The Persian Paranoia Ploy

18 Oct. 2011

by Jeff Huber

I thought about calling this essay “The Boys Who Cried Iran,’” but that title had a cross-purpose parallel problem. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” parallel is that the townspeople eventually ignore the boy’s false alarms.  It seems, on the other hand, that we the people will never tire of hearing the “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” mantra. 

The Iranians vant to
drink your blood!

This time around, the Pentarchy’s bull feather merchants have manage to cull a confluence of Persian Peril Paranoia with our by now Pavlovian terror of terrorism.  An Iranian-American used-car salesman is accused of being the key figure in an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. and to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Washington.  Scary, huh kids?

The used-car salesman in question is 56 year-old Mansour J. Arbabsiar (aka “Scarface), whose apprehension by the FBI was in keeping with the legendary Homeland Security sting operations that netted the Dirty Bomber who turned out to be too retarded to make a dirty bomb, and the Panty Bomber whose panty bomb didn’t even put third-degree burns on his party favor, and the Times Square Screw Up who locked himself out of his bomb car and his getaway car andhis apartment. 

Scarface, if that really is his international underground terrorist cabal code name, is a 30 year resident of Texas, a state renowned for another Justice Department fiasco of fame that unfolded in the town of Waco, a travesty during which Janet Reno’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) hooligans immolated 76 lonesome losers whose heinous crime was allowing themselves to be brainwashed by cult leader David Koresh.  Scarface Arbabsiar inhabited Texas for three decades during which he racked up a string of failed businesses, a covey of angry creditors, and a furious former spouse who sought a protective order against him.  His friends describe him as “perennially disheveled” and “hopelessly disorganized.”  His socks never matched and he constantly lost his keys and cell phone.  A rival used-car salesman described Arbabisiar as “worthless.”

Mansour J. Arbabsiar was a mark so perfect for a pre-election propaganda con game that the fool infested FBI couldn’t have overlooked him if they were wearing two blindfolds instead of the single one that was their standard issue in the years that led up to the 9/11 attacks.    

Attorney General Holder and senior Justice Dept. Staff

At the uber-helm of this cockamamie caper was Attorney General Eric Holder, who is to Barack Obama’s Justice Department what Ford Sterling was to Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops: the chief buffoon.  It was no doubt coincidence, it just had to have been, that the Scarface assassination scare story hit the mainstream fire hose the day after Holder was subpoenaed to do some ‘splainin’ to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious, a gun-walking campaign that should have been dubbed “Faster and Funnier.”  In the course of groping though an investigation trying to trace firearms from American gun dealers to Mexican drug gangs, Holder’s ATF-ups managed to lose track of 1,400 to 2,000 guns that migrated into the mitts of the Mexican drug gangsters they were trying to keep guns from migrating into the mitts of. 

I’d characterize Faster and Funnier as a Petraeus-class fumble, but that would be incredibly unfair to Holder and the ATF.  When then three-star general David Petraeus let U.S supplied guns tiptoe into the hands of Shiite militiamen, he didn’t just hand over a couple thousand of the things.  Petraeus gave away 190,000 of the things, more than enough to arm 10 United States Army infantry divisions.  Funny how the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee never subpoenaed King David to explain how that happened.  It must have been an oversight on their part (heh).  

It's the old "They can't
be that stupid so they
must be that stupid" ploy.

According to the Runyonesque scenario Holder and Company spin, the case just happened to fall together when some Defense Enforcement Agency Dunderhead had a chance meeting with Johnny Scars and a pair of Iran’s elite Quds Force baddies who just happened to be operating on American soil in plain sight of every federal, state and local law enforcement official and intelligence agent in the great state of Texas.  Our best intelligence (double heh) alleges that officials at the highest levels of Iran’s government pulled stunts that prompted Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East and author of several books on Iran, said there was “sloppiness about the case that defies belief.”  “Sloppy” is a kind euphemism.  According to Holder’s Heroes, top Iranian leaders left a paper and electronic trail leading back to themselves that Inspector Clousseau could have followed. 

But incredulity is by no means grounds among the Obama inner-war party for stiff-arming a chance to pacify the Pentarchy with the citizenry marching on Wall Street and an election on the horizon.  State Secretary Cruella Clinton said of the case “The idea that they [the Iranians, I guess she means] would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador, nobody could make that up, right?”  Wake up and smell the napalm, Hillary.  Remember the whoppers Big Dick Cheney and his Delaware Destroyers fabricated about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his ties al Qaeda and his connections to 9/11 that got us into the Iraq quagmire that you voted for?  Conjuring incredible tales so the American public will let you bomb or invade other countries is neocon de rigueur.  If you ain’t lyin’ they ain’t buyin’, that’s the warmongery’s motto when it comes to constructing a casus belli from hydrogen molecules.     

