Obama Channels Nixon

28 June 2011

by Jeff Huber

Richard Nixon’s “peace with honor” has evolved into Barack Obama’s “responsible conclusion.” 

Candidate Richard Nixon promised in 1968 that if elected president, he would end the war in Vietnam.  In 1972, President Nixon, campaigning for reelection, assured the nation that “peace is at hand.”  

"We've ended our
combat mission in
Iraq."

In 1973, Congress passed the War Power Resolution to check the ability of presidents to commit the United States to war without approval of the legislature.  Nixon’s veto of the Resolution was overridden by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate. 

On 9 August 1974, Nixon resigned from the presidency to escape impeachment for obstruction of justice and violations of his Constitutional constraints related to the Watergate affair. 

On 23 April 1975, in a speech at Tulane University, President Gerald Ford declared that the war in Vietnam was “finished as far as America is concerned.”   

On 30 April 1975, newly installed South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh surrendered to the North, seven years after Candidate Nixon promised to end the war and after 116 years of continuous war in that country.

The most toxic denizens of our polluted information environment are calling to have Obama impeached over his illegal war in Libya.  John V. Walsh, one of the paleo-hooligan at The American Conservative (one of my former gigs), recently called for Obama’s ouster on the basis that his disregard of the Constitution is in stark contrast to the understanding of and devotion to that document displayed by Tea Bag Barbie Palin and her adoring idolaters.  One of the wags at Gordon Liddy’s beloved Washington Times (to wit: Eugene G. Windchy) wails that we’re “in a constitutional crisis” because of the way Obama is stiff-arming the War Powers Resolution, the law that, ironically, Dick Cheney and other leading neocons argue is unconstitutional because it hinders presidents from encroaching on the legislature’s exclusive Constitutional prerogative to declare war. It’s funny how you didn’t hear Windchy or anybody else at the Washington Times puling about any constitutional crises when Big Dick was in the saddle.      

As distasteful as I find the agenda of the political right, I’m inclined to sympathize with their desire to rein in the totalitarian tenor of Obama’s reign, but impeach the guy?  Come on.  Not even Denny Kucinich has a serious notion of doing such a thing.  In the age of the New American Centurions, we don’t impeach presidents for taking us into illegal wars.  These days we only impeach presidents for their inability to keep their orbs and scepters in their pants.

We’ve been in a constitution crisis since 1950 when Harry Truman committed us to a full-blown war in Korea that ended in a negotiated tie with a foe that still flares up on us like a wicked case of facial herpes.  The constitutional crisis Obama has created is just another twig on the pyre of our republic.  And after the Bush and Cheney administration flushed shame and irony and truth and accountability and the bill of rights all the way to the Congressional Cafeteria, who will ever impeach anyone for anything ever again? 

Nor is it likely we’ll ever be able to vote the warmongers out of office.  If you’re not sharing a pillow with the war profits machine you don’t get elected.  Remember all that yak from candidate Obama about 16 months and we’re out of Iraq?  It isn’t happening.  Did you hear the yak from President Obama the other night about how he’s going to draw us down from the Bananastans?  That prevarication had barely left his mouth before King David Petraeus was telling the little war correspondents embedded up his rump about how, well, he’d go along with it, but it wasn’t the way he’d like things done, no sir, if Obama was listening to his generals he’d be drawing down a darn sight slower, that’s what, so when we lose in the Bananastans it won’t be King David’s fault, no sir, it will be on Obama’s head. 

It wasn't long after King David’s press ploy that Obama started this standard shuffling retreat, and Admiral Mike Mullen, the military’s top bull feather merchant, announced that generals Obama was giving commanders “wide latitude” to execute the president's “broad timelines.”  What were those broad timelines?  In Obama-speak: "Starting next month, we will be able to remove 10,000 of our troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year."  What in the wide world of sports, arts and sciences is that supposed to mean?  I want to screen the video of that speech in slo-mo so I can see Obama’s tongue flicking in and out.  Donuts will get you dollars that by the end of this year, we’ll have replaced 10,000 uniformed cooks and bed makers with civilian contractors provided by KBR and Blackwater, and we’ll assign extra emergency medical technicians to our combat brigades there and re-designate them as “volunteer fire brigades,” wink, wink, nudge, nudge.      

Take us to your leader.

Obama has fed us another bowl of pet plop and told us it’s chocolate ice cream, but that’s not going to keep him from being reelected.  The only way South Side Slick won’t serve another term is if extra terrestrials reveal themselves to us and tell us that Obama not only wasn’t born in America, he wasn’t born on earth, and then produce the certified original copy of his Martian birth certificate to prove it. 

Support the troops.

The only way I see the public start demanding that we extract ourselves from what even Uncle Bob Gates admits are “wars of choice” (he’s “wary” of them now that he’s all but ensured that they never end) is if prominent political and media figures start stating in unvarnished patois that the likes of Obama and Gates and Mullen and Petraeus are using our troops as pawns, not to preserve our nation but to preserve the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us would acquire “unwarranted influence” over government policy if we allowed it to. 

Lamentably, the chances of someone prominent enough to matter exercising that kind of moral courage are profoundly slimmer than the odds that the little green men will step out of the shadows. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Daily Daoist Diary, June 25 2011

I'll write a glowing tribute to Clarence Clemons the second Wayne Shorter becomes a household name.

JLH

Obama’s Hypocrisy and Other High Crimes

June 21, 2011

by Jeff Huber

“Let me be perfectly clear: I have taught the Constitution, I understand the Constitution, and I will obey the Constitution when I am President of the United States."

--Senator Barack Obama, Feb. 26, 2008

Irony, sentenced the death penalty and executed by lethal bull roar injections during the Bush/Cheney regime, continues to claw at its coffin lid. 

