by Michael Brenner

Operation New Dawn! How disarming it would be were this a sign that a bit of dry wit had penetrated the mental fastness that is the American defense establishment. Alas, the truth is that the Pentagon’s public relations machine is still grinding away. This administration’s dedication to continuing the tradition of dishonest public communication bequeathed it by the Bush bunch is of cardinal importance. For its implications for how we conduct the nation’s affairs are deeper and more enduring than this ridiculous try at casting the mantle of success over our gory, corrupt and inept escapade in Iraq. First a few thoughts on the dimensions of our failure there.

The primary features of what Iraq is becoming are marked out by recent developments. Three stand out. The Maliki government used the military police to force the demission of elected officials in Ninevah province who were political opponents of the current regime. That is one. The shadowy Accountability and Justice Commission that vets candidates for the upcoming elections has succeeded in removing from the lists leading Sunni figures along with a potpouri of secularists and dissident Shi’a. That is two. The mastermind of this operation has been Ahmed Chalabi, erstwhile paladin of the neo-conservative schemers who instigated the entire tragic affair. That is three. Chalabi has had intimate ties with Iranian leaders, especially in the powerful security services, from the outset. He always was Tehran’s man insofar as he placed his largest bets for gaining personal power on his Iranian co-conspirators. His key role in passing to them information that compromised American secret codes back in 2005 led to his being blacklisted by American officers in Baghdad – for awhile. Nonetheless, he has remained a powerful behind the scenes figure. Now, General Odierno pronounces himself shocked by the discovery that Chalabi and his protégé, Mr. Lami, are the sharp edge of mounting Iranian influence in Iraqi politics. The good general acts as one who had just made the stunning discovery that people in Las Vegas play roulette. Or, perhaps, it’s the losing part that leaves him shocked.

The unpalatable truths for the promoters of the ‘New Dawn’ over the Tigris are that Iranian influence has eclipsed that of the United States, a fact of life regardless of whether we have 130,000 troops on the ground or 13; that Iraq is slipping perceptibly into an autocracy in the mode of other states in the region; that simmering sectarian rivalries will bedevil Iraqi politics for the foreseeable future. We have dared the impossible in Iraq and we have failed abjectly – that is the long and short of it. Moreover, we have been obtuse in ignoring the writing on the wall even though it has been there in bright neon for years. After all, when Maliki is repeatedly pictured walking hand-in-hand with Mr. Ahmedinejad in Baghdad as well as Tehran they are doing more than observing courtesies.

Yet, too many have too much at stake to let the truth speak for itself, much less to learn its lessons. The authors of our Mesopotamian misadventure have their reputations and current influence at stake. David Petraeus and his cohort have their personal stake in the myth of a modern day Lawrence on a white Arabian steed with a counter-insurgency manual in one hand and a sword in the other. The Obama people have their own interests in downplaying the Iraq debacle, for the White House has embarked on its own quixotic adventure in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The ambitions there are as grand, the obstacles as formidable, success as improbable, and the justification only somewhat less fanciful. The key assumptions are the same. Hence, the refusal to highlight the outcome in Iraq that contradicts them. They are: the United States can produce the transformation of an entire culture out of the barrel of a gun; the natives eventually will put their trust in well-intentioned Americans no matter what; it is imperative to dominate militarily the region forevermore; the nation’s essential well-being is directly affected by what is going on in these alien places; and, finally, that the audacious goal of reducing to zero the terrorist and pseudo-terrorist threats is realistic.

To face honestly the Iraq fiasco is to undermine support for the escalated commitment in AfPak, since the earlier experience largely invalidates those assumptions. Therefore, their disproval was ignored or studiously misrepresented. That made it easier for the basic questions of ‘why’ and ‘how’ in Afpak to be sloughed over. If not put on the table, there is no need to give answers. Accordingly, General Eikenberry, the skeptical nay-sayer who did raise them, was kept on the sidelines of the endless, meandering discussions whose outcome was predetermined.

This is not the way for a great nation to engage matters of high consequence. Bandying around slogans like “Operation New Dawn” is symptomatic of a process that is dishonest and irresponsible at its core. There are limits to how much dishonestly even a resilient country like ours can take, a limit to the costs that it can bear. Instead, our political class should be leading us in a soul-searching as to what we as a people want and what is achievable. The lives of Americans and the integrity of their public institutions are factors in the equation whether our masters admit it or not. In the present depressed economic circumstances, ones likely to remain with us indefinitely, the trade-offs are momentous. Inescapably, we risk the well-being and health of our citizens by strutting on a field of twisted dreams in Islamic Asia fixated on the chimera of eliminating the last would-be terrorist from the face of the earth.

What we have to look forward to is a Cold Dawn – if not a cold twilight.

Michael Brenner is a professor of International Affairs at The University of Pittsburgh. He can be reached at mbren@pitt.edu.

Wilson was primarily famous for two things: fucking anything he could catch, and funneling arms to the Afghani mujahedeen during the country’s war against the Soviet Union. Those of us unfortunate enough to be stuck in the room during Wilson’s speech were regaled by tales of how he ignored the law, bullied, end-ran, lied and cheated to get what he wanted, and I mean all this literally. Wilson was as proud of flaunting the law as he was of his lifelong pursuit of women with obvious esteem issues.

