I said a few weeks ago that the January 6 incident between U.S. and Iranian naval forces in the Strait of Hormuz might tell us more about the nature of today's news reporting than about the prospects for war and peace in the Middle East. It's now apparent that the affair was emblematic of America's post-modern Orwellian (Rovewellian) information environment.
Unreliable Sources
Initial media reports of the encounter were enough to make you wish you'd salted away an extra month's worth of beef jerky in the backyard fallout shelter.
A senior military correspondent with the Associated Press said that "an Iranian fleet of boats" had "charged at and threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy" transiting the Strait of Hormuz. According to the senior correspondent, Fifth Fleet Commander Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff said in a January 7 press teleconference that the Iranian fleet "fled as American commanders were preparing to open fire."
A Rupert Murdoch newspaper reported that an unnamed "Pentagon official said that US forces were 'literally' on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats," and that another Pentagon official (or maybe the same one) said "It is the most serious provocation of this sort that we’ve seen yet."
An echo chamberlain with the Big Brother News Network squalled, "Was this a mistake not to blow these other Iranian speedboats out of the water? […] Why did we not destroy these speedboats? [...] We had an opportunity to send a message to a nation that has been needling us for 20 years."
Subsequent saner accounts revealed that the "Iranian fleet" consisted of five speedboats of the size that haul sunburned water skiers across American lakes in the summer. The official transcript of the Cosgriff press conference showed that the admiral had not said that American commanders were preparing to open fire, but that he had heard that story reported "on the news."
We discovered that the threats to blow up the U.S. ships broadcast over a VHF bridge-to-bridge radio circuit had almost certainly been part of the standard heckling from untraceable sources that American combatant vessels have heard in the Persian Gulf for more than two decades. The skipper of one of the U.S. ships involved said, “We gave them the opportunity to break off, so that we didn’t have to go the ultimate, which would have been deadly force.” That's a far cry from "preparing to open fire."
Something worth noticing happened between our Navy and the Iranians in the Gulf, all right, but it was merely an upsmanship shenanigan of the kind that has occurred in those waters many times since the Tanker War ended in 1988, and was hardly "the most serious provocation of this sort that we’ve seen yet."
So where did all the alarmist disinformation come from?
Minister of Truth
On January 15, investigative historian Gareth Porter blew the lid off the mystery of who had "disassembled" about the Hormuz incident. Bryan Whitman, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, had held a separate briefing for the Pentagon press corps. Most of what he said was off the record, meaning he could not be directly quoted (when you read quotes from an "unnamed official" in a news story, it's generally propaganda that the initiators don't want traced back to their bosses). In an apparent slip up, a reporter for one major outlet revealed Whitman as the source of the "about to fire" rhetoric.
That the story of the Hormuz incident got "cooked" at the Pentagon reminds one of the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) established under then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shortly after September 11 in order to support the war on terror through information operations, including disinformation and other forms of black propaganda. Officially, Rumsfeld shut down the OSI amid outrage over the news that it would feed false stories to the foreign press, but in a November 2002 media briefing, he made it clear that it would live on in function if not form, saying " if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have."
War Is Sell
The Pentagon and the right wing media weren't the only ones who spun the Hormuz incident all across the information highway.
The military affairs fictioneer with the big online magazine generated a Chariot-of-the-Gods argument to explain why the U.S. and Iranian videotapes of the encounter were so different—they were tapes of two separate events! (The term "Chariot-of-the-Gods argument" derives from the book by Erich von Daniken that says since we can't easily explain who made all those weird giant patterns out in the desert, it must have been ancient astronauts.)
The fictioneer credited his counterpart with the blog of the newspaper that once actually guarded the Constitution from unitary executives like Richard Nixon for inspiring the "two tapes" theory. The counterpart accused the Iranians of "mendacity" without making any attempt to prove that they were actually lying about anything.
The old gray mare (she ain't what she used to be) that gave us Judith Miller and the Niger yellowcake hoax ran an article that compared the Hormuz affair to an incident that happened during a fictional 2002 war game that was mainly conducted by imaginary forces on battlefields in cyberspace in which Iranian small boats notionally sank an entire U.S. naval task force in the Persian Gulf. To make the analogy even more preposterous, in the game, the U.S. and Iran were in a state of declared conflict, which they are not in the real world despite the best efforts of Dick Cheney and his Iranian Directorate.
The same big eastern paper ran an unsolicited editorial by a Marine Corps reservist and Pentagon employee who suggested that a proper step to take against Iranian to deter small boat harassment might be to bomb two Iranian islands in the Gulf. The author is not part of a larger propaganda machine; he was simply relating his own experiences and opinions. But the fact that an opinion piece from an obscure government employee ran in the paper of record as well as other national and international news outlets gives you an idea how willing the major media are to whip Pavlov's Dogs of War into a slathering bloodlust.
The neoconservative mind control program has evolved far beyond anything the old Office of Strategic Influence could have achieved. It is as ubiquitous and dispersed as al Qaeda. It has spread past its original base of truth ministries like the ISO and the Iranian Directorate, think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, private propaganda contractors like Lincoln Group and the Rendon Group, media savvy American Caesars like General David Petraeus and unabashed media proponents of American military hegemony like William Kristol's Weekly Standard.
The neocons have successfully recruited the able services of mainstream media publishers and producers who have pillaged the truth for the sake of ever increasing plunder margins, journalists who gleefully trade their integrity for access to the halls of power, dime store strategists who write pro-war letters to editors who are eager to print them, and full time Pentagon correspondents who would more gainfully be employed as gossip columnists.
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Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
The Schmooze in Hormuz
I've been studying the incident in the Strait of Hormuz of early January between U.S. and Iranian naval forces, and am more convinced than ever that it was blown out of proportion by an administration friendly media with urging from the remnants of Donald Rumsfeld's Office of Strategic Influence (aka Ministry of Truth).
Later this week, I'll have some thoughts on how I think the executive branch's disinformation network operates today, how the Hormuz affair fits into the grand strategy, and what all of it portends for whoever succeeds young Mr. Bush in the Oval Office.
Best,
Jeff
Later this week, I'll have some thoughts on how I think the executive branch's disinformation network operates today, how the Hormuz affair fits into the grand strategy, and what all of it portends for whoever succeeds young Mr. Bush in the Oval Office.
Best,
Jeff
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Who Wants To Be a Commander in Chief?
All you have to do to sound smart in a right wing bar is start every sentence with "Neal Boortz says…" and all it takes to be a political wit is to say "Hillary" out loud.
I for one am fatigued of hearing earnest discussion by the professional and sandlot punditry alike about whether or not Hillary forgave Bill for Monica because it was a good career move, or if she faked crying like a girl on camera, or if she can take it like a man, and of hearing her blamed for every societal ill from inflation to illegal immigration to fluoridation (Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream!) and just about everything else. I'd really like the discussion about Hillary to focus on whether or not she'd make a good president.
I happen to think she wouldn't make a good president at all, but not because I'm afraid she might show a little too much cleavage at her inauguration. I'm convinced she would make a wholly inadequate commander in chief of our military, and after two terms of Bush the younger, that's something we simply cannot endure.
Next!
As I said a few weeks ago, I view our current presidential race as a cattle call audition for the role of commander in chief. The trick to wading through a slate of candidates the size of this one is to begin by eliminating everyone who's obviously not right for the part.
From the top, I can scratch the leading GOP hopefuls, the holy trinity of theocons who hope to exploit misdirected religious fervor to support their neoconservative foreign policies. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were conspicuous Christian Soldiers from the get go. John McCain joined their ranks when he aired the Christmas ad that Mel Gibson could have directed, the one showing young Lieutenant McCain, tortured prisoner of war, looking like You-Know-Who after they pulled Him down off the you-know-what.
But even if we take the Messiah handle away from him, McCain comes up short in the CINC department. Yes, he's been on the Senate Armed Services Committee forever, but being on the SASC doesn’t make one competent on security matters. Joe Lieberman has been on the committee for donkey's years too, and what he understands about military art you wouldn't notice if he stuck it under your right eyelid. Moreover, everyone must (or at least should) admire and respect McCain's heroism in the service of our country, but let's face it; being a prisoner of war doesn’t teach anybody how to run one.
But McCain's chief flaw as a prospective war chief is that he was foursquare in favor of Mr. Bush's Iraq surge strategy, and what's more, he thinks it's working. That makes him an even poorer choice for commander in chief than Hillary.
Clausewitz 101
Based on her January 13 appearance on Meet the Press, Hillary (or one of her staffers) seems to understand Clausewitz's admonition that "The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes." I'm not convinced, though, that a cursory understanding of On War will be sufficient for Hillary to keep Pavlov's Dogs of War in their cages. I'm especially uncertain whether she has what it takes to get Trumanesque with a MacArthur class American Caesar like General David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq.
In the December 13th interview, Tim Russert posed a hypothetical: If Petraeus reports to Congress in March and "says the surge is working, that reconciliation started in a big way yesterday when the Iraqi parliament said that former members of the Saddam government can participate in new government, don't pull 35,000 troops out now, keep them there for at least the remainder of the year, would you be open to that?"
Hillary shot back, "No, and here's why, Tim." She continued strongly for a time, asserting that the surge was "explained and rationalized as giving the Iraqi government space and time to make the hard decisions that they needed to make." But then she wobbled off into kinda/sorta country, mentioning how 2007 was the "deadliest year for American troops" and "that the large part of the reason that we're seeing the Iraqi government do anything is because time is running out" and yada, yada, blah, blah, wimp, wimp, wimp.
What she should have done immediately was mulch Russert from his hairline to his Adam's apple for asking such a stupid question, and told him the issue of extending the surge was irrelevant because the 35.000 extra troops will be all home by this summer come hell or Hezbollah. That was in the plan when the surge began in January 2007. It can't last any longer without doing seed corn damage to the Army.
Then she should have ripped Russert a new exit ramp for suggesting that allowing minor government clerks to go back to work constituted a "big way" toward political reconciliation.
Last but not least, she should have told Russert—and the rest of the world—that as president she wouldn’t let David Petraeus dictate Iraq policy any more than Harry Truman let Douglas MacArthur call the shots in Korea.
But she didn't do any of those things. What's more, when Russert challenged her on her 2002 vote approving the Iraq invasion, Clinton gave her standard non-answer: "I made it very clear that my vote was not a vote for preemptive war. I said that on the floor, I said it consistently after that. It was a vote to put inspectors back in to determine what threat Saddam Hussein did in fact pose."
Let's take a look at what the bill actually said. Its title was "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq. Do you think it's possible Hillary didn't read that part of it, or that she misread it, and thought it said "Resolution to Authorize Putting Inspectors Back In?"
Then there's the part of the bill called "authorization" that says "The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq."
How on earth does Hillary think she didn't vote for the war? Was it a matter of what her definition of "authorize" was? If so, that goes beyond Clintonesque. It's downright Bushwacky.
No matter how vehemently she denies it, Hillary bought the Bush team's narrative on Iraq back in 2002, and now she's vested in their Iran fable.
