The General Who Would Be King

Forgive the smug self-congratulation, but you heard it here first, folks. I’ve been hinting since February that “King David” Petraeus, the “genius” of the surge in Iraq who is now in charge of all our woebegone Middle East wars as head of Central Command, was a leading candidate to be the GOP’s great white hope in 2012.

Lo and behold: a September 4 article in Politico, the online journal that Glenn Greenwald of Salon once described as a right-wing “cesspool,” reports that GOP icon Bob Dole says he’d like to see Petraeus “run as a latter day Ike.”

Dave’s like Ike? Take a hike! That Dole would compare Petraeus to Dwight David Eisenhower suggests that the aging former Senator has gone the cognitive way of fellow Republican Ronald Reagan. A signature symptom of the American right’s mental fragility is its inability to recognize (or its blithe willingness to accept) patently false analogies. As the theater-strategic commander of the European Theater of Operations during World War II, Dwight Eisenhower actually commanded an actual coalition that actually won an actual war. Petraeus hasn’t met any of those criteria.

Petraeus’s three tours in Iraq were noteworthy for their short-term theatrical successes and their dismal strategic failures.

He came to prominence when his hagiographer Thomas E. Ricks singled him out as the only two-star general who had done things right after the fall of Baghdad as commander of the Mosul area. What Petraeus actually did in Mosul was hand out a lot of bribes. When he left, Mosul slid to scheiss in a sleigh, and it continues to be a major trouble spot. During his next tour, in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, Petraeus lost track of 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols that trickled their way into the hands of Shiite militants. As honcho of the surge, Petraeus handed guns out to Sunni militants and bribed them not to use the weapons on anybody but al Qaeda in Iraq, the all but non-existent group that at its zenith contained fewer than 1,000 full time fighters and whose only real connection with the al Qaeda that gave us 9/11 amounted to stealing its name. Al Qaeda in Iraq is the equivalent of a Cleveland garage band calling itself The Beatles in Ohio (“We’ve pledged allegiance to Paul and Ringo,” says lead vocalist.)

As Ricks artlessly admits, Petraeus duped the American people and Congress into thinking he was paving a way out of Iraq when he was in fact laying a yellow brick road to the “long war,” an amorphous conflict with no imaginable end state or any purpose other than to justify America’s seam bursting defense budget.

Two years and change into the surge, Iraq’s government and security forces are corrupt and incompetent and political reconciliation is turning fetid on an unlit back burner. None of the stated objectives of the surge have been met, and few informed observers think we’ll actually adhere to the present Status of Forces Agreement that demands we have all troops out or Iraq by the end of 2011.

Yet the world seems convinced that Petraeus is a military genius. Bush administration veteran Dan Senor says, “If he is as successful in Afghanistan as he was in Iraq, nothing else matters, and he will instantly be considered a top-tier candidate for president.”

If Petraeus does in Afghanistan what he did in Iraq we’ll never leave Afghanistan. It’s unlikely, though, given his track record, that he’ll be held accountable. You may have noticed that Petraeus is keeping a low profile these days. It’s a safe bet he hasn’t developed a case of camera shyness.

Things aren’t all peace, love and understanding in Iraq or the Bananastans* these days, and as head of U.S. Central Command, Petraeus is theoretically responsible for whatever goes wrong in either of those conflicts now. He isn’t the defense establishment’s spokesmodel for either conflict, however. We hear plenty from Defense secretary Bob Gates (The picture in Afghanistan is “mixed,” he says) and from Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen (he advocates “a growing, sustained and trusted partnership with Pakistan”) and Bananastan commander Stanley McChrystal (“We’re truly protecting the Afghan people from all threats," he says as he surveys Afghan people wounded and killed by his latest air strike) and from Ray Odierno, our top banana in Iraq (he wants to delay troop withdrawals from his theater of war. It’s tough to watch your kingdom shrink, huh Ray?)

From Petraeus, we hear non-committal, rear end-covering non sequitur. “I don’t think anyone can guarantee that it will work out even if we apply a lot more resources,” he says of another Bananastan surge. “But it won’t work out if we don’t.” When the second surge doesn’t work out, don’t blame the Teflon General. He warned us!