I desperately wanted, when the self-aggrandizement ended, to force my way to the microphone. Of course, by this point in time the recession was in full swing and it struck me that getting turfed wasn’t necessarily in my best interests. So I held fire. But here’s the comment I wanted to make:

Congressman Wilson, if I understand your remarks correctly, then I suppose we have you to blame for 9/11.

I neither advocate nor condone grave-dancing, but it is nonetheless true that there are bad human beings in the world. And the world is a better place when these people move on.

Maybe I’m going to Hell for saying so. But if I do, at least I’ll finally get a chance to talk to Charlie Wilson.

Of course, despite the monetary award, the prize doesn’t contractually bind the recipient to a specified course of action. Still, one can’t help but wonder how the president’s decision to inject a fresh infusion of troops into Afghanistan, a country already on life support, can be reconciled with his status as a Peace Prize winner. (Yes, I know about Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat.)

Meanwhile, the president is adding insult to injury with an issue that, even on a good week — never mind one that’s dominated by the Afghanistan decision — flies under the radar. The Second Review Conference of the 10-year-old Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines — pause for breath here — and on Their Destruction has just wound down.

For its part, the United States hasn’t used antipersonnel mines since the 1991 Gulf War, nor has it produced them since 1997. So far, so good. But that’s where the good news about the United States and land mines ends. First, the United States still possesses 10 million land mines. Second, along with Russia, China, and India, it’s one of the few states that hasn’t signed the treaty. As if that weren’t bad enough, five days before the conference, Reuters reported that State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said:

This administration undertook a policy review and we decided that our land mine policy remains in effect. … We determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this convention [not to be confused with the conference -- RW]. … But we will be [at the conference] as an observer, obviously, because we haven’t signed the convention, nor do we plan to sign the convention.

Many ostensibly humane Americans are in favor of the United States retaining its nuclear weapons. They believe that nukes have been a successful deterrent and will never be used. But land mines are a different story. Ineffective as a deterrent, they’re deployed to impede the progress of the enemy. But they also hinder a state’s post-war recovery. The ultimate gift that keeps on giving, they are, of course, tripped, often by children, for years afterwards.

Still, some human rights activists were just grateful that the United States at least sent a team of observers. But most, as you can imagine, were incensed by the administration’s refusal to review its policy. At Change.org, journalist and human rights worker Daniel Gerstle wrote:

Many of us have been patient with the Obama Administration on foreign affairs only because if he moves too fast the right may rally and shave off the moderates needed to get pro-peace foreign ops legislation passed though the US Congress. But the Mine Ban Treaty? Seriously? … How many more legs need to be blown off to get a progressive peace laureate to ban an explosive which kills more civilians than combatants?

Nor did Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) pull his punches:

The Administration’s approach to this issue. . . has been cursory, half-hearted, and deeply disappointing. … One would hope that an Administration that portrays itself as a global leader on issues of humanitarian law and arms control recognizes this is an opportunity. … I think [it] has made a dramatic mistake in this area.

What Exactly Do We Want With the Damn Things?

A day later, the United States had changed its tune somewhat. As Geneva Lunch reported, Ian Kelly said that the administration. . .

. . . is still reviewing its position on signing the 10-year-old Mine Ban treaty — the opposite of what it said the previous day, but it was unclear if the statement was a correction of an error, a change in tactics. . . or a change of heart following harsh criticism.

If it was a response to the outcry, it did little to mollify Jodie Williams, another Nobel laureate (the old-fashioned kind — she earned it). The founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “This weak attempt at damage control is hardly credible. … the possibility of policy change remains highly uncertain.”

Note that in 2006, then-Senator Obama voted in favor of an amendment to a Pentagon appropriations bill that would have banned the use of another unspeakably cruel weapon, cluster bombs, in civilian areas. Meanwhile, land mines can’t help but be deployed in civilian areas. What makes them different from cluster bombs? Ms. Williams attempts to divine the administration’s motives for clinging to land mines:

[Given] the closed, hush-hush nature of a review excluding almost everyone involved in the land mine issue, the real reasons remain unclear. Surely the administration has no intention of defending the homeland with antipersonnel land mines? [Since all] of its major allies. . . have signed the treaty [it] remains unclear, then, which commitments to which friends and allies Kelly refers to.

Perhaps South Korea? The Clinton argument for not signing the treaty immediately was that land mines are heavily used in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. [But] the land mines in the DMZ are South Korean, not American, and therefore would be unaffected by Obama’s joining the Mine Ban Treaty. … [Or is it just] reluctance to ruffle military feathers?

Unless the use of land mines is being weighed for the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. But, knowing President Obama, Ms. Williams’s last explanation seems likely.

Ultimately she finds the president’s land-mine policy self-defeating.

How can he, with total credibility, lead the world to nuclear disarmament when his own country won’t give up even land mines?

The conference ended with representatives of the states in attendance signing a five-year plan to further assist land-mine victims and recognize their care as a right. They also vowed to seek ratification of the treaty by those states, such as the United States, that have yet to sign it.

Land Mines: Cancerous to the Earth

Like bullets, land mines lend themselves to profligate use. In fact, the damn things metastasize all over the place. Removing them has been notoriously risky, but a recent, surprising new technique has developed, reports Inhabitat.com:

. . . scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently announced that they have engineered a strain of bacteria that glows green in the presence of explosives, making mine detection a snap.