At the November 2007 Democratic candidates' debate in Las Vegas, she tried to bully a young Iraq War veteran into agreeing that "the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has assisted the militias and others in killing our Americans and in maiming them." In a February 2007 address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), she echoed the administration's boo noise about Iran's nuclear program, and emphasized the "urgency to the necessity to doing everything we can to deny nuclear weapons to Iran."
The claims about Iranian culpability in attacks on American G.I.s started about the same time as the surge, and the administration has yet to provide a stick of credible proof to back those accusations. And we don't need to do anything at all to deny nuclear weapons to Iran because, as we all know now thanks to the latest National Intelligence Estimate, it denied them to itself.
One can only conclude that Hillary is a closet neocon or that she's so afraid of being cast as weak on security that she'll give them whatever they want to keep them from calling her a girly girl on AM radio and Fox News.
In either case, I'm sorry, Senator, but you didn't pass the audition. Next Democrat, please, and remember everyone, we're only seeing singing CINCs today. If you're a dancing CINC, you need to come back tomorrow.
#
Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
I for one am fatigued of hearing earnest discussion by the professional and sandlot punditry alike about whether or not Hillary forgave Bill for Monica because it was a good career move, or if she faked crying like a girl on camera, or if she can take it like a man, and of hearing her blamed for every societal ill from inflation to illegal immigration to fluoridation (Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream!) and just about everything else. I'd really like the discussion about Hillary to focus on whether or not she'd make a good president.
I happen to think she wouldn't make a good president at all, but not because I'm afraid she might show a little too much cleavage at her inauguration. I'm convinced she would make a wholly inadequate commander in chief of our military, and after two terms of Bush the younger, that's something we simply cannot endure.
Next!
As I said a few weeks ago, I view our current presidential race as a cattle call audition for the role of commander in chief. The trick to wading through a slate of candidates the size of this one is to begin by eliminating everyone who's obviously not right for the part.
From the top, I can scratch the leading GOP hopefuls, the holy trinity of theocons who hope to exploit misdirected religious fervor to support their neoconservative foreign policies. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were conspicuous Christian Soldiers from the get go. John McCain joined their ranks when he aired the Christmas ad that Mel Gibson could have directed, the one showing young Lieutenant McCain, tortured prisoner of war, looking like You-Know-Who after they pulled Him down off the you-know-what.
But even if we take the Messiah handle away from him, McCain comes up short in the CINC department. Yes, he's been on the Senate Armed Services Committee forever, but being on the SASC doesn’t make one competent on security matters. Joe Lieberman has been on the committee for donkey's years too, and what he understands about military art you wouldn't notice if he stuck it under your right eyelid. Moreover, everyone must (or at least should) admire and respect McCain's heroism in the service of our country, but let's face it; being a prisoner of war doesn’t teach anybody how to run one.
But McCain's chief flaw as a prospective war chief is that he was foursquare in favor of Mr. Bush's Iraq surge strategy, and what's more, he thinks it's working. That makes him an even poorer choice for commander in chief than Hillary.
Clausewitz 101
Based on her January 13 appearance on Meet the Press, Hillary (or one of her staffers) seems to understand Clausewitz's admonition that "The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes." I'm not convinced, though, that a cursory understanding of On War will be sufficient for Hillary to keep Pavlov's Dogs of War in their cages. I'm especially uncertain whether she has what it takes to get Trumanesque with a MacArthur class American Caesar like General David Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq.
In the December 13th interview, Tim Russert posed a hypothetical: If Petraeus reports to Congress in March and "says the surge is working, that reconciliation started in a big way yesterday when the Iraqi parliament said that former members of the Saddam government can participate in new government, don't pull 35,000 troops out now, keep them there for at least the remainder of the year, would you be open to that?"
Hillary shot back, "No, and here's why, Tim." She continued strongly for a time, asserting that the surge was "explained and rationalized as giving the Iraqi government space and time to make the hard decisions that they needed to make." But then she wobbled off into kinda/sorta country, mentioning how 2007 was the "deadliest year for American troops" and "that the large part of the reason that we're seeing the Iraqi government do anything is because time is running out" and yada, yada, blah, blah, wimp, wimp, wimp.
What she should have done immediately was mulch Russert from his hairline to his Adam's apple for asking such a stupid question, and told him the issue of extending the surge was irrelevant because the 35.000 extra troops will be all home by this summer come hell or Hezbollah. That was in the plan when the surge began in January 2007. It can't last any longer without doing seed corn damage to the Army.
Then she should have ripped Russert a new exit ramp for suggesting that allowing minor government clerks to go back to work constituted a "big way" toward political reconciliation.
Last but not least, she should have told Russert—and the rest of the world—that as president she wouldn’t let David Petraeus dictate Iraq policy any more than Harry Truman let Douglas MacArthur call the shots in Korea.
But she didn't do any of those things. What's more, when Russert challenged her on her 2002 vote approving the Iraq invasion, Clinton gave her standard non-answer: "I made it very clear that my vote was not a vote for preemptive war. I said that on the floor, I said it consistently after that. It was a vote to put inspectors back in to determine what threat Saddam Hussein did in fact pose."
Let's take a look at what the bill actually said. Its title was "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq. Do you think it's possible Hillary didn't read that part of it, or that she misread it, and thought it said "Resolution to Authorize Putting Inspectors Back In?"
Then there's the part of the bill called "authorization" that says "The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq."
How on earth does Hillary think she didn't vote for the war? Was it a matter of what her definition of "authorize" was? If so, that goes beyond Clintonesque. It's downright Bushwacky.
No matter how vehemently she denies it, Hillary bought the Bush team's narrative on Iraq back in 2002, and now she's vested in their Iran fable.
At the November 2007 Democratic candidates' debate in Las Vegas, she tried to bully a young Iraq War veteran into agreeing that "the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has assisted the militias and others in killing our Americans and in maiming them." In a February 2007 address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), she echoed the administration's boo noise about Iran's nuclear program, and emphasized the "urgency to the necessity to doing everything we can to deny nuclear weapons to Iran."
The claims about Iranian culpability in attacks on American G.I.s started about the same time as the surge, and the administration has yet to provide a stick of credible proof to back those accusations. And we don't need to do anything at all to deny nuclear weapons to Iran because, as we all know now thanks to the latest National Intelligence Estimate, it denied them to itself.
One can only conclude that Hillary is a closet neocon or that she's so afraid of being cast as weak on security that she'll give them whatever they want to keep them from calling her a girly girl on AM radio and Fox News.
In either case, I'm sorry, Senator, but you didn't pass the audition. Next Democrat, please, and remember everyone, we're only seeing singing CINCs today. If you're a dancing CINC, you need to come back tomorrow.
#
Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
The Dogs of Holy War
Balboa found the Pacific, and on the trail one day
He met some friendly Indians whom he was told were gay
Soooooooooooooo
He had them torn apart by dogs on religious grounds they say
The great nations of Europe were quite holy in their way
--Randy Newman, "The Great Nations of Europe"
I managed to catch just enough of a replay of the recent ABC GOP presidential debate to hear Fred Thompson say that we won in Afghanistan. I made the sound of one jaw dropping: not so much over what Thompson said, but because not one of the other candidates batted an eyelash.
They didn't contradict Thompson, or take him to task for being senile, or roll their eyes and make one of those "Grandpa smells funny again" faces. I have to conclude that they all think we won in Afghanistan, or that they know better but don't want to admit that we're actually still there and still losing. In either case, this episode illustrates one of the major reasons we don't want any of the Republicans currently running for president as our next commander in chief. They're either disconnected from foreign policy realities or they refuse to recognize the ones they don't like.
We've had enough of that sort of thing.
Another thing we don't need any more of is faith based foreign policy, and it looks more and more as if that's what the GOP front-runners plan on if they grab the brass ring.
God Is My National Security Adviser
Iowa Caucus winner Mike Huckabee says God intervened in the race on his behalf. Then again, Huck also swears on a stack of you-know-whats that the crucifix appearing behind his head in his Christmas ad just happened by accident, so you can pretty much figure anything Huck says is jive.
The New Hampshire victor and "Comeback Codger" John McCain ran a Christmas ad that dramatized the oft-told story about the guard at the Hanoi Hilton who stood next to a battered Lieutenant McCain on Christmas morning and etched a cross in the dirt with his toe. Taken out of its political context, this story is about bravery, cruelty and compassion. As a piece of pandering to the pre-sentient segment of the religious right, its message is slightly subtler but as unmistakable as Huckabee's: Like Christ, John McCain too was tortured.
Mitt Romney, who took the silver in both Iowa and New Hampshire, gave a pre-Christmas speech on December 6 in which he told America that "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." Mitt's grasp of history is as firm as his issue positions are consistent. Freedom and religion have often been practiced independently of each other. Think of how many societies have sought solace from tyranny in their religions (e.g., "Render unto Caesar…").
Mitt said that, "It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions." Apparently, to Mitt's analytical mind, those moral convictions aren't contained in "the creed of conversion by conquest" practiced by "radical Islamists [who] do their preaching not by reason or example, but in the coercion of minds and the shedding of blood."
Mitt doesn’t mention, and possibly isn't aware, that the shedding of blood in our present nightmare in the Middle East was caused by a messianic Evangelical Christian who invaded another country halfway across the world because God told him to.
It's important to point out here that while Mitt pointed his finger at "radical" Islamists, there is really no distinction in neoconservative dogma between radical Islam and any other sort of Islam. Listen to talk radio luminary Neal Boortz wax wacky on the subject some time. He'll remind you of the insane Colonel Kurtz, rotting in his lair at the mouth of the Nung River, gasping, "Kill them all." Deriding any effort to separate Islam the religion from global terrism is one of Big Brother Media's major initiatives, as a recent Washington Times piece written by Diana West illustrates. The article, titled "Foul Play," ridicules initiatives in the Pentagon to parse "Islam" from "jihad" as politically correct appeasement. West makes the standard weekly comparison of the Muslim evil doers to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, blithely skipping over the kind-of-critical detail about how the Nazis and Soviets were honest to goodness peer competitors, whereas today's evil ones don't have a formal army or an air force or a navy or a country or a gross domestic product or even a pot to plant in.
Onward Christian Soldiers
If you think nobody who matters is taking this fear and loathing of Islam talk seriously, think again. Boortz, who refers to Islam as "a deadly virus," has one of the most loyal fan bases in the broadcast media. (If you want to go highbrow in a political debate at a right wing bar, you cite Neal Boortz instead of Rush Limbaugh.) Evangelist Jerry Falwell says the prophet Muhammad was a terrorist. Pat Robertson of 700 Club fame denies that Islam is a religion at all. Rather, "It is a worldwide political movement meant on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law." So make no mistake; the message says that history is leading up to an apocalyptic showdown with the Jews and Christians on one side and the Muslims on the other, and the talk radio/Fox News crowd is eating it up like hotcakes.
One member of this hate speech audience is a retired Army officer I've been acquainted with for some years. Norm (we'll call him) is the kind of Christian conservative who makes an annual production number out of condemning the War on Christmas but who probably hasn't seen the inside of a church since the Cuban Missile Crisis. A couple of Christmases ago, while holding court in one of his favorite watering holes and discussing the war on terror, Norm offered the considered opinion that if we had to slaughter every man, woman and child of the Muslim persuasion to keep America safe, he was sure Jesus Christ would approve. A lot of heads at the bar nodded in agreement.
