“We have reached the point where the senior military generals responsible for nuclear forces are advocating, more vocally, more vehemently, than our politicians, to get down to lower and lower weapons.”
– General Eugene Habiger (Ret.), former head of U.S. nuclear forces, in 2000

Not exactly the kind of talk we’re used to hearing from a high-ranking member of the military, is it? Nor was this, four years earlier, by Gen. Charles Horner, who commanded the aerial forces of the United States and its allies during the first Gulf War:

I came to the realization that nuclear weapons had very little utility during the Gulf War, when I realized that even if Saddam Hussein used a nuclear weapon on us, we would have to retaliate on a conventional basis. And then later, when I became the owner, so to speak, of the land-based ICBM force, and I saw the vast amount of money and resource that was involved in maintaining the large Cold War level of nuclear weapons, I said there’s got to be a better way.

Then, in June of last year, renowned national security analyst and one-time assistant secretary of defense Lawrence Korb echoed the comments of Generals Habiger and Horner in an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and expanded on them:

From its creation as a separate service at the end of World War II until the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force was first among equals amid the nation’s. . . four armed services. [It's] dominance was due primarily to its leading role in developing and deploying strategic nuclear weapons, which were deemed key to the country’s survival.

But after the collapse of the Soviet Union:

Strategic nuclear deterrence was no longer seen as central to U.S. security and the attention and resources of the policy makers in general and the air force in particular began to shift. … toward traditional air missions. Rather than the Bomber Barons, the air force in the post-Cold War era was led by the Fighter Mafia. … Only when current Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposed stopping production of the F-22 at 182 planes did the air force roll out its propaganda machine [to object].

Still, it’s not as if the air force and the military are actually lobbying for an end to nuclear weapons. I’ve yet to be able to find more instances of contemporary military brass venting about nuclear weapons as a white elephant they’re stuck with.

In fact, at Wired’s Danger Room, Nathan Hodge recently wrote:Speaking Tuesday on Capitol Hill, Gen. Kevin Chilton, the head of U.S. Strategic Command, said: “When looking into the future a basic question is … will we still need nuclear weapons 40 years from now? I believe the answer to that question is yes.”

Interviewed by Melanie Kirkpatrick in the Wall Street Journal, the general said that nuclear weapons were, “designed for about a 15- to 20-year life” which worked fine when “we had a very robust infrastructure . . . that replenished those families of weapons at regular intervals.” But now, “they’re all older than 20 years . . . . The analogy would be trying to extend the life of your ‘57 Chevrolet into the 21st century.”

Travis Sharp works on defense spending, among other things, for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. We asked him for his reaction.

Gen. Chilton has repeatedly made comments that blur the line between responsible execution of the nuclear mission and questionable advocacy on behalf of nuclear modernization. I wouldn’t take Gen. Chilton’s statements as being representative of the Air Force’s or U.S. military’s broader attitudes toward nuclear weapons. After all, Gen. Chilton’s role at STRATCOM gives him a strong bureaucratic interest in maintaining, or even enhancing, the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’s Nuclear Information Project, responded as well.

There’s a difference between the belief in nuclear weapons at the top level and the management level; the first tends to say they’re really important while the second group is less interested because nuclear weapons are useless for the kind of operations the military are involved in on a day-by-day basis. The second group might accept that nukes are needed for now, but they tend to see them as competition for funding and personnel and not very relevant to their priorities.

He then points out the irony in Gen. Chilton’s 40-year timeframe:

Chilton’s remark is interesting because he used to say, just one year ago, that we needed nuclear weapons throughout this century. By that standard he has come considerably closer to president Obama’s message.

Steve Hynd of Newshoggers adds:

No branch of the services ever cared about costs or ease of use. The true war is the one between departments and agencies for budget share and bureaucratic power. Control of the nuke arsenal is an essential part of the Air Force’s “clout” in that war.

Independent nuclear scholar Ward Wilson pointed out to us that it’s been decades since the likes of Gen. Curtis LeMay openly advocated advocated nuclear war.

Starting in the Johnson Administration, there just are no examples of military men who are so gung ho for nukes that it makes your hair stand on end.

When Reagan wanted to get rid of all the nuclear weapons in Iceland. . . it wasn’t military men that prevented the deal from going through. There weren’t members of the Joint Chiefs stepping forward saying, “Mr. President, this is an essential weapon and you can’t think of getting rid of it.” The voices of caution come from Weinberger and Shultz.

It’s the Sherlock Holmes thing about the dog that didn’t bark in the night.

As well, Gen. Chilton seems oblivious to the likelihood that, in an interim as lengthy as the 40 years to which he referred, nuclear weapons would most likely have been used in an act of war or detonated by accident. The latter, like Chernobyl, might have kick-started disarmament; the former may have blasted the political landscape — not to mention the earth’s — into something unrecognizable.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Meanwhile, at Foreign Policy in Focus, under the category of Watch Out What You Wish For, Frida Berrigan writes (emphasis added):

Congress gave $68 million to the Boeing Corporation to accelerate the purchase and development of 10-12 “massive ordnance penetrators [MOPs].” … These 30,000 pound bombs carry 6,000 pounds of high explosives.

The MOP. … replaces a nuclear weapon that Congress was unwilling to fund over the past few years — the robust nuclear earth penetrator [intended] to burrow deep into enemy lairs and deliver a nuclear wallop. [In other words, who needs] nuclear weapons to deliver massive destruction. … As we begin to reduce our nuclear capabilities, watch out for a lot of pressure to ramp up conventional weapons procurement.

If you’ve ever watched Antiques Roadshow, you know that collectible toys which remain packed in their boxes greatly surpass in value those that have been removed and used for play. Like those toys, nuclear weapons sit, neatly wrapped, on a shelf. Some generals cast covetous eyes at them; others just want toys that they can play with.

First posted at the Faster Times.

The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson
by Chris Mackowski* and Kristopher D. White
Thomas Publications

*S&R’s very own Chris Mackowski

Reading The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson is like poring over a treasure chest of family relics as a wise uncle explains the contents. The wise uncles are the authors Chris and Kristopher. These two historians and writers have taken an amazing number of primary and secondary sources and woven a fascinating tale of the last week in the life of Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, accidentally shot by his own men at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. They report documented events with insights and an obvious love and respect for the topic.

This accessible volume can be read in a single sitting, but don’t, you’ll be rewarded by savoring the details. The story is told in words, selected art, maps, quotes and historic and modern photos. Each is selected to enhance important points in the storyline. The authors excel at filling in the small details that bring the story to life. The reader knows the weather, feels the confusion of battle, senses the fear when Stonewall is shot, and importantly the authors give us closure in knowing the calm certainty Stonewall Jackson felt in his final moments.

“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” – The last words of Stonewell Jackson.

The story has moments as diverse as learning Stonewall Jackson’s arm was buried separately from his body (it was amputated in the aftermath of his shooting, but some days before Jackson succumbed to complications of pneumonia) to a touching passage retelling the moment Jackson met his daughter Julia. There are handy timelines included and an appendix listing the fate of all the characters in this drama. When you finish the final chapter you will be very glad you opened that treasure chest.

There’s no question that the election was rigged, but the low voter turnout is more dangerous to government legitimacy than the fraud. Just five years ago Afghanistan held an election that defied expectations: women voted in large numbers, old men cried after voting for the first time in their lives, polls had to stay open late so that all who wanted to vote could, and it was peaceful. In effect, we’ve been moving backwards.

Karzai appears to be the odd man out, or at least a convenient scapegoat. The failure that characterizes the mission to date is less about Karzai’s imperfection than about what passed for strategy during the Bush administration. Obama administration spokespeople are promoting the meme that we need a strong central government in Kabul for the mission to be successful. That’s true, and i’m glad to see that everyone read COIN for Dummies, but we’re leaving out significant issues that need to be considered and addressed. The Pentagon only discovered counter-insurgency a few years ago. It certainly wasn’t practiced in the early stages of the Afghan conflict. Our counter-insurgency strategy then went by the name of, publicly i might add, “The Warlord Strategy”.