The XJE2020 "Liberator"

Young Mr. Obama set a new benchmark in self-satirizing political posturing when he said in a speech last Thursday that he was copacetic about negotiating with the Taliban as long as they “renounce violence and accept the Afghan Constitution.”  This eclipsed even the pot-and-kettle hypocrisy we witnessed when young Mr. Bush used to admonish lesser tinhorns for not obeying the “rule of law.”

Obama’s embrace of violence has been so stark I suspect that most of us are too numb to fully comprehend it.  Bush was the first president to drive the country off a cliff in two optional and unwinnable wars.  Obama has embarked us on yet a third imperial snipe hunt, and he’s done so in a way that makes Bush’s contempt for the Constitution seem as venial as snitching a couple of extra cookies from the jar. 

Obama doesn’t want Congress to have any say so on whether or not he can commit forces to hostilities beyond 60 days as required of him by the War Powers Act of 1973, so he had some of the lawyers who work for him tell him the War Powers Act doesn't apply to Libya since all we're doing that's hostile, per se, is bombing some stuff with them predator drones so our troops aren’t subject to enemy fire.

By that benchmark, the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and Dresden in World War II, long after Japanese and German air defenses had been destroyed, didn’t amount to hostilities wither.  If tomorrow we decide to level Iran or Yemen or whatever other little country we’re displeased with at the moment with intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles, that won't amount to hostilities either. 

Blowing a fistful of Muslim wedding chapels to kibbles with cruise missiles launched from naval combatants at sea doesn't amount to hostilities any more.  When the Air Force brings its gizmologically supercalifrag Prompt Global Strike on line, presidents like Bombardier Barry will be able to make smithereens out of third world Palookavilles worldwide within an hour of pushing a button on his iPad, sort of the same way he signed the extension of the Patriot Act a few weeks ago and that won’t constitute hostilities.  When the Navy gets its cockamamie UCAS aka Unmanned Combat Air System aka “killer drones,” presidents like Chicago Slim can order aircraft carrier strikes on the south side of Tripoli and kill all the civilians they want to and it won’t count as hostilities.  And when the Army and Marines get their combat robots with cool names like “Swords” and “Warrior X700,” presidents like Barack “I won’t be like George W. Bush” Obama will be able to invade and occupy whole countries and even regions and that won’t constitute hostilities either.

It’s disconcerting to reflect that you bought the chump “change” slogan when you voted for Obama.  It’s even more cognitively disturbing to accept that your choice in 2012 will be between him and a staunch ally of Tea Bag Barbie.  But neither of those perceptive horrors holds a candle to the appalling realization that you agree wholeheartedly with something that came from the mouth of House Speaker Bill Boehner.  Of the administrations claim that our gun-barrel polka in Libya doesn’t amount to hostilities, Pumpkin said, “it doesn't pass the straight-face test."

No, it doesn't.  And yet it is with a straight face that Team O tells us why the boss rejected the advice of two top Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers when he decided to blow of Congress and its silly little concerns about the War Powers Act and separation of powers.  As the administration’s spin physicians told Charlie Savage of the New York Times to tell us, Mr. Obama decided instead to follow the advice of the White House counsel that said our activities fell short of hostilities, and that under normal circumstances the White House counsel’s interpretation of the law (Savage’s words, my italics) is legally binding on the executive branch.

The  top secret amendment to the Constitution that transfers judicial power from the judicial branch to the White House counsel must be the same amendment that allows FBI agents to ignore the Bill of Rights if, in their considered opinion, violating the first ten unclassified amendments is sanctioned by the broad guidelines of their bosses in the Justice Department.

Lord John Acton was divinely correct when he said that absolute power corrupts absolutely; he conspicuously did not add a codicil that said power only corrupts Republicans.  Obama’s extra-constitutional hijinks overreach even those of Richard Nixon.  Nixon was hounded out of office, in part because of a vibrant, healthy free press that duly performed its function as a fourth estate guarantor of our laws and freedoms.  That free press is now the Big Brother Broadcasting System.  Content-wise, the mainstream media and the rabid right tabloid outlets are virtually inseparable.  

I never imagined I’d look back on the Nixon era and think Those were the good old days.  

P.S.  The recent un-sourced announcements about Obama moving closer to ending the Bananastan bungle is exactly the same pre-election trick Dick Nixon pulled regarding Vietnam, not once but twice.  

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Obama's Law of Armed Conflict

June 14, 2011

by Jeff Huber

If young Mr. Obama is a representative example, the point of being a constitutional scholar is not knowing how adhere to the document but how to get away with using it to wipe your plenary keister.

Obama (left) and constitutional law
mentor Professor Lawrence Tribe

What makes Obama a “constitutional scholar” is that he studied constitutional law under some rooting, tooting, high-faluting constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School and he also taught the subject at the University of Chicago Law School.  I’m not sure if teaching a subject at the graduate level makes you a scholar in it.  All but about four of the faculty at the Naval War College didn’t know attrition from maneuver or their Clausewitz from their elbows or their Sun Tzu from a hole in the ground. 

Whether Obama is a legitimate expert on the Constitution or not, it’s become palpable that when it comes to making moral, ethical and legal decisions, he follows the example set by young Mr. Bush: rather than go through the troublesome chore of exercising his own judgment and moral conscience on weighty issues concerning the fate of his nation, Obama hired a herd of highly educated halfwits to tell him that whatever he wants to do is legal and ethical, and probably non-carcinogenic and low fat to boot.  (In a post-regime interview with NBC morning fop Matt Lauer, Bush said he thought water boarding was legal "because the lawyer said it was legal.”)