We can't simply dismiss yahooligans like this because they vote. They get to vote, of course, because they, like the children of some of them there immigrants they don't like, were born here.
The Dogs of Holy War
It's sad to say, but the history of humanity is largely the history of its wars, and the armed conflicts of western civilization more often than not involved clashes of religious ideologies.
The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) that ended Greece's reign as a hegemon pitted a society of Athena's followers against a cult of Ares worshipers. The Crusades waged by Christian Europe against Muslims, pagans, Orthodox Christians, Gnostics, Shamanists, Buddhists, Hussites, political enemies of the pope, etc. drug on for centuries. Subsequent conflicts among the great nations of Europe involved Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and Orthodox Christians crashing into each other and/or persecuting Jews and/or buggering heathens in the third world. This led to World Wars I and II, and then the Cold War, which was an ideological struggle between the Judeo/Christian west and the Evil Empire of Godless Communists complete with proxy wars that featured more buggering of third world heathens.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution insisted on separation of church and state for a number of reasons. Premier among them was to prevent a self-proclaimed unitary executive from exploiting misplaced religious fervor to wage unnecessary and ill-advised wars. That the leading candidates of what has become America's War Party would fall all over each other invoking God and Islamo-fabulism as the pillars of their foreign policy platforms is not unexpected, but it is disheartening to watch the country Abraham Lincoln called mankind's "last best hope" devolve into a postmodern incarnation of the old world at its worst (Excuse me, great nations coming through…).
If we're not very careful, our politicians will deliver unto us a brave new world of war everlasting with victory just around the corner forever and ever, amen. And if you really think more theo-conservative doctrine can solve our present cornucopia of foreign policy fiascos, please consider this: mankind has been praying for peace for as long as it has been fighting wars, which is about as long as there has been a mankind.
All that praying for peace hasn't done a fat lot of good, has it?
#
Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
He met some friendly Indians whom he was told were gay
Soooooooooooooo
He had them torn apart by dogs on religious grounds they say
The great nations of Europe were quite holy in their way
--Randy Newman, "The Great Nations of Europe"
I managed to catch just enough of a replay of the recent ABC GOP presidential debate to hear Fred Thompson say that we won in Afghanistan. I made the sound of one jaw dropping: not so much over what Thompson said, but because not one of the other candidates batted an eyelash.
They didn't contradict Thompson, or take him to task for being senile, or roll their eyes and make one of those "Grandpa smells funny again" faces. I have to conclude that they all think we won in Afghanistan, or that they know better but don't want to admit that we're actually still there and still losing. In either case, this episode illustrates one of the major reasons we don't want any of the Republicans currently running for president as our next commander in chief. They're either disconnected from foreign policy realities or they refuse to recognize the ones they don't like.
We've had enough of that sort of thing.
Another thing we don't need any more of is faith based foreign policy, and it looks more and more as if that's what the GOP front-runners plan on if they grab the brass ring.
God Is My National Security Adviser
Iowa Caucus winner Mike Huckabee says God intervened in the race on his behalf. Then again, Huck also swears on a stack of you-know-whats that the crucifix appearing behind his head in his Christmas ad just happened by accident, so you can pretty much figure anything Huck says is jive.
The New Hampshire victor and "Comeback Codger" John McCain ran a Christmas ad that dramatized the oft-told story about the guard at the Hanoi Hilton who stood next to a battered Lieutenant McCain on Christmas morning and etched a cross in the dirt with his toe. Taken out of its political context, this story is about bravery, cruelty and compassion. As a piece of pandering to the pre-sentient segment of the religious right, its message is slightly subtler but as unmistakable as Huckabee's: Like Christ, John McCain too was tortured.
Mitt Romney, who took the silver in both Iowa and New Hampshire, gave a pre-Christmas speech on December 6 in which he told America that "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." Mitt's grasp of history is as firm as his issue positions are consistent. Freedom and religion have often been practiced independently of each other. Think of how many societies have sought solace from tyranny in their religions (e.g., "Render unto Caesar…").
Mitt said that, "It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions." Apparently, to Mitt's analytical mind, those moral convictions aren't contained in "the creed of conversion by conquest" practiced by "radical Islamists [who] do their preaching not by reason or example, but in the coercion of minds and the shedding of blood."
Mitt doesn’t mention, and possibly isn't aware, that the shedding of blood in our present nightmare in the Middle East was caused by a messianic Evangelical Christian who invaded another country halfway across the world because God told him to.
It's important to point out here that while Mitt pointed his finger at "radical" Islamists, there is really no distinction in neoconservative dogma between radical Islam and any other sort of Islam. Listen to talk radio luminary Neal Boortz wax wacky on the subject some time. He'll remind you of the insane Colonel Kurtz, rotting in his lair at the mouth of the Nung River, gasping, "Kill them all." Deriding any effort to separate Islam the religion from global terrism is one of Big Brother Media's major initiatives, as a recent Washington Times piece written by Diana West illustrates. The article, titled "Foul Play," ridicules initiatives in the Pentagon to parse "Islam" from "jihad" as politically correct appeasement. West makes the standard weekly comparison of the Muslim evil doers to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, blithely skipping over the kind-of-critical detail about how the Nazis and Soviets were honest to goodness peer competitors, whereas today's evil ones don't have a formal army or an air force or a navy or a country or a gross domestic product or even a pot to plant in.
Onward Christian Soldiers
If you think nobody who matters is taking this fear and loathing of Islam talk seriously, think again. Boortz, who refers to Islam as "a deadly virus," has one of the most loyal fan bases in the broadcast media. (If you want to go highbrow in a political debate at a right wing bar, you cite Neal Boortz instead of Rush Limbaugh.) Evangelist Jerry Falwell says the prophet Muhammad was a terrorist. Pat Robertson of 700 Club fame denies that Islam is a religion at all. Rather, "It is a worldwide political movement meant on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law." So make no mistake; the message says that history is leading up to an apocalyptic showdown with the Jews and Christians on one side and the Muslims on the other, and the talk radio/Fox News crowd is eating it up like hotcakes.
One member of this hate speech audience is a retired Army officer I've been acquainted with for some years. Norm (we'll call him) is the kind of Christian conservative who makes an annual production number out of condemning the War on Christmas but who probably hasn't seen the inside of a church since the Cuban Missile Crisis. A couple of Christmases ago, while holding court in one of his favorite watering holes and discussing the war on terror, Norm offered the considered opinion that if we had to slaughter every man, woman and child of the Muslim persuasion to keep America safe, he was sure Jesus Christ would approve. A lot of heads at the bar nodded in agreement.
We can't simply dismiss yahooligans like this because they vote. They get to vote, of course, because they, like the children of some of them there immigrants they don't like, were born here.
The Dogs of Holy War
It's sad to say, but the history of humanity is largely the history of its wars, and the armed conflicts of western civilization more often than not involved clashes of religious ideologies.
The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) that ended Greece's reign as a hegemon pitted a society of Athena's followers against a cult of Ares worshipers. The Crusades waged by Christian Europe against Muslims, pagans, Orthodox Christians, Gnostics, Shamanists, Buddhists, Hussites, political enemies of the pope, etc. drug on for centuries. Subsequent conflicts among the great nations of Europe involved Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and Orthodox Christians crashing into each other and/or persecuting Jews and/or buggering heathens in the third world. This led to World Wars I and II, and then the Cold War, which was an ideological struggle between the Judeo/Christian west and the Evil Empire of Godless Communists complete with proxy wars that featured more buggering of third world heathens.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution insisted on separation of church and state for a number of reasons. Premier among them was to prevent a self-proclaimed unitary executive from exploiting misplaced religious fervor to wage unnecessary and ill-advised wars. That the leading candidates of what has become America's War Party would fall all over each other invoking God and Islamo-fabulism as the pillars of their foreign policy platforms is not unexpected, but it is disheartening to watch the country Abraham Lincoln called mankind's "last best hope" devolve into a postmodern incarnation of the old world at its worst (Excuse me, great nations coming through…).
If we're not very careful, our politicians will deliver unto us a brave new world of war everlasting with victory just around the corner forever and ever, amen. And if you really think more theo-conservative doctrine can solve our present cornucopia of foreign policy fiascos, please consider this: mankind has been praying for peace for as long as it has been fighting wars, which is about as long as there has been a mankind.
All that praying for peace hasn't done a fat lot of good, has it?
#
Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Iran Aweigh (Again)
The story of the incident between U.S. and Iranian naval forces in the Strait of Hormuz Monday morning may tell us more about the nature of today's news reporting than about the prospects for war and peace in the Middle East.
Veteran military reporter Robert Burns's account of the incident for the Associated Press opened with a bang:
The lead paragraph by Andrew Grey of Reuters sounded eerily similar:
Even more alarming was the top of the article in The Australian:
A Confederacy of Dissemblers
What we know of the incident so far comes from official and mostly unnamed sources who were nowhere in the vicinity of the Strait, and comes filtered through journalists who often don't seem to know what they're talking about. Much of the reportage is also conspicuously contradictory.
The Australian's statement that "U.S. forces were 'literally' on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats" and "had moved to man their guns when the Iranians turned and sped away" is a prime example of every flaw in the narrative. If U.S. forces were just then moving to man their guns as the Iranians turned and sped away, they were closer to the verge of sleep than of firing on anybody. Those guns, almost certainly 50 caliber machine guns placed on the American ships' weather decks, were either manned when the ships set condition Zebra prior to entering the Strait or those skippers will be handing their command pins over to the three-star in command of Fifth Fleet by the end of next week. It's disheartening but not unexpected that the reporter didn't know that, that some source in the Navy told him the story that way, and that despite the deliberate artificial tension in the narrative, nobody in the scenario was on the verge of firing on anybody else: literally, figuratively or conceivably.
That consideration certainly should have crossed the mind of an experienced hand like Robert Burns, but his comment that the Iranians "fled as American commanders were preparing to open fire" was on the same order of disingenuousness. Burns attributed the remark to Vice Admiral Kevin J. Cosgriff, the Fifth Fleet commander, but he doesn't quote Cosgriff directly, which gives him a license to (ahem) dramatize a bit. Speaking of drama, Burns's term "Iranian fleet" is hardly anything anyone with the least experience of naval matters would use to describe what the Iranians actually sent into the Strait, which was a squadron of five speedboats.
And when I say "speedboat," folks, I'm not talking about a small frigate, or even something the size of PT 109. I'm talking about the kind of boat you see on American lakes every summer pulling sunburned water skiers around. These Iranian boats are typically armed with a single high caliber machine gun, which is, to put it placidly, a darn sight less weaponry than U.S. combatant ships carry. It sounds to me like the "white box-like objects" the speedboats dropped into the water were Little Rascals technology simulations of mines, painted a bright color for the express purpose of ensuring the Americans saw them and steered around them.
Scary, Huh Kids?
The Australian quotes an unnamed "Pentagon official" as saying that "It is the most serious provocation of this sort that we’ve seen yet." The paper recounts the claim of a "Pentagon spokesman" that the Iranian boats were operating at "distances and speeds that showed reckless and dangerous intent – reckless, dangerous and potentially hostile intent". The Australian identified the spokesman as one Bryan Whitman, but it didn't mention what Bryan Whitman does in the Pentagon or how he came to be a spokesman for it.
