Spin One for the Gipper

by Jeff Huber

I have to say it again: If the Bush administration put a fraction of the effort it spends on spinning its wars into winning them, it wouldn’t need to spin them.

The current clash between Iraqi Shiite Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s security forces took root last year when Sadr told his forces to take an operational pause for resupply and recuperation. That reduced violence levels enough to allow U.S. commander David Petraeus to claim his surge strategy was working even though it didn’t accomplish its intended political objectives. One might have expected a supposedly smart guy like Petraeus to leave well enough alone, but no. George Bush’s “main man” had to poke his pistol into the hornet’s nest, raiding selected elements of the Mahdi Army in Baghdad’s Sadr City and Shiite population centers in southern Iraq.

The Sadrists warned for months that they would retaliate if the harassment didn’t stop. Petraeus must have been too busy escorting John McCain and Lindsey Graham on shopping sprees in Baghdad to listen, because he kept at it, using both U.S. forces and elements of the Badr organization, one of Sadr’s rival Shiite political groups whose members dominate Iraq’s security forces.

It was not too long after Dick Cheney’s surprise visit to Baghdad on March 17 that Maliki launched his offensive against the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and in the southern city of Basra. The big media were strangely silent about the implications of the timing of the two events. Sadr’s people responded to Maliki’s push with a rocket and mortar attack on the Green Zone in Baghdad.

Petraeus blamed the Mahdis’ retaliation on Iran, but said nothing about why he and the best-trained, best-equipped military in history were powerless to defend the Green Zone well over a year into his “successful” surge, and nobody in the press asked him about it.

The BBC, Fox News and umpteen other major news outlets reported that Pertaeus said he had evidence to back up his claim about Iran, but none of them actually quoted Petraeus as saying he had evidence, nor is there any evidence that Petraeus actually said he had any. But the major media gave up trying to hold Petraeus accountable for anything he says so long ago that it probably doesn’t matter.

On a propaganda whistle stop in Dayton, Ohio, Mr. Bush waxed ecstatic about Maliki’s offensive, calling it a “bold decision” and saying that it demonstrated “the progress the Iraqi security forces have made during the surge.”

Maliki went to Basra to personally oversee the operation. On March 26, he boldly gave the Sadrists 72 hours to lay down their arms or face, as the Washington Post put it, “severe penalties.” Then he boldly extended the deadline by, like, more than a week. (If I have to count to a billion, someone’s going to be in big trouble!)

Then we started hearing reports that almost a thousand of Maliki’s troops had deserted rather than keep fighting. The Bush administration changed its tune, and unrestricted information warfare broke out.

A Horse of a Different Feather

Al-Maliki said he would fight the Mahdi Army “to the end,” warned the Saqdrists to “drop their weapons and turn themselves in,” and vowed he would never negotiate.

On March 30 Sadr offered a deal: he would tell his followers to lay down their arms if the Iraqi government granted certain concessions, including amnesty for his fighters. (Not noted by the media was the fact that Maliki proposed amnesty for militiamen as far back as September 2006. It’s too bad the U.S. didn’t support the proposal back then. Think of all the time, money and lives we would have saved. Oh, well. No use crying over spilled, uh, milk.)

Along with the news of Sadr’s peace offer came the tale of how it came about. McClatchy Newspapers reported that a cornucopia of named and unnamed sources said that “Iraqi lawmakers” had secretly traveled to Iran and had talked a Quds Force commander into talking Sadr into talking his followers into a ceasefire. The story also reported that the Quds had been behind starting the trouble as well, and a bunch of other contentious stuff. A variation of the Vulcan mind meld with the rest of the media’s coverage of this event revealed that four members of Maliki’s Dawa Party and the Badr group with a hard heart for Sadr, the Quds and probably Maliki too went to Iran, did God only knows what, and spun the story to McClatchy using techniques they picked up from Dick Cheney.

Cheney is the master of using off-the-record statements to make his disinformation placement sound like fact being reported by multiple sources. The gaggle of reporters who cover him, ever so grateful for the access they have to the Dark One, write stories that quote a senior government official and a high level White House source and a leading member of Mr. Bush’s inner circle and so forth, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they’re all Dick Cheney.

The same kind of thing happened when Maliki flipped from “turn in your weapons, I’ll never negotiate” to “Sell me your weapons and let’s talk.”

The Snow of Yesteryear

With Maliki’s keister shining like a harvest moon, Bush administration spin merchants stated leaking word to journalists that he had launched “Operation Knight’s Assault” without consulting Washington. Among the reporters who played echo chamberlain in this con operation was Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times, Judith Miller’s partner in crime from Nigergate days.

Gordon was head writer of an April 3 Times story that read “Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker first learned of the Iraqi plan on Friday, March 21.” Crocker was clueless? So what? We’ve known he was clueless since he first became Petraeus’s Sancho Panza in March 2007. Crocker, by the way, praised Maliki for his decision to attack the Mahdi Army in the Gordon piece, but allowed as how the operation ran into "a boatload of problems." Yeah, that Crocker guy. He’s a boatload of something himself.

Interviews by Gordon and his little helpers with a “wide variety” of anonymous pimps, wimps, simps and gimps “suggested” that “Mr. Maliki overestimated his military’s abilities and underestimated the scale of the resistance.” Who needs to remain anonymous over a statement like that? People in the witness protection program?

The claim that Maliki launched a major offensive on his own was laughable at face value. Only one of the dorks in the Pentagon’s J5 planning shop would have come up with a name like “Operation Knight’s Assault.” No wonder so many Iraqi troops didn’t want to fight in it.

But great Caesar’s ghost, only the bull goose right wing lunatics at National Review Online could believe that “the Iraqis independently massed 30,000 troops” in Basra. The Iraqi forces couldn’t take a successful potty break without direct supervision of their American advisers. They couldn’t possibly have conducted an operation of that size without planning and logistic support from Petraeus’s people from the get go. That means Petraeus knew about it all along, and that means Defense Secretary Robert Gates and young Mr. Bush and Lord Cheney knew about it too.

