Thomas E. Ricks, erstwhile journalist and author of The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, has become the embodiment of the warmongery’s moral and intellectual duplicity.

Ricks’s most recent 15 minutes of fame involved an appearance at a Firedoglake book forum. In reply to a commenter who asked if “more deaths in Iraq are worth it,” Ricks said, “I think staying in Iraq is immoral. But I think that leaving Iraq is even more immoral.” In a nutshell, Ricks framed the core fallacy in the long war philosophy: that two wrongs can make a right. This theme dominates Rick’s work these days. The Gamble and the media blitz that accompanied its debut were dazzling examples of what Voltaire was talking about when he said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Full Story »

The recent announcement of General David McKiernan’s permanent transfer to Fort Palooka is the latest punch line in our Bananastan farce. Defense secretary Robert Gates claims that McKiernan’s relief as commander in Afghanistan merely reflected a need for “fresh thinking,” but even the war mongrels on the rabid right can see it was a stratagem to make McKiernan the fall guy for all the collateral damage caused by the air strikes that President Obama authorized.

Ironically, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, McKiernan’s replacement, has a proven record of executing just the kinds of strikes McKiernan got fired for. On top of that, Obama still intends to send the 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that McKiernan requested for no apparent reason. (When Obama asked him how he’d use the extra troops, McKiernan made the sound of sandbags forming a levee.) Full Story »

The U.S. Navy is fumbling a blue and golden opportunity to demonstrate the relevance of its maritime global reach capability (and justify its phony baloney budget) in the age of fourth generation warfare. Admiral Gary Roughead, who as Chief of Naval Operations is the service’s senior officer, says sea power is not sufficient to combat the Somali pirate threat. “Pirates don’t live at sea,” he recently told reporters at a Navy League conference. “They live ashore. They move their money ashore. You can’t have a discussion about eradicating piracy without having a discussion about the shore dimension.”

A mind that astute could only have been shaped at the United States Naval Academy. Yeah, Gary: all of Yamamoto’s people lived ashore too, but you didn’t get to bomb their homeland until you sank their fleet. Full Story »

Remember when we all thought Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Malachi was just another Ahmed Pyle fresh off the bus from Palookadad? Now look at him: he’s a Machiavelli-class political operative, the head of a propped up state who just told his masters to drive it up their exit ramps by demanding that they honor the Status of Forces Agreement whether they like it or not.

Keep in mind, though, that in 1980 Saddam Hussein sentenced Maliki to death. Now Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death and executed, and Maliki has his job. How about them apples? Maliki is so powerful today, in fact, that he may be the only political figure who can help Barack Obama—the head of state of the most powerful nation in history—out of the crack he’s wiggled himself into. Full Story »

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

– Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

A new world order began when the Berlin Wall came down in late 1989. The next new world order began when the U.S. Army staged the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue after the fall of Baghdad in late 2003. A brave new world order, the one we’re now in the early stages of, began in late 2008 when the U.S. economy dropped down a rabbit hole that may go all the way to China. The trajectory should look familiar; it traces a path taken by hegemons throughout the ages, straight to the cliff they fell from. As with great powers before us, the military might that created our empire has become became the instrument of its downfall.

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The late William F. Buckley, political conservative icon and founder of National Review, must be clawing at his coffin lid. The print version of National Review, while Buckley held the reins, was often an over-the-top exposition of the more unsavory facets of the political right, but Buckley managed to keep it semi-respectable. National Review Online, however, always seemed to be written by the sort of thugs you’d find in a Berthold Brecht musical.