It happens that one Bryan Whitman is the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, which makes him part of the Office of Strategic Influence (AKA Ministry of Truth) apparatus that Donald Rumsfeld established to support his wars through misinformation, disinformation, and psychological operations. One of Whitman's most notable contributions to the cause was his attempted whitewashing of the Pentagon's Jessica Lynch hoax.
And from whom are we getting the cockamamie account of the U.S. ships preparing to fire just as the Iranians turned and high tailed it? Reuters' Andrew Gray pretty much coughed up a confession: "Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said after the Iranian threats a U.S. captain was in the process of ordering sailors to open fire when the Iranian boats moved away."
Pentagon officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Jesus, Larry and Curly. How long will the big media allow these yahooligans to use it as a propaganda venue?
According to Burns, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini played down the incident, calling it, "…something normal that takes place every now and then for each party." And Defense Secretary Robert Gates allowed as how there had been two or three similar incidents—"maybe not quite as dramatic"—over the past year, but he offered no details.
So who knows what exactly happened in the Strait Monday morning? I sure don't, but I'll tell you something I do know. U.S. and Iranian naval units have been playing patty cake in the Strait and the Persian Gulf with each other since the tanker wars of the 1980s. I can't count offhand how many times I ran the Strait of Hormuz scenario during the 90s, in tabletop experiments, computer simulations, live play exercises and real world operations. The skippers and crews of the American warships had to have been prepared for what they saw on Monday. Granted, when it's really you transiting the real Straits with five real Iranian speedboats making a run at you, that's a bona fide pucker patrol; and it appears that the U.S. crews conducted every step of the operation by the letter.
Still, back in my day, we called that sort of thing "free training." After all the helmets and fire hoses were put away, we reckoned we'd had a jolly old time, trading love taps with gloves and headgear on, and suspected that the other guys considered the whole thing to be good clean fun too.
So like Bhutto's assassination, the Turks bombing of the Kurds, and other recent fiascos, Monday's incident in the Strait of Hormuz was worth noting as yet another example of how far American policy has run adrift under the Bush administration's stewardship.
But it was nothing to take to your backyard fallout shelter over.
#
Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Veteran military reporter Robert Burns's account of the incident for the Associated Press opened with a bang:
An Iranian fleet of boats charged at and threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy passing near Iranian waters and then fled as American commanders were preparing to open fire.
The lead paragraph by Andrew Grey of Reuters sounded eerily similar:
Iranian boats aggressively approached three U.S. Naval ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a main shipping route for Gulf oil, at the weekend and threatened that the ships would explode, U.S. officials said on Monday.
Even more alarming was the top of the article in The Australian:
A Pentagon official said that US forces were "literally" on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats as they passed through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, and had moved to man their guns when the Iranians turned and sped away.
A Confederacy of Dissemblers
What we know of the incident so far comes from official and mostly unnamed sources who were nowhere in the vicinity of the Strait, and comes filtered through journalists who often don't seem to know what they're talking about. Much of the reportage is also conspicuously contradictory.
The Australian's statement that "U.S. forces were 'literally' on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats" and "had moved to man their guns when the Iranians turned and sped away" is a prime example of every flaw in the narrative. If U.S. forces were just then moving to man their guns as the Iranians turned and sped away, they were closer to the verge of sleep than of firing on anybody. Those guns, almost certainly 50 caliber machine guns placed on the American ships' weather decks, were either manned when the ships set condition Zebra prior to entering the Strait or those skippers will be handing their command pins over to the three-star in command of Fifth Fleet by the end of next week. It's disheartening but not unexpected that the reporter didn't know that, that some source in the Navy told him the story that way, and that despite the deliberate artificial tension in the narrative, nobody in the scenario was on the verge of firing on anybody else: literally, figuratively or conceivably.
That consideration certainly should have crossed the mind of an experienced hand like Robert Burns, but his comment that the Iranians "fled as American commanders were preparing to open fire" was on the same order of disingenuousness. Burns attributed the remark to Vice Admiral Kevin J. Cosgriff, the Fifth Fleet commander, but he doesn't quote Cosgriff directly, which gives him a license to (ahem) dramatize a bit. Speaking of drama, Burns's term "Iranian fleet" is hardly anything anyone with the least experience of naval matters would use to describe what the Iranians actually sent into the Strait, which was a squadron of five speedboats.
And when I say "speedboat," folks, I'm not talking about a small frigate, or even something the size of PT 109. I'm talking about the kind of boat you see on American lakes every summer pulling sunburned water skiers around. These Iranian boats are typically armed with a single high caliber machine gun, which is, to put it placidly, a darn sight less weaponry than U.S. combatant ships carry. It sounds to me like the "white box-like objects" the speedboats dropped into the water were Little Rascals technology simulations of mines, painted a bright color for the express purpose of ensuring the Americans saw them and steered around them.
Scary, Huh Kids?
The Australian quotes an unnamed "Pentagon official" as saying that "It is the most serious provocation of this sort that we’ve seen yet." The paper recounts the claim of a "Pentagon spokesman" that the Iranian boats were operating at "distances and speeds that showed reckless and dangerous intent – reckless, dangerous and potentially hostile intent". The Australian identified the spokesman as one Bryan Whitman, but it didn't mention what Bryan Whitman does in the Pentagon or how he came to be a spokesman for it.
It happens that one Bryan Whitman is the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, which makes him part of the Office of Strategic Influence (AKA Ministry of Truth) apparatus that Donald Rumsfeld established to support his wars through misinformation, disinformation, and psychological operations. One of Whitman's most notable contributions to the cause was his attempted whitewashing of the Pentagon's Jessica Lynch hoax.
And from whom are we getting the cockamamie account of the U.S. ships preparing to fire just as the Iranians turned and high tailed it? Reuters' Andrew Gray pretty much coughed up a confession: "Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said after the Iranian threats a U.S. captain was in the process of ordering sailors to open fire when the Iranian boats moved away."
Pentagon officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Jesus, Larry and Curly. How long will the big media allow these yahooligans to use it as a propaganda venue?
According to Burns, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini played down the incident, calling it, "…something normal that takes place every now and then for each party." And Defense Secretary Robert Gates allowed as how there had been two or three similar incidents—"maybe not quite as dramatic"—over the past year, but he offered no details.
So who knows what exactly happened in the Strait Monday morning? I sure don't, but I'll tell you something I do know. U.S. and Iranian naval units have been playing patty cake in the Strait and the Persian Gulf with each other since the tanker wars of the 1980s. I can't count offhand how many times I ran the Strait of Hormuz scenario during the 90s, in tabletop experiments, computer simulations, live play exercises and real world operations. The skippers and crews of the American warships had to have been prepared for what they saw on Monday. Granted, when it's really you transiting the real Straits with five real Iranian speedboats making a run at you, that's a bona fide pucker patrol; and it appears that the U.S. crews conducted every step of the operation by the letter.
Still, back in my day, we called that sort of thing "free training." After all the helmets and fire hoses were put away, we reckoned we'd had a jolly old time, trading love taps with gloves and headgear on, and suspected that the other guys considered the whole thing to be good clean fun too.
So like Bhutto's assassination, the Turks bombing of the Kurds, and other recent fiascos, Monday's incident in the Strait of Hormuz was worth noting as yet another example of how far American policy has run adrift under the Bush administration's stewardship.
But it was nothing to take to your backyard fallout shelter over.
#
Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
" A profane and hilarious parody of the post–Cold War navy…Populated by outrageous characters and fueled with pompous outrage, Huber’s irreverent broadside will pummel the funny bone of anyone who’s served." -- Publishers Weekly
"A witty, wacky, wildly outrageous novel that skewers just about anything you’d care to name…a remarkably accomplished book, striking just the right balance between ridicule and insight." -- Booklist
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Don't Cry for Me, Pakistanis
To hear media luminaries like MSNBC's Chris Matthews tell it last week, Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan in October was the second coming of Eva Peron, and her assassination was the second slaying of Archduke Ferdinand.
Mika Brzezinski makes gag noise when her producers make her do stories about the childish antics of girl celebrities like Paris Hilton, but she gushed over the Bhutto news when it broke on Thursday like it was the biggest story since Suzy Homemaker stuck her head in her Easy-Bake Oven. When Mika read the text from Bhutto's last speech she practically cried, especially when she got to the part about how brave Bhutto confessed she was being because she came back to her country from exile to help make all Pakistanis free, and knew full well she was putting her own life at great risk for the sake of her faithful followers, and don't cry for her, Argentina, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I normally think quite highly of Mika. Let's hope she just caught a 48-hour bug or something, and gets better soon.
Matthews—good gravy, Matthews started in about how Bhutto was a great democratic leader, and how the world needs great democratic leaders because it doesn't have enough great democratic leaders, and what a tragic loss it is when we lose great democratic leaders like Bhutto, because great democratic leaders like Bhutto are made not born, and it's so hard to make great democratic leaders like Bhutto, and he kept saying that and saying it and saying it until I had to hit the mute button. I thought I was going to be okay until I looked up and saw he was still saying it. I could tell he was still saying it because I could read his lips from having heard him say it so many times, and I became mesmerized, and I watched and watched and watched him say it and say it and say it, until I got so cross eyed that I tawt I taw a putty tat.
Retired U.S. Army General and MSNBC military expert Barry McCaffrey, for a change, provided a delightful breath of fresh air when he reminding everybody that the great democratic leader Benazir Bhutto had been forced into "self-imposed" exile because she and her old man supposedly got caught sticking their hands in the Pakistani national till too many times. McCaffrey didn't go as far as saying that the Bhuttos, as a power couple, made the Clintons look like Ma and Pa Kettle, but you got the idea.
But it was David Shuster who, as he often does, supplied MSNBC's redeeming moment. After listening to Joe Scarboro wax wacky about how Bhutto's death wasn't a reflection on Bush's foreign policy because Bush hadn't done anything wrong in Pakistan or, really, even in Afghanistan for that matter, if your studied the situation a bunch and thought about it a whole lot, Shuster looked at Joe like he'd grown a horn in the middle of his forehead, and said something to the effect of, "Dude, where can I buy a bag of the weed you've been smoking?"
Sorry if it seems like I'm singling out MSNBC, but they have all the anchor and weather girls I have a crush on, so they're news channel I watch the most. I hear, though, that the Fox News set, which normally resembles the bridge of a Klingon battle cruiser anyway, looked like the crew had gone to general quarters and were bracing for impact from a Pakistani photon torpedo.
I finally got sick of television and flipped on the local NPR station, just in time to listen to umpteen yahooligans having the umptieth discussion I'd heard on how maybe Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had Bhutto killed, or maybe it was al Qaeda, or maybe the Taliban, or maybe the CIA, or maybe what's left of the old KGB. Who knew? Certainly not the people who were talking about it on NPR and all the other news outlets. Some of the people talking about it flat out admitted that neither they nor anyone else talking about it knew what the hell they were talking about. In fact, some confessed, it was irresponsible to even be talking about it in the media at all, but that's what they were all getting paid to talk about, so they all kept talking about it.