Now we all know that Maliki got his can kicked from Baghdad to eternity and back. Well, all of us except the Bush administration’s favorite former chief bull plucker. While guest hosting Bill O’Reilly’s Radio Factor on April 4, Tony Snowoffered his uniquely styled interpretation of how and why al-Sadr had proposed a truce: “What happened was the bad guys backed down because they were getting crushed!”

Crushed? My very God! Do you reckon that Tony Snow creature is internally conflicted or what?

It’s going to be like Buffalo Bill and the Indians rode into town when Petraeus and Crocker take the stand on Capitol Hill this week. Kids at Christmas got nothing on me. I cannot wait. Word on the street is that Petraeus will revive the meme that says our presence in Iraq constitutes a proxy war with Iran.

Brother. Remember when our proxy wars were with superpowers?


Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword.


"So we can play war…"

"Populated by outrageous characters and fueled with pompous outrage, Huber’s irreverent broadside will pummel the funny bone of anyone who’s served." — Publishers Weekly

"A remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight." — Booklist

View the trailer here.

Rovewell, USA

I’ve said more than once that America’s most profound strategic casualty in the woebegone war on terror has been its information environment. The recent military operation in Iraq against Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s organization once again illustrates how we have entered a post-modern Orwellian (Rovewellian) age of dissonant dystopia.

The Horse’s Mouthpiece

General David Petraeus, George W. Bush’s “main man” in Iraq, reacted to the March 23 shelling of the Green Zone in Baghdad by doing what he does best: he blamed the Iranians. Petraeus trying to make Iran responsible for his own failures has become so commonplace it’s barely worth noting; but the manner in which the media portrayed his accusation warrants further scrutiny.

The BBC, Fox News, ABC News, Voice of America and other major news outlets reported that Petraeus said he has “evidence” that the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was behind the Green Zone attack. None of those outlets, however, mentioned what that evidence consisted of, or if Petraeus mentioned what it might be, or whether any of them bothered to ask him about it. In fact, it’s hard to find evidence in any of the reports that Petraeus actually said he had any evidence.

None of the many news sources I found that talked about Petraeus’s evidence actually quoted him as saying he had evidence. They just paraphrased; they said that he said he had evidence. And as best I can tell, all the other paraphrasers were paraphrasing the paraphrase in the BBC story, which read, “The most senior US general in Iraq has said he has evidence that Iran was behind Sunday's bombardment of Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.”

(Please note that in order to illustrate how the media told this cockamamie story, I had to make a verbatim quote of a paraphrase. Yeah. I know. Crazy.)

So all the other reporters got their reportage from the BBC report. From reading the BBC report, it looks like the BBC reporter who wrote it got his reportage from an interview of Petraeus by another BBC reporter named John Simpson.

I grappled with Google for two hours trying to find a transcript of the interview. All I could dig up was the March 24 BBC News story where I originally read about the interview between Simpson and Petraeus and a video of the interview. I watched the three and a half minute video three times. Toward the end, Petraeus makes the accusations about the Quds Force being behind the attacks, but he doesn’t mention anything about having “evidence” to back up his accusations, and rather than ask him for any, Simpson changes the subject to the British pull out from Basra.

My running gag of late has been that the proof the administration has provided that Iran is behind attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq consists of a handful of photographs in a PowerPoint presentation that for we know could have been taken in a) Joe Lieberman’s attic, b) Lindsey Graham’s closet, c) John McCain’s belfry or d) the vault where John Bolton hides his porno collection.


When the administration made Iran its pet scapegoat—around January 2007, the same time they announced the surge strategy—all they had to do was say they had evidence to back up their claims to keep them in the news cycle. Now, the administration doesn’t even have to say it has proof. It just makes the claims.

I really, really wanted to track down the writer of the BBC article and ask him where in blue blazes he came up with the “evidence” line, but I couldn’t, because there was no byline on the BBC story. How about them horse apples?

Four Horsemen

Six days after the BBC and everybody else echo chambered Petraeus’s accusations about the Quds force starting the al-Sadr uprising, Leila Fadel of the McClatchy Newspapers group ran a story saying a Quds Force one-star was responsible for getting al-Sadr to call for his followers to stop fighting.

Fadel’s story was a literary shell game, seemingly infested with a cast of named and unnamed high-level sources who said that a group of yahooligans from Iraq’s parliament went to Iran and talked Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani of the Quds into talking al-Sadr into talking his Mahdi Army into laying down its weapons. The article also blamed the Quds for inciting the Mahdi uprising in the first place, and helped make Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki look like a bigger dolt than he already did.

After about an hour’s research, I figured out that the parliament yahooligans were four guys from the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite dominated coalition that sports a raging tumescence for al-Sadr, would probably like to scrape off al-Maliki like a fat blind date, and seems to have picked up a dose of the of jilted girlfriend flu because Iran pays more attention to al-Sadr’s crowd than it does to the United Iraqi Alliance.

With the McClatchy article, these four guys managed to pull off one of Dick Cheney’s favorite shenanigans: they talked to the press about themselves off the record, and the press cooperated by attributing what they said to anonymous third parties, making their propaganda sound like proven fact. Here’s the article’s piece of resistance:

Ali al Adeeb, a member of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's Dawa party, and Hadi al Ameri, the head of the Badr Organization, the military wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, had two aims, lawmakers said: to ask Sadr to stand down his militia and to ask Iranian officials to stop supplying weapons to Shiite militants in Iraq.

Tell everybody we asked them to quit doing something we never proved they were doing in the first place, but don’t mention that second part, and don’t tell anyone you heard any of this from us, okay? Man, that’s cold. That’s diabolical. That’s like your wife’s divorce attorney standing you in front of the judge and asking you when you stopped beating her, and when you turn to the judge for help the judge says, “Just answer the question.” Heck, it’s even better than that. It’s like the lawyer getting your kid to ask the question.

