tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127965512024-03-26T05:18:53.729-04:00Pen and SwordIf we all pattern our behavior after the worst examples available to us then all is truly lost.Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.comBlogger1326125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-83265031274348161612012-01-08T23:40:00.037-05:002012-01-14T06:46:38.186-05:00Fools and Fanatics and Bull Feather Merchants<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div><div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">by Jeff Huber<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves…”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">-- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell">Bertrand Russell</a><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5onLwZffcOA3_As5QPW2CBluQMuK_JVJATZaHZEzA4wCFkpHhVP8BLDVt8aCOKeoNo1n6oFBpzk5msIz1poYN-Vo5hmaYdUj561yrNhKSEf1OZwG_reAvPAk5fOmjG3mN6DKa/s1600/Victoria_Clarke.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5onLwZffcOA3_As5QPW2CBluQMuK_JVJATZaHZEzA4wCFkpHhVP8BLDVt8aCOKeoNo1n6oFBpzk5msIz1poYN-Vo5hmaYdUj561yrNhKSEf1OZwG_reAvPAk5fOmjG3mN6DKa/s1600/Victoria_Clarke.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for<br />
Public Affairs Victoria Clarke, creator of the<br />
<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Pentagon_military_analyst_program">Retired Military Analyst</a> propagansda program:<br />
She'll brainwash you <i>and your little dog too!</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">When deconstructing the flock of war hawkers who comprise the Pentarchy’s propaganda pantheon, I normally stick to teeing off on the top tier: four-star masters of mendacity like King David Petreaus and ex-Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, DoD civilian lore lords like <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Victoria_Clarke">Victoria Clarke</a>, and trusty echo chamberlains of the mainstream media’s military beat like <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=michael+r+gordon">Michael R. Gordon</a>, <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=dexter+filkins">Dexter Filkins</a> and the just god-awful <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=tom+ricks">Thomas E. Ricks</a>. <o:p></o:p></div></div><div><br />
</div><div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">But under the elite stratum of Goebbelites skulks a collection of players who range from the triple-A to the sandlot levels, commonly referred to as the “military press,” who need a shot from the long club as well. These bush leaguers don’t enjoy the vast market that the major moguls command. They do, however, have a captive audience among the crowd of fools, fanatics, true believers, ends-justify-means Jesuits, Doublethinkers and outright Cheney-class psychopaths who need to be kept on the straight and narrow warpath so they never examine the absurdities they have subscribed to for, in most cases, their entire lives. <o:p></o:p></div></div><div><br />
</div><div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">At the top of this pseudo-journalistic underclass are full-color glossy magazines like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Joint Force Quarterly</i> (aka <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">JFQ</i>) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Proceedings</i> that you might mistake at first glance for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gentleman’s Quarterly </i>(aka <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">GQ</i>) or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hustler</i>.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9zB9nVzNs_TCL1eMFReReQz7lnzQR2ymp3QkhzJ3TZTHgLV94NTbL6TiL1fqJjU7Cj7uFIWvnNQ0_U85-GuFNhk_pZX41t-TPrRaUF0mqkonoSWMw5e3LUgawCNeO8nwefk8H/s1600/Erica.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9zB9nVzNs_TCL1eMFReReQz7lnzQR2ymp3QkhzJ3TZTHgLV94NTbL6TiL1fqJjU7Cj7uFIWvnNQ0_U85-GuFNhk_pZX41t-TPrRaUF0mqkonoSWMw5e3LUgawCNeO8nwefk8H/s1600/Erica.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A funny thing happened on the way<br />
to the independent forum. </td></tr>
</tbody></table><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">JFQ</i> is the Joint Chiefs chairman’s personal propaganda platform, used to promote the military’s budgetary, doctrinal and political agendas. Then chairman Admiral Mike Mullen famously used it during the 2000 presidential campaign to warn of the adverse affect that a Democrat in the Oval Office would have on the “mission in Iraq,” and he did so in an article with the sublimely ironic title “Military Must Stay Apolitical.” Mullen, the spin-savvy son of a Hollywood press agent, was cunning enough to frame his political message as a wide-spread concern of “the troops,” but after segments of the alternate press threw the bull roar flag at him, Mullen’s keyboard commandos <a href="http://www.jcs.mil/chairman/speeches/JFQ_July2008.html">pulled the article</a> from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">JFQ</i> website. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"></div>The U.S. Naval Institute’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Proceedings</i>, a former pseudo-employer of mine, has for decades billed itself as an “independent forum,” a quizzical claim considering that the Institute’s offices are located on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Academy, and that the magazine’s <a href="http://www.usni.org/executive-staff">CEO</a> is a retired vice admiral, and that the <a href="http://www.usni.org/about/editorial-board">editorial board</a> consists of active duty career military officers and NCOs, and that every whole-grain company meme that passes through an admiral’s system and clings to a sheet of paper fertilizes a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Proceedings</i> cover story.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS_t3q7g1hdF6tRDDNhHqj8VbTC8S-bVGcEJ8YErzbmjWYOEMzxb7b-dMRMEow_MhN-nBqDHkdti2ve5M9DPgPazFvwpGxyGaySJX_LPzu7DkR6_s4_krWcfe-iwY-gWEOo56A/s1600/bBlowed.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS_t3q7g1hdF6tRDDNhHqj8VbTC8S-bVGcEJ8YErzbmjWYOEMzxb7b-dMRMEow_MhN-nBqDHkdti2ve5M9DPgPazFvwpGxyGaySJX_LPzu7DkR6_s4_krWcfe-iwY-gWEOo56A/s1600/bBlowed.gif" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Uncle Jimbo (left) and Crush of BLACKFIVE<br />
say "Baghdad blowed up <i>real</i> good!"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>In the bottom righthand quadrant of the continuum we have the likes of ex-Army person <a href="http://unclejimbo.com/blog1/?page_id=41">Uncle Jimbo</a>. Jimbo is the leading luminary of <a href="http://www.blackfive.net/main/">BLACKFIVE</a>, a compendium of comical commentary from a collection of Free Republican G.I. Joe Sixpacks who, like Jimbo, believe that “America is the greatest country to have sprung up here,” and therefore has a manifest mission to blow the lesser countries that have sprung up elsewhere to more smithereens than you can wag a dog at. According to BLACKFIVE’s editorial guidelines, “<a href="http://www.blackfive.net/main/2012/01/ptsd-and-bigotry-horton-slays-the-who.html">PTSD</a>” is spelled p-u-s-s-y.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"></div>Kitty cornered from the niche BLACKFIVE infests we have the military <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">intelligencia</i> who produce scholarly journals like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.fpri.org/orbis/">Orbis</a></i> and the now defunct <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Strategic Review</i>, both edited by Professor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackubin_Thomas_Owens">Mackubin Thomas Owens</a>. Owens is presently an Associate Dean of Academics at the U. S. Naval War College where, during my one year of shore duty in the ‘90s, I drank my way through the graduate curriculum in post-modern imperialism.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidhLYHzKIUa1CrCAS7s440A_sJ9YT5bSKM8EysfsNGaUG_PAl8Ro_MKTyB0RdCoQNhCCfuKyHVYvpZ-bIBV10GGNECExQLM4UTi3mXs6kFfwkiBmjGxhAhwbYok1Tw6a_JPAR-/s1600/Mack.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidhLYHzKIUa1CrCAS7s440A_sJ9YT5bSKM8EysfsNGaUG_PAl8Ro_MKTyB0RdCoQNhCCfuKyHVYvpZ-bIBV10GGNECExQLM4UTi3mXs6kFfwkiBmjGxhAhwbYok1Tw6a_JPAR-/s1600/Mack.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Professor Owens:<br />
"No, I don't expect you to do all of the<br />
assigned reading. I expect you to die."</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Profiled as a “conservative political figure,” Owens served in the Reagan administration, is a regular contributor to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/author/63438">National Review</a></i>, and is afraid of women in the military. The crowning milestone of Mack’s multitude of warmongering credentials was his co-authorship of the New American Centurions’ September 2000 monograph “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the neoconservative manifesto that outlined the Bush administration’s grand strategy for dominating the world by establishing a central military base of operations in Iraq. It’s little wonder, then, that elevated foreign policy journals like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Orbis</i> feature the studied sophistry of full-time war wonks who wage a relentless intellectual battle to preserve the the armed forces, armed conflict and their phony-baloney careers in academia, tank thinkery and the assistant cabinet secretarial pool. Surprisingly, Mack and many other of these high-toned war drummers are Vietnam veterans. They apparently figure that since they had to fight in a stupid war everyone else should too. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">Somewhere in the middle of all this mind-bending malevolence lies Military.com. Military.com’s editor-in-chief is retired naval flight officer Ward “<a href="http://wardcarroll.com/about_bio.html">Tomcat Guy</a>” Carroll, author of juvenile fiction about juvenile fighter pilots. Ward spent his active duty career lounging in the back seat of F-14 Tomcat fighter jets, drawing cartoons for in-house naval aviation magazines and playing his electric guitar in rock-and-roll bands. His post-Navy efforts as a double-dipping <a href="http://www.military.com/aboutus/aboutusarticle/0,15897,teambios,00.html">civil servant public affairs operative</a> make him uniquely responsible for the existence of one of the leading killers of U.S. Marines: the <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1666282,00.html">V-22 Osprey</a>. Ward was also a pseudo-employer of mine until he spiked one too many of my op-eds when they pulled the noses of his high-powered pals—most notably the detestable Tom Ricks—out of their sockets. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8mm4O_MgjWRm2MNhu3VRLm0BXDdNrVWe-NylbfDTPqy2qdWY97Vw-Oiaw2g2tyK1vIFkXSvTt9Ac4Lh1DFQFRQFCRdofw13_5AQwM-TFEPULHiUTlLWcaY-imejM1PFFNvkai/s1600/ward-with-cheap-trick-5a-tn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8mm4O_MgjWRm2MNhu3VRLm0BXDdNrVWe-NylbfDTPqy2qdWY97Vw-Oiaw2g2tyK1vIFkXSvTt9Ac4Lh1DFQFRQFCRdofw13_5AQwM-TFEPULHiUTlLWcaY-imejM1PFFNvkai/s1600/ward-with-cheap-trick-5a-tn.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Tomcat Guy" Ward Carroll with Cheap Trick.<br />
And they say irony is dead.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Bringing me on board was probably Ward’s half-acre attempt at pretending to have a balanced editorial policy, kind of like how FOX News kept Alan Colmes around all those years. But Ward keeps Military.com on the bandwidth by rebroadcasting whatever the Pentagon's reality rangers tell him to in a way that draws in Uncle Jimbo’s audience and one or two other viewers who can read with their mouths closed. A good example is a recent article by staff writer Michael Hoffman titled “<a href="http://www.military.com/news/article/texas-guardsmen-warn-of-iranian-influence-in-iraq.html?ESRC=eb.nl">Texas Guardsmen Warn of Iranian Influence in Iraq</a>.” It’s an even thinner than usual information attack on Iran that’s dripping in hysterical accusations and arid on supporting evidence.<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">“Military analysts and Middle East experts have spent years warning about the growing influence of Iran in Iraq,” the piece begins. “A group of Texas National Guardsmen watched it firsthand,” Hoffman tells us, and they came home to share their observations with “congressional lawmakers.” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The unnamed “analysts” and “experts” Hoffman is talking about are Victoria Clarke’s <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2011/12/preview-pentagon-propaganda-programmers.html">retired military shills</a> like Barry McCaffrey and Jack Jacobs, AIPAC prostitute <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=David_Albright">David Albright</a>, the fear-and-loathers at <a href="http://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/">United Against Nuclear Iran</a>, and the phalanx of other patriotic psychopaths who persistently demonize Iran without producing a parcel of proof to back their claims. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">“A group of Texas National Guardsmen,” we discover later in Hoffman’s story, are Major General Eddy Spurgin and Brigadier General William Smith, a pair of career weekend warriors looking to score points with the denizens of inner ring of the five-sided <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rätselschloss</i>. We also discover that the “congressional delegation” is Republican Congressman from Texas <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Conaway">Mike Conaway</a> who typically grips and grins with returning guardsmen who are stationed in his district. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Paragraphs deep into Hoffman’s <i>dreck</i> we find that Spurgin and Smith are concerned about Iran’s “malign influence” in Iraq. But “the Texas soldiers” presentation to Conaway “<span style="color: #434343;">didn’t focus solely on advanced military operations out of Iran” because they “didn’t witness” any “brash power displays.” Spurgin and Smith instead spun a scary campfire tale about “how something as simple as groceries allows Iran’s government to gain power in Iraq.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="color: #434343;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"></span>Sweet mother of pearl. Everyone involved in the fabrication of this story is as phony as a blue dollar bill. Bush crony Conaway is a member of the House Armed Services Committee who gained his military expertise during a two-year Army that he served at Fort Hood, Texas around the same time that young Mr. Bush was AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. The “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._36th_Infantry_Division">infantry division</a>” that Spurgin and Smith command exercises “training and readiness oversight” of other Texas Army National Guard units that, like Guard units from every state, perform combat support functions as doctors, mechanics, clerks, cooks, etc. The division’s deployment to Iraq was no doubt vital to the care and feeding of the trigger pullers doing the actual fighting, but how it put Spurgin or Smith in a position to observe Iranian infiltration of Iraq will no doubt remain an unsolved mystery. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcy2EywfB9DRv6bi8PUZdtxxlMvp1QMtT_-qX1vVEV4VTBB8GxJOCCdKowTzxQiD1_Qi1FwzSsOFAD4ycD5y82YMHX0IAdtQYDRrdwo3vs0_CDAWViGbBm_pdkRJ5FD2iKcbvd/s1600/smitty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcy2EywfB9DRv6bi8PUZdtxxlMvp1QMtT_-qX1vVEV4VTBB8GxJOCCdKowTzxQiD1_Qi1FwzSsOFAD4ycD5y82YMHX0IAdtQYDRrdwo3vs0_CDAWViGbBm_pdkRJ5FD2iKcbvd/s1600/smitty.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Brigadier Smith: Lean, mean, Texas<br />
National Guard fighting machine.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="color: #434343;">According to <a href="http://www.agd.state.tx.us/36id/">General Spurgin’s official bio</a>, he is a conservationist in civilian life, suggesting that his </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #434343;">experience in intelligence is limited to unearthing the secrets of preserving wildlife and natural resources. <a href="http://www.ng.mil/ngbgomo/library/bio/2112.htm">Brigadier Smith’s bio</a> doesn’t say what he does full time, or give any inkling of how he comes to understand the methods by which Iran is using groceries to take over Iraq, though his official photo suggests that he does have a working knowledge of groceries.</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="color: #434343;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><span style="color: #434343;">Military journalist Mike Hoffman used to make a living as an Air Force intelligence officer. As I’ve noted before, military intelligence is to intelligence what Kenny G is to jazz. Air Force intelligence is to military intelligence what Barry Manilow is to rock and roll. Maybe that explains why Hoffman didn't question any of the intelligence Spurgin and Smith fed him for the article. Maybe it also explains how he wound up being a mildly successful military correspondent. As an intelligence weenie he learned the art of fabricating facts that his warmonger masters wanted to hear, so tapping out hackery--like this cockamamie "report" about a pair of ambitious play-warriors that was transparent excuse to repeat long standing but still unsubstantiated allegations that Iran has been training and arming Iraqi militants to kill American troops--was was a natural transition for him. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">As to the question of whether I’m being a big blue martinet for chaining a fistful of minor league news mongers to the whipping post, the answer is not just “no.” It’s one word longer. These Durham bull feather merchants would snap at a chance to move up to The Show faster than you can say “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” They’re every bit as eager and able to peddle death, destruction and human misery in pursuit of personal fame and fortune as their counterparts in the Big Brother Broadcast, and they not only deserve to be regarded with the same degree of disdain and ridicule, they demand it. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><i><span style="color: #434343;">Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1">Bathtub Admirals</a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</span></i></div></div></div></div></div><div><div></div></div></div></div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-66870938008396396372012-01-03T05:13:00.016-05:002012-01-05T12:39:53.636-05:00Wars of Diminishing Returns<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">by Jeff Huber<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">“We are engaged in a long war…” – <a href="http://www.newt.org/solutions/tell-truth-about-national-security">Newt Gingrich</a><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">“No nation ever profited from a long war” – Sun Tzu<o:p></o:p></div></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">We continue to hurtle further down the slope that leads to the edge of the same cliff that the Athenians and the Romans and the English and the French and the Germans and the Japanese and the Russians drove themselves over. I wrote some years ago that empires have a penchant for becoming footnotes in succeeding empires’ history books because they fail to learn that the military power that brought them to preeminence was insufficient to keep them there. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The United States has arrived at the moment the Romans found themselves in during the reign of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodus">Commodus</a>, son of the general and stoic philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius">Marcus Aurelius</a>, the last of Rome’s “Five Good Emperors.” They say the acorn never falls far from the tree, but someone must have come along and kicked Commodus down the hill and over the dale. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3LlqUaR9y7DyDXxTkZQW5rHlZofYW97o3qUCnNs4ooEczySfpNnQ2j2e0gGKeFOkv3Lmuv7EcIinQJJkFa2H3HpZhjEsJSjr4lqv8fni2snR0G5fyb0H_q2COtoCU6N4RdUu_/s1600/cheney.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3LlqUaR9y7DyDXxTkZQW5rHlZofYW97o3qUCnNs4ooEczySfpNnQ2j2e0gGKeFOkv3Lmuv7EcIinQJJkFa2H3HpZhjEsJSjr4lqv8fni2snR0G5fyb0H_q2COtoCU6N4RdUu_/s1600/cheney.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dick Cheney circa 1500.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Commodus was the first in a long line of Roman emperors to consolidate his power by bribing Rome’s elite military forces into supporting him. Eventually, as Renaissance era political science virtuoso <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavelli">Niccolò Machiavelli</a> noted in his seminal work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=YxcM_GaR9g0C&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=machiavelli+praetorian+guard&source=bl&ots=S5Pem1tl2h&sig=h9IIb7cb5APP57frwPt7K5MzQZw&hl=en&ei=s9zkSrmzPJDeMcvx2K8B&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=machiavelli%20praetorian%20guard&f=false">The Art of War</a></i>, the Praetorian Guard became “insolent and formidable, not only to the Senate but to the emperors themselves” and in time the Guard “put many emperors to death and disposed of the Empire as it pleased.” That, Machiavelli observed, was decisive point that transformed the Romans into the Italians of his day, a pseudo-confederacy of warring principalities that became a low-hanging-fruit target for foreign interlopers. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">Like it or not, the history of humanity is the history of its wars. Other stuff happened, sure, stuff that enriched human existence rather than debased it, but none of our man-made beauty would have been created without the man-made horror that accompanied armed conflict. Italy’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance">Renaissance</a> period that spanned the 14<sup>th</sup> to the 17<sup>th</sup> century, a flowering of literature, science, art, education and intellectual growth, could not have occurred without the internecine violent conflict that Machiavelli chronicled (and played a large part in fomenting. One could justifiably argue that Machiavelli was Renaissance Italy's moral and political equivalent of Dick Cheney, though old Nick leaves dirty Dick in the dust when it comes to cognition). Conflict is, in fact, the very essence of art, as the core purpose of art is to resolve conflict. You will never witness a superior work of art, be it visual (painting, sculpture and so on), language (plays, movies, books and the like), musical (including the dreck you see on the annual Grammy awards) or social (politics, war, sports) that is not characterized by an underlying tension created by opposing forces. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Like other human societies, the America we know today could not have come to be—for better or for worse—without its <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_War">unrelenting procession of wars</a>. The birth of our nation was its armed rebellion and revolution against the British. We then fought a line of internal and external wars of establishment, consolidation and expansion. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War">Spanish American War</a>, in which we enlarged and solidified our sphere of influence in the Pacific and the Caribbean, was the war that announced our intention to be reckoned with as an equal of the Old World powers. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">America's intervention in World War I America’s insistence that it would have a say in Europe’s affairs. It also, in retrospect, proved to be a prime example of how war aims, especially the aims of optional wars, are seldom realized and, moreover, usually give way to unintended and unwanted consequences. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGZdr4sGZxWrc-aSjllQOt3pmDoGc6E3LXChDFld20IlcCnXZlHAnova8wKLSc_0EoYZ2n5ePqed8Wjll6lUZKsvNVph1-1F4oflNzBBOrji4jgj2gSx67TQPfSVsU0Sm9ritu/s1600/evil+dick.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGZdr4sGZxWrc-aSjllQOt3pmDoGc6E3LXChDFld20IlcCnXZlHAnova8wKLSc_0EoYZ2n5ePqed8Wjll6lUZKsvNVph1-1F4oflNzBBOrji4jgj2gSx67TQPfSVsU0Sm9ritu/s1600/evil+dick.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Neocon Dick after five centuries<br />