And how about those zany presidential candidates? A bunch of them made haste to stand in front of Iowa snow drifts for the cameras and talk about how they'd know how to handle the Pakistan security situation right now, by golly, because of their experience and how well they personally know all the players involved. John Edwards grabbed the brass ring when he could brag that Musharraf had actually called him on the phone. (How's that for access, Joe Biden? Nyeh, nyeh.) You'd think Edwards and the rest of these characters might wonder just if a bit if coming across like they're lipstick buddies with Musharraf is really the best way to impress people with their foreign policy savvy right now.
In all, the media's hysteria over the Bhutto assassination has been their most embarrassing display of indefensible hype since the Jerry Lewis-class mourn-a-thon they threw when Ronald Reagan died. How could any of these "savvy" news types have been surprised? This wasn't the first time someone has tried to kill Bhutto lately, and political assassination is something of a Pakistani tradition. In Bhutto's case, it's a family tradition; her father and two of her brothers were knocked off for political purposes.
The underlying justification for all the neck deep hoopla, of course, is the notion that Bhutto's assassination might set off World War III the way Archduke Ferdinand's death sparked World War I, which is tommyrot. World War I was already packed and ready to leave the station. If the Ferdinand incident hadn't caused hostilities to erupt, something else would have shortly. Hell, at that point in history, Europe would have gone to war over a butterfly beating its wings in the wrong part of Africa.
Likewise, World War III will either happen or it won't independently of Bhutto's demise; things like Bhutto's demise happen all the time in that part of the world. So there were riots in the streets in Pakistan. Big whoop. That puts Bhutto's assassination on par with a soccer match.
I'm always trying to come up with a pithy, cogent way to frame the true nature of the threat we face from the Middle East, and always falling short, but let me try this out on you:
When I think how to describe what kind of danger Pakistan poses, the first thing that comes to mind is a tale from a military journalist pal who spent a day in a Pakistani airport, waiting for her airplane to show up and watching the janitor work. The janitor had a broom that he held by string instead of a handle. Every hour, he walked through the terminal, swatting at mounds of dirt, cigarette butts, chicken droppings and other inscrutable filth, trying as best he could to push it all under the chairs the passengers sat in while waiting for their boarding calls. You know who came behind the janitor and cleaned under the chairs? Nobody.
In that context, I also have trouble getting riled up about the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on a Pakistani nuclear weapon. The most complicated thing terrorists have done to date is to fly a few airplanes into buildings. I won't tell you doing that is as easy as falling off a rolling log, but it's not quite so hard as staying up one. Stealing a nuke and hiding it, and sneaking it halfway across the world, and making it blow up in a major American city, now that's real rocket science. If terrorists shoplift a Pakistani nuke, the people they're most likely to blow up with it are themselves. And I've heard whispers that in some circles, experts wonder if even Pakistan's rocket scientists could get one of their piece of junk nukes to cook off if they wanted it to.
Keep that in mind if you start hearing the Bush leaguers insist that Iran is still a bigger threat to us than Pakistan is, and consider that no one on earth can make Iran's nukes blow up because they don't exist.
Then start guessing which Middle East country Pavlov's Dogs of War will try to make you scared incontinent of next.
Maybe we should start a pool.
#
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Mika Brzezinski makes gag noise when her producers make her do stories about the childish antics of girl celebrities like Paris Hilton, but she gushed over the Bhutto news when it broke on Thursday like it was the biggest story since Suzy Homemaker stuck her head in her Easy-Bake Oven. When Mika read the text from Bhutto's last speech she practically cried, especially when she got to the part about how brave Bhutto confessed she was being because she came back to her country from exile to help make all Pakistanis free, and knew full well she was putting her own life at great risk for the sake of her faithful followers, and don't cry for her, Argentina, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I normally think quite highly of Mika. Let's hope she just caught a 48-hour bug or something, and gets better soon.
Matthews—good gravy, Matthews started in about how Bhutto was a great democratic leader, and how the world needs great democratic leaders because it doesn't have enough great democratic leaders, and what a tragic loss it is when we lose great democratic leaders like Bhutto, because great democratic leaders like Bhutto are made not born, and it's so hard to make great democratic leaders like Bhutto, and he kept saying that and saying it and saying it until I had to hit the mute button. I thought I was going to be okay until I looked up and saw he was still saying it. I could tell he was still saying it because I could read his lips from having heard him say it so many times, and I became mesmerized, and I watched and watched and watched him say it and say it and say it, until I got so cross eyed that I tawt I taw a putty tat.
Retired U.S. Army General and MSNBC military expert Barry McCaffrey, for a change, provided a delightful breath of fresh air when he reminding everybody that the great democratic leader Benazir Bhutto had been forced into "self-imposed" exile because she and her old man supposedly got caught sticking their hands in the Pakistani national till too many times. McCaffrey didn't go as far as saying that the Bhuttos, as a power couple, made the Clintons look like Ma and Pa Kettle, but you got the idea.
But it was David Shuster who, as he often does, supplied MSNBC's redeeming moment. After listening to Joe Scarboro wax wacky about how Bhutto's death wasn't a reflection on Bush's foreign policy because Bush hadn't done anything wrong in Pakistan or, really, even in Afghanistan for that matter, if your studied the situation a bunch and thought about it a whole lot, Shuster looked at Joe like he'd grown a horn in the middle of his forehead, and said something to the effect of, "Dude, where can I buy a bag of the weed you've been smoking?"
Sorry if it seems like I'm singling out MSNBC, but they have all the anchor and weather girls I have a crush on, so they're news channel I watch the most. I hear, though, that the Fox News set, which normally resembles the bridge of a Klingon battle cruiser anyway, looked like the crew had gone to general quarters and were bracing for impact from a Pakistani photon torpedo.
I finally got sick of television and flipped on the local NPR station, just in time to listen to umpteen yahooligans having the umptieth discussion I'd heard on how maybe Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had Bhutto killed, or maybe it was al Qaeda, or maybe the Taliban, or maybe the CIA, or maybe what's left of the old KGB. Who knew? Certainly not the people who were talking about it on NPR and all the other news outlets. Some of the people talking about it flat out admitted that neither they nor anyone else talking about it knew what the hell they were talking about. In fact, some confessed, it was irresponsible to even be talking about it in the media at all, but that's what they were all getting paid to talk about, so they all kept talking about it.
And how about those zany presidential candidates? A bunch of them made haste to stand in front of Iowa snow drifts for the cameras and talk about how they'd know how to handle the Pakistan security situation right now, by golly, because of their experience and how well they personally know all the players involved. John Edwards grabbed the brass ring when he could brag that Musharraf had actually called him on the phone. (How's that for access, Joe Biden? Nyeh, nyeh.) You'd think Edwards and the rest of these characters might wonder just if a bit if coming across like they're lipstick buddies with Musharraf is really the best way to impress people with their foreign policy savvy right now.
In all, the media's hysteria over the Bhutto assassination has been their most embarrassing display of indefensible hype since the Jerry Lewis-class mourn-a-thon they threw when Ronald Reagan died. How could any of these "savvy" news types have been surprised? This wasn't the first time someone has tried to kill Bhutto lately, and political assassination is something of a Pakistani tradition. In Bhutto's case, it's a family tradition; her father and two of her brothers were knocked off for political purposes.
The underlying justification for all the neck deep hoopla, of course, is the notion that Bhutto's assassination might set off World War III the way Archduke Ferdinand's death sparked World War I, which is tommyrot. World War I was already packed and ready to leave the station. If the Ferdinand incident hadn't caused hostilities to erupt, something else would have shortly. Hell, at that point in history, Europe would have gone to war over a butterfly beating its wings in the wrong part of Africa.
Likewise, World War III will either happen or it won't independently of Bhutto's demise; things like Bhutto's demise happen all the time in that part of the world. So there were riots in the streets in Pakistan. Big whoop. That puts Bhutto's assassination on par with a soccer match.
I'm always trying to come up with a pithy, cogent way to frame the true nature of the threat we face from the Middle East, and always falling short, but let me try this out on you:
When I think how to describe what kind of danger Pakistan poses, the first thing that comes to mind is a tale from a military journalist pal who spent a day in a Pakistani airport, waiting for her airplane to show up and watching the janitor work. The janitor had a broom that he held by string instead of a handle. Every hour, he walked through the terminal, swatting at mounds of dirt, cigarette butts, chicken droppings and other inscrutable filth, trying as best he could to push it all under the chairs the passengers sat in while waiting for their boarding calls. You know who came behind the janitor and cleaned under the chairs? Nobody.
In that context, I also have trouble getting riled up about the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on a Pakistani nuclear weapon. The most complicated thing terrorists have done to date is to fly a few airplanes into buildings. I won't tell you doing that is as easy as falling off a rolling log, but it's not quite so hard as staying up one. Stealing a nuke and hiding it, and sneaking it halfway across the world, and making it blow up in a major American city, now that's real rocket science. If terrorists shoplift a Pakistani nuke, the people they're most likely to blow up with it are themselves. And I've heard whispers that in some circles, experts wonder if even Pakistan's rocket scientists could get one of their piece of junk nukes to cook off if they wanted it to.
Keep that in mind if you start hearing the Bush leaguers insist that Iran is still a bigger threat to us than Pakistan is, and consider that no one on earth can make Iran's nukes blow up because they don't exist.
Then start guessing which Middle East country Pavlov's Dogs of War will try to make you scared incontinent of next.
Maybe we should start a pool.
#
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
The Iran Narrative, Continued…
In the last episode of the Bush administration's Iran opera, U.S. intelligence revealed that Iran does not, as previously believed, have a nuclear weapons program. Our spies couched this information in terms that strongly infer Iran had a nuclear weapons program at one time, but one has to wonder how much that was influenced by the gang in Dick Cheney's Iranian Directorate.
Some skeptics, including this one, noted that if Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in fall of 2003, and the Russians only began building Iran's first nuclear reactor in fall of 2002, Iran's nuclear weapons program, if they had one at all, must have been the sort of thing Spanky and Alfalfa could have slapped together in Darla's back yard one afternoon and torn down the next morning.
Other doubters observed that Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other administration luminaries are attempting to cover up the fact that they continued to scare the world with boo noise about Iran's nuclear weapons program long after they knew it did not exist.
It is, no doubt, with these criticisms in mind that administration echo chamberlains have shifted the Iran narrative back to its alternate plot line.
Meanwhile, Back at the Other Fabrication…
On Sunday, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker said that Iran's government has decided "at the most senior levels" to pull in the reins on Shiite militias operating in Iraq. Crocker further stated that it would be "a good beginning" for a fourth round of talks between him and his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad if Tehran should "choose to corroborate it in a direct fashion."
That was typical of the "when did you stop beating your wife?" kinds of accusations the Bush leaguers have leveled since it began making Iran the top scapegoat for all things wrong with Iraq around January 2007, about the time it unveiled the surge strategy.
Since February 2007, when they first began providing "evidence" of Iran's culpability in attacks on American G.I.s in Iraq, the administration's front row pieces in the Departments of State and Defense have yet to provide any proof more definitive than the testimony of a U.S. Army weapons expert who says some components of explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) that have killed and maimed U.S. troops either came from Iran or RadioShack.