Horse Feathers

We have no way to form an accurate map of reality given the distorted information presented to us. The notional leader of the free world blithely lies to support his agenda without regard to known fact or fear of potential censure. Witness his March 20 pronouncement on Voice of America that Iranian leaders have “declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people.” Iranian leadership has declared no such thing, of course. As proliferation expert Joseph Cirincione says, "That's as uninformed as [Senator John] McCain's statement that Iran is training al-Qaeda. Iran has never said it wanted a nuclear weapon for any reason. It's just not true."

The brainwash cascades from the top down. The right wing media beat the neocon war drum relentlessly. We’ve caught the so-called liberal media carrying water for Bush and the Cheney Gang so often (think Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times) that we can’t trust anyone in the American press. The administration conducts unlimited information warfare with foreign news services, and no imaginable firewall can bar disinformation planted overseas from spreading to the domestic market.

Despotic regimes use cognitive chaos to reduce the populace to a childlike state. We can’t understand anything because nothing makes sense, and we are so small, and the world is so enormous, and we have no choice but to trust our masters, and hope that they have our best interests at heart even though, in what’s left of our rational minds, we know damn good and well that they don’t. We effectively become the Dickensian waif who stays in the orphanage where the sadistic nun beats him after dinner and the pedophile priest molests him after evening mass because he doesn’t know where else to go.

Go ahead, scoff and tell yourself and your friends there’s no way things could get that extreme in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But please consider this: GOP crown prince John McCain has promised us more of exactly what George W. Bush gave us for two terms, and in a March 20 Fox News poll, he was neck and neck with his competition for the presidency.

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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword.

"So we can play war..."

"Populated by outrageous characters and fueled with pompous outrage, Huber’s irreverent broadside will pummel the funny bone of anyone who’s served." — Publishers Weekly

"A remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight." — Booklist

View the trailer here.

Al Sadr Does the Christian Thing

It was mighty Christian of Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr to tell his Mahdi Army to stop fighting in Basra. I’m afraid I would have taken a far more Old Testament approach to the recent violence in Iraq.

It’s not, after all, like al-Sadr and his followers were the ones who started this latest round of bang-bang. It was, in fact, al-Sadr’s self imposed moratorium on violence that gave President Bush’s “main man” General David Petraeus grist for his claim that the surge was “working.” You’d think maybe Petraeus would have wanted to leave the hornet’s nest alone; but no. He decided to target ”criminal” and “rogue” elements within the Sadr organization.

U.S. forces and the Badr Organization, a rival Shiite group, conducted raids for months on Sadr’s people. The Mahdis warned repeatedly that they would fight back, and they finally did. Shocking.

Predictably, Petraeus reacted to the March 31 rocket attacks on the Green Zone in Baghdad by blaming them on the Iranians. Blaming Iran for Shiite violence is his favorite method of trying to cover up the fact that he’s the one who armed the Shiite militias back in 2004 and 05 when, while in charge of training Iraqi security forces largely consisting of Shiites, he handed out Kalishnikovs like they were Hershey bars. (As overall commander in Iraq, he compensated for his earlier gaffe by establishing his Awakening program in which he armed Sunni militias.)

Somebody in what we laughingly refer to as the “chain of command” in Iraq decided that President Nuri al-Maliki would lead an offensive against the Sadrists in Basra. On March 27, Mr. Bush called Maliki’s operation “bold” and said that it showed the growing capability of Iraq’s security forces. Heh.

Al-Maliki gave the militants in Basra an ultimatum; if they didn’t surrender in 72 hours, they would face “severe penalties.” At the end of 72 hours, he extended the deadline. I guess that showed those pesky Sadrists. (I’m going to count to three. Then I’m going to count to ten. Then I’m going to count to a hundred. If I have to count to a million, I’m going to become very cross with you.)

Some of Malaki’s forces refused to fight or changed sides. One officer in an Iraqi commando unit said, "We did not expect the fight to be this intense." Four of his men were killed and 15 were wounded. "Some of the men told me that they did not want to go back to the fight until they have better support and more protection."

It must be nice to be in an Iraqi commando unit and have the choice not to go back to fighting until you get the support and protection you want. It’s too bad the troops providing the support and protection didn’t have that option, because those troops were U.S. troops who flew in air strikes on Basra positions and fought militiamen in the streets in Baghdad. I bet those guys are completely thrilled that their boss Petraeus let Maliki go off half cocked on an operation that they had to step in and bail him out of.

I also bet those U.S. troops were relieved to hear from neoconservative luminary and father of the surge strategy Fred Kagan that “The Civil War in Iraq is over.” Yep, Freddie the Freebaser really said that, on Monday March 24 at an American Enterprise Institute event titled “Iraq: The Way Ahead." Less than 24 hours later, Maliki went ahead and launched the growing capability of his troops into the bold operation that, apparently, only al-Sadr can put an end to.

Ali al-Dabbagh, an al-Maliki spokesman, said on the television channel Iraqia that the government welcomed al-Sadr’s call for a ceasefire. I guess so. It’s always a good thing when the guy who’s kicking your teeth in stops it. Whether or not the ceasefire continues depends on whether the government is grateful enough to al-Sadr to accept his terms, which include amnesty for Mahdi Army fighters.

One wonders how long al-Maliki will consider al-Sadr’s amnesty request, especially considering that al-Maliki first proposed amnesty for militia members in September of 2006.

Isn’t it simply lovely that the more corners we turn in Iraq, the more we paint ourselves into the same corners?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword.

"So we can play war..."

"Populated by outrageous characters and fueled with pompous outrage, Huber’s irreverent broadside will pummel the funny bone of anyone who’s served." — Publishers Weekly

"A remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight." — Booklist

View the trailer here.