of cryogenic preservation.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>I subscribe to the school that says we would have ascended to global hegemony if we had stiff-armed “The Great War” and let the Euros slug it out among themselves until they’d lost their taste for war forever. Then we could have dictated terms by which we fed Europe until it could grow another generation of able-bodied men who could take up the plow again. That would most probably have preempted the need for a Second World War to mop up the unfinished business of the first one, and would likely have also averted the emergence of the Soviet Union and the Cold War and our dirty little third world proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam and, most relevant to us now, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_in_Afghanistan">first superpower substitute war in Afghanistan</a>, in which we created a guerilla force adversary to defeat the Soviets as payback for Vietnam that we ourselves are hopelessly, haplessly grappling with today. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">But we let ourselves get stuck on our zippers in the First World War when peace didn’t produce the results Woodrow Wilson had envisioned, and immersion in the Second World War was pretty much unavoidable, as was the rest of the follow-on fornicating mess. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Application of military force in World War II established American as a first-magnitude superpower. Since then, however, our investment in war has produced exponentially diminishing returns. Our best-trained, best-equipped military has only been effective as a force-in-being that, like a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being">fleet-in-being</a>, can exert influence on world events through the simple fact of its existence. Our Cold War arsenal clearly deterred another outbreak of general war in Europe and a global nuclear doom <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Krieg</i>. But every time we committed ourselves to fuzzy pretext land wars against pathetically inferior forces, we managed to shoot our baby makers off. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">By the time the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, America had been on a wartime footing for a half-century, and the shadow powers that be had no interest in allowing the country to become that kinder, gentler, shining city on the hill that Big Daddy and The Great Communicator talked about. We’re still on a war economy for the same reasons we’re still in an oil economy and a tobacco economy. War and oil and tobacco are still making large lucre, and it’s a bad business decision to change products when the old product is still turning a pandemic profit.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOuVV2EbcDVVIdh8SV8L3E5Ezk-VxujCVf3z96nxA2plUsJQDd04-TfCMz-SAtruiS_bv9h7XWQ8AddrRna_b09_o7WvX6pksA27nxSsjORAn51KUzSjeeaGLztmE8JFivkKPA/s1600/guardians.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOuVV2EbcDVVIdh8SV8L3E5Ezk-VxujCVf3z96nxA2plUsJQDd04-TfCMz-SAtruiS_bv9h7XWQ8AddrRna_b09_o7WvX6pksA27nxSsjORAn51KUzSjeeaGLztmE8JFivkKPA/s1600/guardians.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The trilateral power elite.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>That’s largely why the New American Centurions aka the neoconservative cabal were able to so completely gain the support of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being">Rockefeller trilateralists</a> and whatever other theoretical conspirators we suspect to be the hidden <a href="http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/19/where_the_power_elite_gets_its_power/">masters of the known universe</a>. In September 2000, the Centurions published a neo-imperialist manifesto titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.antiwar.com/orig/stockbauer1.html">Rebuilding America’s Defenses</a></i> that proclaimed, in essence, that American had a global leadership responsibility to single-handedly ensure the survival of warfare as a vibrant, ongoing human institution because nobody else had to the oomph to do it anymore. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Even the neocons must have realized that their stated ambition sounded like so much whack-a-doodle-doo, because they confessed that the American public was unlikely to fall for their shenanigan ideology barring a “new Peal Harbor.” Then 9/11/2001 came along, almost a year to the day after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rebuilding America’s Defenses</i> polluted the information highway, and the neos got just what they were looking for. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The grand-sounding doctrines and strategies we were promised would assure victory in the “new kind of war” we were embarking upon—<a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=sticker+shock+and+awe">Shock and Awe</a> and Network Centric Warfare and Counterinsurgency aka COIN and the Revolution in Military Affairs aka RMA and <a href="http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,NI_Transformers_1003,00.html">Transformation</a> and the <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/28/opinion/la-oe-hayden28-2010mar28">Long War</a> and <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/war-on-terror-promises-era-of-persistent-conflict-30653/">Persistent Conflict</a> and the rest of the unrefined used horse lunch that the Pentagon and its pet newsmongers have been spoon feeding us for roughly the last decade—have been nothing but one big, red, shiny, fat-assed, expensive failure after the next. Every place we have bombed, boarded, bludgeoned, beheaded and bloodied, from <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/13/132997/a-second-iraqi-province-seeks.html">Iraq</a> to the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/militant-groups-in-pakistan-form-united-front/2012/01/03/gIQAwEvMYP_story.html">Bananastans</a> to <a href="http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/30/al-qaeda-sends-fighters-to-libya/">Libya</a> to <a href="http://allafrica.com/stories/201201031286.html">Somalia</a> to <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203899504577126883574284126.html">Yemen</a>, looks like a big-city zoo ten minutes after the force-ten earthquake hit it. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Our generals and the sycophant politicians who grovel at their spit-polished feet would have us believe that we now have to dedicate the next 80 years or so into rounding up all the critters we let loose and putting them back in their cages. Well guess what, folks. All them loose critters are making new critters faster than we can give Dick Cheney's pals no-bid contracts to build new cages to put them all in. You cannot win un-winnable wars. The longer you pursue them, the longer it takes to lose them. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">We have overreacted to the 9/11 attacks to a degree that must have exceeded Osama bin Laden’s hopes by magnitudes. In exacting revenge for approximately 3,000 American innocents killed in the New York and Washington D.C. guerilla air raids, we have directly caused the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Asians and have <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/opinion/the-forgotten-wages-of-war.html?_r=2">destroyed the lives of millions</a> of others. We spend more on defense than the <a href="http://www.thomhartmann.com/forum/2011/12/us-really-does-spend-more-defense-rest-world">rest of the world combined</a> to wage wars with vaguely identifies adversaries that have no defense budget whatsoever while our economy follows the birds to their summer retreats. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha13fukgb8xmBXKX6QIlwzcqDBNKGnVJ1NEDnGJwORo0Mfo14ePNyrkEkQEpY3UiZrriwmKmu8pUyTpN6EbUf2HG5OQJ256g-NSlCOlebGx5yhFaRZ3ZArhmIc0hl_6C1Lm7nB/s1600/wounded+soldier.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha13fukgb8xmBXKX6QIlwzcqDBNKGnVJ1NEDnGJwORo0Mfo14ePNyrkEkQEpY3UiZrriwmKmu8pUyTpN6EbUf2HG5OQJ256g-NSlCOlebGx5yhFaRZ3ZArhmIc0hl_6C1Lm7nB/s1600/wounded+soldier.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">G.I. Shmo</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Our military’s officer corps has become a culture of Petraeus worshiping yes-colonels who pine to become yes-generals. The only warriors who count anymore are the bull feather merchant marines who conjure the pro-war propaganda that their echo chamberlains in the media pawn off on us as “news.” Our country has become the abject servant of the American Pentarchy, that cabal of <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26733319/">sandbox generals</a>, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/01/mullen-says-military-strike-plan-iran/">bathtub admirals</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html">beltway bandits</a>, <a href="http://www.jewishjournal.com/images/articles/obamaaipac350h.jpg">AIPAC rats</a>, <a href="http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/kimberly_kagan/">Warlord Fauntleroys</a>, <a href="http://old.nationalreview.com/document/document092101b.shtml">New American Centurions</a>, <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-praetorians.html">post-modern Praetorians</a>, <a href="http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2008/11/do-democrats-even-deserve-filibuster_14.html">Long War legislators</a>, <a href="http://www.calvin.edu/january/2003/krauthammer.htm">Dr. Strangeloves</a>, <a href="http://unclejimbo.com/blog1/?page_id=41">G.I. Joe Six-Packs</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Vets_for_Freedom">Pavlov’s dogs of war</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1914822,00.html">patriotic psychopaths </a>and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the <a href="http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm">long dreamed-of permanent American security state </a>a reality. The military-industrial complex that launched our reign as a superpower is <o:p>about to grind it to a bitter end.</o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">But heck, who wants to look a 19-year old wounded war veteran in what’s left of his face and tell him all that?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1">Bathtub Admirals</a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</i></div></div></div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-33372110311561711942011-12-27T09:59:00.017-05:002012-01-02T20:12:41.620-05:00Pentagon Propaganda Programmers Pardoned; Pro-War News at Eleven<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">by Jeff Huber<br />
<br />
The man who was perhaps the last of the true investigative reporters on the Pentarchy beat may have just taken a swan dive into the canvas.<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-XQumyG2WtFpegh0DM79hVzcqK12ppbmV4JjrDa8M7MVxmUdOjWR8ih2NlQyao7G9LopqTThKFSDkthaxK4pUwoSljWQPmWupQJguuQTd6Eb3_Ibkv5yz0pJe_v4STswExSbb/s1600/The+Operation+Iraqi+Freeedom+W.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="145" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-XQumyG2WtFpegh0DM79hVzcqK12ppbmV4JjrDa8M7MVxmUdOjWR8ih2NlQyao7G9LopqTThKFSDkthaxK4pUwoSljWQPmWupQJguuQTd6Eb3_Ibkv5yz0pJe_v4STswExSbb/s320/The+Operation+Iraqi+Freeedom+W.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Look at those yo-yos. That's the way you do it.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>For years, David Barstow of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i>, amid a phalanx of the <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2010/09/all-kings-bull-feather-merchants.html">warmongery’s</a> favorite echo chamberlains, the likes of Michael R. Gordon and Dexter Filkins and the disgraceful <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2009/05/monday-preview-two-ricks-make-wrong.html">Thomas E. Ricks</a>, managed to dig up unpleasant truths about our Whack-a-Doodle Wars on Evil. Even more incredibly, Barstow was able to get the truth to us via the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">NYT</i>, the propaganda conduit of record that abetted <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=White_House_Iraq_Group">Dick Cheney and his malignant mob</a> in selling the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-iraqis-us-says-hussein-intensifies-quest-for-bomb-parts.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">snake-oil intelligence</a> to the American public that led to the invasion of Iraq. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">Barstow’s crowing coup against American’s military-media junta was his 2008 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?pagewanted=all">expose</a> of the Pentagon’s gray propaganda operation know as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_military_analyst_program">Retired Military Analyst</a> (RMA) program. The RMA was launched by Donald Rumsfeld’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (aka Head Assistant Bull Feather Merchant) Victoria Clarke in early 2002 to recruit “key influentials” to peddle Operation Iraqi Freedom on the Big Brother Broadcast. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">RMA was a glad-handing, highway-robbing, war-hawking, hootenanny. Clarke’s spin commandos wined, dined, sipped and supped a gang of retired senior officers who had gone into the defense contracting and tank thinking field, and fed them an endless supply of finely crafted pro-war talking points. The RMAs went on air and a) palmed off said talking points as their own original analyses and b) neglected to mention that they stood to profit from extension and escalation of the war by way of their business connections in the defense industry. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxUv7zD9LR8zSpCz0f3qrhBLISxrEmXTO4G7G5UGPqRXr4gfdYkFSvWGgfgqhMR97W22QyOkZP2RHUI8hILG3l50udYBIYD7Go7I9AGd-60yMVxvQuzXIFnUa32MhEqrF1Tt3C/s1600/general+evil.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxUv7zD9LR8zSpCz0f3qrhBLISxrEmXTO4G7G5UGPqRXr4gfdYkFSvWGgfgqhMR97W22QyOkZP2RHUI8hILG3l50udYBIYD7Go7I9AGd-60yMVxvQuzXIFnUa32MhEqrF1Tt3C/s1600/general+evil.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That's "<i>General</i> Evil" to you. I didn't slaughter<br />
my way to the four-star level to be called<br />
"<i>Mister </i>Evil." </td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Retired Army Colonel Ken Allard, one of the most prominent RMAs who, during his active duty career, taught information warfare at National Defense University, admitted the program was “Psyops [aka ‘psychological operations’] on steroids, a “coherent, active policy.” If you played ball with your information handlers, you thrived. If you didn’t, you got shut out and the news networks lost interest in you. “Night and day,” Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.” (So sad, Ken, but I’d feel a lot sorrier about you getting so wet if you hadn’t jumped up and volunteered right away when Dad asked who wanted to help wash the car.)</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">Along with Ken Allard, the names that go with the faces on the RMA <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Pentagon_military_analyst_program">Wall of Shame</a> include Wayne Downing, Rick Francona, James Marks, Thomas McInerny, Monty Miegs, Bernie Trainor, John Warden, Thomas Wilkerson and Jack Jacobs, the Yoda-like war wonk who has forged a lucrative retirement career out of shamelessly shilling his Vietnam War Medal of Honor. But the most heinous the RMA rangers was retired four-star general <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/washington/30general.html?pagewanted=all">Barry McCaffrey</a>, who so brazenly used his military credentials and his Washington insider influence to reap war profits that Barstow described his racket as a “one man’s military-industrial complex.”<br />
<br />
It’s little wonder that McCaffrey stood head and haunches above the rest of the retired war panderers. During his active duty days, he was one of the most malevolent military men to ever sport a service dress uniform. If the military had a real judiciary instead of its Uniform Code of Marsupial Justice*, McCaffrey would have been convicted of capital felonies after the first Gulf War for the <a href="http://www.salon.com/2000/05/15/hersh_4/">Massacre at Rumalia</a> during which McCaffrey disobeyed direct orders to commit the premeditated mass murder of retreating Iraqi soldiers during a declared ceasefire. (According to a colleague, McCaffrey exhorted his subordinate commanders over the radio to find a way for him to “go kill all of those bastards.”) Army investigators later exonerated McCaffrey of wrongdoing, just as Pentagon investigators later exonerated everyone at the Pentagon involved in the RMA Program.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">What a bitter sample of uneven-handedness it was that Barstow had to be the one to write the Christmas Eve <i>NYT </i>story titled “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/us/pentagon-finds-no-fault-in-its-ties-to-tv-analysts.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha24">Pentagon Finds No Fault in Ties to TV Analysts</a>.” One has to wonder if Barstow volunteered to write the story or if the onerous task was crammed past his tonsils by the <i>NYT</i>’s war-worshiping editorial staff. Whatever the case, irony, if it were still alive in the collective American consciousness, would have savored the way that Barstow told the story. If this was his last round, at least he went out fighting. <br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZB9ZSKm-5OvrG_0NbNAswrAMLsk5CcZ7LKRrKB9bn-pQ9Ijo7yyY7Yy0CoW5_XjbVhHh6Ef4FoSv5FvhcgvANyrjsb8p2ZqPr8Fhf8WdwqBOMahJj-sBWEfRlibvlTkgJvIXC/s1600/medal+of+honor.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZB9ZSKm-5OvrG_0NbNAswrAMLsk5CcZ7LKRrKB9bn-pQ9Ijo7yyY7Yy0CoW5_XjbVhHh6Ef4FoSv5FvhcgvANyrjsb8p2ZqPr8Fhf8WdwqBOMahJj-sBWEfRlibvlTkgJvIXC/s1600/medal+of+honor.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hi. I'm Jack Jacobs. Aren't I cuddly?<br />
Do you like my Medal of Honor? <br />
Then please buy more of the wars I sell<br />
here on NBC so I can make more<br />
money from them. And don't forget to<br />
SUPPORT THE TROOPS!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>You’re not far into the story before you realize that the title should have read “Pentagon Finds No Fault <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">with Itself</i> in Ties to TV Analysts.” It turns out that the recently completed two-year Pentagon inspector general (aka IG) inquiry is the second such inquiry into the RMA shenanigans Barstow tells us. The IG’s office issued an earlier report, in 2009, that exonerated Pentagon Public Affairs and the RMAs and everyone else involved in the RMA program after it interviewed Pentagon Public Affairs personnel and RMAs and everyone else involved in the RMA program. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Shortly after 2009 report hit the streets, someone in the IG office who was senior to whoever had put it on the streets pulled it back off the streets, saying that it was so riddled with inaccuracies and flaws that none of its conclusions could be relied upon. Later that year a second report was ordered, the one just released. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The investigators who conjured the second report claimed that they could not find sufficient documentation to determine the program's strategy, objectives or intent. So the “investigation” consisted of interviews with former Rumsfeld public affairs aids, including Victoria Clarke, who created and ran the RMA program. From those interviews the “investigators” concluded that the “outreach activities were intended to serve as an open information exchange with credible third-party subject-matter experts” who could “explain military issues, actions and strategies to the American public.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Though Barstow did not offer an authorial judgment statement on the second IG report’s conclusion, a slow child can see that it is the exact equivalent of a police chief pulling over a visibly, audibly and aromatically obviously intoxicated mayor, asking him if he has been drinking, and letting him drive away when he answers “No.” The second IG RMA investigation has not been recalled, so whoever spiked the first one must have retired and been replaced by a, ah, less principled officer who more suitably conforms to the military's Petraeus-era standards of ethics. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX6xE-TL5fLQM53p_R1OMnodgJkBtlrXHB3SeeUUd_GfcaL1LPvlB8cQm3r0wXesbbGLpN47rl9qQ9LpkYeZAUX2g2dHIHVU1Z7mJhgrze_xLqxzfiVoPZ_H8Q7arnEet7GkdU/s1600/warbucks.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX6xE-TL5fLQM53p_R1OMnodgJkBtlrXHB3SeeUUd_GfcaL1LPvlB8cQm3r0wXesbbGLpN47rl9qQ9LpkYeZAUX2g2dHIHVU1Z7mJhgrze_xLqxzfiVoPZ_H8Q7arnEet7GkdU/s1600/warbucks.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I didn't make my<br />
first billion until<br />
<i>after</i> I was a general.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Lamentably, much of the American population’s cognizant skills have fallen far beneath the level of a slow child’s. So when standard citizens see the likes of McCaffrey and Jacobs appearing on NBC as military analysts (yes, they’re <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">baaaaaaaaaack</i>), it won’t occur to them that these are the same retired bums who have been lying to them about our Woebegone Wars all along. Or if they do remember anything about the RMA scandal, one of their FOX News aficionado chums will chime in with “Nah, they had two big investigations of those guys, went on for four years, didn’t find nothin’ on ‘em. It was all bull roar.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">*The UCMJ is the justice system that sent retarded Army Private <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynndie_England">Lynndie England</a> to jail over prison abuse while Donald Rumsfeld, chief architect of the prisoner abuse program, retired high on the dole in his <a href="http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/06/30/travel/escapes/30michaels.html?pagewanted=all">mansion</a> on the eastern shore, the one next to Dick Cheney’s multi-million dollar monstrosity. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1">Bathtub Admirals</a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</i> </div></div></div></div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-83868727213892973842011-12-26T09:47:00.000-05:002011-12-26T09:47:54.911-05:00Moving to Wednesdays<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv9m7Rbo0jwiYnDMaQiov3X2bMD2GiR_JNvIak8GLOu9AyaQRhSQrd4xhalY6aDjcZCvrXtHW-SMd5vVCH8baPzijF841Klv7hvZHgOAl9Ub5g1PlVc8xEiN340f4lZebihGKu/s1600/speep.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgv9m7Rbo0jwiYnDMaQiov3X2bMD2GiR_JNvIak8GLOu9AyaQRhSQrd4xhalY6aDjcZCvrXtHW-SMd5vVCH8baPzijF841Klv7hvZHgOAl9Ub5g1PlVc8xEiN340f4lZebihGKu/s1600/speep.jpeg" /></a></div>I completed the first draft of <i>Sandbox Generals</i> on 21 December. Now it's time to take an operational pause for the cause and wait for a better sun angle before I re-attack and revise. In the meantime, I'll be filling the psychic space with a number of other projects, among which will be mounting a slightly more fully developed version of the weekly P.S. column that I'll post on Wednesdays instead of Tuesdays, beginning on Wednesday 28 December. <br />
<br />
I hope you're enjoying your holidays. <br />
<br />
J</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-45583813166071820242011-12-19T19:12:00.003-05:002011-12-20T06:51:41.349-05:00Newt the Impaler<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">By Jeff Huber<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0RgvkkuiHAL2NZ_vTERnTOMTQvFN8DTyjmL4_Swa5GdM3aLyW4TVOL0Ii4L1FJunq5CN3bMO1seUHds2fRWNQhvZDlD94dFSlrSlUMHhFCQqDF5b0kEFBL6JPlJubKM6GG7kO/s1600/Vlad.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0RgvkkuiHAL2NZ_vTERnTOMTQvFN8DTyjmL4_Swa5GdM3aLyW4TVOL0Ii4L1FJunq5CN3bMO1seUHds2fRWNQhvZDlD94dFSlrSlUMHhFCQqDF5b0kEFBL6JPlJubKM6GG7kO/s1600/Vlad.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Newt circa 1465.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">President <a href="http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Gingrich_Newt">Newt Gingrich</a> (shudder) is likely to have a foreign policy as draconian as his domestic policies were during his reign of terror as House Speaker. Newt’s cockamamie “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America">Contract with America</a>” that, if successful, would have impaled the nation’s middle and poor working classes ala <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_Impaler">Vlad Tepes</a>, the real life model for Bram Stokers Dracula, long before young Messrs. Bush and Obama ever got a chance to. While Newt’s domestic agenda channels Marie Antoinette’s infamous “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake">Let the eat cake</a>” decree, his attitude toward the rest of the planet can be best summarized as “Let them eat shrapnel”—the “them” in that statement being people who are Muslim and living anywhere within a B-2 bomber’s combat range of Jerusalem or American Israel Public Affair Committee (AIPAC) headquarters on H Street in Washington D.C., which pretty much includes all people who are Muslim. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">At the top of Newt’s wrong-color, wrong-creed, wrong-color target list are the <a href="http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/12/11/3090671/gingrich-sticks-by-palestinian-comment-draws-rebukes-from-gop-candidates">Palestinians</a>, who Newt claims are an “invented people.” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">When criticized by his fellow GOP presidential hopefuls for his remark, Newt responded that what he said was “historically true” and “factually correct.” That’s only the case if we view the term “true” in the context of Steven Colbert’s “truthiness” rubric, and if by “factually correct” we’re referring to the kinds of fabricated facts that conform to the sort of political correctness that resonates with Newt’s prospective rabid right voter base whose “conservative values” are rooted in cherished traditions like cross burnings and lynchings. (I'm in persistent wonderment at how American bigots who once hated Jews became I-Stand-with-Israelites once they were programmed to hate Muslims instead.)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The “invented people” meme was invented by AIPAC bull feather merchants to refute Palestinian claims of a right to a homeland. AIPAC’s tank thinkers haven’t bothered to clarify who exactly they think invented the Palestinian people. I’m guessing it wasn’t Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein or Mel Brooks’ either. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">It doesn’t take a historian, either a real one or a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/newt-gingrich-historian-fact-checker-biography/2011/12/13/gIQAJqiMsO_blog.html">fake one like Newt</a>, to realize that the people who invented the Palestinian people were other Palestinian people, and that Palestinian people have been making replicas of themselves since before the days of old testament references to Palestine. If ever there were an invented people, it would be Americans like Newt whose ancestors, at the time that Old Testament Palestinians were making babies in Palestine, were making babies somewhere other than in America. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDVnj2jNhyphenhyphen5cvxWngIn2syCy9Nx4R3N7_pA_vfDqi90FYZuOS7L3n-ChbwhbzgnzXZR5xOSNzG8pDBWPhN7PVHjK5KPYTD7rPHXEmfFKr1FKaRrpAdZ2aPZ782_dsfjnpYLS5M/s1600/Speaker.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDVnj2jNhyphenhyphen5cvxWngIn2syCy9Nx4R3N7_pA_vfDqi90FYZuOS7L3n-ChbwhbzgnzXZR5xOSNzG8pDBWPhN7PVHjK5KPYTD7rPHXEmfFKr1FKaRrpAdZ2aPZ782_dsfjnpYLS5M/s1600/Speaker.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Speaker Newt seduces an intern.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">But that kind of clear thinking doesn’t interest a phony intellectual like Newt, who dedicates his acumen not to the acquisition of truth but to the acquisition of power. And one of the best ways for Newt to acquire the kind of power he’s running for now is to align himself with whatever malignant purposes Israel would have him pursue, and to appeal to a fearful and hateful voter base. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">In that light, Newt’s stance toward<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/us/politics/gingrichs-foreign-policy-words-summon-the-cold-war-but-enemy-is-iran.html?_r=2&hp"> Iran</a> is hardly surprising. Newt says we face a protracted ideological struggle with the Muslim world that will resemble he Cold War, and he casts Iran in the role of the old Soviet Union. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Just shuck my jive, will you Newt? Newt reminds me of a hard drinking retired Vietnam era Army veteran of my acquaintance who we’ll call Johnny Shiloh. About seven Budweisers into lunch not long ago, the subject of refusing to hold diplomatic talks with Iran came up, and well, Johnny came to life and said the best story he ever heard on that there situation was about the hunter who ran into a bear in the woods. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The bear says, hey, don’t shoot, now. All I want is a full stomach and all you want is a bear coat. So why don’t you put that gun down and we’ll talk, and I’m sure we can come up with a solution that will give us both what we want. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">So sure enough, Johnny said, the hunter put his gun down and the bear got a full belly and the hunter got a bear coat. Johnny slapped his knee, and said, “Yep, best story on that subject I ever heard,” several times.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">I said, “Johnny, in your story, the hunter is the United States and the bear is Iran, right?” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Johnny, taking a slug of Bud, shook his head hesitantly, figuring I was maybe about to shoot his allegory full of large caliber holes. “Now Iran’s military budget is less than one percent the size of ours," I continued. "In fact, our total defense related expenditures exceed Iran’s entire Gross Domestic Product. Iran can’t project conventional power more than a stone’s throw from its borders and regardless of what <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2011/11/preview-hey-i-know-what-lets-lie-about.html">Israel and its UN Stoogette Susan Rice</a> bullied the International Atomic Energy Agency into saying in its latest report, Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTqG8SO5a_oHjENsDmvwyR2x1YT-Ue5pJHSw8jKPrU8HmSgtJz1m2dJv1fBBQy37_jZkR0WO8PdaLBpGMLbVyE-OuJabS4i3LO4HtRt4rGtYTvlUaKQtMsaOLBVZNPaO0CLzW7/s1600/light.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTqG8SO5a_oHjENsDmvwyR2x1YT-Ue5pJHSw8jKPrU8HmSgtJz1m2dJv1fBBQy37_jZkR0WO8PdaLBpGMLbVyE-OuJabS4i3LO4HtRt4rGtYTvlUaKQtMsaOLBVZNPaO0CLzW7/s1600/light.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Newt's lighter side.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">So if Iran is the bear in this story, I told, Johnny, it’s not even a teddy bear. It’s more of a gummy bear. And how on earth, I asked Johnny to explain, did the hunter manage to get himself swallowed by a gummy bear?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Johnny took another slurp of Bud suds and said, “Best story I heard yet on the subject.”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">By comparing Iran to the Soviet Bear, Newt is crafting a comparison every bit as asinine as Johnny Shiloh’s metaphor. Yet people throughout the country are taking Newt seriously. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">It may be that America is finally ready for the Full Newt Monty. He brings out the very worst in the very worst element of the American body politic.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">So there’s an excellent chance he’ll win the GOP nomination. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1">Bathtub Admirals</a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</i> </div></div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-44293527827281248602011-12-12T09:56:00.025-05:002011-12-13T07:55:00.664-05:00Dumb, Dumber and Doonesbury<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">by Jeff Huber<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">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. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzoaBRsLPN5wtU-JPf-DTRequZxsaus1optTbYw2-U-8L65ehlWyRIEEgLXYouL8msAny5ZT0hvrgoL-_sdXTvJUaUwGcCB1FYWckmCjzWvKPzci1XllYi8uJQBv4nwUsnEiGF/s1600/220px-GarryTrudeau.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzoaBRsLPN5wtU-JPf-DTRequZxsaus1optTbYw2-U-8L65ehlWyRIEEgLXYouL8msAny5ZT0hvrgoL-_sdXTvJUaUwGcCB1FYWckmCjzWvKPzci1XllYi8uJQBv4nwUsnEiGF/s1600/220px-GarryTrudeau.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Must remember...this is my shoulder,<br />
this is my elbow, this is my shoulder...</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">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. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Huffington Post</i>’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). <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Case in point is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doonsebury</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">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 <a href="http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2011/12/07">7 December strip</a> 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.”<br />
<br />
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:</div><blockquote class="tr_bq">What a crushing disappointment to see in your <a href="http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2011/12/07"><span style="color: #06b070; text-decoration: none;">7 Dec. strip</span></a> that you too have chugged the propaganda that blames Iran for our failures in Iraq. The recent <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=IAEA"><span style="color: #06b070; text-decoration: none;">IAEA report</span></a> 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. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">The loop-tape allegations that Iran has armed and trained Shiite Iraqi rebels <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=190%2C000"><span style="color: #06b070; text-decoration: none;">have never been substantiated</span></a>. 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. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">Shame on you, Garry, for allowing yourself to become one of the warmongery’s leading echo chamberlains. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq"><o:p> </o:p>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) </blockquote><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Someone named “Editor” posted my comment, and added the following curious caveat: “<i>This seems a good occasion to remind readers that if GBT shared the beliefs of all of his characters, he would be deeply schizophrenic.”<o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Holy non-rebuttal. Knowing it was a waste of effort, I further submitted this:</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="tab-stops: 409.5pt;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">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.</blockquote></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7zQWJFonPCyeDVDYfJKm2RV5S53nt_4OWAdpnDqU6zn85unL8lHLLt_N_RRzEq43Ebuce3MDocuQe6pI1GQO_EbNdneu6ltYsaxEcwNlnT9LHzrlQFPy842mHLTldbtPKRGe-/s1600/curly+joe.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7zQWJFonPCyeDVDYfJKm2RV5S53nt_4OWAdpnDqU6zn85unL8lHLLt_N_RRzEq43Ebuce3MDocuQe6pI1GQO_EbNdneu6ltYsaxEcwNlnT9LHzrlQFPy842mHLTldbtPKRGe-/s1600/curly+joe.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">...and dumber...</td></tr>
</tbody></table>That submission hasn’t been blessed for live bandwidth at the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Doonesbury</i> 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 <a href="http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2011/12/07">Iranian involvement</a> has been continuous, with <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/world/middleeast/23iran.html">lots</a> of <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/8624489/Iran-supporting-Shiite-groups-in-Iraq-that-are-killing-US-troops.html">reporting</a>.” If you click on the “lots” and “reporting” links of Mr. Mitchell’s sentence, you’ll discover what kind of “evidence” he considers convincing. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The “lots” link, as I noted in my second, unpublished Blowback submission, leads to “a story with Iran allegations penned by <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=gordon">Michael R. Gordon</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-iraqis-us-says-hussein-intensifies-quest-for-bomb-parts.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm">Nigergate</a> hoax on us that led to the invasion of Iraq, and has been a go-to war propaganda conduit to this day.” <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggCpM6yuSkeH9JoOgriTJu_C00PPjlTQDSIl8xhRvRmqTShbNfvW56S0LwH9O4UkvM2P3FRKmJ4IshyphenhyphenEKNn3BByl-g6wvAhiQmxzIK9bHEwWC_9vvvf2bmP7S3DutuzuUEAdGb/s1600/uncle+jimbo.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggCpM6yuSkeH9JoOgriTJu_C00PPjlTQDSIl8xhRvRmqTShbNfvW56S0LwH9O4UkvM2P3FRKmJ4IshyphenhyphenEKNn3BByl-g6wvAhiQmxzIK9bHEwWC_9vvvf2bmP7S3DutuzuUEAdGb/s1600/uncle+jimbo.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">...and BlackFive's Uncle Jimbo</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The “reporting” link leads to a July 2011 piece from Britain’s right-wing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Telegraph</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">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, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the likes of</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">progressive icon Garry Trudeau are too!</i><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Jesus, Mary and Curly Joe DeRita. With anti-war liberals like these, who needs <a href="http://www.vetsforfreedom.org/about/hanson.aspx">Pavlov’s Dogs of War</a> like bathetic BlackFive pundit <a href="http://unclejimbo.com/blog1/?page_id=41">Uncle Jimbo</a>? <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1">Bathtub Admirals</a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</i> <o:p></o:p></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> </span></div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-64309536183355762882011-12-07T19:11:00.001-05:002011-12-08T08:33:21.710-05:00Open Letter to Gary Trudeau<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
7 Dec. 2011<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
What a crushing disappointment to see in your <a href="http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2011/12/07">7 Dec. strip</a> that you too have chugged the propaganda that blames Iran for our
failures in Iraq. The recent <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=IAEA">IAEA report</a> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The loop-tape allegations that Iran has armed and trained
Shiite Iraqi rebels <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=190%2C000">have
never been substantiated</a>. 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Shame on you, Gary, for allowing yourself to
become one of the warmongery’s leading echo chamberlains. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-5505816115630816362011-12-05T20:03:00.001-05:002011-12-06T21:33:12.969-05:00All Aboard for Zombieland!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
by Jeff Huber</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
Elder Lady, a long-time friend of Pen and Sword and
a keen observer of the sorry scene playing out across our country and the
world, recently shared this quote from British author <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_le_Carr%C3%A9">John le Carré</a>: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
"God
appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God
appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy and anyone
who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with
the enemy, and d) a terrorist."<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
-- Published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0115-01.htm">The London Times</a>,
</i>15 Jan. 2003<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Nine years after le Carre published that
statement, America and its snippy <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/world/middleeast/tehran-protesters-storm-british-embassy.html">British
lap dog</a> are imposing all <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-senate-defense-bill-20111202,0,2842180.story">new
and improved set of draconian sanctions on Iran</a> that, the political theory
goes, will coerce Iran into doing things that the old shopworn set of draconian
sanctions failed to make Iran do. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnRN1D90rbXLcBQUhpen5fkqWfWvolCJTThgvDUZ6BkAYsCQOet3rYdB7SqZXGOzwzjbmo1vWKhV4OXr7plpKWpSQxrlj16IfjbKe6E2Lp5yYbCKE9VdFMrV4s21rU_sdG7Nz3/s1600/diplomacy.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnRN1D90rbXLcBQUhpen5fkqWfWvolCJTThgvDUZ6BkAYsCQOet3rYdB7SqZXGOzwzjbmo1vWKhV4OXr7plpKWpSQxrlj16IfjbKe6E2Lp5yYbCKE9VdFMrV4s21rU_sdG7Nz3/s1600/diplomacy.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">American Diplomacy: It's code for "war."</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The pretext for this latest round of “diplomatic”
preparations for all out war on Iran was the recent <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2011/11/preview-being-led-by-our-foreign-policy.html">International Atomic Energy Agency report</a><br />
that said Iraq might still have a nuclear weapons program. The report, which has been thoroughly refuted
in every forum except the war wagging mainstream media, was based on hearsay evidence from “member nations” that
could only have been Israel, the UK and the US, and on the activities of a
“nuclear scientist” who turns out not to have been a nuclear scientist at all
but a pioneer in the field of nanodiamond technology that is use for
industrial and medical purposes.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Iranian Students stormed the British Embassy in
Tehran, the Brits closed the embassy and hauled scones, and now we don’t even
have second-hand diplomatic lines of communication with Iran. Still, the bull feather merchant marines who spin our foreign policy shenanigans can replay the Team Cheney meme that said "we tried diplomacy and it didn't work," even if said diplomacy consisted of refusing to speak directly to parties we were punishing with sanctions until they agreed to pre-conditions that no country in its right national mind would agree to. (In the case of Iran, we insisted that they give up their UN guaranteed right to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. What a surprise that they passed on <o:p>the offer. Telling the Iranians they could have a nuclear energy industry if they got their nuclear fuel from us was like telling them they could have an auto industry as long as they made their cars in Detroit and called them Buicks.)</o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I’ve delineated many times how possession of nuclear weapons would be, for the Iranians, the
equivalent a doomsday device that
would spell doom for the entire ancient Persian race. I only know of one group of people crazy
enough to take those sorts of risks in the name of acquiring more power,
and that group of people is the group of people who led us down the <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/28/opinion/la-oe-hayden28-2010mar28">Long War</a> path that began in Iraq and that is about to intersect with the road to ruin. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCg4xo2YNbRS6W-pq6H5rvrZr5Zgq7OOUN4wIQumqw-RRTnV53BhTIsPyoUp5zfG1Sr-BLNravG0sjDRrwzO3wvPRQOZWIS9CJvKnoI5T1e5L-69vbwKhghqadff6i5aL8_Q_c/s1600/dictator.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCg4xo2YNbRS6W-pq6H5rvrZr5Zgq7OOUN4wIQumqw-RRTnV53BhTIsPyoUp5zfG1Sr-BLNravG0sjDRrwzO3wvPRQOZWIS9CJvKnoI5T1e5L-69vbwKhghqadff6i5aL8_Q_c/s1600/dictator.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Who's your worst nightmare now?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
It is perhaps because of the state of the economy
and because our our body politic has become such a FOX News driven menagerie that the American public continues to allow its government to slaughter hundreds of thousands of
innocents overseas over…what? Certainly
not 9/11. The evildoer young Mr. Bush swore to bring in dead or alive is sleeping with the whales. Certainly not to preempt an
invasion of our soil. Despite what Mr. Bush’s speechwriters told us, the oceans still protect us from that sort of
thing. Nobody has the kind of army or
air force or navy required to invade and occupy us the way we’ve made a
national pastime out of doing to everyone who is a supposed threat to us, and <i>nobody ever will have that kind of military force</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
We have gone from a mighty nation dedicated to become
Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” to a global bad guy; a global bad
guy who is about to dwarf the malignant accomplishments of every global bad guy
who came before us. As le Carré put
it in 2003, “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but
this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of
Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Countless sages of eastern and western cultures
have noted that human events have a way of leveling themselves in the
same manner that nature does. Actions
produce opposite but equal reactions among societies just as they do in the
physical universe. As one popular volume
of spiritual guidance admonishes us, “ye shall reap as ye shall sow,” and as we
used to say in the Navy, “What goes around comes around.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHF1h6ImHVpGLfIABAVmz1DDT1slL3A_oGJqjpvx-HmUaD-Kv9MUR06IvqB2Ah6Cy3tBN7vl5thSeA5PDfoJ4s9YyAZs68GAXQJ_GaxdARIFlvz46ZndoLnWo_fUZqwJF1gl28/s1600/convention.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHF1h6ImHVpGLfIABAVmz1DDT1slL3A_oGJqjpvx-HmUaD-Kv9MUR06IvqB2Ah6Cy3tBN7vl5thSeA5PDfoJ4s9YyAZs68GAXQJ_GaxdARIFlvz46ZndoLnWo_fUZqwJF1gl28/s1600/convention.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The 2012 Tea Party Convention. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The longer we as a nation stay on this neoconservative, post-modern imperialist crazy-train joy ride, the further we’re going to
fall when China calls in our debt or the tea baggers turn the country into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zombieland</i> or a space ship lands and a
guy who looks like Michael Rennie steps out of it and tells us to pack our bags for a one-way trip to oblivion.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhky3TBkhfv7gur6Awzs9oX8DhCc0yzhtFgilWSv03FuCeXBGZKE4CEst_Jc6bK1Wskd6EiwNbW0sfFB-jsxi00d9XOcu9vMYD59ZnbRh_-d2KuTMdd5gzYtgBczXr6nsSZ_6Y_/s1600/earth.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhky3TBkhfv7gur6Awzs9oX8DhCc0yzhtFgilWSv03FuCeXBGZKE4CEst_Jc6bK1Wskd6EiwNbW0sfFB-jsxi00d9XOcu9vMYD59ZnbRh_-d2KuTMdd5gzYtgBczXr6nsSZ_6Y_/s1600/earth.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Say goodbye to hegemony.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
My biggest concern regarding our inability to
correct our behavior before God, nature or Mr. Spock’s relatives correct it for
us is that the anti-war movement has been hijacked by paleo-conservative libertarians who
don’t want to pay for roads because they don’t think we need roads and by latter-day
hippies who are more interested in legalizing pot than in putting an end to self-defeating wars. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is
author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1">Bathtub
Admirals</a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</i> <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-22923777228488945872011-11-28T08:41:00.001-05:002011-11-29T12:05:09.963-05:00Fog and Friction are Stranger than Fiction<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilG7AyyGVkBJD40CaCN6t5nLbjwnRS5bJnITklptmBjKS1tjW8TDqlVzQbSDZFW8oCCp9K5DOAT6hXZLzmoJWLsLsplrzIV-fvwHj-64nkrpRAvhoy3FY1Hv7hrsfv3SA7_Ckm/s1600/funny+farm.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilG7AyyGVkBJD40CaCN6t5nLbjwnRS5bJnITklptmBjKS1tjW8TDqlVzQbSDZFW8oCCp9K5DOAT6hXZLzmoJWLsLsplrzIV-fvwHj-64nkrpRAvhoy3FY1Hv7hrsfv3SA7_Ckm/s1600/funny+farm.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That unnamed "senior<br />
Pantagon official" you're<br />
heard so much from.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
by Jeff Huber<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I took a long enough oxygen break from the novel
project (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sandbox Generals</i>) this week to
catch a whiff of the story about how we <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/world/asia/pakistan-says-nato-helicopters-kill-dozens-of-soldiers.html?_r=2&hp">bombed
the smithereens out of some of our little Paki pals</a>. At least 25 of the Central Asian
buggers shuffled off to party with however many virgins it is
non-terrorist Muslims shuffle off to when they shuffle off. One thing you can be sure of is that none of
the non-Muslims who shuffled them off the face of the planet could give a
gnat’s eyelash less where the Hajis hi-hoed to or how many hoes they had when
they got there. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
A gram of war truth that managed to sneak under
the radarscopes of the Pentarchy’s echo chamberlains at the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/world/middleeast/iraqi-widows-numbers-have-grown-but-aid-lags.html?_r=1">New
York Times</a> </i>was a November 24 story by Andrew E. Kramer about how many
Iraqi widows and fatherless children nine years of war in that country have
created. A UN report states that at the
peak of sectarian violence in 2006, nearly 100 women were widowed every
day. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I grow increasingly appalled at the number of
people, most of whom likely consider themselves God-fearing Christians, continue to support our overseas armed abominations. Sure, we can look down our noses at the
non-sentient masses who are hooked on a study diet of Fox News, Rabid Radio and
the rest of the Big Brother Broadcast, but they aren’t the only ones passively supporting our national atrocities. All
those liberals camped out across the country because they’re mad at the rich
could long ago have stopped our psychotic hegemony in Iraq
and the Bananastans and Libya and in all the <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/162566/secret-war-120-countries">120</a> or so other places where
we’re freeing peace-loving peoples of all creeds and colors and nationalities
by relieving them of the burden of existence.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i>,
our newspaper of revised record, identified the parties who parted the Pakistani patriots from this mortal coil as “NATO aircraft" that “killed at least 25 soldiers in strikes against two [Pakistani] military
posts.” Two major things are wrong with
this take of the story.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The first is that "NATO" is propaganda peddler code for "US." The combatant commander of NATO is, always was and always will be an American four-star and hence NATO's commander in chief is and always was and always will be the President of the United States. Pointing a blood-stained finger at NATO every time one of our cockamamie conflicts turns another corner for the worse illustrates our psychopathic refusal to bear responsibility for our actions. </div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Second, "NATO aircraft" are kind of like guns. NATO aircraft don’t kill people. People flying in NATO aircraft kill
people. This business of making war more
palatable by framing its human toll in terms of remotely controlled
violence needs to end. People in manned
NATO aircraft and/or people flying UAVs over Kabul from air conditioned bunkers
in Nevada are hands-on killing their victims as surely as the special ops cats
who snipe at alleged evildoers from a thousand yards away or skewer them at
something less than arm’s length with a high-tech Ka-bar they bought at the
“tactical store” just outside the front gate at Joint Expeditionary Base Little
Creek. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEqzKMtPjzWzhUsokU0K-ielDnYF6AapMoQJ1qxZcRSPgkCreGdSBDLSUQlL1WW2Fc93-SxLFkeKr0wcLvtNpu6siCE7CPutUU1wcgXd2TyugeESX5-5PV5OzjTFTde26fXrIf/s1600/Unknown-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEqzKMtPjzWzhUsokU0K-ielDnYF6AapMoQJ1qxZcRSPgkCreGdSBDLSUQlL1WW2Fc93-SxLFkeKr0wcLvtNpu6siCE7CPutUU1wcgXd2TyugeESX5-5PV5OzjTFTde26fXrIf/s1600/Unknown-1.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We have met the barbarians, and they are us.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The more we’ve managed to depersonalize the horrors
of war, the more palatable war has become.
