a regular commentator.

The Right Tool for the Right Job

Many were surprised when Bush named Navy Admiral William "Fox" Fallon to replace General John Abizaid as head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). At first blush, it seemed unusual to place a Navy man in charge of an area of responsibility (AOR) in which two ground wars are taking place. But the CENTCOM AOR also includes Iran, and any military confrontation with Iran will be a major maritime and air operation. A naval flight officer, Fallon's credentials as a maritime and air power expert, his combat experience, and his record as a force commander at the three and four-star level, are unmatched. What's more, from what I've observed and heard about him, he possesses a super-human intellectual capacity. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that he still remembers the serial number on his baby spoon.

So it I were Mr. Bush, and was determined to press forward with Bill Kristol's neoconservative agenda, Fallon is the exact guy I'd put in the CENTCOM billet.

The Ides of February or March or April

If Mr. Bush decides to escalate and expand his Middle East war, all the key senior players and all the forces necessary for him to do so should be in place by mid-winter or early spring.

The majority of Congress and the public seem to be against such a move, but Mr. Bush doesn't appear to be listening to the legislature or the people. He appears to be marching to the beat of a drummer named William Kristol.

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Related articles:

Navy Admiral Goes to CENTCOM (by Jeff)

Smoke, Mirrors and War Powers (by Jeff)

Wars and Empires (by Jeff)

BYOT Leakage or Conscience Leakage? (by Larisa Alexandrovna)

Hersh: U.S. mulls nuclear option for Iran (CNN)

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword.

Eating Crow in the Next World Order

In case you hadn't noticed, the neoconservative approach to foreign policy has been an unmitigated failure.

The media are still abuzz with stories of the North Korean missile tests. David E. Sanger of the New York Times notes that "after a barrage of missile launchings by North Korea, President Bush and his national security advisers found themselves on Wednesday facing what one close aide described as an array of 'familiar bad choices.'"

"Familiar bad choices" will be a suiting epithet on the Bush administration's tombstone. Sanger notes that top advisers are less concerned over what to do about North Korea's new missile "than with the bigger question of whether the president is prepared to leave office in 2009 without constraining an unpredictable dictator who boasts about having a nuclear arsenal."

Mister Bush will leave office--in 2009 or whenever--with more problems than any successor, Democrat or Republican, will be able to solve easily. The Brave Neoconservative World has already turned into the Next World Order, a world order that's a far cry from the delusional dream of U.S. global domination through military force.

Our experiments with regime change at the point of a gun in Afghanistan and Iraq have been colossal train wrecks. Pentagon planners can't come up with a coherent master air attack plan for Iran because they can't find anything suitable to bomb, or any proof that Iran isn't telling the truth when it says it doesn't have a nuclear weapons program and has no intention of developing one. And the best solution to the North Korean missile testing seems to be to encourage them to test fire missiles until they don't have any missiles left.

Without question, the critical vulnerability in the neoconservatives' overall foreign policy was its myopic fascination with Iraq. They were bound and determined to invade that country come hell or high water, whether Saddam Hussein was still in power or not. This unfortunate misstep, and the incompetent manner in which it was executed, has left America profoundly weaker militarily, economically, and diplomatically. Our executive branch has a well earned global reputation for secrecy and deception, and our news media have been so profoundly corrupted that there's no taking any information coming from any U.S. source at face value. That's a sorry state of affairs for the nation that was the home of Honest Abe and the president named George who could not tell a lie.

Reversing America's vector to oblivion will take swallowing some very big and very bitter pills. One will be that the cornerstone of America's power--its military might--can no longer be relied upon to achieve the country's policy aims. The more the balance of armed force has tilted in our favor, and the more we have applied armed force to foreign policy, the more unfavorable consequences we have managed to create. This is not to suggest we disarm. Our physical security, and arguably that of the entire world, will continue to require a robust capability to respond swiftly and decisively to contingencies that only armed force can counter.

