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.”

Ricks continues to exalt General David Petraeus, who he has known since Petraeus was a colonel or a light colonel (Ricks says he can’t remember which). Ricks became King David’s chief legend maker when the Iraq surge began in January 2007. In a radio interview that month on WNYC in New York, Ricks described Petraeus as a “fascinating character” and “just about the best general in the Army.” He specifically cited Petraeus’s “very successful first tour” as commander in Mosul after the fall of Baghdad, but made little mention that the general tamed the city by handing out guns and bribes, and that months after Petraeus left Mosul the chief of police defected and the place went up for grabs again. (Mosul remains a major trouble spot to this day, and Petraeus is still arming and bribing militants.)

By August 2007 Ricks was waxing giddy over Petraeus’s persona. On NPR he called the general “a force of nature,” and gushed as he described the sight of Petraeus engaging in pushup contests with privates less than half his age. A veteran Pentagon reporter like Ricks should have seen the pushup prank for the used chicken feed it was, but by then Ricks was already sleeping in the general’s field cot.

Freud would have a field day with some of Ricks’s latest disclosures. In The Gamble, Ricks flat out admits that Petraeus deceived Congress (and betrayed the country) by telling the House Foreign Affairs committee he aimed to create “conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage.” Petraeus’s plan all along, Ricks confesses, was “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” How does Ricks view this Promethean abuse of power and trust? “”The surge was the right step to take,” He says. It was “the least wrong move in a misconceived war.”

The “least wrong move” mantra might carry Petraeus’s water if Ricks backed it up with a sound argument, but his justifications are a logic lizard that consumes itself from the tail forward. Ricks warns that if we leave Iraq, things will almost certainly go back to the way they were under Saddam Hussein. But he also asserts that things are worse in Iraq then than they were before we invaded because “Saddam was kind of an aging, toothless tiger” and “wasn‘t a threat to anybody.” So we have to stay to keep things from getting better.

Ricks also echoes the ghost story that if we leave Iraq, a regional war is a “live possibility.” None of the countries in that region are capable of projecting conventional force much beyond their own borders, and the only nation in that part of the world capable of nuking anyone else is Israel. Terrorists organizations are already in place and we’ve seen what they can do, which is nothing compared to the havoc we have wrought with our preemptive delusions.

Ricks judges that it was “quite noble” of surge proponents like Ambassador Ray Crocker who “allegedly opposed the initial invasion of Iraq” to “step into something they thought was a mistake.” As if deliberately perpetuating a mistake could ever be a noble thing.

Ricks has evolved into such an incorrigible bull feather merchant he’s taken to lashing out at anyone who presents a viewpoint different from the one he and his masters are shilling. He decries refutations of his rhetoric as “personal” attacks, and harangues his critics with angry emails. At the Firedoglake forum, a guest asked Ricks to comment about criticisms of Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our new commander in the Bananastans, made recently by my colleague Gareth Porter. Ricks replied, “If Gareth Porter is reporting it, then it’s probably wrong. ‘Nuff said?” (“’Nuff said” is one of those macho expressions guys like Ricks use when they want to sound like Ralph Peters.)

I am familiar enough with Porter’s methods to know he practices sound journalism. Ricks, on the other hand, has succumbed to the access poisoning that has plagues most of the mainstream Washington media. He spent decades courting inside sources. They have now become the movers and shakers of the American hegemony, and he is their court stenographer. The most blatant example of this was his “transformation” of General Ray Odierno from the raging ox whose incompetence was the main cause of the insurgency to the genius who “conceived and executed” the surge strategy “by himself in Baghdad.” The sources of this revelation were Odierno’s subordinates and mentors and Odierno himself.

In response to an Antiwar.com piece criticizing Ricks and his colleagues at the Center for a New American Security, Ricks growled: “This is what happens when someone writes about an area about which they know absolutely freaking nothing.” What Thomas E. Ricks knows about national defense he learned from a flock of and tank thinkers and Pentagon desk rangers who don’t know their centers of gravity from their elbows. If Ricks limits himself to writing what he knows about, we’ll never hear from him again.

Let’s hope that happens real soon.

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.

]]> http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2009/05/26/one-ricks-makes-a-wrong/feed/ 5 http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2009/05/18/fort-palooka/ http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2009/05/18/fort-palooka/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 12:11:41 +0000 Jeff Huber http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/?p=9190 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.)

So we’re on track to escalate a war for which the administration admits there is no military solution and continuing to employ attrition tactics that make more new bad guys than they attrite. It’s enough to make Clausewitz claw at his coffin lid.

Here’s how you’re supposed to plan and execute a military strategy. You look at a situation and you decide what kind of political end state you want to achieve. Then you decide if you can formulate a feasible military objective that can accomplish the policy aim. Next you determine the adversary’s center of gravity, which is the thing (or collection of things) he can use to thwart your military plan, and the thing you have to defeat. Only when you’ve done those things do you begin to calculate how many troops you need to accomplish the mission, and after that you start working details like logistics.

But with our Bananastan strategy, we started with logistics and worked our way backwards. In January 2009, the Washington Post reported that the Army was already building $1.1 billion worth of Fort Palookas in Afghanistan to accommodate additional troops, and planned to begin spending an additional $1.3 billion on construction in 2010. That money started queuing up at the hopper well before McKiernan’s request for 30,000 additional troops became public. It’s a cherished military stratagem: throw bad seed money at whatever hooliganism you want; then Congress has to throw good money after it or be labeled as “weak on national security.”

Gates’s bull feather merchants had been making a show of working on a Bananastan strategy when they decided to let the stink roll uphill for a change. As the Post reported, they began “looking for Obama to resolve critical internal debates.” That’s a traditional military leadership technique known in the trenches as “the buck stops there.”

The White House national security team—laughably described by Robert Dreyfus in a recent Rolling Stone article as “Obama’s chess masters”—unveiled a white paper describing its new Bananastan strategy in late March. National Security Adviser James Jones and the rest of the chess club based their plan on “realistic and achievable” objectives that are fantastic and unattainable. We cannot, as they suggest, make stable governments in Afghanistan or Pakistan. “Increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces” is a pipe dream that, even if it comes true, would simply give us one more armed outfit in the region that we can’t control. Their initiative for “involving the international community” makes one wonder if they’ve been paying attention at all. To hear Gates tell it, everything that’s gone wrong in the Bananastans is NATO’s fault, so why would we want more international involvement?

The most delusional aspect of the new strategy is its “core goal,” which is to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its safe havens.” Modern terrorists need safe havens like dolphins need power tools. The only sanctuary they need to plan and coordinate their operations is a pocket large enough to conceal an iPhone.

The white paper makes no mention of centers of gravity, critical strengths and vulnerabilities, measures of effectiveness, decisive points, courses of action, lines of operations, or any other term that belongs in a proper strategy involving military action. It contains a host of trendy platitudes about a “new way of thinking” and “building a clear consensus.” The paper even has talk of bringing non-military forms of power to bear, as if that’s something new. Information, diplomacy and economy were key elements of warfare long before Thucydides and Sun Tsu wrote on the subject around 400 BCE. And make no mistake; when a foreign policy action involves shooting people and blowing things up, it’s not “economic assistance” or “education and training.” It’s “war.”

When a strategy’s aphorisms morph into non-sequiturs, you know none of the think tankers involved with the project was doing any thinking, new or otherwise. “A strategic communications program must be created, made more effective, and resourced,” the chess set tells us in its white paper. I wonder which they’ll do first: create the program or make it more effective.

I’ve said before that in order to put an end to the American security state, Obama needs to order every military officer from the full bird level up to retire. It is now clear that he also needs to purge the defense apparatus of its thundering flock of foreign policy wonks. It may be that the generals and tank thinkers driving our ship of state will drop dead from brain hemorrhage before they make America the latest superpower to embalm itself in Afghanistan, but don’t count on it.

I doubt if Obama will do what needs to be done. Look on the bright side, though. Athens produced most of the art and philosophy that defined western civilization only after it lost its wars with Persia and Sparta, so maybe America can still become Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”

If we do, we’ll need a new generation of strategists who know that it’s better to charge down a hill than up one.

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.

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.

In an April 18 NPR interview, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the pirate problem “It’s not just a military solution here.” As you’d probably guess, Mullen is also a USNA grad. It’s never just a military solution, Mike. Even World War II involved economy, diplomacy, information and other forms of soft power.

The Navy will never again have a peer competitor like the Imperial Japanese Fleet to contend with for control of the great oceans, and it has been so desperate to play a role in the war on ism that it plucked career aviators out of shore duty assignments to deploy to Iraq as part of Army counter-explosive teams. Yet, incredibly, when faced with the prospect of having to counter the only maritime threat in existence—teenage pirates—the top naval officers in our land flip their palms skyward and whine, “It’s not our job.”

It’s time to start asking why we have a navy.

Only once in a month of blue moons do I rest an argument on my expertise and authority. But as I’ve said before, two carrier strike groups—with their self-contained airborne early warning, fixed wing surface search, rotary wing lift, special forces, surface combatant and command and control capabilities—could, properly employed, shut down the pirate pranks faster than you can say Arr, Jim Boy. Anybody who tells you otherwise is wrong.

Using carrier strike groups to battle teenage pirates sounds like overkill, but what better things have the carriers got to do? Blow the smithereens out of Afghan civilians? Do manly air-to-air combat with Taliban MiGs? Oh, that’s right…the Taliban doesn’t have any MiGs. It doesn’t have an air force at all, or a navy, for that matter. It can barely be said to have an army, even though it’s doing a pretty good job of mopping up in Pakistan.

The argument that carriers are too expensive to use against teenage pirates is specious. We always have at least two carrier groups deployed, peacetime or wartime. They’ll cost just as much chasing pirates as they do drilling holes in the sea and sky.

Emblematic of our national security state is that even though aircraft carriers presently contribute goose eggs to our national security, Congress has approved the purchase of a new class of aircraft carrier that will cost twice as much to make as the old class. The Navy justifies the additional up front cost with the promise of future savings in operating and maintenance costs. When the future arrives, of course, the savings will have will have vanished like the apple pies on Aunt Polly’s windowsill. To make things even more preposterous, the new class of carriers will be named after Gerald R. Ford. What, they had to settle for Ford because Mad magazine wouldn’t give up the copyright to Alfred E. Neuman? I suppose if they ever get their cockamamie flying submarine off the drawing board they’ll name it after Joe Lieberman.

Events at sea are only relevant as they affect events on land; but Broadhead, Mullen and those who think like them are asserting that we need to send force ashore to affect events at sea. An April 13 Bloomberg story reported that the U.S. military was considering “attacks on Somali pirates’ land bases.” Neocon tank thinker James Carafano says, “There really isn’t a silver-bullet solution other than going into Somalia and rooting out the bases.”

The problem with all this talk of rooting out pirate bases with silver bullets is that modern pirates need “bases” like modern terrorists need “sanctuary.” Today’s evildoers, fanatic or piratical, can plan, direct and finance their operations from an iPhone. Good luck rooting out all those things with preemptive deterrence.

Exploiting an opportunity to resolve a national security issue at sea avoids a host of difficulties associated with use of force in a sovereign nation. Navies have an inherent right to occupy international waters, whereas armies have to jump through a jungle of legal and moral hoops to pitch tents in somebody else’s campground. Invading another nation requires a declaration (or capitulation) some sort from Congress and it’s a good idea to get a mandate from the U.N. too. Laws are already in place for combating piracy.

You don’t need to get the New York Times to print a phony baloney reason why it’s important to fight pirates. It doesn’t matter if pirates were or weren’t involved in 9/11 or what they are or aren’t up to with their nuclear program. You can whack them just because they’re pirates committing piracy. There’s a very low risk of collateral damage from a Navy sniper shooting a handful of pirates in a dingy. Compare that to the risks involved when you carpet bomb a Somali village on the chance that the head assistant evil one you’re targeting showed up for the wedding like your bad intelligence said he was going to.

Of course, the top brass may not consider teenage pirates much of a threat to national security after all. Mullen says it’s up to merchants to pay for their own protection, but they don’t want to do that “because it costs them too much money.” If they don’t want to hire Blackwater to guard their ships, let ‘em go fish, eh Mikey?

That makes a certain amount of sense except that Mullen also says “it’s about what the international community is going to do with respect to Somalia. So Mullen wants to have a sort of Global War on Piracy (GWOP), I guess. Funny how we go it alone when we want to but it takes a global village when we don’t.