I, for one, don't call that proof of anything.
Fear and Loathing in November
One of Mr. Bush's primary goals is to be able to say "We were winning in Iraq when I turned the watch over." That terms like "win" and "lose" long ago lost any cogent application to the Iraq conflict makes little difference to a presidency noteworthy for framing all matters great and small in terms of binary banalities. In that context, it doesn't really matter whether America "wins" anything; it matters that Mr. Bush wins, and to a lesser extent that the GOP and the neoconservative movement win as well. They don't need genuine success. An illusory victory will suffice, and as hapless as the administration and its corrupt allies have proven themselves to be at all other aspects of wielding great power, they are unsurpassed in human history at violating the borders between perception and reality.
So it is that the "reduced levels of violence" in Iraq have diminished the war as an election issue—for now, anyway. Never mind that tactical and operational victories mean nothing without corresponding strategic and political results. Never mind that even Fred Kagan, chief architect of the surge, once admitted that that military operations which do not lead to accomplishment of a conflict's political objectives are indistinguishable from "organized but senseless violence." The "things in Iraq have improved" mantra has been established, and the popular media have given it giraffe legs.
But this improvement, as engineered by Bush's "main man" David Petraeus, has been purchased at horrifying levels of risk. Iraq's internal conflict still has more sides than the Pentagon, and through a series of flying trapeze maneuvers like the "Awakening" program that has empowered Sunni groups formerly hostile to U.S. forces and still unallied with the central government, Petraeus has ensured that every one of those sides is armed to the armpits.
What we're seeing now is not so much a downturn or lull as an operational pause. Factions rearm and regroup as millions of refugees return to smoldering hotspots like Baghdad. The once peaceful Kurdish area is becoming the next front in what threatens to become a wider regional conflict. And oh yeah: the surge is out of poop. The Pentagon has to start redeploying units without sending replacements because there's no grain left in the silo, and we can't bump up troop levels again without tapping into the seed corn.
Iraq is a replenished powder keg waiting for another Archduke Ferdinand style catalyst like last year's golden dome shrine incident to set it off again, and the country is rife with such potential triggers.
The trick for the administration, then, is to stiff-arm that eventuality until at least November. But if things go bang while Bush still occupies the bunker, it will be wonderfully convenient to have Iran to blame things on, as well as al Qaeda, the Democrats, the liberal media, activist judges, Hollywood, the ACLU, Catholics who voted for John Kerry, MTV, YouTube, stem cells, steroids, hurricanes, fluoridation, Beatles music, etc., etc., etc.
Afterbrow
Speaking of Archduke Ferdinand: the breaking news of the assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto this morning further illustrates how ludicrous the Bush administration's Iran policy is. We don't need to worry that Iran may become the unstable Muslim nation whose nuclear weapons can fall into the hands of terrorists. One of our supposed allies already fills that prescription.
#
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Some skeptics, including this one, noted that if Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in fall of 2003, and the Russians only began building Iran's first nuclear reactor in fall of 2002, Iran's nuclear weapons program, if they had one at all, must have been the sort of thing Spanky and Alfalfa could have slapped together in Darla's back yard one afternoon and torn down the next morning.
Other doubters observed that Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other administration luminaries are attempting to cover up the fact that they continued to scare the world with boo noise about Iran's nuclear weapons program long after they knew it did not exist.
It is, no doubt, with these criticisms in mind that administration echo chamberlains have shifted the Iran narrative back to its alternate plot line.
Meanwhile, Back at the Other Fabrication…
On Sunday, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker said that Iran's government has decided "at the most senior levels" to pull in the reins on Shiite militias operating in Iraq. Crocker further stated that it would be "a good beginning" for a fourth round of talks between him and his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad if Tehran should "choose to corroborate it in a direct fashion."
That was typical of the "when did you stop beating your wife?" kinds of accusations the Bush leaguers have leveled since it began making Iran the top scapegoat for all things wrong with Iraq around January 2007, about the time it unveiled the surge strategy.
Since February 2007, when they first began providing "evidence" of Iran's culpability in attacks on American G.I.s in Iraq, the administration's front row pieces in the Departments of State and Defense have yet to provide any proof more definitive than the testimony of a U.S. Army weapons expert who says some components of explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) that have killed and maimed U.S. troops either came from Iran or RadioShack.
I, for one, don't call that proof of anything.
Fear and Loathing in November
One of Mr. Bush's primary goals is to be able to say "We were winning in Iraq when I turned the watch over." That terms like "win" and "lose" long ago lost any cogent application to the Iraq conflict makes little difference to a presidency noteworthy for framing all matters great and small in terms of binary banalities. In that context, it doesn't really matter whether America "wins" anything; it matters that Mr. Bush wins, and to a lesser extent that the GOP and the neoconservative movement win as well. They don't need genuine success. An illusory victory will suffice, and as hapless as the administration and its corrupt allies have proven themselves to be at all other aspects of wielding great power, they are unsurpassed in human history at violating the borders between perception and reality.
So it is that the "reduced levels of violence" in Iraq have diminished the war as an election issue—for now, anyway. Never mind that tactical and operational victories mean nothing without corresponding strategic and political results. Never mind that even Fred Kagan, chief architect of the surge, once admitted that that military operations which do not lead to accomplishment of a conflict's political objectives are indistinguishable from "organized but senseless violence." The "things in Iraq have improved" mantra has been established, and the popular media have given it giraffe legs.
But this improvement, as engineered by Bush's "main man" David Petraeus, has been purchased at horrifying levels of risk. Iraq's internal conflict still has more sides than the Pentagon, and through a series of flying trapeze maneuvers like the "Awakening" program that has empowered Sunni groups formerly hostile to U.S. forces and still unallied with the central government, Petraeus has ensured that every one of those sides is armed to the armpits.
What we're seeing now is not so much a downturn or lull as an operational pause. Factions rearm and regroup as millions of refugees return to smoldering hotspots like Baghdad. The once peaceful Kurdish area is becoming the next front in what threatens to become a wider regional conflict. And oh yeah: the surge is out of poop. The Pentagon has to start redeploying units without sending replacements because there's no grain left in the silo, and we can't bump up troop levels again without tapping into the seed corn.
Iraq is a replenished powder keg waiting for another Archduke Ferdinand style catalyst like last year's golden dome shrine incident to set it off again, and the country is rife with such potential triggers.
The trick for the administration, then, is to stiff-arm that eventuality until at least November. But if things go bang while Bush still occupies the bunker, it will be wonderfully convenient to have Iran to blame things on, as well as al Qaeda, the Democrats, the liberal media, activist judges, Hollywood, the ACLU, Catholics who voted for John Kerry, MTV, YouTube, stem cells, steroids, hurricanes, fluoridation, Beatles music, etc., etc., etc.
Afterbrow
Speaking of Archduke Ferdinand: the breaking news of the assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto this morning further illustrates how ludicrous the Bush administration's Iran policy is. We don't need to worry that Iran may become the unstable Muslim nation whose nuclear weapons can fall into the hands of terrorists. One of our supposed allies already fills that prescription.
#
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Keystone Kondi's Kurdish Kaper
Condoleezza Rice, Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science and 66th United States Secretary of State, arrived unannounced in the oil rich Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Tuesday, just after Turkey's attacks on Kurdish targets in northern Iraq, to do what she does best: step into a bad situation and make it worse.
Keystone Kop-out
Kurdish regional President Massud Barzani refused to meet with her because the U.S. had assisted the Turks. Regional Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani (Massud's nephew) said, "It is unacceptable that the United States, in charge of monitoring our airspace, authorized Turkey to bomb our villages."
Pentagon officials, preferring more passive language to describe America's role in the strikes, said that the U.S. had "deconflicted" the airspace over northern Iraq for the Turks. That sounds eerily similar to the way Dick Cheney deconflicted the airspace over Lebanon for Israel two summers ago.
An unnamed "American military officer" said that, “Nothing the Turks have done to date should be considered a surprise,” and that while "we've shared information" with the Turks, "the decision to pursue military options is theirs.” The New York Times granted the quoted officer anonymity because he was "discussing actions of a sovereign ally," which is the NYT's lamest excuse to date for allowing a faceless administration official to use it as a propaganda platform.
Nabi Sensoy, Turkey's ambassador to the U.S., said the air strikes against the Kurds were the result of real-time, actionable intelligence provided by the Americans.
Real-time actionable intelligence isn't something you casually "share" with an allied chum over cocktails at the embassy. It's something your command and control people aggressively monitor and pass to your ally's forces as they execute an operation. That doesn’t happen spontaneously, either; it requires significant prior planning. Further, you don't "deconflict" an ally's strike aircraft into your controlled airspace unless you know just what in the wide world of sports they're up to.
And it looks like the order to play along with the Turkish strikes came from the top of the U.S. chain of command. Ambassador Sensoy claimed the strikes and follow on ground incursion operations were "tangible results" of talks in Washington last month between Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Mr. Bush, during which Mr. Bush promised the U.S. would do everything it could to help Turkey counter the threat presented by the Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK.
Kondi Inkognizance
While everyone knows the strikes on the PKK were a U.S. certified operation, Condi had the bald temerity to pretend otherwise and caution Turkey that, “No one should do anything that threatens to destabilize the north.”
But the Turks aren't interested in pretense. Ambassador Sensoy said, "This is not a once and for all operation… The ultimate target is the elimination of the PKK operation." Prime Minister Erdogan, speaking from Turkey's capital of Ankara, seconded that sentiment with: “From now on, our security forces will continue to do whatever is necessary.”
It sounds like Condi's got a lot more cautioning to do. She'll also have to smooth some ruffled feathers, something she's not the best choice for doing since she sold Lebanon down the river during the 2006 Israeli/Hezbollah conflict.
We knew about the Turkish ops, and gave them the go ahead, but, apparently, we didn't tell our pals in the Iraqi government about it.
Iraqi officials condemned the Turkish raids, saying they added "insult to injury" and calling them "a cruel attack to Iraqi sovereignty."
Our sovereign ally Turkey said it had a right to strike the PKK in northern Iraq because its presence there threatens Turkey's sovereignty.
Poor Condi. Torn between two sovereigns. At least she had the good sense not to point out that nothing constitutes a crueler attack on a nation's sovereignty than occupying it with an armed force, and that nothing threatens a nation's sovereignty more than having to ask America's permission to protect its sovereignty.
She did, however, manage to insult Kirkuk's municipal officials before she left, lecturing them on how grateful they should be for America's help. "I look forward to talk with you about how the PRTs (provincial reconstruction teams) are helping to bring prosperity, creating jobs and bringing political reconciliation," she told them.
Great. Caesar's. Ghost.
I’m not sure what stuns me more: that our Secretary of State actually said that to a hostile audience, or that she might actually have thought saying it was a world-class piece of international diplomacy. How much do we have to pay Doctor Ditz to resign, jump on her broom, and go back to teaching political science at Stanford?
Komik Karma Koda
Here's one last theater of the absurd wrinkle in the U.S./Iraq/Turkey relations saga.
Ambassador Sensoy says that the Unites States has promised—presumably during the meeting between Bush and Prime Minister Erdogan—to investigate charges that U.S. weapons have fallen into the hands of the PKK.