Eisenhower, in contrast, was prepared to shoulder full responsibility in the event the invasion of Normandy failed.

The World War II general Petraeus most resembles is the self-aggrandizing and public relations savvy Douglas MacArthur, who took credit for winning the war in the Pacific that should have gone to Admiral Chester Nimitz. MacArthur was also Franklin Roosevelt’s most dangerous political opponent. Some contend that Roosevelt kept MacArthur in the Pacific for the express purpose of keeping him from running for president.

We can’t know for certain what President Obama was thinking when he retained Petraeus, along with Gates, Mullen, Odierno and the rest of Petraeus’s long war mafia, but Obama didn’t become the first black president, one who whipped both the Clinton and GOP political machines, because he lacks political acumen. His decision calculus almost certainly included the realization that he could keep them under better control if he kept them subordinate to him in the military chain of command.

Unfortunately, that decision also leaves him obliged to go along with their wishes. They want to establish a permanent military presence in Iraq, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who dances on whatever lap offers him the most on any given day, will renegotiate the Status of Forces agreement when they make him the right offer. If Obama doesn’t go along with the deal, it will be his fault we “lost” in Iraq. Candidate Obama deflected criticism of his senatorial vote against the Iraq surge by saying it had taken focus from the fight in Afghanistan, where he promised he would “finish the job” there. He’ll be finished if he turns around now and doesn’t give the general the resources they need to accomplish the mission he gave them.

It would be nice to think our woebegone wars will die of natural causes when we can no longer afford them, but when it comes to the federal budget, war is like Jell-O: there’s always room for it. We’ll just add Iraq and the Bananastans to the tab. China will cover it for us.

Our Congress will never stand up to the war mafia; too many political careers and regional U.S. economies are wholly dependent on it. And our presidents will be the likes of Petraeus who are made guys, or the likes of Obama who quickly discover they were out maneuvered before they made their first move.

*Afghanistan and Pakistan, Our banana-republic-style quagmires in Central Asia.

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

Another Krock of Krepinevich

"Strategy is fundamentally about identifying or creating asymmetric advantages that can be exploited to help achieve one’s ultimate objectives despite resource and other constraints."

– Andrew Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts, Regaining Strategic Competence,September 2009

The problem with retired Army light colonel Andrew Krepinevich, the self-described "expert on US military strategy," isn’t so much that he says silly things; it’s that people in positions of power and influence take the silly things he says seriously. Krepinevich is the epitome of contemporary American think-tankery: a pseudo-intellectual war hawk with Washington connections who can talk all day and get people to listen, but who couldn’t find the body part he sits on with both hands and a GPS receiver.

In Regaining Strategic Competence. a recent monograph written under the aegis of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts argue that America needs to regain its strategic competence. That’s the one assertion they make that I have no argument with.

Strategy is not, as they claim, "fundamentally about identifying or creating asymmetric advantages." That’s the core concept behind maneuver warfare and the crux of Sun Tzu’s philosophy, but strategy encompasses much more than asymmetric considerations. Many a sound strategy has featured a symmetric superiority over one’s opponent. Patton didn’t defeat Rommel’s tank divisions with cunning applications of tai chi and Taoist thought.

"Resource and other constraints" hardly apply to the American strategic calculus. We spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined. Our post-World War II failures — most notably Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan — have not been a result of constraints in resources or methods, but in the self-defeating nature of the conflicts themselves. No quantity of field manuals or doctrines can make counterinsurgency a winning proposition. The only folks who win that kind of war own the local gene pool.

Krepinevich and Watts say that, "the overall trend in the strategic performance of American political and military elites appears to be one of decline." We hardly need full-time tank thinkers to deliver us to that conclusion. It is telling, though, that the authors point to "the outcome of the Cold War" as an example of superior U.S. strategy. They specifically credit "offsetting Warsaw Pact numerical superiority with precision strike, increased US defense spending in the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, and the covert arming of mujahedeen fighters to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan" as highlights of American strategic thinking.

The precision strike vs. numbers aspect was likely included because of Watts‘ Air Force background and his subsequent career as and air power "expert." Despite the claims of the wild blue fanatics, going toe-to-toe with the Russkies was always about a symmetric, Patton-esque tank battle in Germany’s Fulda Gap.

