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Sunday, June 01, 2008
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 "THE STUPIDEST FUCKING GUY ON THE PLANET": DOUGLAS FEITH & THE MARKETING OF WAR
I'm a weird guy in that I often buy books by people that I'm convinced are idiots. Because I like to belittle the intelligence of people I loathe in public, I've found it helpful to know the precise dimensions of their ignorance. It's just one of the things that makes me so goddamn adorable.
For that reason, I recently bought Douglas Feith's War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. I haven't yet read it, as I am engrossed in Rick Perlstien's magnificent Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, which I recommend heartily to each and every one of you.
I was going to hold off on writing this until I had read Feith's book, but he decided to make that unnecessary by writing an op-ed in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal.
I began this by pointing out my love of calling people idiots and that's where I shall continue. There are few people who have risen to such a high level of the American government who are as profoundly dumb as is Mr. Feith. So disturbing is Feith's ignorance that his nominal subordinate, General Tommy Franks (himself no intellectual powerhouse), reportedly referred to him as "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet."
Some would argue that Feith is more blinded by ideology than actually stupid. The former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy has a longstanding and often noted relationship with Israel's Likud Party and has been known to write policy papers for its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. So notable is this relationship, that during a meeting on the impending invasion of Iraq, the then-national security advisor, Condolezza Rice, told Feith after one of his briefings "Thanks Doug, but when we want the Israeli position we'll invite the ambassador."
Mr. Feith was one of the so-called "neocons" (a term I try to avoid using due to anti-Semitic connotations attached to it by the left) brought in to the Bush administration by Vice President-elect Dick Cheney. That group also included former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, and former Chief of Staff to the Vice President and Counsellor to the President, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. They were seen by Cheney as a check on the influence of then Secretary of State Colin Powell.
According to several sources, Feith was instrumental in setting the stage for the American invasion of Iraq, first suggesting it approximately two days after 9/11. Like many in the administration, including former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, Feith was a signatory to the Project for a New American Century's (whose website has been suspended) open letter to President Clinton calling for an invasion of Iraq in 1998.
Rumsfeld, as we now know from books such as Cobra II:The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq and Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005, wanted to test his theory of a lighter "new" American military in Iraq with a force that the professional military saw as inadequate.
Feith wanted to go even further than Rumsfeld, advocating an invasion force consisting primarily of Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi with minimal American tactical support. Chalabi would then be immediately installed as the new president of Iraq, despite his lack of credibility with the State Department and CIA, and his in absentia conviction for a massive bank fraud in neighboring Jordan. Even Rumsfeld knew such a plan to be unmitigated nonsense. And few people in American history have proven to be as consistently wrong as Donald Rumsfeld.
In every aspect of the Iraq War that Douglas Feith was involved in, he was proven to be not only wrong, but fantastically so. This makes him an interesting critic of the administration's handling of the war to say the least.
In his Tuesday essay for the Journal, Feith seems to argue that one of the greatest challenges facing Operation Iraqi Freedom is one of communications.
In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq.
President Bush no longer stressed Saddam's record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president's credibility that had already been caused by the CIA's errors on Iraqi WMD. The president was seen as distancing himself from the actual case he had made for removing the Iraqi regime from power. As my longtime readers know, I supported the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. However, I thought that both WMD and the establishment of democracy were silly beyond words. My support was predicated not on WMD, but Saddam's penchant for strategic miscalculation in invading his neighbours.
If left in power as United Nations sanctions, Saddam would almost certainly have rearmed and threatened Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or all three, necessitating a US response. If he had to be removed from power - which I thought that he eventually would - better to do it when he was weak than when he was strong.
However, I did not see Iraq as an immediate threat. While it had to be done, it could have waited until Afghanistan was further stabilized. The UN sanctions against Iraq would probably have lasted for another year or two. Even if they were lifted, there is little chance that Saddam would have launched aggressive operations while there was such a heavy American military presence in the region, particularly after 9/11, when the United States had uniform international support.
Nor was the Ba'ath regime itself a serious threat. There is no evidence whatsoever that the party itself would have acted as it did in the absence of Saddam. In fact, the party had been in power for a decade before Saddam assumed power and went to war with no one. Was it repressive against its own people? Yes, but so is every Arab government, including some of America's closest allies. Saddam was the threat, not the Ba'ath Party. Unlike the Nazi party of Adolf Hitler, Ba'ath long pre-existed the arrival of Saddam Hussein.