According to Edinburgh University scientists, the new strain of bacteria can be sprayed onto local affected areas or air dropped over entire fields of mines. Within a few hours the bacteria strain begins to glow green wherever traces of explosive chemicals are present. … Our only concern is that great care must be taken when blanketing areas with the bacteria, such that their spread doesn’t amount to an act of biological warfare in and of itself.

Let’s see if we’ve got this straight. On one hand, we have an administration which, along with seeking to abolish nuclear weapons, would likely never use land mines. Yet it refuses to sign a treaty banning them. On the other, we have a new technique for removing them which may pose more of a threat than the mines themselves. Land mines certainly have a way of heaping irony upon irony, don’t they?

First posted at the Faster Times.

“Christmas tree a la mode.” That’s how my grandfather, Bill Mackowski, described it to his wife, LaVerne, back in December of 1944.

Bill was stationed in Belgium, part of the 330th infantry regiment of the 83rd Army Division. The world was embroiled in war and, at that 
time, the Battle of the Bulge had been raging for a week.

But the night of December 24 was quiet along the front. The men were sitting around, talking about their girls back home, missing their families. “I just kept thinking how foolish most of them were not be married or not to have someone like you,” Bill had written to Verne just a few days earlier, after a similar bout of homesickness had befallen him and his buddies.

It was Bill’s third Christmas in the army. In December of 1942, when he was still learning to cope with the homesickness, he treasured the cards and packages sent to him. “Funny, but before I always just looked to see who sent the cards [and] the pictures, but now I read everyword & feel good that people do remember me,” he wrote.

He worried that people back home would think less of him because he wasn’t able to reciprocate. “Gosh, I haven’t sent a card or bought a thing for Christmas,” he admitted. “I hope everyone understands & believes I haven’t turned into a Scrooge.”

By 1944, with the war still on, men had learned to cope with the homesickness a little better even if they didn’t like it at all. That December twenty-fourth evening in Belgium, with the wistful Christmas spirit sunk deep in their bones, my grandfather and his buddies decided to find a way to celebrate on their own.

“You might think you’re the only ones with a Christmas tree, but you can’t take Christmas away from us, thanks to the Air Corps & G. I. ingenuity,” Bill wrote to Verne. “We decided we’d have a tree in our tent or bust, so we did.”

The Air Corps provided the inspiration. “It seems they drop long strips of tinfoil to offset enemy radar, so after chasing bunches of it we got our tinsel. We found by running our finger nails down it, it curled like those icicles we use to buy,” he wrote.

Next, they had to procure a tree. “It was kinda nasty to steal a little evergreen tree from around behind the church, but it was just the right size & shape,” he wrote. “We found a bush with red berries on it & made loops out of the tin foil to hang them up with.

“We cut a star out of the bottom of a tin can & with a piece of dental floss & a band aid we hung it from the slope of the tent down to the top of the tree.

“We made a white base out of toilet paper and then ripped open a couple of our first aid bandages & made snow out of the cotton and also found it would stick on the side of the tent. So we formed the letters Merry Xmas above the tree & dobs of cotton around it like a snow storm.”

One of the officers asked a local woman for some colored yarn—red, orange, green, yellow, and blue—which they strung on the tree.

“Then off of some of the tomato cans we cut out the red circles & hung them on,” Bill wrote. “Then to top it off, we all put our wives, girls & babies pictures on it. The only trouble was that brought on a few drops of water to the eyes.”

The mood turned lighter when a chaplain broke out a book of hymns. “We sat around and sang Christmas Carols,” Bill wrote. “We had all the nice carols & really sang them out.”

It reminded him of the carols sung that afternoon in the nearby town’s little church when he visited. The church, he wrote, “was decorated real nice & the choir sang carols & really put us in the mood. They did kinda choke me up when they tossed in an ‘Ave Maria,’ but it always did get me a little, it’s super pretty. Oh me, here I go getting sentimental again.”

As the twenty-fourth of December turned into the twenty-fifth, the men in Bill’s company huddled around a radio to listen to Midnight Mass. “I guess all in all,” wrote Bill, “we’re pretty lucky after all. There are a lot of guys with a lot less. Tomorrow we’re going into town again for church, so we’ll have a good day in spite of the Germans.”

But it was the tree, decorated with Air Corps tinsel and tomato-can circles that meant the most to those men that Christmas. “Now that it’s finished,” Bill wrote, “we all wonder if it helped our morale or made us twice as homesick.

“But it really looks nice and Christmassy as any I’ve seen. I’m telling you, we all just sit around & stare at it & never say a word for minutes at a time.”

The moon rose high that night. It was, Bill wrote, as bright as could be. “[A]nd in the west…was a star that shone the brightest I’ve ever seen,” he added. “We could almost see the points & just when I was thinking it, one of the officers said aloud, ‘I hope my wife is looking at that tonight.’”

This holiday season, please remember our men and women in uniform, especially those separated from their families. May they find Christmas tree a la mode of their own.

In the reflecting pool, the monument points directly at me.

I look back at Lincoln. For the moment, he has company enough—busloads of school kids and vanloads of families. A gaggle of middle-schoolers in red sweatshirts that say “Redwood City, California” race past me, the adults looking every bit as anxious to get up the stairs as the kids.

Instead of following them, I peel away toward the south, toward the Korean War Memorial, just a few hundred yards away.