We don’t really know that increased defense spending in the 80s tipped the scales of the Cold War. The defense spending we’d been doing up to then had done a fine job of containing the Soviets and shoving them down the slope to economic ruin. The Strategic Defense Initiative always was (and still is) the stuff of cinematic space opera. We’ll develop the kind of missile defense adequate to have survived a nuclear exchange with the Soviets shortly after we colonize the Pleiades. Krepinevich and Watts make no mention of the fact that our covert arming of mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan led to the most challenging strategic conundrum we presently face, but why should they? That might be like admitting that they’re post-modern bull feather merchants (which they are).

That the authors make homage to Reagan-era strategies exposes their political bias, as does their endorsement of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower as presidents who "took strategy seriously" and whose examples "remain worthy of study and emulation."

Lincoln was a deep thinker, but his strength was as a policy maker, not a strategist. His unifying concept — that the Union must be preserved at all costs — is what led to the North’s victory in the Civil War despite the incompetence of most of Lincoln’s generals and their thumb-less execution of the war. It took elevation of U.S. Grant to general-in-chief to turn the tide of that war, and his strategy was hardly the "asymmetric" maneuver scheme that Sun Tzu described and that Krepinevich and Watts adore. Grant, in fact, was almost Soviet in his approach. The North had more men, industry, communications, infrastructure, and overall stuff than the South. All he had to do to achieve strategic victory was engage the enemy tactically. He could lose a thousand battles and still win the war.

Like Grant, Eisenhower was the leading general of a great war who made for a sub-mediocre president. As the five-star officer in charge of the European Theater of Operations during World War II, Ike was more of a politician than a strategist, the competent figure capable of juggling the galactic egos of the great political and military figures of that conflict. As president, Ike was more of a golfer than a politician. His best strategy moves were building the U.S. interstate highway system and ending Douglas MacArthur’s botched Korean War. Krepinevich and Watts say nothing of those accomplishments; they opt instead to laud Ike for forming what would later become the National Security Council planning and operations coordinating board, a body that was actually created by Ike’s Democratic predecessor Harry Truman.

To credit Reagan with strategic acumen is to liken Jessica Simpson to Beethoven. The Cold War was won before Reagan took office. All he had to do was look like a movie star and not flub his lines too badly. But, like Lincoln and Ike, he was a Republican and worth the praise of Krepinevich and Watts and the rest of the warmongery.

Krepinevich and Watts give Democrat Franklin Roosevelt a certain amount of credit for victory in World War II, but they make it clear that success was largely a matter of Winston Churchill and George Marshall keeping Roosevelt from screwing up too badly. It’s telling as well that the authors identify their target audience as the "next administration," making it clear that they don’t expect the Democrats in charge now to pay any attention them. Here’s hoping that the Republicans who replace the Obama crowd don’t listen to Krepinevich and Watts either.

One could write volumes about the Aristotelian lapses in their logic, but this one stands out for me: a common pitfall of strategic performance, they tell us, is "mistaking strategic goals for strategy." That’s like mistaking a sentence for its subject and predicate. Without goals, a strategy is merely a collection of wimp words and platitudes. If you need further evidence that the latest Krepinevich manifesto is a pile of day-old horse lunch, witness that David Petraeus hagiographer Thomas E. Ricks, who has lately shown himself to be dumber than Jessica Simpson and dirt mixed together, says that right now Regain Strategic Competence is his "subway reading."

If that’s the best thing you have to read on your way to work, Tom, sharpen two pencils and shove them in your eyes.

Krepinevich is part of the neoconservative cabal that has captured the narrative of strategic thought. Their core assumption — that armed force is still and will continue to be a effective tool of American foreign policy — will be the downfall of this country unless we reject the notion out of hand. That so many people (like Ricks) continue to regard Krepinevich as a "fine strategic thinker" should frighten you. Krepinevich is one of the maddest hatters at the think tank tea party going on in Washington.

Krepinevich and Moss make much of the necessity to identify and develop individuals with the "cognitive skills to do strategy well." What they really want is to place people in decision-making positions who think like Krepinevich. They aim to replace the "American political and military elites" with a political and military elite cast in their image.