Holder's argument that top Iranian government officials were involved in a plot to hire Mexican Drug runners to assassinate a Saudi diplomat and bomb an Israeli embassy has more holes in it than Scientology dogma.  But that’s okay because young Mr. Obama said in a 13 October press conference that, “the facts are there for all to see,” though he failed to mention what any of those facts are or where any of us might go to see them.     

When Holder's Iranian/Mexican assassination/bomb plot accusations began generating guffaws globally, Obama’s spin physicians switched to another cherished wolf cry.  Favored Pentarchy echo chamberlain David E. Sanger of the New York Times relays to us that “President Obama is pressing United Nations nuclear inspectors to release classified intelligence information showing that Iran is designing and experimenting with nuclear weapons technology.”  If you crawl between the gutters in this puff piece you pick up that the “classified intelligence information” they’re talking about is the so-called “smoking laptop” documents that were proven to be forgeries five freaking years ago. 

But young Mr. Obama’s story is that Iran wants to kill Saudis and Israelis and they’ll do it with hired banditos or nukes or trick-or-treaters or whatever it takes, and he’s sticking to it, and he’ll get away with this used mare's oats mendacity because beating war drums appeases the neocons and today's liberals are too vaginal to stand up to him.    

Where do we find such candidates?

Why do we elect such men to the highest office in our land?  Oh, that’s right.  The choice was him and Bazooka Joe or Grampaw Pettibone and Patriotic Barbie.  The difference between the two tickets doesn’t seem so clear in the rearview mirror, does it?  This Obama person who promised to put the brakes on the neocon agenda is starting to make Barry Goldwater look like a peace pansy.    

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

Bananastan-iversary!

11 Oct. 2011

by Jeff Huber

Last week marked the tenth anniversary of our War on Evil (aka WOE) in the Bananastans, those Central Asian banana republics of Pakistan and Afghanistan.  If you’re confused as to which of the two Bananastans we’re at war with, don't worry.  You’re in good company, some of which resides in the National Security Council and much of which dwells in the Pentagon and even more of which infests Congress. 

Technically speaking, we aren’t at war with either country, even though we’ve been in the process of blowing both of them to piecemeal smithereens for over a decade now.  Then again, strictly speaking, constitutionally speaking, we aren’t at war with any country, since we haven’t formally declared war against anybody since back in the early forties.  That war, the last war Congress declared, World War II, was actually two wars, one against Imperial Japan and one against Nazi Germany.  We didn’t declare war against Nazi Germany, by they way, but we didn’t have to.  Nazi Germany declared war against us after we declared war against Imperial Japan.  But that was good enough to constitute a Constitutional war according to the Marquess of Queensbury or Charles Goren or whoever was authorized to make up the rules of warfare back before there was a UN to make things up.    

Japanese foreign affairs minister Moramu Shigemitzu
formally declares "Uncle-san!"

The wars against Germany and Japan were over by the late 1940s.  We know they ended because Germany and Japan signed formal surrender documents.  The German and Japanese people went along with those surrenders because they were signed by heads of state of the governments that existed in Germany and Japan at the time they surrendered.  Another nation formally surrendering to us is another thing that hasn’t happened since the 1940s, and is a very large part of the reason that we haven’t actually won a war since then.  We declared victory in Vietnam after we got our heinie handed to us there and went home, and the uneasy peace between the Koreas is the product of a cease-fire that has lasted more-or-less successfully for a half-century and tool-booth tokens. 

Even though we haven’t declared any wars since the 1940s, we are presently involved in roughly 120 of them, give or take, around the world.  The legitimizing pretext for some of those wars is the Authorization for Use of Military Force aka AUMF that our Congress persons passed almost unanimously a week after the 9/11/2001attacks without thinking about what they were doing.  The pre-ramble to the 9/18/2001 AUMF says that “the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.”  The 9/18/2001 AUMF is often referred to as “the blank check” that allowed young Mr. Bush to do whatever hoodoo he had to in order to keep them evildoers from doing their evil whenever his neocon masters decided he needed to do it. 

The 9/18/2001 AUMF as well as the 10/16/2002 AUMF that gave Mr. Bush and his puppeteers permission to invade Iraq are provisions of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which says that a president can only employ troops in combat overseas beyond 60 days unless Congress “has declared war or has enacted a specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces.”  Bush administration Federalist Society lawyers, most notably John Yoo (aka Yoo Manchu), argued that Bush didn’t need a separate AUMF to invade Iraq because the original AUMF allowed it, plus a pile of other pony plop about how international law allows you to conduct preemptive self defense even if you don’t really need to, because, hey, how can you know for sure that you don't need to defend yourself from another country unless you invade the place and toss it to find out?  Huh?  You tell me. 