Donald Rumsfeld used to cry like a
wet wicked witch about how all the “terrible images” the mainstream media
were showing us were turning popular opinion against his Morass
in Mesopotamia. That dose of mind
detergent flowed through the BBB until everyone, even a majority of the self-proclaimed
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cognoscenti </i>who should have known
better, believed that they had in fact seen all sorts of grisly war zone violence in the popular electronic and tree-centric media. In reality nobody had seen anything remotely close to the sorts of apocalyptic horror that we have created in the name of the “9/11” meme. We have killed <a href="http://www.michigandaily.com/opinion/neill-mohammad-jacket-art-post-911-history">well
over 50 brown and yellow</a> overseas people for every American who died in the
Twin Towers and Pentagon air strikes that the multi-billion dollar North
American Aerospace Defense Command (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Aerospace_Defense_Command">NORAD</a>)
failed to defend us against (because, I’ve always suspected, they had already
tweaked their radars to track <a href="http://www.noradsanta.org/">Santa’s
sleigh</a> and weren’t looking that closely at jumbo jets veering off their
assigned courses and altitudes and on hot vectors for national landmarks). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
But they’re brown and yellow people we’re killing,
and they’re halfway across the world, and our gutless wonder press has gone
belly up for bull feather merchant marines like Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan,
warriors whose full time mission it is to wage information operations against
the American people, culling us into believing that ou fundamental
security hinges upon our support of an exorbitant war against enemies who
have no armies or navies or air forces or even a defense budget. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The likes of General Jeff in this man’s military,
along with their trusty little <a href="http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/05/25/one-ricks-makes-a-wrong/">Tom
Ricks</a> wannabe helpers in the woefully misnamed fourth estate, also have the
programmed masses believing that military leaders like “King” David Petraeus
actually know something about the art of war when, as the latest bottom burp
with the Pakistanis clearly illustrates, they don’t know their helmets from
their mess kits from the things that mark their skivvies. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLEgACrfTV0ynOFPj0Hg8wjNRSj9ibAruTCkhrRLsJVlzPNtthF19I8Bw4cgRrU0uMFCYoHvWcacg7rijx8ZIf2o6ha0YJijL3-_dpwTwil9GYI6c_C0zM30PDPcP1p2xPuD_E/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLEgACrfTV0ynOFPj0Hg8wjNRSj9ibAruTCkhrRLsJVlzPNtthF19I8Bw4cgRrU0uMFCYoHvWcacg7rijx8ZIf2o6ha0YJijL3-_dpwTwil9GYI6c_C0zM30PDPcP1p2xPuD_E/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"That was close!" says "Revoltin'" John Bolton.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
One doesn't need a PhD in post-Clausewitzean bebop
theory to understand the truth of Sun Tzu’s caution that “No nation ever
profited from a long war.” But what did
the tank thinkers at the Pentagon cook up as their overarching post-9/11 strategy? <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/28/opinion/la-oe-hayden28-2010mar28">The
Long War</a> and the <a href="http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/era-of-persistent-conflict/">Era
of Persistent Conflict</a>. Clausewitz
admonished that all actions in war should contribute to the war’s political aim. But the only
political aim the Long War seems to further is to make itself as long as
possible, possibly forever or until Dick Cheney and John Bolton and the rest of
the New American Centurions draw a “Get Out of Hell Free” card, which ever
comes first. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The Clausewitzean concept of critical
vulnerabilities is something the military artist is supposed to identify or
create in the adversary, allowing friendly forces to attack the tragic flaw in an
enemy’s armor and causing him to collapse with relatively minor own-force
expense and effort. Throughout our persistently conflicted Long
War, we have take pains to create vulnerabilities in our own armor. Especially notable among these right now is
our reliance on a line of supply that runs through Pakistan, a country that is
as much of an enemy as it is an ally, and one that we consistently
double-dog-dare to shut down our flow of war material into our primary theater of operations. If the guys running the Bungle in Bananastan
had been in charge of the Normandy invasion, they would have routed Allied
supply lines through German occupied Poland.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I abandoned earlier treatments of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sandbox Generals</i> because every time I
dreamt up some incredibly stupid stunt for Prince Albert and Fix Felon and the
rest of the Pentarchs to pull, their real life counterparts would pull
something incredibly dumber. It
seemed, at first effort (and second and third effort as well, in this case),
impossible to write a farce that burlesques real life events that are themselves parodies of human political behavior. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
But then I recalled how it occurred to me once
that the most accurate film portrayal of the American west was probably <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blazing Saddles</i>. That gave me the measure of the problem,
and I hope to have the current draft-in-progress completed in time for the Baby Jeebus to preview
it, or Baby New Year at the latest.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is
author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1">Bathtub
Admirals</a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-30045366103537519212011-11-21T06:21:00.001-05:002011-11-22T05:26:41.538-05:00Holiday Haitus Humbuggery and Book Leave<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
By Jeff Huber<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I’ll be putting the column on the back burner for
the rest of the year in hopes of completing the first draft of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sandbox Generals</i> by Baby Jeebus
Day. In lieu of an actual essay that
requires disciplined and organized thought and writing, I’ll be posting a
headline or two that’s caught my eye lately and something form the
work-in-progress that covers the territory. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
This week I came upon <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/us/costly-osprey-symbol-of-fight-to-cut-pentagon.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2">this
story</a> about the V-22 Osprey, the lean, mean Marine killing machine that
even Dark Lord Cheney couldn’t put to death.
Even Big Dick can’t fight Daddy Warbucks. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
A comment on the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/us/politics/lawmakers-concede-budget-talks-are-close-to-failure.html?emc=na">budget
impasse</a>: I used to maintain that the
difference between Republicans and Libertarians is that Republicans want
someone else to pay for the roads and Libertarians don’t think we need
roads. The gap seems to have narrowed to
the width of a gnat’s eyelash toward the Libertarian ideal. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSl81wgkoHrzWa4YxEowAWnwVE5n3GFd5ZuQOYFnOmXVtxTW4oIgTteKE9Cl7qGx9Odn40RP_PDGhWhbnbKHA4bXldnaHnKTkoWMSZtJUhDxBP2iU_5fytTR8uzSVfKXX8w6-N/s1600/Daddy.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSl81wgkoHrzWa4YxEowAWnwVE5n3GFd5ZuQOYFnOmXVtxTW4oIgTteKE9Cl7qGx9Odn40RP_PDGhWhbnbKHA4bXldnaHnKTkoWMSZtJUhDxBP2iU_5fytTR8uzSVfKXX8w6-N/s1600/Daddy.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">How dare he say those true<br />
things about me? Curses!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
When it comes to the defense budget, though, war
spending is like Jell-o: there’s always
room for it. Heck, war’s our biggest job
creator! And on that note, please give
your consideration to the following public service preview: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">Unknown to just about
anyone besides the inner Centurion circle—which included Buzz, which meant Jack
knew about it too—was that one of the first things Fix unfarkled, once he found
himself in the human skin-upholstered seat of power at the head of the
petrified round table in the Voodoo Hunker Bunker at the bottom of the hole
beneath the White House, was to get rid of most of that expensive crap like
stealth bombers and aircraft carriers and flying submarines and SCUBA tanks and
pretend like he hadn’t gotten rid of them.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">Fix got that idea from his
trusty but unwitting adviser Jack, who had suggested in his WinstonSmith.com
column that the only way to get the Pentarchy to scrap most of its arsenal
would be to do allow it to do so in secret while continuing to charge its
maintenance and operating costs on the tax payers’ revolving charge account
with China. The way weapons acquisition
worked, Jack explained, was that once the arms industry had a contract to build
fantastical killing machines, it put the Government in a conundrum, a pickle, a
jam, a fait accompli, a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catch-22</i> if
you will. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">As soon as the industry got
a contract to make X numbers of Death Doodads for Y dollars per copy, it
revised the Death Doodad’s cost estimate to reflect, say, the rising price of
suntan oil at Ipanema Beach in Brazil, vacation spot for the thousands of
Brazilian workers who grew and harvested the bananas that the riveters who
riveted the wings and rudders and keels and tires on the Death Doodad in North
Buttplug, South Dakota peeled and sliced and placed on top of their children’s’
bowls of breakfast cereal every morning.
As per federal regulations regarding compensation of employees of firms
under federal contract to provide goods and services relating to national
security, the inflated bananas necessitated a raise in said employees cost of
living allowances (COLAs). The COLA
increase, by law, had to be a set percentage of the annual earnings of the
employees, and the increase had to apply to all employees of the company under
contract whether that employee worked directly on the Death Doodad or not. Otherwise an employee might be unfairly
punished by being transferred from riveting the Death Doodad to screwing rubber
nipples to the tops of baby bottles, thus losing income needed to buy his or
her children food sufficiently nourishing to compensate for the ketchup soup
and baked bean burgers they were eating at school. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<div style="text-align: right;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtDVNibF5I-OmnjTPGcDNC3FehVFv9mhTLkmH-pndk2lUVBfU7et73wMcQm93VnJIwqHr0PFLW1Otshg-b9eiF8bZY61JrS6n15gTLOjQaN_wpC-jBAAeZqTsOKGv15zBCHKN1/s1600/mono.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtDVNibF5I-OmnjTPGcDNC3FehVFv9mhTLkmH-pndk2lUVBfU7et73wMcQm93VnJIwqHr0PFLW1Otshg-b9eiF8bZY61JrS6n15gTLOjQaN_wpC-jBAAeZqTsOKGv15zBCHKN1/s1600/mono.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I'm afraid we've experienced cost<br />
overruns with the Death Doodad.<br />
Darn the bad luck!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">The riveters received
sufficient extra pay to purchase the pricier bananas. That alone wouldn’t have had that much effect
on the per-copy cost of the Death Doodad.
Things got expensive as the COLA percentage increase was applied to the
compensation packages of the chief executive officers and finance officers and
operating officers and administrative officers and training officers and safety
officers and human resource officers and horoscope officers and presidents and
executive vice presidents and vice presidents and executive assistant vice
presidents and so on. When the smoke
finally cleared, a half-percent increase in the cost of Brazilian bananas could
jack the per-copy cost of X Death Doodad from Z bazillion simoleons to 2Z
bazillion or even 3Z. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">And if Congress didn’t play
along and pass the 2 or 3Z appropriation, the contracting company’s chief
propaganda officers, most of whom by Sandbox Generals day had been trained by
Flip or one of Flip’s protégés, launched an ad campaign on the Big Brother
Broadcast decrying that Congress was taking the bananas off of the cereal of
the children of honest American Death Doodad Riveters. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria;">As soon as the defense
contracting company got the new appropriation for the Death Doodad, its
researchers discovered that the Doodad didn’t do what it was designed to do if
it didn’t have a Destruction Dealie attached to it. Destruction Dealies wouldn’t have been so
costly except that they had to be made from non-stainless steel, an alloy that
could only be manufactured by a process specially invented that took the
chromium out of stainless steel. And no,
steel that hadn’t been turned into stainless steel wouldn’t do for reasons
having to do with aerospace-age chemistry highly classified (heh!). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is
author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1">Bathtub
Admirals</a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-39690646856205326362011-11-14T10:18:00.001-05:002011-11-15T08:44:41.083-05:00Letting Israel Lead Us Around by the Potty Wand<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
by Jeff Huber<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDBJ_N2-B5Cs3MJjHvJ5493ahUMZ9aqOnCrgDmY7XDLGvq22eKkD43e_ShByyAEZhUnDVK2f-f22JeZ7RBj9UAI0Gf67TCez1ZYUB4N304CBhcZ5aSxi2N2tx5PCLjdCjRHqzb/s1600/Mitt+and+bebe.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDBJ_N2-B5Cs3MJjHvJ5493ahUMZ9aqOnCrgDmY7XDLGvq22eKkD43e_ShByyAEZhUnDVK2f-f22JeZ7RBj9UAI0Gf67TCez1ZYUB4N304CBhcZ5aSxi2N2tx5PCLjdCjRHqzb/s1600/Mitt+and+bebe.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mitt Romney and 51 percent<br />
of his constituency.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The best political joke of the election season so
far has been <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/10/28/356276/romney-israel-policy/">Mitt
Romney’s</a> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
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.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Phase one of <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=scarface">Operation Persian
Poppycock</a> 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington Post</i> did their very best to
peddle the pathetic plot to the proletariat, the story was quickly dismissed by
the cognizant majority as <a href="http://www.merip.org/mero/mero110311">bunker
mentality bunkum</a>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLTwiVl6m7U_QY2o170T57kJTSdk_-OSl1BOof5-4wA7J3lqhvtfnhkvnWL-MzZDm_XYbPtBeu7ixqhAIqFCFSmW0DcX5EvlSlK7-J2W6LsQ-cA6tyvMlmFNG0jdqNOy5eZ_zI/s1600/iaea+report.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLTwiVl6m7U_QY2o170T57kJTSdk_-OSl1BOof5-4wA7J3lqhvtfnhkvnWL-MzZDm_XYbPtBeu7ixqhAIqFCFSmW0DcX5EvlSlK7-J2W6LsQ-cA6tyvMlmFNG0jdqNOy5eZ_zI/s1600/iaea+report.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The IAEA Report on Iraq</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Less probal to thinking was the <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2011/11/preview-hey-i-know-what-lets-lie-about.html">grand
scale deception</a> the Pentarchy's bull feather merchant marines conducted regarding accusations about Iran’s nuclear intentions
centered on the release of the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/nov/09/iran-nuclear-programme-iaea-report">recent
report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)</a>. This canard too was supported by the
warmongery’s select echo chamberlains, most notably the deplorable David E.
Sanger of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i> and the
irredeemable Job Warwick of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington
Post, </i>both of whom tumbled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tokeses</i> 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 <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=David_Albright">David Albright</a>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/13/us-iran-nuclear-israel-idUSTRE7AC0XX20111113">Israeli
Prime Minister Bebe Netanyahu</a>, who French President Nicholas Sarkozy
recently had the moral spine to call a <a href="http://arabnews.com/opinion/columns/article533244.ece">liar</a> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinrjH6v3_7qWQRJhAGMlnD6Zw4fUdVQuxOY9Pp8p1Gns_v6X5JlTGiSJusm2ZvKnIkkdmeqj1T0gDXwsJ1wslapZhu6-syFlkWHsMoYXgikCVAPwj91yfOw0mu0hi16CpYzSwK/s1600/Bebe.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinrjH6v3_7qWQRJhAGMlnD6Zw4fUdVQuxOY9Pp8p1Gns_v6X5JlTGiSJusm2ZvKnIkkdmeqj1T0gDXwsJ1wslapZhu6-syFlkWHsMoYXgikCVAPwj91yfOw0mu0hi16CpYzSwK/s1600/Bebe.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I cannot tell a lie. Know what<br />
I mean? Eh? Know what I mean?<br />
Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.<br />
Say no more.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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, <a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105776">the scientist</a>, 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detonation_nanodiamond">detonation
nanodiamonds</a>, 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
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<i>
New York Times</i> and <i>Washington Post</i> 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.”<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Not shockingly, neither the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i> nor the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington
Post</i> 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.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Yet <a href="http://news.antiwar.com/2011/11/10/panetta-attacking-iran-might-have-unintended-consequences/">Minister
of Peace Leon Panetta</a> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove">Doctor Strangelove</a>
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Air_Force"> </a>Bebe would have his flying circus turn Iran into a parking lot for our permanent occupation forces in Iraq and
the Bananastans. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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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<sup>st</sup> 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.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Israel has a much better deal the way things are
now. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="color: #262626;"><i>Commander Jeff Huber,
U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1"><span style="color: #c11e00; text-decoration: none;">Bathtub Admirals</span></a>,
a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</i></span></div>
</div>
</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-65874034418360421502011-11-10T20:27:00.001-05:002011-11-12T17:26:02.670-05:00Hooray for Gareth Porter!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;">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: "<span style="color: #0000ef; font-family: Georgia;"><a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105776">IAEA’s ‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons</a></span></span><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16pt;">."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16pt;">Kinda shakes your faith in the <i>New
York Times</i> and the <i>Washington Post</i>, doesn't it? (Heh.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16pt;">You might also want to read the
analysis of the cooked IAEA report at <a href="http://www.moonofalabama.org/2011/11/on-nuclear-iran-allegations-nanodiamonds-aint-nuclear-bombs.html"><span style="color: #0000ef;">Moon of Alabama</span></a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16pt;">I'll have further choice
observations to make on the affair in next Tuesday's column. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16pt;">Ciao, hounds, and remember:
warmongers aren't just right-wing nut cases anymore. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16pt;">Jeff</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-64931118944309297732011-11-09T09:51:00.001-05:002011-11-09T09:54:52.671-05:00...And Keep Lying Some More...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By this morning the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/world/un-details-case-that-iran-is-at-work-on-nuclear-device.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=all">Sanger/Broad</a> 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:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States <a class="meta-classifier" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/us_intelligence_community/national_intelligence_estimates/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline;" title="More articles about National Intelligence Estimates.">National Intelligence Estimate</a> issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...</span></blockquote>
You can see the IAEA report in the raw <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/nov/09/iran-nuclear-programme-iaea-report">here</a>. 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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author
of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1"><i>Bathtub
Admirals</i></a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-32853444512220688922011-11-08T20:36:00.000-05:002011-11-09T07:54:39.091-05:00Let's Keep Lying!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<b>Update: Double Shame! Triple Shame!<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk000ianUzrI9asoOmtRL4uvjkE0IXMwaj8iJzZ86Ajfux-YkqQ0D_DZIZS6ANaaOjLwqZXKA2lR19nGCBjKk0pSugQjxv2kA80BxW0gp2K5kipHPaSHWayHQsYbQ-rNK0Ysl7/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk000ianUzrI9asoOmtRL4uvjkE0IXMwaj8iJzZ86Ajfux-YkqQ0D_DZIZS6ANaaOjLwqZXKA2lR19nGCBjKk0pSugQjxv2kA80BxW0gp2K5kipHPaSHWayHQsYbQ-rNK0Ysl7/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" style="cursor: move;" /></a></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; padding-top: 4px; text-align: center;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
Journo-swine David E. Sanger</div>
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The detestable <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=sanger">David E. Sanger</a> co-wrote a <i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/world/un-details-case-that-iran-is-at-work-on-nuclear-device.html?_r=2&hp">New York Times<span style="font-style: normal;"> story</span></a></i> posted on Tuesday afternoon titled “U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward Nuclear Device.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The story began: “United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on Tuesday that they say makes a ‘credible’ case that ‘<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iran/index.html?inline=nyt-geo">Iran</a> 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 <i>twelve</i>, which reads:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<b>The report corroborates the conclusion of a much-debated classified <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/us_intelligence_community/national_intelligence_estimates/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier">National Intelligence Estimate</a> issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Great. Caesars. Ghost. What unadulterated, shameless journalistic humbuggery. That should have been the story’s <i>lead sentence</i>. 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.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
Sanger and Broad and the rest of the warmongering mainstream media simply cannot start burning in hell soon enough. They simply cannot. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>*The Pentarchy is that cabal of <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26733319/">sandbox generals</a>, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/01/mullen-says-military-strike-plan-iran/">bathtub admirals</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html">beltway bandits</a>, <a href="http://www.jewishjournal.com/images/articles/obamaaipac350h.jpg">AIPAC rats</a>, <a href="http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/kimberly_kagan/">Warlord Fauntleroys</a>, <a href="http://old.nationalreview.com/document/document092101b.shtml">New American Centurions</a>, <a href="http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2008/11/do-democrats-even-deserve-filibuster_14.html">Long War legislators</a>, <a href="http://www.calvin.edu/january/2003/krauthammer.htm">Dr. Strangeloves</a>, <a href="http://unclejimbo.com/blog1/?page_id=41">G.I. Joe Six-Packs</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Vets_for_Freedom">Pavlov’s dogs of war</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1914822,00.html">patriotic psychopaths </a>and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the <a href="http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm">long dreamed-of permanent American security state </a>a reality.</i> <o:p></o:p></div>
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1"><i>Bathtub Admirals</i></a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</div>
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</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-81815606180818686962011-11-07T15:42:00.001-05:002011-11-14T10:12:03.725-05:00Hey, I Know What. Let's Lie Some More about Iran.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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8 Nov 2011</div>
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by Jeff Huber</div>
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The Pentarchy* continues to blow smoke about Iran
despite its long-standing inability to produce a smoking gun. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In a 3 November piece for the Middle East Research
and Information Project titled “Debunking
the Iran ‘Terror Plot,’”<b> </b>my colleague <a href="http://www.merip.org/mero/mero110311">Gareth Porter</a><b> </b>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.<br />
<br />
<b>Hey, Abbott! </b> <o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieqotZmVMe5c6N8tyV6PPyptyAbkO88B7pavCWAXgHfKro1ezMGH2jqhT6kIRBwskjNkEZ2uAOzlBdBT79qnYJ_gV5kLQ8tnk6XNt6GhiSGvJbhlCxvweBxgWHoJlq4Re0m1n-/s1600/Keystone.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieqotZmVMe5c6N8tyV6PPyptyAbkO88B7pavCWAXgHfKro1ezMGH2jqhT6kIRBwskjNkEZ2uAOzlBdBT79qnYJ_gV5kLQ8tnk6XNt6GhiSGvJbhlCxvweBxgWHoJlq4Re0m1n-/s1600/Keystone.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A still image from <i>Abbot and Costello<br />Meet the FBI</i>.</td></tr>
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The <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2011/10/preview-persian-paranoia-ploy.html">FBI’s cock-eyed case was a keystone caper</a> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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A brigade of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_(TV_series)">Jack Bauer</a> 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tailor_of_Panama">Tailor of Panama/Our Man in Havana</a></i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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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 <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the-secret-memo-that-explains-why-obama-can-kill-americans/246004/">suspend the Constitution</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>Keystone Kondi Klaims the Persians Puke a Peck of Split Pea Soup</b></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY-SKF6Ib_eC41tGy8bFkwKT_qcPFHr2vuPleCjYn1IuKfFihvP2ClE9WQOqeB8R7tLS5kpHS1m61S9kc1KIHa80uHO0HSItt29Ltc9DLCu_QReWuluxNBiQjOwY4FiVeimz_7/s1600/Condi.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY-SKF6Ib_eC41tGy8bFkwKT_qcPFHr2vuPleCjYn1IuKfFihvP2ClE9WQOqeB8R7tLS5kpHS1m61S9kc1KIHa80uHO0HSItt29Ltc9DLCu_QReWuluxNBiQjOwY4FiVeimz_7/s1600/Condi.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Possessed by Dick Cheney or just stoned?</td></tr>
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Over the weekend, the usual echo chamberlains
launched the second wave of disingenuous accusations regarding Iran’s nuclear
intentions. Ghoulish <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-speaker-john-boehner/story?id=14892830&page=13#.Trgn72DfbhE">Condi
Rice</a>, one of the most persistent political herpes strains gifted to us by
the Bush administration, made an appearance on ABC’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This Week</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This Week</i> 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, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">apparently</i>, more details showing, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">apparently</i>, 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. </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/06/us-nuclear-iran-idUSTRE7A50KE20111106">Fredrick
Dahl of Reuters</a> 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 <a href="http://www.reuters.com/places/iran">Iran</a> 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." <o:p></o:p></div>
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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 <a href="http://asaninst.org/eng/index.php">ASAN Institute for Policy Studies</a>,
a neoconservative tank thinkery that schmoozes Donald Rumsfeld and other prominent warlords of our <a href="http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/era-of-persistent-conflict/">Era of Persistent Conflict</a>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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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 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/iaea-says-foreign-expertise-has-brought-iran-to-threshold-of-nuclear-capability/2011/11/05/gIQAc6hjtM_story.html?hpid=z4">Joby Warwich of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Washington Post</i></a>. 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.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3ivQIsGWPErsX45DlbmaW8oOwFcLHoH5_1PPj-qIKL1Y_cWJSMNjfAUPTjvnbvO7_QIAQYRxHszi3VukjaE76Abz278dwe8kY462yZ45kXDCOHoqWXwsEaKmShHYlcJjoJoPM/s1600/strange.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3ivQIsGWPErsX45DlbmaW8oOwFcLHoH5_1PPj-qIKL1Y_cWJSMNjfAUPTjvnbvO7_QIAQYRxHszi3VukjaE76Abz278dwe8kY462yZ45kXDCOHoqWXwsEaKmShHYlcJjoJoPM/s1600/strange.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
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Self-designated UN weapons inspector<br />
David Albright. </td></tr>
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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 <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=David_Albright">David Albright</a>,
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. <br />
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<b>R.I.P. Shame</b> <o:p></o:p></div>
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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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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What
nobody seems willing to own up to is that the most immoral acts committed in
the <a href="http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Project_for_the_New_American_Century">New
American Century</a> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II">Dresden massacre</a>. 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.</div>
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<b>Update: Double Shame! Triple Shame!<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk000ianUzrI9asoOmtRL4uvjkE0IXMwaj8iJzZ86Ajfux-YkqQ0D_DZIZS6ANaaOjLwqZXKA2lR19nGCBjKk0pSugQjxv2kA80BxW0gp2K5kipHPaSHWayHQsYbQ-rNK0Ysl7/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk000ianUzrI9asoOmtRL4uvjkE0IXMwaj8iJzZ86Ajfux-YkqQ0D_DZIZS6ANaaOjLwqZXKA2lR19nGCBjKk0pSugQjxv2kA80BxW0gp2K5kipHPaSHWayHQsYbQ-rNK0Ysl7/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Journo-swine David E. Sanger</td></tr>
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The
detestable <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/search?q=sanger">David E.