At this point in the American experiment, our best strategists exist outside the influence of the D.C. beltway. Anyone who steps into the puzzle palace immediately becomes as puzzled as the puzzle masters.

The Next New Plan for Bananastan

We’re going through Bananastan* war strategies like they’re Pez candies. As Jason Ditz of Antiwar.com has noted, General Stanley McChrystal’s new report on Afghanistan "admitted that the current strategy, which was itself a new strategy presented only five months ago to replace the previous new strategy, isn’t working and that yet another new strategy is needed." It seems certain that Stan the Man will ask for more troops, though, so we’re at least being consistent in our policy of sending more American soldiers to war without knowing why.

When you slice out the wimp words and platitudes, the current new strategy is the same as the old new strategy: clear, hold and build. Any new strategy the war wonks come up with will look pretty much the same, and will require even further escalation in terms of troops and national treasure. Clear, hold and build hasn’t worked in Afghanistan just as it didn’t work in Iraq. It didn’t work in Vietnam either, even though at one point we committed over a half-million troops there. It will never work.

Any cogent strategy must be built around realistic, achievable goals that involve U.S. national security. Our goals, as presently stated, involve turning Pakistan and Afghanistan into real countries with real security forces that civilian authorities are in control of and disrupting terrorist networks. We’ll never achieve those things. The Bananastans will always be warlord-ruled thuggeries, and it is impossible to disrupt terrorist networks when the only "sanctuaries" those networks need in order to operate are pockets large enough to carry an iPod.

Our top military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, still insists that Afghan civilians are the "center of gravity." Civilian populations are never a center of gravity. They may be a critical factor — a strength, weakness or critical vulnerability — but only to the extent that they affect political leadership, and that affect is almost always overstated. America supposedly has the most representative form of government of any modern nation, yet even though the population has voted against war in two straight national elections, we’re still embroiled in two wars. Afghanistan’s voting process makes the electoral systems of Florida and Ohio look honest, and it’s difficult to say where Afghan political leadership lies: with the official government or with the warlords or with whatever the loose collection of hooligans is that we refer to as the Taliban.

Power is so decentralized in Afghanistan at the strategic and tactical levels that there is no center of gravity that our military force can focus its efforts against. This is true in virtually any counterinsurgency scenario, and is why counterinsurgency is a self-defeating form of warfare. Our attempts at building infrastructure in Afghanistan have literally backfired. New roads, schools and police stations merely provide fresh bombing targets. Our strategists will never come up with a plan that works, not because they’re incompetent (though they are), but because the situation does not lend itself to successful strategizing.

The only strategy that seems to be working so far is the propaganda effort to convince the American public to go along with another asinine war. Mr. Obama has called the Bananastan conflict a "war of necessity" (it isn’t). Admiral Mullen says we’ll only have credibility with the Afghan people if we promise to stay there forever and then actually do it (we won’t have credibility then, either, nor is there a burning national security requirement for us to have credibility with the Afghan people). Max Boot says Americans are only dissatisfied with the Afghanistan war "because they don’t see enough signs of progress" (they don’t see enough signs of progress because there is no progress).

Boot’s fellow neocons Bill Kristol and Fred Kagan promote the notion that a surge in Afghanistan will produce the same results that the Iraq surge gave us. I’m inclined to agree with that. Two and a half years after the Iraq surge began, Iraq’s government and security forces are corrupt and incompetent, Sunni reconciliation is sliding backwards and no progress has been made with the Kurdish situation. General David Petraeus, having armed everyone in Iraq to the teeth, has made the country even more dangerous than it was under Saddam Hussein, but only more dangerous to itself; it’s only a danger to us for as long as long as we leave troops there who can be attacked.

I caught Boot on NPR’s Sept. 1 Diane Rehm show, talking gibberish and getting away with it. Kristol’s citation of Kagan was in the Sept. 1 edition of the Washington Post. The likes of Boot and Kristol and Kagan, who brought us the Iraq fiasco, should have been laughed and feathered out of town years ago. That they can still command bandwidth in the so-called "liberal media" illustrates the extent to which the war-centric right has hogtied the information environment.