I come up behind a slightly larger-than-life soldier cast in stainless steel. Draped in a poncho, he carries a hand-held radio and has a rifle slipped over his left shoulder. He looks a little surprised, a little worried, like I caught him off guard with my approach.

He’s one of eighteen such figures trudging through a narrowing triangle of juniper bushes and granite slabs. Spectral white light shines on each figure. They wear vague disquiet on their faces. Their eyes are hollow.

A smooth wall of black granite flanks the men on their right, and etched on that wall are faces, large and small, of men and women who served, who defended “ a country they never knew and a people they never met.” Maybe they’re the ones who went on before. Maybe they’re the ones who didn’t make it back. Now, they keep watch—and they remind me what the memorial means by its inscription “Freedom is not free.”

On the opposite side of the reflecting pool, along a different black wall, I find a watcher of a different kind. He describes himself as “one of the vets who walks The Wall.” I don’t catch his name, but he tells me he has held vigil at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial almost every evening for the past year and a half. “Even before that,” he tells me, “I’ve been coming here at least once a month since 2001.”

On this night, he’s the only veteran at the memorial, but a park ranger later tells me there are several “regulars” who walk The Wall and answer questions and tell their stories.

This vet, in his early sixties, doesn’t tell me about his service in Vietnam, though. Instead, his fight has been with the Veterans Administration. He’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and lung cancer from Agent Orange, he says, and the V.A. keeps denying him benefits. He’s hopeful that his latest appeal will get approved, he says, though it won’t be until May. Maybe then, he hopes, he can get the treatments he needs.

Until then, he spends his evenings at The Wall until eleven, when he can retreat to the homeless shelter he stays at. “They kick me out of there at six in the morning,” he says.

He doesn’t ask for money. He just asks to be heard. But then his pocket rings, and he pulls out a cellphone. “Hopefully it’s my buddy ready to pick me up,” he says.

We part ways, and I walk to The Wall’s far panels. In the dim light, I read names like David H. Whitchill and Jessie C. Alba and Nicholas S. Viankovich. There are so many of them. How often do they get read? How often do they get remembered?

The Wall is devoid of the memorabilia I’m used to seeing along the bases of the panels. At the bend in the wall stands a wreath of red, white, and blue flowers sent by an elementary school in Indian Valley, Virginia. Otherwise, there are no flowers, no photos, no teddy bears. The rangers must’ve picked everything up for the night.

On this night I also visit the largest of the mall’s war memorials. It’s the toughest for me to visit, too, because both of my grandfathers served in the war. As actor Tom Hanks once said, their generation did no less than help save the world. That was a pretty big thing for my grandfathers to be a part of.

The World War Two Memorial is comprised of fifty-six columns that form two semicircles—semi-ovals, really—around a rainbow pool alive with fountains. Each column represents a state or territory that sent men into action. A large pillared entryway on the north side of the plaza symbolizes the Atlantic theater of war while a similar entryway to the south, where I enter, symbolizes the Pacific theater.

And at the east end of the memorial, with Lincoln’s memorial as a backdrop, stretches a wall with 4,048 gold stars—each star symbolizing more than a thousand of the men who died during the war. “Here we mark the price of freedom,” it says.

My throat catches. I can’t help it. My father’s father wanted so badly to see the completed memorial, but like many of his comrades-in-arms, he died before it was finished. At the time, more than a thousand WWII vets were passing away every day—a rate, according to the Associated Press, that continues to this day. One study suggests that by 2020, all of the veterans of that war will be gone.

The memorial, as proud and sweeping as it is in its grandeur, with its wide granite plaza and magnificent fountain and inspiring words, hardly feels like it’s enough.

I walk back to the Lincoln Memorial to pay my last respects before heading to my hotel. I climb the steps, past the immortal words of Martin Luther King, Jr., inscribed on one of the plateaus to commemorate one of America’s most powerful dreams. I usually stop and stand on that spot, but tonight, something else pulls me.

Near the top of the stairs, I see a sign that says, “No sliding down banisters.” I chuckle because that sign means someone, at some point, thought sliding down the banisters was a good idea and probably learned, the hard way, that it wasn’t.

I pass between two of the pillars and into Lincoln’s memorial chamber. The soft light reflecting off white marble makes Lincoln glow.

To his right, on the chamber’s south wall, the Gettysburg Address looms large, but it’s the north wall I always find myself drawn to—to the closing words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

“With malice toward none, with charity for all…” Lincoln said. He hoped for reconciliation and hoped to move forward with healing, “to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

That just and lasting peace has seemed elusive at times. But that’s what Lincoln and his army hoped for. That is, I think, what the veterans of World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam hoped for, too.

I cannot think of a finer memorial.

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.

Q: Let’s say you’re sick with a potentially deadly disease. Who do you want for a doctor?
A: The smartest, most experienced and highly qualified expert in the field.

Q: You’re looking to invest your life savings. Who do you trust to handle your money?
A: The brightest, most agile financial mind I can find.

Q: You’ve been selected to participate in a “private citizens in space” program. Who do you want in charge of building the rocket?
A: The most brilliant and reliable engineers in the nation.

So far, so good. One more.

Q: You live in a time of unimaginable complexity and danger. Who do want to be the leader of the free world?
A: Somebody I can have a beer with. You know, a regular guy, a Joe Sixpack.