But we'll have to disavow, even if only tacitly, that the preemptive deterrence doctrine is a bust. War hawks will continue to insist that any posture other than willingness to fight any where, any time shows weakness, but applying terms like "appeasement" and "surrender" to the actions of a nation that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined is ludicrous. We can spend a heck of a lot less on armed force than we are now and still whip anyone who wants to take us on hands down.

We need to get out of Iraq, and barring a miracle, there's no good way to do that. Whatever moral obligation we have to help that country get on its feet is just about paid up. Right now in Ramadi American troops are fighting Iraqi insurgents with an Iraqi unit that's undermanned because up to 500 of its soldiers didn't want to fight other Iraqis. If Iraqi soldiers don't want to fight for themselves, we have no ethical requirements to do it for them.

We might want to redeploy forces to Afghanistan to clean up the mess we allowed to resurge there. That would be admitting we made a mistake, though, and we might wind up just creating another Iraq and draining our force even further. We may have to admit that Afghanistan is an insoluble problem and pull out of there too.

We'll have to concede that Iran has right to develop its own uranium enrichment capabilities and hope we can find a way to ensure they don't go in the nuclear weapons direction. Unfortunately, there may be no sure-fire way to ensure Iran doesn't produce nukes behind our backs. If that's the case, we'll have to fall back on the same deterrence measure we applied to the Soviets during the Cold War and the one we're using with the North Koreans now: our own nuclear arsenal.

Like many, I'd like to see a complete eradication of nuclear weapons, but I don't see anything like that in the cards for decades. Another one of those bitter pills we'll have to swallow is that non-proliferation is a blown policy. The cats are out of the corral, and all the cowboys in the world won't be enough to round them back up. We'll just have to put out a bowl of milk and wait for them to come around when they're good and ready to.

As I wrote last September, empires come and empires go. Some land softly, some wind up as a footnote of another empire's history book. In order for America to position itself as a "first among nations" in the next world order, we're going to have to taste a little crow.

But hey, I hear that with the right seasonings, crow can be downright palatable.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.

...And Keep Lying Some More...

By this morning the Sanger/Broad bull roar piece on the IAEA report had been altered, and the remarks about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate were promoted to paragraph six.  The key sentence now reads:

The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...

You can see the IAEA report in the raw here.   If you can get past the Guardian's incendiary intro and manage to merely skim the report from head to tail, you'll come away with the strong impression that it's loaded with he said/she said allegations that clearly came from the U.S. and Israel, not from actual scientific inspection.

The ongoing campaign to bully the UN into going along with the anti-Iran strategy seems to have established a permanent base camp in the New York headquarters.  When the neocons and likudniks read the IAEA report their lips must have been moving.  It occurs to me that liberal dog of war Susan Rice, our Ambassador to the UN, is accomplishing things that Revoltin' John Bolton only dreamed of.

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.

Iraq: Lowering the Bar

In the face of a showdown with Congress over mandatory timelines for troop redeployments from Iraq, the White House and Pentagon struggle to retain their blank check.

The art of the lowered expectation has long been a hallmark of Bush administration political strategies, so it's little surprise they're now applying it to the Iraq situation. According to David E. Sanger of the New York Times, some of Mr. Bush's top advises now say the White House is scaling back its expectations for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government. Ryan C. Crocker, the new U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, describes al-Maliki's situation as "trying to fight fires from every direction."

“We have to be clear to him on where our priorities are," Crocker told U.S. reporters by phone, "so that we can buy him the time he needs. And we have to buy the time now because he is going to need it in the future.”

If we haven't made out priorities clear to al-Maliki by now, I doubt we ever will. And this business of buying him time now so he'll have it in the future sounds like something out of the worst Star Trek episode ever written. But don't be fooled--there's a method to this madness.

Lock Step

Not surprisingly, this new White House approach coincides with remarks made last week by General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. Of the escalation effort in Iraq, Petraeus told reporters "It is an endeavor that clearly is going to require enormous commitment and commitment over time," and refused to speculate on how many U.S. troops would need to be committed to Iraq over what period of time.