The Really Long War

“The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war.” – Quadrennial Defense Review Report (February 6, 2006)

“No nation has ever profited from a long war.” – Sun Tzu (long ago)

The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review Report noted that it was “imperative” for the Department of Defense to “hedge against uncertainty over the next 20 years.” The DoD will have to hedge a sight longer than 20 years if John McCain gets himself elected in November. McCain has “no objection” to American troops staying in Iraq for a hundred, a thousand, or heck, make it an even million years. He’s not likely to meet a lot of resistance to that policy from the Pentagon. Ten thousand centuries’ worth of job security doesn’t grow on trees.

Our old playmates Russia and China won’t object to McCain’s plans for a million-year replay of the Cold War either. The only concern they have on that score is McCain’s penchant for either changing his mind or forgetting what he said in the first place.

Brave New World Order

A new world order emerged when Mr. Gorbachev brought down the Berlin Wall. The next world order began when U.S. psyop forces staged the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue. From that point, it became apparent that America’s military might meant little without a peer force to compete against.

Desperate to designate a new boogey man, the Bush administration pulled a country out of its hat whose gross domestic product and defense budget are barely six percent of America’s. In its 2006 National Security Strategy, the administration asserted, “We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran.”

Admiral William Fallon, outgoing chief of Central Command, gave us a far more ingenuous assessment of the Iranians. “These guys are ants,” he told Thomas P.M. Barnett of Esquire magazine. “When the time comes, you crush them."

True enough, but if we crush Iran, what then? Leveling Tehran will only make us look like bigger jerks than we already do. We could whack Iran’s navy, but we did that in the late 80s during the tanker wars and it didn’t do us much good—they still have a navy, and it’s a better one than they had then. It’s doubtful we can bomb all of Iran’s nuclear industry. Whatever part of it we can get at the Russians can rebuild for them fairly quickly, and Iran can afford to pay them to do it because all the stealth bombers in the U.S. Air Force inventory carrying all the deep penetrators in the arsenal can’t put a dent in Iran’s oil reserves.

Plus, if we smack down Iran, whom do we get to replace them as our greatest “challenge?” We’d pretty much have to reach for a fictional bad guy like Eastasia or maybe even Lilliput. The administration doesn’t want to paint Iran’s patrons Russia and China as too much of a threat because we supposedly already beat them up. It’s embarrassing enough for Bush and the Cheney Gang that they can’t win the wars they started; they don’t want to admit that they’ve gone and retroactively lost the Cold War as well.

The 2006 QDR report says that “Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States,” but that’s cover smoke to give our nuclear submarines and stealth bombers a reason to exist other than being the most expensive means imaginable for assassinating terrorists. It may be that, as the report says, “The outside world has little knowledge of Chinese motivations and decision-making,” but the Chinese have a long end eminently scrutable track record. They had sufficient ancient wisdom to stay out of the arms race of the first Cold War, and they know better than to change strategies for the second one.

The QDR report ominously tells us that, “Since 1996, China has increased its defense spending by more than 10% in real terms in every year except 2003.” Great Caesar’s ghost, if that’s the best the Pentagon's propaganda wiz kids can come up with, they need to find themselves a new bull to pluck.

America’s defense spending has more than doubled since 2001. We spend darn near as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. China’s defense budget is about 17 percent of ours, and keep in mind that China isn’t building on the "best-trained, best-equipped” military “on the face of the earth.” They’re still replacing the force structure they had around the time that they shot down William Holden in The Bridges of Toko Ri. There’s no percentage in trying to catch up with us. It’s impossible. The Soviets came off their wartime economy in the early nineties and the Chinese had the good sense to never go on one. The only way they could obtain an arsenal to match ours would be to buy it from the only nation left with a viable arms industry, which would be us.

And why should they bother to do that? Strategically, they’ve already got us where they want us. They can sit back and let us be the ones who pour ever-increasing hordes of national treasure into the Middle East sand trap we’ve created for ourselves and on extravagant weaponry that doesn’t protect our shores or win our overseas wars. They can let us double our national debt every six or eight years while we engage them in the most lopsided economic warfare in the history of nations: they buy our debt; we buy their poisoned toys and feed them to our kids.

But look on the bright side. The long war may not last so long after all. At the rate we’re going, Cold War II won’t last a million years, or even the 50 years the first Cold War lasted, before our economy consumes itself.

Heck, John McCain might even live to see the end of it.

"So we can play war"

"Populated by outrageous characters and fueled with pompous outrage, Huber’s irreverent broadside will pummel the funny bone of anyone who’s served." — Publishers Weekly

"A remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight." — Booklist

View the trailer here.

Week Endnotes

Here are the stories that got my attention this week.

1. Robin Wright and Joby Warrick, “U.S. Steps Up Unilateral Strikes in Pakistan,” Washington Post, Thursday.
Wright and Warrick note that U.S. strikes on al Qaeda sites (i.e., “villages”) in Pakistan are taking place in accord with “a tacit understanding with Musharraf and Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani that allows U.S. strikes on foreign fighters operating in Pakistan.” My question is, and has been, who in the U.S. is ordering these operations and under what authority? I’ve also asked this question about Somalia, where we’re also bombing selected al Qaeda villages.

I’ve heard the answer that the host governments have invited us in, and that’s dandy. But host governments don’t order U.S. troops into hostilities; the president does that, and he does it with either a) a declaration of war from Congress or b) specific statutory authority of Congress. One can reasonably argue that the original Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) of September 2001 covers our activities in Afghanistan, and the separate Iraq AUMF authorizes combat actions there. But there is no AUMF for Pakistan or Somalia. No one in Congress or, that I can find, the mainstream media is raising an eyebrow over this, although plenty of these folks are screaming about other executive branch abuses of constitutional authority.