Karzai’s government is weak and ineffectual because we spent those heady days leaving him to molder in Kabul while the CIA handed attaché cases full of cash to the warlords whose power we now bemoan. Reconstruction has been woefully underfunded. Plans have been mired in indecision and bureaucracies working at cross-purposes. Much of the money spent found its way back to donor countries through consultancies and contracting. It’s a functioning society that gives government legitimacy. Would you give a rip what the President says if you only had electricity every few days?

You can’t change history. You also can’t pretend that it didn’t happen. And you certainly can’t make it go away by chanting, “Bush’s fault, Bush’s fault.” We do, however, have to deal with the effects of that sordid history. The Afghan insurgency—religious, nationalist or tribal—is strong and gaining strength; that’s what insurgencies do in the vacuum created by weak government. It’s victory by default, because while a person may find Taliban justice horrifying, it is at least justice. When a weak government obviously leans on its foreign patron, the insurgency wins again. It is able to portray an already weak government as a puppet of the occupier. The deck is stacked against a foreign power occupying territory with an indigenous insurgency. If the insurgency has outside support or safe haven, then the game is rigged. This insurgency has both, which is why Pakistan is leveling South Waziristan. Whether Pakistan is genuinely attempting to address the insurgency issues on its side of the not-really-an-international-border border or not remains to be seen. It has a long history of playing multiple sides of the game, even when Pakistan is endangered.

The Obama administration made Hamid Karzai lose whatever honor he had left when it forced him to announce the run off. I believe in the sanctity of democracy, and i’m disgusted by the fraud. On the other hand, Afghanistan after more than 30 years of ceaseless conflict is no place to play political-science Pollyanna. Our chances of finding a leader who’s untouched by corruption and also powerful enough to demand loyalty in the present circumstances are roughly the same as there being a leprechaun guarding that leader at the end of a rainbow.

That leaves us with a short list of possible resolutions to the election issue. We can assume that turnout will be dismally low, and we can assume that there will be more fraud. In which case we can A. hide it; B. declare the election fraudulent and let Karzai rule without a constitutional mandate through (at least) the winter, which will surely be a boon to the perception of legitimacy; C. depose Karzai and put an unelected leader in his place; or D. scrap the Afghan-written constitution and put together something we think will work better. I don’t see a good one in the lot.

Galbraith’s noble whistle-blowing put the administration in a difficult position. That it made political hay out of the situation by publicly lecturing on democracy, subtly blaming the mission’s failure on Karzai’s weak government and not-so-subtly displaying the true power relationship in the Kabul election fraud press conference was its own decision. It didn’t have to do any of those things. The left is divided on Afghanistan in the first place, and it isn’t even paying attention. Now the administration is in a corner of its own painting in the midst of deciding how to proceed.

This is not the time to give the Pentagon a chance to prove that it really could have won in Vietnam. Doing this by the DoD’s book will require hundreds of thousands of troops and uncountable sums of money over a very long time span, and even with all that, failure is a real possibility. McChrystal’s 40,000 minimum is unlikely to turn the tide of this conflict, and the idea that the Afghan National Army will make up the bulk of the hundreds of thousands of troops necessary is, at present and in the near-term, laughable. A piece-meal escalation of 15,000 here and 40,000 there might be easier to accomplish from a domestic politics perspective, but it won’t help—and may in fact hinder—the mission. Biden’s plan for a limited, counter-terrorism presence sounds good politically: protect the national security flank while mostly withdrawing from Afghanistan. But it will amount to the US being just one more militia on the Afghan landscape during a civil war.

Obama is in a difficult position. He’s been clear about his intent to stay in Afghanistan, so withdrawal means the dreaded flip-flop, a political opening for the Republican Party and having to stand up to his generals. The last is particularly problematic because he appointed them. Withdrawal has its consequences. The USGS found significant resources in Afghan territory: oil, gas and minerals. The Chinese have already developed a copper mine. These considerations may not make the front page, but rest assured that they’re being discussed behind closed doors.

There are no “good” or incredibly feasible solutions here. The US could drop its pretenses and behave like a real empire, but that’s unlikely and probably wouldn’t be successful anyhow. It can withdraw and leave the area to fester, which will be a massive victory for our supposed enemies and a loss of national honor that few politicians would be willing to risk. Or it can continue muddling through and leave the inevitable for future leaders at the cost of blood, treasure and regional stability.

The best option is, unfortunately, the least realistic. A massive international effort in peacekeeping, disarming Afghanistan and reconstruction combined with grand diplomacy that addresses regional issues is the only realistic possibility for accomplishing our purported goals in the region. There is no template for such an action. There may not be enough international trust to bring it to fruition. And Obama confronting the military to the degree necessary is unlikely, but more likely than him being able to commit the US to such a long-term project.

We can’t know if the deliberations are considering the long-term implications of policy direction. Given the nature of the US, there’s a good chance that decisions will be based more on institutional and political positioning for the short-term. Those long-term implications, however, are real and very dangerous. Remember that Gorbachev chose to escalate the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan when he became General Secretary; he was forced to withdraw later. His situation is instructive, as there are plenty of parallels between his USSR and the United States today. Wisdom is learning from other people’s experience. Should we choose to ignore history and follow Franklin’s maxim that experience is a dear school but a fool will learn in no other, we are likely to fulfill the “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires” prophecy. Afghanistan is not the graveyard of empires because of any characteristics inherent in the nation. It just happens to be where falling empires go to die.

In novels and movies, presumably, no one really dies if fictional operational details are revealed.

But should we be reading details of real, life-at-risk military operations, such as those found in The Washington Post and The New York Times and other press outlets regarding a kidnapped merchant marine captain? Especially when those stories carry not a single named source?

In today’s Post, reporter Ann Scott Tyson details how Navy SEALs killed three Somali pirates and rescued Capt. Richard Phillips, whose Maersk Alabama had been attacked by pirates. Ms. Tyson’s story is based solely on interviews with “military officials,” “the officials,” “a senior military official,” and “the official.” There is no named source in the story.

There is this, though, about “the senior military official”: He “spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter on the record.” [emphasis added]

The Times story by Robert D. McFadden and Scott Shane — in the section specific to Capt. Phillips’ rescue — quotes only “senior Navy officials” and “the officials.” Similarly, the rescue portion of a CNN story only quotes “a military official” and “the U.S. military.”

Somali pirates, of course, have threatened revenge. “From now on, after the killings by the U.S. and France, we will add some harsher steps in our dealings with hostages, particularly American and French hostages,” said Ali Nur, a Somali pirate quoted by CNN.

No doubt pirates could figure out what happened to their three fellow felons and who did it, even without news reports.

But if any detail of a military operation in an anonymously sourced news report leads to the death of a hostage held by Somali pirates, surely the family of that sailor would like to know the name and rank of the “officials” whose tongues wagged too loosely.

If senior military officials are going to release details of a military operation, then they ought to attach their names — and reporters ought to hold them to that, deadline or “breaking news” be damned.

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.

–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.

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.

I’m either the best or worst type of commentator for this situation.  I don’t have a dog in this fight.  And while i can see some point to both sides being right, i mostly see both sides being terribly, terribly wrong.  The more pressing issues are, as usual, buried under the weight of politics, punditry, and personal animosity.

Let’s begin with the picture.  That’s photographic evidence of Israel using either artillery fired cluster munitions or white phosphorus (probably the latter) in an urban area.  Hardly civilized.  Almost certainly that shell was payed for with the American taxpayer monies, and may well have been manufactured right here in God’s country…at least we still have some export manufacturing sector, no?  That Israel is using cluster munitions suggest one of two things: either that wanton destruction is the military plan or that Israel is not so confident in the vaunted IDF.