It’s said that people tend to get the leaders they deserve, and I can’t imagine better proof than the United States. At present we’re watching as a new president attempts to arm-tackle an array of national political and economic crises of evil supervillain jailbreak proportions, and at this early stage it’s far from clear that he’s Rushmore-bound.

• He may or may not get health care reform passed, and if he does it may or may not be as comprehensive as the programs pursued by previous arch-progressives Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower.
• He may or may not bog us down in a vastly expanded quagmire in Afghanistan, although at present only an idiot would bet on him meeting his campaign promises regarding getting the heck out of Iraq.
• He may or may not decide to honor the pledges he made to the gay community.
• He may or may not spearhead a green revolution that saves the species from itself.
• And his economic policies may boost us to new, unprecedented levels of universal prosperity. Or they may plummet us nards-first into a meat grinder of a global recession so epic it will make the Great Depression look like a weekend in the Hamptons.

So the jury is still out on Mr. Obama. But… While past performance is no guarantee of future results, there’s also that thing about those who don’t understand history being doomed to repeat it. And America’s history of electing dolts, buffoons, scoundrels, knaves, low-jackers, pig-fuckers, gomers, dog-whistlers, Kloset Klansmen, recidivists and sheep pimps to the Highest Elected Office in the Land does not make one optimistic about the prospects for Barackapalooza. I’d love to be wrong, but let’s be honest. An indicator that can pick a loser 100% of the time is every bit as valuable to the shrewd investor as one that always picks the winner, and the Electoral College is as reliable a Finger of Doom as the world has ever seen.

Let’s review, shall we?

George W. Bush: Worst president ever? Dumbest president ever? Hard to say for certain, although put me down for “hell, yes.” The nation apparently elected a string of semi-housebroken wombats in the 1800s, and contemporary polling feels obliged, in the name of “balance,” to humor the estimations of conservative “scholars” who rate him the sixth-best ever. For my money, that opinion alone is sufficient for the credentialing institution to revoke the PhD, but such is the price we pay for the privilege of living in an society that not only tolerates fools gladly, it gives them television shows.

Bill Clinton: In so many ways, Clinton was the archetypal president of our age. He was the distilled, undiluted essence of the modern political animal. He was like everything in Washington, only moreso. And I don’t mean that in the good way.

Bubba may not be the man who invented the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, but he was damned sure the one who established it as the only wing that mattered. The irony, of course, was that he was reviled by the GOP. I’ve always wondered if the source of that rage was that Clinton was a better Republican than they were.

In addition, he cheapened the office at every turn: whether renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to the highest bidder, pardoning Marc Rich or “hiking the Appalachian Trail” like mink freebasing Viagra, it seemed as though his every action left us feeling the need for a shower. From the poor house to the penthouse to the whore house, we’ve never seen anything like him. God willing, we never will again.

George HW Bush: It’s still hard to fathom how this mealy-mouthed little wimp stumbled into the White House. All the Democrats had to do in 1988 was find a candidate with a pulse. Instead, they trotted out Mike Dukakis, a man with all the charisma and passion of an accountant on a phenobarbital drip.

Bush the Elder was the latest incarnation of an established and thoroughly corrupt dynasty, and between him and his fuckwit kids there is no better argument, could be no better argument, in favor of a 100% inheritance tax. If they’d had to earn anything on their own merit their only entree into a country club would be as assistant assistant assistant greenskeepers reporting to Carl Spackler at Bushwood.

Ronald Reagan: Wow. Where to start. Back in the 1960s Marshall McLuhan, in writing about where television was taking the culture, predicted Reagan in terms so accurate that you’d think you were reading a history instead of a precognition. The only thing missing was the name and home address. The failing in McLuhan’s analysis, if there was one, was this: as cynical as he was, the reality turned out to be even worse than he feared.

Ronnie was as anti-intellectual a leader as we could have imagined prior to Dubya. A man who somehow managed to remain immensely popular despite the fact that most Americans disagreed with his policies. One of the most corrupt collections of advisors, staffers and appointees in history. And the man who represented the grand triumph of years and years of scheming by wealthy conservatives bent on by god rolling the rich-poor gap back to feudal levels. An intellectually void, amoral cesspool of a human being who will nonetheless go down as one of our “great” presidents.

Jimmy Carter: Carter has the distinction of being one of the very few politicians that Hunter Thompson ever said anything nice about, and his record since leaving the White House has made clear what an outstanding statesman and humanitarian Carter really is. History will not mark him down as the most adept practitioner of the presidential arts, however, and for those who bemoan the erosion of the line between church and state, let’s remember just how very publicly Baptist Jimmy was. Now, thanks in part to him, we’ll never get the smell of the fundamentalists out of the furniture. (Which reminds me – Phish is playing four dates at Red Rocks, so those of us who live in downtown Denver are hoping the wind isn’t blowing straight west-to-east for the next few days.)

Gerald Ford: Nice enough guy, seemed like. For a politician and all. But he wasn’t ever elected.

Richard Nixon: Please tell me we don’t really need to talk about this one.

Lyndon Johnson: Ever heard of Vietnam? It’s hard to recall the last time somebody took an idea so bad and managed to make it even worse. He does get credit for important civil rights legislation, at least.

Still, in the final analysis he was a president from Texas with a lust for illicit, unwinnable wars. If that reminds you of somebody else, don’t blame me. I’m just reporting the facts.