And if Mullen doesn’t give a sailor’s first night in port whether we deal with the teenage pirate threat or not, how come he told the pod people who host ABC’s Good Morning America that the military has initiated a review to look “broadly and widely and deeply” at the pirate problem. “We’ve actually been focused on this issue for some period of time and set up a task force out in that part of the world last fall,” he told the pod people. “We’ve had a focus on it,” he said. The pod people nodded. “There are many, many people working on it right now,” he said. The pod people smiled.

I wonder if Mullen’s nose popped out of joint when Smart Power poster girl Hillary Clinton announced that she too had been broadly and widely and deeply looking at this issue for some period of time, and that many, many people in her State Department were also working on it. Between DoD and DoS, it sounds like many, many, people indeed are focusing on a solution to what Hillary, old salt that she is, calls the “scourge of piracy.”

A committee that size is guaranteed to come up with a counter-piracy strategy that looks like something along the lines of a seagoing giraffe.

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.

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.

The warmongery that controls the Pentagon and Congress never did take any of that Iraq withdrawal timeline jive seriously. Defense secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, National Security Adviser James Jones, “King David” Petraeus and Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno are all on record as having said withdrawal timelines are a bad idea. Odierno has, through Petraeus publicist Tom Ricks, broadly expressed his desire to see 35,000 or more troops in Iraq through 2015, Status of Forces Agreement and Obama campaign promises be damned. Early in April, Odierno put out the word that he might ignore the June 30 deadline for U.S. troops to leave Iraqi cities, and it looked like another domino was about to drop in the Pentagon’s “hell no, we won’t go” strategy. Then Maliki said “not so fast,” and told Babe Odierno to have his troops out of Mosul and the rest of the cities by the end of June and that they couldn’t go back without a hall pass.

Two aspects of this event should shock every American. First is that Odierno, who is four levels down in the chain of command (under Obama, Gates and Petraeus) announced he might unilaterally abrogate an occupation arrangement agreed to at a level higher than his. Second, and perhaps more alarming, is that the only guy who threw the bull plop flag about it was the prime minister of the occupied country. Nobody in the White House or Congress did anything but put palm prints on the seats of their pants. The military’s take over of America is now so complete that the Buck Turgidsons and Jack D. Rippers can do whatever they want and the rest of the body politic demurs as if it’s the Pentagon’s Constitutional right to dictate policy to the executive and the legislature.

There’s one political journalist, though, who’s willing to pretend the Obama administration hasn’t been rolled flat by the military industrial cash caisson. With his article in the May 14 edition of Rolling Stone, Robert Dreyfus has become for Team Obama what Tom Ricks is for Team Petraeus and what Joseph Goebbels was for you-know-who. “Obama’s Chess Masters” is as a stunning a piece of White House propaganda as anything Dick Cheney’s minions ever filtered through the New York Times. “The president has assembled a trusted circle of advisers to oversee all aspects of national security from the White House,” Dreyfus blares in the lede. “It’s the most centralized decision-making I’ve ever seen,” one source tells him. G.W. Bush let Cheney and Rummy run the show and make all the decisions, Dreyfus reports, but not Obama. No sir. Obama is the, uh…decider in this administration.

Dreyfus manages to make Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller of the New York Times look like real journalists in comparison. His sources include “a well-connected defense and intelligence consultant,” “a senior Capitol Hill staffer,” “an insider,” “several insiders,” “one veteran of both the State Department and the Pentagon” and—perhaps the most credible voice in the article—“the Washington rumor mill.”

The piece’s named sources are so blatantly sleeping in the commander in chief’s tent that Dreyfus might as well have just asked Michelle who she thought was running the show. Leslie Gelb, who hasn’t been right about a single aspect of U.S. foreign policy from Vietnam on, avows that, “They’re making decisions there, at the White House. On everything.” Dreyfus paints National Security Adviser Jones as the kind of hard-boiled hawk the neocons better not mess with. “He’s pro nuclear” Dreyfus relates. “He likes oil drilling.” As if those right wing crackers credentials weren’t sufficiently malignant, Dreyfus throws in “He was on the boards of Boeing and Chevron.” Shudder.

William Cohen, whose chief accomplishment as Bill Clinton’s defense secretary was to hide in his office while his generals cocked up the Kosovo War, testifies that during his tenure he wanted James Jones on his team because “he knew where the bodies were buried, and I wanted to make sure that mine wasn’t among them.” It sounds like Cohen is still afraid enough of Jones to play ball with Obama’s spin merchants and make the guy sound like a Cheney-class leg breaker. Scary, huh kids?

From Dreyfus himself (supposedly) we hear that “The foreign policy vision that animates Obama and his team might be described best as a ‘Goldilocks’ approach: not too hot, not too cold. It’s a just-right philosophy.” Jesus, Larry and Curly. Do you think they had to waterboard Dreyfus to get him to paste that piffle into the article?

All this smoke about Obama’s national security team being large and in charge would be well and good except that they’ve already revealed themselves to be a team of bus riding Bozos. Their most spectacular pratfall has been their mumbling, bumbling, tumbling, fumbling Bananastan strategy. Get this:

During the campaign, Obama screws up and says that whatever success the surge in Iraq might have had (it really had none), it got in the way of putting enough troops into Afghanistan to “get the job done.” The Pentagon’s long war mafia chortles with glee, and the next thing you know, David McKiernan, the general in charge of the Bananastan bungle, says he needs at least 30,000 more troops for five more years or so. Gates and Mullen and the Joint Chiefs say, Yeah, yeah, he really, really needs those troops, give them to him, okay? So Obama asks the Joint Chiefs what they see as the “end game” in Afghanistan and they start staring at something a thousand yards behind Obama’s head. Obama calls McKiernan in Afghanistan and asks him what he plans to do with the 30,000 extra troops and McKiernan says, “Hey, somebody’s at the door.”

Then Obama hunkers down with his chess club, and they decide that the best compromise between doing nothing to doing something stupid is doing something half-baked. Obama agrees to send McKiernan a little over half the troops he wants—17,000—and tells his team to come up with a strategy for the generals who are apparently so busy fighting wars they can’t be bothered with planning them.

On March 17, Obama’s national security team releases the new strategy for the Bananastans; it’s an eye-watering compendium of fog, friction and humbug. It features an array of “realistic and achievable objectives,” none of which are realistic or achievable or particularly connected to national security.

The New York Times quoted “A dozen officials who were involved in the debate” as saying the new strategy does not involve nation building, even though its aims include things like “promoting a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan” and “developing increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces” and “assisting efforts to enhance civilian control and stable constitutional government in Pakistan.” You know—nation building. The strategy also speaks of denying al Qaeda and other Islamofabulists “sanctuary” from which they can launch terror attacks. The notion that evildoers need a physical sanctuary is quainter than a tea cozy. Given the global proliferation of cheap communication equipment and even cheaper extremists eager to blow themselves to smithereens, the top terror guys can plan and execute attacks from a bleacher seat in the Himalayas or the Cannes Film Festival or the far side of the moon.

As Obama transitions from his 100-day honeymoon into his permanent bubble, I can’t help but wonder whether he knows he’s surrounded by fools and fanatics or if he’s been in the puzzle palace long enough now to have become as puzzled as everyone else in it.

Does he take what his loonies say seriously? I really want to think he puts on an elaborate show of listening to what they say, then shoos them out of the office, and calls up guys like al Maliki and says, “Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”

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.

– 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.

Niccolo Machiavelli, who served as secretary to Florence and had extensive dealings with the infamous Caesar Borgia, is probably history’s premier political scientist. Machiavelli insisted that “A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline.” So we can see that the guy was no hand-wringing peace pansy. Conversely, however, he said of war that, “a well established republic or kingdom would never permit its subjects or citizens to employ it for their profession.” Machiavelli asserted that, “…as long as [the Romans] were wise and good, never permitted that their citizens should take up this practice as their profession.” It was only when Pompeii and Caesar established the institution of Emperor as professional warrior that Rome’s republic began to erode. Eventually the army’s elite Praetorian Guard “became formidable to the Senate and damaging to the Emperor” and “gave the Empire and took it away from anyone they wished.”

In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned America to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by the “military industrial complex” for the same reason Machiavelli cautioned heads of state of his day to beware of advisers who “in times of peace, desire war because they are unable to live without it.” In ’61, Eisenhower admonished that the “economic, political, even spiritual” influence of America’s new war industry was “felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.” A decade into the new American century, militarism has woven itself into the very fiber of our society. Political careers and regional economies are wholly dependent upon it. The defense industry has transformed America into warfare welfare state, and it doesn’t bother making a secret of it.

Witness the recent uproar over Secretary Robert Gates’s proposed defense budget “cutbacks” that are actually an increase. Lipstick neocon Joe Lieberman led the protest over Gates’s refusal to expand the F-22 stealth fighter purchase. At $360 million a pop, the F-22 is a cold war albatross that was designed to go toe-to-toe with the Russkies in the skies over Europe. Now, its mission involves air-to-air combat against jumbo jets armed with box cutters; but it’s built in Joe’s state of Connecticut, so it’s of vital importance to national security.

Even more deplorable than the persistence of Lieberman and other congressional war mongrels at investing in what defense analyst William Lind calls “a military museum” is their willingness to let the Pentagon dictate policy. From the beginning of our Mesopotamian mistake, the generals, supposedly, were calling the shots. When then Army chief of staff Eric Shinseky said we weren’t taking enough troops into Iraq, then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld handed him a Purple Heart for the bruise he got where the door hit him on his way out. From then on, all the generals said we didn’t need any more troops in Iraq than we already had there, so we didn’t need any more troops in Iraq.

Then the GOP lost the 2006 election, and Rumsfeld got his Purple Heart. Young Mr. Bush decided it was time to go on a surgin’ safari, and General David Petraeus signed on to play Bwana. Even the once credible Thomas E. Ricks, who has done more than anyone to exalt Petraeus, admits that his idol has been pulling a confidence game on the American Congress and public since he assumed command of forces in Iraq. In a February 2009 Washington Post article, Ricks wrote that Petraeus’s agenda was “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” Congress, the public, and Petraeus’s critics in the military largely failed to recognize what he was up to, mainly because he patently misled them when he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “We’re after conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage.”

He was, in fact, after conditions that would never allow his soldiers to disengage, at least not during his lifetime, and possibly not during theirs. Throughout his tenure in Iraq—first as commander in Mosul (where he made his reputation as a counterinsurgency “genius” thanks to Ricks’s fabrications), then as the general in charge of training Iraqi security forces, and finally as commander of international forces in Iraq—Petraeus has achieved short term results by handing out guns to everybody and bribing them not to use the guns against U.S. troops or Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki’s forces. As a result, Ricks admits, “we have poured “a lot of gasoline on the fire,” and if we leave, “it will be much worse than it was when Saddam was there.” So we can never leave.

What Petraeus deserves for his perfidy would cauterize his exit ramp. He has been, instead, elevated to five-star deity status. David Petraeus is the Douglas MacArthur of the 21^st century—a general so dangerous that he challenges the commander in chief’s constitutional authority. As MacArthur did with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, Petraeus poses the threat of challenging Barack H. Obama for his job come the next general election. Don’t think for a minute that a Petraeus/Palin ticket is too absurd to come to pass. Look what’s happened so far in the new American century.

In April 2008, Mr. Bush announced that his “main man” Petraeus would be the decider of when and how U.S. troops would withdraw from Iran, and “King David,” now in charge of Central Command, has been the de facto commander in chief of the U.S. military ever since. Now, President Obama’s decisions must be sanctioned by Petraeus and the rest of the long war generals.

Petraeus, his pet ox Ray Odierno and Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen all publicly opposed withdrawal timelines (and the Obama candidacy) during the 2008 presidential race. Individually and as a group, they have waged an information campaign to desensitize the American public to the reality that their country may always be ensnared in counterproductive wars. Babe Odierno is on record as wanting to keep more than 30,000 troops in Iraq until 2015 or so. If you’re watching, you’ll see that they’re blaming the resurgent violence in Iraq on the pending withdrawals from Iraqi cities, i.e. the “timelines.” When the 2012 political season rolls around, the reasons we’re still in Iraq will be as slippery and amorphous as the reasons we invaded in the first place.

The Petraeus patrol is steering us into the same trap in the Bananastans, and President Obama either doesn’t see that the road ahead looks identical to the one in the rear view mirror, or he figures he’s powerless to reverse America’s vector toward self-immolation, or he’s dumber than he looks, or he just doesn’t care.