All the sound and fury about a "new way forward" has been a smokescreen to preserve the same old "stay the course" strategy. The "surge" was never really a "best last chance for success." It was a stalling tactic--the next step in ensuring America would maintain significant military presence in Iraq through at least the end of the Bush term.

What worries Bush and his advisers about Congress's timeline bill is that it catches them in a lie. In essence, the bill says "Okay, we'll fund your surge, but only for a limited amount of time. If the surge works, great, we're out of there. If it doesn't work, too bad, we're out of there anyway."

That's pretty much how the administration sold the so-called surge in the first place, but as we have discussed, the surge justification was a canard from the get go.

Hiding Behind the Troops

If the Congress wants to test my will as to whether or not I'll accept a timetable for withdrawal, I won't accept one. I just don't think it's in the interest of our troops.

-- George W. Bush, April 27, 2007

This statement is typical of Mr. Bush's fallback position in any debate--turn everything into a manhood measuring contest and hide behind the troops. You'd think that as the notional leader of the world's most powerful nation and having reached the ripe old age of 60, Mr. Bush would have abandoned this kind of schoolyard rhetoric long ago, but it appeals to the non-cognitive segment of his base, and it's worked for him so far, so why should he change now?

Most of us can see the foolishness in deciding vital questions of policy through adolescent genital comparisons, but it's somewhat harder to keep the discussion within the bounds of logic and reason when "support the troops" is invoked. Very few of us, no matter how much we may object to that administration's policies and strategies, wish anything but the best for our troops, especially the vast majority of them who have no say in the policies and strategies.

If you believe the administration's propaganda, the troops want to stay in Iraq and get the job done (whatever getting the "job done" might consist of). If you buy the results of a Zogby Poll, the vast majority of troops in Iraq have wanted a withdrawal timeline for over a year.

At the end of the day, though, when it comes to matters of foreign policy and national security strategy, what the troops think or want or feel doesn't matter. Certainly, if America decides to put its all-volunteer force in harm's way, it owes that force whatever it needs to accomplish the agreed upon mission and to sustain and protect itself (a pact, by the way, that the Bush administration and its sycophants in Congress and the Pentagon have miserably failed to live up to.)

But it's not up to the troops to determine where and when they go into harm's way, or how long they stay there. And as to the head troopers in charge--the active duty Generals--they've proven themselves throughout the course of the Bush administration to be little more than invertebrate yes men. I had hoped that Petraeus might turn out to have something more in the lumbar department than his predecessors, but those hopes began to vanish like a blind widow's silverware when he stage managed that outdoor market shopping trip in Baghdad for John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and a hundred of their very best heavily armed friends.

Given Petraeus's complicity in the neoconservative bait-and-switch "surge" plan (the "surge" that was actually a long term escalation), it's fairly apparent that Bush didn't expect Petraeus to win the war in Iraq. Bush was looking for a pliant four-star who would help him spin the war into the next administration's lap, and early indications suggest that Bush made a sound choice in that regard.

But as I said earlier, Petraeus's inputs on the future of U.S. involvement in Iraq aren't pertinent. The Iraq policy issue is now in the proper arena, a showdown between the executive and legislative branches. The first veto will no doubt come by the middle of this week. What happens then is anybody's guess. We hear rumors that some sort of compromise is already in the making, but these days we hear a lot of rumors that turn out not to be true.

Moreover, one has to wonder what kind of compromise can be crafted given the basic nature of the opposing positions. Mr. Bush wants a blank check that allows him to continue his war in Iraq indefinitely. The Democratic Congress wants put a finite cap on the duration and intensity of U.S. involvement in that war. I don't see how anyone can square a circle that big. The choice is between Mr. Bush and Congress, and in that regard, William Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general and former Director of the National Security Agency aptly framed the issue in a radio address last Saturday.