John F. Kennedy: He invaded Cuba, and once the troops started landing he changed his mind. He nearly got us into a hot nukular shooting war. Then there was that Vietnam thing – he and LBJ can share this honor. Marilyn Monroe was either a plus or a minus, depending on where you stand with respect to the marital infidelity issue.

Ultimately, though, the only thing that saved his legacy was death. Had he lived to serve out his term(s) he’d be judged today based on his record, which falls somewhat short of the legend.

So, when was the last time America elected a president it could be proud of? By today’s standards Ike isn’t looking bad at all, and his two predecessors, FDR and Truman, also score high marks.

If you look at that chart in the link above, it seems like maybe the country’s ability to elect somebody half decent runs in cycles.

Let’s hope that’s the case, and that the wheel is turning back in our direction. Because damn, America is due.

The Deproliferator

Conventional thinking holds that deterrence has kept us safe. If, that is, you don’t mind a little brinkmanship like Berlin in 1961 and the Cuban Missile crisis. The history of the Cold War was also sprinkled with accidents such as the 1966 Palomares, Spain crash of a B-52 bearing four hydrogen bombs.

Nor has the Cold War’s thaw elicited the same sigh of relief from the disarmament community as from the public at large. One state or another always seems to be looking for an excuse to develop nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, non-state actors, such as al-Qaeda or Chechen rebels, make no bones whatsoever about their nuclear avarice.

Thus does the prospect of Russia’s loose nukes falling into the wrong hands and an A.Q. Khan wanna-be replenishing the nuclear black market keep us more or less permanently on edge. Add to that conflicting reports on the security of Pakistan’s nukes. Finally, just to make absolutely sure we don’t become complacent, plenty of nuclear weapons still remain on hair-trigger alert.

This kind of peace conjures up the old sight gag about nitroglycerin — one false move and we’re blown to kingdom come. No doubt about it: Deterrence is looking a little shop-worn these days. At the same time, thanks in part to President Obama’s stated commitment, disarmament is being refurbished to the glossy finish it boasted for a brief spell in the eighties.

Let’s not forget, though, that conventional weapons do a pretty good job of mimicking nuclear weapons. Where does that leave us then? Post-nuclear disarmament, we’d still be on the road to total war, just not tailgated by nuclear weapons.

In fact, the net effects are disturbing in their similarities. To the victims of Dresden and Hamburg, on the one hand, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the other, the quantitative and qualitative differences between the two types of bombing ranged from negligible to nonexistent. Those who survived the A-bomb attacks weren’t saying to themselves: “I bet I’d be in a lot less pain if my injuries were inflicted by conventional weapons.”

The justifications commonly given for total war are either collective guilt or the argument that, because they contribute to the war effort, civilians can be classified as combatants. Total war’s unstated assumption, meanwhile, is that a state can suffer no more disastrous fate than invasion and occupation.

It’s nice to know that “Give me liberty or give me death” still lives. But, in light of technological developments in warfare, this hoary rallying cry needs an overhaul. How about “Give me liberty or give all of us death”?

Wait, What’s Behind Door Number Three?

In the Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Third Edition, Lawrence Freedman writes:

The response from those prepared to contemplate use [of nuclear weapons] tended to be based on a choice of values rather than strategic logic. It was considered ‘better to be dead than red’, to go down fighting rather than to succumb to the horrors that had come to be associated with communist rule. The nuclear pacifist might argue that [for] a particular code of honour to be applied to a whole society was an imposition more absolute and authoritarian than the type of rule it was supposed to avoid.

Freedman then quotes Lieutenant-General Sir John Cowley [writing in 1960]:

The choice of death or dishonor is one which has always faced the professional fighting man [who] chooses death for himself so that his country may survive, or. . . that the principles for which he is fighting may survive. [With nuclear weapons] we are facing a somewhat different situation, when the reply is not to given by individuals but by countries as a whole. Is it right for the government of a country to choose complete destruction of the population rather than some other alternative, however unpleasant that alternative may be?

Retaliating against an aggressor with total war will likely result in the obliteration of not only vast swaths of the population on both sides, but those very qualities with which the state earned our loyalty, such as respect for human rights. In other words, the question fundamental to total war and not often asked is: Just how much is preserving the sanctity of the state worth? The “unpleasant alternative” of which Lt. Gen. Cowley speaks is, of course, submitting to enemy rule.

Perhaps an aggressor can be repelled with another method besides an all-out preemptive attack or retaliation, whether nuclear or conventional. Let’s think of a recent example of a state that’s invaded another state and met with strong resistance. Oh, that would be us when we invaded Iraq.

Sure, the Iraqi Army’s capacity for retaliation was killed on contact. Nevertheless, as everyone knows, the citizens of Iraq have made our lives as occupiers hell. While Iraq has yet to shake us off, at least it’s reduced us to the point where we’re not getting much of anything out of their country. But what application does this have for the United States were it to be attacked?

Call me whimsical, but instead of trading apocalyptic death and destruction with a state that attacks us, what if we made an end run around mass destruction? In other words, if an attack by intercontinental missiles — whether the warheads are nuclear or non — is imminent, why not make it clear that we choose not to retaliate in kind?

Say what? Refusing to fight back is not only un-American, it runs contrary to human nature. Even if we sought to behave otherwise, it wouldn’t be long before we were caught in the death spiral of total war.