These generals of ours, whose authority is too formidable for either the president or the Congress to oppose, don’t have a clue how to win their wars. They don’t know their centers of gravity from their elbows, but that’s okay. They’re not supposed to win their wars. In fact, that would be counter to the real objective: to keep the gravy boat afloat and the cash caisson rolling along for as long as they possibly can. That they’re leaving tire tracks all over the Constitution they took an oath to support and defend by subverting the president’s authority matters little to them. Whether they’re Manchurian Candidate true believers, or Orwellian double thinkers, or simply take the Machiavellian position that ends justify means, I just can’t say. I knew officers of all those flavors during my career. I also knew officers of genuine moral vision and clarity (as opposed to the Ann Coulter/Pat Robertson version of moral vision and clarity), but few of them were invited into the generals’ club, and the few who managed to sip past the doorman have by now earned their Purple Hearts the way Shinseki did. The generals we have left lie like other people eat, sleep and go to the bathroom, all for the sake of preserving an institution that will never again have a peer competitor and will never be capable of defeating an ism of any kind.

I believe we still have a window of opportunity to become the “kinder gentler nation” and that “shining city on the hill” of a brave new world order, but the window is dwindling rapidly. Our generals, openly disdainful of their commander in chief and the legislature, have stolen our country. The zombie Republicans in Congress think it’s patriotic to back the generals against the president, and the Democrats have folded like the Chicago Cubs in August.

Obama needs to step up to the plate, fire all of his four stars and that bureaucratic dimwit Gates, and take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

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 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.

Thing are even wackier at the other end of the nut farm. In a December 2008 Weekly Standard piece, Barnacle Bill Kristol suggested that “the Marines would no doubt be glad to recapitulate their origins [on the “shores of Tripoli” during the Barbary Coast wars] and join in by going ashore in Africa to destroy the pirates’ safe havens.” In the same issue, Seth Cropsey also proposed that we address the pirate peril by invading Somalia. “Americans ought to know the limits of relying on naval power alone to stop piracy as a result of the nation’s experience in the Barbary Coast wars,” Cropsey wrote. “Notwithstanding the offshore victories of larger American frigates, a successful conclusion was only reached by combined naval, Marine, and mercenary action that captured the Tripolitan town of Derna.”

Comparing Thomas Jefferson’s Barbary Coast wars to today’s situation in the waters off Somalia is an apples and elephants analogy. The Somali government, such as it is, isn’t demanding “tribute” from the United States, and it’s as likely to get its pirates under control as the Afghan and Pakistani governments are likely to tame the Taliban. Moreover, today’s U.S. Navy isn’t a small fleet of wooden frigates. I’ll repeat this as often as necessary: simply placing two or even just one of our 11 carrier strike groups—with their self-contained wide ocean surveillance, maritime lift, escort, communications and special force capabilities—off the coast of Somalia would shut down the pirate shenanigans faster than you can say avast!

The opinions of Kristol and Cropsey on matters of war and peace are even less credible than Hanson’s. Kristol, Weekly Standard editor and founder of the infamous Project for the New American Century, is a sterling example of how far a boy with a low IQ can ride on his father’s connections and Rupert Murdoch’s money. Cropsey’s credentials as a warfare expert mainly consist of his membership in neocon think tanks like Kristol’s PNAC and its parent organization, the American Enterprise Institute. Still, Kristol and Cropsey have stronger grasps of military and foreign policy matters than their fellow PNAC and AEI denizen Long John Bolton. As the folks at Think Progress point out, Bolton, our former ambassador to the UN, told his chums at FOX News that attacking Somalia would be “the prudential response” to our buccaneer conundrum, just as he said last year that attacking Iran would be “the most prudent thing to do,” and as he asserted in 2002 that we were on a “prudent course” with Iraq.

In a saner American century, the likes of Hanson, Cropsey, Kristol, Bolton and the rest of the war clowns would have been laughed off the world stage years ago. Bathetically, in the American century we have, the masses, washed and unwashed, take them as seriously as they take professional wrestling and TV evangelists.

According to an April 13 Bloomberg story by Jeff Bliss, unnamed “defense officials” say “The U.S. military is considering attacks on pirate bases on land.” One can’t help wonder what kind of bases the U.S. military thinks the pirates have: the ones Dr. Evil left behind when Austin Powers chased him out of Africa? I can guarantee you their “bases” look nothing like the embassy we’re building in Baghdad. Somali piracy is a direct result of abject Somali poverty. That’s why the pirate they captured on the recent caper is only 16 years old.

Hey. What do Somalis call a 16 year-old pirate? An intern. What does the Pentagon call a 16 year-old Somali pirate? A number two man.

James “Jim Boy” Carafano, a right wing tank thinker at the Heritage Foundation (Bolton, Cropsey and Hanson have Heritage ties as well), told Bloomberg’s Bliss “There really isn’t a silver-bullet solution other than going into Somalia and rooting out the bases.” There isn’t a silver-bullet solution at all, nor are there much in the way of bases to root out, but as we have discussed, there is at least one superior option that hopefully involves doing whatever the Navy comes up with (throwing carriers at the problem) after JCS chairman Admiral Mike Mullen makes the maritime service look “broadly and widely and deeply” at the problem. (“We’ve actually been focused on this issue for some period of time,” Mullen said on ABC’s Good Morning America. “We’ve had a focus on it,” he reassured us. He promised us that, “There are many, many people working on it right now.”)

Neil Livingstone, chairman and chief executive officer of ExecutiveAction LLC, a Washington-based anti-terrorism consultant, told Bliss it’s futile to concentrate anti-pirate efforts solely at sea. “It’s a massive area,” he said. “You can’t patrol all of it.” Livingstone is another security expert who knows nothing about military capabilities. The assets of a carrier strike group or two, directed by E-2C Hawkeye surveillance aircraft, can patrol that area handily.

Unnamed “security analysts,” most likely Carafano and Livingstone, told Bliss “The U.S. should take as its model the 1801 decision by then-President Thomas Jefferson to send a naval force to assault the land bases of Barbary pirates.” Gee, is there a network where all these war mongrels get together and decide on how they’re going to talk us into their next stupid war, do you think?

If they are going to cite historical precedent, they’d serve us better by pointing to more recent case studies. Operation Restore Hope, the Big Daddy Bush and Bill Clinton excursion into Somalia, began in December 1992 as a humanitarian mission and turned into a cluster bomb. That’s what happens when you put boots on the ground in a place you know nothing about. Things didn’t go appreciably better when we paid the Ethiopians to invade Somalia for us in 2006, and the air raids we supported them with reinforced what I said earlier about suitable air strike targets: the best ones our AC-130 gunships could find were Somali villages.

Somalia does not offer tangible military objectives. There are no pirate seaports or forts or barracks to bomb from the air. And if we invade, how do Kristol and the rest of the brown shirt bubbas suppose our Marines will tell the pirates from the other starving Somalis? By their jolly swaggers and the parrots on their shoulders?

Smart Power poster girl Hillary Clinton apparently has “many, many people” working on the pirate issue as well. An April 15 BBC headline read “US unveils plan to tackle piracy,” referring to Hillary’s announcement of her State Department’s new “counter-piracy initiatives” designed to address “the scourge of piracy.” (Arr, and that’s the salty kind of talk we like to hear, Madame Secretary). Hillary’s plan includes four “immediate” steps: 1) sending “an envoy to attend” a meeting, 2) calling “for immediate meetings,” 3) tasking a “diplomatic team to engage” in meetings and 4) directing her team to meet and “work with shippers and the insurance industry.” As silly as they sound, Hillary’s team meetings and make more sense that the standard kill-kill-kill mantra we get from the neocon Kilroys.

I will always maintain that a smooth operator in the back of an airborne E-2C Hawkeye controlling a carrier group’s assets could ensure that any pirate who boards a merchant ship in the in the NPZ (No Pirate Zone) would be mumbling into a Navy SEAL’s gun barrel within hours. But the simplest and cheapest way to tackle the piracy scourge might be for all ships transiting the POA (Pirate Operating Area) to pull up their metal boarding ladders and stow them on deck. You can count the number of Somali pirates who are really, really motivated to swing a grappling hook over a gunwale then climb hand over hand up the side of a pitching ship on the fingers and toes of a porpoise.

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.

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).

Alas, the people who wear four stars who are presently in command of our wars seem to believe body counts are a perfectly good measure of effectiveness. We hear reports all the time from the Pentagon about the deaths of more evil doing number two men than you can take a number one on, but very little comment about how, given our proclivity for collateral damage, we manage to make two or more new evildoers for every number two evildoer we do in.

My cyber bud who lost soldiers in war informs me that the “metrics of success in Small Wars are things like who collects the taxes, who runs the Courts, and who teaches the kids in the little villages and in the neighborhoods of the large cities.” In a saner American century, other countries’ taxes and courts and schools were their business, and if we stuck our nose in that kind of business, we did it with the Peace Corps, not the military. In the American century we have now, faux scholars of war use things like numbers of “soccer balls handed out to neighborhood kids” and “little Afghan girls going to school” to tout the “success” of COIN, or counterinsurgency, or what in that saner century we called being the world’s mommy.

I wonder if it will ever occur to my friend with the lost soldiers that if “lowest number of casualties ever” sounds like a win, bringing all the soldiers home and having no casualties at all would be an absolute rout. Interestingly enough, at the end of the discussion thread in question, my leader of lost soldiers noted that what “General [David] Petraeus and his brain trust” did to win in Iraq was the “antithesis of ‘body count,’” apparently having forgotten that he started the discussion by saying a favorable body count was the criteria by which we’ve “won” in Iraq. Maybe he got confused. So many people do that these days.

Defense secretary Robert Gates, America’s number two man in charge of losing soldiers, seems confused about the surge and General Petraeus as well. In a September 2008 press conference, as Petraeus ascended from commander of forces in Iraq to head of all Central Command, Gates called the general the “hero of the hour” for presiding over the “remarkable turnaround” of Iraq. Gates also used the opportunity to tell the press, “Let’s continue to listen to the commanders in terms of the pacing of these withdrawals so that we don’t put at risk the successes that we’ve had.” The commanders, of course, will always say we should withdraw at the pace of a very sick snail.

Journalist and Petraeus idolater Thomas E. Ricks may be confused about his hero’s merits, but his assessment of the surge is spot on. Ricks slipped Freudian at length about it in a February 2009 interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. We’ve armed the militants “to the teeth” he said. We have “trained and organized” the Shiite dominated army and put the Sunni insurgency “on the payroll.” Thanks to Petraeus, we have poured “a lot of gasoline on the fire,” and if we leave Iraq, “it will be much worse than it was when Saddam was there.”

In a February Washington Post article, Ricks confessed that Petraeus’s goal with the surge was “not to bring the war to a close” but “simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” Petraeus’s stratagem from the outset, Ricks revealed, was that “The surge itself would last 18 months,” but “what neither [Petraeus] nor Bush had articulated—and what lawmakers, the public and even some high up the military chain of command did not recognize—was that the new strategy was in fact a road map for what military planners called ‘the long war.’”

How lawmakers and the public and some military leaders failed to recognize the surge’s real agenda is understandable. As Ricks also notes, Petraeus testified at open hearings before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the surge’s purpose was to create “conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage.” Petraeus didn’t bother to elaborate that he meant “allow our soldiers to disengage some time in the next American century.”

One would like to think a venerable Pentagon correspondent like Ricks would be outraged by mendacity of this magnitude on the part of the military, but that would be the wrong thing to think. In his latest book, The Gamble, Ricks states unequivocally that, “The surge was the right step to take.”

In a finer century of American journalism, Ricks’s peers would condemn him for endorsing Petraeus’s grand scale abuse of trust and power. But this century’s American journalists seem to agree with that pseudo-liberal popinjay Matthews, who at the end of their February interview on Hardball thanked Ricks and said, “You‘re going to help us learn.”

We live in confusing times; and this century’s American journalists seem confused about a lot of things related to national security. An amusing April 9 New York Times headline read “Standoff With Pirates Shows U.S. Power Has Limits.” The lead paragraph explained “The Indian Ocean standoff between an $800 million United States Navy destroyer and four pirates bobbing in a lifeboat showed the limits of the world’s most powerful military.” A U.S. warship being held at bay by a dinghy is the state of American foreign policy writ small, all right, but after our misadventures in Iraq and the Bananastans, we hardly needed this illustration to see the impotence of America’s military-centric grand strategy. The difference between our pirate pratfall and the bigger wars is that there is a military solution to the pirate pratfall: a single one of our 11 carrier strike groups, with its organic wide area surveillance, escort, lift and special operations capabilities, could shut down the jolly Somali buccaneering quicker than you can say Avast! Unfortunately, all 11of the carrier groups are occupied with things like dropping bombs and cruise missiles on Muslim weddings.

Whether they contribute to national security or not, all 11 carrier groups will stay in the arsenal until at least 2040 according to the defense budget proposed recently by Secretary Gates. Gate’s budget proposal is another national security issue this American century’s journalists are totally at sea about.