Would it not be a kolossal kick in the kranium to discover the PKK is killing Kurds with some of the 190,000 Kalishnikov rifles and pistols U.S. military commander in Iraq David Petraeus lost track of in 2004 and '05 when he was handing them out like Hershey bars to Iraqi security force trainees?
I'd love to hear what Condi would have to say about that. Something klever, no doubt.
#
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Keystone Kop-out
Kurdish regional President Massud Barzani refused to meet with her because the U.S. had assisted the Turks. Regional Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani (Massud's nephew) said, "It is unacceptable that the United States, in charge of monitoring our airspace, authorized Turkey to bomb our villages."
Pentagon officials, preferring more passive language to describe America's role in the strikes, said that the U.S. had "deconflicted" the airspace over northern Iraq for the Turks. That sounds eerily similar to the way Dick Cheney deconflicted the airspace over Lebanon for Israel two summers ago.
An unnamed "American military officer" said that, “Nothing the Turks have done to date should be considered a surprise,” and that while "we've shared information" with the Turks, "the decision to pursue military options is theirs.” The New York Times granted the quoted officer anonymity because he was "discussing actions of a sovereign ally," which is the NYT's lamest excuse to date for allowing a faceless administration official to use it as a propaganda platform.
Nabi Sensoy, Turkey's ambassador to the U.S., said the air strikes against the Kurds were the result of real-time, actionable intelligence provided by the Americans.
Real-time actionable intelligence isn't something you casually "share" with an allied chum over cocktails at the embassy. It's something your command and control people aggressively monitor and pass to your ally's forces as they execute an operation. That doesn’t happen spontaneously, either; it requires significant prior planning. Further, you don't "deconflict" an ally's strike aircraft into your controlled airspace unless you know just what in the wide world of sports they're up to.
And it looks like the order to play along with the Turkish strikes came from the top of the U.S. chain of command. Ambassador Sensoy claimed the strikes and follow on ground incursion operations were "tangible results" of talks in Washington last month between Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Mr. Bush, during which Mr. Bush promised the U.S. would do everything it could to help Turkey counter the threat presented by the Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK.
Kondi Inkognizance
While everyone knows the strikes on the PKK were a U.S. certified operation, Condi had the bald temerity to pretend otherwise and caution Turkey that, “No one should do anything that threatens to destabilize the north.”
But the Turks aren't interested in pretense. Ambassador Sensoy said, "This is not a once and for all operation… The ultimate target is the elimination of the PKK operation." Prime Minister Erdogan, speaking from Turkey's capital of Ankara, seconded that sentiment with: “From now on, our security forces will continue to do whatever is necessary.”
It sounds like Condi's got a lot more cautioning to do. She'll also have to smooth some ruffled feathers, something she's not the best choice for doing since she sold Lebanon down the river during the 2006 Israeli/Hezbollah conflict.
We knew about the Turkish ops, and gave them the go ahead, but, apparently, we didn't tell our pals in the Iraqi government about it.
Iraqi officials condemned the Turkish raids, saying they added "insult to injury" and calling them "a cruel attack to Iraqi sovereignty."
Our sovereign ally Turkey said it had a right to strike the PKK in northern Iraq because its presence there threatens Turkey's sovereignty.
Poor Condi. Torn between two sovereigns. At least she had the good sense not to point out that nothing constitutes a crueler attack on a nation's sovereignty than occupying it with an armed force, and that nothing threatens a nation's sovereignty more than having to ask America's permission to protect its sovereignty.
She did, however, manage to insult Kirkuk's municipal officials before she left, lecturing them on how grateful they should be for America's help. "I look forward to talk with you about how the PRTs (provincial reconstruction teams) are helping to bring prosperity, creating jobs and bringing political reconciliation," she told them.
Great. Caesar's. Ghost.
I’m not sure what stuns me more: that our Secretary of State actually said that to a hostile audience, or that she might actually have thought saying it was a world-class piece of international diplomacy. How much do we have to pay Doctor Ditz to resign, jump on her broom, and go back to teaching political science at Stanford?
Komik Karma Koda
Here's one last theater of the absurd wrinkle in the U.S./Iraq/Turkey relations saga.
Ambassador Sensoy says that the Unites States has promised—presumably during the meeting between Bush and Prime Minister Erdogan—to investigate charges that U.S. weapons have fallen into the hands of the PKK.
Would it not be a kolossal kick in the kranium to discover the PKK is killing Kurds with some of the 190,000 Kalishnikov rifles and pistols U.S. military commander in Iraq David Petraeus lost track of in 2004 and '05 when he was handing them out like Hershey bars to Iraqi security force trainees?
I'd love to hear what Condi would have to say about that. Something klever, no doubt.
#
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Two Wars, No Hits, Two Errors, One Left
Despite the neoconservative establishment's best efforts at amending history, Mr. Bush will go down as the first U.S. president to lose two wars. Efforts at spinning the recent "military success" in Iraq have met their inevitable collision with ground truth.
On Sunday, Turkey bombed militant Kurdish targets in northern Iraq, following up the air strikes with artillery shelling. “Turkish Armed Forces gave one message to Turkish people and rest of the world,” said General Yasar Buyukanit, commander of the Turkish Army. “It can be winter, snowing or them hiding in caves, but we would ultimately find and hit them.”
Yes, General, you can ultimately find them and hit them if the U.S. tells you where they are and gives you permission to fly into their air space, like it did this time. Giving Turkey permission to attack the Kurds was no doubt cheaper than having Blackwater do it, and it certainly created far fewer legal complications. And it was a darn sight safer to let another country use our intelligence to carry out an offensive action than to take that action ourselves. That way, when our intelligence turns out to be wrong again, it's not our fault that women and children get blown to kingdom come instead of the bad guys we were after because we're not the ones who dropped the bombs.
Neat, huh?
Your Old Kit Baghdad
The oafish U.S. handling of long-standing issues in Kurdish northern Iraq has, in essence, created yet another major front in a war that was already noteworthy for its resemblance to the Whack-a-Mole game so popular at America's favorite pizzeria for children. And it's not as if things are going swimmingly on all the old fronts.
Last month, Iraq's government invited its more than 1.4 million refugees currently in Syria to return home. That presents a huge problem for the occupying American force. According to Colonel William E. Rapp, a senior aide to the commanding general in Iraq David Petraeus, "There is an element of the violence being down because segregation has already happened."
In other words, sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites in places like Baghdad is down because the Sunnis and Shias living in integrated neighborhoods packed their bags and hightailed it out of there. When former Baghdad residents return, they're likely to find someone of the opposite sect living in their old homes (providing that their old homes still exist).
They'll also find a changed security situation.
The hundreds of senior and mid-level members of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army arrested by U.S. forces during the surge have been replaced by boys, some as young as 15. These al-Sadr youth, who terrorize Sunnis and non-cooperative Shiites alike operate with virtual impunity "under the radar" of American forces in the city, disguised as, of all things, themselves. "No one will suspect they are Mahdi Army," says one young militiaman of his comrades, as they patrol the streets on foot and mopeds, dressed in blue jeans and baseball caps. These young militants, intoxicated with their newfound power, have turned Baghdad into a bizarre reincarnation of Al Capone era Chicago. Theft and extortion are rampant. Many young Mahdi soldiers have become ruthless murderers.
The return to Baghdad by refugees—particularly Sunni refugees—will be like an infusion of kerosene on a conflagration already barely under control. What is the U.S. military's proposed solution for avoiding the pending catastrophe?
Iraqis have to ask themselves, ""Do you even want to come back?" offers Colonel Rapp.
Unfortunately for most Iraqi refugees, whether or not they want to come back is a moot point. Syria and other countries neighboring Iraq have recently stepped up efforts to evict them. Imagine that, countries who are tired of uninvited immigrants. This situation has been gestating for a long time, but U.S. high command is completely unready for it, just as it's been unready for every predictable disaster that has occurred since the staged fall of Saddam Hussein's statue.
What will those refugees do? It's a good thing for us they can't swim to Canada and Mexico and slip into America through our porous borders, huh? Think how many of them there terrorists might sneak in with them!
Meanwhile, Back at the Other Fiasco…
From AFP: "The Pentagon confirmed Monday that the US military and its NATO partners were reviewing plans for Afghanistan, rocked by its bloodiest year since 2001 amid a fierce Taliban resurgence."
Afghanistan, once the crown jewel in Mr. Bush's war on terror, is now the bloody ball of fur on the side of the road that nobody wants to look at or touch. President Hamid Karzai's government has no influence outside of the capital city of Kabul; Afghanistan is a world leader in narcotics exports and a sanctuary for terrorists. And to think, the mission was accomplished in Afghanistan well before we even ventured into Iraq.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, sounding more every day like he's just another standard Bush appointee, says the fate of the Afghanistan mission is in the hands of his NATO allies and has asked that a European official be put in charge of coordinating (i.e., taking the fall for) the international presence in Afghanistan.
With all this beautiful ugliness collapsing around his ankles, Mr. Bush continues to make boo noise about Iran. During a Monday speech to the Rotary Club in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Mr. Bush agreed with one of the Rotarians that Iran has a nuclear weapon, even though the recent National Intelligence Estimate says they have neither a nuclear weapon nor a nuclear weapons program. He also stated that Iran is a threat to peace, even though its defense budget is less than one 20th that of the United States, even though it has never started a war, even though during the one war it fought—with Iraq, a war that Saddam Hussein initiated by invading Iran—it was unable to project land or air power significantly beyond its own borders.
On paper, it would be impossible for Iran to win a war against the United States; but keep in mind that Mr. Bush has achieved the impossible twice before. He might still go for the hat trick.
#
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
On Sunday, Turkey bombed militant Kurdish targets in northern Iraq, following up the air strikes with artillery shelling. “Turkish Armed Forces gave one message to Turkish people and rest of the world,” said General Yasar Buyukanit, commander of the Turkish Army. “It can be winter, snowing or them hiding in caves, but we would ultimately find and hit them.”
Yes, General, you can ultimately find them and hit them if the U.S. tells you where they are and gives you permission to fly into their air space, like it did this time. Giving Turkey permission to attack the Kurds was no doubt cheaper than having Blackwater do it, and it certainly created far fewer legal complications. And it was a darn sight safer to let another country use our intelligence to carry out an offensive action than to take that action ourselves. That way, when our intelligence turns out to be wrong again, it's not our fault that women and children get blown to kingdom come instead of the bad guys we were after because we're not the ones who dropped the bombs.
Neat, huh?
Your Old Kit Baghdad
The oafish U.S. handling of long-standing issues in Kurdish northern Iraq has, in essence, created yet another major front in a war that was already noteworthy for its resemblance to the Whack-a-Mole game so popular at America's favorite pizzeria for children. And it's not as if things are going swimmingly on all the old fronts.
Last month, Iraq's government invited its more than 1.4 million refugees currently in Syria to return home. That presents a huge problem for the occupying American force. According to Colonel William E. Rapp, a senior aide to the commanding general in Iraq David Petraeus, "There is an element of the violence being down because segregation has already happened."