It’s true that the idea there’s a time to attack and a time to yield might better be applied to a state other than a superpower. But, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend it’s the United States that’s attacked.

Upon signal, we’d disband our armed forces and they’d morph into a resistance movement with hidden caches of weapons at their disposal. It’s not, of course, as un-American as it sounds: Guerilla warfare was employed in the early days of the Revolutionary War and by select forces during the Civil War. If it makes nuclear types feel any better, think of this approach as a second-strike capability, just not nuclear.

Because total war can’t be waged on an insurgency — though Russia came close in Chechnya — not only is much less life lost, but less infrastructure demolished. Also, aside from retaining the moral upper hand, should an insurgency ultimately prevail, it would generate a national myth which, like the Revolutionary War, could sustain us for 200 years.

This may have seemed like a pointless exercise to some. But is it any more so than a method of waging war that stands to kill millions on both sides, level the landscape, and ravage the environment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s hope that happens real soon.

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

]]> http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2009/05/26/one-ricks-makes-a-wrong/feed/ 5 http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2009/05/18/fort-palooka/ http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2009/05/18/fort-palooka/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 12:11:41 +0000 Jeff Huber http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/?p=9190 The recent announcement of General David McKiernan’s permanent transfer to Fort Palooka is the latest punch line in our Bananastan farce. Defense secretary Robert Gates claims that McKiernan’s relief as commander in Afghanistan merely reflected a need for “fresh thinking,” but even the war mongrels on the rabid right can see it was a stratagem to make McKiernan the fall guy for all the collateral damage caused by the air strikes that President Obama authorized.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Deproliferator

President Obama’s Prague speech has inspired a flurry of opposition from nuclear weapon proponents. Among their arguments, that old chestnut deterrence still holds pride of place. But another seeks to shoulder it aside. In The Trouble With Zero, the lead article of the May 10 New York Times Week in Review, Philip Taubman writes:

If arsenals are drastically reduced, the next steps toward abolition could be even trickier. Since scientific and engineering knowledge cannot be expunged from mankind’s memory, the potential to build weapons will always exist.

Does this rationale, aka You Can’t Put the Nuclear Genie Back in the Bottle, succeed in its intended purpose of making a mockery of disarmament?

Whirled View’s Cheryl Rofer, a former chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, wrote to us in an email:

Most of us know how to waterboard now, and we don’t have an epidemic of neighborly waterboarding, or even by local law-enforcement authorities. … We can’t eliminate the knowledge of how to waterboard, either, but we can outlaw it. And, since building a nuclear weapon takes a bit more than a piece of cloth and a pitcher of water, there are effective choke points to limit building nuclear weapons. … It’s not the knowledge, it’s what we do with it.And so far the opponents of setting zero as a goal haven’t done much with their knowledge. If future proliferators follow their lead, we have nothing to worry about.

Along with the choke points to which Ms. Rofer refers, improved tools for monitoring and verifying compliance with treaties stand ready and waiting to be used to prevent proliferation, as are ever-more intrusive inspections. Still, short of burning the papers of nuclear scientists, confiscating their hard drives, and injecting them with memory-erasing drugs, their research won’t disappear into the recesses of time anytime soon.

Normally, it’s to mankind’s credit when knowledge is archived and endures. But, while nuclear knowledge in its resting state is a form of potential energy, it yearns to be made kinetic. Is there a way for us to keep it down on the archive after its seen the testing grounds?

Convincing Nuclear Aspirants to Step Away from the Nukes

Blissfully unhaunted by the Cold War, states that long for nuclear weapons view them as essential to security. Little do they know that, once armed, the honeymoon period is all too brief before a state — India and Pakistan come to mind — discovers that it’s in no less peril than before it developed them.

To prevent non-nuclear states from realizing its aspiration, nuclear states need to think outside the monitoring and compliance box, or at least supplement it with more tools. Nuclear-aspiring states might respond to the same encouraging, proactive steps that Lewis Dunn proposes in the recent Arms Control Today for dealing with nuclear states like Russia and China. These include:

Information, data exchanges, and transparency measures;
Joint studies, experiments, and planning;
Personnel exchanges, liaison arrangements, and joint military staff bodies;
Joint activities, programs, systems, and centers; and
Unilateral initiatives and coordinated national undertakings.

As for the individuals who become nuclear scientists and are hired by the nuclear-aspiring state, is there any hope of inducing qualms in them about working on nuclear weapons? Unfortunately, they’re often indisposed to not only politics but ethics. In addition, they’re likely to be susceptible to the nationalistic exhilaration that accompanies their state’s own version of the Manhattan Project.

The work-around, though, is obvious. Offer nuclear-aspiring states assistance with projects that will quicken scientists’ pulses even more than developing nuclear weapons — after all, enriching uranium with its endless rows of centrifuges quickly becomes tedious. Alternative energy, for example. Still, that will likely be insufficient to divert a state from developing nuclear weapons.

In regard to inducing states in possession of nuclear weapons to intensify their disarmament measures, Taubman writes:

One solution suggested by abolition advocates would be a form of latent or virtual deterrence, based not on weapons all but ready to launch, but on the ability to reassemble or rebuild them.