Eric Holder and the rest of the attorneys general conjuring legal positions favoring Obama’s tsarist policies make Bush era Svengali John Yoo seem like a decent human being in comparison.  Obama administration foreign policy wonks like Suzy Rice are neocons in Democrat's clothing.  As our ambassador to the UN, Suzy makes John Bolton look in retrospect like a blustering peace poofter.  And Obama’s top military advisers look exactly like Bush’s top military advisers because they’re the exact same herd of four-star hooligans. 

Boy George had the grace to let Congress rubber stamp them wars in Iraq and the Bananastans with a couple of them Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs).  Bush no doubt thought them two wars was legal ‘cause Congress said they was, and heck, Congress makes the dadburned laws so they ought to know what’s legal and what ain't, shouldn’t they?  Kid Obama hasn't even offered Congress a reach-around on his Libya deal. 

When our “days not weeks” commitment to Operation Odyssey Loser went screaming past the two month marker, Denny Kucinich and others did their best banshee impersonations about how Obama was in violation of the War Powers Act of 1973 because he’d exceeded the sixty day limit for committing U.S. troops to combat without a Simon Says from Congress. But the legislators behind the check and balance issues are just going through the motions and they know it.

Boehner, Graham,
McCain and Lieberman
say we should do
more in Libya.

Bad Bill Boehner shoved a “rebuke” of Obama through the House that amounts to a rap across the knuckles with a Nerf ruler.  Boehner’s resolution demands that the White House answer questions about the goals of the military campaign in Libya.  That’s probably because despite his resolution, Boehner is, along with his fellow Golden Girls of War in the Senate—John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman—in favor of continued if not escalated fighting in Libya, and he’s no doubt desperately searching for a plausible argument to justify his position. 

The warmongering ménage of McCain, Graham and Lieberman actually disagree on Libya: not over whether to escalate the fight there, but on how to do it.  Goober Graham wants to “cut the head of the snake off” (oh, Goobs, you little mongoose you) by bombing Ghadaffi’s strongholds.  Senator Ex-Prisoner of War wants to beef up the rebel forces so they can win the battle on the ground.  Joe Bag-o’-Bullroar says we’re only a “foot and a half” engaged and would like to see us plunge both feet firmly into our latest Manic Misadventure in Quicksand Land.


But even the Three Senate Sisters can’t toil-and-trouble up a real reason for fighting the war in Libya.  Oh, they toss around the “regime change” rubric faster than FOX News can fling a straw man, but circumcising the sovereignty from tinhorn heads of state like Khadafi is a means, not an end.  What real objective do we have in ousting Khadafi?  There are no weapons of mass destruction, there are no ties to 9/11 or al Qaeda and there’s no pressing humanitarian situation in Libya that doesn’t exist in Egypt or Syria or Somalia or dozens of other third world hornet holes that we aren’t engaged in militarily.  The reason nobody is coming forth with an “explanation” of what we’re doing in Libya is that they can’t.  Even Carl Rove can’t pull a bluster this big out of his hat.  What, we’re going to say we’re enforcing a no-fly zone over there so they can’t enforce a no-fly zone over here? 

So our leaders are motivated to circumvent our core founding document for the sake of the dope deals within dope deals they’ve cut with the Saudis and the Israelis and the military industrial complex and our Maker only knows what other malignant monkey shiners.

But whatever's going on, you can kiss the notion of the Constitution being a “living document” farewell.  It’s dropped dead away; it's as dead as irony, shame and integrity. 

Oh, happy Flag Day.  And support the troops, huh?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

For Whom the Mission Creeps in Libya

June 7, 2011

By Jeff Huber

“Nobody wants to sit on the bench.”

-- Los Angeles Angels pitcher Bobby Wilson

One of the big Sunday stories was about how British and French attack helicopters deployed on amphibious ships have joined the fight in Libya.  Unnamed information warriors told Simon Denyer of the Washington Post to tell us that the helicopters give “NATO he ability to strike military targets in built-up areas with more precision than fast-moving, high-flying warplanes.”  

Attack helicopters:
Libyan chicks dig 'em.

That may be true in some cases.  Say, for example, you want to hover over a street for hours and blow off any human head that happens to stick out a door or window. Helicopters do that pretty well, as we’ve seen so graphically in Iraq.  In their first few days of Libyan operations, however, the Brit Apaches and French Tigers and Gazelles (adorable nicknames, huh?) targeted military vehicles, military command buildings, a radar installation and a checkpoint, all targets that can be struck with precision by laser and Satellite guided bombs dropped from fixed-wing aircraft flying well above the maximum altitudes of the sorts of tactical anti-aircraft weapons that typically chew helicopters into bite-sized morsels. 

So why are the helicopters involved?

Warriors, like athletes, don't like sitting on the bench come game day.  Like it or not, that’s a desirable and even admirable trait for military personnel to have.  We don’t want a big, expensive force of Sgt. Bilkos who, once a war breaks out, will move heaven and earth and their floating crap game to stay out of it.  There’s even a legitimate goal in utilizing an armed conflict, however minor, to “blood” as much of your force as you can get in on the action.  It is, when you get right down to it, a waste of perfectly good mayhem if you don't.  This is especially true of naval and air forces that, given the paucity of credible navies or air defenses among the have-nots we like to go to war with, offer little risk of suffering embarrassing levels of unsightly friendly casualties. 