Had Saddam been removed from power and a Ba'athist or military government been left in power, the American military could have been out of Iraq in a year or two. Every subsequent disaster in that theatre stem from those decisions.
The stunning change in rhetoric appeared to confirm his critics' argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie. That's a shame, for Mr. Bush had solid grounds for worrying about the dangers of leaving Saddam in power.
(...)
On May 22, 2004, I gave Mr. Rumsfeld a memo to pass along to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the president's speechwriters. I proposed that the speech "should deal with some basics – in particular, why we went to war in the first place." It would be useful to "make clear the tie-in between Iraq and the broader war on terrorism" in the following terms: The Saddam Hussein regime "had used WMD, supported various terrorist groups, was hostile to the U.S. and had a record of aggression and of defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions."
In light of 9/11, the "danger that Saddam's regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great" to let stand. And other ways of countering the danger – containment, sanctions, inspections, no-fly zones – had proven "unsustainable or inadequate." I suggested that the president distinguish between the essential U.S. interests in Iraq and the extra benefits if we could succeed in building democratic institutions there: "A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism." Those arguments are wildly ridiculous and easily refuted by anyone who knows anything about the history of Saddam's Iraq. They should be addressed one by one.
1. "The Saddam Hussein regime had used WMD:"
So had the United States, so what? The last recorded use of WMD by the Ba'ath regime was in 1988 and the Reagan administration did everything in its power to ignore it. It was only after Time magazine printed photos from Halabja that the United States government said anything at all.
2. "The Saddam Hussein regime supported various terrorist groups:"
This is true, but with a very important qualification. Among Middle Eastern regimes that support terror, Saddam's was probably the most conservative. He did provide post-facto sanctuary to terrorists, but he did very little in supporting or financing foreign terrorist attacks before the fact.
Saddam was reluctant in the extreme to have anything at all to do with groups that he couldn't control. His first priority was maintaining his hold on power in Iraq and was very careful to insure that. It's important to remember that Iraq only invaded Kuwait after the American ambassador, April Glaspie, told Saddam that "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America."
It is entirely possible that Iraq would not have invaded Kuwait were it not for the mixed signals the United States sent in the summer of 1990. One should also remember that, current conventional wisdom to the contrary, the United States supported Iraq's invasion of Iran, reestablished diplomatic relations during that period and provided it with both arms, loan guarantees and intelligence.
If Iraq was going to support terrorism against the American homeland or foreign interests, it almost certainly would have done so just before the 1991 war or in the period thereafter. There is no evidence that Saddam did and that is probably likely due to his instinct for self-preservation.
Saddam was likely involved in the 1993 assassination attempt against former President Bush, but that is noteworthy for its singularity. Furthermore, the only retaliation for it was a one night strike against the Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad.
Was one decade-old instance of prior support for a foreign terrorist act the predicate for war? Despite the assertions of the administration, Iraq under Saddam was not a state sponsor of terrorism in the way that Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan were and are to this day.
3. "In light of 9/11, 'the danger that Saddam's regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great:'"
This is the silliest and most easily refuted of all arguments. It was also the central premise of the 2003 war and the argument Mr. Feith insists that President Bush should have stood by.
Everything we know about Saddam Hussein indicates that his grip on power was his single priority. This is why he had 11 intelligence services devoted to spying on one another and it is why he called in Ambassador Glaspie to get the American position on his dispute with Kuwait prior to the invasion.
When American troops invaded southern Iraq during the liberation of Kuwait, Iraqi WMD - which we know that there were then adequate stockpiles of - were not deployed. The only plausible reason for that is that a WMD strike against US troops would have forced a drive to Baghdad and the certain end of the regime as former Secretary of State James Baker made clear in his memoir. If there was a time to deploy WMD against American forces or pass it on to terrorists groups, that time would have been in 1991, not after 9/11.
Let's assume that Saddam did pass WMD to al-Qaeda or a like group despite the lack of evidence of any operational relationship, and such a weapon was used against the American homeland. Iraq would have to know that such an act would invite massive - and very probably nuclear - retaliation with broad international support. It would be an act of national and personal suicide that Saddam Hussein had absolutely no history of.