The New York Times, the newspaper that has been America’s propaganda portal of record since it helped Dick Cheney sell the invasion of Iraq, is talking about Gates’s “cuts to an array of weapons” that include the “cancellation of the F-22” stealth fighter. Gates hasn’t actually proposed a “cut” to much of anything. In most cases, he’s merely asking Congress not to give more money to questionable big-ticket projects than have already been allocated to them. The F-22 won’t go away. Lockheed will still make four more of them by the end of 2011 to bring the total buy to 187, as previously arranged, and nothing Gates recommends shuts off the possibility of ordering more F-22s after the present contract has been filled. That’s pretty much the way it is with everything Gates has supposedly “cut.” He’s just kicking the can down the street, a trick that weapons industry friendly defense secretaries have been pulling since President Dwight Eisenhower warned us they were pulling it in his 1961 farewell address.

No one is paying attention to the most far-reaching tenet of Gates’s proposal, his commitment to “completing the growth in the Army and Marines.” The only reason for growing a larger Army and Marine Corps is to continue to squander them throughout the eastern hemisphere in a type of war that the best available study done by the world’s finest national security analysts concludes should be pursued with “a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.”

In The Prince, his seminal work on the nature of power in 16^th century Italy, Niccolo Machiavelli acknowledged that the fall of Rome came about largely because emperors like Commodus (the bad guy in the movie Gladiator) couldn’t keep their army under control. Keep that in mind when you read about things like General Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno’s recent decree that he may ignore the Iraq Status of Forces Agreement withdrawal timeline.

A decade from now, Chris Matthews will ask a round table of “experts” how we let our military maneuver us into a state of ruinous perpetual war. The experts will avoid addressing the question, but the answer will be obvious.

We’ll have spent too much time trying to “learn” from the likes of Tom Ricks.

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.

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.

Ricks might also answer along the line of propaganda operations hinted at by a March 31 New York Times story that leads with “As the American military prepares to withdraw from Iraqi cities, Iraqi and American security officials say that jihadi and Baath militants are rejoining the fight.” Obama’s announced withdrawal timeline, goes the narrative, is what has caused the “new insurgency.” That’s a branch of the original story line that said once we announced a withdrawal date the evildoers would “wait us out.” (“Branches and sequels” are the parts of operational plans that describe what to do when things don’t go according to plan.)

The new narrative argues that Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki wants to mop up on the Sunni Awakening fighters while we’re still around to help him do it. As journalist Gareth Porter notes, Maliki has drawn us into a fight—possibly a long term one—with the very Sunni militants we bribed to stop fighting Maliki and us, and whose cooperation we previously credited for the “success” of the surge. In a saner American century, this would have been the camel straw, the signal that finally, for God’s sake, it was time to roll up our tents and bring our sideshow home, two-headed chicken and all. But in the present American century, where Newspeak and Doublethink have supplanted logic and reasoned discourse, it is all the more reason to stay. As in George Orwell’s 1984, we switch sides whenever necessary in order to keep the war going.

It’s quite possible that all our yesterdays in Iraq will have merely led that country back to the dusky state it was in before we invaded it. Having consolidated his power with backing from us, al Maliki is on the brink of becoming another Saddam Hussein. That too, in the hands of bull feather merchants like Ricks, will become a reason for us to stay in Iraq. We’ll need to keep Maliki from becoming a new Saddam Hussein, or to make sure he becomes a new Saddam Hussein who plays ball with us, or to overthrow the new Saddam Hussein and make sure the next new Saddam Hussein does or doesn’t become like the old new Saddam Hussein and/or the original one.

Don’t think that justifying eternal occupation of Iraq is a cakewalk, though. Using the country’s unraveling as the excuse for staying throws a torpedo into the myth of a successful surge strategy. So first, the spin merchants have to re-revise their own revised history, then they have to plaster over the gash they’ve made in the time space continuum.

Ricks led the charge in that sector of effort. In February, he told NBC’s Chris Mathews that “we have armed to the teeth many Iraqis” and have “trained up and organized a Shiite-dominated army” and “made friends with the Sunni insurgency, put them on our payroll,” so “there‘s a lot of gasoline that Americans have potentially poured on this fire” and if we leave Iraq “it will be much worse than it was when Saddam was there.” On Meet the Press, he told David Gregory “none of the basic problems that the surge was meant to solve have been solved.”

At first blush, that kind of talk doesn’t speak well of General David Petraeus, the Macarthur of Mesopotamia and, according to defense secretary Robert Gates, the “hero of the hour” who presided over the “remarkable turnaround” of Iraq.

Fear not, though, Ricks has King David’s back covered. According to Rick’s new book The Gamble, it wasn’t Petraeus or even neocon luminary Fred Kagan who invented the surge. It was General Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno, the guy Ricks earlier told us was the big dumb slob who made such a mess of things right after the fall of Baghdad with his 4^th Infantry Division and caused the insurgency and the civil war and everything else that went wrong. Sometime after that, according to Ricks, Odie went through a “transformation.” An angel came unto him in the night and gave him an immaculate conception of what a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq ought to look like, or something like that. The important thing is that when there’s anything good to be said about the surge, the warmongery can credit Petraeus (and to a lesser extent Kagan), and when it’s time to tell the truth about it, they can blame the oaf.

It’s important to maintain the illusion of Petraeus as “the best general in the Army,” which was how Ricks described him at the beginning of the surge. That’s because the warmongery needs Petraeus’s clout in mugging President Obama into further escalation of—and entanglement in—the war in the Bananastans. On April Fool’s Day, appropriately enough, Petraeus told a Senate panel that extremists in Pakistan ““could literally take down their state” if left unchallenged, thus endorsing John McCain’s initiative to send an additional 10,000 troops to the Bananastans on top of the 4,000 additional troops Obama just promised to send on top of the 7,000 additional troops he already promised a to send on top of the 38,000 troops already there.

Sadly, even if we have half a million troops in the Bananastans (like we did in Vietnam), they can’t accomplish anything without a coherent strategy, which they still don’t have despite the recent unveiling of Obama’s new Bananastan plan, the tenets of which sound like his policy team stole them from Scientology. The new strategy’s stated objectives include a “capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan” and a “stable constitutional government in Pakistan,” goals impossible to achieve without extraterrestrial intervention. Inexplicably, while these two aims would constitute the reengineering of an entire region’s social structure, presidential advisers who crafted the strategy maintain that it does not constitute nation building. Even more inscrutably, prominent foreign policy analyst Pat Lang agrees that the new strategy avoids “multi-decade nation building.” This observation suggests that Lang has been nipping at the Kool-Aid he accused so many of chugging during the Bush administration or that he’s suffering from the long-term effects of having been a military intelligence officer. It’s hard to say which; the symptoms are nearly identical.

The strategy’s objectives also include “Disrupting terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan to degrade any ability they have to plan and launch international terrorist attacks.” That might be achievable, but it’s not a goal worth pursuing. If evil ones can plan and launch terrorists attacks from a bleacher seat in the mountains on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, they can do it from the other side of the Van Allen radiation belt (and the North Koreans can put them out there now!)

The aspect of the new strategy I find hardest to believe is that none of the goals involve keeping the Islamofabulists from getting control of Pakistan’s nukes or the oil pipeline that runs through Afghanistan. Those are the only real national security concerns we have in that region, ones we can decisively address with military power by blowing up the nukes and the pipeline, declaring victory and bringing everybody home.

Alas, that would be counter to the real objective of the neoconservative agenda, which is progressive military entanglement. If you’re not yet convinced that’s what the war mongrels are after, take a look at what their most prominent pundits are saying about Obama’s new strategy. Bill Kristol cries, “All hail Obama!” Kritol’s partner Bob Kagan cheers, “Hats off to President Obama for making a gutsy and correct decision on Afghanistan.” Charles Krauthammer calls the Obama strategy one that you can imagine “John McCain having adopted had he been elected.”

This is the clearest signal I’ve seen to date that America’s collective brain activity has flatlined. Obama’s election was above all a national rejection of the militaristic adventurism of the previous regime. Yet here we are, not only continuing Bush era foreign policy but expanding it, and America is watching it unfold dumbly, like a dazed Jake La Motta, clinging to the top rope and rasping Come on, hit me. Harder.

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.

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.

McKiernan at the time said the additional troops were not a “temporary force uplift,” that we would need to “sustain in a sustained manner” for two to three years, throughout which time we would need to stay “heavily committed.” McKiernan noted that being heavily committed would require about 10,000 more additional troops than the 17,000 Obama had already committed to his theater of operations. (McKiernan had asked for 30,000 additional troops.)

That’s a standard tactic with the generals these days, making sure word gets out when Obama doesn’t give them exactly what they want. The generals’ boss, defense secretary Robert Gates, pulled a similar number recently on Meet the Press when he said the generals would obey the mandate to remove combat brigades from Iraq by August 2010, but if they “had had complete say in this matter, they would have preferred that the combat mission not end until the end of 2010.” Gates and his generals say things like that in the media whenever they can so when things go wrong they or their proxies can claim it was Obama’s fault for not listening to his generals. If the generals put as much thought and energy into winning their wars as they put into duping the American public they wouldn’t have to dupe the American public. But they know how to dupe the American public, whereas…

General McKiernan didn’t mention to anybody why Obama didn’t give him all the troops he asked for at once. That’s not surprising, because the reason was that Obama called McKiernan directly and asked him what he planned to do with all those additional troops, and McKiernan couldn’t give him a coherent answer. This is a good news/bad news scenario. The good news is that Obama only gave McKiernan about half the troops he asked for when he couldn’t say what he’d do if he had all of them. The bad news is that Obama didn’t do what he should have done when he heard McKiernan making the sound of one mouth breathing into the phone: tell McKiernan to pack his bags and come home and bring the 30,000 U.S. troops already in Afghanistan home with him.

In a March 23 interview, Obama said we need an “exit plan” for the Bananastans. He’s apparently been looking for one since a January 28 meeting with Gates, Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When he asked them, “What is the end game?” all he heard in reply was the sound of six mouths breathing.

At that moment, our planning for the Bananastans was standing on its head, facing backwards and advancing to the rear. Before you send extra troops into a fight, you’re supposed to have an idea what you want them to do, and before you come up with an exit strategy for bringing them home, you have to know what you sent them there to accomplish. Like every other human endeavor, war must have a lucid objective. Without that objective, armed conflict is nothing more than extravagant violence. Until Obama announced the new strategy on March 27, the closest he had come to expressing a suitable objective was to ensure the Bananastans “cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States.”

That’s a lovely sounding national security goal that, if achieved, would do nothing whatsoever to improve national security. If you can attack the U.S. from a nosebleed seat in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, you can do it from any point between the Marianas Trench and the Sea of Tranquility. Not even the wet brain trust at the American Enterprise Institute would suggest we can grow a force large enough to occupy that much territory.

Obama’s security team rolled out the official objectives on March 27 and they are, to say the least, stupefying. Even more stupefying is the way the mainstream media is describing them. “A dozen officials who were involved in the debate” told the New York Times that the goals did not involve attempts at nation building. The Times also published the white paper that delineated the strategy’s goals: “promoting a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan” and “developing increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces” and “assisting efforts to enhance civilian control and stable constitutional government in Pakistan.” That’s not just nation building, it’s social re-engineering of an entire region. Moreover, the white paper describes these goals as “realistic” and “achievable,” which they most assuredly are not.

Even worse, the new strategy includes further escalation of our Bananastan bungle by 4,000 more troops and officially expands the conflict into Pakistan. We’re watching a train wreck about to happen, fellow citizens–one that will make our onanism in Iraq look like Hitler’s blitz of Poland. If you can believe the Times, the debate inside the administration pitted military advisers like Gates and Mullen, who said the Afghanistan war effort would be “imperiled” without even more troops, against Vice President Joe Biden, who “warned against getting into a political and military quagmire.” Great Gatsby, if Joe Biden can see through the Pentagon’s shenanigans, someone of Obama’s demonstrated intelligence should be able to.

So why is Obama going along with all of this? Come to think of it, why did Obama go along with the cockamamie relabeling of combat units for Iraq?

As investigative historian and journalist Gareth Porter observed recently, combat brigades will remain in Iraq beyond Obama’s August 2010 deadline through the hocus-pocus of renaming them “advisory and assistance brigades” and assigning a few dozen officers to them who will carry out the advising and assisting. By those rules you can assign a comedian and a hooker to a combat brigade and call it a USO Show.

The odds that this absurdity hasn’t penetrated Obama’s bubble are wafer thin. As Porter points out, the Times revealed the Pentagon’s rename game on 4 December 2008, and later reported that Mullen and Gates discussed this semantic sleight-of-hand with Obama at a meeting in Chicago on December 15. One has difficulty buying that Obama could have forgotten that discussion by February 27, when he publicly announced he’d get the combat brigades out of Iraq by August 2010.