But England and France didn’t send their amphibious helicopters to war because the helicopter crews and sailors wanted to fight.  The Euros need a justification to keep spending outrageous amounts of money on their naval air forces.  And if they don’t use their naval air strike forces in a war that just happens to be happening in the Mediterranean Sea where all the NATO members’ naval forces can get to, and that happens to involve doing air strikes on a country with a big coast along the Med, then why do they have naval air strike forces in the first place?  Come to think of it, why is there still a NATO two decades after the Evil Empire it was formed to oppose did a Humpty Dumpty off the Berlin Wall?  

Our lose-lose Libya lunacy is about preserving the Long War for as long as possible.  Yeah, there's a keep Russia's mitts off Libya's oil factor and a certain amount of doing the Bush family Saudi pals' bidding, but our play war in Africa has so little to do with national security that nobody behind the wheel of this brakeless bus is bothering to pretend that it does.  Worse is that the passengers seem oblivious to the cliff’s edge their leaders are in the process of driving them over.  (In the middle of an extended recession and during an era when we have no military peer on the horizon, our on-the-books defense budget is the highest it has been since World War II and plausible estimates peg our actual defense spending at $1.22 trillion, roughly a third of our total 2012 budget.) 

What started as UN Ambassador and liberal warmonger Suzan Rice’s wafer-thin no-fly zone for the purpose of protecting the freedom-loving peoples of Libya from Muamar Kadhafi’s Our Gang air force has become a strategic bombing campaign aimed at regime change.  The best purpose we have for wanting regime change comes from Bombardier Barry himself, whose present position is that regime change is the only way to protect the freedom loving peoples of Libya, as opposed his position in March that said regime change wasn’t necessary to protect the freedom loving peoples of Libya.

What unmasked poppycock.  The second we signed on for the no-fly zone we signed on for regime change, and boy, as war aims go, hasn’t that one worked out swell for us in the past decade?  We have yet to extract ourselves from the two countries we puppet rigged on young Mr. Bush’s botched watch, and Mr. Obama’s promised withdrawal timelines have proven to be pure “disassembly.” 

Five U.S. troops were killed in a June 6 rocket attack on an Iraqi base in eastern Baghdad.  I’m sure those troops parents slash spouses slash children will find great comfort in knowing that Obama ended their deceased parents’ slash spouses’ slash children’s combat mission almost a year ago.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

  

Obama's Patriot Games

May 31, 2011

by Jeff Huber

Harvey Korman and Mel Brooks
test prototype "autopen."

Young Mr. Obama signed an extension of the Patriot Act on May 26, minutes before a midnight deadline.  Or rather, he robo-signed it.  Obama was in France meeting with that country’s president, Nikolas Sarkozy.  The Patriot Act extension was somewhere in Washington, presumably in the Oval Office.  “The White House” told AP’s Jim Abrams to tell us that, “the president used an autopen machine that holds a pen and signs his actual signature.”  Talk about distancing yourself from your actions. 

One supposes that using an autopen involves something like Obama pushing the “enact” button on his 3G iPad II and sending a signal across the web to the iPen on his desk.  Do you think he has a customized Executive Overreach app that controls all that business?  One rather wonders if he read the bill with one of the sundry eBook apps available for iPad before he eNacted it, though one rather doubts that he did. 

One can safely risk a shiny new Illinous quarter that darned few people who ever had anything to do with making the USA Patriot Act law actually read it.  One could also wager that even fewer people know that the law is a god-awful acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”  I bet it took as many true believers to trance up that tortured title as it took to transcribe the Act itself. 

You should have read
the fine print!

It’s little wonder that so few people have read the Patriot Act; it is unreadable.  I regularly read Joyce, Proust, Faulkner and Clausewitz and enjoy them all immensely, but I can’t make hide nor hair of the Patriot Act.  They might as well have titled it Remembrance of Legislation Past, because it is a compendium of amendments to laws already on the books that are themselves unreadable because they’re incomprehensible and/or classified and/or don’t even exist as far as anyone really knows.  About all one can glean about the Patriot Act is that it made the Bill of Rights as obsolete as human decency among Republicans and moral courage among Democrats.   

In 2007, yahooligans from both sides of the aisle howled like Sergeant Fury’s Commandos at the release of an inspector general report that revealed abuses of the Patriot Act by the FBI.  "It shows just how this administration has no respect for checks and balances” barked Democrat Chuck Schumer.  Republican Arlen Specter growled that Congress might "take away some of the authority which we've already given to the FBI, since they appear not to be able to know how to use it."  But in the end, nothing really changed and everybody in the FBI lived to molest the Constitution another day.

This time around, the extension was passed over “bi-partisan resistance” that amounted to little more than a road bump on Obama’s road to establishing an executive branch so plenary as to make Julius Caesar churn in his urn and Dick Cheney jealous.  At the end of the day—or rather minutes before that—Barry the Kid had signed a law that allows his minions to write their own search warrants and listen in on dirty phone calls ‘til they tickle themselves dry.

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Senate Republican leader and a leading neocon chimp, said that provisions of the Patriot Act "have kept us safe for nearly a decade and Americans today should be relieved and reassured to know that these programs will continue."

Sure, Mitch.  All that executive trumping of the Constitution allowed us to catch the Panty Bomber who couldn’t even blow off his own tally whacker and the Times Square Screw Up who locked himself out of his bomb car and his get away car and his apartment, both of whom Inspector Clouseau could have tracked down and nabbed from his deathbed, Patriot Act or no Patriot Act. 

And after all the fuss, Congress passed the extension by a landfill—the vote went 72-23 in the Senate and 250-153 in the House, showing you that your representatives are far more committed to revoking your rights than to providing you with health care.  It’s also another indicator that Congress has completely abdicated its war-making powers to the executive. 