On the other hand, if he had WMD in 2003 and knew as a certainty that the United States was going to remove his regime, that would have provided the necessary predicate to give those weapons to terrorists as a retalitory measure. They certainly had enough time to do so, since the congressional vote autorizing military force in Iraq was in early October and the invasion didn't happen until the end of March.
By Douglas Feith's own logic, the Bush administration ran the risk of suffering a chemical or biological strike on the American homeland. But for the grace of God and the incredible incompetence of the international intelligence community, they missed an attack that their own actions practically invited.
There are, however, other nations with active WMD programs and significant ties to al-Qaeda. The most notable is Pakistan.
Throughout the 1980s, the Reagan administration passed Mujahadeen financing for Afghanistan through Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence. It is believed that a significant proportion of those funds were diverted by the ISI to the Pakistani nuclear program headed by A.Q Khan.
We know that the Khan network was instrumental in the North Korean, Iranian and Lybian weapons programs. We also know that scientists associated with Khan visited al-Qaeda figures in Afghanistan and that the CIA found design diagrams for a nuclear weapon there following the October 2001 invasion.
We know that the government of Pakistan supported both terrorist actions against the Indian parliament, in Kashmir, and were indispensable early supporters of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. We know that they have a history of weapons proliferation.
We know that Iran has an active weapons program and has an operational relationship with terrorist groups such as Hezbollah with active cells within the United States. The same has recently been suspected of Syria.
That is the history. It is not, however, the history of Iraq. Furthermore, the case presented by the Bush administration is more applicable to other nations than it was to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
4. "A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism:"
That might be the most unknowable and dangerous assertion of all. Iraq is not a natural country and never has been. It was a rump country haphazardly carved out of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. It is much more like Yugoslavia than any of its immediate neighbors in that it is populated by antagonistic ethnic groups with competing national aspirations.
When even a small measure of democracy was introduced in Yugoslavia, the country immediately disintegrated. The only thing preventing this from happening is likely the continuing presence of 150,000 American troops. To this very day, you would be hard pressed to find an Iraqi flag flying north of Kirkuk, which does not bode well for a future unified Iraq. There is absolutely no reason to believe that Iraqi Kurdistan will not democratically declare independence and claim Kirkuk as its capital once the United States leaves Iraq.
Mr. Feith also ignores the fact unified and democratic countries also have WMD programs. India and Israel are the two most famous examples. Iraq has already demonstrated that they have both the technology and the scientific capability to produce WMD.
Furthermore, if Iran is the danger that the Bush administration presents it as, why shouldn't have a defensive deterrent? In what way would a democratic Iraq be different than Israel? Does the administration forsee an endless American presence in Iraq to defend it from Iran?
Then there's the issue of terrorism itself. Most terrorist groups do not see themselves as such. They see themselves as "freedom fighters." That's certainly true of the African National Congress, which only renounced "armed struggle" - a popular euphemism for terrorism - after it had become the government of South Africa. As a matter of fact, Nelson Mandela remains on an American terrorist watch list to this day.
India is a democracy and both the Indian army and RAW have been accused of atrocities in Kashmir that can certainly be defined as terrorism. Then there's the small matter of the PKK within Iraq itself.
What if a democratic Iraq decides to ally itself with and support Palestinian "freedom fighters" such as Hamas? Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has yet to recognize Israel or denounce Hezbollah's kidnapping of Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese border, which predicated the 2006 war. Maliki still does not designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group.
Precisely how is that "an important victory in the war on terrorism?" The policy of democratic Iraq vis-a-vis terrorism is virtually unchanged from the Saddam era and could very well degenerate into operational cooperation that threatens Isreal that didn't exist under Saddam. Remember, Iraq offered compensation to the families of suicide bombers only after they were dead. There is no evidence that it was involved in the planning or execution of the attacks themselves.
Democracy is usually a safeguard against terrorism, but it isn't always. A conservative policy would assume that it isn't and plan for any eventuality, which the administration clearly hasn't done.
Again, I proposed that the president distinguish between achieving our primary goal in Iraq – eliminating a security threat – and aiming for the over-and-above goal of democracy promotion, which may not be readily achievable.