If we’re serious about rehabilitating ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, the pipeline flowing through Afghanistan has no bearing on our national interest. The notion of evil ones getting their hands on Pakistan’s "fissile material" gets one’s attention at first blush, but on examination it suffers from what George Costanza called "shrinkage." The "suitcase nuke" is an urban myth from the Cold War. Terrorists will develop a suitcase nuke capable of destroying an American city about the time they invent time travel. The thing terrorists are most likely to do if they get their unholy mitts on Pakistan’s nuclear warheads is die of radiation poisoning. If we really want to eliminate risks presented by Pakistan’s nukes, we can have our worthless $2 billion stealth B-2 bombers fly over there, evade Pakistan’s non-existent air defenses, and blow them all up.

Let’s just hope the B-2s don’t blow a hundred Muslim wedding chapels to smithereens instead. What will that do to our credibility, Admiral Mullen?

*Bananastan (noun) 1. A banana-republic style regime in Central Asia ruled by a U.S. backed puppet government 2. Afghanistan and Pakistan 3. The Central Asian version of a banana republic, a bananaraq, or a United Banana Kingdom.

Mullen's Mulligan

In golf and other sports, a "mulligan" is a second chance to get something right, sometimes referred to as a "do-over." In most sports, one do-over is all you get, and sports are just games. In war, humanity’s deadliest undertaking, the folks in charge of the Pentagon keep asking for another mulligan, and the president, Congress, and the news media keeping saying sure, tee it up again.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen appeared on the Aug. 23 edition of Meet the Press to sell the war in Afghanistan. He couldn’t have asked for a better straight man than David Gregory. Gregory pulsed Mullen "on the question of U.S. resolve." Gregory noted the recent Washington Post/ABC News poll that indicated 51 percent of Americans don’t think Afghanistan is "worth the fight," and he asked Mullen "have the American people lost that will to fight this war?"

"Well, I’m, I’m a Vietnam veteran myself," Mullen replied, and assured the American people that he was certainly aware of "the criticality" of their support. He mumbled and grumbled and said "the president’s given me and the American military a mission," and he went yakety-yak about the "new strategy" and wheezed that it "focuses on al-Qaeda" and blabbed yada, yada, yada about the "original 9/11 attacks" and sniffled that "they still plot against us" and blubbered "in that regard, we’re very focused on executing that mission."

It was a perfect non-answer to a perfect non-question.

Any time you hear talk about the American people losing their will to fight, you’re listening to war propaganda. The "will" stratagem often uses terms like spine, stomach, guts, and other anatomical references commonly associated with courage and bravery. Like almost all war propaganda, the will stratagem is based on a false main assumption: that the war in question is good and/or necessary. Our brave troops will prevail (another common false assumption) as long as the folks back home have sufficient qualities of the proper body parts to stay the course.

Mullen evoked his Vietnam experience right on cue. One of the cruelest lies in the U.S. military ethos says that we lost in Vietnam because the media and Congress lacked the stiffness required to see things though when public support waned. Our involvement there spanned 25 years. At one point over a half million U.S. troops were deployed there, and America spared no expense in supporting their efforts. Yet, incredibly, one still hears old timers in the irascible Right claim "If we’d only had 18 more months." If folks like them had their way, victory in Vietnam would still be at hand.

Mullen learned propaganda techniques like subliminal messaging from a master; his father was a press agent for MGM studios. Mullen’s personal public affairs officer, Capt. John Kirby, has been with him for many years. Mullen and his military did not choose the mission in Afghanistan, the message goes. The president gave it to them. Mullen started playing fast and loose with young Mr. Obama when, during the campaign, he warned in a Joint Force Quarterly article that a Democrat in the White House would have a negative effect on the mission in Iraq (the article has since been removed from the JFQ Web site).

Al-Qaeda… 9/11… they still plot against us: Mullen has the full arsenal of fear mantras on the tip of his tongue. Our intelligence in that part of the world is pathetic. We don’t have a clue what al-Qaeda is plotting, or thinking, or where any of its members actually are or even how many of them exist. Even if we could find a way to run them out of Afghanistan or Pakistan, they’d just go somewhere else. All it takes to plan and execute a terror attack is an iPhone, and they can get one of those anywhere. Why hang out in the nosebleed seats in the Himalayas when they can bask on the Riviera?