In retrospect, the Bush machine's threats to bypass the legislature appear to have been a stratagem to gulling our Keystone Kongress into demanding a chance to vote for the Iraq invasion, and then letting them vote for it so they couldn’t hold the executive branch responsible if it turned out that we invaded another country on fuzzy pretexts (which turned out to be the case).   

The 9/18/2001 AUMF and the self-defense mantra have been the bulwark of “legal” justification for the triple-digits worth of third world wars we’re now waging—with one major exception.  Even the best and brightest warmongers in young Mr. Obama’s administration couldn’t claim that Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was a terror threat.  He had, in fact, renounced jihadist terrorism in general and al Qaeda specifically.  And they couldn’t say we had to preemptively defend ourselves against Gaddafi because he had voluntarily ash canned whatever sort of Our Gang weapons of mass destruction program he might have had.  They couldn’t even say the Gadaffi’s regime was illegitimate because young Mr. Bush recognized it in return for Gadaffi ash canning his WMD and renouncing al Qaeda.   

So Susie Rice, the liberal warmonger who young Mr. Obama hand-picked to succeed neocon warmongers John Bolton and Zalmay Khalilzad as our Ambassador to the UN, crammed a resolution past the Security Council’s tonsils to establish a no-fly zone to protect the freedom loving peoples of Libya from their mean old dictator Gaddafi (who the UN had also recognized as a legitimate head of state).  That quickly turned into an extensive bombing campaign ala the Kosovo Konflict to run mean old Gadaffi out of office and replace him with a bunch of hoodlums who can't decide among themselves who is in charge of them. 

The Obama warmongers’ UN gambit accomplished something even Yoo Manchu didn’t manage to pull off: stiff-arm the War Powers Act and Congress completely from the business of starting wars.  They got away with what the Bush camp couldn't consummate because liberals get the vapors when a conservatives start pointless, ill-advised wars, but when a fellow liberal does such things, well, liberals, you know how they are, they have to hold a vagina dialogue before they actually do anything and, except for the very few of them who still have a spine like Denny Kucinich, they’ll go along with whatever young Mr. Obama wants because they don’t want to see him get his progressive pants pulled down by some tea-bagging bobble head come 11/6/2012.

That explains why liberals couldn't seem to give a bat’s eyelash less about the recent revelation by the British press (our press doesn’t reveal things any more) that Obama is initiating wars on individuals, including American citizens like US born citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, by authority of a secret panel within his National Security Council. 

"We don't
want to rush
into getting
 out of wars!"

And maybe it’s not all that shocking to discover that a secret panel is committing America to wars against individuals, since we’ve cut Congress out of the picture anyway and since we don’t actually fight wars against countries anymore. The original enemy in the Bananastans Woe was Osama bin Laden,  supposedly, and the WOE in Iraq was against Saddam Hussein.  That both of those enemies are now dead does not, of course, mean that the wars we've stopped fighting wars agains them, or that we're even in the process of ending them.  General John Allen, who just replaced King David Petraeus as the four-star bull feather merchant in charge of the Bananastans, says we’re going to be there for a “long time” beyond the notional 2014 troop withdrawal date.  

“The plan is to win,” General Allen says.  If that’s the case, inhabitants of the Next American Century will still be waging an undeclared war in the Bananastans against an enemy who will never surrender because the Next American Centurions, like us, won’t be able to figure out who exactly that enemy is. 

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

Extort the Troops!

4 Oct. 2011

by Jeff Huber

I was plenty riled when Walgreens tried to shame me into doing my patriotic duty by contributing a dollar to send a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup to one of our troops overseas.  “Don’t you want to support the troops?” the McJobette at the cash register asked me. 

I’d been waiting in line for several minutes to pay for two dollars and something worth of something or other because all of the people in front me who didn’t believe in the 21^st Century who had taken the time to write checks for a few dollars worth of something else, so I was maybe more annoyed than I might otherwise have been.  Whatever the case, I decided to use the time I would have taken to write a check for two dollars if I wrote checks and something to give Ms. McJob and the people in line behind me an impromptu lecture on wartime economics. 

Praise the Lord and pass the chocolate.

Since 9/11, I explained, every American who wasn’t either too poor or too rich to pay taxes had “supported” the troops to the tune of well over $5 trillion, and the actual figure was probably closer to $10 trillion.  If $5 or $10 trillion wasn’t enough to buy the troops all the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Mars Bars and Gummy Bears and Jujubes they could possibly hold then me kicking in an extra couple of bucks at Walgreens wasn’t going to help to keep their candy cache combat capable.    

The McJobstress gave me a baleful look and said, “So you don’t want to support the troops?”  Some guy in line behind me wearing a biker T-shirt and a ponytail muttered “f*****g liberal” as he reached for his checkbook.  