Robert Fisk recently wrote a scathing estimate of both sides of this conflict from a military point of view.  This isn’t Southern Lebanon, and Hamas is not the same caliber of fighting force as Hezbollah.  It seems unlikely that Hamas has learned any significant lessons from Hezbollah’s success.  That the IDF can target Hamas leadership suggests that the organization is riddled with spies and informers.  On the other hand, there have been suggestions that Hamas has spent the blockade years amassing heavy weaponry and deploying booby traps; that may be mostly bluster, but the IDF has said that much of the artillery barrage was meant to detonate planted explosives.  Assuming that the IDF has seriously infiltrated Hamas, they are likely to know what awaits their forces and where it has been planted.

But none of that changes the fact that this is full blown war in very tight confines with huge numbers of civilians trapped in the crossfire.  US media has made it a point to relay Israeli’s warning to Palestinian civilians that full war is on the march and they should leave the area.  That same media fails to point out that there’s nowhere for civilians to go.  Gaza is a walled ghetto.

Urban warfare is the most chaotic and dangerous form of conflict.  Even the most highly trained and experienced forces have difficulty in full urban combat.  There is reason to believe that the IDF is not the vaunted fighting force of song and legend.  Fisk points out that it hasn’t won a war since 1973.  It pretty well got its ass handed to it by Hezbollah in 2006, and that was in a situation where the overall superiority of the IDF should have been overwhelming.  I’ve seen a fair number of pictures of Israeli tanks massed at the border.  It’s an impressive sight, but the last place a tanker wants to go is down an urban street.  If the opposition can take the first and last tank in a column, everything in between is trapped for a massacre.

Can Hamas manage that?  Maybe not; they’re better known for shooting their guns into the air than military discipline.  But the Hungarians managed it against the Red Army, and they did so without much more than Molotov cocktails.

But the IDF forces arrayed against Hamas might not be much better.  It appears that a large portion of the fighting will fall to called up reservists…hardly “elite”.  And once the IDF forces engage Hamas on the streets of Gaza, their air and artillery superiority may well be of zero consequence.  Contrary to popular belief, most munitions are not “smart” and even the smart munitions are not so accurate as the Pentagon’s propaganda machine would lead us to believe.

Imagine an armor supported infantry unit in Gaza.  Hamas manages to block at least one path of exit by destroying an Israeli tank.  The ambush is sprung and IDF troops are trapped.  Any call for air support at that point takes a serious risk of blowing up the IDF as well (or instead of) the Hamas fighters.  The quarters are too close, and Hamas should have the advantage of knowing the area far better than the IDF.

And then, of course, there are the civilians…if they were trapped to begin with, they are further trapped by the Israeli strategy of splitting Gaza into three regions.  Israel is also, and somewhat understandably by the methods of modern warfare, targeting infrastructure.  Understandable though it might be, it significantly worsens the conflict’s effect on the civilian population…er, it increases “collateral damage”.

Tzipi Livni appears comfortable taking the low road, “The moment they fire we will respond with great force,” she said, “It could be that several operations are needed.”  In other words, Israel is not attempting to dissuade Hamas but to crush it once and for all.  Ehud Barak reinforced her point and suggested that this operation might take a while.  Whether it will be successful depends on a great many variables, but the most salient variable is the very definition of success.

Does Israel actually want peace?  It must surely understand that ravaging the Palestinian population will only act as a bellows on the flames of this conflict.  Barak insists that Israel is not “war hungry”, but his nation’s actions make his statement questionable.  Just as Hamas’s ineffective rocket attacks provoke Israel, Israel’s invasion will surely provoke Palestinian retaliation.

Unfortunately, that may be the whole point.  It has been pretty solidly established that Israel founded and funded Hamas in an effort to counteract the power of the PLO.  There was some sense (albeit perverted) to such an action.  The PLO was effectively secular and nationalist, so it was hard to portray them as blood thirsty Islamic terrorists.  Hamas was always an Islamist counterweight to the PLO, and much evidence suggests that Israel allowed the counterweight to get heavier.  Now Hamas must be destroyed.  It is impossible to tell if a situation like this was part of the original plan or if we’re watching blowback on a large scale.  Considering the long-term recycling of Israeli power players, the former cannot be discounted…though i would surmise that the truth is a blend of the former and the latter.

Which leads us to the most unfortunate casualty of this conflict: any hope for peaceful dialogue.

Abu Yussef (Palestine Monitor) writes, “The fourth casualty, and perhaps the most tragic, is the Palestinian voice of peace and non-violence. Anyone who has devoted their time and work to teaching the merits and methods of non-violent resistance and joint dialogue have been made to look like utter fools and apologists for the ongoing horror.” [Emphasis added.] The Palestinians are being cajoled by Hamas, with the help of Israeli examples, into believing that peace is not even possible.  They’re happy to paint Israel as a blood thirsty monster as much as Israel is happy to paint Hamas as an evil terrorist organization.  It’s a self-perpetuating circle of violence and recrimination, proven by the actions of both sides.  And it has descended, according to Yussef, to the point where Hamas has threatened to target rival politicians along with Israelis.

It becomes harder and harder to not wonder if the circle of violence is by design.  The violence that begets violence forms the rationale for Israel being surrounded by enemies and for Palestine to be oppressed and attacked by its enemy.  The interlocking memes keep the military aid from the US flowing…no doubt happily for those who profit from it…and the region so unstable as to necessitate a large US presence in the region (directly and by proxy).  A non-violent campaign by the Palestinians would almost certainly be effective in turning world opinion firmly against Israel; consequently, Israel (and its financial patron…that would be us) has a vested interest in making sure such a campaign never gathers momentum.

It seems that the point is to perpetuate the cycle of violence.  And in this the United States is complicit.  We know that the Bush administration is whole-heartedly with the program.  We still don’t know where the incoming Obama administration stands, but its avoidance of the issue may well mean that it will have no choice other than to be with the program by the time Obama takes office.  There is good reason to believe that Israel may have timed the operation for this reason, and by not speaking immediately, Obama walked right into the trap.

We’ll have to wait and see, but it certainly appears that yet another presidential administration will pass without significant progress towards peace in the region…unless Israel manages to thoroughly decimate Hamas; in which case the President Elect will be somewhat relieved of the burden.  But the most likely outcome is that everyone will lose except the most violent and war like ideologues on both sides.

*This post may already be out of date, considering the talk of cease-fire possibilities.  And i am traveling and unable to make some adjustments that i would prefer to make before posting…my apologies.

Image credit: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images

Hat tip: Russ Wellen for the Yussef quote

Speaking of perdition, somebody needs to throw another handful of clean coal in the brazier under Yasser Arafat, and hopefully someone has confirmed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s reservation for the spot next to Arafat’s. Bush and Kondi and Lord Cheney and Bad Will Ambassador John Bolton must be looking forward to occupying adjoining rooms with a view of the inferno in the LBJ Hilton, because they appear bent on squeezing in as much last minute evil as they can before a house drops on them.

Never tired of watching its own horror show, the Bush team is reprising the scenario it ran in Lebanon: Cheney goads Bush into giving tacit approval for Israel to launch a military offensive against a group of sand colored people who, in terms of relative firepower, amount to an ant colony. Kondi does her hair up like a fright wig and drags out the ceasefire process until Israel a) has killed all the sand colored people it wants to kill or b) starts getting its tohkes kicked by the sand colored people and wants mommy to make them stop it.