In a recent NRO piece, military historian and former classics professor Victor Davis Hanson comes across like a rabid war mongrel. Frothing over the recent Somali pirate caper involving a U.S. flagged merchant ship, Davis insists that, “To end Somali piracy, disproportionate measures against the shore should be taken—for every one pirate assault, a lethal air assault should immediately follow.” It’s perhaps understandable that Hanson doesn’t mention what Somalia offers in the way of suitable air strike targets; underdeveloped nations like Somalia don’t have any. Hanson probably doesn’t understand that, because like so many hawkish military historians, he doesn’t understand anything about the military. He doesn’t know much about warfare theory, either. He calls for extreme (though ineffectual) military measures in response to something he admits “may not be a matter of American national security” committed not by a peer competitor or a group of global extremists but by “two-bit pirates.” When a giant purposely crushes an anthill, he’s not pursuing a political objective; he’s feeding his perversions. That, like waterboarding someone 183 times, is not the sort of thing a global hegemon needs to be doing, Victor. Full Story »

We’re a decade into the new American century, the neoconservatives are still leading the country on a march to the cliff, and most of the citizenry still hasn’t caught on to what’s happening.

I’ve been bumping into a wandering soul at various stops along the information highway of late who claims to have “lost soldiers in war.” In one discussion thread, this ostensible leader of lost soldiers insists that the surge in Iraq was successful because “we had the lowest number of casualties ever last month, which sounds like a win to me.”

I can’t tell if this person really commanded troops in war, or is a Pentagon viral propaganda operative, or if he’s just a computer generated personality disorder. I’d like to believe that someone who led troops in combat knows that casualty rates (aka body counts) are seldom if ever accurate indicators of how a war is going. The Union suffered more casualties than the Confederacy in the Civil War. The best Vietnam casualty figures we have indicate that roughly 1.1 million North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong personnel were killed in action compared to 47,378 Americans (U.S. combat and non-combat deaths combined totaled over 58,000). Full Story »

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. — Voltaire

The propaganda war on the American public appears to have entered a new phase.

In a March 30 post at his Foreign Policy blog, Thomas E. Ricks wrote, “I thought some of the surge-era deals in Iraq would unravel but I didn’t think that would begin happening this quickly. It’s only March 2009, and already Awakening fighters are fighting U.S. soldiers in the streets of Baghdad.” Ricks cited a number of recent confrontations between members of the Sunni Awakening movement and Nuri al Maliki’s government and got all giddy about how he “wouldn’t be surprised to see Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia re-emerge.”

At the end of his blog, Ricks asks “Question of the day: What should I say the next time someone tells me the surge ‘worked’?”

Ricks will almost certainly say the same thing he’s been saying to Chris Matthews and David Gregory and Washington Post readers and everyone else who’s wasted bandwidth on him since his latest book came out: “General Odierno…would like to see 35,000 American troops [in Iraq] in 2015.” That is, after all, neocon message number one these days: Status of Force agreement and campaign promises be damned; the generals say we need to stay in Iraq so that’s what we need to do. And Ricks, along with the rest of the so-called liberal media, is falling all over himself to help the neocons echo it. Full Story »

President Barack Obama’s March 27 announcement of a “new strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan” makes it official. He has no clue what he’s doing in the Middle East. Unless, of course, he’s leading us further down the road to ruin on purpose, in which case he knows exactly what he’s doing and is making an excellent job of it.

On February 17, Obama announced he would send 17,000 additional troops to the Bananastans to address the “urgent” situation there. The situation was so urgent that the troops were scheduled to deploy “sometime in the spring or summer,” according to General David McKiernan, the commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan. Full Story »

If you’re not cheating you’re not trying.

–Anonymous U.S. military officer

As a naval aviator pal of mine once remarked, cadets in our military academies spend the summer before their freshman year learning an arcane honor code and spend the next four years learning how to violate it without getting caught. So is it any wonder our general officer corps is populated by Orwell-class doublethinkers who speak doubletalk like it’s their first language?