I am not now nor have I ever been a Democrat or a Republican. Thus, I do not speak for the Democratic Party. I speak for myself…

…Most Americans suspect that something is fundamentally wrong with the President's management of the conflict in Iraq. And they are right…

…We cannot 'win' a war that serves our enemies interests and not our own. Thus continuing to pursue the illusion of victory in Iraq makes no sense. We can now see that it never did…

… No effective new strategy can be devised for the United States until it begins withdrawing its forces from Iraq…

…I hope the President seizes this moment for a basic change in course and signs the bill the Congress has sent him. I will respect him greatly for such a rare act of courage, and so too, I suspect, will most Americans.

I appreciate General Odom's sentiments, but as we have observed over the past six years plus, acts of courage on the part of the Bush administration and its supporters are rare indeed.

Still Making the Mesopotamia Mistake

Thursday morning, I listened to Fred Kagan on an NPR program telling the world how well the "surge" is going, how Iran is a trouble maker, and the rest of the standard neoconservative line of bunk.

Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and was a chief architect of the so-called surge plan. Along with his father Donald and brother Robert, Fred Kagan was a key member of Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the "think tank" that brought us our Mesopotamia mistake.

It's little wonder that Fred's painting a rosy picture.

More Maliki Malarky

NPR reported on Wednesday that the Pentagon itself has finally caved and started using the "c" word.

For the first time, the Pentagon's update to Congress on the state of the Iraq war acknowledges that elements of the Iraq conflict "are properly descriptive of a 'civil war.'"

Properly descriptive of a civil war. Brother. The Iraq war is properly descriptive of a Hobbesian nightmare.

Thursday morning, MSNBC showed live footage of Mr. Bush speaking with Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi in Washington. Bush congratulated Abdul-Mahdi on his government's progress at working toward unification (He knows it's "hard work.")

Also on Thursday morning, Helene Cooper and David E. Sanger of the New York Times gave a different view of the Iraqi government's "progress."

The Bush administration, which six months ago issued a series of political goals for the Iraqi government to meet by this month, is now tacitly acknowledging that the goals will take significantly longer to achieve.

A “notional political timeline” that the administration provided to Congress in January in an attachment to a letter from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had called for most of the objectives to be met by this month.

According to the Times, most of those objectives have not been met by Malaki's government. "Officials" say they expect "most political progress to be months away."

How many months? 10? 100? 1,000?
The officials also say the slowness of the political progress could extend the amount of time the surge troops will need to stay in Iraq and its suburbs. There's a surprise.

Philip D. Zelikow, until recently the counselor at the State Department, says that part of the slow progress is because of “a recognition that things were worse than people realized.”

What a classic piece of Bush administration indigestion this is. The problem is that we now recognize a problem that we didn't recognize before? No, Mr. Zelikow, the problem is that you didn't recognize problems. And there's little indication that the Bush cabal will learn to recognize them in the future.

Mr. Zelikow's successor at the State Department is Eliot Cohen, who along with Donald Kagan, Dick Cheney and others was a charter member of the PNAC.

Zeilikow said that “significant parts of the new strategy need to be developed from scratch.”

The entire new strategy needs to be thrown out with the junk mail.

The Senate bill that called for troop withdrawal to begin within 120 days and set a goal for complete withdrawal by March 31 2008 got blown out of the water late Thursday. A House bill calling for all combat troops to be out of Iraq by September 1, 2008 passed through committee, but House Republicans are resisting the measure.

Representative C.W. Bill Young (R-FL) said, "Nobody wants our troops out of Iraq more than I do, but we can't afford to turn over Iraq to al-Qaida."

This is sheer lunacy. Is Young really dumb enough to think a Sunni group like al-Qaeda could take over a Shiite dominated country, or was it just his turn to introduce the nonsensical talking point of the week?

The Bush administration has made mistake after mistake in Iraq, and seems bound and determined to keep making them. Fanatics like Young are enablers.

I'd like to see the House bill passed on the floor, but am not optimistic. I fear we'll continue to flop and twitch in Iraq until the Army and Marine Corps grind themselves into hourglass fill. Then we'll redeploy to the periphery, like Representative Jack Murtha (D-PA) proposed back in November of 2005.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword.