Gates, Mullen, and National Security Adviser James Jones are all on record as being opposed to Obama’s withdrawal timeline. Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno, the general in charge of coalition forces in Iraq, has publicly aired his desire to see 35,000 troops remain in Iraq through 2015. Mullen and Odierno both snickered at the Status of Force agreement’s deadline to have all of our troops home for Christmas in 2011. We’ve built enough infrastructure in Iraq to base 180,000 something troops and as many civilians; none of it will evaporate until well into the next American century.

Speaking of infrastructure, the Army was spending $1.1 billion on new facilities to berth the troops in Afghanistan before Obama took office, and plans to spend another $1.3 billion this year. This is another Pentagon ploy that goes “We already bought the troopers’ tickets for Afghanistan and paid for their hotel rooms, so they have to go and they have to stay when they get there.” Those Pentagon scamps; you couldn’t wring a cogent war strategy out of them with a water board, but when it comes to cooking up stratagems, you can’t beat them with a stick.

The new Afghanistan strategy promises to repeat counterinsurgency tactics employed by General David Petraeus in Iraq. That’s more bad news. Even Petraeus hagiographer Tom Ricks admits that Petraeus, by bribing everyone and arming them to the teeth, merely “poured more gas on the fire,” and the “enemy” is biding its time, waiting for us to leave Iraq, so we have to stay there forever, just like we’re about to get stuck in the Bananastans forever.

It’s hard to say where Obama lies on the continuum that ranges from precocious fool to willing conspirator of the warmongery, but it looks more every day like the change we believed in has changed into the neoconservative agenda for everlasting pointless war.

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.

–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.

As the 2006 elections neared, almost everyone at Defense, including Rumsfeld, was talking about lowering public expectations for Iraq and beginning a drawdown of U.S. presence. Narcissus, however, wouldn’t let young Mr. Bush lose a war that could be lost on his successor’s watch. Levers were pulled, wheels turned, somebody shoved a pie in the Iraq Study Group’s face and, voila, out trotted the surge.

For the longest time we thought neoconservative academic Fred Kagan was the chief architect of the surge. Recently, Thomas E. Ricks told us that the real genius behind the Iraq escalation was David Petraeus’s 300 lb. lapdog Ray Odierno. That assertion required a worm-to-butterfly transformation of Odierno, whom Ricks had earlier portrayed as the bull in the china shop who single-handedly fomented the Iraq civil war. Now Odie’s the Desert Ox.

Whoever actually cooked up the surge, the Joint Chiefs and commander in Iraq General George Casey were dead set against it. But then the dope dealing commenced and the four-stars’ objections faded like the Chicago Cubs. The ground service generals were promised a larger Army and Marine Corps, Casey got the Army chief of staff assignment and Admiral Mike Mullen was promised the chairman’s job.

January 2007 was a key month in American history. On the fifth, the American Enterprise Institute published Fred Kagan’s Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq. On January 10, Mr. Bush announced that he would increase U.S. presence in Iraq by 21,000 troops. On the twelfth, at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain endorsed the surge and became the de facto presidential candidate of the neoconservative movement.

January 2007 was also the month David Petraeus assumed command of international forces in Iraq. Tom Ricks kick started the public image campaign to make Petraeus into a five-star deity, describing the general in the media as a “fascinating character” who was “just about the best general in the Army” and, oh yeah, “quite ambitious.” Ricks noted Petraeus’s “very successful first tour in Iraq in 2003-2004,” referring to his command in Mosul, but did not mention how Mosul collapsed after Petraeus left and the bribes he’d been handing out dried up. That January was also the month the Bush administration promised to provide evidence that Iran was providing arms to Iraqi militants. The administration never did prove those accusations, but that didn’t prevent it from repeating them loudly and often.

One of the loudest Iran bashers was Petraeus, who didn’t even pretend to have credible proof Iran was arming Iraqi militants. Reminiscent of the joke about the man beating his wife, Petraeus simply challenged Iran to prove that they had stopped arming Iraqis. Then Irony cleared its throat: in August 2007 a story broke that in 2004, while in charge of training Iraqi security forces, Petraeus had lost track of 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols that couldn’t have walked anywhere but into the hands of the Iraqi militants Iran was supposedly arming. Irony might also mention that as Petraeus was arming the insurgency, Doctor Conrad Crane and others at the Army War College began work on the new counterinsurgency field manual that Ricks and others would later claim Petraeus “wrote.”

Petraeus pursued an aggressive information campaign that promoted the agenda he shared with the neocons to establish a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. His most outrageous publicity stunt was the March 2007 Baghdad shopping spree he staged for McCain and McCain’s office wife Lindsey Graham. At a news conference, McCain, Graham and other Republicans remarked that they could “mix and mingle unfettered” with Iraqis and that the market reminded them of “a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summer time.” The next day, the New York Times and other sources revealed that Petraeus had put more than 100 of his troops in harm’s way to provide security for a propaganda demonstration supporting the surge strategy and the McCain candidacy.

Admiral Mullen also tried to tip the election toward the GOP. In a July 2008 Joint Force Quarterly article, Mullen wrote that every day, troops asked him questions like “What if a Democrat wins? What will that do to the mission in Iraq?” (Italics Mullen’s.) The article’s title (Irony winks) was “From the Chairman: Military Must Stay Apolitical.”

Also that month, right after Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki agreed with candidate Obama that 16 months would be the right interval for a withdrawal timeline, Mullen warned on FOX News that a withdrawal timeline would be “dangerous.” In his July JFQ article, Mullen wrote that “we [in the military] defend the Constitution” by “obeying the orders of the commander in chief.” He didn’t specify whether he meant obeying all commanders in chief or just the Republican ones, but he didn’t have to. Everybody got the message.

By mid-summer 2008, Petraeus had beaten Admiral William Fallon two out of three falls for control of Central Command, he had hand picked the next generation of Army generals, and young Mr. Bush had announced that his “main man” Petraeus would be the decider of when and if U.S. troops would redeploy from Iraq. Petraeus and his long war generals owned American foreign policy, and they were determined to keep it. Fortunately for them, their best course of action was obvious: they merely had to keep doing what they were doing, which was entrenching America deeper and deeper in to Iraq. If McCain pulled an upset in the election, great, he was already on board. The beauty part was that Obama would have to go along with what the long warriors wanted as well. If he crossed them openly, and things went poorly (which they’re bound to whether Obama follows their advice or not), it would be Obama’s fault for ignoring his generals. Defense secretary Robert Gates turned a nice trick in this vein during a recent interview on Meet the Press. He told David Gregory that the generals would obey the mandate to end the combat mission in Iraq by August 2010, but if they “had had complete say in this matter, they would have preferred that the combat mission not end until the end of 2010.”

Obama played into the long war strategy by insisting he would finish the job in Afghanistan. Now his generals are pushing him into an aimless escalation of that conflict that will likely make us the latest superpower to embalm itself in that part of the world. Nobody in the Pentagon is taking the Iraq Status of Forces agreement’s December 2011 deadline seriously. The ink on the SOF was barely dry when both Mullen and Odierno smirked that “three years is a long time,” and that the situation cold change. Gates claims that Obama himself may force Maliki to renegotiate the agreement. Thanks to Ricks, Odierno is on record as wanting to keep 35,000 or more troops in Iraq through 2015. And if anyone thinks to question the need to sustain these two wars, the long generals can always tell another lie about Iran (like Mullen did recently when he said the Iranians have enough fissile material to make a bomb—they don’t) and claim that our presence in Iraq and the Bananastans is necessary to keep Iran contained.

Our generals are forcing a self-defeating security policy on us for the sake of preserving their institution, which means far more to them than the Constitution they swore to protect or the country they’re supposedly defending. In a finer era of American journalism, editorial pages across the nation would have demanded the forced retirement of every four-star on active duty. Today’s big news media, unfortunately, are either afraid of the Pentagon or in its corner. Congress has been on life support for nearly a decade, and as we have discussed, Obama political constraints are considerable.

It’s up to what few retired or active duty generals of integrity we have left to confront the junta in a very public “have you no sense of decency?” moment.

Unfortunately, that would amount to generals ratting out fellow generals, which would violate their honor code.

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.

Smart Power poster girl Hillary Clinton bombed relations with the Iranians back to the Cheney age when she said that diplomacy with Iran probably won’t work. You can be assured it won’t work if she’s in charge of it. After two days of talks in Egypt and Israel, where she heard “over and over and over again” how worried Arabs and Israelis are about the Persian state, she accused Iran of “fomenting” divisions in the Arab world and seeking to “intimidate as far as they think their voice can reach.” That’s abject hypocrisy coming from the chief diplomat of a superpower that single-handedly placed the Middle East in a state of perpetual turmoil. If Hillary’s remarks were calculated, they were miscalculated. We need a secretary of state who sounds like an intelligent adult, not a two-faced harpy who flies around the world hurling fireballs at straw men. We just had four years of that from Keystone Kondi.

Hillary has confirmed that despite her campaign claim of possessing a foreign policy experience edge over Obama, it was Bill, not she, who was commander in chief during the Clinton administration. Like candidate Hillary, Secretary Hillary feels the need to act tough so the draft dodging neocons won’t call her a girly man. She shouldn’t worry. They’ll call her a girly man no matter what she does. And if she goes into high orbit every time the Arabs and Israelis lie to her about Iran, she’ll never come down to earth.

The neocons will never have anything bad to say about Hillary’s counterpart at Defense. Bill Kristol must have thought he’d ascended into heaven when young Mr. Bush named Bob Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Gates was brought in to serve as a welcome mat for the surge strategy, the key to attaining Kristol’s dream of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. Kristol especially likes having a warmonger around who says even dumber things than he does.

Gates is a grand master of self-contradiction, as he illustrated once again on a recent Tavis Smiley Show. He said that one of the “biggest lessons learned” from the Iraq experience “is if you are going to contemplate preempting an attack, you had better be very confident of the intelligence that you have.” Gates repeated that sentiment several times, then noted that the war in Afghanistan is now his “biggest challenge,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that he encouraged Obama to preemptively escalate the conflict there on the basis of no intelligence at all. We will never have good intelligence on the Bananastans. You can count the number of people who speak both Pashtun and English and can also pass a background check on the toes and fingers of a duck. Our best sources of intelligence on Afghanistan and Pakistan are Afghan and Pakistani intelligence officials. If we’re going to trust them, we may as well believe everything the Mossad tells us.

You’d think Gates would understand that, having been chief of the CIA, but you’d be wrong. Where Hillary made her mark in Washington by clinging to a coattail, Gates built his career as a bureaucratic dimwit the old fashioned way: by not rocking the boat. He “succeeded” as Secretary of Defense by telling Bush what he wanted to hear and being more popular with his subordinates than Rummy was, a feat considerably easier than falling off a log. You do everything General A tells you to do, say everything General B tells you to say, pretend you don’t know General C is tagging his enlisted driver and, by golly, you’re such a military genius the next administration simply has to keep you on for a year or so.

After Admiral William Fallon lost the showdown for control of Central Command, the generals that remained—including Admiral Mike Mullen, now the Joint Chiefs chairman—were all aboard the Petraeus train; there’s nobody left but the long warriors. The way things look now, the Status of Forces agreement won’t amount to a speed bump on the road to eternal occupation of Iraq, and we’ll continue to bury ourselves in the Bananastans whether we cook up a flimsy excuse to be there or not.

In a bizarre turn on the BBC comedy Yes, Minister, our State and Defense secretaries are little more than figureheads for the career military officers who have gained a stranglehold on U.S. foreign policy. I recommended several weeks ago that Obama should order every officer from the full bird level up to submit a request to retire, but he may consider that politically untenable. And if he canned Hillary, oh, my: double, double, toil and trouble!

He can marginalize Hillary by encircling her with advisers and special envoys and such who report directly to him. Hopefully, by the end of Gates’s “year or so,” Virginia governor Tim Kaine will have been succeeded by a Democrat and can take Jim Webb’s Senate seat, freeing Webb to take over at Defense. The best way to “get rid” of King David may be to promote him to Joint Chiefs chairman. The chairman doesn’t have any command authority; he’s merely the president’s top uniformed military adviser. Obama can privately make it loud and clear that he expects Petraeus to have his ten-word advice memorandum to the Oval Office by 5 p.m. every tenth Friday, pronto.

With Petraeus neutralized, maybe—just maybe—Webb or someone like him can begin developing a new generation of generals who don’t believe that defending their country involves keeping it entangled in never ending, counterproductive wars that defeat its economy.