During the run up to the Iraq invasion, then Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki was the only four-star who had the strength of character to take a public stance against Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to conquer Iraq with a small force, relying on crackpot warfare theories like network-centric operations and shock and awe to make up for insufficient troop strength. Shinseki’s principled stand bought him a one-way ticket to Fort Palooka. Rumsfeld, not satisfied that any of the active duty generals would toe the line sufficiently, brought his old cow tipping buddy Peter Schoomaker out of retirement to replace Shinseki. Rummy had sent an unmistakable message: it was his way or the exit ramp. The remaining generals either fell into lockstep or kept their own counsel, and we got four years of dead-enders in their last throes. Full Story »

Young Mr. Bush and his handlers managed to squander more than two centuries of American progress. Two interminable armed conflicts and the economic collapse they produced left President Obama with the worst combination of foreign and domestic policy disasters in our country’s history. He faces a conundrum; he needs to take care of the economic problems first, but they won’t fully heal until he straightens out the tangled web of war Bush created in the Middle East. Unfortunately, he made very bad decisions when he chose his foreign policy cabinet secretaries. Full Story »

President Obama has committed 17,000 additional troops to Operation Enduring Freedom, our misadventure in Afghanistan. His generals don’t know what to do with those troops when they get there; they’re not even sure what troops to send. Someone on Obama’s sprawling national security team should have told him it’s a bad, bad idea to send troops into a combat zone without a well-defined task and purpose. Ronald Reagan’s 1983 end zone fumble in Beirut should serve as a shining example of that maxim, but today’s defense hierarchy isn’t keen on learning from the past. Neocon luminary Fred Kagan, chief architect of the surge strategy, taught military history at West Point for a decade, which shows you how little regard the Army has for the subject.

The Keystone Kollege of Armed Konflict Knowledge that all our generals seem to have attended doesn’t place much importance on coherent strategy making, either. Full Story »

[They] were not fighting this perpetual war for victory, they were fighting to keep a state of emergency always present as the surest guarantee of authoritarianism.

– George Orwell, 1984

It looks like the fat lady will become a Victoria’s Secret model before she sings the finale of our woebegone war in Iraq.On Friday Feb. 27, at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, young Mr. Obama announced that, “by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.”We can speculate till the troops come home why Obama chose to make this announcement on a Marine Corps base as opposed to, say, on an aircraft carrier, but it’s a dead cert that the mission will be no more accomplished by August 2010 than it was in May 2003.

Obama also said in his speech that 35,000 to 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq after August 2010. Re-label them trainers, force protectors or whatever you like, the troops that stay behind will be combat troops.They won’t be training Iraqi security forces to peel potatoes, nor will they be protecting the day care facility for children of single Iraqi soldiers. Full Story »

If you know neither your enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. –Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu maintained that proper planning secures victory before the battle begins. Carl von Clausewitz insisted that war must focus on the political aim. How is it, then, that we are about to put more troops into a war we know is unwinnable and have no coherent objective for them to pursue?

President Obama announced on Feb. 17 that he will send 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. That’s just over half of the 30,000 troop escalation that’s been discussed in recent months. Gen. David McKiernan, top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, says he needs another 10,000 troops on top on the 17,000 Obama has promised on top of the 32,000 already in Afghanistan. McKiernan says the pending escalation won’t be a “temporary force uplift.” He thinks we need to keep 60,000 troops in Afghanistan for the next three to four years. “We’ve got to put them in the right places,” he says; but he doesn’t appear to know where those places are.

As foreign policy analyst Gareth Porter tells us, Obama was ready to support the full 30,000 troop escalation, endorsed by Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Central Command head Gen. David Petraeus. Full Story »

We are witnessing what a military takeover of a superpower looks like in the new American century. David Pertraeus became the most dangerous American general since Douglas MacArthur when George W. Bush announced that his “main man” would decide when, how and if an Iraq troop drawdown would occur, giving Petraeus unilateral control of U.S. foreign policy. In the summer of 2008, when then candidate Barack Obama started talking about a 16-month withdrawal deadline and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said that sounded about right, you could almost hear Petraeus screeching What a world! What a world! from Baghdad to Washington. If you listened closely, you also heard the propaganda campaign to sell America on an endless occupation of Iraq click into high gear. Full Story »

Parts I, II and III of the “Ministry of Truth and Peace” series discussed how Pentagon propaganda operations represent the confluence of Big Oil, Big War, Big Bucks, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze in the new American century. Part IV examines how General David Petraeus and his followers are waging unrestricted information warfare on President Barack Obama’s foreign policy mandate.

Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks has become the center of gravity in the U.S. military’s information war on the American public.

On February 2, policy analyst Gareth Porter reported that General David Petreus, General Ray Odierno, retired Army general Jack Keane and others were preparing a campaign to mobilize public opinion against President Barack Obama’s pledge to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 16 months. Keane co-authored, with fellow American Enterprise Institute neoconservative Frederick Kagan, “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” the January 2007 study that outlined the Iraq surge strategy.

The onset of the information campaign came close behind Porter’s forecast. On Sunday, February 8, Tom Ricks captured the airways and the headlines, appearing on Meet the Press as the first of his two part series on the stratagem behind the surge strategy appeared in the Washington Post. Ricks’s new book on the surge hits the shelves, not surprisingly, on Tuesday February 10. Full Story »

Parts I and II of the “Ministry of Truth and Peace” series described the Pentagon propaganda program that the Department of Defense inspector general didn’t judge to be a propaganda program because he couldn’t find a definition of “propaganda.” Part III examines how one retired military media analyst made a killing from our woebegone war on terror.

Retired military media analysts aided the Pentagon’s propaganda campaign in support of the Bush administration’s wars for a variety of reasons. The analyst with the broadest motivations was undoubtedly retired Army four-star Barry McCaffrey, who exemplified the confluence of Big War, Big Bucks, Big Message, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze in the new American century. Full Story »

Part I described how the Pentagon’s use of retired military media analysts to funnel propaganda through the mainstream media fit into a larger operation aimed at rewriting history as it happened.

On January 16, the Friday before Barack Obama’s inauguration, the Defense Department inspector general released the report of an investigation of the Pentagon’s Retired Military Analyst program. The report stated that, “the evidence in this case was insufficient to conclude” that the program had “violated statutory prohibitions on publicity or propaganda,” because “the definition of propaganda in this context remains unclear.”

Miriam-Webster OnLine defines propaganda as “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.” In April 2008, an in-depth investigation by the New York Times revealed that the RMA program had employed retired military officers in a “campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.”

So all that really remains unclear in this context is why the I.G. didn’t look up the definition of “propaganda.” Maybe that was outside the scope of his investigation. Full Story »

It’s fitting that as young Mr. Bush exited the world stage, the military pardoned itself for lying about his woebegone wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. A report released on January 16 by the Pentagon’s inspector general stated, “we found the evidence insufficient to conclude that RMA (retired military analysts) outreach activities were improper,” and concluded that further investigation into the matter “was not warranted.”

The RMA program flew under the radar until an April 2008 New York Times article revealed that the Pentagon had recruited media military analysts for a “campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.” The article discomfited the Pentagon I.G. office into launching an investigation of the RMA program—nearly six years after it had been initiated. The I.G. report, posted on the Pentagon’s web site the Friday before the inauguration so everyone would be sure to notice it, explained, “the evidence in this case was insufficient to conclude” that RMA activities “violated statutory prohibitions on publicity or propaganda,” but conceded that the judgment had been difficult to arrive at because “the definition of propaganda in this context remains unclear.”

So it all depends what your definition of “propaganda” is. I feel the I.G.’s pain, don’t you?

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In December 2008, Joe Klein of Time magazine called the war in Afghanistan an “aimless absurdity.” Our new president is onboard with committing 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, despite the fact that the Pentagon isn’t certain what to tell the additional troops to do there or even what kind of troops it wants to send. According to the Washington Post, “the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like ’surge’ of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.”

So why are they executing an Iraq-like “surge” of forces? Full Story »