But as indicators of Congressional vaginitis go, the rubber-stamping of the Perpetual Patriot Bill is eclipsed by The Kid’s merry derision the War Powers Act of 1973.  Days not weeks of our Libya lollapalooza have turned into months, which means the O’bombardier’s 60-day deadline for engaging in hostilities not approved by Congress has come and gone like a goose’s breakfast with no Congressional approval, and aside from a few voices like Dennis Kucinich's crying in the Constitutional wilderness, nobody’s overly apoplexied about it. 

Representative Howard Berman of California, a Democrat and enthusiastic consumer of Obama’s precious bodily fluids, gargles, “There are no black-and-white answers here.”  Yes, there are black and white answers, here, Dennis, written in black ink on white paper in the War Powers Act: "s-i-x-t-y-space-d-a-y-s."  Lamentably, though, Berman’s bleat reflects the singular sad truth about the American mutation of the rule of law, namely that laws only mean what they say if they say what the rulers want them to mean. 

I got mine, baby!

The White House says it has all the authority it needs to keep on fighting in Libya, but declines to explain what law gives them that authority or even bother to make a flimsy legal argument to that effect.  That’s probably because there is no argument, flimsy or otherwise, that says what Obama is doing in Libya is legal. 

But Obama is a law unto himself, isn’t he?

As an aside, I loved how Obama makes cutesy appearances like his Memorial Day photo op at Arlington National Cemetery as his outgoing Secretary of War Bob Gates is telling folks like the inner warmongery at the American Enterprise Institute that we’ll need to reduce defense spending by cutting military pay and veteran’s benefits.

Support the troops, huh Uncle Bob?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Bin Laden: Dead and Loving It

May 24, 2011

by  Jeff Huber

Count Bin Laden meets his
72 wirgins.

Alexander the Great, eat your heart out.  Et tu, Julius Caesar.  The same goes for you, Charlemagne.  Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden is the greatest military and political strategist in human history, bar none. 

Neither Alexander nor Caesar nor Charlemagne managed, as bin Laden has, to lure the best-trained, best-equipped military of the world’s all-time mightiest nation in a series of inescapable goat-rope entanglements without so much as an army or a navy or an air force of his own.  Moreover, humanity’s other great conquerors’ achievements barely lasted beyond their lifetimes.  Alexander’s empire, which stretched from modern-day Turkey and Egypt to the border of India, collapsed almost immediately upon his death, reputedly caused by poisoning, at age 32.

Big Julie’s wet impeachment sent Rome on a long tumble that led to its fall when the military that had created it took control of it and sold it to the Barbarians they were supposedly protecting it from.     

Navy Seal Charlie Sheen puts
a silver bullet right between
the fangs.

Charlemagne managed to organize the barbarians into a single European empire, but when he died in 814 CE his realm split up into France and Germany, and you know what sorts of trouble those two caused until the 20^th century when two world wars and an upstart country in the new world put the kibosh on their escapades.  

The upstart United States went on to consolidate its gains in the Cold War when the “Evil Empire” succumbed with a whimper, and became the first truly global hegemon.  The American warmongery was lost at sea.  How could they possibly continue to coerce Congress into continued cash caisson and gravy boat and wild blue budget defense spending?  

Now, some folks said he looked like
Zubin Mehta...

Along came a fantastic new superhero of the neoconservative movement and no, I’m sorry to disappoint you Frank Zappa fans, it was not Studebaker Hoch.  It was Bill Kristol, the slow-witted son of the “godfather of neoconservatism” Irving Kristol.  Bill’s brain, Robert Kagan, whose even plumper brother Freddie is said by some to have been the “godfather of the Iraq surge,” talked Bill into forming a tank thinkery called the Project for the New American Century, and the rest, as they say, is the history of yet another empire that took a swan dive off a cliff in the Khyber Pass. 

Bob Kagan gathered a kennel of the world’s most rabid right wing war wonks like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld who got down to work—or rather the glittering young Stepford Republicans who do their work for them got down to work—and cranked out a forest’s-worth of letters and statements and publications and reports about what American needed to do.

One such literary masterpiece was their 1997 Statement of Principles, a harangue that principally stated that even though America’s leadership had produced an era of global peace and prosperity unknown in any previous age, America’s foreign policy was “adrift.” 

To correct the alarming global trend toward a post-modern renaissance, the New American Centurions insisted that, “we [Americans] need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global 
responsibilities,” and that, “we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”  By “our principles,” of course, they meant good old conservative principles rooted in the grand traditions of cross burning, lynching and brainwashing poor white people into thinking cake is a super food.

Then in ’98 they wrote a letter to President Pants demanding that we (Americans) invade Iraq before Iraq invaded us or somebody just like them did.  I was wrapping up my naval career at the time, and though I correctly diagnosed the New Centurions as a flock of crackpots suffering from Cold War withdrawal, I unwisely dismissed them as a harmless flock of crackpots suffering from Cold War withdrawal.  By Sept. 2000 it looked like their handpicked finger puppet and his master Dick Cheney might actually gain the White House, and the Centurions bared their fangs with their Neoconservative manifesto, Rebuilding America’s Defenses.

RAD revealed the center of gravity of the oncoming administration’s foreign policy: global domination through military occupation.  Invasion of Iraq was a key first phase of the neocon strategy.  It had nothing to do with terrorism, or with weapons of mass destruction, or even with getting even with our long-time former ally Saddam Hussein.  Ending Hussein’s regime was merely a convenient excuse to establish a permanent military base of operation in the center of the oil rich Gulf region. 

But the Centurions admitted that the American public wouldn’t go along with a scheme as crazy as theirs without some sort of “new Pearl Harbor.”  I turned in my retirement request right about that time, thinking that if I were a maniac bound and determined to outdo Bill Kristol’s maniacs, I’d give the crazy bastards exactly what they were looking for. 