This war's for you.

Cashing in on our War on Evil is hardly a new thing.  I was sitting in a local tap-and-trough the first time I saw the Anheuser Bush “Coming Home” commercial, the one where troops returning from the war walk through an airport terminal to a standing ovation from the civilians who are waiting around to board for their delayed flights.  I shook my head and asked the bartender to replace my Budweiser with a Coors.  She asked why, and I said that if the Budweiser people wanted to use the war to sell beer they’d have to sell it to somebody besides me.

That’s when Virginia Beach legend “Drunk Dave” pried his nose from the bar and said, “Aw, man, they’re not trying to sell beer, they’re just trying to show their patriotic spirit.”  This is the same Drunk Dave who once claimed that he got a balanced view on politics because he listened to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

To gain even further perspective on the events of the day, Drunk Dave often tunes in to G. Gordon Liddy’s program.  Dave is especially fond of the G. Man’s bumper music, most often war tinged, patriotic, twangy jingles by the likes of the abominable Toby Keith about how it’s the American way to put a boot in everybody’s bottom and sell a lot of records about it. 

One of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, that the anti-war movement has less traction than a curling stone is that it’s not only the defense industry parasites who are knocking down big war bucks.  It’s everybody.  One can’t pass a single merchandising venue in my area without bumping against some sort of trooper-dooper sales gimmick.  Granted, I live in an area (Hampton Roads) that contains the densest military population in the country, but given the advertising I see on what little television I watch it appears that Madison Avenue has cast its “support the troops” net from coast to coast. 

It’s the American way, I suppose, to use whatever’s available to gull one’s fellow citizens into buying fecal matter they probably don’t need, and why should war be any different from, say, body odor or erectile dysfunction?  After all, exploiting human misery and suffering has always been a core tenet of capitalism, hasn’t it? (Especially when the political right gets its way and eliminates all government regulation, eh?)

One might even be willing to grant that making money on war is downright virtuous, up to a point.  Unfortunately, the hideous truth at the core of “support the troops” commercialism is that it supports the neocons' Orwellian doctrine of “Long War” (aka “Persistent Conflict”).  Had irony not gone the way of truth, justice and honor during young Mr. Bush’s administration, it would delight at Persistent Conflict’s key internal contradiction: in order to keep the Long War going as long as possible, it must be fought in such a manner as to generate an infinite supply of enemies. Thus does the Long War doctrine defeat any rational claims that they contribute to our national security, yet national security is the fallback rationale for persisting in the Long War. 

And Irony would turn positively giddy over the sign that as of this weekend hangs behind the cash register of my corner 7-Eleven:

U.S. Armed Forces

We Don’t Start Wars

We Finish Them

Support the Troops

Jesus on a jet ski, there’s not trace of truth in that entire slog of slogans.

We do start wars.  We supposedly invaded Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks even though none of its masterminds or hijackers were actually from Afghanistan.  We kicked the closest thing Afghanistan has ever known to a legitimate government out of power and replaced it with a gang of hoodlums and drug dealers who now constitute the second most corrupt government on the face of the earth.

We supposedly invaded Iraq because of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his role in 9/11 via his ties to al Qaeda.  None of these justifications turned out to be true.  We replaced Hussein with a gang of hoodlums who now constitute the fourth most corrupt government on the face of the earth.  

We instigated the bombing of Libya to remove a head of state who we legitimized by recognizing his government and replace him with a gang of hoodlums who promise to surpass Somalia as the country with the most corrupt government on the face of the earth.

Billions of American tax dollars financed the efforts of U.S. “non-profit” groups that fomented the Arab Spring movement that has set the Middle East afire, a circumstance that will abet the Long War policy goal of creating an inexhaustible supply of maniacs fighting among themselves to become even worse tyrants than the ones they deposed.

We’re presently mired in 120 wars throughout the globe, all of which we started or are involved in by our own choosing.  And we’ll never "finish" any of them because their very nature inhibits them from ever ending.  The only way we'll ever walk away from them is to just get up and walk away.  

Can we blame the “U.S. Armed Forces” for having started these unending wars?  You bet your bippy, we can.  Oh, the “troops” aren’t to blame.  It was the Pentagon brass who helped Dirty Dick Cheney and Dandy Don Rumsfeld cook the intelligence and manufacture the propaganda that got us stuck by the zipper in Iraq.  And the felonious four-stars—David Petraeus, Richard Myers, Pete Pace, George Casey, Mike Mullen and Ray Odierno, just to name the top row on the wall of the pogues’ gallery—have been as thick with the military-industrial warmongery as ticks on a wild dog when it comes to peddling pro-war propaganda designed to obliterate withdrawal timelines.    