Take Two

Dick Cheney says Israel didn’t seek “U.S. approval” to begin the ground attack into Gaza. Heh. They didn’t seek “U.S. approval” before they attacked Lebanon, either. They sought Dick Cheney’s approval, and he gave it to them. Dick Cheney isn’t the “U.S.” He’s just the vice president, and the president of the Senate. He’s not in the military chain of command at all, and according to him he doesn’t even work in the executive branch of government.

No word yet on whether Israel got Dick’s permission to use cluster munitions on the sand colored people, this time or last time. Israel’s Haareetz says the Israeli Defense Force is aiming the cluster ammunition at “open areas.” I have trouble imagining Hamas placing suitable cluster bomb targets in the open. You might shell an open area to set off mines that could be buried there, but if you use cluster bombs to do that you’ll create another minefield on top of the one you’re trying to clear. Cluster bombs are made for killing people. Maybe the IDF is shelling open areas with cluster bombs as a humanitarian gesture, something to remind the Palestinians to stay in the closed areas where it’s safer, but I doubt it. Journalist Jamal Dajani of Link TV, posting from the Israel-Gaza border, judges Israel’s self described “surgical strikes” to be “as surgical as shooting chickens in a coop with a shot gun.”

Mr. Bush blames the Gaza debacle on Hamas, saying it has “once again shown its true colors as a terrorist organization” with attacks on Israel. Bush didn’t mention that Israel broke the ceasefire in November when it sent ground troops into Gaza. Cheney probably didn’t let anybody tell Bush that part. Maybe it’s a moot issue; Israel has had Gaza under a blockade since January 2008, six months before the ceasefire went into effect. Since a blockade is an act of war imposed by armed force, one has to marvel at how even the most adroit Rovewellian can say with a straight face that a ceasefire exists within a blockade.

But then logic has never been a requirement of Bush administration rhetoric. Kondi says that, “Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage ever since their illegal coup against the forces of (Palestinian Authority) President Mahmoud Abbas.” The “illegal coup” she refers to was the January 2006 election in which Hamas won a large majority of Palestinian Parliament and ousted the corrupt, self-serving Fatah party. Fatah, you may recall, was the political organization of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who built a personal nest egg of $1 billion and $3 billion out of public funds.

Kondi says that she won’t settle for a ceasefire that allows Hamas to keep its rockets to defend itself with. Hamas makes the Qassam rockets themselves, since they can’t afford to buy weapons from anybody. The rockets are simple steel filled tubes with no guidance system. The fuel is a mixture of sugar and fertilizer, and the warhead contains fertilizer and scavenged TNT. Qassam rockets are worthless against the F-16 fighter-bombers we gave the Israelis.

FOX News put fear and loathing merchant John Bolton on the air to say the Israelis has a right to use those F-16s to “eliminate” Hamas. After that, Bolton said, Israel should use the F-16s to attack Iran for us.

Bush neocons aren’t the only U.S. politicos lifting their skirts for Israel. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally.” Dick Cheney must not have let anybody tell her that Israel attacked first either. On Meet the Press last Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid prattled on about how generous the Israelis were when they gave the Palestinians control of the Gaza Strip in 2003. He didn’t mention that Israel was giving back land the UN parceled to the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 when it established Israel.

It’s too bad for the Palestinians they can’t afford to set up a lobbying group like the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and to buy all of our politicians and our media like the Israelis have done.

Lonely at the Bottom

The Armistice Agreements that ended the 1948 Arab-Israeli War eliminated Palestine as a defined territory. The land not ceded to Israel was distributed to Egypt, Syria and Jordan, who essentially told their Palestinian Arab pals to go fish in a sand dune. In early December 2008, Egyptian president Mubarak blocked the Iranian Red Crescent from delivering food to Gaza to relieve Palestinians who had been reduced to eating grass. I reckon Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni hadn’t heard about the grass eating business when she said, “There is no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. Or maybe she doesn’t think Palestinians eating grass constitutes a humanitarian crisis.

The Telegraph describes how the U.S. blocked the UN Security Council from passing a statement urging an immediate ceasefire on both sides on Saturday. Historian and journalist Gareth Porter exposes how the Bush administration has been plotting the current Gaza confrontation since early 2007.

I once had the audacity to hope that my country would become that shining city on a hill, a champion of the oppressed and abandoned. Human societies don’t get much more oppressed or abandoned than the Palestinians, but political regimes don’t come any more malignant than the Bush administration.

It would be nice to believe that change is just around the corner, but the ear-splitting silence from Barack Obama, on a holiday surfing safari as the Gaza debacle unfolded, has me suspecting that the Israelis now own U.S. foreign policy trigger, stock and barrel regardless of who the American public puts in power. I don’t buy Obama’s “one president at a time” excuse. Bush, Cheney and the neocons have gotten away with atrocity after atrocity after atrocity for eight merciless years because people who could have stopped them didn’t want to speak out of turn.

I’d also like to believe that Barack Obama is more concerned with doing the right thing than with what the John Boltons and Sean Hannitys and Bill Kristols of this world have to say about him.

But just now, I’m more inclined to believe in Scientology.

___

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.

Merry Christmas, fellow citizens. Odds are now almost certain that your country will be in a state of war throughout your lifetimes, and possibly throughout your children’s lifetimes as well.

They Lied With Their Boots On

It’s hard to be surprised any more when the NYT echoes the Pentagon’s G.I. jingo, but the experience of watching the newspaper of record cut and paste phrases like “a page from the successful experiment in Iraq” is aging poorly. From the outset, a key component of the surge strategy was the propaganda piece that would make it sound “successful” regardless of how it went.

As in the principles of war, “objective” is a prime tenet of information operations; but there’s a difference between the way objectives work in warfare and how they’re used in propaganda. In warfare—theoretically, anyway—the objective is supposed to be straightforward and tangible, and all operations and tactics should support the primary goal. In information operations, the objective, at least the stated one, is so vague and flexible that it doesn’t need to have anything at all to do with the actual military operation. In fact, it’s best if it doesn’t; the less any statement meant for public consumption has to do with reality, the greater freedom of movement the information operator (aka “bull feather merchant” or “BFM”) has.

When Bill Kristol pal Fred Kagan and the rest of the neocons at the American Enterprise Institute rammed their surge strategy past the Joint Chiefs’ tonsils, the BFMs had to justify escalating the war to the public. Too many brass hats had admitted there was no military solution to the Iraq fiasco, so the “political unification” canard was adopted.

Political unification has proven to be as elusive as Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction; with the provincial elections just a stone’s throw away, there’s talk of a coup to oust Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki. That’s been no problem for the BFMs, though; looking ahead, they nested the “security” piece of the puzzle in the original mission statement: establish security in order to allow political unity to come about. Since some measure of decreased violence has been achieved in Iraq, the BFMs can point to it as proof of the surge’s success, and be reasonably confident no one will remember that improving security was the task, not the goal. They can also be fairly sure that not too many folks will ask hard questions about how that “security” was achieved.

In his three tours of duty in Iraq, David Petraeus has followed the same operational formula: he hands out a lot of weapons, bribes everybody he gave the weapons to not to use them, and transfers the heck out of Dodge before the time bombs he set blow off his successors’ thumbs and noses (Hey, what’s this?).

Four months after Petraeus turned over command of a “tamed” Mosul, the city’s police chief defected and insurgents overran the city. When Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, his recruits disappeared into the desert night along with about 190,000 AK-47 rifles and pistols. As commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq, he created “Awakening Councils,” groups of former Sunni militants that Filkins says “are credited by American officials as one of the main catalysts behind the steep reduction in violence there.” More that 100,000 of these former anti-U.S. guerillas have been armed to armpits and put on the dole so they won’t attack Nuri al Maliki’s government forces. Creating the Awakening Councils was the single dumbest thing—among a field of highly qualified contenders for the title—that we’ve done in Iraq, and now, it’s one of the most compelling reasons for us to stay there forever: if we leave, the gravy spigot runs dry, and all our beautiful ugliness will melt out the drain pipe when the Sunni gunmen go back to their old line of business.