I don’t know if Osama bin Laden had the same thought, but he might as well have, because he couldn’t have picked a better stratagem than the 9/11 attacks to goad us into becoming the victim of our own military/industrial establishment, the one that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us in 1961 would take over if we didn't stay on guard against it.

Those of us who hoped young Mr. Obama’s election would mean an end to the unwarranted influence of the American Pentarchy have been sorely disappointed.  The promised withdrawal deadlines for Iraq and the Bananastans have vanished like a twenty-dollar tip, and we’re bombing Libya into so many smithereens that it will take Dick Cheney’s Halliburton pals forever and a day to put it back together again. 

The strategic genius of Osama bin Laden has turned our once great Republic into a militaristic oligarchy that will ruin us, just as the Praetorians ruined Rome.   The only things I can see stopping that from happening are a) if Denny Kucinich takes the Democratic nomination and the White House in 2012 and has a filibuster-proof congressional majority backing him or b) if the Vulcans reveal themselves to us and give their matter/anti-matter technology. 

But what are the odds of either of those things happening?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Air Libya

May 17, 2001

By Jeff Huber

America’s trade deficit continues to grow, but the good news is that our one viable export shows no sign of going into a slump.  Among our biggest little trading buddies, our Long War on Evil is a hotter selling game than Call of Duty, Gears of War and Tom Clancy’s Insurance Selling Geek Patrol combined. 

Our “days not weeks” of military involvement in Libya have turned into months.  Now the Brits want to sign us on for a commitment that will keep us backing that show longer than The Fantasticks ran off-Broadway (i.e., 42 years).  These would be the same pet bulldogs who begged on their hind legs to take the car ride to Iraq and the Bananastans with us and who extradited our nemesis Julian Assange to Sweden for “questioning” about sexual behavior that by Swedish standards is the equivalent of kissing your prom date on the cheek.

Gen. Sir David Richards
orders infrastructure
raid on Tripoli.

Subsequent to the coalition’s inability to bomb Colonel Moammar Gadhafi into the great game beyond, Britain’s top military commander Gen. Sir David Richards (harrumph) says Gadhafi could remain “clinging to power” unless NATO steps up its bombing operation to include Libya’s infrastructure. 

Next to the importance of air-to-air fighters to maintaining air superiority, the strategic importance of infrastructure bombing is airpower theory’s most elaborate and cynical hoax.  Since the beginning of air warfare, the preponderance of combat air kills came from air defense artillery (aka ADA), which today consists of surface-to-air missiles (aka SAMs) and anti-air artillery (aka AAA, pronounced “triple A”).  The $350 million-a-pop F-22 Raptor is about as effective at ruling the sky as the bi-winged box kites fighter pilots flew during “the war to end all wars” (aka "the great war" aka World War I).  Long after the 8^th Air Force had shot the Luftwaffe down in flames in "the good war" (aka World War II), Colonel Hogans and Sergeant Kinchloes were still parachuting into Luftstalags thanks to flak “so thick you could walk on it.”

Snoopy patrols no-fly zone
over Libya.

In our decade of enforcing the northern and southern thou-shalt-not-fly zones aka no-fly zones aka NFZs over Iraq, we never quite established air supremacy because of the Iraqis’ uncanny ability to sneak new SAM sites into the NFZs right under the noses of our spy satellites.  We scored a tactical victory or two by bombing one or two or three of the SAM sites, of which maybe half were cardboard decoys placed in the NFZs to defile with our heads. 

Sadam Hussein’s air-to-air fighters mostly stayed out of the NFZs, mainly because so few of them were able to stay off the ground.  But if they had managed to get off the ground and into the no-fly airspace they wouldn’t have been a threat to the Kurd and Shia populations we supposedly established the zone to protect in the first place because the Shia population lived on the ground and air-to-air fighters aren’t geared to attack ground targets. 

The only confirmed kills of the Iran no-fly fiasco were the two U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters that two U.S. Air Force F-16 Falcon fighters shot down by mistake over the northern NFZ.  The true ignominy of The Blackhawk Downer was that the AWACS controllers who were hundreds of miles away swung in the wind over it and the fighter pilots who actually saw the Blackhawks and shot them down without getting a better look at them skated away on the thin ice of the warrior ethos.  This was in keeping with the Uniform Code of Marsupial Justice (aka UCMJ) tradition later reflected when the person who took the big fall for the Abu Ghraib disgrace was a pregnant retarded corporal.

It was in the grand tradition of tragic American post-World War II strategy-policy mismatches that a decade of no-fly zones over Iraq failed to unseat a dictator who was once our ally and who we now realize, after we’ve tinkled away most of another decade in a no-win war of occupation, that we should have left in place.  I got a morbid case of the mission creeps the second I heard young Mr. Obama had signed on to enforce a wafer-thin NFZ over Libya for the purpose of protecting Libyan civilians from their dictator who we'd be better off leaving in place, knowing full well that once the creeps in charge got their noses in Gadhafi's tent they would escalate the mission.

And so it came to pass.  The NFZ defensive counter air (aka DCA) mission turned into a close air support (aka CAS) mission, which in turn became an interdiction (aka INT) mission, which morphed into a leadership assassination mission (aka ASS).  Then the ASS killed a lot of the Libyan civilians we were supposed to be protecting but failed to kill Gadhafi, just as the ASS in Iraq killed a lot of Iraqi civilians but not Saddam Hussein.

RAF Bomber Command and
U.S. 8th Air Force
liberate civilian population of Dresden.