2. Gareth Porter, “US/IRAQ: Sadr Offensive Shows Failure of Petraeus Strategy,” IPS, Wednesday.

Porter cuts to the chase and tells us how Mr. Bush’s “main man” David Petraeus responded to the Mahdi Army uprising: “Petraeus reacted immediately to Sunday's rocket attacks on the Green Zone by blaming them on Iran.”

Petraeus, naturally, didn’t offer any explanation as to why his enhanced force was unable to deter or defend against the rocket attacks, or why his blessed surge strategy was coming apart at the seams. And, as usual, he offered no concrete evidence whatsoever to back his accusations against Iran. As I’ve said before, the most tangible evidence of Iranian participation in attacks on U.S. troops the Bush administration has managed to provide is a series of pictures in a PowerPoint presentation that for all we know could have been taken in Joe Lieberman’s attic or Lindsey Graham’s closet. Yet time after time, for over a year, the big press has played echo chamberlain for the administration’s claims.

I hear this morning on NPR that Iraqi President Nuri al Maliki has extended the “deadline” for the Mahdi Army to lay down its weapons. Heh. “I’m going to count to three, and then I’m going to count to three again, and then I’m going to count to three three times, and then I’m going to count to ten, and then I’m going to…”

3. Bill Maher, “The 100 Years War,” The Huffington Post, March 21.

I missed this one last week. Maher postulates: “That by a certain neocon definition, Iraq is a success” because maybe a 100 year, indecisive war is exactly what they wanted.

Well, yeah, Bill. In “McQaeda,” I offer my take on what is evolving not as World War III, but as Cold War II. I’ll have more on that subject in next week’s regular column.

4. Jeff Huber, Bathtub Admirals, Kunati Books, 2008.

Yay me! The story on my book is that Amazon started shipping it this week and they say they only have four copies left but they’re ordering more. I hope that doesn’t mean they only had five copies to start with.

Somewhere in the five-year course of working on BA I decided that it was a satiric prequel to the shenanigans we see Bush and the Cheney Gang pulling today. BA is populated with more Queegs than you can throw a ball bearing at, including the mysterious Fix Felon, a murky, Cheney-like “power behind the scenes” character. Little did I know at the time that Admiral William “Fox” Fallon would become a leading character in our real life drama of a failed president and his failed wars.

In BA, Fix Felon is one of the bad guys. In real life, Fox Fallon is evolving into the only four-star hero to come out of Mr. Bush’s woebegone war on terrorism. He’s the only top officer who stayed on and stuck to his guns regarding his disdain for Bush/Cheney policies and strategies. I’m more convinced than ever that his Esquire profile was a deliberate effort at getting out the message that he was het up about the nonsense in Iraq, that he had, in fact, called Petraeus a chicken stuff heinie smoocher to his face, and that he was purposely forcing the “crazies” to force him to step down. It’s clear in the second picture of Fallon in the article that he was sitting in a studio for celebrity photog Peter Wang, and basically says, “Yeah, I’m flipping Bush off. Got a problem with that?”

It now appears that the administration is holding up Fallon’s retirement so it can keep him from testifying before Congress. Talk about chicken stuff.

And speaking of chicken stuff, here’s a nice picture of the book ;-)


"So we can play war…"

"Populated by outrageous characters and fueled with pompous outrage, Huber’s irreverent broadside will pummel the funny bone of anyone who’s served." — Publishers Weekly

McQaeda

It must be a kick in the head to base your claim to the presidency on your savvy in foreign affairs only to have it get out that Joe Lieberman knows more about them than you do. I bet it’s a lot like how I feel when my dog corrects my grammar in front of people.

One would like to think that Senator John McCain misspoke when he said in Jordan during his tour of the Middle East that the Iranians have been “taking Al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.” He is, after all, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the GOP’s designated crown prince, so you’d think he’d be aware that the official rant is that Iran is training Shiite Iraqi militants, not the Sunni al Qaeda guys. But no, McCain made the Iran-al Qaeda accusation four times in just over three weeks, and it wasn’t until Lieberman cooed something in his ear that he said, “I’m sorry. The Iranians are training extremists, not Al Qaeda.”

The question is, of course, whether McCain is really that dumb and/or senile or if he’s just being a diligent echo chamberlain of the neoconservative agenda. It may be that he lives in a bubble even more opaque than the one Mr. Bush occupies. Then again, he may be a Cheney class Machiavellian. As historian and journalist Gareth Porter noted on March 22, “Sen. John McCain's confusion in recent allegations of Iranian training of al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq is the result of a drumbeat of official propaganda about close Iran-al-Qaeda ties that the George W. Bush administration and neoconservatives have promoted ever since early 2002.”

Whatever the case, McCain is a key component of the disinformation campaign designed to revive the world order we thought we’d put out of its misery at the end of the 20th century.

Speak of the Devil

By the wildest of coincidences, Dick Cheney was careening around the Middle East at the same time John McCain was and (would you believe it?) also talking about al Qaeda. We’ve come to expect that any time Cheney opens either side of his mouth a covey of satanic versus will fly out of it, and he came through for us during a stopover in Baghdad where he asserted that there was "a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda" prior to the U.S. invasion, despite the findings of a recently released Pentagon study that stated there was "no smoking gun" to prove an "operational relationship" between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group.

That’s par for Cheney. In April 2007, he went on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program to deny an earlier Pentagon report that confirmed Hussein had no strong ties with al Qaeda, and in 2003 he claimed there was “overwhelming” evidence of a Hussein-al Qaeda connection after the 9/11 commission concluded that “no collaborative relationship" had existed.

Mr. Bush was on message as well on March 19 during his Operation Iraqi Freedom fifth birthday speech. He associated al Qaeda with Iraq a whopping 14 times in the course of 26 minutes. He made ample reference to 9/11, naturally, and to Saddam Hussein. And I’d love to know which young Republican wrote this piece of eyewash for him: “As we have fought al Qaeda, coalition and Iraqi forces have also taken the fight to Shia extremist groups -- many of them backed and financed and armed by Iran.”