And thus it is that our catalyst of victory is the machinery of our failure; we’ve succeeded so well in Iraq that we must stay there always. Permanent occupation of Iraq was the operational and strategic objective all along, of course, even before 9/11, even before young Mr. Bush was selected to head the neoconservative ticket.

But the BFMs are still doing a good job of keeping the system from acquiring that target.

Hell No, They Won’t Go

They’re also doing a good job of camouflaging what the junta is up to these days. As of December 28, Barack Obama’s web site still promises to phase “combat troops” out of Iraq in 16 months. His Secretary of Defense and top generals must not have looked at his web site lately. (I’m sure they’ve been busy.)

Retired Marine General James L. Jones, the incoming National Security Adviser, and ongoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and legacy Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen are all on record as being opposed to withdrawal timelines. Jones has said a timeline would be “against our national interest.” Mullen warned that a deadline would be “dangerous,” and Gates objected to the 16-month plan during the presidential campaign.

General Ray Odierno, commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq and boy sidekick to David Petraeus, recently announced that U.S. troops would stay on in Iraqi cities beyond the summer deadline called for in the Status of Forces agreement. Gates, who was on a tour of the region blaming Iran for everything wrong in the world, didn’t say boo about Odierno’s public defiance of the agreement. That’s not surprising. In a recent article Foreign Affairs article, Gates Wrote, “there will continue to be some kind of U.S. advisory and counterterrorism effort in Iraq for years to come.” From the tenor of the rest of the piece, it sounded like he meant “years to come after 2011.”

The BFM work-around to ignoring international agreements and mandates from the commander in chief is pure magic:

Q: When are armed troops in a combat zone not combat troops?

A: When we call them something else.

Presto, change-o, give them a different name and grind the new president’s campaign promises into his eye like a broken whiskey bottle. Maybe the BFM expression for that sort of thing is “following orders from the bottom up.”

The folks who brought us war without end in Iraq are rolling out advance publicity of their planned sequel set in the Bananastans, and nobody, including Barack Obama, seems to notice or care. In propaganda art that’s called “desensitizing.”

Maybe we used up what was left of our national outrage on the Iran strike that never happened. Or maybe we have this waifish notion that Barack Obama couldn’t possibly let a bad thing like Iraq happen again.

Could he?

He sure isn’t stepping up to the plate on this Gaza atrocity, is he? Maybe he’s waiting for the Pentagon to give him permission.

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. Also catch Scott Horton’s interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

Last week, at a meeting of his country’s ruling party, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak accused Iran of “trying to devour the Arab states.” Don’t worry, Hosni. Iran won’t eat you. It can’t. It can’t sit on you either. It’s too far away.

What led Mubarak to say such a mean thing about Iran? Well, it seems that a bunch of Iranian students shouted a bunch of mean things at the Egyptian embassy in Tehran, including their apparently genuine wish that someone would hang Mubarak. The Iranian students shouted mean things about Mubarak because Egypt wouldn’t let the Iranian Red Crescent sneak around Israel’s blockade of the Gaza strip and deliver food and supplies to Palestinians, who have been reduced to eating grass.

So Iran wasn’t trying to eat Arabs; it was trying to feed them. Gee, how did Mubarak get that story all backwards?

Mr. Congeniality

If there’s a big blue meanie in this scenario, it’s Mubarak, who for two years running has made Parade magazine’s “World’s Worst Dictators” list. Mubarak has stayed in power in Egypt for over a quarter century through military rule, torture, emergency law, rigged elections, and keeping his nose planted in Israel’s tohkes (and, by extension, America’s as well).

But if he says the Iranians are up to no good, the no goodniks, that’s good enough for us, because we’ve had years of Dick Cheney and his Iran Directorate telling us how bad Iran is.

Though they have yet to prove any of their allegations, the Cheney Gang has most of the world believing the Iranians are responsible for arming militants in Iraq. The world, mostly because of the mainstream media’s indolence, is largely unconscious that the party most responsible for handing out free guns to Iraqi yahooligans is General David Petraeus. Nor is the world especially cognizant that the reductions in violence that Petraeus so merrily takes credit for are actually the result of Iran brokering a peace agreement between Shiite factions headed by cleric Muqtada al Sadr and Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki.

The preponderance of the world believes Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program, despite decisive statements by U.S. intelligence agencies that they abandoned their program in fall of 2003. The Russians didn’t begin building Iran’s first reactor until fall of 2002, so whatever nuclear program Iran had must have been the kind of thing a bunch of Revolutionary Guard colonels drew on the back of a napkin on a rainy afternoon Fort Farsi Officers’ Club. That U.S. intelligence granted the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program at all was almost certainly a result of pressure from Lord Cheney’s leg breakers.

The world perceives that Iran instigated Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon because of allegations like the one made by the Israeli cabinet that Lebanon had become infested with “Iranian-sponsored terrorist enclaves of murder.” This perception endures despite the discoverable big block facts in the Lebanon conflict: the Israelis were the ones who blew the bejesus out of southern Lebanon, and the Persian Iranians were the ones who came in afterward and offer aid to injured and homeless Arabs despite attempts by the nice guy Arabs in Turkey and Saudi to stop them.

And now the Persian Shiite Iranians are the ones trying to help Sunni Palestinian Arabs in Gaza who the Israelis are starving, and it’s Egyptian Sunni Arab Mubarak who’s assisting Israel and who’s trying to paint Iran as the bad guy.

Welcome to your Brave New World Order, fellow citizens. Black is white, up is down, scumbags rule, humanitarian works are acts of aggression and so say the round heeled news media.

Witness this statement from January 2008 by the British Telegraph: “Iran is known to use humanitarian aid to further its political aims around the region.”

Stunning humbuggery. Simply stunning.

And everybody knows, of course, that the Iranians want to get their mitts on nuclear weapons so they can blow Israel off the map because that’s what their president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said. Well, actually, nobody knows that because that’s not what Ahmadinejad said. He was actually quoting the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and according to Professor Juan Cole and other Farsi speaking commentators, Ahmadinejad’s exact words were “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

But everybody says he said he wants to nuke Israel off the face of the earth, and what everybody says is what passes for gospel truth in our Rovewellian age.

Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons or a program to make any. It may or may not have ballistic missiles that will reach Israel, but without nuclear warheads, ballistic missiles are little more than multi-million dollar popguns. Iran’s army can’t project power more than ten miles beyond its borders, Iran’s air force can’t fly to the other side of the Persian Gulf, and its bathtub navy, while an effective coastal and choke point denial force, couldn’t go toe-to-to with the Somali pirates because it would sink of natural causes before it got halfway to Africa.

Iran can’t do much to our troops in Iraq. If—and this is a big if—they manage to talk the Shiite militias into throwing themselves against the fence in an all out assault on our forces, so what? You couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to wipe out the Shiite militias. You hear speculation that Iran might mobilize Hamas and Hezbollah against our Iraq enclaves, but what would they use to mobilize them? Flying carpets?

A lot of folks also believe the talk that Iran might incite the rest of the Middle East into a full-blown major regional conflict, but how on earth are the Middle Eastern nations going to fight each other? The past 50 years or so have clearly demonstrated that none of them can successfully project conventional military power into any of their neighbors’ territories, much less any other countries in the area. Iran’s maritime forces might be able to close the Strait of Hormuz briefly, and could very well pull our Navy’s pants around its ankles in broad daylight, but Iran would only do that if we attacked it for no real reason.

And as we’ve discussed, we have no real reason to attack Iran. We have no real reason to demonize them the way we have been either, except that making a boogie man out of the Persians is the best thing the warmongery has left to justify staying in Iraq, something they seem intent on doing despite the agreement young Mr. Bush just signed that says we’ll leave.