Mr. Bush gave his speech at the Army War College on May 24, as Iraq was entering into the last month of its 14-month occupation by the U.S. The president declared: "I sent American troops to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power. I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history, and find their own way."
I had hoped the president would explain why sending American troops to Iraq had helped defend our security, but he did not. The questionable line about sending those troops to make Iraq's people free had remained in the speech. And it was rather late to be promising the Iraqis that we would not stay as an occupying power but instead let them find their own way. In this, President Bush might prove to be more intelligent than even the celebrated defense intellectual, Douglas Feith. Once the canard of WMD and Iraqi intentions was conclusively disproved, Mr. Bush would have only looked foolish to remain publicly attached to them. How does one argue that there was a sucessful defense against a security threat that didn't exist? It's bad enough that the president of the United States continues to insist that Iraq was something other than what it was, a war of choice.
The president had chosen to talk almost exclusively about Iraq's future. His political opponents noticed that if they talked about the past – about prewar intelligence and prewar planning for the war and the aftermath – no one in the White House communications effort would contradict them. Opponents could say anything about the prewar period – misstating Saddam's record, the administration's record or their own – and their statements would go uncorrected. This was a big incentive for them to recriminate about the administration's prewar work, and congressional Democrats have pressed for one retrospective investigation after another. There is no evidence that Iraq was going to provide WMD to terrorists, had the capability to use them directly on the American homeland or engage in third state proliferation, and there never was. If they were going to, it would have been far more sensible for them to have done so over a decade before the invasion or in the months leading up to it.
The administration itself misstated Saddam's record and continue to do so to this day. And the tragedy is that it wasn't necessary. The provable likelihood of further agression by Saddam against his neighbors necessitating American intervention was more than enough of a causus belli to remove Saddam from power.
But that wasn't sexy or "imminent" enough for the president and his minions, and that's where the ridiculous "mushroom cloud" imagery came from. What it did instead was create a case that was far more applicable to other countries than it was to Iraq. Furthermore, it created a precedent for other countries to use with far more dangerous consequences.
What, for example, would the United States have to say if India launched a full-scale invasion of Pakistan citing its WMD program, proliferation efforts and operational relationship with terrorists? The above would all be far truer and more imminent than the Iraqi threat was and would leave the United States with no other option than to stand aside as an important strategic partner was dismembered.
This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future. To fight a long war, the president has to ensure he can preserve public and congressional support for the effort. It is not an overstatement to say that the president's shift in rhetoric nearly cost the U.S. the war. Victory or defeat can hinge on the president's words as much as on the military plans of his generals or the actions of their troops on the ground.
In his book, former CIA director George Tenant described "marketing meetings" in the Oval Ofiice to best "sell" the war to the American people. What the president didn't understand and still doesn't is that war is not a political campaign and marketing such a thing can only lead to a case of buyer's remorse with far more dramatic consequences than a single election can cure.
To this day, all Douglas Feith wants to argue about is marketing. And that's why General Franks was right all along. Feith was and remains "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet."
Link lovingly stolen from Decision '08
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: War Pigs By: Black Sabbath From: Paranoid
PermalinkLabels: The Department of International Relations
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Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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 JAIL JIMMY CARTER
I couldn't have been more pleased when Gerald Ford's decision to pardon Richard Nixon was vindicated in his lifetime. Even the special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, doubted that Nixon would have received a fair trail in a reasonable time in the District of Columbia. Furthermore, all a trial would have accomplished was to drag out the freakshow of Watergate for years to come. In fact, it would have been much better if Nixon had pardoned himself before resigning.
While I supported the impeachment, conviction and removal from office of Bill Clinton, I also thought that his successor, whether it was Al Gore or George Bush, should have pardoned him. As a general rule, I believe that impeachment or resignation is punishment enough for a president of the United States for abuses that take place during his term of office. Regardless of how polarized American politics has become, few Americans have any desire to see a former president in prison.
Is that presidential immunity? Probably. But there's a significant difference a president and even the worst of criminal defendants. Someday no one will remember who Charles Manson was, but Richard Nixon's disgrace will live forever in history. Furthermore, if presidents face the prospect of prison, the quality of presidents will only go further downward. Frankly, the quality of presidents is bad enough as it is.