These Colors Can't Think

The troops, for the most part a captive audience of Armed Forces media and their true-believing superiors, have been brainwashed even worse than the rest of the nation.  A 2006 Zogby poll showed that almost 90 percent of American troops serving in Iraq thought the war there was retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s role in 9/11. 

Lying to the troops, and exhorting them to finish wars that cannot be won, and exploiting them for the benefit war profiteers cannot in any way be defined as “supporting” them.

But try telling that to the likes of Lady McJob or Drunk Dave or the yahooligan who posted the Bush Coming Home commercial on YouTube and called it “Probably the best commercial ever made.” 

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

Click and Clack and Play War

27 Sep. 2011

by Jeff Huber

I’ve said for some time that the biggest casualty of our woebegone Ism Wars may be our national cognizance.  The lines between intelligence, news, gossip, rumor and brainwash have faded like a hangover at happy hour, and the gap between reality and perception has never been greater.  Big Media has been the dutiful echo chamberlain for Big War for so long that it may never again be possible for Americans, by now hopelessly addicted to the slime from their TV sets, to clearly conceptualize the causes and consequences of our fist-first foreign policy. 

Leon Panetta and Mike Mullen
testify before the Senate.

During an INFOWAR opportunity last week, Leon “Uncle Leo” Panetta and Mike “Moon” Mullen, the Pentarchy’s Click and Clack, told the Senate Armed Services Clodhoppers that the recent attacks on the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan were the evildoing of a terror networks relationship with the intelligence service of Pakistan.

Senator Lindsey Graham
has always relied on the kindness
of campaign contributors in
the defense industry. 

Mullen, the son of a Hollywood publicity agent, followed standard operating procedure and weasel wordsmithed his way out of presenting anything anyone could call, strictly speaking, a “lie.”  He told Blanche Graham and Joe Liebfraumilch and Senator Ex-Prisoner of War that the Hagqani terrorist network “acts as” a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s Internal Services Intelligence Agency aka “ISI.”  You can drive the flat earth theory through that kind of wiggle room.

Mullen didn’t offer any proof to back his claims other than to cite “credible intelligence.”  Hey, Abbott.  At what point since 9/11 have we had “credible” intelligence, civilian or military, in this country?  U.S. intelligence is to intelligence what McDonalds is to food.  Our intelligence consists of bribing or beating sources into telling us what we want to hear and/or weaving facts out of air molecules and selling them to Congress and the public in packages designed by Mullen’s bull-feather merchant marines.  

Mullen is invoking a variation on Don Rumsfeld’s one-percent doctrine.  If one percent of anything the likes of Mullen says is true—and one can reasonably infer that yes, Pakistan’s ISI is up to things they’d rather we didn't know about—then we have to buy the other 99 per-cent of their message too.  It’s kind of like the colossus cosmetics company that only allows retailers to carry its top-of-the-line products if said retailers also display said colossus cosmetics company’s crud-ola.  We only have one military, and if we don't allow it to defend us from the 99 percent of our enemies that they manufacture, they won’t protect us from the one percent that are real.

Uncle Leo hurled a healthy helping of hamana hem-and-haw onto the heap about how “we should put as much pressure as we can” on Pakistan, and then he cut to the chase and said that if Congress forces the Pentagon to cut its budget it will cause “catastrophic damage to the military.”  Uncle Leo didn’t bother to explain what “catastrophic damage” meant any more than Moon troubled himself to clarify what a “veritable arm” might be or how it might “act as” anything. 

When you take a fire hose to Click and Clack's cockamamie presentations, you get "we need more money so we can continue to send American troops to third world countries that pose no genuine threat to us to act as targets for our enemies there who increase in number every day we keep American troops in their countries."  Neither Click nor Clack nor anyone in Congress nor the newspapers bother to point out the obvious truth that thee enemies who are killing our troops would stop being enemies the moment we took our troops out of their country.  The only way they can kill our troops is if we deliver our troops to their doorstep.  Despite what young Mr. Bush's spin physicians used to tell us, the only way they can fight us over here is if they manage to jump or swim across the oceans.  

Let's play war!

Panetta and Mullen are engaged in something I identified in Bathtub Admirals as “play war.”   Intelligence weenies tell bathtub admirals and sandbox generals what they want to hear so they can play war, and fight among themselves for control of the toy ships and tanks and airplanes and melting plastic soldiers, and to see who can suck up to the bedroom politicians the most and become master of the known universe (aka “become King David Petraeus”).  Play war assumes many guises, from stacked “battle experiments” whose purpose is to prove the need for the newest and costliest weapons systems to wars against countries that don’t have militaries to toys and games that the warmongery fashions to make war seem no more real than reality television programming. 