_____

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. Also catch Scott Horton’s interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

In a pair of recent opinion pieces, Lind asserts that we shouldn’t let women and gays in the armed services because if we do, “men who want to prove they are real men will not join.”

Lind’s relative manliness doesn’t necessarily add to or subtract from his opinion’s validity, but unnamed sources who knew him when assure me that the closest he ever came to wearing a uniform was dressing his G.I. Joe doll in one.

Gays and Dolls

As one might expect a social conservative to do, Lind laces his positions with a number of intellectual subterfuges, not the least of which is filing gay men and women in the same pigeon hole. The go-to argument against women serving in the military is that they are, on average, smaller and weaker than their male counterparts and they can get pregnant, a consideration that doesn’t apply to gay men.

If you think that gay men are intrinsically less physically capable than their heterosexual counterparts, and you want to take a trip to the emergency room, I invite you to walk up to a homosexual member of the American Ballet Theater and call him a faggot. I doubt if there’s a segment of the population more physically prepared for direct placement into elite commando training than male dancers. (There are such things as heterosexual male dancers, by the way, and they generally don’t lack for the companionship of women who wouldn’t give either Lind or me the time of day).

But there’s more required of a fighter than physical toughness, according to Lind. “Throughout history,” he prates, “some armies have fought a lot harder than others. The specific reasons vary widely, but one way or another they all come down to human factors.” The most important human factor, Lind assures us, “is that men fight to prove they are real men.” Their membership in fighting organizations is a “badge of honor” that says, “We’re not sissies or pansies. We are men who fight, serving alongside other men who fight.” An infusion of sissies and pansies among the company of real men, Lind warns, could damage “military unit cohesion.”

Mr. Lind has a selective sense of military history and/or a blind notch in his Doppler gay-dar.

As a carrier skipper I served with said when President Bill Clinton enacted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, “Sailors have been rubbing heinies since Sinbad reported to boot camp.” Soldiers have been sharing pup tents just as long.

The ancient Greeks believed that physical love between soldiers improved morale, bravery and overall battle efficiency. Plato, the philosophical father of the American political right, considered it utter stupidity to ban physical relationships between soldiers. “Wherever, therefore, it has been established that it is shameful to be involved in sexual relationships with men,” he wrote, “this is due to evil on the part of the rulers, and to cowardice in the part of the governed.”

In a song honoring the Lelantine War, Plato’s pupil Aristotle wrote that, “love…thrives side by side with courage.”

The Roman historian Plutarch noted that tribal ties were of little value “when dangers press, but a band cemented by friendship grounded upon love is never to be broken.”

Lind cautions that gay and straight men can’t mix in “very close quarters” without “serous friction.” I’ve got news for Lind: gay and straight men have been mixing in very close quarters in the American military without serious friction since forever, including those World War II John Wayne types that conservatives like Lind have such a school girl crush on.

They’re queer, Bill. They’re here, Bill. Now drop and give me fifty pushups (heh).

G.I. Jane

The notion of women serving in the military is hardly new either. Plato favored it. He wrote in Republic that women must be taught the “art of war, which they must practice like men.”

“Is she capable of sharing either wholly or partially in the actions of men, or not at all?” he asked. “And is the art of war one of those arts in which she can or can not share?” Then “let [women] share in the toils of war and the defense of their country… Only in the distribution of labors the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same.”

Lind’s specific objection to letting women serve is that they might be allowed into “ground combat arms.” I’m not sure what he means by that. Women are and will be assigned to war zones in combat support capacities. So what? He may suppose that women inherently lack the “right stuff” for combat, but those Israeli Security Force babes who pull the trigger on those remote control machine guns along the Gaza Strip don’t appear to be lacking anything in the killer instinct department. If Lind is worried that women will elbow their way into Delta Force, he is, in Plato’s words, “plucking a fruit of unripe wisdom.” I don’t know of anyone who is seriously trying to make women into commandos, or of anyone who would take the notion seriously. Maybe Lind is confusing that movie where Demi Moore becomes a Navy SEAL with reality. Confusion about reality is, after all, a leading occupational hazard of conservatism.

I don’t claim that integrating women in the military has been a tribulation-free experience. In my day, the incidence of young single sailor girls getting themselves pregnant to get out of duties they didn’t care for was completely out of hand. We developed a pretty good solution though; all the single mommy strikers got discharged and sent home.

I’ve also known a fair number of female officers who benefitted from reverse discrimination, but not nearly as many as the number of male officers I knew who got where they got thanks to Uncle Admiral or Governor Grandpa or a godfather who had a village in the old country named after him. And never forget that whatever wartime leadership qualities George S. Patton possessed that allowed him to get away with his vainglorious shenanigans, he was also one of the richest dudes in the Army.

Lind’s bottom line isn’t that women and homosexuals serving in the military will impair America’s war making capability. He’s concerned about “cultural Marxism,” which is a code phrase narrow shouldered white male bigots intone when they sense that cultural Darwinism is about to bust them another pay grade or two down the social pyramid. By Lind’s criteria, emancipation was cultural Marxism, as was the ban on feeding Christians to lions.

There may be good arguments for barring women and gays from military service, but Lind doesn’t make them, and I haven’t heard any that make an ounce more sense than his do.

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. Also catch Scott Horton’s interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

John Heileman, New York magazine, The Next New Deal:

“Personally, I think the depth of the Obama realignment is being underestimated,” says the Republican media savant Stuart Stevens, who helped elect Bush twice. “They have basically invented their own party that is compatible with the Democratic Party but is bigger than the Democratic Party. Their e-mail list is more powerful than the DNC or RNC. In essence, Obama [was] elected as an Independent with Democratic backing — like Bernie Sanders on steroids.”

In other words, the Democratic party is but a brigade of the Obama juggernaut.

James Kunstler, The Long Road Ahead:

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson found himself in the dock to answer how come, when he ran Goldman Sachs, there was a special unit in the company dedicated to short-selling the very mortgage-backed securities that another unit in the company was so busy pawning off to every pension fund on God’s green earth.The mind reels at the scale of the cynical opportunism.

David Remnick, New Yorker editor, speaking with William Ayers, just before he repaired to Grant Park for Obama’s acceptance speech:

This is an achingly exciting moment.

Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch, interviewing Ralph Nader, on Obama:

He campaigned for two years, promised blacks nothing, Latinos nothing, women’s groups nothing, labor nothing. Contrast the lack of demands on the liberal progressive side to what the Limbaugh crowd exacted from McCain.

He might seem like a figure of ridicule. But he still makes sense.

Gail Collins, New York Times, on Sarah Palin in A Political Manners Manual:

But the worst part is that if these people get any meaner, we’re going to wind up feeling sorry for her. This is not something we are looking forward to, Republicans, and we will resent you for it.

Anna Marie Cox, the Daily Beast, interviewing Steve Schmidt, McCain’s, chief strategist:

But if the party does not figure out a way to appeal to Latino voters, it will become increasingly difficult, and maybe impossible, to ever again win a national election.

In The Messiah is amongst us Steven Pollard of Britain’s Spectator asks himself:

What is your single biggest hope for Barack Obama?

I can’t make up my mind between curing cancer or turning water into wine.

Melissa Biggs Bradley, Huffington Post, Why Being Nouveau Pauvre Cheers Britain:

“We should not underestimate the pleasure that discomfort brings to the British,” [British commentator A.N. Wilson] wrote. “All their ‘finest hours’ and ‘happy memories’ tend to be of wars, family holidays on rainswept Welsh beaches or periods at boarding school. … Already we look back on the past twenty years with disgust — the wastefulness of it seems nauseating. There will be positive pleasure in the cold mornings, before we don our darned and mended garments and eat our austere meals.”