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.

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.

Who’s on First?

As investigative historian Gareth Porter revealed recently, Obama was willing to go along with the full 30,000 troop escalation monty for Afghanistan until the Joint Chiefs admitted they didn’t have an end game in mind and General David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, couldn’t tell him what he planned to do with the extra troops. Back in the day, all those four-stars would have kept smoke grenades handy so they’d have something to blow up the boss’s skirt if he asked a hard question. Things changed over the last eight years. McKiernan must have made the sound of one jaw dropping when he heard a commander in chief ask “why?” Talk about shock and awe.

Defense secretary Robert Gates and his rear echelon commandos have been working on an Afghanistan strategy for dog years and still haven’t hit the dartboard. One segment of the security brain trust thinks the center of gravity in Afghanistan is the Taliban. Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen says the Afghan people are “the real centers of gravity.” Senator John Kerry says the center of gravity in Afghanistan is in Pakistan. Let’s hope Obama stays mindful of Kerry’s track record vis-à-vis winning strategies.

Like most military matters, the center of gravity concept is broadly misunderstood, especially among the military’s top brass. Clausewitz dictated that the center of gravity must be “the point against which all our energies should be directed.” For his admonition to have any meaning, centers of gravity must be related to our objectives. Hence, the enemy center of gravity is the main obstacle between us and our goal and is the thing we must defeat, destroy, annihilate, deceive, bypass, sucker punch, pacify, erode, eradicate, and otherwise put the whammy on in order to achieve victory. Once we formulate a reasonably concrete and achievable goal, the center of gravity becomes relatively easy to identify.

Unfortunately, the “concrete and reasonable goal” factor has been AWOL since the neoconservative movement turned U.S. foreign policy into a radical equation.

We won’t make western democracies out of either of our Bananastans. We won’t eliminate corruption in them. We won’t stem opium production. If we effect regime change we’ll just be swapping out puppets. It’s too late to keep them from becoming failed states because they already are. We might make things so Afghan girls can go to school, but that’s a cockamamie reason for a bankrupt hegemon to wage war, especially given that half the kids in urban America don’t finish 12^th grade.

Young Mr. Obama has said he wants to ensure that Afghanistan—and by extension Pakistan—”cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States.” That at least reflects a legitimate U.S. security goal, which is more than you can say for any of the gas his generals have been passing off as strategic acumen. Unfortunately, as objectives go, it’s so unrealistic as to be downright hallucinatory. If you can launch an attack on the United States from atop the Himalayas along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, you can launch one from any spot on the surface of the earth, or buried beneath it, or floating above it.

We can’t draft enough people to occupy that much territory.

We Don’t Know

We don’t know the enemy. The term “Taliban” describes an array of groups with different leaders. Warlords and drug lords are a whole separate power paradigm: some are aligned with one Taliban or another, some aren’t. The line between good guys and bad guys in the Bananastans is wafer thin; the official governments and their agencies are hardly more than sanctioned gang bangers. Then there’s the average Joe Bananastan who’s just fed up with the U.S. air strikes on all the weddings he goes to. And, oh yeah, none of those people had anything to do with 9/11.

Air strikes have, however, “heightened the threat” of al Qaeda “to Pakistan as the group disperses its cells [there] and fights to maintain its sanctuaries.” That’s according to the New York Times, the newspaper of record whose sources for that factoid were “senior analysts and officials of Pakistan’s main spy service” who “spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency’s policy.”

Great. Caesar’s. Ghost. Anonymous Pakistani intelligence officials are to reliable sources what Pig Latin is to Latin. Equally unreliable and equally anonymous CIA officials recently told NPR that their airstrikes in Pakistan have “decimated” al Qaeda leadership and that they now foresee a “complete al-Qaida defeat” in the region. That’s a remarkable conclusion considering that the CIA’s best sources of intelligence on Pakistan are Pakistani intelligence officials. It doesn’t take a bloodhound to sniff two separate agendas here.

Despite knowing nothing about ourselves and even less about the enemy—Sun Tzu’s recipe for disaster a la king—Obama is going ahead with the Bananastan escalation his feckless generals and defense secretary have recommended. Obama says “the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan demands urgent attention and swift action.” He probably feels pressured to shoot first and think later, but that’s never a good idea. I’m not a world-class military historian, but I’m a fair one, and I know of no instance in war where doing nothing proved to be an inferior course of action to doing something stupid.

The closest thing we have to legitimate security concerns in the Bananastans are that evildoers might get control of Pakistan’s nukes and the oil pipeline that runs through Afghanistan. There’s a very simple military solution to both of those problems: blow up the nukes and blow up the pipeline. Blowing stuff up is the one thing Obama’s generals know how to do real good.

In a March 6 interview with the New York Times, Mr. Obama said he is considering a plan to “reach out” to moderate elements of the Taliban. That’s a fantastic idea, and the best possible way to reach out would be to have our troops line up and shake the hand of each and every one of those mother’s sons and then climb on a plane for home.

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.

– 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.

What’s more, the enabling trainers are likely to be in Iraq past the December 2011 deadline called for by the Status of Forces agreement. Key Pentagon figures who have voiced opposition to any sort of withdrawal timeline include defense secretary Robert Gates, who may be the only civilian officer holder in Washington who understands less about warfare than Joe Lieberman.Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen has said a deadline for withdrawal would be “dangerous,” and National Security Adviser James Jones, a retired Marine general, cautioned that a timeline to leave Iraq would be “against our national interest.” General David Petraeus, as always, has avoided saying much on the subject that might stick to his body armor.Petraeus’s sidekick Ray Odierno, though, says he wants to keep at least 35,000 troops in Iraq through 2015, and the once credible Tom Ricks has echoed this metric over every major information outlet in America.

Both Odierno and Mullen kick started the “a lot can happen in three years” chant as soon as the Status of Forces agreement was signed.It’s evident that no one in the Pentagon considers the SOF and its 2011 benchmark a done deal, and why should they?They’re used to discarding treaties—the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention on Torture—like day-old candy wrappers.The SOF isn’t even a treaty.The Senate never ratified it, so how hard could it be to abnegate?

Time Bandits

The main vector of the warmongery’s timeline argument is that successful military operations can’t be conducted with time constraints.This flies in the face of reality, of course; if military operations didn’t have D-Days and H-Hours, the Normandy invasion would still be on hold.

Gates is probably unaware of this; he is quite possibly the only civilian officer holder in Washington who knows less about warfare than Joe Lieberman.Mullen and Odierno and Jones either a) know that timelines are essential to military operations and are lying or b) they’re as ignorant of the basic tenets of their profession as Gates and Lieberman are. It’s entirely possible that both a) and b) are true.

Ricks himself admits that Petraeus’s task was never to produce a victory in Iraq.He simply needed time, “to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.”In other words, Petraeus needed time to fake us out of demanding a timeline.

Mullen and Gates were both circumspect message managers on last Sunday’s political gab show circuit.On CNN, Mullen said he is “comfortable” with Obama’s withdrawal schedule, but also said he is confident the president will be “flexible” with the timetable if conditions on the ground change.On NBC, Gates admitted that the troops remaining in Iraq will still be in harm’s way, “but at a very different level than in the past,” which is Newspeak for “the troops remaining in Iraq will still be in harm’s way.”Sounding eerily like Mullen, Gates noted that Obama has said he “retains the flexibility and the authority to change a plan or adjust it if he thinks it’s in the national security [interest] of the United States.” Gates and Mullen both gave the impression that renegotiating the Status of Forces agreement would be along the same order of difficulty as getting a pizza delivered from Domino’s.

Both men also stressed the importance of following the advice of the military commander on the scene, who is now Ray Odierno.Thanks to a two-inch thick make-over by Ricks, Odierno has transformed from the raging ox who did nothing right in post-invasion Iraq to the military genius singularly responsible for the surge, so when he says he needs 35,000 troops in Iraq until at least 2015, gee, who’s to say he’s wrong?And oh, Gates made a point of confiding to David Gregory (with the rest of the world listening in) that “if the commanders had had complete say in this matter that, that they would have preferred that, that the combat mission not end until the end of 2010.”So anything that goes wrong after August happened because Obama didn’t listen to Ray of Arabia.

For the moment, Ricks is the chief propagandist of the Iraq Forever movement, but he has capable help from the likes of neocon luminaries Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollock.In a Feb. 25 New York Times op-ed piece, O’Hanlon and Pollock baldly assert “The mission ceased to be a ‘war of choice’ the moment American forces crossed the border in March 2003. Now we have no choice but to see Iraq through to stability.” This is akin to saying that once we board an airplane, we have no choice but to ride it until it runs out of gas and crashes into the sea.Wahoos like O’Hanlon and Pollock never admit that there is a broad menu of sane alternatives to what they propose, the best of which amount to taking control of the airplane, returning to the airport and landing safely.

One hopes that Obama can resist the pressure from the lunatic right to perpetuate the counterproductive occupation of Iraq, but it’s important to note that in his Camp Lejeune speech, he said, “I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.”

Even in the Newspeak Dictionary, you could drive the entire Army and Marine Corps through the distance between intend and shall.

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.

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. A hunch must have told Obama to ask one more question, because he called McKiernan directly and asked him how he planned to use those additional 30,000 troops. McKiernan couldn’t give him a straight answer.

Obama’s hunch must have generated in a Jan. 28 meeting with the Joint Chiefs and Defense Secretary Robert Gates. According to NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, Obama asked his service chiefs “What is the end game” in Afghanistan? His service chiefs replied, “Frankly, we don’t have one.”

In a related story, journalist Robert Dreyfuss reports that Danielle Pietka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, worries that Afghanistan is a “war that we may walk away from.” This remark came at a Feb. 28 meeting of AEI, the neoconservatives’ home think tank. Tom Donnelly, AEI’s top analyst and former deputy executive director of the infamous Project for the New American Century, hammered the Obama team for “the dumbing down of Afghanistan strategy,” which is a phrase he appears to have stolen from fellow AEI and PNAC luminary Gary Schmitt. It’s hard to tell whether Donnelly and Schmitt know that their chambermaids Gates, Mullen, Petraeus and Kiernan, not team Obama, are the ones pushing for an escalation without knowing what they’re escalating to or what to do with the escalators. They don’t even know which escalators to send. According to the Washington Post, nobody has even decided what kinds of forces to deploy.

At the AEI hobnob, Fred Kagan—who was thought to be the principle architect of the surge until publicist Tom Ricks said the real architect was Petraeus’s pet ox Ray Odierno—expressed concern that the Obama administration is trying to “define success down.” One wonders what Kagan means by that since nobody at AEI, including him, has defined what success in Afghanistan would be at all. Schmitt slams the administration for bandying buzzwords like “realism,” “attainable,” and “end game.” How dare they?

According to Dreyfuss, Kagan hopes President Obama isn’t listening to any of that slacker talk about realistic goals. Kagan hopes Obama listens to Petraeus.

Petraeus is the guy who bribed everybody in Mosul, which went to heck in a handcar when he left. As general in charge of training Iraqi security forces, Petraeus armed the Shiite militias before he left. As top commander in Iraq, he bribed and armed all the Sunni militias before he left. Now Iraq is a more dangerous place than it was before we invaded, so we can never leave or things will go back to the way they were under Saddam Hussein, and while things were better then, to go back to the way things were would be unacceptable after the hard work and sacrifice we’ve put in to make things the way they are now. As theater commander, Petraeus wants to repeat his “successful experiment” in Iraq by bribing and arming Afghan militias so we can never leave there either.

Yeah, Petraeus is just the guy we want Obama to listen to. Thanks for the tip, Freddie.

Obama should stop listening to whoever told him to commit 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Going along halfway with a stupid idea is twice as stupid as taking it hook, line and sinker. And Obama should rendition whoever told him it would be a good idea to step up the air strikes in Pakistan. What, we weren’t pushing enough locals into the arms of the militants as it was?

Our military’s senior officers are either unforgivably ignorant of the basic tenets of their profession or they’ve pawned their integrity for enduring job security through the “persistent conflict” of the “long war.” Whichever is the case, it’s time for a Stalin-esque purge of the Department of Defense. Every officer from the full bird level up should be ordered to submit a request to retire, and all DoD civilians with the word “secretary” in their titles need to submit a letter of resignation. Don’t worry that the folks next in line aren’t ready for greater responsibility. Ike was a light colonel when World War II broke out.

Note to the commander in chief: the people who tell you this is a bad idea are the ones you need to push out the hatch first.

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.

On February 2, foreign policy analyst Gareth Porter revealed that in a January 21 meeting, Petraeus, Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were unable to dislocate President Obama from his 16-month redeployment policy. Porter also reported that a group of senior retired officers were preparing to support Petraeus, General Ray Odierno and their allies by mobilizing public opinion against Obama’s decision. I estimated that support to be part of the larger information campaign that was an integrated effort of the surge strategy from the outset.