Bush got the story straight on which evil doers Iran is supposed to be backing in Iraq, but the story is still specious. Despite the best efforts of Dick Cheney’s Iranian Directorate, the most compelling proof that Iran has backed and financed and armed any Iraqi extremists the administration has come up with so far is that handful of photographs in a PowerPoint presentation that for all any of us know could have been taken in Lindsey Graham’s closet.

Bush’s “main man” General David Petraeus added to the “My Pet Scapegoat” story on Monday March 24. He told reporters he had evidence that Iran was behind the Easter Sunday shelling of the Green Zone in Baghdad, but apparently he didn’t bother to say what that evidence might consist of and the reporters didn’t press him on the subject. How convenient.

But it matters not one whit that none of these messages are coherent; the important thing is that the mantra once again got airplay and bandwidth: Hussein…9/11…al Qaeda…Iran… All the Rovewellian dissonance gets drowned out by talk radio and Fox News and the beer buzz, and if Hussein and al Qaeda and Iran and al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks are all connected, then everything the Bush administration has done is righteous, and of the remaining viable presidential candidates, only John McCain can carry on the great crusade.

How Cold Was It?

Mr. Bush’s boo noise about World War III erupting if Iran gets nuclear weapons decoys attention from the direction the world is actually taking. A no fooling Clausewitzean war between the U.S. and Iran would do about as much real damage as a professional wrestling match and last about as long. As outgoing Central Command chief Admiral William Fallon said of the Iranians in his celebrated Esquire profile, "These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them."

Indeed, Iran’s economy is barely six percent the size of ours, and the disparity between the two defense budgets is similar. What primarily makes Iran a serious player in the global power competition is its status as the most important client state of our old Cold War adversaries Russia and China.

Don’t succumb to the fear factor that the mention of Russia and China evoke, though. Those two are no more dumb enough to step in between Iran and us if teeth and eyeballs start flying than they are to reengage us in a serious arms race. But to have a second Cold War where Iraq and Iran substitute for western and eastern Europe (with Venezuela standing in for Cuba and the bananastans taking the roles of South Korea and Japan), and where we supply all the military hardware and personnel and they don’t have to chip in a single soldier or tank or ship or airplane, hell yeah, as far as Russia and China are concerned, bring it on!

And like John McCain, they couldn’t give a rat’s watch fob less if it lasts 50 years like the first Cold War, or a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years.

You know who else won’t mind? The neocons’ pals in the military industrial complex. They’ll be able to extort Congress into buying and maintaining a fleet of exorbitant weapons like nuclear submarines and stealth bombers to fight an adversary armed with RadioShack explosives and Home Depot box cutters for a virtual eternity.


"So we can play war…"

"Populated by outrageous characters and fueled with pompous outrage, Huber’s irreverent broadside will pummel the funny bone of anyone who’s served." — Publishers Weekly

"A remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight." — Booklist

Another Corner Turned

This just arrived in the email:

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Sunday, March 23, 2008 -- 10:27 PM ET
-----

4 Soldiers Killed in Baghdad, Pushing A.P. Count to 4,000 Killed in Iraq

The U.S. military said four American soldiers were killed by
a bomb in Baghdad, raising The Associated Press's count of
the U.S. death toll in the war to at least 4,000.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

Ah, me. Well.

I can’t wait to see what I do to the first jackass I hear say that they would have all died in a car accident anyway.

GWOT Chronicles: Strategy Schmategy

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

Someday we Americans will look back on our Global War on Terror and ask ourselves what the hell we thought we were doing. Here’s one of our latest shenanigans.

In case you hadn't noticed, we're using nuclear submarines to assassinate terrorists these days. That’s not the most efficient way to assassinate terrorists, but it’s the most expensive, so it has that going for it.

Even assassinating terrorists with B-2 stealth bombers wouldn’t be as expensive as doing it with nuclear submarines. B-2s cost a ridiculous amount of money, all right, but not as much as the subs. The subs carry a lot more people and take a lot longer to get where they’re going, so the people in them have to eat and sleep and so forth. The two pilots in a B-2 eat box lunches and can go to the bathroom without getting up from their seats. And then there are those expensive nuclear reactors, which nuclear submarines have and B-2s don’t.

And as ridiculous as the cost of an F-22 air-to-air stealth fighter is, it’s less ridiculous than the cost of a B-2 stealth bomber, and there are other drawbacks to using an F-22 to assassinate terrorists as well.

Buck for the Bang

For an F-22 air-to-air fighter to assassinate a terrorist, the terrorist pretty much has to be in another airplane. The other airplane is most likely to be an airliner, and the terrorist is not likely to be on an airliner alone. Hence, if an F-22 assassinates a terrorist, it will create a lot of collateral damage (i.e., kill innocent people) in the process.

If a B-2 tries to assassinate a terrorist, it does so by dropping one or more bombs on the place where we think the terrorist is. This usually kills a lot of innocent people too, but they’re usually in a village in a third world country and aren’t the kind of people who can afford to travel in an airliner, so nobody cares about them. Still, the problem with using a B-2 to assassinate a terrorist, aside from it being cheaper than a nuclear submarine, is that even though its stealth is supposed to make it invulnerable to air defenses, it can still crash like any other airplane. If a B-2 crashed while it was trying to assassinate a terrorist, it would be like it got shot down by a village full of poor people, and the U.S. Air Force can’t afford that kind of embarrassment.

Subcontracts

When a nuclear submarine tries to assassinate a terrorist, it does so with its Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles, which pretty much do what a B-2’s bombs do except that while a B-2 flies the bombs from the air base to the target, the cruise missiles fly themselves from the submarine to the target. That makes the cruise missiles a lot more expensive than the bombs, and is yet another reason why submarines are better for trying to assassinate terrorists than B-2s. Plus, a submarine’s cruise missiles can kill as many innocent poor people as a B-2’s bombs can, so sub launched cruise missiles have virtually no drawbacks.