The latest play war toy to surface in the “real world” is something called the “Obama Kills Osama” (aka “OKO”) action figurine.  It was supposedly cooked up by some kooks in China to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of 9/11.  The figurine is cheesy to the point of obscenity.  The keyboard commandos who populate Military.com object to the figurine, but not because of its repellant portrayal of violence.  They don’t like it because it gives Obama credit for killing bin Laden, and not SEAL Team Six.  The repellent violence part they actually kind of like. 

On that note, here is a snippet from the work in progress on Sandbox Generals:  

            Calling the “enemy” World Wide Evil (aka WWE) was Flip’s idea and he stole it from World Wide Entertainment, the fake professional wrestling franchise.  The subconscious association Flip created exploited Americans' latent tendency to think of war the same way they thought of professional wrestling: as an entertainment.  The main difference between the two was that though Americans knew professional wrestling was fake they managed to sufficiently suspend their disbelief to respond to it emotionally as if it were real.  Americans knew that war, on the other hand, was real, but they tended to regard it as entertainment, and attached little emotion at all to it.  Even graphic pictures of babies horribly burned by sulfur bombs seldom moved Americans, whose minds had come to equate the war violence they observed in the news with the special effects they saw in movies and television and video games.

We have met the barbarians, and they are us.

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

Fraud, Waste, and Standard Operating Procedure

20 Sep. 2011

By Jeff Huber

I’m not sure what made me think that taking time off to work on Sandbox Generals, (the sequel to Bathtub Admirals) would get me away from fixating on current headlines.  Last Saturday the thousands of days late and billions of dollars short New York Times editorial board ran an editorial excoriating  “Runaway Spending on War Contractors.” 

I owe it all to
Michael R. Gordon and
Judith Miller of the
New York Times.

“Tales of waste, fraud and mayhem by private contractors have been commonplace during 10 years of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq,” the editorial they tell us.  “Now a Congressional study commission has put a ‘conservative’ estimate on waste of between $31 billion and $60 billion in the $206 billion paid to contractors since the start of the two wars.”  The rag-of-record’s editors also note that according to the study, “Excessive reliance on badly supervised private contractors indulging ‘vast amounts of spending for no benefit’ is the heart of the problem.”

Psst.  New York Times.  The heart of the problem is that Saddam Hussein wasn't trying to get yellowcake from Niger like you said he was back in 2002.  Are we supposed to get all het up by your editorial about contractors making big war bucks thanks to the propaganda you fed the country? 

Lamentably, we’ve been in a wartime economy since the Second World War on Evil, and even though that book-of-matches approach to fiscal policy is finally turning our fingers into Chicken McNuggets, there’s no alternative strategy that anyone is likely to implement.  Redirect all of that defense spending into domestic infrastructure project jobs that can’t be sent offshore because the workers have to be here to work on the infrastructure?  What for?  We’re still making money pig knuckle over ham hock on war.  Retooling an industry to make a new product when the old product is still profitable is a bad business decision.  Why do you think we’re still consuming oil and tobacco fumes? 

Here’s a sneak preview from this week’s labors on Generals, an Orwellian screed on how things got the way they are.  Be advised, this is a rough draft (!!!).    

The WWEIII (The Third World War on Evil, aka the Cold War on Evil aka the CWoE) everybody agreed to plan for but never have after everybody agreed not to blow up the world with nukes first centered on a WWEI style trench war with tanks in the middle of Europe.  But the action in the center ring was actually just a sideshow to justify the air and naval hootenannies that would break out like herpes everywhere else in the world. 

That was the war the Navy and the Air Force would fight, a peripheral war that actually had little to do with the stated Evil Empire objective of expanding its client state buffer to include Western Europe so as to ensure no more Hitlers or Napoleons would come along and destroy their armies and countries in a vain attempt to capture Moscow again.  Jack supposed that made the objective of us Americans and our little NATO (“Not A True Organization,” according to Jack) buddies was to ensure that another Hitler or Napoleon did come along and try to wreck the world in an attempt to capture Moscow.  That didn’t make any sense, Jack ceded, until you considered that the objective of global thermo nuclear-war between the ESSR (Empire of Semi-Socialist Republics) countries and the loose league of American customer states was to destroy the world before the other guys did. 

While the high-tech conventional war was peripheral to the opposing physical objectives of expanding or limiting Russia’s European real estate holdings, the war’s overall strategic objective quickly evolved into an economic one, a contest to which of the two diametrically smoke-and-mirror economic systems could outlast the other.  So seeing which economic system could develop and field and maintain the most outlandishly exorbitant air and sea weapon systems that would never actually be used for their designed purpose became the modus of combat in what Jack came to know of as “play war.”   