D-Day of the latest phase of that information campaign arrived on February 8 when Pulitzer Prize winning Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks launched a series of TV interviews and Washington Post articles to promote his new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. It’s not pleasant to call Ricks out for prostituting his credentials, but you can’t sleep in a general’s tent for years the way Ricks has and pretend not to be a camp follower. Ricks has become for Petraeus what Ned Buntline was to Buffalo Bill Cody: his official legend maker.

In his 2005 book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Ricks painted Petraeus as the only division commander who got it right in post-invasion Iraq. By January 2007, when Petraeus became the new commander of forces in Iraq, Ricks described him in an interview as a “force of nature,” and recalling the sight of the general doing one-arm push ups with teenage privates sent Ricks into a breathless arrhythmia. With The Gamble, Ricks promotes Petraeus to five-star deity. Both Brainiac and action figure, Super Dave defies the establishment and changes the course of mighty strategies to save America from the agony of defeat in Iraq. He’s got a PhD from Princeton, he wears Kevlar, he’s a complicated man—but no one understands him but Tom Ricks, can you dig it? By the time you finish The Gamble, you’ll pray on your knees that Dave Petraeus runs for president in 2012.

Ricks used a crate of lipstick to make Petraeus’s sidekick, General Ray Odierno, look presentable in The Gamble. He savaged Odie in Fiasco: ox-like Odierno is “confused by criticism” that his 4^th Infantry Division, the “worst outfit” in theater at handling prisoners and civilians, is a virtual corps of “recruiting sergeants” for the insurgency. Odierno himself denies an insurgency is in progress, and is the epitome of the dysfunctional leader who doesn’t want to hear the “bad stuff.” But in The Gamble, Odierno has experienced an “awakening.” It is Odierno, more than anyone else, who is responsible for the surge’s success. “White House aides and others in Washington…had nothing to do with developing” the way the surge was executed. Odierno made all those decisions. You can trust Ricks on that score because he got the information straight from source: Odierno.

In fact, almost the entirety of Ricks’s surge saga is told from the perspective of Petraeus, Odierno and the rest of the surgin’ safari. If Ricks picks up another Pulitzer for The Gamble, the inscription should read “best stenography.” Petraeus and Odierno are assisted by crafty retired Army general Jack Keane. Big Jack wields his mighty influence to break down the doors of the Washington bureaucracy, and helps his protégés maneuver around their chain of command to place their surge concept before young Mr. Bush himself. The three wise warriors vanquish a host of fakes, liars, fumblers and meanies, and put their enlightened counterinsurgency scheme to work in Iraq, so gosh, we can’t just give up now that things are going so good. Well, better. Sort of.

In his book, his Post columns and his interviews, Ricks manages to run through the gamut of neocon talking points on why we still need to stay the course, a compendium of doublethink mantras that in real-speak boil down to “Buy our war or we’ll shoot this soldier’s dog” and “Don’t forget to be afraid of Iran.” At the same time, remarkably, Ricks generates a mountain of fog in an attempt to cover the neocons’ tracks.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Ricks absolved the neocons, saying they get “too much credit and too much blame” for Iraq. Nothing was the neocons fault, really. It was that mean old Dick Cheney who duped the public into supporting the war, and that grouchy old Donald Rumsfeld who ran the war so badly. Never mind that Cheney and Rumsfeld were charter members of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon think tank that first publicly called for an invasion of Iraq in early 1998. Ricks makes a single passing mention of the PNAC in The Gamble. That’s a stunning omission when you consider that along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Scooter Libby, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage and many other PNACers also held key positions on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy team. Eliot Cohen is a featured player in The Gamble, a key figure in the selling of the surge and, according to Ricks, the man who told Bush he should make Petraeus the top commander in Iraq. Not once does Ricks note that Cohen is a luminary in the neoconservative constellation and that, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, he was a founding member of the PNAC.

Also noteworthy is Ricks’s glaring omission of any reference to Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the September 2000 PNAC manifesto that delineated the foreign policy the Bush administration would adopt in whole. Unfinished issues from Desert Storm, it said, provided the “immediate justification” for an invasion of Iraq, but the need to establish a large, permanent military footprint in the geostrategic heart of the oil rich Gulf region transcended “the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” 9/11 gave the neocons the “new Pearl Harbor” they needed to launch their scheme, and the rest is history—as rewritten by the likes of Tom Ricks, who is now abetting them in pursuit of their original purpose.

As is the case with all revisionists, you’ll find grains of truth along the path of Ricks’s narrative, just as you’ll find grain in every pile of horse manure. The only honest thing you’ll find picking through Ricks’s prose, though, is the insanity behind the argument for staying in Iraq.

The real secret of Petraeus’s “success” at counterinsurgency is payola. As commander of the 101^st Airborne in Mosul, “he bought everybody off.” The enemy “was just biding its time and building capacity, waiting him out.” When Petraeus left Mosul, it went up for grabs. As top commander in Iraq, Petraeus bought everybody off again, making “a lot of deals with shady guys” who are “just laying low,” so we can never leave, or the whole country will go up for grabs like Mosul did.

Odds are things will be worse if we leave than they were under Hussein, Ricks told NBC’s Chris Matthews. Hussein was a toothless tyrant, but now that Petraeus has “armed everybody to the teeth” it’s too dangerous to get out. We’ve made the Iraqi security forces strong enough that they might attempt a coup if we’re not there to stop them. The surge may have averted a civil war, but one colonel tells Ricks he doesn’t think “the Iraqi civil war has been fought yet,” so we have to stick around so we don’t miss all the fun. As Iraq becomes more secure, it moves backwards. There’s a “long-term trend toward increasing authoritarianism,” so we have to stay in Iraq so things don’t go back to the way they were under Hussein even though, as Ricks just told us, things were better under Hussein than they are now.

Ricks says the surge is a strategic failure because it didn’t bring about the unification government it was supposed to produce. But that’s okay, because an analyst Ricks knows says “power sharing is always a prelude to violence,” so we have to stay in Iraq to make sure we don’t achieve our strategic objective, which will be easy because “the whole notion of democracy and representative government in Iraq” was “absolutely ludicrous” from the get go.

If you’re thinking Petraeus was plotting all along to create a situation we couldn’t extract ourselves from, you’re right. As Ricks notes, Petraeus needed time “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.”

Even Ricks seems uncertain that we’ve seen genuine progress; maybe we’ve actually just “poured more gas on the fire,” he says, and even though the surge is a failure, its “attitude is right” so it was “the right step to take,” and we should continue to support U.S. presence in Iraq because we’ll be there a long time whether we support it or not.

As Ricks explained to David Gregory on Meet the Press, Petraeus and his henchmen have Obama over a barrel. If Obama continues to stand up to them, they’ll accuse him of betraying the troops because of a campaign promise he made to get the peace poofter vote. If things go the way Ricks predicts, the president will fold, the military oligarchy will consolidate its hold on American political power, and the neocons will live to make other people’s sons fight another day because they conned Tom Ricks into covering for them.

How sad it is to see that Thomas E. Ricks, dean of the Pentagon beat, has been pants down, bent-over-the-table seduced by the neoconservative cabal. He is as mad as they are, and as madly in love with their eternal crusade in the Middle East as he is with David Petraeus.

UPDATE: Ward Carroll of Military.com, where I have contributed a weekly column for nearly three years, refused to run this essay.

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.

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.

Ricks gives us an astonishing insider’s look at the machinations behind the campaign to force a “long war” of indefinite occupation on Mr. Obama. Some of Ricks’s narrative sounds wholly credible, some reeks of Orwellian fabrication, and none of it constitutes objective reporting.

In his Sunday piece, “The Dissenter Who Changed the War,” Ricks paints a doubtful portrait of Ray Odierno as the “true father” of the surge strategy. It was Odierno taking all the risks, Ricks assures us, “bypassing his superiors” like General George Casey “to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military” to make the case for escalating the Iraq war.

Odierno may well have gone around his chain of command; that was standard operating procedure in the Bush years. But given the cast of Machiavellians in this three-ring kabuki, it’s unlikely that big Ray was the kingpin. Odierno more suitably fits the profile of fall guy; he’s been the one making public statements about how the military will stay in Iraq longer than 16 months whether the commander in chief likes it or not, something that would earn a less politically connected officer administrative punishment at the very least. Petraeus has been, as always, circumspect on this subject. You’ll have to look very hard to find a written record of an insubordinate syllable passing Petraeus’s lips at any moment in his career. If Petraeus wants to trash a superior, he’s the type to have somebody like his pet ox Odierno do it for him.

The most telling part of Ricks’s version of the surge genesis is what it omits. Ricks makes no mention of the American Enterprise Institute, or of Fred Kagan, or of the neoconservative movement’s role in selling the surge to the public, an effort spearheaded by Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, FOX News, the New York Times, AEI and the Project for the New American Century.

On Sunday’s Meet the Press and in his Monday Post article, Ricks describes with often horrifying candor how Petraeus set out to pave the way for a “long war” that would last well beyond the Bush presidency. Petraeus needed time “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” That the surge has, as Ricks acknowledges, “failed politically,” is of little consequence.

The generals’ gambit, as Ricks explained it to David Gregory on Meet the Press, is “they feel they have made huge sacrifices, that they have had friends die and sons bleed, and that they don’t want to throw that all away on the—you know, because some guy said on the campaign trail, ‘We’re going to get all these guys out.’”

Thus did Ricks, wearing the beard of an impartial journalist, deliver the ultimatum for Petraeus, Odierno, Keane, Kristol, and the rest of the warmongery. Obama can either accede to the their goal, which is and always has been a permanent military occupation of Iraq, or be vilified as the wimp who betrayed the troops because of a campaign promise he made to get the peace pansy vote.

Ricks saved the punch line for the end of his interview with Gregory. “Iran has…its fingers throughout the Iraqi government. This is something that General Odierno mentioned several months ago and got in some trouble for, for talking about so publicly. Iran really does worry me in, in this situation.”

The Petraeus gang has been stacking the deck around the Iran card since the surge was unveiled in January 2007, leveling one accusation after the next against the Shiite Persian state to frame it as the point defense rationale for staying in Iraq. They haven’t proven a single allegation in all that time, but most Americans, numb by now from the constant bombardment of messages demonizing Iran, have accepted them as gospel truth. And, hey, if Tom Ricks is worried about Iran, shouldn’t the rest of us be worried about it too?

I knew Ricks had fallen like a schoolgirl for Petraeus when, in an April 2007 interview for NPR, he described the general as “a force of nature” and gushed, “He’s famous, for example, for his one-armed push-up contest against privates. You know—challenging a guy half his age to one-arm push-ups. But basically Petraeus [is determined] he’ll do one more than the other guy will, no matter how many the other guy does.”

Ricks was once the respected dean of the Pentagon beat. As of Sunday, he displaced Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times as chief echo chamberlain of the neoconservative junta. One can’t help suspect Ricks is at the top of the list to become Minister of Truth and Peace in the Petraeus administration. He has all the qualifications.

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.

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.

In a November 2009 New York Times profile of McCaffrey, reporter David Barstow described him as “a force in Washington’s power elite.” That’s putting it politely: it’s understatement to call McCaffrey a great white military-industrial-media shark. His use of access and influence to pursue personal profit from war was singularly predatory.

McCaffrey was an early advocate of the Iraq invasion. He was board member of the now-defunct Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group of influential neoconservative tank thinkers with ties to the George W. Bush administration and the now infamous Project for the New American Century. He started BR McCaffrey Associates in 2001 to “build linkages” between government officials and contractors. McCaffrey was also one of more than 75 media military “experts” recruited into the Pentagon’s Retired Military Analyst program, initiated in 2002 to help sell the public on the Iraq War. One of the analysts, retired Army colonel Ken Allard, called the program “PSYOPS [psychological operations] on steroids.”

McCaffrey began his career as a media analyst for NBC shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Just prior to that, he had become a key member of the advisory council of Veritas Capital, a small player looking to grow in the defense sector. Veritas gave advisers like McCaffrey board membership in its military companies, along with profit sharing and revenue stakes. McCaffrey, like so many of the power elite, had much to gain from what the Pentagon would later refer to as the “long war.”

In his first months on the air, McCaffrey called for increases in defense spending to fight the war on terrorism. He specifically touted the virtue of high tech weapons like precision munitions and unmanned aircraft supported by defense companies in the Veritas portfolio. He called the C-17 military cargo aircraft—also a source of Veritas contracts—a “national treasure.”