The most recent evildoer targeted by submarine launched cruise missiles was Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. I should have said “alleged evildoer” because Nabhan was not on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list. To get on that list, you have to be indicted as a terror suspect. Nabhan was on the FBI’s “seeking information list,” wanted for questioning about terror attacks that happened in 2002.

According to reports, the submarine, stationed off the coast of Somalia, launched “at least two Tomahawk missiles” at the town of Dobli on March 3. Submarines usually launch two or more missiles at a time because they can crash like a B-2 before they reach the target, or malfunction and not explode when they get there. Shooting more than one cruise missile increases the odds that at least one of them will do what the others were supposed to. We know that at least one of these cruise missiles made it to Dobli and blew up there because at least one of them killed at least six people.

We don’t know if one of the people killed was the intended target, though. In fact we’re not entirely sure the intended target was Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. The Associated Press says he was; the Los Angeles Times says it was a guy named Hassan Turki. One wonders if the guys in the submarine that launched the cruise missiles knew which guy they were trying to whack.

If the intended target was Nabhan and he survived the attack, maybe that’s a good thing. That way, the FBI might still get a chance to contract the CIA to water board him and ask him those questions they wanted the answers to before they decided to job a submarine to do a job on him.

It’s not pleasant to use words like “assassinate” and “whack” and “do a job” to describe this sort of thing. It would be nicer to call it an “act of war,” but the War Powers Act of 1973 requires Congress to approve wars that go on longer than 90 days. We’ve been whacking people in Somalia for more than 90 days, and Congress hasn’t approved a war there yet. The same thing holds true with Pakistan.

Some of the people in the Congress that hasn’t approved war in Somalia or Pakistan insist that the President can’t have war with Iran unless they approve it. They’re not saying a thing about him whacking people in Somalia and Pakistan though. I don’t quite understand why that is, or why it doesn’t seem to bother these Congress people that we’re snuffing individuals who we deem to be probable or possible or even simply thought to be terrorists based on the say so of the same kind of intelligence experts who told us Saddam Hussein still had weapons of mass destruction.

Throw More Money at It

A lot of those Congress people voted to fund the new Virginia class of nuclear submarines we’re using to rub out these probable and possible and thought to be terrorists. Maybe some lobbyist for Electric Boat and Northrop Grumman convinced them that the older, less expensive Los Angeles class submarines weren’t up to the job.

Oh, I know, people will say we didn’t really build the new nuclear submarines to kill terrorists; we really built them to kill bad guy submarines. That may be true. I’ve studied a little bit of military history, though, and we’ve built a boatload of submarines since the Civil War, but I don’t recall hearing or reading about a single one of them ever killing a bad guy submarine. One or two instances may have escaped my attention, of course, and we certainly killed a lot of bad guy submarines in World War II, but we did that with airplanes and surface ships.

In February, the Pentagon proposed a $515.4 billion defense budget for 2009 that, adjusted for inflation, will be the most America has spent on defense since World War II if our Congress people pass it.

That doesn’t cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else, or Homeland Security, or spy stuff not done by the Defense Department, or defense activities that the State and Treasury and other departments do. No, the $515.4 billion mainly go for things like the new class of submarines we use to assassinate terrorists, and the B-2s and F-22s we need as back up in case all the submarines sink.

On a closing note, Admiral William Fallon, whom Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called “one of the best strategic thinkers in uniform today,” announced his resignation as head of Central Command last week because he couldn’t bring himself to pretend he supports his commander in chief’s GWOT strategy.

That’s the news from our woebegone war on terror, where the president plays general, the generals play politics, the politicians play dumb, and the body armor still sucks.


"So we can play war…"

"Populated by outrageous characters and fueled with pompous outrage, Huber’s irreverent broadside will pummel the funny bone of anyone who’s served." — Publishers Weekly

"A remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight." — Booklist

"Desert Fox" Fallon Folds

Admiral William Fallon announced today that he will step down as head of Central Command on March 31.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated that, "The notion'' that Fallon's leaving "portends any change in Iran policy is ridiculous.''

So stand by for the you-know-what to hit the fan when the policy changes.

Sandbox Admiral

I normally find some pseudo-witty way to euphemize profanity, but for this piece I felt it was important to reflect the language of the source documents. Thanks for your indulgence.

Admiral William "Fox" Fallon is the first Navy four-star to be put in charge of U.S. Central Command, the Middle East sandbox traditionally assigned to an Army or Marine Corps general. According to a recent Esquire article by Thomas P.M. Barnett, Fallon may also be the only force in global politics keeping Dick Cheney from entangling America in an all out war with Iran.

If that's so, it's another indication of just how broken America's system of government has become under George W. Bush's dysfunctional stewardship.

Bull Run

When Fallon took the CENTCOM helm in March 2007, some observers (including this one) feared he had been given the job for the specific purpose of attacking Iran. Who better, the reasoning went, to preside over the type of air and maritime operation that a conflict with Iran would dictate than a naval aviator, especially one like Fallon who'd already had experience as a four-star theater commander in the Pacific?

Historian and journalist Gareth Porter put that perception to rest in May when he cited Fallon as having said an attack on Iran "will not happen on my watch" and reported that Fallon had identified himself as part of a group of senior officers who were "trying to put the crazies [Cheney's neocon cabal] back in the box."

In September, Porter gave an account of a meeting between Fallon and Mr. Bush's "main man" General David Petraeus in which Fallon called Petraeus "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" to his face. "Fallon had a 'visceral distaste' for what he regarded as Petraeus's sycophantic behavior in general," Porter wrote. Fallon was "strongly opposed to Petraeus's role as pitchman for the surge policy in Iraq" and deemed that Petraeus had put "his own interests ahead of a sound military posture in the Middle East and Southwest Asia."