Diane Tucker, Huffington Post, Voting Expert William Jacoby Knows How You’re Going To Vote:

Racism still permeates a large component of white America, but today it’s a different kind of racism. … A majority of whites do not believe they’re inherently superior. Research indicates they believe “we are all the same,” but that certain demographic groups “aren’t living up to their potential.”

Fred Kaplan on our Syria raid:

Finally, at a time when some members of the Bush administration have begun to see the merits of reaching out to Syria — as an inducement to pry it away from Iran, sever its ties with Hezbollah, stabilize Lebanon, and secure the borders of Iraq — the air raid, a deliberate violation of Syrian sovereignty, pushes those goals further out of reach.

Cinque Henderson, New Republic’s blog, the Plank:

However, I’m not looking forward to his speech, so much as his official swearing in. … will Obama say, “I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States.” The first four words. . . “I, Barack Hussein Obama”–may well outstrip, for sheer bravura, any inaugural address he could possibly give.

George Monbiot:

Like most people on my side of the Atlantic, I have for many years been mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

Sports

Ralph Vacchiano, the New York Daily News:

[New York Giants running back] Brandon Jacobs was impressed with how the Giants held Cowboys RB Marion Barber to just 54 yards on 19 carries (2.8 yards per rush). … “If I was a running back against our defense today,” Jacobs said, “I would’ve said, ‘Stop giving me the ball. You’re bringing my average down.’”

As I was saying, I’m already tired of hearing about how Obama’s election was historic. Not because it’s not true, but rather because it’s already overdone. I lost count of the number of times I heard the phrase “historic election” even before President-elect Obama took the stage in Chicago election night, never mind all the times I’ve heard it on the radio and read it on nearly every webpage, blog, and news site I’ve visited since election night.

There’s another reason I’m sick of the phrase, too. It’s not enough.

It’s not enough to just elect the first black man to be President. It’s not enough to elect the first biracial man to be President. It’s not enough to elect someone who actually knows what it’s like to live on food stamps. It’s not enough to elect a compentent President after 8 years of rank presidential incompetence. It’s not enough that Obama organized the youth of this country into a force to be reckoned with. In fact, no matter how historic Obama’s election is, it’s not enough.

Enough already with the “historic election”. The election of Barack Obama was only the first step. In 10 or 20 years, what will define whether President Obama’s election was truly historic won’t be that he was black, or mixed race, or anything else I mentioned above. Instead, it will be what he does during his administration.

If Obama gets the U.S. out of Iraq without leaving a mess we’ll have to re-invade to fix later, that will be historic.

If Obama puts an end to the Taliban and al Qaeda in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan without provoking a war with Pakistan, that will be historic.

If Obama keeps the country from slipping into a second depression, that will be historic.

If Obama puts the U.S. onto a path of oil independence without relying on environmentally destructive shale and coal-to-liquids programs, that will be historic.

If Obama leads the U.S. to a renewable energy standard and strips away market-distorting carbon fuel subsidies, that will be historic.

If Obama leads the country in upgrading our collapsing water, transportation, and energy infrastructure, that will be historic.

If Obama helps Congress develop a solution to the linked problems of entitlements, defense spending, and national debt, that will be historic.

If Obama can rebuild our relations with the rest of the world, that will be historic.

If Obama can cut U.S. carbon emissions in the short time the best science available says we have, and can get the rest of the world to do the same, that will be historic.

If Obama can reduce the costs of health care, provide health care to the millions of Americans who lack it at present, and maintain the quality and freedom our health care system provides at present, that will be historic.

If Obama can implement all the economic, regulatory, scientific, technological, social, cultural, and diplomatic changes required to do everything I just listed off, at the same time, and still deal with all the other things that will come up, that will be historic.

President-elect Barack Obama will always be the first black President. No-one will ever be able to take that from him, and no one should try. But there will come a time when our next President’s “blackness” will be an important historical footnote. And when that happens, when Obama’s race has been relegated to the status of a footnote by the accomplishments of his presidency, that too will be historic.

It will also, ultimately, be enough.

An airstrike by United States-led forces killed 40 civilians and wounded 28 others after it hit a wedding party in Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Wednesday. The casualties included women and children, the officials said.

At his news conference Wednesday, Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, referred to civilian casualties in the attack on Sha Wali Kot. “The fight against terrorism cannot be won by bombardment of our villages,” Mr. Karzai said. “My first demand from the new president of the United states when he takes his office will be to end the civilian casualties and take the fight to where the nests and sanctuaries are,” he said.

Exactly what is it about wedding parties that turns them into such tempting targets?

Is it an unconscious urge to make preemptive strikes against Middle-Easterners to keep them from propagating?

Hey, the theory is no less called for than the strikes.

“If the polls are right, if it don’t rain and the creek don’t rise, the winner of the presidential election is sure to be . . . Lyndon Baines Johnson. When he signed the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson knew he was also signing away the South and, with it, much of the white vote elsewhere as well. “We have lost the South for a generation,” he supposedly said back then.

A significant number of southern whites, even men, figure to vote for Barack Obama. Cohen cites blacks who have excelled in high-profile fields like politics and entertainment. Since most southern and conservative white men don’t care about politics and are unmoved by Oprah and Denzel Washington, what would make them vote for a black man?

Consider where they might have interacted with or observed blacks in positions of authority? Some no doubt have been supervised by blacks on jobs. But that’s more likely to build resentment than respect.

But there are four other positions accorded unalloyed respect, where blacks are found more and more often these days: 1. Drill sergeants. 2. High school quarterbacks and coaches. 3. NFL quarterbacks (especially the toughest, like Steve McNair). 4. NFL coaches, like Art Shell and Tony Dungy.

Serving under and observing blacks in military and sports leadership positions — and learning that they’re at least as capable as whites of leading them to success — has probably done more to soften up conservative whites to consider voting for Obama as much as anything.

Link of the Week (as opposed to the Weakest Link):

Jonathan Freedland at the Guardian: “Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood. … But if McCain wins in November, that might well change. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start — a fresh start the world is yearning for.” [Emphasis added.]

Naomi Foner at Huffington Post asks: “What kind of misplaced chivalry would keep the Democrats from calling Sarah Palin what she is? An ignorant, misinformed, inexperienced, bigoted fraud. And unless we find a way to do it, she will be running the country before we have time to turn around.”

From a New York Times article, “Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes“: “The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government.”

Paul Begala has been as good on McCain-Palin as anybody: “McCain and Palin also claim the Alaska governor opposes earmarks — despite the fact that she’s gotten her state so much pork she’s at risk for trichinosis.”

Taibbi on Obama’s appeal: “Obama manages to appeal somehow to that part of us that is tired of there always being another side of the story when it comes to our presidents. We don’t want to live in a world where there’s always a set of lurid secret tapes that will come out someday, or a mistress with a cigar in her twat hidden off-camera somewhere, or a backroom deal to juice a prewar intelligence report for a bunch of oil-fat-cat golf buddies.”

In “What small-town America is saying about Obama” on Salon, Dan Hoyle shares this: “Gary Ball, a former coal miner and editor of the firebrand Mountain Citizen newspaper that is published in Inez [KY], points to an authenticity gap for Obama. ‘People around here see Obama as being privileged,’ he said. … “We know Obama’s plenty book-smart. . . but I liked Harry Truman, the last president to have a simple high school education.” Even though this guy’s an editor, a college education is capable of disqualifying a candidate in his eyes. You see what Obama is up against.

Comic actor Paul Reiser (remember Mad About Us?) at Huffington Post: “Now everyone is calling for Obama to ‘get angry.’ ‘Get out there and frown this way, curl your lip that way, and clench your fist like so.” [But there's] only so much the guy can do. It’s going to have to be us.”