McCaffrey had early doubts about the Iraq war plan; he was one of many observers who thought the invasion force was too small. But on NBC, he assured viewers that the war would be brief, telling Brian Williams “These people are going to come apart in 21 days or less.” Years afterward, McCaffrey claimed he knew the post invasion planning was a disaster. “They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war,” he said. But before the invasion, he waxed ecstatic on NBC with Pentagon talking points about the “astonishing amount” of postwar planning.

Days before the invasion, when Tom Brokaw asked “What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?” McCaffrey answered, “Well, I don’t think I have any real serious ones.”

In March 2003, shortly after the war began, McCaffrey shouted on MSNBC, “Thank God for the Abrams tank and…the Bradley fighting vehicle.” That same month, Integrated Defense Technologies, a Veritas company, received more than $14 million in contracts relating to the Abrams and the Bradley.

In spring of 2007, a small defense company called Defense Solutions hired McCaffrey as a consultant. Four days later, McCaffrey wrote a letter to then commander of U.S. forces in Iraq General David Petraeus recommending the bid by Defense Solutions to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles. McCaffrey didn’t his connection with Defense Solutions or his letter to Petraeus the next month when he told Congress that it should immediately buy a large number of armored vehicles for Iraq and criticized a Pentagon plan to use armored vehicles provided by a Defense Solutions competitor.

These incidents were not lapses of judgment; they were emblematic of McCaffrey’s standard operating procedure, a behavior that any sane, intelligent adult can see is both unethical and immoral. Yet McCaffrey’s apologists, under his employ or otherwise, are quick to defend his honor. “His motive is pure,” says his publicist Robert Weiner. “It is national interest.” In this regard, McCaffrey is like every other megalomaniac; what’s good for him is good for his country, the world, the solar system, the universe and whatever awaits us in the afterlife.

Other McCaffrey supporters excuse his mendacity by pointing to his criticism of the way former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld conducted the war, but that’s like forgiving all mortal transgressions because the sinner condemns the way Satan runs hell.

One Pentagon correspondent, an “old friend” of the former general, admonishes us to “remember that McCaffrey is one of the most highly decorated combat Soldiers ever to wear general’s stars, with two awards of the Distinguished Service Cross and three Purple Hearts for wounds he suffered in the Vietnam War.”

How sad it is to see heroism become, like patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel.

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.

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.

Sock Puppets

“Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” by David Barstow was a watershed story for the New York Times, the paper that, more than any other mainstream media outlet, had allowed the Bush administration to use it as a conduit for the false propaganda that convinced the country of the need to invade Iraq. Where Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller cited unnamed “officials” nearly 30 times in their September 2002 article that fraudulently asserted Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons technology, Barstow’s investigative report was an exemplar of cold fact and attributed testimony.

Retired Army colonel Ken Allard, an NBC analyst, called the RMA program a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he told Barstow.

Barstow referenced internal Pentagon documents that “repeatedly refer to the military analysts as ‘message force multipliers’ or ’surrogates’ who could be counted on to deliver administration ‘themes and messages’ to millions of Americans ‘in the form of their own opinions.’”

Don Myer, aide to assistant secretary of defense for public affairs Torie Clarke, told Barstow that a strategic decision was made in 2002 to use the analysts as the main focus of the public relations push to argue the case for war with Iraq. Another Clarke aid, Brent T. Krueger, said the idea was to have the analysts be in effect “writing the op-ed” for the war.

In all, the program recruited more than 75 retired officers, all of them cleared by Donald Rumsfeld, the largest contingent of whom, not surprisingly, worked for FOX News.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Krueger told Barstow. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over… You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

The Pentagon “armed its analysts with talking points” and expected to hear them echoed in the media. Former Green Beret and FOX News analyst Robert S. Bevelacqua admitted, “It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ”

Ironically, White House spokesmodel Brian Whitman told Barstow it is “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

It would have been incredible to think that in another American century, but not in this one. Up until the very end of the Rumsfeld reign, the Pentagon kept its analysts on a short leash the same way it manipulated the rest of the media, by granting access to those who played ball and denying access to those who refused to.

I Cannot Tell a Lie, Unless…

Retired army general and FOX News commentator Paul E. Vallely confessed to Barstow that when the Pentagon flew him and other retired military analysts to Iraq in 2003, he immediately saw that “things were going south.” On returning home, however, Vallely told Fox anchor Alan Colmes “You can’t believe the progress.”

Vallely’s mendacity was in part motivated by his belief in the hallucination that the U.S. lost the Vietnam War because of unfavorable press coverage. Vallely and others of his generation have ingrained this mantra on younger military personnel to the point where it is now an indelible part of the American military ethos; it never occurs to any of them that with deployments of up to a half million troops and all the material support a force could possibly want over a span of more than a decade, the country couldn’t have supported the war any more than it did, and that it wasn’t bad press that caused the war to be lost, it was the lost war that caused the bad press.

Delusional as he is, we might grant Vallely virtue points for sincerity. Other analysts, though, were in the game for the money, a lot more money than the per-appearance fees they got from the news networks. Most of them were connected to military contractors and stood to profit from the war they were promoting.

Part III will describe how the Retired Military Analyst program served as a confluence of Big War, Big Message, Big Bucks, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze.

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.

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?

Rewriting Military History

I first started hearing the expression “we’re losing the public affairs war” about the time of Desert Storm, when the Air Force was grabbing the headlines for winning the air battle and Navy carrier participation got piddled into the footnotes.

Time passed. During the 1999 Kosovo War, my ship, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, entertained more members of the foreign press than the number of combat sorties she launched. As a wartime operations officer of a U.S. Navy flagship, my number one concern was to make sure each and every one of those reporters got on and off the ship safely and received a triple dose of gee whiz by watching flight operations from Vulture’s Row high atop the ship’s island.

What the air wing did over the beach didn’t matter; the targets they bombed were mainly plywood decoys. I didn’t have to worry about defending the ship, either. Bad Guy’s Navy was sinking at the pier. We never did accomplish our original objective, which had something to do with keeping Bad Guy Milosevic from cleansing his ethnics, who were the good guys in this particular war because then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said they were. Milosevic cleansed as many ethnics as he wanted to before he quit and everyone left him alone, a technique the Israelis later exploited to great effect in Lebanon and Gaza. None of our guys got killed in combat. In fact, the biggest friendly casualties of the war were the careers of most of the flag and general officers involved, some of whom retired in disgust, and some who just got caught taking their pants off in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong company, a trait they shared with their commander in chief, who unlike them managed to keep his job for a few more years.

In all, the Kosovo Conflict was a perfect play war to end the 20^th century with.

Boondoggle or no, we came home to heroes’ welcomes, and our carrier was hailed as a keystone of the greatest naval and air victory ever won under the command of a clueless Army general. The carrier Navy held onto its slab of the defense budget, and lived to play war in a new American century.

Bull Feather Merchants

The Kosovo War was a watershed conflict in that it illustrated—or should have illustrated—that the efficacy of American military power was nearing the terminus of its collision course with a brick wall. No one could really say the Kosovo War had defended America or had protected its interests overseas or had even protected innocents abroad because the good guys in the conflict were no better than the bad guys. At that point in history, the military’s full time mission shifted to self-preservation, and the purpose of the relatively new “information warfare” specialty went from supporting armed conflicts to fabricating convincing arguments for having them.

Shortly after 9/11, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established the Office of Strategic Influence, an information warfare directorate with “a broad mission ranging from ‘black’ campaigns that use[d] disinformation and other covert activities to ‘white’ public affairs that rely on truthful news releases,” according to its chief, Air Force one star Simon P. Worden. Protests arose when the Pentagon announced that the OSI would “provide news items, possibly even false ones.” Rumsfeld shut down OSI to quell the controversy. Well, he sort of shut it down. “You can have the [OSI] name,” he said at a press conference, “but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.”

Before it skulked out the servants’ door, OSI spawned a number of truth sub-ministries within DoD, one of which was the Retired Military Analyst program.

Part II will analyze RMA as a microcosm of the Pentagon’s propaganda campaign to protect and defend the military industrial complex.

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.

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

No, After You…

One senior U.S. military commander told the Post “We have no strategic plan. We never had one.” He was referring to the Bush administration’s Afghanistan program, but he might as well have been talking about Iraq and Iran and every other tentacle of Bush era foreign policy. The senior commander also said that Obama’s first order of business will be to “explain to the American people what the mission is” in Afghanistan. Obama will be hard pressed to explain what the mission is if he doesn’t have a strategy.

A December New York Times article stated that “Taking a page from the successful experiment in Iraq, American commanders and Afghan leaders are preparing to arm local militias to help in the fight against a resurgent Taliban.” Arming local militias was only part of the “successful” experiment in Iraq. The larger part of the experiment involved bribing militias not to use the arms we gave them, a course of action that has further cemented the ostensible necessity for U.S. troops to stay in that country well beyond Obama’s promised 16 month deadline. The surge has been so successful that, after two years, it’s still in effect; we have several thousand more troops in Iraq than we did when the surge began in January 2007, and it still hasn’t produced its stated purpose of political unification. Maybe that’s okay. Objectives seem to have gone the way of the foreign policies of yesteryear.

The hero of the Iraq surge, General David Petraeus, is now in charge of Central Command, the area of responsibility that encompasses Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In a November press conference at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, Petraeus said that, “an overall effort is essential,” but declined to give details on what the effort might consist of.

Antonio Giustozzi, an Afghanistan expert at the London School of Economics, puts it bluntly: “In the end, I believe it will boil down to bribing people into joining militias.” He cautions, “How military effective [this is] going to be remains to be seen.”

Bribing militias to fight the Taliban won’t be effective at all if the Pentagon decides not to fight the Taliban. As analyst Gareth Porter notes, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his rear echelon military functionaries have already had months to develop a new strategy, and the bottle is still spinning. Some officers have suggested we shift from killing the Taliban to protecting the population (from the Taliban, I’m guessing). Other proposed strategies include offering the Taliban protection from international forces in Afghanistan if they agree to undertake peace negotiations, and many believe the only solution is to offer a share of political power to the Taliban, in which case—arguably, at least—we might not want to kill them at all.

Then, as in Iraq, we’ll have to stick around forever to make sure the militias we paid to kill the Taliban don’t kill them or turn on us. Of course, they probably won’t kill the Taliban if we don’t pay them to, and they pretty much can’t kill the Taliban if we don’t arm them, and they can’t turn on us if we leave; but what kind of strategy would that be?

Throw Soldiers at It

For all the machinations of the Bush administration, its standard operating procedure was quite simple, more of a tactic than a strategy. The closest analogy to it I can think of is ice hockey’s dump-and-chase play. Hockey teams with overwhelming speed and size don’t bother with coordinated maneuvers; they simply sling the puck into the opponent’s zone, skate after it, knock the other guys into the boards and try to slide the puck to an open teammate in front of the net. If the tactic doesn’t work, they just do it again, and again, and again. If the opponent scores, the dump-and-chase team shakes it off and goes back to dumping and chasing and never stops doing it.

It’s not long before all the dump-and-chase team knows how to do is dump and chase, and after a time it’s too late for them to relearn how to skate and pass and play as a team. The U.S. has been playing dump-and-chase since the end of World War II. The stronger and bigger and faster we got relative to everyone else, the more we played dump-and-chase, and the less effective armed force became as a tool of foreign policy. Rather than reexamine the efficacy of our methods, we merely invested in an ever more powerful but increasingly impotent military.

So it is that we invaded Iraq on fuzzy pretexts with no idea of what we’d do after we “won,” without even a way of determining we’d accomplished our mission other than hanging a sign behind our commander in chief that said we had.

We’re about to escalate yet another enigmatic war with no particular purpose in mind. Mr. Obama says Afghanistan is now the “central front on terror.” The central front has moved from Afghanistan to Iraq to Iran to Syria to North Korea to Pakistan and back to Afghanistan again. That’s a boatload of central fronts for a war that doesn’t have any front lines. I can’t wait to hear who Obama says the latest incarnation of Hitler is.

Obama says he wants to make sure Afghanistan “cannot be used as a base to launch attacks against the United States.” Nobody can actually launch an attack on much of anything from the mountains of Afghanistan. You can plan an attack from there, but you can plan an attack on the United States from a picnic blanket spread out in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And oh yeah, the Taliban, whether we decide to kill them or not, had nothing to do with 9/11, and have no interest in being party to a second one, and wouldn’t be fighting us if we hadn’t pitched a tent city in their front yard.

I hope young Mr. Obama thinks good and hard before he decides to send more G.I.s to risk life and limb in a third world wasteland for no coherent reason. I grew sick from watching the last commander in chief treat our troops like hockey pucks.

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.