However, once presidents leave office, they resume being ordinary citizens and that immunity should cease, particularly in matters of national security and foreign affairs. It's enough of a nightmare that President Bush is allowed to continue making American foreign policy a bad fucking joke. He certainly doesn't need any help from former president Jimmy Carter.
Carter's actions over the last 27 years, while not always criminal (such as writing the individual members of the UN Security Council and asking them to vote against the the 1990 use of force against Iraq resolution), have been extremely distasteful and unbecoming of a former president. What has his conduct gotten him? Well, a Nobel Peace Prize for starters.
President Carter actually seems to believe one of two things, either that he wasn't actually voted out of office in a fucking landslide or that none of his successors have had the moral right to the presidency. Those are the only two things that can explain his almost thirty years of freelance diplomacy.
The problem with such diplomacy - other than it being a giant pain in the ass to his successors - is that it is a felony. James Earl Carter of Plains, Georgia, is in repeated violation of the Logan Act. Each such violation carries with it a penalty of three years imprisonment.
There is little doubt what Carter was doing in North Korea in 1994. He was negotiating a peaceful resolution to the dispute over that country's nuclear program. He wasn't shy about saying so and the Clinton administration was very forthright in saying that Carter was not an authorized representative of the United States government. Why the Justice Department didn't convene a grand jury is beyond me.
Since he was awarded the Peace Prize, Carter has grown even more insufferable. That culminated last weekend, when the former president publicly stated the precise extent of Israel's nuclear program.
Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.
His remark, made at the Hay-on-Wye festival which promotes current affairs books and literature, is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line. Carter, who has immersed himself since his presidency in Israeli-Palestinian relations, was highly critical of Israeli settlers on the West Bank, and of Israel's refusal to talk to elected officials of the Islamic party Hamas, although he said that Israel's security was his prime concern. Not only is Israel's nuclear program not a secret, neither is its proliferation activities. Isreal is widely suspected of having collaborated with the Apartheid-era South Africa's nuclear weapons program.
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert accidentally (and idiotically) confirmed the existence of his countries weapons stockpile. However, Olmert is accountable to the Israeli people who elected him and Jimmy Carter isn't accountable to anyone.
Carter is the first person to be in a position to know - and he is in such a position - to confirm the extrent of the Israeli arsenal.
How is Carter in such a position? As a former president, Carter receives regular CIA briefings and maintains a high-level security clearance. If the American government knows something, there's a better than even chance that Jimmy Carter knows it as well.
That has never posed a serious problem before, but it appears to now. If the Israelis, or any foreign government, has to be concerned about senstive intelligence being made public by the likes of Carter, said governments aren't likely to long share their secrets with the United States.
Not that Jimmy Carter gives a shit. He's the third fucking Blues Brother and is on a mission from God. If American foreign policy is crippled as a consequence of that mission, all the better. For a guy who keeps harping about the joys of electoral democracy, he seemingly forgets that no one has elected him to anything in over three decades.
As we all learned from the Scooter Libby - Valarie Plame debacle, knowingly revealing classified intelligence is a felony. This is a whole lot more serious than even Plamegate was. This is a matter of international relations regarding nuclear war. It also endangers continued intelligence cooperation between the United States and its allies.
For that reason, Jimmy Carter's CIA briefings should be immediately halted and his security clearence revoked. Furthermore, the Justice Department should seriously start consider investigating Carter's continued private diplomacy.
Get the son of a bitch once and for all.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: You Got a Reputation By: The Byrds From: Sweetheart of the Rodeo
Permalink Labels: Fun With Politics, I Fought The Law, The Department of International Relations
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Sunday, May 18, 2008
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 BUSH, HYPOCRISY, IDIOCY AND ISRAEL
Turns out that making a dry drunk leader of the free world wasn't as funny as I had originally hoped. As it happens, the brain damage chronic drinkers are prone to suffer might just disqualify someone from the presidency.
We learned that all too well on Thursday when President Bush adderessed the Israeli Knesset and spoke out in defiance of two hundred years of political tradition, personal decency and common sense. It was a speech that was contrary not just to world history, but the history of his own useless administration.
For most of America's history, its statesmen have abided by the dictum that "politics ends at the water's edge." Political campaigns were not to be waged overseas, and certainly not by sitting presidents. Nixon did not go to China and declare that the Democrats would destroy the world and Ronald Reagan would never have dreamed of doing that. I suspect that the current president's father would rather have resigned his office rather than break that proud tradition.