Now General Sir Fopping Popinjay wants to expand the air mission to encompass good old-fashioned strategic bombing against the dreaded enemy infrastructure.  Strategic bombing (aka “shock and awe” in Newspeak), the core tenet of air power theory, has not once caused an enemy to capitulate or effected a regime change, not in either World War nor Korea nor Vietnam nor the Balkans nor Iraq nor the Bananastans nor no place.  Never.  The only ones who feel the effect of infrastructure bombing are the civilians whose welfare we pretend to be so concerned for.

But a strategic bombing campaign in Libya will serve four main purposes.  1) It will give MacArthur-esque demagogues like General Sir Fop ‘n’ Pop (as his adoring troops so lovingly call him) a bigger fiefdom to fo-fum over, 2) it will give NATO increasingly phony-baloney but nonetheless convincing reasons to continue its existence, 3) it will open the floodgates for corrupt contractors from the participating allied countries to make a fortune in a half-hearted attempt to rebuild the infrastructure we just spent a fortune bombing to smithereens. 

And, oh yeah, 4) it will keep the Russians’ mitts off Libya’s oil, which we now know, thanks to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, was the real reason Susie Rice and the rest of Obama's war mongrels instigated the UN resolution to molest Libya in the first place. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Bin Laden's Funniest Home Videos

May 10, 2011

by Jeff Huber

Pseudo-comedian Bob Saget never had a better narrative to work with:

Bob: Okay, here’s Osama at home.  He’s going for the remote.  What’s that he’s saying to one of his sixty-seven kids? 

Bob as Osama, Sr.: Step out of the way.  I cannot see the images of myself with you in the way. 

Bob as Osama, Jr.: Daddy hug!  Daddy hug!

Bob as Osama, Sr.: No Daddy hug, you unholy spawn of an indolent wife. 

Osama, Jr.: Daddy hug!

Osama, Sr.: Take this, you whoreson!   (Bob makes gunshot sound)

Osama, Jr.: (Gasping, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth) I love you, Daddy! (Osama, Jr. dies).

Osama, Sr.: Someone come take this garbage away immediately!

(Five young women dressed in I Dream of Jeanie get ups scurry into the room, scoop up Junior and exit, wailing.)

Bob slash Osama, Sr.: And stop that infernal racket, you disgusting houris.  I have to concentrate!

(Osama views videos of himself while Saget provides the internal monologue)

Osama, Sr:  Yes, I can destroy the infidels in a holy global jihad.  I am good enough, I am smart enough, and doggone it, people predisposed to martyrdom like me!

The bin Laden home video hysteria was but one piece of the demonization campaign revived by the Pentarchy’s bull feather merchants upon their target’s demise.  Labeling an enemy as “evil” is a powerful propaganda weapon that most often turns back on you like a runaway torpedo.  Invoking “evil,” like subscribing to any other intangible, leads to muddled, superstitious thinking, and that inevitably leads to defeat. 

"My fellow jihadists..."

Lamentably, in contemporary America, even the supposedly sharpest, most skeptical minds in the public for a have fallen into this trap.  John Stewart of The Daily Show has taken to calling bin Laden “the world’s most evil man,” and it doesn’t sound to me like he’s kidding when he says that sort of thing.  Firebrand Maureen Dowd lapsed into mouth-breathing insentience with a May 7 ditz diatribe titled “Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil” in which she justified the killing of bin Laden by characterizing the al Qaeda leader as a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response.

Neither Mo Dowd nor anyone else needs to justify killing bin Laden.  But calling him evil because he killed thousands of Americans with a shoestring operation that should have been stopped by our law enforcement agencies long before any hijackers boarded an airplane is a masterpiece of rationalistic moralizing. 

Bin Laden is responsible for the death of thousands all right, but he did so with a new twist on an old, old tactic called an “air raid” as the first strike of a war that he openly declared a good five years before Sept. 11, 2001.  The last time we bothered to actually declare war before we attacked was in 1941.

Those “thousands” of Americans he killed as part of an act of declared war seem like a paltry casualty count compared to the tens and probably hundreds of thousands of innocents we have killed and maimed and the untold millions of lives we have destroyed since we had him pinned down at Tora Bora in Dec. 2001 (we only let him get away out of kindness, I suppose).  Killing him finally, after nearly a decade doesn’t redeem the swath of destruction we created between then and now.

And calling him “evil” carries no more or less moral weight than he and his followers and the rest of the world that wishes we’d take a flying tackle at a rolling donut calling us “the great Satan.”  In war, no matter whose side you’re on, you’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys, and God loves you and He hates them to pieces like meeces.  Adolph Hitler believed God was on his side, as did Benito Mussolini.  The Japanese believed that God was on their side because, heck, they believed their emperor was God, so who else’s side would God be on? (Heh!)

We killed a lot of Japanese and German civilians from the air in World War II, most notably at Nagasaki and Hiroshima and Dresden.  Many argue that the A-bomb attacks on Japan were necessary, but in truth they were only necessary to terminate the war with an unconditional surrender.  If we had offered the Japanese surrender on the terms we would up giving them anyway, they likely would have cut the bushido and thrown their hands up.   Apologists for the annihilation of Dresden note that the city was a vital German military and an economic target.  So…what kinds of targets were the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers? 

Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden is, in my considered opinion, humanity’s all-time greatest military and political mastermind.  With no navy or air force or army or even a defense budget he has managed to entangle the best-trained, best-equipped ever military of history’s mightiest nation in a self-defeating war that it can never win. 

And it’s a war that we’ll never stop until we can somehow grow out of the asinine notion that name-calling makes for sound strategy. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Bin Laden: Hang 'Em High Comedy

May 3, 2011

by Jeff Huber

Osama bin Laden’s reported death marks a transition in America’s Long War on Evil from vulgar burlesque to Plautus-class high farce.  And the appointments of Leon Panetta and David Petraeus to take over the Department of Defense and the CIA respectively all but assures that the show will go on longer than The Producers ran on Broadway. 