Sanger</a> co-wrote a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/world/un-details-case-that-iran-is-at-work-on-nuclear-device.html?_r=2&hp">New
York Times<span style="font-style: normal;"> story</span></a></i> posted on
Tuesday afternoon titled “U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward Nuclear
Device.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The story
began: “United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on
Tuesday that they say makes a ‘credible’ case that ‘<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iran/index.html?inline=nyt-geo">Iran</a>
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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">twelve</i>, which reads:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>The
report corroborates the conclusion of a much-debated classified <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/us_intelligence_community/national_intelligence_estimates/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier">National
Intelligence Estimate</a> issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly
focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Great. Caesars.
Ghost. What unadulterated,
shameless journalistic humbuggery. That
should have been the story’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lead
sentence</i>. 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Sanger and
Broad and the rest of the warmongering mainstream media simply cannot start
burning in hell soon enough. They simply cannot. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Quadruple Shame!</span></b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-weight: normal; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></span></b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-weight: normal; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">By this morning the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/world/un-details-case-that-iran-is-at-work-on-nuclear-device.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=all" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Sanger/Broad</a> 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:</span></span></b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States <a class="meta-classifier" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/us_intelligence_community/national_intelligence_estimates/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" style="color: #004276; text-decoration: underline;" title="More articles about National Intelligence Estimates.">National Intelligence Estimate</a> issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...</span></span></b></blockquote>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">You can see the IAEA report in the raw <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/nov/09/iran-nuclear-programme-iaea-report" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">here</a>. 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.<br /><br />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. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Times;">
</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><b>More Update: Hooray for Gareth Porter!</b><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; line-height: 24px;"><span style="font-family: Times;">
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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: "<a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105776">IAEA’s
‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons</a>."<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Kinda shakes your faith in the <i>New York
Times</i> and the <i>Washington Post</i>, doesn't it? (Heh.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
You might also want to read the analysis of the
cooked IAEA report at <a href="http://www.moonofalabama.org/2011/11/on-nuclear-iran-allegations-nanodiamonds-aint-nuclear-bombs.html">Moon
of Alabama</a>.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I'll have further choice observations to make on
the affair in next Tuesday's column.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Ciao, hounds, and remember: warmongers aren't just
right-wing nut cases anymore. Susan Rice is even word than Condi Rice was. </div>
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<br /></div>
</span></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<i>*The Pentarchy is that cabal of <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26733319/">sandbox generals</a>, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/01/mullen-says-military-strike-plan-iran/">bathtub admirals</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html">beltway bandits</a>, <a href="http://www.jewishjournal.com/images/articles/obamaaipac350h.jpg">AIPAC rats</a>, <a href="http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/kimberly_kagan/">Warlord Fauntleroys</a>, <a href="http://old.nationalreview.com/document/document092101b.shtml">New American Centurions</a>, <a href="http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2008/11/do-democrats-even-deserve-filibuster_14.html">Long War legislators</a>, <a href="http://www.calvin.edu/january/2003/krauthammer.htm">Dr. Strangeloves</a>, <a href="http://unclejimbo.com/blog1/?page_id=41">G.I. Joe Six-Packs</a>, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Vets_for_Freedom">Pavlov’s dogs of war</a>, <a href="http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1914822,00.html">patriotic psychopaths </a>and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the <a href="http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm">long dreamed-of permanent American security state </a>a reality.</i> </div>
</div>
</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1"><i>Bathtub Admirals</i></a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</div>
</div>
<br /></div>
</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-51926607128486745372011-10-31T20:55:00.000-04:002011-11-02T06:16:58.618-04:00Get Over It Getting Over Over There<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
1 Nov 2011<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
by Jeff Huber<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The about face happened even <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2011/10/preview-fat-ladies-promises-and-iraq.html">faster
than I thought</a> it would. Only two
Fridays ago young Mr. Obama announced that the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/middleeast/president-obama-announces-end-of-war-in-iraq.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=all">last
American soldier would leave Iraq</a> by the end of this year. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The last soldier, that is, except for the Marine
contingent we’ll leave behind at the embassy/fortress we built in
Baghdad. But Marines aren’t in the Army,
so they’re not technically soldiers are they? That's why they call them "Marines," isn't it? And the mutant CIA ninjas we’re leaving behind aren’t soldiers
either, so they don’t count. And the
heavy brigade of Blackwater mobsters we’re leaving behind under the control of
State Department clerks, they don’t count as soldiers, either. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Some undetermined number of
“advisers” we’ll leave behind even though the Status of Forces Agreement says we can't will be special force types, but lots of
them will be Navy SEALs, who aren’t soldiers because they're sailors. Some of the advisers we leave behind will
be Army Green Berets, who <i>are</i> soldiers if you want to be a stickler about it. But their operational chain of
command goes through the Unified Combatant Command called U.S. Special
Operations Command aka USSOCOM (pronounced “U.S. so calm”). But SOCOM (for short) has its own budget just
like one of the uniformed services (i.e., Army, Navy, Air Tunes) so it’s kind
of a separate uniformed service itself. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
SOCOM, even operates under different laws and
legislative oversight procedures than the rest of the armed services do, so it can do things that mere mortal soldiers and sailors and Marines can't do. SOCOM is like the CIA in that regard, but the CIA, which isn't part of the Department of Defense at all, operates under
a different set of laws and oversights than SOCOM, so that if some dirty deed
needs doing that SOCOM doesn't have the legal dope deal to deal with, then the CIA can deal with it
instead (and vice versa). In case
some totally rat's-fundament-filthy dirty deed needs doing that neither the CIA nor SOCOM can do then
it gets done by mercenaries like the Blackwater gunsels we’re leaving behind at
the embassy in Baghdad, whose activities overseas aren’t governed by any laws of God or man. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9DxPZ-qKfhhL4TUWSIB3BbfnBZE2-NRHOyYR6ctbg4vPjQnn6ZCrkBKed2wGT5s-kpf_5KK0PIyulaMXhk6pLBpgklEx3h5XKGSimqmvNZVA_60dZmYThWQCcdWV_BRWD0kN6/s1600/merc.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9DxPZ-qKfhhL4TUWSIB3BbfnBZE2-NRHOyYR6ctbg4vPjQnn6ZCrkBKed2wGT5s-kpf_5KK0PIyulaMXhk6pLBpgklEx3h5XKGSimqmvNZVA_60dZmYThWQCcdWV_BRWD0kN6/s1600/merc.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Fabios of Fortune" can wear<br />
their hair much longer than their<br />
military counterparts are allowed to. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
There’s bound to be talk sooner or later, if there
isn’t already, about how this system of having three separate dirty deed doing
directorates is inefficient and costly, and that we should just pour the SOCOM and CIA appropriations directly into our
Blackwater thug budget. That way, not only can our
dirty deed doers commit atrocities with impunity; they can
pitch national treasure into the wind to their black little hearts' delight.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The counterargument to completely outsourcing our
dirty deeds, and it’s a good one, says that if we ax the CIA and SOCOM
in favor of commercial thuggery, we’ll eliminate the commercial thugs industry's training program. Pretty soon we won’t
have anybody qualified to do dirty deeds for hire, sort of like how we’d soon
run out of airline pilots if we shot down military
aviation. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
But the counter-counter argument says that we can just pay Blackwater to recruit and train goons for
us. This counter-counter approach offers
several strategic advantages over the present system. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
For starters, we ditch the cumbersome requirement
to track the money used for training because once we turn it over to Blackwater
it falls into a black hole, the same way that we’re now saying the $6.6 billion
we thought maybe we left on the seat of a Baghdad bus is “found” because
we discovered it was “transferred” to the Central Bank of Iraq. Where that $6.6 billion was transferred from
there is irrelevant, by Jupiter; we’ve got a phony-baloney receipt for it and
that’s all that counts. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Next, we don’t have to apply the same entrance qualification
standards to our Blackwater trainees that we require of our military
enlistees. That lets us recruit
hoodlums straight from the hood, where they’ll come to us with prior experience of firearms and lethal violence and an innate disdain for law and order. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Best of all, if we recruit criminal ruffians and
train them to operate outside the limits of decent restraint from the get-go
then we don’t have the problem of reprogramming military and CIA snake snackers,
who have been conditioned to pay at least a modicum of attention to legal
limits, as they transition to the private
sector. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4WuGIxU60c_qehgjX6vwCV6I9LMvLP75U9bhyphenhyphenOl-TBdrwRK-69buNm07asQ8cK7PzKB3cQAuzOG905kIPa5nOCkcqSAW3qFF5KLrgddCxJOmSONlDuKnNFeMDMK4klKH7pZtY/s1600/select.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4WuGIxU60c_qehgjX6vwCV6I9LMvLP75U9bhyphenhyphenOl-TBdrwRK-69buNm07asQ8cK7PzKB3cQAuzOG905kIPa5nOCkcqSAW3qFF5KLrgddCxJOmSONlDuKnNFeMDMK4klKH7pZtY/s1600/select.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Senate Armed Services Select Committee</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
But for the time being we’re stuck with
fuddy-duddy CIA and SOCOM, some of whose activities do, in fact, have to endure
legislative scrutiny. That’s okay,
though. The congressional scrutinizers who scrutinize them get on select scrutiny committees the same way one gets adopted into the
Soprano family. You’re the new kid on
the block and somebody does you a big favor and gets you on a select
committee. They feed you a few dirty
secrets and let you approve of things that it isn’t legal for you to approve
of, and the next thing you know you’re a bona fide law breaking lawmaker, a
made member of the Pentarchy, and you’re knocking back ice-cold shots of Stoli
with Revoltin' John Bolton ringside at the Bada-Bing.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
So anything the Pentarchy wants from you you’re
pretty much going to approve, just like you won’t ever again put up a fuss
about it when a president bypasses Congress completely and <a href="http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-19/us/us.libya.action_1_arab-league-state-hillary-clinton-amr-moussa?_s=PM:US">starts
a war on the authority of his Ambassador to the UN</a>, the way Bombardier Barry started
the lollapalooza in Libya. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
And don’t worry that something might crop up in
the Middle East that SOCO or CIA can’t carry out once the “soldiers” leave Iraq,
because the soldiers aren’t going very far. As prominent
Pentagon propagandist <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/world/middleeast/united-states-plans-post-iraq-troop-increase-in-persian-gulf.html?_r=1&hp">Tom
Shanker of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times</i></a>
announced this past Saturday, the Obama administration plans to replace the
soldiers in Iraq with soldiers in Kuwait. This, Shanker tells us, is in case
they need to “respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military
confrontation with Iran.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtGpIe42obRf4ZgT_ih79dg8TJcwgBEDDvtBz3gxHBFDcHh76f8tBFyOnqz4SMxmbqHsLqt_PB5fqDV0pnm-0PLjGEbL0Qcjo7rSEV_2hVwkW_yN97pL4sGSfcCfpp6gBWkJ9x/s1600/images-2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtGpIe42obRf4ZgT_ih79dg8TJcwgBEDDvtBz3gxHBFDcHh76f8tBFyOnqz4SMxmbqHsLqt_PB5fqDV0pnm-0PLjGEbL0Qcjo7rSEV_2hVwkW_yN97pL4sGSfcCfpp6gBWkJ9x/s1600/images-2.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This Shanker cat has got to be<br />
jiving me, man.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Man-oh-Manischewitz. What an irredeemable line of unlimited weight
class bull roar. Security in Iraq
collapsed in 2003 when we invaded the place and <a href="http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/25609/World/Region/Iraq-violence-leaves-five-dead-.aspx">it hasn't recovered to this day</a>. As for a military confrontation
with Iran, Iran can’t project land or air power any further than any other
country in that region, which is about three miles from its border. The only potential military confrontation we
might have with Iran is the one we instigate on the next set of fabricated and
unsupported accusations that no one in the three pillars or fourth estate of our failed experiment in government will question because everyone in them is part of
the war mob, a mob for which there is no witness protection program because the
people who would protect you are the very people you’d be witnessing against.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Our country, fellow citizens, is captive in the
clutch of warmongers and the fearful fools who follow them. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)
writes at <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/">Pen and Sword</a>.
Jeff's novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195441879&sr=8-1">Bathtub
Admirals</a> (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global
dominance, is on sale now.</i> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-90918883248051044012011-10-24T21:32:00.000-04:002011-10-25T09:01:34.587-04:00Fat Ladies, Promises and Iraq<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
25 October 2011<br />
<br />
By Jeff Huber<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Please don’t be duped into thinking that young Mr.
Obama’s “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/middleeast/president-obama-announces-end-of-war-in-iraq.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all">troops
will be home for the holidays</a>” announcement last Friday really means that the
proverbial plump soprano has crooned the coda of our Wagnerian Iliad in Iraq:
the troops’ journey home is likely to resemble the one in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Odyssey </i>that dragged on for ten years or so after the Trojan War ended. Also don’t fall
into the perception traps that might lead you to think Obama is beginning to
keep his last set of campaign promises just in time to cook up some new ones,
or that he’s finally gotten control of his New Praetorian Generals or of the
New Centurion Pentarchy. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
And whatever you do, don’t buy the lysergic
assertion that Obama’s announcement heralds the beginning of the end of our <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/28/opinion/la-oe-hayden28-2010mar28">Long
War</a> aka Era of <a href="http://www.army.mil/article/5516/chief-sees-future-of-persistent-conflict/">Persistent
Conflict</a> aka the Global War on Terrorism (aka GWOT) aka the Global Struggle
Against Violent Extremism (aka <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/03/23/the_end_of_the_global_war_on_t.html">GSAVE</a>)
War on Evil (aka WOE). No, Americans
will still be consuming pro-war bull feather merchandising when Gen Y is
puling like a herd of kittens about Gen Z’s reluctance to buy into
Social Security and Public Health Care. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB1NY_iycMJ-X-OVnpvL5lU0lZv09oM_JIvsP9Df2JYimlb7-iTeLk5k0MpPK2YpgJW04k7wEhTDo6LQ5QrnBz93uYX-3qRvkS4dMVPeHTyW8pmRwqLf-zP1AFZif0wULPAXMp/s1600/petraeus.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB1NY_iycMJ-X-OVnpvL5lU0lZv09oM_JIvsP9Df2JYimlb7-iTeLk5k0MpPK2YpgJW04k7wEhTDo6LQ5QrnBz93uYX-3qRvkS4dMVPeHTyW8pmRwqLf-zP1AFZif0wULPAXMp/s1600/petraeus.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">CIA Director Petraeus was just kidding<br />
back when he said he'd get us<br />
out of Iraq (hah!).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It’s worth noting that Mr. O didn’t specify which holidays of which year the troops would be home from Iraq by. One doesn't like to think that our wartime
leaders would play us with that level of weasel wordplay, but you never
know. Obama might be following the
successful example of his fair-haired step-general <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/08/AR2009020802321_pf.html">Dave
Petraeus</a> who, back in summer of 2007, told the House Foreign Affairs
Committee that his objective as Supreme Sultan of the Surgin’ Safari in Sumaria
was to create “conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage." King David didn't say if he was aiming to
allow out soldiers to disengage in <a href="http://www.antiwar.com/orig/stockbauer1.html">this American Century</a>
or the next one. We know from Petraeus consecrator
and camp concubine <a href="http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/05/25/one-ricks-makes-a-wrong/">Thomas
E. Ricks</a> that the general’s real intention was “not to bring the war to a
close” but to con the American people into sticking with it even longer. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Here we are four years and lunch money after the surge with an Iraq that’s as up for grabs as it ever was, and John Boehner is
expressing concerns that a full withdrawal from Iraq could “jeopardize” the
“gains” we’ve achieved. Holy mackerel,
Sapphire. Where do we find such tanning bed bimbos? That’s like Jonah worrying
if the whale can get by on an empty stomach. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Obama’s “withdrawal” from Iraq doesn't just leave
the back door open; it leaves the front of the building blown off. There’s still a “possibility” that we’ll
leave an unspecified number of “trainers” behind to “advise” Iraqi troops. Military advisers have a way of making like
bunnies, folks. We didn’t end the
Vietnam War by putting advisers in country.
That’s how we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">started</i> the
Vietnam War. There will also, of course
be a Marine security contingent at our embassy in Baghdad. That’s standard procedure in the capitol of
every nation that still sucks up to us. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
What’s not standard procedure about our embassy in
Baghdad—a compound the size of Vatican City that looks like the fortress in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_Navarone_(film)">The Guns of
Navarone</a></i>—is that in addition to the Marines it will also be infested by
what Mark Landler of the New York Times describes as “4,000 to 5,000 <span style="font-family: Georgia;">private State
Department security contractors”</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-size: 15pt;"> </span>(aka Blackwater
hoodlums) “as well as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">significant</i>
[my italics] CIA presence.” You start
adding on the soldiers of ill-gotten fortune that Exxon and Halliburton and KBR
and the rest of the war buckaroos will bring with them and pretty soon you’re
talking about a force the equivalent of a U.S. Army division (the embassy
mercenary corps alone is brigade size). <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5Bi7adZqAQ1OK4YYGXBT7U52xetfgbv3SC_EyER_ASJO4aH7D0jJwqZXCf5eDWTpuUcxldwsZ3nl8Fm51vWumkOO9QP-WiXQQMXcMdBQzGa5FI6W9oVbsinlh5VpHxAbPM7eG/s1600/Hillary.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5Bi7adZqAQ1OK4YYGXBT7U52xetfgbv3SC_EyER_ASJO4aH7D0jJwqZXCf5eDWTpuUcxldwsZ3nl8Fm51vWumkOO9QP-WiXQQMXcMdBQzGa5FI6W9oVbsinlh5VpHxAbPM7eG/s1600/Hillary.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lawyers, Guns and Hillary</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The “advisers” will be special force phantoms who,
along with the CIA spooks, operate outside of any chain of
command you can define with a wire diagram. The mercenaries, once they’re
abroad, run amok unrestrained by any written or unwritten laws of God or
man. The only authority they’re
concerned about is the one that signs their paychecks, who in this case is our
warmongering Secretary of State. Cruella
Clinton can now commit our nation to war without the consent of Congress or the
judiciary or even the commander in chief whenever she gets the notion, which puts her on equal footing with
our <a href="http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-19/us/us.libya.action_1_arab-league-state-hillary-clinton-amr-moussa?_s=PM:US">UN
Ambassador Susie Rice</a>, who started our whackadoodle-do in Libya by carping
the Security Council into passing a bombs-away resolution. <o:p></o:p></div>
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No, the fat lady isn’t singing in Iraq. She hasn’t even sprayed her throat yet. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Claims that Obama’s non-withdrawal
announcement show he’s living up to campaign promises to shut the Iraq WOE down are as legitimate as blue
money. The deadline to haul heinie out
of Iraq at the end of this year was in the status of forces agreement the Bush regime signed onto when the UN mandate ran out. Obama is semi-bringing
the troops home because his Pentarchs couldn’t bully the Iraqi government into
granting indefinite legal immunity to whatever troops we decided to leave
behind. If an agreement to leave troops
in place had been reached, Obama would have gone slut-puppy for it just like
he’s done with everything else his velvet junta generals have ordered him to
do. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-QlS4nfM6FhTcmHEIjH2BEqMhfB4HmOpEZnUObuUYyIwv_DyB7Mp9AkvGmfMwY_3pwnLUeSgBxGeVueCTYaISRVgT8HYrwt_MXzVvTm64h-LSmhqcfMi4SL31jYTXgyNn53r4/s1600/Pops.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-QlS4nfM6FhTcmHEIjH2BEqMhfB4HmOpEZnUObuUYyIwv_DyB7Mp9AkvGmfMwY_3pwnLUeSgBxGeVueCTYaISRVgT8HYrwt_MXzVvTm64h-LSmhqcfMi4SL31jYTXgyNn53r4/s320/Pops.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We've got to drop all those leftover bombs on <i>somebody</i>!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In no way have the Pentagon brass hats given up on
maintaining a permanent presence in Iraq.
Senior sanctioned leakers are feeding the Tom Ricks wannabe echo
chamberlains tag lines about how we'll have to get by with a “smaller
footprint” to administer “training” and “guidance,” and to provide Iraq with
air defense from, uh, the Kurdish Air Force, I guess. But, hey, you know, if we leave people
behind to do that stuff we’ll need additional security personnel to protect
them, and we’ll need additional support personnel to cook food and make beds
and fix stopped up toilets for the additional security personnel, and then
we’ll need extra additional security personnel to provide security for the
additional security personnel’s additional support personnel, and then we’ll
need extra additional support personnel to support the extra additional security personnel, and so on and so on and so on. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
But aside from that, everybody is coming home. </div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXXHy0OsOqDugh1KXGKkug244u5fdomcFwJ1u2KZpKyhQ12V7N8dg1WKgvV7c7q24Whw4fRNfM1XCiRQJK6UkxBkhTmd544Uu5LrETY4gfNh614X9gW_KpNG5vAxLnYc7PTuk8/s1600/220px-Mickey_Rourke_2009_portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXXHy0OsOqDugh1KXGKkug244u5fdomcFwJ1u2KZpKyhQ12V7N8dg1WKgvV7c7q24Whw4fRNfM1XCiRQJK6UkxBkhTmd544Uu5LrETY4gfNh614X9gW_KpNG5vAxLnYc7PTuk8/s1600/220px-Mickey_Rourke_2009_portrait.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With Moammar "The Ram" Gadhafi<br />
gone, who's next? </td></tr>
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Any talk that Obama’s homecoming address is another
sign that he’s reining in our warhorses is pure reconstituted horse
lunch. We no sooner get done having
those images of Moammar Gadhafi looking like Mickey Roark at the end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wrestler_(2008_film)">The Wrestler</a></i> jammed in our eyes like pencils than <a href="http://www.military.com/news/article/mccain-suggests-military-options-in-syria.html?ESRC=eb.nl">Pops
McCain</a> starts howling about how now we can start bombing the living Christ
our Lord and Savior out of Syria!<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Remember thinking the warmongery was kaput when McCain lost the election?<br />
<br />
THIS JUST IN: <a href="http://www.military.com/news/article/turkish-tanks-enter-northern-iraq.html?ESRC=eb.nl">TURKISH TANKS ENTER NORTHERN IRAQ</a>.<br />
<br />
Hi ho!</div>
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<i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)
writes at <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/">Pen and Sword</a>.