The very notion that the 9/11 attacks sprang from Afghanistan is specious. "Mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was operating in the Philippines when he first presented the attack plan to bin Laden in 1996. The six hijackers who controlled the airplanes received their flight training in the U.S., and the "muscle hijackers" came from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

New strategy… focused on executing the mission. The new strategy Mullen referred to is the one National Security Adviser James Jones and his White House war wonks cobbled together from the last eight year’s worth of incomprehensible talking points. It is a compendium of vague tasks and incoherent platitudes. A "mission," in military parlance, consists of a task and a purpose, and without coherent strategic goals, the Afghanistan mission is nothing more than a laundry list of purposeless tasks.

Straight man Gregory introduced the topic of the real purpose of Mullen’s appearance when he asked if Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, will "request of this president more troops to fight in Afghanistan?"

Mullen hemmed and hawed and said McChrystal’s assessment wouldn’t "specifically deal with requirements for additional resources," and that Mullen and the grown-ups in Washington would "deal with" requirements in the "normal process" (whatever in God’s name the "normal process" might be at the Pentagon these days).

Gregory, not once but twice, invoked Sen. John McCain, who had been the Pentagon’s tacitly endorsed presidential candidate. McCain says it’s not a question of whether we need more troops in Afghanistan, Gregory explained, it’s a question of how many more: 15,000 or 25,000 or 45,000? "Can you carry out this mission with the troops you’ve got?" Gregory demanded of Mullen.

"That’s really something that we will evaluate over the next few weeks," Mullen answered, satisfied that he’d accomplished the mission of getting Gregory to carry his water for him. Gregory made a show of pushing back later in the interview, but it didn’t matter. Mullen had already delivered the message: Obama didn’t listen when we said we didn’t want any timelines for Iraq. He said Iraq was a distraction from "finishing the job" in Afghanistan. So we’re going to have our "long war" in Afghanistan, and if we say we need more troops there, he darn well better give them to us or it will be his fault we lost there just like it will be his fault we lost in Iraq.

Long-war Mafiosi like Mullen can’t tell us what they hope to accomplish, or even give a compelling argument that what they’re doing overseas is connected to national security. They claim that our military adventurism is keeping us safe from terror attacks even though historical analysis inarguably demonstrates that armed force is by magnitudes the least effective means of combating terrorism. They lied to us throughout the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and have lied to us ever since, and yet they still own the narrative on U.S. foreign policy and our poisoned news media continues to abet them overtly (Rush and Rupert and the rest of the Big Brother Broadcast) or implicitly (just about everybody else).

So no matter how badly they deceive us or how egregiously they fail to deliver results, the warmongery continues to get mulligan after mulligan after mulligan.

Thugs of Fortune

A singular absurdity of the 21^st century is that the nation that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined needs to hire mercenaries to fight wars against enemies who have no defense budget at all.

An August 19 New York Times article revealed that in 2004 the CIA hired Blackwater USA to help “locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda.” This is the secret program that Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to not tell Congress about for seven years. “It is unclear,” wrote Times reporter Mark Mazetti, “whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program.” The program, says Mazetti, “did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects,” which makes it sound like they tried to kill terrorist suspects and blew it. There’s something about assassinating “suspects” that makes the mercenary aspect of the program seem trivial.

It was the mercenary facet, though, according to Mazetti, that led CIA director Leon Panetta to cancel the program in June and then tell Congress about it. Panetta would have been fine with assassinating suspects, I reckon, if only CIA types had been involved.

But wait a minute. An August 20 Times article by Mazetti and James Risen says the CIA is still using mercenaries to help them kill terror suspects. A “division” of “the company formerly known as ‘Blackwater’” is loading Hellfire missiles and guided bombs on drone aircraft at “hidden” bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Blackwater mercenaries, now known as “Xe” (pronounced “zee”) mercenaries, also provide security at the bases. They don’t pull the trigger or pickle off bombs though; CIA “employees” do that by remote control from the agency’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. CIA types also pick which terror suspects to target.

How is this drone assassination program different from the assassination program Panetta cancelled in June? Both employ mercenaries. Both target “suspects.” Both rely on iffy information; our intelligence in that part of the world amounts to beating people up or bribing them so they tell us what we want to hear.