President Bush didn't do that on Thursday. Instead he broke with even his own disjointed version of history. It was a speech that stood out for it's ignorance, arrogance and short-sightedness. When one considers the incredible damage to America's future foreign policy, it becomes almost mindblowing.
We believe that religious liberty is fundamental to a civilized society. So we condemn anti-Semitism in all forms -- whether by those who openly question Israel's right to exist, or by others who quietly excuse them. We know this because the president of the United States rountinely condems Saudi Arabia and Egypt for making after-school specials based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In Egypt's case that's of particular importance as they receive about $2 billion in American foreign aid each and every year. A more cynical blogger might argue that the American government is actually subsidizing anti-Semitism. Luckily, I'm not at all cynical.
We believe that targeting innocent lives to achieve political objectives is always and everywhere wrong. So we stand together against terror and extremism, and we will never let down our guard or lose our resolve. Unless that terror eminates from Kurdish Iraq. That's different.
And that is why the founding charter of Hamas calls for the "elimination" of Israel. And that is why the followers of Hezbollah chant "Death to Israel, Death to America!" That is why Osama bin Laden teaches that "the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties." And that is why the President of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.
There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century. Here's where the president's intrepretation of history gets interesting.
Firstly, the founding charter of Hamas indeed calls for the elimination of Israel. The first problem is that Hamas hasn't referenced that charter in public for years. Second, both Fatah and the Israeli government knew that Hamas would win election in 2005 and begged the Bush administration to support a postponement of that election, which the president ignored.
The administration then attempted a half-hearted coup against a democratically elected Hamas, which directly led to the forcible takeover of Gaza and further endangered Israeli civilians. President Bush didn't point that out.
If I were a Jew, I would be outraged by Bush's contention that "Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred." From that, one can only assume that the president is referring to Holocaust. While it's true that Americans saw the consequences, only Jews suffered them. The Allies were well aware where the death camps were and what their function was. And they did nothing at all to stop it. Despite having uncontested control of the air by 1943, the Allies wouldn't even destroy the rail links to the camps as a gesture to the victims of places like Auschwitz.
While the Germans perpetrated the Holocaust, each and every Allied government was complicit in it because we did nothing. We may not have been able to stop it, but we didn't even attempt to slow it down. And the Allies had air superiority for almost all of the period that the Final Solution was carried out.
Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history. That might be the most incredible distorition of the facts to come from a president who has excelled at doing just that.
When Nazi tanks crossed into Poland, the United States was practising a policy of strict neutraily. As a matter of fact, the United States Congress passed, and President Roosevelt signed, no fewer than four Neutrality Acts during Hitler's first four years in power. In fact, the Neutrality Act of 1939 passed two months after Hitler invaded Poland.
When the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were passed, the United States was neutral. Even after Kristallnacht, the United States remained neutral. The Anschluss and invasion of Poland did nothing to change American neutrality, in fact, they strengthed it. Were it not for Hitler's ill-advised declaration of war against the United States after Pearl Harbor, it's an open question as to whether America would have fought in Europe at all.
Neville Chamberlain may have been wrong to negotiate with Hitler, but the United States ignored the threat entirely until the war came to its shores. How fucking dare any American politician claim moral superiority to Chamberlain given that history? Most Americans believe to this day that the Second World War began 26 months later than it actually did.
All of the Western powers are complicit in the Holocaust. We knew it was happening and we did nothing to stop it. Worse, we refused to accept refugees from it and sent them back to the ovens of Poland. Millions of Jews were murdered and we bear that guilt along with Germany because we didn't even try to stop it. It just so happens that the United States bears a special burden because as a neutral, it refused to call Nazi aggression what it was.
But let's look at Bush's position on negotiating with "terrorists and radicals." Since Hamas doesn't have tanks or heavy artillery, one can only assuming that he's speaking of actual states, specifically Iran.
Not only did President Bush's hero, Ronald Reagan, negotiate with the terrorist state of Iran, he sold them weapons. Furthermore, he sold them weapons as a ploy to release American hostages held by Iranian sponsored terrorists. When questioned about it, President Reagan not only lied, he backdated Presidential intelligences findings authorizing the sales, which is clearly an impeachable offense.