Jeff's novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195441879&sr=8-1">Bathtub
Admirals</a> (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global
dominance, is on sale now.</i> <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-5732210484143423242011-10-17T21:40:00.000-04:002011-10-18T09:25:45.160-04:00The Persian Paranoia Ploy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
18 Oct. 2011<br />
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by Jeff Huber<o:p></o:p></div>
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I thought about calling this essay “The Boys Who Cried Iran,’” but that title had a cross-purpose parallel problem. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” parallel is that the townspeople eventually ignore the boy’s false alarms. It seems, on the other hand, that we the people will never tire of hearing the “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” mantra. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; color: #333333; float: right; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 1em; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px; position: relative; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmWHgGkzqtuXf-IWCSGw5ytCegjceOZ6l4Ab1JFJ2p6n8yGBvMTsvPveTq2z5031Kr1U0OtIwzyfnbKRbeb5d4GXQ35UzBUYDDiKH_L_dM76Uj2mkcIIWatG8H3aVI_D7RdQhj/s1600/Coung+floyd.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; color: #cc3300; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmWHgGkzqtuXf-IWCSGw5ytCegjceOZ6l4Ab1JFJ2p6n8yGBvMTsvPveTq2z5031Kr1U0OtIwzyfnbKRbeb5d4GXQ35UzBUYDDiKH_L_dM76Uj2mkcIIWatG8H3aVI_D7RdQhj/s1600/Coung+floyd.jpeg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0976562) 0px 0px 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; border-width: initial; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0976562) 0px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 11px; text-align: center;">The Iranians vant to<br />
drink your blood!</td></tr>
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This time around, the Pentarchy’s bull feather merchants have manage to cull a confluence of Persian Peril Paranoia with our by now Pavlovian terror of terrorism. An Iranian-American used-car salesman is accused of being the key figure in an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/us/us-accuses-iranians-of-plotting-to-kill-saudi-envoy.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2&pagewanted=all" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Iranian plot</a> to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. and to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Scary, huh kids?<o:p></o:p></div>
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The used-car salesman in question is 56 year-old Mansour J. Arbabsiar (aka “Scarface), whose apprehension by the FBI was in keeping with the legendary Homeland Security sting operations that netted the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_(prisoner)" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Dirty Bomber</a> who turned out to be too retarded to make a dirty bomb, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab#The_awareness_of_US_intelligence" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Panty Bomber</a> whose panty bomb didn’t even put third-degree burns on his party favor, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Times_Square_car_bombing_attempt" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Times Square Screw Up</a> who locked himself out of his bomb car <i>and</i> his getaway car <i>and</i>his apartment. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/us/odd-turn-for-mansour-arbabsiar-suspect-in-iranian-plot.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Scarface</a>, if that really is his international underground terrorist cabal code name, is a 30 year resident of Texas, a state renowned for another Justice Department fiasco of fame that unfolded in the town of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Waco</a>, a travesty during which Janet Reno’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) hooligans immolated 76 lonesome losers whose heinous crime was allowing themselves to be brainwashed by cult leader David Koresh. Scarface Arbabsiar inhabited Texas for three decades during which he racked up a string of failed businesses, a covey of angry creditors, and a furious former spouse who sought a protective order against him. His friends describe him as “perennially disheveled” and “hopelessly disorganized.” His socks never matched and he constantly lost his keys and cell phone. A rival used-car salesman described Arbabisiar as “worthless.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mansour J. Arbabsiar was a mark so perfect for a pre-election propaganda con game that the fool infested FBI couldn’t have overlooked him if they were wearing two blindfolds instead of the single one that was their standard issue in the years that led up to the 9/11 attacks. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Hwazki8t652MqnEU8HzaU1tE231VCdb2ScnIAhuHhthEILoYpWH97PTbn9FKQnsuXVrGvetNYDE0W35eGipvTThY1EB7HZBDXb2QhXdXCX_iDxxTuyUtlYZQ9D0dFnCbryJT/s1600/KeystoneKops.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; color: #cc3300; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Hwazki8t652MqnEU8HzaU1tE231VCdb2ScnIAhuHhthEILoYpWH97PTbn9FKQnsuXVrGvetNYDE0W35eGipvTThY1EB7HZBDXb2QhXdXCX_iDxxTuyUtlYZQ9D0dFnCbryJT/s1600/KeystoneKops.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0976562) 0px 0px 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; border-width: initial; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0976562) 0px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 11px; text-align: center;">Attorney General Holder and senior Justice Dept. Staff</td></tr>
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At the uber-helm of this cockamamie caper was Attorney General <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eric-holder-obamas-albatross/2011/10/10/gIQA5u8IaL_story.html" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Eric Holder</a>, who is to Barack Obama’s Justice Department what <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Sterling" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Ford Sterling</a> was to Mack Sennett’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Cops" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Keystone Kops</a>: the chief buffoon. It was no doubt coincidence, it just had to have been, that the Scarface assassination scare story hit the mainstream fire hose the day after Holder was subpoenaed to do some ‘splainin’ to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the ATF’s Operation <a href="http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2011/10/14/21009/fast-and-furious" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Fast and Furious</a>, a gun-walking campaign that should have been dubbed “Faster and Funnier.” In the course of groping though an investigation trying to trace firearms from American gun dealers to Mexican drug gangs, Holder’s ATF-ups managed to lose track of 1,400 to 2,000 guns that migrated into the mitts of the Mexican drug gangsters they were trying to keep guns from migrating into the mitts of. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I’d characterize Faster and Funnier as a Petraeus-class fumble, but that would be incredibly unfair to Holder and the ATF. When then three-star general David Petraeus let U.S supplied guns tiptoe into the hands of Shiite militiamen, he didn’t just hand over a couple thousand of the things. Petraeus gave away <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080501299.html" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">190,000</a> of the things, more than enough to arm <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Infantry_Division_(United_States)" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">10 United States Army infantry divisions</a></i>. Funny how the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee never subpoenaed King David to explain how that happened. It must have been an oversight on their part (heh). <br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; color: #333333; float: right; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 1em; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px; position: relative; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDIp_9ZCrKz2hAgvOZGh9YpqPpWIS6Ec3zr42_CyfbOEPkdogm0n368sbNvSfGUAufedqgvVuDJ8SI9ImijLLLFDsDxu_qr8qqsTzC9uZJ0kMGbJDdgw4tzb4W-UeOG_saEwiQ/s1600/sloussear.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; color: #cc3300; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDIp_9ZCrKz2hAgvOZGh9YpqPpWIS6Ec3zr42_CyfbOEPkdogm0n368sbNvSfGUAufedqgvVuDJ8SI9ImijLLLFDsDxu_qr8qqsTzC9uZJ0kMGbJDdgw4tzb4W-UeOG_saEwiQ/s1600/sloussear.jpeg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0976562) 0px 0px 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; border-width: initial; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0976562) 0px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 11px; text-align: center;">It's the old "They can't<br />
be that stupid so they<br />
must be that stupid" ploy.</td></tr>
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According to the <a href="http://www.blogger.com/Runyonesque" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Runyonesque</a> scenario Holder and Company spin, the case just happened to fall together when some Defense Enforcement Agency Dunderhead had a chance meeting with Johnny Scars and a pair of Iran’s elite Quds Force baddies who just happened to be operating on American soil in plain sight of every federal, state and local law enforcement official and intelligence agent in the great state of Texas. Our best intelligence (double heh) alleges that officials at the highest levels of Iran’s government pulled <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/alleged-plot-is-uncharacteristically-bold/2011/10/11/gIQA7vzpdL_story.html?hpid=z1" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">stunts</a> that prompted Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East and author of several books on Iran, said there was “sloppiness about the case that defies belief.” “Sloppy” is a kind euphemism. According to Holder’s Heroes, top Iranian leaders left a paper and electronic trail leading back to themselves that Inspector Clousseau could have followed. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But incredulity is by no means grounds among the Obama inner-war party for stiff-arming a chance to pacify the Pentarchy with the citizenry marching on Wall Street and an election on the horizon. State Secretary Cruella Clinton said of the case “The idea that they [the Iranians, I guess she means] would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador, nobody could make that up, right?” Wake up and smell the napalm, Hillary. Remember the whoppers Big Dick Cheney and his Delaware Destroyers fabricated about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his ties al Qaeda and his connections to 9/11 that got us into the Iraq quagmire that <i>you voted for</i>? Conjuring incredible tales so the American public will let you bomb or invade other countries is neocon de rigueur. If you ain’t lyin’ they ain’t buyin’, that’s the warmongery’s motto when it comes to constructing a casus belli from hydrogen molecules. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Holder's argument that top Iranian government officials were involved in a plot to hire Mexican Drug runners to assassinate a Saudi diplomat and bomb an Israeli embassy has more holes in it than <a href="http://hypernation.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/batshit-insane-scientology-facts/" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Scientology dogma</a>. But that’s okay because young <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/us/obama-calls-for-iran-sanctions-following-alleged-plot.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2&pagewanted=all" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Mr. Obama</a> said in a 13 October press conference that, “the facts are there for all to see,” though he failed to mention what any of those facts are or where any of us might go to see them. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi93p77LC4MkqV-pgQFsRKWKqjR7mmfKjokXLsCqnw2C-X-kr8UPn3HchmdVeUPl9Zpiua-5Ymc3uHowTDbYHfZbbF9PmrCYHhkZRpvRy6YsSVaXd80fPtkUu8RWU0gAFnBLoRM/s1600/Grampaw.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; color: #cc3300; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi93p77LC4MkqV-pgQFsRKWKqjR7mmfKjokXLsCqnw2C-X-kr8UPn3HchmdVeUPl9Zpiua-5Ymc3uHowTDbYHfZbbF9PmrCYHhkZRpvRy6YsSVaXd80fPtkUu8RWU0gAFnBLoRM/s1600/Grampaw.jpeg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px; position: relative;" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnmZQy9Mfk7Jg1kp5Hs4up8MXznBiPk48E98HmRu0a_RDl3P1RyhppsujvqekbDDtpTO9UC8xQNBHxINOVJLTg79fDUxOHFajH3PXSTC5l71ishqr-YAOr_qKUgUpeGLgLQSyB/s1600/Patriotic+Barbie.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; color: #cc3300; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnmZQy9Mfk7Jg1kp5Hs4up8MXznBiPk48E98HmRu0a_RDl3P1RyhppsujvqekbDDtpTO9UC8xQNBHxINOVJLTg79fDUxOHFajH3PXSTC5l71ishqr-YAOr_qKUgUpeGLgLQSyB/s1600/Patriotic+Barbie.jpeg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px; position: relative;" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjoJXDigbnH6wrlJgrYmg29cQSeoVhfutPJmamnIpzAuyxLWMmXTkFGgwvWJudXJ3bMufskVapWLxq4lkGvxM2uyQcfwQYMEO6-pE_wvSp6TOUBeycN1uVoqVTb3yeohIFaXKW/s1600/BAzooka+Joe.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; color: #cc3300; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjoJXDigbnH6wrlJgrYmg29cQSeoVhfutPJmamnIpzAuyxLWMmXTkFGgwvWJudXJ3bMufskVapWLxq4lkGvxM2uyQcfwQYMEO6-pE_wvSp6TOUBeycN1uVoqVTb3yeohIFaXKW/s1600/BAzooka+Joe.jpeg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px; position: relative;" /></a>When Holder's Iranian/Mexican assassination/bomb plot accusations began generating guffaws globally, Obama’s spin physicians switched to another cherished wolf cry. Favored Pentarchy echo chamberlain <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/world/middleeast/white-house-says-data-shows-iran-push-on-nuclear-arms.html?sq=iran&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">David E. Sanger</a> of the New York Times relays to us that “President Obama is pressing United Nations nuclear inspectors to release classified intelligence information showing that Iran is designing and experimenting with nuclear weapons technology.” If you crawl between the gutters in this puff piece you pick up that the “classified intelligence information” they’re talking about is the so-called “<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-gareth-porter/liebermankyl-vs-the-evide_b_66020.html?" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">smoking laptop</a>” documents that were proven to be forgeries <i>five freaking years ago</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But young Mr. Obama’s story is that Iran wants to kill Saudis and Israelis and they’ll do it with hired banditos or nukes or trick-or-treaters or whatever it takes, and he’s sticking to it, and he’ll get away with this used mare's oats mendacity because beating war drums appeases the neocons and today's liberals are too vaginal to stand up to him. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 1px 1px 5px; color: #333333; float: left; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-right: 1em; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px; position: relative; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUiJN6V3xMx5_RLT9_PVxSYCu6cYdSM7ImMCTncfgfoZvZSqCZ76PBmXXd3f11wycLrrODbmL0zS6pBkgC8q57_Qvbl-HByOsLzpl-5wCsdLu1YHo38XEXCSGr9ZGTc6lmBMva/s1600/erkel.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; color: #cc3300; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUiJN6V3xMx5_RLT9_PVxSYCu6cYdSM7ImMCTncfgfoZvZSqCZ76PBmXXd3f11wycLrrODbmL0zS6pBkgC8q57_Qvbl-HByOsLzpl-5wCsdLu1YHo38XEXCSGr9ZGTc6lmBMva/s200/erkel.jpeg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0976562) 0px 0px 0px; background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; border-width: initial; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.0976562) 0px 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; position: relative;" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 11px; text-align: center;">Where do we find such candidates?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Why do we elect such men to the highest office in our land? Oh, that’s right. The choice was him and Bazooka Joe or Grampaw Pettibone and Patriotic Barbie. The difference between the two tickets doesn’t seem so clear in the rearview mirror, does it? This Obama person who promised to put the brakes on the neocon agenda is starting to make Barry Goldwater look like a peace pansy. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i><span style="color: #262626;">Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #c11e00; text-decoration: none;">Pen and Sword</span></a>. Jeff's novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195441879&sr=8-1" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #c11e00; text-decoration: none;">Bathtub Admirals</span></a> (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.</span></i><span style="color: #262626;"> </span></div>
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</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-17669438588705637522011-10-09T16:52:00.001-04:002011-10-11T22:46:05.508-04:00Bananastan-iversary!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
11 Oct. 2011<br />
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<br />
by Jeff Huber<o:p></o:p></div>
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Last week marked the tenth anniversary of our War
on Evil (aka WOE) in the Bananastans, those Central Asian banana republics of
Pakistan and Afghanistan. If you’re
confused as to which of the two Bananastans we’re at war with, don't
worry. You’re in good company, some of
which resides in the National Security Council and much of which dwells in the
Pentagon and even more of which infests Congress. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Technically speaking, we aren’t at war with either
country, even though we’ve been in the process of blowing both of them to
piecemeal smithereens for over a decade now.
Then again, strictly speaking, constitutionally speaking, we aren’t at
war with any country, since we haven’t formally declared war against anybody
since back in the early forties. That
war, the last war Congress declared, World War II, was actually two wars, one against Imperial Japan and one
against Nazi Germany. We didn’t declare
war against Nazi Germany, by they way, but we didn’t have to. Nazi Germany declared war against us after we
declared war against Imperial Japan. But
that was good enough to constitute a Constitutional war according to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquess_of_Queensberry_Rules">Marquess of
Queensbury</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Goren">Charles
Goren</a> or whoever was authorized to make up the rules of warfare back before
there was a UN to make things up. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn0Lv8OCgCgkUuWFAR8_qO9nS6EA1tr5ha5O1AirOs4AGLL0D0GpTeGm_Hi3e_aEyWrzrB4W-gYN8aV97YHpibxcShRC8Gjpk66k0kHw_26e0eqBKswvJvryv0rrZsraHJHubv/s1600/Uncle+san.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn0Lv8OCgCgkUuWFAR8_qO9nS6EA1tr5ha5O1AirOs4AGLL0D0GpTeGm_Hi3e_aEyWrzrB4W-gYN8aV97YHpibxcShRC8Gjpk66k0kHw_26e0eqBKswvJvryv0rrZsraHJHubv/s1600/Uncle+san.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Japanese foreign affairs minister Moramu Shigemitzu<br />
formally declares "Uncle-san!"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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The wars against Germany and Japan were over by the late 1940s. We know they
ended because Germany and Japan signed formal surrender documents. The German and Japanese people went along with
those surrenders because they were signed by heads of state of the governments
that existed in Germany and Japan at the time they surrendered. Another nation formally surrendering to us is
another thing that hasn’t happened since the 1940s, and is a very large part of
the reason that we haven’t actually won a war since then. We declared victory in Vietnam after we got
our heinie handed to us there and went home, and the uneasy peace between the Koreas is
the product of a cease-fire that has lasted more-or-less successfully for a
half-century and tool-booth tokens. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Even though we haven’t declared any wars since the
1940s, we are presently involved in roughly <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/162566/secret-war-120-countries">120
</a>of them, give or take, around the world.
The legitimizing pretext for some of those wars is the Authorization for
Use of Military Force aka <a href="http://news.findlaw.com/wp/docs/terrorism/sjres23.es.html">AUMF</a> that
our Congress persons passed almost unanimously a week after the 9/11/2001attacks without thinking about what they
were doing. The pre-ramble to the 9/18/2001 AUMF says that “the
President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and
prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.” <o:p></o:p>The 9/18/2001 AUMF is often referred to as “the blank
check” that allowed young Mr. Bush to do whatever hoodoo he had to in order to keep them
evildoers from doing their evil whenever his neocon
masters decided he needed to do it. <br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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The 9/18/2001 AUMF as well as the 10/16/2002 AUMF that
gave Mr. Bush and his puppeteers permission to invade Iraq are provisions of
the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution">War Powers Resolution
of 1973</a>, which says that a president can only employ troops in <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50/usc_sec_50_00001544----000-.html">combat
overseas beyond 60 days</a> unless Congress “has declared war or has enacted a
specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces.” Bush administration Federalist Society
lawyers, most notably <a href="http://politics.salon.com/2008/04/02/yoo_2/">John
Yoo</a> (aka Yoo Manchu), argued that Bush didn’t need a separate AUMF to
invade Iraq because the original AUMF allowed it, plus a pile of other pony plop about how international law allows you to conduct preemptive self defense even
if you don’t really need to, because, hey, how can you know for sure that you
don't need to defend yourself from another country unless you invade the place
and toss it to find out? Huh? You tell me.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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In retrospect, the Bush machine's threats to bypass
the legislature appear to have been a stratagem to gulling our Keystone
Kongress into demanding a chance to vote for the Iraq invasion, and then letting them vote
for it so they couldn’t hold the executive branch responsible if it turned
out that we invaded another country on fuzzy pretexts (which turned out to be the case). <o:p></o:p></div>
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The 9/18/2001 AUMF and the self-defense mantra
have been the bulwark of “legal” justification for the triple-digits worth of
third world wars we’re now waging—with one major exception. Even the best and brightest warmongers in young
Mr. Obama’s administration couldn’t claim that Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was a
terror threat. He had, in fact,
renounced jihadist terrorism in general and al Qaeda specifically. And they couldn’t say we had to preemptively
defend ourselves against Gaddafi because he had voluntarily ash canned whatever
sort of Our Gang weapons of mass destruction program he might have had. They couldn’t even say the Gadaffi’s regime
was illegitimate because young Mr. Bush recognized it in return for Gadaffi
ash canning his WMD and renouncing al Qaeda.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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So <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/03/20/libya-airstrikes-hillary-clinton-and-the-women-who-called-for-war.html">Susie Rice</a>, the liberal warmonger who young Mr.
Obama hand-picked to succeed <a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm">neocon
warmongers</a> John Bolton and Zalmay Khalilzad as our Ambassador to the UN,
crammed a resolution past the Security Council’s tonsils to establish a no-fly
zone to protect the freedom loving peoples of Libya from their mean old
dictator Gaddafi (who the UN had also recognized as a legitimate head of state). That quickly turned into an extensive bombing
campaign ala the Kosovo Konflict to run mean old Gadaffi out of office and
replace him with a bunch of hoodlums who can't decide among themselves who
is <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/12/world/la-fg-libya-fighting-20110912">in charge</a> of them. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The Obama warmongers’ UN gambit accomplished
something even Yoo Manchu didn’t manage to pull off: stiff-arm the War Powers
Act and Congress completely from the business of starting wars.
They got away with what the Bush camp couldn't consummate because liberals get the vapors when a conservatives start pointless,
ill-advised wars, but when a fellow liberal does such things, well, liberals,
you know how they are, they have to hold a vagina dialogue before they actually
do anything and, except for the very few of them who still have a spine like <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dennis-j-kucinich/act-now-to-end-the-war-in_b_835707.html">Denny
Kucinich</a>, they’ll go along with whatever young Mr. Obama wants because they
don’t want to see him get his progressive pants pulled down by some tea-bagging
bobble head come 11/6/2012.<br />
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That explains why liberals couldn't seem to give a
bat’s eyelash less about the recent revelation by the British press (our press
doesn’t reveal things any more) that Obama is <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-cia-killlist-idUSTRE79475C20111005">initiating
wars on individuals</a>, including American citizens like US born citizen Anwar
al-Awlaki, by authority of a secret panel within his National Security
Council. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3X2wlbqbBSE6BcW878D1OfEiaRjb1Z_LeKl_8-zR6JlnOJ1b2kEqLZp7ESozbATgCazic-CG7SoAAGEgdgOARE3EGrfigMQyBrs1HONQkCpmbYvjxYZsanq0BbuxaWHmKHLVk/s1600/halftrack.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3X2wlbqbBSE6BcW878D1OfEiaRjb1Z_LeKl_8-zR6JlnOJ1b2kEqLZp7ESozbATgCazic-CG7SoAAGEgdgOARE3EGrfigMQyBrs1HONQkCpmbYvjxYZsanq0BbuxaWHmKHLVk/s1600/halftrack.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"We don't<br />
want to rush<br />
into getting<br />
out of wars!"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
And maybe it’s not all that shocking to discover
that a secret panel is committing America to wars against individuals, since
we’ve cut Congress out of the picture anyway and since we don’t actually fight
wars against countries anymore. The original enemy in the Bananastans Woe was Osama bin Laden, supposedly, and the WOE in Iraq was against Saddam Hussein. That both of those enemies are now dead does
not, of course, mean that the wars we've stopped fighting wars agains them, or that we're even in the process of ending them. <a href="http://news.antiwar.com/2011/10/03/gen-allen-disavows-2014-us-going-to-stay-in-afghanistan-for-a-long-time/">General
John Allen</a>, who just replaced King David Petraeus as the four-star bull
feather merchant in charge of the Bananastans, says we’re going to be there for
a “long time” beyond the notional 2014 troop withdrawal date. </div>
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“The plan is to win,” General Allen
says. If that’s the case, inhabitants of
the Next American Century will still be waging an undeclared war in the
Bananastans against an enemy who will never surrender because the Next American Centurions, like us,
won’t be able to figure out who exactly that enemy is. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)
writes at <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/">Pen and Sword</a>.