Both sides of the CWoE justified lavishing precious national wealth on extravagant weaponry by using it in the dirty little third world proxy wars they suckered each other into from time to time, in Korea and Vietnam and Bananastan and elsewhere, but pricey mayhem machines had little affect on the outcomes of these teakettle conflicts.  Third world wars were dumb soldier intensive affairs that mainly required low-dollar carbon-based air-breathing weapon systems largely procured from the lower and middle classes by means of conscription or the lure of stable employment with benefits. 

A key factor of top-drawer air and naval gizmology was not merely that it was expensive to produce, although it most certainly was.  The beauty part, the piece of resistance of all this, was that however much any given piece of this high-tech crap cost to make, it was boatloads more expensive to maintain, and the older it got, the more it cost to keep in operation.  Better yet was that the more a given gizmo cost to make and maintain, the longer it was expected to last, which made it even magnitudes more to make and oodles more to keep operating.  So if a flying submarine cost a butt-zillion Houdinis to make, it cost ten butt-zillion Houdinis to keep flying and diving for the thirty years it was supposed to last, at which time it would become eligible for a life extension overhaul that would screw it up so bad it would need two or three follow-on overhauls to fix the first one.  By the time the damn thing was finally turned into a museum in some coastal Podunk that needed a tourist attraction, the flying sub will have cost an amount roughly equivalent to what the Gross National Product was in the year it was built.

The Evil Empiricals followed the same general force strategy vector but in a somewhat different manner.  Their working class enlisted stiffs who maintained their gear weren’t nearly as well educated as our working class enlisted stiffs, so they built stuff three or four times as solid as it needed to be, realizing that when it broke it was broke-dick and nobody was going to fix it.  Hence, rather than spend more Carnacs trying to fix broke-dick stuff they just made new stuff. 

A by-product of that practice was that our intelligence weenies could say with a fair amount of accuracy (for a change) that they had a lot more stuff than we had, and we could turn that information around to justify building more expensive stuff to give ourselves the so called “technology edge” to bridge the “numerical superiority gap,” two buzz phrases that Flip often wished he’d been old enough to have originally stolen them from whoever their real originator had stolen them from.  It didn’t matter that their numerical superiority gap was a de facto hoax since more than 99 percent of their gear was rusting on the flight line, sinking at the pier, or burning in Chechnya. 

That’s not to say that our gear was all immaculate and purring like a fat tomcat getting its dick scratched.  Throughout our careers, when Jack and I went on play war deployments overseas, we were lucky if half of the jets in our air wing were fully mission capable (aka FMC)—i.e., they flew and all their radars and weapons and so on worked like they were supposed to—at any given time.  Squadron skippers typically reported a 75 percent FMC rate because reporting anything lower was like sinking the teeth of their careers into the chewy end of a shotgun barrel.  Maintenance supervisors knew this and ensured that by the end of any given day the paperwork would reflect a 75 percent FMC rate, even if the spare parts that would make a given aircraft FMC weren’t onboard the ship and wouldn’t arrive for weeks if ever. 

It must have been some time around the VWoE (Vietnam War on Evil) that air wing maintenance officers and ship supply corps gonifs cut the dope deal where as long as a part was on order everyone would pretend like it was on hand whether it was or not, thus making both the maintenance and supply pukes look good without actually having to do their jobs.  Squadron skippers looked the other way because phantom parting made them look good, and air wing commanders looked the other way because it made them look good too, and the same thing held true all the way up the chain of command.  And there was little fear that anyone would ever blow the whistle because everybody was in on the scam.

Postscript: Monday morning the PPPP (Pentarchy’s Primary Propaganda Platform) trotted out the crown jewel of the information campaign to preserve the defense budget.  “Retiree Benefits for the Military Could Face Cuts” reads the headline of a Times story that says if the Pentagon has to face fiscal reductions, the burden will fall on retirees, whose benefits the bull feather merchant marines are now calling a “social program.” 

The military’s spin physicians’ main assumption is that we can keep our present and future wars going with “support the troops” brainwash while we cut back on the support we promised the troops of our past wars.  That won’t hurt recruiting as long as the economy makes joining the military our nation’s most attractive career option.  If irony were alive and with us it would smirk at the fact that the head-sex fiends who cook up this scare tactic strategy will themselves get screwed if retiree benefit cuts come to pass. 

Mind you now, if we cut retiree benefits we’ll still have flying submarines, and stealth airplanes that are too expensive to actually use in wartime because they’ll shoot themselves down over enemy territory due to design flaws, and multi-billion dollar bomber drones that fly halfway across the world from mega-billion dollar aircraft carriers that are already halfway across the world. 

JLH 

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

Postcard from the Beachhead

by Jeff Huber

13 Sep. 2011

Aloha, y’all:

The great thing about living at a beach is how much it simplifies one’s late summer vacation travel arrangements.  You don't have to go anywhere to take a vacation.  And you don't really have to quit working to take one either.  