Iraq: Ryan and David's Laugh-In

It's very interesting: If someone suggests that we repeal Mr. Bush's tax breaks for the wealthy, Mr. Bush and his liegemen don't refer to that as returning taxes to their former levels, they call it a "tax increase." When U.S. commander in Iraq David Petraeus suggests that we return to our pre-surge troop levels, however, they refer to with terms like "troop reduction."

Officers involved in preparation of Petraeus's testimony before Congress next week say he will introduce the possibility of withdrawals beyond January 2008 that will bring the troop count down to 130,000, where it was before the "surge" began in January 2007. In the short term, according to David E. Sanger and David S. Cloud of the New York Times, "senior administration and military officials" say that Petraeus "could accept the pullback of 4,000 troops beginning in January, in part to assuage critics in Congress."

There's something else interesting: Reporters for a newspaper like the New York Times using language that says a four-star general can "accept" the desires of Congress, as if he has a choice in the matter. Then again, maybe these days he does have a choice in whether or not he accepts a mandate from our national legislature.

Here's something else interesting: A Friday morning story from the Associated Press carried the news of seven more U.S. troop fatalities in Iraq, four of whom were Marines killed during fighting in Anbar province, the area touted by Petraeus and others as the crown jewel of the surge's "success" at establishing enhanced security in Iraq.

The even more interesting part of the AP story, though, comes at the very end:

U.S. troop levels -- currently at a record 168,000 -- are expected to hit a high of 172,000 in the coming weeks, the Pentagon said Thursday.

How about them bad apples? No wonder Petraeus is willing to accept a "pullback" of 4,000 troops in January--their replacements will already be in theater. It's less wonder still that he's magnanimous enough to concede to a further "reduction" to the base number of 130,000 by spring of 2008, which from the beginning was as long as senior-most Pentagon officials said the surge could last.

So, what I see happening next week when Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iran Ryan Crocker bring their medicine show to Capital Hill is a promise of a drawdown that isn't a withdrawal in exchange for an extra $50 billion to keep the surge that isn't an escalation going until it was scheduled to end before it even started. And oh, the $50 billion will go on top of the $ 9 trillion national credit card balance because we wouldn't want to burden the wealthy with new taxes that look like the old taxes they used to pay before their pal Dubya started his expensive war in Iraq.

It should all be, as Arte Johnson used to say on the 60s comedy show Rowan and Martin's Laugh In, …

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword, ePluribus and Military.com. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books, ISBN: 9781601640192) will be available March 1, 2008.

Letting Israel Lead Us Around by the Potty Wand

by Jeff Huber

Mitt Romney and 51 percent
of his constituency.

The best political joke of the election season so far has been Mitt Romney’s assertion that we should let Israel dictate our Middle East Policy.  Jesus at the temple, Mitt; catch up.  Israel has had undue influence on our policies in that part of the world since its inception in 1948.  Since the neocon/Likudnik cabal came into power with the pseudo-election of young Mr. Bush in 2002, Israel has been leading our Middle East policy around the potty wand. 

The latest evidence of our abject obedience to Israel's interests was the latest two-prong offensive against Iran, the most recent operation in a long propaganda campaign aimed at turning the Persian state into a post-modern incarnation of the Evil Soviet Empire. 

Phase one of Operation Persian Poppycock was a Keystone Kop caper cooked up by the DEA and the FBI that took a drug dealer looking to ditch hard jail time and an alcoholic wife-abusing dead beat and framed them as key conspirators in a Iranian Quds Force scheme to blow a big shot Saudi and an Israeli Embassy to smithereens.  Even though the warmonger friendly New York Times and Washington Post did their very best to peddle the pathetic plot to the proletariat, the story was quickly dismissed by the cognizant majority as bunker mentality bunkum. 

The IAEA Report on Iraq

Less probal to thinking was the grand scale deception the Pentarchy's bull feather merchant marines conducted regarding accusations about Iran’s nuclear intentions centered on the release of the recent report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).  This canard too was supported by the warmongery’s select echo chamberlains, most notably the deplorable David E. Sanger of the New York Times and the irredeemable Job Warwick of the Washington Post, both of whom tumbled tokeses over teakettles to cite the most irresponsible and incendiary sources available on the subject of Iran’s nuclear program, including fake nuclear weapons shaman and prominent AIPAC prostitute David Albright. 