Jeff's novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195441879&sr=8-1">Bathtub
Admirals</a> (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global
dominance, is on sale now.</i> <o:p></o:p></div>
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Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-63957731471929696142011-10-03T07:15:00.001-04:002011-10-04T09:29:10.842-04:00Extort the Troops!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
4 Oct. 2011<br />
<br />
by Jeff Huber<br />
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<br />
I was plenty riled when Walgreens tried to shame
me into doing my patriotic duty by contributing a dollar to send a Reese’s
Peanut Butter Cup to one of our troops overseas. “Don’t you want to support the troops?” the
McJobette at the cash register asked me.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’d been waiting in line for several minutes to
pay for two dollars and something worth of something or other because all of
the people in front me who didn’t believe in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century who had
taken the time to write checks for a few dollars worth of something else, so I
was maybe more annoyed than I might otherwise have been. Whatever the case, I decided to use the time
I would have taken to write a check for two dollars if I wrote checks and something to
give Ms. McJob and the people in line behind me an
impromptu lecture on wartime economics. <o:p></o:p></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnQrhJi20taiatHA1VJh1JjosaeAfkHxAACD5Pi_iM-ue58MUSVBU4mSvp2XnSrRDmhG3RQkqU0SxBODfnwBsIoXAdVdSfbHD9NO5Q3zraCvzAimryIaatzH5CnCmcF1sEepRM/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnQrhJi20taiatHA1VJh1JjosaeAfkHxAACD5Pi_iM-ue58MUSVBU4mSvp2XnSrRDmhG3RQkqU0SxBODfnwBsIoXAdVdSfbHD9NO5Q3zraCvzAimryIaatzH5CnCmcF1sEepRM/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Praise the Lord and pass the chocolate.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Since 9/11, I explained, every American who wasn’t
either too poor or too rich to pay taxes had “supported” the troops to the tune
of well over $5 trillion, and the actual figure was probably closer to $10
trillion. If $5 or $10 trillion wasn’t
enough to buy the troops all the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Mars Bars and
Gummy Bears and Jujubes they could possibly hold then me kicking in an extra
couple of bucks at Walgreens wasn’t going to help to keep their candy cache combat capable. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The McJobstress gave me a baleful look and said,
“So you don’t want to support the troops?”
Some guy in line behind me wearing a biker T-shirt and a ponytail muttered
“f*****g liberal” as he reached for his checkbook. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0g_sF6fx8YszWydrEAmHhKLgq4w_JQXQZ0bD7OHdzDWIT_VjvnufNATGEs2LtDu-q8c3c8P-et8G8uxpSHqG0cfWkS5aOW-JeXNqOGHUesd0P-FfYHggNjh-CONiMnW2sWhf-/s1600/Warbucks.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0g_sF6fx8YszWydrEAmHhKLgq4w_JQXQZ0bD7OHdzDWIT_VjvnufNATGEs2LtDu-q8c3c8P-et8G8uxpSHqG0cfWkS5aOW-JeXNqOGHUesd0P-FfYHggNjh-CONiMnW2sWhf-/s1600/Warbucks.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This war's for you.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Cashing in on our War on Evil is hardly a new
thing. I was sitting in a local
tap-and-trough the first time I saw the Anheuser Bush “Coming Home” commercial,
the one where troops returning from the war walk through an airport terminal to
a standing ovation from the civilians who are waiting around to board for their delayed
flights. I shook my head and
asked the bartender to replace my Budweiser with a Coors. She asked why, and I said that if the Budweiser people
wanted to use the war to sell beer they’d have to sell it to somebody besides
me.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
That’s when Virginia Beach legend “Drunk Dave” pried
his nose from the bar and said, “Aw, man, they’re not trying to sell beer,
they’re just trying to show their patriotic spirit.” This is the same Drunk Dave who once claimed
that he got a balanced view on politics because he listened to Rush Limbaugh <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> Sean Hannity. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
To gain even further perspective on the events of
the day, Drunk Dave often tunes in to G. Gordon Liddy’s program. Dave is especially fond of the G. Man’s
bumper music, most often war tinged, patriotic, twangy jingles by the likes of
the abominable Toby Keith about how it’s the American way to put a boot in
everybody’s bottom and sell a lot of records about it. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
One of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, that
the anti-war movement has less traction than a curling stone is that it’s not
only the defense industry parasites who are knocking down big war bucks. It’s everybody. One can’t pass a single merchandising venue
in my area without bumping against some sort of trooper-dooper sales gimmick. Granted, I live in an area (Hampton Roads)
that contains the densest military population in the country, but given the
advertising I see on what little television I watch it appears that Madison
Avenue has cast its “support the troops” net from coast to coast. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
It’s the American way, I suppose, to use
whatever’s available to gull one’s fellow citizens into buying fecal matter they
probably don’t need, and why should war be any different from, say, body odor
or erectile dysfunction? After all, exploiting
human misery and suffering has always been a core tenet of capitalism, hasn’t
it? (Especially when the political right gets its way and eliminates all
government regulation, eh?)<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">One might even be willing to grant that making money on war is downright virtuous, up to a point. Unfortunately, the hideous truth at the core of “support the troops” commercialism is that it supports the neocons' Orwellian doctrine of “</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/28/opinion/la-oe-hayden28-2010mar28">Long War</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">” (aka “</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.army.mil/article/5516/chief-sees-future-of-persistent-conflict/">Persistent Conflict</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">”). Had irony not gone the way of truth, justice and honor during young Mr. Bush’s administration, it would delight at Persistent Conflict’s key internal contradiction: in order to keep the Long War going as long as possible, it must be fought in such a manner as to generate an infinite supply of enemies. Thus does the Long War doctrine defeat any rational claims that they contribute to our national security, yet national security is the fallback rationale for persisting in the Long War. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
And Irony would turn positively giddy over the
sign that as of this weekend hangs behind the cash register of my corner
7-Eleven: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
U.S. Armed
Forces<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
We Don’t
Start Wars<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
We Finish
Them<o:p></o:p></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
Support the
Troops<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Jesus on a jet ski, there’s not trace of
truth in that entire slog of slogans. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
We <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do</i>
start wars. We supposedly invaded
Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks even though none of its masterminds
or hijackers were actually from Afghanistan. We kicked the closest thing Afghanistan has ever known to a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban%27s_rise_to_power">legitimate
government</a> out of power and replaced it with a gang of hoodlums and drug
dealers who now constitute the <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2010/11/01/most-currupt-countries-2010-business-beltway-currupt-countries.html">second
most corrupt government</a> on the face of the earth. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
We supposedly invaded Iraq because of Saddam
Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his role in 9/11 via his ties to al
Qaeda. None of these justifications
turned out to be true. We replaced
Hussein with a gang of hoodlums who now constitute the fourth most corrupt
government on the face of the earth. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
We instigated the bombing of Libya to remove a
head of state who we legitimized by recognizing his government and replace him
with a gang of hoodlums who promise to surpass Somalia as the country with the
most corrupt government on the face of the earth. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&emc=eta1">Billions
of American tax dollars</a> financed the efforts of U.S. “non-profit” groups
that fomented the Arab Spring movement that has set the Middle East afire, a
circumstance that will abet the Long War policy goal of creating an
inexhaustible supply of maniacs fighting among themselves to become even worse tyrants than the ones they deposed. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
We’re presently mired in <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/162566/secret-war-120-countries">120
wars</a> throughout the globe, all of which we started or are involved in by
our own choosing. And we’ll never "finish" any of them because their very nature inhibits them from ever ending. The only way we'll ever walk away from them is to just get up and walk away. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Can we blame the “U.S. Armed Forces” for having
started these unending wars? You bet
your bippy, we can. Oh, the “troops”
aren’t to blame. It was the Pentagon
brass who helped Dirty Dick Cheney and Dandy Don Rumsfeld cook the intelligence and manufacture the propaganda that got us stuck by the zipper in Iraq. And the felonious four-stars—David Petraeus, Richard
Myers, Pete Pace, George Casey, Mike Mullen and Ray Odierno, just to name the
top row on the wall of the pogues’ gallery—<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">have
been as thick with the military-industrial warmongery as ticks on a wild dog
when it comes to peddling pro-war propaganda designed to obliterate withdrawal timelines. </span></div>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWbyLqmI6MydzWZolnwDyarDiVN1eyTlSD_bY5FlPK5Elvj1nVlYAI0dPivRd9O6at9ADCGznD7LsPDiScySBDAIbgwxhayhFSFEVu-lv_vduVLPyFb_zKk04LE0YpHQ__SmRx/s1600/these+colors.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWbyLqmI6MydzWZolnwDyarDiVN1eyTlSD_bY5FlPK5Elvj1nVlYAI0dPivRd9O6at9ADCGznD7LsPDiScySBDAIbgwxhayhFSFEVu-lv_vduVLPyFb_zKk04LE0YpHQ__SmRx/s1600/these+colors.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">These Colors Can't Think</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The troops, for the most part a captive audience
of Armed Forces media and their true-believing superiors, have been brainwashed
even worse than the rest of the nation. A
2006 <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0228-01.htm">Zogby</a> poll showed
that almost 90 percent of American troops serving in Iraq thought the war there
was retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s role in 9/11. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Lying to the troops, and exhorting them to finish
wars that cannot be won, and exploiting them for the
benefit war profiteers cannot in any way be defined as “supporting”
them. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
But try telling that to the likes of Lady McJob or
Drunk Dave or the yahooligan who posted the Bush Coming Home commercial on
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUrf6Qg4T4E">YouTube</a> and called it “Probably the best commercial ever made.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<i><span style="color: #262626;">Commander Jeff
Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #c11e00; text-decoration: none;">Pen and Sword</span></a>. Jeff's novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195441879&sr=8-1"><span style="color: #c11e00; text-decoration: none;">Bathtub Admirals</span></a> (Kunati
Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.</span></i>
<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-88039325842095815002011-09-26T22:10:00.000-04:002011-09-28T03:39:26.481-04:00Click and Clack and Play War<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
27 Sep. 2011<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
by Jeff Huber<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
I’ve said for some time that the biggest
casualty of our woebegone Ism Wars may be our national cognizance. The lines between intelligence, news, gossip,
rumor and brainwash have faded like a hangover at happy hour, and the gap between reality and perception has never
been greater. Big Media has been the
dutiful echo chamberlain for Big War for so long that it may never again be possible
for Americans, by now hopelessly addicted to the slime from their TV sets, to clearly conceptualize the causes and consequences of our
fist-first foreign policy. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEQAyRxsG6-APJFPOYbeAQgGy0gvznh_GGHYS0fuWUNvLt-pGLJv9CT4O-sM8vqDahN-rbmVw_sBkpstvJs-B6xBeyCw4CkWnaltVQlpXAVqLCtAKUY-7DmNu2J77TXNmFu2KX/s1600/Click+and+Clack.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEQAyRxsG6-APJFPOYbeAQgGy0gvznh_GGHYS0fuWUNvLt-pGLJv9CT4O-sM8vqDahN-rbmVw_sBkpstvJs-B6xBeyCw4CkWnaltVQlpXAVqLCtAKUY-7DmNu2J77TXNmFu2KX/s1600/Click+and+Clack.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Leon Panetta and Mike Mullen<br />
testify before the Senate.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
During an <a href="http://www.talkradionews.com/news/2011/9/22/mullen-panetta-pakistan-born-terror-mass-cuts-threaten-milit.html">INFOWAR
opportunity</a> last week, Leon “Uncle Leo” Panetta and Mike “Moon” Mullen,
the Pentarchy’s Click and Clack, told the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/mullen-panetta-slam-pakistan-over-attacks/2011/09/22/gIQAozyxnK_video.html">Senate
Armed Services Clodhoppers</a> that the recent attacks on the U.S. embassy in
Afghanistan were the evildoing of a terror networks relationship with the
intelligence service of Pakistan. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk8EGFRLw_fN1oAYin5tFJKmVsJx5M0ji6RymMggKAU6wZqZxguWVmR1LetvxvZ3LfRxsARWrH0VN6UFeh2vOMdqd320KykWrms4TkJWDZ8qQ9Wiw9CfmQPiYS0vTF-FFlUU_7/s1600/Unknown-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk8EGFRLw_fN1oAYin5tFJKmVsJx5M0ji6RymMggKAU6wZqZxguWVmR1LetvxvZ3LfRxsARWrH0VN6UFeh2vOMdqd320KykWrms4TkJWDZ8qQ9Wiw9CfmQPiYS0vTF-FFlUU_7/s1600/Unknown-1.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Senator Lindsey Graham<br />
has always relied on the kindness<br />
of campaign contributors in<br />
the defense industry. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Mullen, the son of a Hollywood publicity agent,
followed standard operating procedure and
weasel wordsmithed his way out of presenting anything anyone could call,
strictly speaking, a “lie.” He told
Blanche Graham and Joe Liebfraumilch and Senator Ex-Prisoner of War that the Hagqani terrorist network “acts as” a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s
Internal Services Intelligence Agency aka “ISI.” You can drive the flat earth theory through
that kind of wiggle room.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">
Mullen didn’t offer any proof to back his claims
other than to cite “credible intelligence.”
Hey, Abbott. At what point since
9/11 have we had “credible” intelligence, civilian or military, in this
country? U.S. intelligence is to
intelligence what McDonalds is to food.
Our intelligence consists of bribing or beating sources into telling us
what we want to hear and/or weaving facts out of air molecules and selling them
to Congress and the public in packages designed by Mullen’s bull-feather merchant marines. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Mullen is invoking a variation on Don Rumsfeld’s one-percent doctrine. If one percent of anything
the likes of Mullen says is true—and one can reasonably infer that yes,
Pakistan’s ISI is up to things they’d rather we didn't know about—then we have
to buy the other 99 per-cent of their message too. It’s kind of like the colossus cosmetics
company that only allows retailers to carry its top-of-the-line products if
said retailers also display said colossus cosmetics company’s crud-ola. We only have one military, and if we don't
allow it to defend us from the 99 percent of our enemies that they manufacture, they won’t protect us
from the one percent that are real. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Uncle Leo hurled a healthy helping of hamana hem-and-haw onto the heap about how “we should put as much pressure as we can”
on Pakistan, and then he cut to the chase and said that if Congress forces the
Pentagon to cut its budget it will cause “catastrophic damage to the
military.” Uncle Leo didn’t bother to
explain what “catastrophic damage” meant any more than Moon troubled himself to
clarify what a “veritable arm” might be or how it might “act as” anything. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
When you take a fire hose to Click and Clack's cockamamie presentations,
you get "we need more money so we can continue to send American troops to third
world countries that pose no genuine threat to us to act as targets for our
enemies there who increase in number every day we keep American troops in their
countries." Neither Click nor Clack nor anyone in Congress nor the newspapers bother to point out the obvious truth that thee enemies who are killing our troops would stop being enemies the moment we took our troops out of their
country. The only way they can kill our
troops is if we deliver our troops to their doorstep. Despite what young Mr. Bush's spin physicians used to tell us, the only way they can fight us over here is if they manage to jump or swim across the oceans. </div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwX5_JFW5jdiy2IQfmumTC5XWIE7OWhWbI1cGZRW6iJCQXHT-y2BqBH7PD7AS1uQvJMO2Fpct-BpD_lBTeR-_PHQcFuuEMZgR7qYYyisTd0srJbhe9L9VdTgfv9WHf8Yqiynp-/s1600/Play+war.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwX5_JFW5jdiy2IQfmumTC5XWIE7OWhWbI1cGZRW6iJCQXHT-y2BqBH7PD7AS1uQvJMO2Fpct-BpD_lBTeR-_PHQcFuuEMZgR7qYYyisTd0srJbhe9L9VdTgfv9WHf8Yqiynp-/s1600/Play+war.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Let's play war!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Panetta and Mullen are engaged in something I
identified in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1601640196?tag=penandswo-20&camp=213381&creative=390973&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=1601640196&adid=0EXHM6Y8W8MQ553P7E51&">Bathtub
Admirals</a></i> as “play war.” Intelligence
weenies tell bathtub admirals and sandbox generals what they want to hear so
they can play war, and fight among themselves for control of the toy ships and
tanks and airplanes and melting plastic soldiers, and to see who can suck up to
the bedroom politicians the most and become master of the known universe (aka
“become King David Petraeus”). Play war
assumes many guises, from stacked “battle experiments” whose purpose is to
prove the need for the newest and costliest weapons systems to wars against
countries that don’t have militaries to toys and games that the warmongery
fashions to make war seem no more real than reality television
programming. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The latest play war toy to surface in the “real
world” is something called the “<a href="http://undertheradar.military.com/2011/09/osama-takedown-collectible-figurine/?ESRC=soldiertech.nl">Obama
Kills Osama</a>” (aka “OKO”) action figurine.
It was supposedly cooked up by some kooks in China to commemorate the 10<sup>th</sup>
anniversary of 9/11. The figurine is cheesy to the point of obscenity. The keyboard commandos who populate
Military.com object to the figurine, but not because of its repellant portrayal
of violence. They don’t like it because
it gives Obama credit for killing bin Laden, and not SEAL Team Six. The repellent violence part they actually kind of like. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria;">On that note, here is a snippet from the work in progress on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sandbox Generals</i>: </span></div>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span>Calling the “enemy” World Wide Evil (aka WWE) was
Flip’s idea and he stole it from World Wide Entertainment, the fake
professional wrestling franchise. The subconscious association Flip created exploited Americans' latent tendency to think of war the same way they thought of professional
wrestling: as an entertainment. The main
difference between the two was that though Americans knew professional
wrestling was fake they managed to sufficiently suspend their disbelief to
respond to it emotionally as if it were real.
Americans knew that war, on the other hand, was real, but they tended to
regard it as entertainment, and attached little emotion at all to it. Even graphic pictures of babies horribly
burned by sulfur bombs seldom moved Americans, whose minds had come to equate
the war violence they observed in the news with the special effects they saw in
movies and television and video games.</blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria;">We have met the barbarians, and they are us.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Cambria;">Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/">Pen and Sword</a>. Jeff's novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195441879&sr=8-1">Bathtub Admirals</a> (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.</span></i><br />
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Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-66219441216639469652011-09-18T22:32:00.002-04:002011-09-20T07:00:56.127-04:00Fraud, Waste, and Standard Operating Procedure<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;">20 Sep. 2011<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;">By Jeff Huber<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;">I’m not sure what made me think that taking time
off to work on <i>Sandbox Generals</i>, (the sequel to <i>Bathtub Admirals</i>)
would get me away from fixating on current headlines. Last Saturday the
thousands of days late and billions of dollars short <i>New York Times</i>
editorial board ran an editorial excoriating “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/opinion/sunday/runaway-spending-on-war-contractors.html?_r=3&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha211"><span style="color: #0000ef;">Runaway Spending on War Contractors.</span></a>” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8FENMMybyHKjbUgLLdauqMkGRfLZHrVxM1Tjp1iguQ9rKmExBTAHc0-sVqvNM975J30UvtwmAwmlVM2oy2HIqTTw0d5YIF3en-XzvWDMhAem8MObW8PRjsyXwiX152PhZqJaL/s1600/Warbucks.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8FENMMybyHKjbUgLLdauqMkGRfLZHrVxM1Tjp1iguQ9rKmExBTAHc0-sVqvNM975J30UvtwmAwmlVM2oy2HIqTTw0d5YIF3en-XzvWDMhAem8MObW8PRjsyXwiX152PhZqJaL/s1600/Warbucks.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I owe it all to<br />
Michael R. Gordon and<br />
Judith Miller of the<br />
<i>New York Times</i>.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;">“Tales of waste, fraud and mayhem by private
contractors have been commonplace during 10 years of military operations in
Afghanistan and Iraq,” the editorial they tell us. “Now a Congressional
study commission has put a ‘conservative’ estimate on waste of between $31
billion and $60 billion in the $206 billion paid to contractors since the start
of the two wars.” The rag-of-record’s editors also note that according to
the study, “Excessive reliance on badly supervised private contractors
indulging ‘vast amounts of spending for no benefit’ is the heart of the
problem.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;">Psst. <i>New York Times</i>. The heart
of the problem is that Saddam Hussein wasn't trying to get <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-iraqis-us-says-hussein-intensifies-quest-for-bomb-parts.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm"><span style="color: #0000ef;">yellowcake from Niger</span></a> like you said he was
back in 2002. Are we supposed to get all het up by your editorial about contractors
making big war bucks thanks to the propaganda you fed the country? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;">Lamentably, we’ve been in a wartime economy since
the Second World War on Evil, and even though that book-of-matches approach to
fiscal policy is finally turning our fingers into Chicken McNuggets, there’s no
alternative strategy that anyone is likely to implement. Redirect all of
that defense spending into domestic infrastructure project jobs that can’t be
sent offshore because the workers have to be here to work on the
infrastructure? What for? We’re still making money pig knuckle over
ham hock on war. Retooling an industry to make a new product when the old
product is still profitable is a bad business decision. Why do you think
we’re still consuming oil and tobacco fumes? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;">Here’s a sneak preview from this week’s labors on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Generals</i>, an Orwellian screed on how
things got the way they are. Be advised, this is a rough draft (!!!).