Needless to say, latent deterrence doesn’t apply to non-nuclear states, because they have no weapons to disassemble. But that positions them to enact another, more sophisticated form of deterrence than latent. Let’s call it pregnant deterrence. We’ll define it as possessing the knowledge and ability to develop nuclear weapons, without bringing their development to fruition.

But everyone knows how long it takes to develop the fuel cycle. What state inimical to the one in question, especially if it’s both equipped with nuclear weapons and a non-signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, will be shaking in its boots about the other’s ability to develop nukes five years down the line?

Pregnant deterrence can only work if a state’s neighbors think the state is able to accelerate completion of the fuel cycle. That can only come to pass if a nuclear state not only provides the nuclear aspirant with all the knowledge needed to develop nuclear weapons, but, nuclear umbrellas aside, promises to help facilitate said development in the event of a imminent nuclear threat to the aspirant. Wait — what NPT nuclear state (or states) in its right mind would consider making such a commitment?

Nuclear weapons proponents claim that disarmament does nothing to stop other states from arming. But, it’s disingenuous and an abdication of the position of leadership implicit in a state’s position as an NPT nuclear state to contend that disarmament should start with anyone but the haves. Thus, the only way to make pregnant deterrence work is for nuclear weapon states to couple the promise of assistance with a sure-fire way of preventing the need for that from ever arising.

Maybe pregnant deterrence is best filed under the category of: “We can dream, can’t we?” But setting a deadline for significant disarmament and sticking to it just might buy the time needed to keep a nuclear state from threatening a state that’s in a state of pregnant deterrence. There will then be no need for the latter to induce labor and give birth to a bouncing, baby nuclear weapons program.

Also, the title, if it’s his doing, turns the concept of “getting to zero” inside-out. What does that remind me of? Oh, the term he once coined: deproliferation. Basically, he hitched a ride on the back of “nonproliferation” to reach the idea marketplace and barter for credibility. But, in the process, he reached under the concept of nonproliferation and cut its throat.

For deproliferation is, if not the opposite, a perversion of proliferation. As Etzioni once explained: “Deproliferation calls for removing the access to nuclear arms and the materials from which they can readily be made — first and foremost in unstable and noncompliant states, and only then in all others.” In other words, targeted nonproliferation, like a smart bomb.

Though he doesn’t invoke his pet term in this piece (perhaps to keep it from wearing out its welcome), the message is familiar:

The fate of the curbs on the spread of nuclear arms in the near future is going to be decided in Iran. If it is allowed to gain a bomb, there will be no stopping Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations from going down the same road, and Japan and South Korea are likely soon to follow, to countervail North Korea. … Zero can wait.

In other words, when Etzioni declares, “Zero can wait,” he means that the larger nuclear states, like the United States, Russia, England, France, and Germany should be in no rush to disarm. Their first task is to keep those states with nuclear aspirations from realizing their dream.

But, as I’m sure he knows, it’s as impossible to apply an end date to the human inclination to arm itself to the max as it is to declare that the War on Terror has scrubbed the human heart clean of vengeance.

Basically, Etzioni is trying to extend the expiration date on the Bush administration’s policy of abdicating disarmament leadership. The danger of figures like Etzioni is that they profess to seek disarmament, but, in truth, work to sabotage it. At least, with the likes of missile-defense advocate extraordinaire Keith Payne (who no doubt did his best to keep the report issued by the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture, of which he was a member, from furthering the cause of disarmament) and hawk-for-all-seasons Frank Gaffney, what you see is what you get.

A term coined by sociologist and professor of international relations Amitai Etzioni, “Deproliferation,” he writes, “calls for removing the access to nuclear arms and the materials from which they can readily be made — first and foremost in unstable and noncompliant states, and only then in all others.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Arms Control Organization’s Darryl Kimball explains:

. . . the Department of Energy announced in 2006 that studies by Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories show that the plutonium primaries, or pits, of most U.S. nuclear weapons “will have minimum lifetimes of at least 85 years,” which is about twice as long as previous official estimates.

Contrary to the myth perpetuated by some CTBT [Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty] critics, maintaining the reliability of proven U.S. nuclear warhead designs does not depend on a program of nuclear test explosions. Instead, the existing U.S. nuclear arsenal has been maintained and modernized through non-nuclear tests and evaluations, combined with the replacement or remanufacture of key components to previous design specifications. …

According to weapons physicist Richard Garwin, the new evidence on the longevity of weapons plutonium “has removed any urgency to engineer and manufacture new design replacement warheads.” Garwin says the continued performance of legacy warheads can be more reliably certified than new ones. [Emphasis added.].

In other words, because current nuclear weapons are in the prime of their life, there’s no need to develop and manufacture new models. Wait, if they’re still years from retirement, aren’t we still stuck with the threat of being blown to kingdom come for the foreseeable future? Business as usual, in other words.

True, but the CTBT is only one tool in the box and if it halts nuclear progress, it’s performed its function. Actually rolling back nuclear weapons has, of course, been the domain of START-1 and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In a matter of days, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will meet with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to discuss a new arms reduction deal to replace START-1, which expires at the end of the year. The next NPT review conference is scheduled for next year.

Meanwhile the United States Senate needs to step up to the plate and ratify the CTBT. As Kimball says:

With Obama’s leadership, bipartisan support from opinion leaders, and significant improvements in the ability to maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal and detect nuclear test explosions, the case for the CTBT is stronger than ever.

Cross-posted at Newshoggers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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