Maybe the election isn’t about about the economy. Glenn Thrush at Politico writes: “Added a Democratic pollster: ‘Don’t look at the unemployment rate. The key metric is the percentage of voters who think Obama is ready to lead. So far, that’s been around 50 to 58 percent. If that number stabilizes in the mid-50s, he’ll win.”

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly quotes an old E.J. Dionne column: “A very intelligent political reporter I know said the other night that Republicans simply run better campaigns than Democrats. If I were given a free pass to stretch the truth to the breaking point, I could run a pretty good campaign, too.”

Billmon on the how minorities are only decades away from becoming the majority in the United States: “If you watched any of the Republican National Convention last week — that sea of milky faces, celebrating its own pasteurized homogeneity — you got a good, hard look at the party’s greatest strength: Its hammerlock on the political allegiances of a majority of white Americans. But I think you also saw the party’s greatest weakness: White Americas hammerlock on the party’s future. The time is fast approaching when the weakness will outweigh the strength.”

Lionel Beehner of the Guardian writes: “Interestingly, if Saakashvili is a ‘political corpse‘, as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev described him in a fit of anger, then Cheney’s recent meeting with the Georgian leader was just one political corpse talking to another.”

A victim of the Los Angeles train collision speaks: “‘Within an instant I was in my friend’s lap. It was so quick. It was devastating,’ he said. … The man said he was involved in a devastating 2005 Metrolink crash in Glendale and was talking about it with the other passenger when Friday’s crash occurred.”

Sports

At Sports Illustrated, Dr. Z write: “The AP had this postgame non sequitur: “Vince Young was on crutches after injuring his left knee against Jacksonville. . . Titans coach Jeff Fisher didn’t think the injury was serious.’ Just backs up my longtime contention that coaches have a remarkably high threshold for other people’s pain.”

Also at Sports Illustrated, Peter King writes about the player who injured Tom Brady: “‘I tried to apologize to him,’ Bernard Pollard said. … ‘But I’m not sure he heard me. He was screaming.’”

“The young fighters were chattering excitedly about a missile that had recently destroyed one of their ammunition dumps. An American missile, the kids said. ‘It was a plane without a pilot,’ one of the boys explained through an interpreter. His eyes darted back and forth among his fellows. ‘We saw a flash. And then the building exploded.’”

But it’s a little different when you’re on the receiving end of a drone attack. On September 8, just the other side of the border in the North Waziristan tribal area of Pakistan, we launched a UCAV (unmanned combat aerial vehicle) strike on a madrassa and the house of Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani. The obligatory ten to 20 civilians, with, as usual, a heavy representation of women and children, were killed.

Earlier, on September 3, U.S. special operations forces charged straight out of our Bagram base in Afghanistan, crossed the border, and carried out a commando raid in South Waziristan. The number of dead approximated that of the September 8 attack.

An anonymous American official said: “The situation in the tribal areas is not tolerable. … Orders have been issued.”

When the subject is missing from a sentence like the last one, you know the speaker mean business. Especially if it’s the Bush administration, to whom winning hearts and minds would be an impressive legacy for a president — if he were Stuart Smalley.

By nature, the hard right is impervious to the argument that our interventions in the Middle East are “just creating more enemies” argument. You don’t fret about the consequences if you have right on your side. Wringing your hands over the possibility of blowback is for wimps.

As for the drones, according to another Times article, “some Pakistani officials have made clear that they prefer the C.I.A.’s Predator aircraft, operating from the skies, as a method of killing Qaeda operatives [to ground operations].”

But what kind of a country, unless it’s being invaded by an army — no matter how much money we funnel into it — invites us to attack it with missiles and Special Forces, thus putting its citizens in harm’s way? Did Pakistan sign an agreement with the United States to allow these attacks by land and air?

In the case of the Special Forces raids, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti reported in the New York Times that “President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government.”

But, as Gareth Porter was the first to discover: “Patrick Lang, former defence intelligence officer for the Middle East at the Defence Intelligence Agency, told IPS he understands the intelligence community issued a ‘pretty clear warning’ [to the administration in opposition to the September 3 raid]. ‘They said, in effect, if you want to see the Pakistani government collapse, go right ahead,’ Lang said.”

Robert Dreyfuss agrees. “There could hardly be a worse strategy. It risks inflaming Pakistani public opinion against the United States and boosts the religious parties. It will make the new Pakistani government look like pawns or puppets of the United States.”

Schmitt and Mazzetti add: “American officials say that they will notify Pakistan when they conduct limited ground attacks. . . but that they will not ask for its permission.”

“In other words,” Dreyfuss writes, “the Pakistani government is winking at the idea.”

Still, according to Schmitt and Mazzetti, last week’s ground assault drove Pakistan’s military chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani to venture his first public criticism of America’s policy. “‘The rules of engagement with the coalition forces are well defined’ and foresee Pakistan alone taking action against militants inside its borders.”

Asia Times Online’s Syed Saleem Shahzad expanded on that: “Kiani is making the correct noises, but one has to question his sincerity. This month, Pakistan announced that because of the [September 3 attack], it was stopping NATO supplies at the Torkham border. But not only were NATO supplies allowed to continue into Afghanistan within a few hours, after two attacks on Pakistan by US Predator drones, Pakistan stayed silent.”

Thus Pakistan not only winks at the United States about ground and air attacks, but, after expressing its outrage, winks again.

The military, however, “is said to be fuming” over the recent attacks, according to the Hindu. Shahzad explains. “Pakistan’s corps commanders are clearly not convinced by Kiani’s statements as they are the ones who have to send troops” into the battles the Special Forces have begun. In other words, they know a wink when they see one.

What is Pakistan trying to accomplish by playing both sides against the middle? For starters, of course, it hopes to avoid acting as the aggressor in the frontier areas in order to keep its residents from turning on the state. Also, the Pakistan military doesn’t attack the Taliban because both groups have in common their religion and their hatred of America.

Filkins got a rare admission out of a Taliban warlord in Afghanistan named Namdar.

“What’s going on? I asked the warlord. Why aren’t [the Pakistani army] coming for you?

‘I cannot lie to you,’ Namdar said, smiling at last. ‘The army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama — it is just to entertain.’

Entertain whom? I asked.

‘America.’”

But, as Filkins explains, there’s a deeper reason why Pakistan refrains from attacking the Taliban. After the United States invaded in 2001, “India lost no time in setting up consulates throughout Afghanistan and beginning an extensive aid program. According to Pakistani and Western officials, Pakistan’s officer corps remains obsessed by the prospect of Indian domination of Afghanistan should the Americans leave. The Taliban are seen as a counterweight to Indian influence.”

As for Pakistan, winking — whether it’s at us when we launch rockets and raids, or at the Taliban when it does the same — does not a foreign policy make.

As for the United States, taking out terrorists amounts to lancing boils when the problem is systemic. Should the Taliban prevail in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it might be disposed to turn over the care and feeding of its nuclear weapons to al Qaeda-recruited scientists. We need to implement the carrot half of Barack Obama’s plan — massive aid to Pakistan’s civilian sector — pronto.

It would also go a long way toward easing tensions if we leaned on India to give up its designs on Afghanistan. As the recent beneficiary of pressure we put on the Nuclear Supplier Group to agree to a nuclear energy deal with it, India needs to do us a favor and stop meddling in Afghanistan.

For more on the Middle-East. . .

Letters from Afghanistan: Installment 8
Back from Bamyan; the sewing program; village dominance
By Connor O’Steen

Is Azizabad the new My Lai?
By Russ Wellen

Letters from Afghanistan: Installment 7
Poisoning dogs, orphan teamwork, getting poisoned
By Connor O’Steen

What to do — blow myself up or study engineering at Caltech?
By Russ Wellen