Our intelligence is so bad that we don’t even know for certain if our drone assassination program has killed any suspects. We know for sure that we’ve killed a lot of people who aren’t terrorists through collateral damage though, so we can be fairly sure the drone assassination program—like the rest of our woebegone war on terror—creates two or more new terrorists for every one it eliminates.

In the assassination program that Panetta cancelled, operations to kill or capture suspects had to be approved by the CIA director and presented to the White House. Risen and Mazetti say that drones land or take off from the bases in the Bananastans “almost hourly,” so it’s a good bet that nobody at the White House is getting told about the drone assissination missions, and the CIA director probably gets a weekly summary that he may or may not read. That means that “employees” are deciding when and where to create collateral damage.

The assassination program Panetta cancelled probably violated U.S. and international law. The drone assassination program does too. We’re running airstrikes, which are acts of war, against targets in Pakistan. Congress has not specifically approved combat operations in Pakistan, unless you consider the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force as a blank check for any president to apply military power anywhere at any time if it involves counterterrorism. If that’s the case, Mr. Obama can fire bomb Dresden and nuke Nagasaki if he thinks suspected terrorists are hiding there. Heck, he might delegate those decisions to CIA “employees,” or even employees of Blackwater/Xe.

It speaks philosophical volumes about contemporary American values that an illegal secret assassination program that involved mercenaries had to be shut down, but an illegal overt assassination program involving mercenaries continues without objection.

In March 2009 Blackwater/Xe lost its billion-dollar contract to protect U.S. diplomats in Baghdad, a job normally done by the U.S. Marines. Blackwater had been under fire for a 2007 incident in which its security personnel killed 17 civilians in an unprovoked shooting. Another mercenary outfit, Triple Canopy, won the contract and hired the same security personnel who had just been fired to do the same job they’d been fired from. Some in the Iraqi government speculated that Triple Canopy subcontracted the job to an outfit called the Falcon Group, which was a Blackwater/Xe affiliate.

Two former Blackwater/Xe employees have filed sworn statements in a federal court alleging that company founder Erik Prince may have been involved in the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company’s actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The statements assert that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." There’s plenty more and it’s plenty sordid, and it’s mighty salacious stuff for people to swear to in front of a federal magistrate is it has not basis in truth. Prince is a former Navy Seal, he’s rich, and he’s politically connected. He probably knows a few good lawyers.

There are a number of reasons to hire mercenaries. Some of them are financial; it’s cheaper to rent a shooter for a short-term job than it is to train a career soldier or intelligence officer or torture specialist whom you have to provide with benefits and retirement pay. The main reason to use mercenaries, though, is that they exist in a legal twilight zone. If they operate overseas, they’re not exactly subject to U.S. law or host nation law or international law. They don’t operate under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or congressional oversight either. They can get away with shenanigans that even the CIA and Special Forces wouldn’t dirty their hands on. Nobody has to know how contract interrogators get information from prisoners, and the second the government pays a mercenary outfit the money vanishes from the books forever.

If, as Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker a certain former vice president formed death squads that answered directly to him, they likely contained mercenaries. Blackwater/XE may not have been directly involved in any trigger pulling, but former Middle East CIA field officer Robert Baer noted recently at TIME.com that “Blackwater was not the worst of the contractors, some of which did reportedly end up carrying out their assigned hits.”

Doesn’t all this make you proud to be an American?

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

In Bush's Footsteps

Those of you still hoping for “change” can forget it. Young Mr. Obama is working the same number that young Mr. Bush pulled on us. In Obama’s address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, Arizona on August 17, he made his commitment to war in the Bananastans irrevocable.

It would be wonderful if public servants seeking to associate themselves with the military would cater to the agenda of the Veterans for Peace. For a president of the United States to pander to the VFW is a disgrace. While the VFW is not a pack of latter day Brownshirts like the American Legion is, the two groups possess a common value: they never saw an armed conflict they didn’t like. If they had to serve in a pointless war, everyone else should too. They also never met a Republican politician they didn’t like. Why a Democrat who was elected on a peace platform feels compelled to throw a bone to Pavlov’s dogs of war is inscrutable.