In other words, sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites in places like Baghdad is down because the Sunnis and Shias living in integrated neighborhoods packed their bags and hightailed it out of there. When former Baghdad residents return, they're likely to find someone of the opposite sect living in their old homes (providing that their old homes still exist).
They'll also find a changed security situation.
The hundreds of senior and mid-level members of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army arrested by U.S. forces during the surge have been replaced by boys, some as young as 15. These al-Sadr youth, who terrorize Sunnis and non-cooperative Shiites alike operate with virtual impunity "under the radar" of American forces in the city, disguised as, of all things, themselves. "No one will suspect they are Mahdi Army," says one young militiaman of his comrades, as they patrol the streets on foot and mopeds, dressed in blue jeans and baseball caps. These young militants, intoxicated with their newfound power, have turned Baghdad into a bizarre reincarnation of Al Capone era Chicago. Theft and extortion are rampant. Many young Mahdi soldiers have become ruthless murderers.
The return to Baghdad by refugees—particularly Sunni refugees—will be like an infusion of kerosene on a conflagration already barely under control. What is the U.S. military's proposed solution for avoiding the pending catastrophe?
Iraqis have to ask themselves, ""Do you even want to come back?" offers Colonel Rapp.
Unfortunately for most Iraqi refugees, whether or not they want to come back is a moot point. Syria and other countries neighboring Iraq have recently stepped up efforts to evict them. Imagine that, countries who are tired of uninvited immigrants. This situation has been gestating for a long time, but U.S. high command is completely unready for it, just as it's been unready for every predictable disaster that has occurred since the staged fall of Saddam Hussein's statue.
What will those refugees do? It's a good thing for us they can't swim to Canada and Mexico and slip into America through our porous borders, huh? Think how many of them there terrorists might sneak in with them!
Meanwhile, Back at the Other Fiasco…
From AFP: "The Pentagon confirmed Monday that the US military and its NATO partners were reviewing plans for Afghanistan, rocked by its bloodiest year since 2001 amid a fierce Taliban resurgence."
Afghanistan, once the crown jewel in Mr. Bush's war on terror, is now the bloody ball of fur on the side of the road that nobody wants to look at or touch. President Hamid Karzai's government has no influence outside of the capital city of Kabul; Afghanistan is a world leader in narcotics exports and a sanctuary for terrorists. And to think, the mission was accomplished in Afghanistan well before we even ventured into Iraq.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, sounding more every day like he's just another standard Bush appointee, says the fate of the Afghanistan mission is in the hands of his NATO allies and has asked that a European official be put in charge of coordinating (i.e., taking the fall for) the international presence in Afghanistan.
With all this beautiful ugliness collapsing around his ankles, Mr. Bush continues to make boo noise about Iran. During a Monday speech to the Rotary Club in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Mr. Bush agreed with one of the Rotarians that Iran has a nuclear weapon, even though the recent National Intelligence Estimate says they have neither a nuclear weapon nor a nuclear weapons program. He also stated that Iran is a threat to peace, even though its defense budget is less than one 20th that of the United States, even though it has never started a war, even though during the one war it fought—with Iraq, a war that Saddam Hussein initiated by invading Iran—it was unable to project land or air power significantly beyond its own borders.
On paper, it would be impossible for Iran to win a war against the United States; but keep in mind that Mr. Bush has achieved the impossible twice before. He might still go for the hat trick.
#
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Friday, December 14, 2007
When Did Iran Stop Beating Its Wife?
It seems as if the fat lady will sing herself hoarse before the Bush administration drops its fabulist's narrative on Iran. Its echo chamberlains continue to condemn Iranian complicity in the deaths of American G.I.s in Iraq even though, as historian and journalist Gareth Porter phrases it, "The administration has not come forward with a single piece of concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government has been involved in the training, arming or advising of Iraqi Shiite militias."
Now, in a transparent attempt to save face from the recently released National Intelligence Estimate that says Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003, Mr. Bush has challenged Iran to "come clean" and "explain to the world why they had a program." Presumably, Mr. Bush means Iran should come clean about its "nuclear weapons program," but presuming that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in 2003, or at any other time, might be, well, overly presumptive.
The latest NIE has the look of a corpse that's been picked over by every vulture in Dick Cheney's undisclosed aerie. Every statement in which a professional intelligence analyst appears to be conveying that Iran isn't really a major threat to the U.S. and/or its interests is accompanied by a disclaimer that Iran could very well be a major threat to the U.S. and/or its interests. Contrarily, each assertion that Iran really might be a major threat devolves into a pretzel logic loop that asserts Iran isn't much of a threat at all. In all, the NIE calls to mind the American POW who, when tortured into reading enemy propaganda in front of a camera, blinked "S-O-S" repeatedly so everyone at the receiving end would know he was speaking under duress.
The NIE "does not assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons" in one sentence, but assumes in the next sentence that Iran's nuclear activities are only "partly civil in nature" (page 4).
It judges with "moderate confidence" that the earliest Iran would be capable of producing a weapon is "late 2009," but then it says that is "very unlikely" (page 7). If you're moderately confident that something is very unlikely, why would you even bother to mention it, much less include it in an intelligence estimate?
It states: "We do not have sufficient intelligence" to "judge confidently" whether "Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear weapons program." But we're confident enough about the sufficiency of our intelligence (presumably) to warn that Tehran may "already" have "set specific deadlines or criteria that will prompt it to restart the program" (page 7). This NIE is starting to sound like one big confidence game, isn't it?
The NIE says that, "We cannot rule out that Iran has acquired from abroad—or will acquire in the future—a nuclear weapon or enough fissile material for a weapon" (page 6). Hells bells, we can't rule out that the Vulcans will reveal themselves to us tomorrow night and let us in on the secret of their matter/anti-matter drive.
The NIE goes on like this, and on and on and on. My very God. You can sleep tonight, America. Your intelligence services are awake.
As I said earlier in the week, if an intelligence officer brought me a compendium of bull feathers like this NIE, he'd need a surgical instrument to pluck it from his sinuses. If I’m the head of Dick Cheney's Iranian Directorate, though, I may be rather pleased at how the final NIE product turned out. Its primary message—that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon or an active nuclear weapons program—was bound to come out sooner than later. The important thing to me, if I'm the head of Dick Cheney's Iranian Directorate, is that the NIE says the one thing I absolutely, positively need it to say:
If I'm the head of Dick Cheney's Iranian Directorate, that one statement gives my boss all the ammunition he needs to carry on his disinformation campaign about Iran until at least November, and probably through next January. As long as the world buys that Iran had a nuke weapons program at one time, we can pretty much hang any prevarication we want on that belief.
The only thing that can spoil the scheme is if some disloyal, un-American smarty pants takes a cursory glance at Iran's nuclear timeline. Any smarty pants who does that can't help but notice that Russia didn't begin building Iran's first nuclear reactor until September of 2002, and that the International Atomic Energy Commission said there was no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program in November of 2003, which is around the time the latest NIE says Iran "halted" its nuclear weapons program.
Having digested those data bits, said smarty pants might conclude that the nuclear weapons program that "Iranian military entities" were working to develop must have consisted of a couple of Revolutionary Guard colonels shooting the breeze about it one afternoon at the Fort Khomeini O' Club over 10 or 12 pitchers of San Miguel.
I don't know how much longer the Bush administration and its side buoys plan to stay on their Iran horse. I suspect that unless Congress or the Joint Chiefs of Staff knock them out of the saddle, they'll keep whipping it, presumably in hopes of bringing it back to life.
#
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
Now, in a transparent attempt to save face from the recently released National Intelligence Estimate that says Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003, Mr. Bush has challenged Iran to "come clean" and "explain to the world why they had a program." Presumably, Mr. Bush means Iran should come clean about its "nuclear weapons program," but presuming that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in 2003, or at any other time, might be, well, overly presumptive.
The latest NIE has the look of a corpse that's been picked over by every vulture in Dick Cheney's undisclosed aerie. Every statement in which a professional intelligence analyst appears to be conveying that Iran isn't really a major threat to the U.S. and/or its interests is accompanied by a disclaimer that Iran could very well be a major threat to the U.S. and/or its interests. Contrarily, each assertion that Iran really might be a major threat devolves into a pretzel logic loop that asserts Iran isn't much of a threat at all. In all, the NIE calls to mind the American POW who, when tortured into reading enemy propaganda in front of a camera, blinked "S-O-S" repeatedly so everyone at the receiving end would know he was speaking under duress.
The NIE "does not assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons" in one sentence, but assumes in the next sentence that Iran's nuclear activities are only "partly civil in nature" (page 4).
It judges with "moderate confidence" that the earliest Iran would be capable of producing a weapon is "late 2009," but then it says that is "very unlikely" (page 7). If you're moderately confident that something is very unlikely, why would you even bother to mention it, much less include it in an intelligence estimate?
It states: "We do not have sufficient intelligence" to "judge confidently" whether "Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear weapons program." But we're confident enough about the sufficiency of our intelligence (presumably) to warn that Tehran may "already" have "set specific deadlines or criteria that will prompt it to restart the program" (page 7). This NIE is starting to sound like one big confidence game, isn't it?
The NIE says that, "We cannot rule out that Iran has acquired from abroad—or will acquire in the future—a nuclear weapon or enough fissile material for a weapon" (page 6). Hells bells, we can't rule out that the Vulcans will reveal themselves to us tomorrow night and let us in on the secret of their matter/anti-matter drive.
The NIE goes on like this, and on and on and on. My very God. You can sleep tonight, America. Your intelligence services are awake.
As I said earlier in the week, if an intelligence officer brought me a compendium of bull feathers like this NIE, he'd need a surgical instrument to pluck it from his sinuses. If I’m the head of Dick Cheney's Iranian Directorate, though, I may be rather pleased at how the final NIE product turned out. Its primary message—that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon or an active nuclear weapons program—was bound to come out sooner than later. The important thing to me, if I'm the head of Dick Cheney's Iranian Directorate, is that the NIE says the one thing I absolutely, positively need it to say:
We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.
If I'm the head of Dick Cheney's Iranian Directorate, that one statement gives my boss all the ammunition he needs to carry on his disinformation campaign about Iran until at least November, and probably through next January. As long as the world buys that Iran had a nuke weapons program at one time, we can pretty much hang any prevarication we want on that belief.
The only thing that can spoil the scheme is if some disloyal, un-American smarty pants takes a cursory glance at Iran's nuclear timeline. Any smarty pants who does that can't help but notice that Russia didn't begin building Iran's first nuclear reactor until September of 2002, and that the International Atomic Energy Commission said there was no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program in November of 2003, which is around the time the latest NIE says Iran "halted" its nuclear weapons program.
Having digested those data bits, said smarty pants might conclude that the nuclear weapons program that "Iranian military entities" were working to develop must have consisted of a couple of Revolutionary Guard colonels shooting the breeze about it one afternoon at the Fort Khomeini O' Club over 10 or 12 pitchers of San Miguel.
I don't know how much longer the Bush administration and its side buoys plan to stay on their Iran horse. I suspect that unless Congress or the Joint Chiefs of Staff knock them out of the saddle, they'll keep whipping it, presumably in hopes of bringing it back to life.
#
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books) will be available April 1, 2008.
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