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">The WWEIII (The Third World War on Evil, aka the Cold War on Evil aka
the CWoE) everybody agreed to plan for but never have after everybody agreed
not to blow up the world with nukes first centered on a WWEI style trench war
with tanks in the middle of Europe. But the action in the center ring was
actually just a sideshow to justify the air and naval hootenannies that would
break out like herpes everywhere else in the world. </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">That was the war the Navy and the Air Force would fight, a peripheral
war that actually had little to do with the stated Evil Empire objective of
expanding its client state buffer to include Western Europe so as to ensure no
more Hitlers or Napoleons would come along and destroy their armies and
countries in a vain attempt to capture Moscow again. Jack supposed that
made the objective of us Americans and our little NATO (“Not A True
Organization,” according to Jack) buddies was to ensure that another Hitler or
Napoleon <i>did</i> come along and try to wreck the world in an
attempt to capture Moscow. That didn’t make any sense, Jack ceded, until
you considered that the objective of global thermo nuclear-war between the ESSR
(Empire of Semi-Socialist Republics) countries and the loose league of American
customer states was to destroy the world before the other guys did. </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">While the high-tech conventional war was peripheral to the opposing
physical objectives of expanding or limiting Russia’s European real estate
holdings, the war’s overall strategic objective quickly evolved into an
economic one, a contest to which of the two diametrically smoke-and-mirror
economic systems could outlast the other. So seeing which economic system
could develop and field and maintain the most outlandishly exorbitant air and
sea weapon systems that would never actually be used for their designed purpose
became the modus of combat in what Jack came to know of as “play war.”
</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">Both sides of the CWoE justified lavishing precious national wealth on
extravagant weaponry by using it in the dirty little third world proxy wars
they suckered each other into from time to time, in Korea and Vietnam and
Bananastan and elsewhere, but pricey mayhem machines had little affect on the
outcomes of these teakettle conflicts. Third world wars were dumb soldier
intensive affairs that mainly required low-dollar carbon-based air-breathing
weapon systems largely procured from the lower and middle classes by means of
conscription or the lure of stable employment with benefits. </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">A key factor of top-drawer air and naval gizmology was not merely that
it was expensive to produce, although it most certainly was. The beauty
part, the piece of resistance of all this, was that however much any given
piece of this high-tech crap cost to make, it was boatloads more expensive to
maintain, and the older it got, the more it cost to keep in operation.
Better yet was that the more a given gizmo cost to make and maintain, the
longer it was expected to last, which made it even magnitudes more to make and
oodles more to keep operating. So if a flying submarine cost a butt-zillion
Houdinis to make, it cost ten butt-zillion Houdinis to keep flying and diving
for the thirty years it was supposed to last, at which time it would become
eligible for a life extension overhaul that would screw it up so bad it would
need two or three follow-on overhauls to fix the first one. By the time
the damn thing was finally turned into a museum in some coastal Podunk that
needed a tourist attraction, the flying sub will have cost an amount roughly
equivalent to what the Gross National Product was in the year it was built.</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">The Evil Empiricals followed the same general force strategy vector
but in a somewhat different manner. Their working class enlisted stiffs
who maintained their gear weren’t nearly as well educated as our working class
enlisted stiffs, so they built stuff three or four times as solid as it needed
to be, realizing that when it broke it was broke-dick and nobody was going to
fix it. Hence, rather than spend more Carnacs trying to fix broke-dick
stuff they just made new stuff. </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">A by-product of that practice was that our intelligence weenies could
say with a fair amount of accuracy (for a change) that they had a lot more
stuff than we had, and we could turn that information around to justify
building more expensive stuff to give ourselves the so called “technology edge”
to bridge the “numerical superiority gap,” two buzz phrases that Flip often
wished he’d been old enough to have originally stolen them from whoever their
real originator had stolen them from. It didn’t matter that their numerical
superiority gap was a de facto hoax since more than 99 percent of their gear
was rusting on the flight line, sinking at the pier, or burning in
Chechnya. </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">That’s not to say that our gear was all immaculate and purring like a
fat tomcat getting its dick scratched. Throughout our careers, when Jack
and I went on play war deployments overseas, we were lucky if half of the jets
in our air wing were fully mission capable (aka FMC)—i.e., they flew and all
their radars and weapons and so on worked like they were supposed to—at any
given time. Squadron skippers typically reported a 75 percent FMC rate
because reporting anything lower was like sinking the teeth of their careers
into the chewy end of a shotgun barrel. Maintenance supervisors knew this
and ensured that by the end of any given day the paperwork would reflect a 75
percent FMC rate, even if the spare parts that would make a given aircraft FMC
weren’t onboard the ship and wouldn’t arrive for weeks if ever. </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">It must have been some time around the VWoE (Vietnam War on Evil) that
air wing maintenance officers and ship supply corps gonifs cut the dope deal
where as long as a part was on order everyone would pretend like it was on hand
whether it was or not, thus making both the maintenance and supply pukes look
good without actually having to do their jobs. Squadron skippers looked
the other way because phantom parting made them look good, and air wing
commanders looked the other way because it made them look good too, and the
same thing held true all the way up the chain of command. And there was
little fear that anyone would ever blow the whistle because everybody was in on
the scam.</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #161616; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">Postscript: Monday morning the PPPP
(Pentarchy’s Primary Propaganda Platform) trotted out the crown jewel of the
information campaign to preserve the defense budget. “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/us/retiree-benefits-for-the-military-could-face-cuts.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2"><span style="color: #0000ef;">Retiree Benefits for the Military Could Face Cuts</span></a>”
reads the headline of a <i>Times</i> story that says if the Pentagon
has to face fiscal reductions, the burden will fall on retirees, whose benefits
the bull feather merchant marines are now calling a “social program.” </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #161616; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">The military’s spin physicians’
main assumption is that we can keep our present and future wars going with
“support the troops” brainwash while we cut back on the support we promised the
troops of our past wars. That won’t hurt recruiting as long as the
economy makes joining the military our nation’s most attractive career
option. If irony were alive and with us it would smirk at the fact
that the head-sex fiends who cook up this scare tactic strategy will themselves
get screwed if retiree benefit cuts come to pass. </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #161616; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">Mind you now, if we cut retiree
benefits we’ll still have flying submarines, and stealth airplanes that are too
expensive to actually use in wartime because they’ll shoot themselves down over
enemy territory due to design flaws, and multi-billion dollar bomber drones
that fly halfway across the world from mega-billion dollar aircraft carriers
that are already halfway across the world. </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #161616; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">JLH </span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="color: #161616; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16pt;">Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy
(Retired) writes at <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #a50000; text-decoration: none;">Pen and Sword</span></a>.
Jeff's novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195441879&sr=8-1"><span style="color: #a50000; text-decoration: none;">Bathtub Admirals</span></a> (Kunati
Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.</span></i><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-2156000441764079822011-09-12T23:06:00.003-04:002011-09-14T19:10:04.911-04:00Postcard from the Beachhead<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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13 Sep. 2011</div>
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Aloha, y’all:<o:p></o:p></div>
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The great thing about living at a beach is how much it simplifies one’s late summer vacation travel arrangements. You don't have to go anywhere to take a vacation. And you don't really have to quit working to take one either. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wake me when the<br />
war is over.</td></tr>
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Shady and I are enjoying the last of the summer sun here at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, though I’m still full steam ahead working on finishing the current draft of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sandbox Generals</i> (we’re just now getting to the point in the narrative where Fix Felon regains the throne of the Pentarchy by eating King David alive, lending credence to protagonist Jack Hogan’s long held suspicion that Fix is, in fact, an undead mother groper).<o:p></o:p></div>
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And of course I’m keeping up with our woebegone wars—12 of them at last count. I see over the weekend where Uncle Leo is foursquare behind keeping three or four thousand troops in Iraq beyond the year-end deadline. Pentagon echo chamberlain Eric Schmitt of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/world/middleeast/07military.html">New York Times</a></i> tells us that Uncle Leo’s plan keeps considerably fewer troops in Iraq than “proposals presented at the Pentagon in recent weeks by the senior American commander in Iraq, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, to keep as many as 14,000 to 18,000 troops there.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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You sure have to wonder how Schmitt got that quote from Austin, and why he might stenograph it for us when he already got the “official” word from the “boss” that the “Pentagon” only wants to keep three or four thousand troops after the deadline. Maybe if we only keep three or four thousand troops in harm’s way for the hopeless cause of supporting a corrupt government, it won’t seem so bad. After all, that general man wanted to keep lots, lots more, didn’t he?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Oh, but then if we don't give the general as many troops as he wanted and things don’t go well, it will be somebody or other’s fault for not listening to what his generals said, won’t it? <o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOrYFWIjS4aVRHPtMDdp02CCiWdrRhmSRCEjbo9Z2AC7WWThPICKM1IH4cxNKCaAUxBs882hBushuEsTCFfeSk4fEE065owzliwo-7rTPBfBM5NuPxxT-pRfXRjpwnd4Or4jJc/s1600/Tricky+dick.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOrYFWIjS4aVRHPtMDdp02CCiWdrRhmSRCEjbo9Z2AC7WWThPICKM1IH4cxNKCaAUxBs882hBushuEsTCFfeSk4fEE065owzliwo-7rTPBfBM5NuPxxT-pRfXRjpwnd4Or4jJc/s1600/Tricky+dick.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our goal in the Arab world<br />
is Peace without<br />
Humidity.</td></tr>
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One also has to wonder what prompted Schmitt to write that the proposal to keep troops in Iraq until brown cows give chocolate milk reflects “the tension between Mr. Obama’s promise to bring all American forces home and the widely held view among commanders that Iraq is not yet able to provide for its own security.” Schmitt doesn’t bother to mention that Iraq is not yet able to provide for its own security in spite (because?) of the fact the man in charge of training Iraqi security forces clear back in 2004 and 2005 was none other than our own, our very own <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/sep/10/usa.iraq1">Teflon General</a>, "<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080501299.html">King" David Petraeus</a>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Schmitt also doesn’t bother to pose the question of why, if <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/07/eveningnews/main4999948.shtml">miracle worker</a> Petraeus’s Surgin’ Safari in Sumaria was so <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2008/01/on_anniversary_of_the_surge_de.asp">rootin’-tootin’-high-falutin' successful</a> then how’s come we still gotta leave us troops there to get blowed up? And Schmitt ponder the puzzler that if seven years weren’t enough for the Iraqis to get their own security act together, how many years will it take them? (As many years as there are left?) <o:p></o:p></div>
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Schmitt makes the vanishing Iraq deadline sound like news. It’s nothing of the sort. The Pentarchy started its <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2009/09/velvet-junta.html">hell-no-we-won’t-go media</a> campaign the second Candidate Obama made his 16-month withdrawal promise and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said why, sure, that sounded <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/07/19/us-iraq-maliki-obama-idUSL198009020080719">kosher to him</a>. Joint Chiefs Chairperson Mike Mullen went so far as to write an article in the summer of 2008 for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Joint Force Quarterly</i>, his personal glossy propaganda rag, that warned of the danger that a Democrat in the White House would pose to the mission in Iraq. <o:p></o:p></div>
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And General Lloyd J. “Harrumph” Austin III’s proposal to keep 14 to 18 thousand troops in Iraq for an unspecified amount of time rhymes with General Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno’s statement in early 2009 (via the "dean" of the Pentagon press prostitution ring <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/07/AR2009020702153_pf.html">Tommy Ricks</a>) that he wanted to see 30,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq until 2004 or 2005. Or so. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2009/02/tuesday-preview-ministry-of-truth-and.html">Troop Tent Trollop Tommy</a> was also the bull feather merchant chosen to throw a brass gauntlet in young Mr. Obama’s face in an early 2009 episode of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Meet the Press,</i> when he laid out the case to NBC fop David Gregory that Obama will have betrayed the troops if he withdraws them from Iraq against the generals’ wished because of a darn old campaign promise. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“Cave Man” Obama took a ten count vis-à-vis the New American Praetorians’ agenda a long time ago. He won’t start standing up to them now. Stand by to support the troops to your grave. And theirs. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I'll be posting here sporadically through the fall as I wrap up <i>Sandbox Generals</i>. It's fun but taxing work. Think <i>1984</i> meets <i>Blazing Saddles</i>. </div>
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Ciao, hounds! </div>
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Jeff<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #c11e00; text-decoration: none;">Pen and Sword</span></a>. Jeff's novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195441879&sr=8-1"><span style="color: #c11e00; text-decoration: none;">Bathtub Admirals</span></a> (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.</span></i></div>
Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-27683120744284628302011-09-05T12:54:00.000-04:002011-09-05T12:54:06.557-04:00Operational Pause for the Cause<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:DocumentProperties> <o:Revision>0</o:Revision> <o:TotalTime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:Pages>1</o:Pages> <o:Words>153</o:Words> <o:Characters>874</o:Characters> <o:Company>Pen and Sword</o:Company> <o:Lines>7</o:Lines> <o:Paragraphs>2</o:Paragraphs> <o:CharactersWithSpaces>1025</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:Version>14.0</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>JA</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> <w:UseFELayout/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst">Happy End of Summer!<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">I’m celebrating Labor Day this year by making it the first day of my summer vacation which, if I’m going to take one, I need to get cracking, don’t I?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWCAjRfaDEa5u9mM-27ucqJFT-FCWLlBghIj2cS80nXdDtx5FUKaAzqBkP4ELAIntX0C8yVmuzRkYIBc2rA_WTidCxeYc4WTQBuLnO0ICVuO_o5fuIt-qMRVaM1rQwLJvqKeG-/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWCAjRfaDEa5u9mM-27ucqJFT-FCWLlBghIj2cS80nXdDtx5FUKaAzqBkP4ELAIntX0C8yVmuzRkYIBc2rA_WTidCxeYc4WTQBuLnO0ICVuO_o5fuIt-qMRVaM1rQwLJvqKeG-/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wake me when the next war<br />
is over.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Catch you after the equinox.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hopefully we won’t have started a fourth war by then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, a fifth war, if you count <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/top-secret-america-a-look-at-the-militarys-joint-special-operations-command/2011/08/30/gIQAvYuAxJ_story.html">Yemen</a> as being a war already.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which it is, when you get right down to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then again, we’re also at war in Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So here’s hoping we’re don’t start a how ever many-eth war it would be if we start a new one before fall officially starts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">And what would the rush be?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not like we need new wars to replace the ones we already have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Out withdrawal “deadlines” for Iraq and the Bananastans are more fictional than Sergeant Fury and His Howling Commandos, though not nearly so well written, drawn or inked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1" style="color: #cc3300; text-decoration: none;">Bathtub Admirals</a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
</span></span></div><!--EndFragment--></div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12796551.post-47257472303316243912011-08-29T15:28:00.006-04:002011-08-31T14:25:21.410-04:00Shock and Awe and Daylight Precision Bull Roar<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">30 Aug. 2011<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">by Jeff Huber<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Parts <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2011/08/preview-post-clausewitzean-bebop-in-new.html">I</a> and <a href="http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/2011/08/preview-all-that-clausewitz-jazz.html">II</a> of “Post-Clasuwitzean Bebop in the New American Century” outlined the pathetic state of today’s American military intellect. Part III describes how Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare evolved from fundamentally flawed air power theory. <o:p></o:p></i></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">COIN (aka counterinsurgency) is the latest in a panorama of war dogmas that promise a new and better way to fight armed conflicts. But COIN is actually a degenerative development in warfare philosophies, a return to manpower-intensive operations that high-dollar gizmos of destruction were supposed to have made obsolete. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The collision between soldier-centric and gadget-driven conflicts began in the American Civil War and reached critical mass during <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I">World War I</a>. Napoleonic infantry tactics designed to break through lines of sword and musket defenders withered in the face of machine gun fire. More than 10 million military personnel were killed in World War I and total military casualties topped 38 million, an unimaginable horror to Europeans who thought their races were far to civilized to ever allow such carnage to occur. Little did they know at the time that they’d only seen a preliminary bout—total <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties">World War II deaths</a> alone exceeded 60 million. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_u0L6bkIGiYpSSBbNBtqEGIoEVtwCyQNSzHkgnsOlbW6TUYL12y5W26hsGMnfQ1X4L1A9eDycjItyoVDcdgotSJRG44tVwjp00LayfUCPW7eQQysDrFJtgSVKEcV62MY5VzI7/s1600/strategic+bombing.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_u0L6bkIGiYpSSBbNBtqEGIoEVtwCyQNSzHkgnsOlbW6TUYL12y5W26hsGMnfQ1X4L1A9eDycjItyoVDcdgotSJRG44tVwjp00LayfUCPW7eQQysDrFJtgSVKEcV62MY5VzI7/s1600/strategic+bombing.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The birth of air power theory.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">World War I was combat airpower’s debutante ball. Much ado was made (and still is) of the magnificent men in their flying machines derring that do that they did so well in the skies above the pathetic mud knockers slogging it out below. But as a a senior U.S. Air Force officer once confessed to his airpower elective seminar at the U.S. Naval War College, “World War I did more for air power than air power did for World War I.” What ended the trench war of attrition stalemate in that conflict was the late influx of American bodies that ensured the Central Powers would bleed white before Allied Powers did. The <a href="http://www.richthofen.com/rickenbacker/">flying circuses</a> were sideshow performers. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Interwar air power advocates like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell">Billy Mitchell</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Douhet">Giulio Duhet</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing">Hugh Trenchard</a> pandered the “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing">strategic bombing</a>” doctrine that advocated use of bomber aircraft to defeat enemy states by destroying their economic infrastructure and their publics’ will to wage war rather than battling their armies and navies. To this day the goal of air power psychopathy is to make all other forms of warfare obsolete and to redirect the budgets of armies and navies into air services’ coffers. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Strategic bombing theory suffered from a number of famously flawed assumptions. First among them is the dictum that “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bomber_will_always_get_through">the bomber will always get through</a>,” a maniacal mantra first mouthed by Sir Stanley Baldwin in the late 1920s that promised bombers would always be able to defeat air defenses and destroy enemy cities. That philosophy alone had sufficient holes to guarantee that air power would never live up to its hype. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih9pulXPRyMmPOaYFMsVjTfKdhcANb20meSydoqKBdkw-cuB4XlBEx-NezNCSJg2A6rTGuMIak7t9ikW8fgxNypX3ZRgzoK0w0W1WMgQ-tBB2594HT68ReiEfwrTWTW-F30VzB/s1600/Hogan.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih9pulXPRyMmPOaYFMsVjTfKdhcANb20meSydoqKBdkw-cuB4XlBEx-NezNCSJg2A6rTGuMIak7t9ikW8fgxNypX3ZRgzoK0w0W1WMgQ-tBB2594HT68ReiEfwrTWTW-F30VzB/s1600/Hogan.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Let's make that, "The bomber will <i>sometimes</i><br />
get through."</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The 8<sup>th</sup> Air Force bombing campaigns in Europe gave us a veritable entertainment franchise chronicling the adventures of bomber crews shot down over Nazi Germany who spent the duration of the war trying to escape from a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Luft Stalag</i>. What would post-modern life be without our fond memories of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Escape_(film)">Steve McQueen</a> bouncing his baseball against the wall of the “cooler,” or of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_17">William Holden</a> organizing mouse races, or of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan%27s_Heroes">Bob Crane</a> threatening to pull some stunt that would get Werner Klemperer transferred to the Russian front? <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">The preponderance of Allied air casualties came about as a result of the daylight precision bombing concept, which was itself flawed in multiple respects. The most incongruous of these flaws was the assumption that heavily armed B-17 flying fortresses would be as able to defend themselves against enemy fighters during the day as well as they could at night, a notion spawned in an era when fighter aircraft were strictly visual combatants and did not fly at night. Daylight precision bombing also assumed that the B-17s’ super-duper Norden bombsights could consistently put bombs on their assigned targets. That assumption blithely ignored easily anticipated probabilities like changes in wind direction between the bomber and the target, clouds and fog and haze obscuring the targets, bombardiers not recognizing the target, and so on. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCVk4Lz0IU135bUJkIIrYFhJbe3E2zCilu4eQn6WasiIwuqVpmPEvxf2R8S4Nf_OcW9s61xg0SS3QGH1VJwr9UWUb-RJ7CUKsLRIfCntNKnQwvXU7NSLbl64M7-4tnuRCvsUE1/s1600/Sheep-and-TV.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCVk4Lz0IU135bUJkIIrYFhJbe3E2zCilu4eQn6WasiIwuqVpmPEvxf2R8S4Nf_OcW9s61xg0SS3QGH1VJwr9UWUb-RJ7CUKsLRIfCntNKnQwvXU7NSLbl64M7-4tnuRCvsUE1/s1600/Sheep-and-TV.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The public's will to wage war.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">“Conventional” strategic bombing did manage to destroy cities in World War II, Dresden and Tokyo being two of the most horrifying examples. But this type of bombing—also called “terror bombing”—failed to destroy the publics’ will to wage war. In fact, the publics’ will is seldom a factor in totalitarian nations like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, or even in so-called liberal democracies like today’s America where state-of-the-art propaganda distributed through the mass media has seduced the public into a state of bovine torpor. The only known instances of successful terror bombing were the 9/11 attacks that goaded malleable Americans into going along with ill-advised invasions of countries that had nothing to do with the attacks. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Asserting that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war in the Pacific is like saying that Julius Caesar died from a massive injection of tetanus bacteria. The Japanese had already been defeated through a years-long series of horrible land and naval campaigns. A very good argument, and one that I subscribe to, says that Hirohito would have forced his government to surrender without the need for atomic operations if we had communicated to him via back channels that he could stick around as emperor, which was what we apparently planned to do all along. (Please note that the argument over whether the nuclear option was necessary with Japan is a separate issue from whether or not nuking the two Japanese cities was moral or legal. If I'd been in President Truman’s shoes and thought that dropping the nukes would save a single G.I.'s life, I would have dropped them too.)<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Air power made its greatest contribution to the war in Europe when General Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, supreme commander of the European Theater of Operations, ordered the 8<sup>th</sup> Air Force to switch its priorities from strategic bombing to operational support of the Normandy Invasion and the subsequent land offensives that led to the defeat of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wehrmacht</i>, which Ike correctly identified as the German’s center of gravity. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">In instance after instance since World War II, airpower’s useful contributions have consisted not of independent, strategic bombing but of strikes in support of ground and naval operations. We’ve seen that as recently as our Libyan lark; strikes against infrastructure and regime “target sets” had little impact. It was only when air power was used in support of rebel offensives that balls started dropping into pockets. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Shock and Awe and Network-Centric Warfare are little more than a 21<sup>st</sup> century take on strategic bombing theory. GPS guided munitions replace the Norden bombsight and computers replace the bombardiers, but the strategic effect remains nil. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">Next: A COINfederacy of Dunces<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><i>Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bathtub-Admirals-Jeff-Huber/dp/1601640196/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298988155&sr=1-1">Bathtub Admirals</a>, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.</i> <o:p></o:p></div><br />
</div>Jeff Huberhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14146644937683409726noreply@blogger.com2