In Barnett's article, Fallon called Porter's account of his meeting with Petraeus "absolute bullshit," and said the tip-off that the story was bogus was the word "chickenshit." "My kids called me up laughing about that one," Fallon told Barnett, "saying they knew the story wasn't true because I never use that word."

"So put Fallon down as a 'bullshit' and not a 'chickenshit' kind of guy," Barnett wrote.

Heh. I'll tell you what's bullshit: the notion that a hard-boiled character like Fallon could spend forty years in the Navy and rise to the four-star level and never use the word "chickenshit." "Chickenshit" is a keystone of traditional naval jargon. It means something distinctly different from "bullshit," and is the precise word that describes Petraeus and the publicity stunts he pulls like when he challenges enlisted men half his age to one-arm push up contests to dazzle senior Pentagon correspondents who ought to know better than to be taken in by that kind of chickenshit. (Like, is there a private in the Army who doesn’t know he needs to let Petraeus win when Tom Ricks is watching?)

In fact, the more I reread Barnett's article, the more it sounds like a crock of bullshit that somebody's trying to pass off as a bowl of chocolate ice cream.

Looks Like, Feels Like, Smells Like, Tastes Like

Porter wrote an analysis of Barnett's story, and Barnett wrote a blog on Porter's analysis, and pretty soon Barnett's Fallon story turned into a story about Barnett. I guess that sort of thing is an inescapable fact of post-modern journalism. Regardless of their primary media, investigators and pundits alike have to compete with Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly for bandwidth, and transparent, objective reportage these days is as rare as a Mel Brooks screenplay that doesn't have a juicy part for Mel Brooks. As a result, journalists of all stripes feel pressure to trade their integrity for access to the high and mighty.

Accordingly, it's hard to ignore the conspicuous indications that, wittingly or not, Barnett told the world the story about Fallon that Fallon wanted the world to hear.

Barnett describes Fallon as "that rarest of creatures in the Bush universe: the good cop on Iran, and a man of strategic brilliance." It's "left to Fallon--and apparently Fallon alone" to "push back" against an "ill advised" attack on Iran. Fallon is "the American at the center of every circle" in the Middle East, and it is "a testament to his skill, and to the failure of American diplomacy, that so much is left for this military man to do himself."

In all, "Desert Fox" Fallon does the entire American hero repertoire: speeding bullets, locomotives, tall buildings, you name it.

It may just be that Barnett is taken with powerful men and can't refrain from gushing about them in print. In 2005 he gave the same lipstick service to then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. ("Rumsfeld pops out of his chair with the speed of the weekly squash player he still is at age seventy-three and strides over to shake my hand." Ick!)

But Barnett's Fallon story contains more shape charged messages than a schoolboy crush alone can account for.

We have a major magazine telling a global audience that Fallon might get fired for standing up to Bush. That pretty much guarantees Bush can't fire him. For good measure, we get the horseshit where Fallon calls the chickenshit story total bullshit. That's in case anybody gets the bright idea of shit canning him for letting the chickenshit story get out; he couldn't have leaked the story if it never happened, right? Tee hee, wink. I bet that just about drives Dick Cheney snakeshit.

The world hears Fallon's private message to the leaders of Iran. When Barnett asks what will happen if it comes to war with that country, Fallon answers, "Get serious. These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them." Sounds like these ant guys need to straighten up and fly right on the wing of their biggest, bestest buddy Fox Fallon, doesn't it?

"I'm not the chief diplomat of this country, and certainly not the secretary of state," Fallon just happens to say one night in Pakistan within earshot of Barnett. But pages later, when Barnett is again around to bear witness, Fallon eviscerates the U.S. embassy deputy chief of mission for not knowing about one of a provincial governor's long standing problems. No, Fallon is not the chief diplomat in these parts. He is far more. Douglas McArthur, Dwight Eisenhower and Chester Nimitz each served a wartime tour of duty as commander of a theater of operations. Fox Fallon is on his second such tour. He is God.

Here's the piece of resistance. Shortly after Barnett's story hit the web, Fallon got on the horn to Tom Ricks at the Washington Post and cried like a girl about how what everyone else described as a "glowing" and "admiring" profile of him was "poison pen stuff" that was "really disrespectful and ugly."

What kind of shit do you call that, huh? I mean, what sort of animal's rear end did that busload of whiff drop out of?

The only things in Barnett's article Fallon might possibly have to complain about are the pictures of him that make him look like the title character in a 50s horror flick. At first glance, you'd guess that Esquire Photoshopped a couple of his official photos. But they're both credited to Peter Yang, a high profile photographer who shoots rock stars and other cool people. The second picture appears to show Fallon sitting on a stool and relaxing for a moment, suggesting that Fallon sat for Yang in a studio and approved of the bizarre lighting effects. Hence, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fallon, for reasons we may appreciate but never fully understand, wanted to look like a monster.

Whatever went on with the Barnett article, it was a lot more than meets the eye. It's difficult to imagine that Barnett got the kind of access to Fallon he had without granting Fallon a major say about what got hung on the clothesline. Fallon's never been one to hog the media spotlight, but he didn't get where he is by being a dip shit about handling the press.

To be honest though, I mostly agree with Barnett's fawning assessment of Fallon. The Fox may well be the most brilliant strategic thinker and player of the 21st century, and we should probably thank our Maker that the right guy is in the right place at the right time to keep our civilian leaders from turning the disaster they've created into an even bigger one.

On the other hand, it scares the living shit out of me that an admiral who's supposed to be a general is most likely dictating foreign policy to elected officials in our executive and legislative branches who are supposed to dictate foreign policy to him. You expect squirrelly shit like that to go on in one of Fallon's bananastans, but it's not supposed to happen in the United States of America.


"So we can play war…"

"Populated by outrageous characters and fueled with pompous outrage, Huber’s irreverent broadside will pummel the funny bone of anyone who’s served." — Publishers Weekly

"A remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight." — Booklist