Hang 'Em High Comedy

A new screenplay by Noel Voltaire

 Opening scene:

My fellow Americans...

Dwayne Johnson as President Barry “The Rock” Warbomber broadcasts a Sunday night address from the White House. 

Warbomber:  Today, at my direction, a small team of Americans carried out an operation with extraordinary courage and capability during which they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body…

Cut to:

Mel Brooks as Joe B. Average sits at his breakfast table the next morning, drinking his coffee and watching the rebroadcast of Warbomer’s speech.  As Warbomber says, “they killed bin Laden and took custody of his body,” Mel nods approvingly, then glances at the front page of his New York Times. 

Cut to:

You've got to be
drecking me!

Close up of text on front-page story that reads:  “American officials said bin Laden resisted and was shot in the head. He was later buried at sea.”

Cut to:

Mel Brooks does spectacular coffee spit-take into his copy of the New York Times, wipes his mouth and mutters: Meshugah!

Cut to:

A large, well appointed office in the inner ring of the Pentacle.  Clint Eastwood as newly appointed CIA chief David Petraeus stands tall in front of Pat Hingle as defense secretary Leon Panetta.  Facially, Buddy Hackett would have been a better casting choice for Panetta and Paul “Pee Wee Herman” Reubens would have been the spitting image of Petraeus, but neither of them were in Hang ‘Em High, the western we're spoofing just now.

I aimed low, but I shot him in the head.

Eastwood as Petraeus is dressed in black battle dress utilities and jump boots.  Pinned above his left blouse pocket are a Navy Seal badge, an Army infantryman’s rifle, silver Air Force Jump Wings, gold naval aviator wings and twenty rows of ribbon decorations.  On the shoulder of his left sleeve are a Ranger tab and a Special Forces tab.  Above his right blouse pocket is an oversized nametag that reads “David Petraeus, Ph.D, Director, CIA.  On his head Clint wears a black campaign “fishing” hat similar to the one worn he wore in the combat scenes of Heartbreak Hill that recalls the cowboy hats he wore in spaghetti westerns like Hang ‘Em High.   A Blackwater logo is displayed on top of the back of his BDU blouse, and the bottom reads “This Space Available.” 

You did WHAT with the body?

Hingle slash Panetta stands to confront Eastwood slash Petraus, his face twisting in consternation the way Buddy Hackett’s did the first time Herbie the Volkswagen spoke to him in the Disney film The Love Bug.

Panetta:  What do you have to say for yourself, Super Dave?

Petraeus:  Well, we aimed low, but we hit him in the head.  Then as we were taking DNA samples to positively identify the body, we accidentally buried it at sea. 

Panetta:  Well, things happen: frog of war and all that.

Did I mention that
it smelled really,
really bad?

Petraeus: That’s “fog” of war, sir.

Panetta:  Oh, yeah.  Well.  I’ll get the hang of this soldier patois eventually…

Petreaus: That's “military jargon,” sir.

Panetta:  You’re right, you’re right.  No, no, it goes “Your left, your left, your left, right, left.” Right?

Petraeus: Yes, sir. That’s very good...

                                #

The official line is that they tossed bin Laden’s corpse over the side because Muslim law demands a quick burial, but it sounds more like they were following the Sicilian tradition of ditching the stiff where nobody will ever find it.  Conspiracy theories are flying through the info-sphere like bats in a blimp hangar.  One attempt to quash the naysayers is a press release that says the CIA'S facial recognition technology has identified bin Laden's face with 95% certainty.  That recognition technology must be dynamite if it can recognize the face of a guy who just got his head blown off. 

I’m inclined to believe that however badly they botched the message line of this operation, they really did bag old Evil Eyes.  If they said they bagged them and they really didn’t, he'd have a video of himself out the next day on al Jazeera holding up a copy of the New York Times with the headline about his demise on the front page.  I’m pretty sure the “Chess Masters,” as psuedo-journalist Robert Dreyfuss once laughably called Obama’s national security team, aren't quite that stupid.  But you won’t find me betting a house payment on that because, after, they’re the bozos who okayed putting the body in bed with the fishes before anybody could independently confirm its identity.

The cement shoes gambit gives a certain amount of credence to the theory that whatever DNA evidence the Pentarchs finally produce came from the corpse that’s been on ice since the CIA/Navy Seals/Green Berets/Blackwater whacked bin Laden in the early days of the Obama regime.  This theory goes on to postulate that they kept Binnie's death a secret so they could spring it on us when Obama needed a boost in his approval ratings.  No comment on that angle from me just yet.  

Director David H. Petraeus
(official CIA photo) 

The normal nabobs are nattering up sinful amounts of bandwidth agonizing over what bin Laden’s death means vis-à-vis the War on Evil.  My take is that it mainly lets young Mr. Obama keep young Mr. Bush’s wars—as well as whatever new ones he can twist open on top of his Libya travesty—going indefinitely and still be able to boast that he finished the “dead or alive” job for his predecessor.  Other than that, bagging bin Laden won't have any more effect than bagging Hussein did.  

As for Panetta and Petraeus: putting them in their new jobs adheres to the Sun Tzuian principle of keeping your friends close and historic weasels like those two even closer.  Obama has given the okay for things torture-wise, assassination-wise and otherwise that might actually have gotten old “Mission Accomplished” impeached, and Panetta and Petraeus were in on it so they know where all the bodies are buried.

Except, of course, for the one that right about now is sitting down to dinner with Jonah.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.