Israeli Prime Minister Bebe Netanyahu, who French President Nicholas Sarkozy recently had the moral spine to call a liar in front of U.S. President Barack Obama, took advantage of the mainstream bullhorn to criticize the IAEA report because “only things that could be proven were written” in it, but, “in reality there are many other things that we see."  In reality one needs a microscope and a fertile imagination to see anything provable whatsoever in the IAEA report.   

I cannot tell a lie.  Know what
I mean?  Eh?  Know what I mean?
Wink, wink.   Nudge, nudge.
Say no more.

The crux of the report’s allegations that Iran may yet be working toward building a nuclear weapon rest on its claim that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.  But as my colleague Gareth Porter quickly pointed out, the scientist, identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist at all.  Danilenko, as research of open source documents revealed, has specialized for his entire career in the production of detonation nanodiamonds, which are diamond particles used for industrial and medical purposes including the treatment of cancer.  Iran, coincidentally, has been endeavoring to establish a nanodiamond industry.  Maybe that's the next plank in our Iran policy: they can have a nanodiamond industry as long as they buy their nanodiamonds from us.  

The IAEA could easily have researched the materials that Porter researched and arrived at the same conclusions that he reached.  Considering the report’s predictably profound impact on international relations, one might think that the IAEA would have to taken as much trouble as Porter took to get its facts straight.  But one would be sadly mistaken, and one should be furious to find that the IAEA chose instead to use unchallenged information fed to it by an undisclosed “member nation,” much in the same manner that the New York Times and Washington Post repeat pro-war propaganda channeled though it by unnamed “senior officials.”  I can’t say for sure what that member nation’s identity might be, but I’d bet a dollar of my own money that its first initial stands for “Israel.”  You never know, though.  The member nation’s first initial might also stand for “United.”

Not shockingly, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post nor any of the rest of the mainstream news foppery has bothered to take the trouble to break the news that their breaking news about the IAEA report was pure unadulterated bull roar. 

This monkey business of accusing Iran of everything from killing our soldiers in Iraq to building nukes to getting dairy goats pregnant without providing a scrap of credible evidence to back the accusations up has been going on since at least 2007 when Mr. Bush’s bunch was looking for excuses to extend the War on Evil in Iraq indefinitely with a “surge” escalation.  If a tenth of shenanigans the Pentarchy has charged Iran with being up to were true, there would be no excuse on earth for not having bombed the entire Persian race into the carrier pigeon mode by now.  

Yet Minister of Peace Leon Panetta wasted little time in calling a news conference and cautioning, oh, no, no, we don’t want to bomb Iran, that might bring on “unintended consequences,” yepper, yup, yup, yo!  It must be that Uncle Leo has reached the age where he's worried about the destination of his immortal soul.  

Iran is not a military threat to anyone—except possibly to itself if it ever were to acquire nuclear weapons.  Nukes in the hands of Iran would be the third-world equivalent of a doomsday machine, and as Doctor Strangelove admonished the Soviet Ambassador in the eponymous film by Stanley Kubrick, a doomsday machine doesn’t serve its purpose unless you tell everyone that you have it.  Once Iran were to announce its possession of a nuclear arsenal, Fork-Tongued Bebe would have his flying circus turn Iran into a parking lot for our permanent occupation forces in Iraq and the Bananastans.

Despite plain evidence that our Iran policy is the epitome of rogue hegemony, we continue to demonize Iran in accordance with the dictates of the Israelis, who could populate the world’s museums with the galleries' worth of U.S. politicians it has purchased over the years.  I have suggested that if we really want to vouchsafe Israel’s security we should make it the 51^st state.  But Israel isn’t likely to go along with that.  As I mentioned a moment ago, they don’t need formal legislative representation here because they already own our Congress, and if they become a state they’ll have to pay our taxes and obey our laws.

Israel has a much better deal the way things are now.  

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.