In Phoenix, Obama deflected criticism of his lack of support for the self-defeating Iraq war by drumming up support for his self-defeating conflict in the Bananastans. He continued a tradition established by his predecessor when he told the veterans “Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.” Are we doomed to hearing presidents evoke 9/11 every time they want to justify overseas adventurism?

“But we must never forget,” Obama reminded the veterans, that the Bananastans conflict “is not a war of choice.” It is a “war of necessity” because “if left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.” So, according to Obama, the Bananastans crusade is not only “worth fighting,” it is “fundamental to the defense of our people.”

What fundamental horse manure.

We’ve accepted the myth that the 9/11 attacks were made possible by Osama bin Laden’s “sanctuary” in Afghanistan for far too long. 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was operating in the Philippines when he first presented the attack plan to bin Laden in 1996. The six hijackers who controlled the airplanes received their flight training in the U.S. The “muscle hijackers” came from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. That bin Laden was in Afghanistan at the time is a narrative of our “good intelligence” in that part of the world which, to this day, amounts to beating or bribing locals into telling us what we want to hear or believing the lies that Afghan and Pakistani intelligence agencies feed us.

“We will plan responsibly,” Obama told the veterans, and boasted of the “new comprehensive strategy” for the Bananastans that he announced in March. The people responsible for Obama’s new comprehensive strategy deserve a session of tar-and-feather therapy.

The strategy, conjured by National Security Adviser James Jones and his team of “chess masters,” is nothing more than a compendium of wimp-words and hazy goals. We’ll be “promoting a more capable” Afghan government, one that “can eventually function.” We’ll also be “developing” an “increasingly self-reliant” Afghan security force. On top of all that, we’ll be “assisting efforts to enhance civilian control” of Pakistan’s government.

With a strategy like this, who needs enemies? It’s self-defeating. We’ll kinda/sorta try to do things we can’t possibly accomplish. A prolonged occupation of the Bananastans will not “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda” and its allies. Al Qaeda and its allies have iPhones. They don’t need to hunker down in the Bananastani Himalayas. They can plan and execute their evildoing at a Club Med getaway if they want to.

By June 2009 the Pentagon still hadn’t figured out what measures of effectiveness to use in determining if the new comprehensive strategy is working. Defense secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said that some of those metrics—whatever they turn out to be—will remain classified. That way they won’t have to explain how they know they’re being effective (if they told us, they’d have to kill us). We’ll just have to take their word for it that they’re turning corners and mopping up dead-enders and that it will be a long struggle but victory is at hand. Gates and Mullen make Cheney and Rumsfeld seem like straight shooters.

Obama told the VFW that “military power alone will not win this war,” but military power, as flaccid as it has become, is more effective than the other forms of power in the American arsenal. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is as adept at diplomacy as John Bolton was. Whenever she opens her mouth it’s all anyone can do to keep another war from breaking out. Whatever economic efforts we can afford to make in the Bananastans will amount to handing out bribes like the ones we handed out in Iraq, and our information operations there involve, at best, a gentlemanly exchange of mendacities with the host countries.

“By moving forward in Iraq,” Obama told the VFW, “we’re able to refocus on the war against al Qaeda and its extremist allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Candidate Obama pledged to “get the job done” in Afghanistan when his opponents attacked him for having voted against the surge in Iraq. He would have been better off to refute claims of the strategy’s success. Today, more than two-and-a-half years after the surge commenced, counterinsurgency expert John A. Nagl says, “The insurgency is not over.” Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks says we’re “at about the midpoint of the conflict now.”

Bush was probably too dim to realize he was talking gibberish about Iraq, but Obama is too smart to believe the bull jargon he’s handing us about the Bananastans. Obama has to realize that there is no strategy for Afghanistan, and that the organized but senseless violence his generals are conducting there will not further “the security and safety of the American people.”

At this point, Obama cannot escape the Bananastan trap without gnawing off a political foot. He needs to poop can his National Security Council and everyone in the Department of Defense who wears a bird or a star in their collar or whose title contains the word “secretary.” Then he needs to tell the nation that he was wrong about escalating the war in Afghanistan, and then he needs to bring our troops home.

I doubt that he has the political baby makers to do that.

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