Wake me when the
war is over.

Shady and I are enjoying the last of the summer sun here at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, though I’m still full steam ahead working on finishing the current draft of Sandbox Generals (we’re just now getting to the point in the narrative where Fix Felon regains the throne of the Pentarchy by eating King David alive, lending credence to protagonist Jack Hogan’s long held suspicion that Fix is, in fact, an undead mother groper).

And of course I’m keeping up with our woebegone wars—12 of them at last count.  I see over the weekend where Uncle Leo is foursquare behind keeping three or four thousand troops in Iraq beyond the year-end deadline.  Pentagon echo chamberlain Eric Schmitt of the New York Times tells us that Uncle Leo’s plan keeps considerably fewer troops in Iraq than “proposals presented at the Pentagon in recent weeks by the senior American commander in Iraq, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, to keep as many as 14,000 to 18,000 troops there.”

You sure have to wonder how Schmitt got that quote from Austin, and why he might stenograph it for us when he already got the “official” word from the “boss” that the “Pentagon” only wants to keep three or four thousand troops after the deadline.  Maybe if we only keep three or four thousand troops in harm’s way for the hopeless cause of supporting a corrupt government, it won’t seem so bad.  After all, that general man wanted to keep lots, lots more, didn’t he?

Oh, but then if we don't give the general as many troops as he wanted and things don’t go well, it will be somebody or other’s fault for not listening to what his generals said, won’t it?  

Our goal in the Arab world
 is Peace without
Humidity.

One also has to wonder what prompted Schmitt to write that the proposal to keep troops in Iraq until brown cows give chocolate milk reflects “the tension between Mr. Obama’s promise to bring all American forces home and the widely held view among commanders that Iraq is not yet able to provide for its own security.”  Schmitt doesn’t bother to mention that Iraq is not yet able to provide for its own security in spite (because?) of the fact the man in charge of training Iraqi security forces clear back in 2004 and 2005 was none other than our own, our very own Teflon General, "King" David Petraeus. 

Schmitt also doesn’t bother to pose the question of why, if miracle worker Petraeus’s Surgin’ Safari in Sumaria was so rootin’-tootin’-high-falutin' successful then how’s come we still gotta leave us troops there to get blowed up?  And Schmitt ponder the puzzler that if seven years weren’t enough for the Iraqis to get their own security act together, how many years will it take them?  (As many years as there are left?) 

Schmitt makes the vanishing Iraq deadline sound like news.  It’s nothing of the sort. The Pentarchy started its hell-no-we-won’t-go media campaign the second Candidate Obama made his 16-month withdrawal promise and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said why, sure, that sounded kosher to him.  Joint Chiefs Chairperson Mike Mullen went so far as to write an article in the summer of 2008 for Joint Force Quarterly, his personal glossy propaganda rag, that warned of the danger that a Democrat in the White House would pose to the mission in Iraq. 

And General Lloyd J. “Harrumph” Austin III’s proposal to keep 14 to 18 thousand troops in Iraq for an unspecified amount of time rhymes with General Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno’s statement in early 2009 (via the "dean" of the Pentagon press prostitution ring Tommy Ricks) that he wanted to see 30,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq until 2004 or 2005.  Or so. 

Troop Tent Trollop Tommy was also the bull feather merchant chosen to throw a brass gauntlet in young Mr. Obama’s face in an early 2009 episode of Meet the Press, when he laid out the case to NBC fop David Gregory that Obama will have betrayed the troops if he withdraws them from Iraq against the generals’ wished because of a darn old campaign promise.

“Cave Man” Obama took a ten count vis-à-vis the New American Praetorians’ agenda a long time ago.  He won’t start standing up to them now.  Stand by to support the troops to your grave.  And theirs. 

I'll be posting here sporadically through the fall as I wrap up Sandbox Generals.  It's fun but taxing work.  Think 1984 meets Blazing Saddles. 

Ciao, hounds!  

Jeff

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

Operational Pause for the Cause

Happy End of Summer!

I’m celebrating Labor Day this year by making it the first day of my summer vacation which, if I’m going to take one, I need to get cracking, don’t I?

Wake me when the next war
is over.

Catch you after the equinox.  Hopefully we won’t have started a fourth war by then.  Well, a fifth war, if you count Yemen as being a war already.  Which it is, when you get right down to it.  Then again, we’re also at war in Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.  So here’s hoping we’re don’t start a how ever many-eth war it would be if we start a new one before fall officially starts. 

And what would the rush be?  It’s not like we need new wars to replace the ones we already have.  Out withdrawal “deadlines” for Iraq and the Bananastans are more fictional than Sergeant Fury and His Howling Commandos, though not nearly so well written, drawn or inked.   

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.