Worse still, President Bush himself has negotiated with terrorists, specifically, Muammar al-Gaddafi of Lybia. Gaddafi was directly responsible for the terrorist attack on Pan Am 103 that killed 270 people, including 180 Americans. Bush negotiated with Gaddafi to stop his joke of a nuclear program, most only of the components of which hadn't even been taken out of their shipping crates.
Gaddafi was a major financier of Black September and Carlos the Jackal. He was the prime state sponsor of the PLO during the 1970s and 80s. In 1986, Gaddafi ordered the bombing of a Berlin disco frequented by US servicemen, killing two and wounding another 50. President Reagan responded to this by calling Gaddafi "the mad dog of the Middle East" and bombing his house.
To this very day, Colonel Gaddafi has not renounced terrorism or accepted the right of Isreal to exist. Yet, Bush still lifted American sanctions against Lybia.
That's who President Bush is willing to negotiate with. And let's not forget that his administration was instrumental in electing Hamas in the Palestinean Territories and giving Hezbollah legitimacy in Lebanon, both of which border on Isreal and are an existential threat to Isreali democracy.
America stands with you in breaking up terrorist networks and denying the extremists sanctuary. America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror to possess the world's deadliest weapons would be an unforgivable betrayal for future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Mr. Bush has cited several remarks by the Iranian leadership calling for the destruction of Israel. What he doesn't tell you is that every single Arab country has said the same or worse. In fact, each and every one of those countries have attacked Israel one time or another, and most of them don't recognize Israel's right to exist to this day.
Not only was Iran the second country in the world to recognize Israel, it has never declared war on her. In fact, you would have to go back over 300 years to find an instance of Iran invading anybody. Indeed, the American missles sold to Iran by the Reagan admisistration were routed through Israel. How many countries have the United States aggressively attacked in its history? I happen to live in one of them.
Does Iran have a nuclear weapons program? Yes, they almost certainly do. But one should consider Iran's stragetic position. Iran is in the immediate vicinity of a nuclear Israel, Russia, China, Pakistan and India. Oh, and the United States government that has been screaming for regime change in Iran for the last thirty years now has about 200,000 troops on no fewer than two of Iran's borders.
Can you imagine what the United States would do if it were surrounded by so many aggressive nuclear powers? Saddam Hussein was thought to have WMD that no serious person thought that he could deliver to the American homeland, but that was enough to warrant an invasion. If you don't think of the Iranians as guys in turbans with religious beliefs almost nutty enough to qualify them for a Republican congressional seat, you quickly come to the conclusion that Iran isn't crazy to have a nuclear program, they'd be crazy if they didn't.
How many democratically elected American governments has Iran overthrown? America has overthrown at least one freely elected government in Iran. The United States has nothing to fear from Iran, but Iran has everything to fear from the United States and they have very good historical reasons for them to do so.
That's not to suggest that I'm in favor of Iran having nuclear weapons, but it should be taken as meaning that I'm not against it either. The Bush administration, in its enthusiasm of pre-emtive war, has even given Iran a plausible excuse to attack the Israeli reactor at Dimona.
You know what could kill the Iranian nuclear program tomorrow? A guarantee that the United States won't invade Iran. That's all. I believe that the Iranians would even recognize Israel if it received an American security guarantee. It would cost the United States nothing and go further than anything else in reaching a Middle East peace agreement. Besides, the US extended the same guarantee to Cuba. What did that cost?
Neither Iran or Saudi Arabia recognizes Isreal. But Saudi Arabia has attacked Israel and Iran hasn't. Furthermore, there was no Iranian involvement in 9/11 and there were 15 Saudis on those planes and there were financial transactions that flowed in and out of the Kingdom both before and after the attacks.
The worst thing about President Bush's remarks is that they were aimed at American politicians - almost certainly Barack Obama - from foreign soil.
Not only is that a break with 200 years of American political tradition, it is incredibly damaging to American foreign policy.
Let's assume for a moment that Obama wins the presidency in November. Bush would have already tied his hands in foreign policy and created an ingrained distrust toward the new president with one of Israel's closest allies. No president in American history has ever done that before, and that is just another reason that George W. Bush is a cheap fucking punk.
There would have been all manner of hell to be paid if Bill Clinton did a world wide tour saying that Republican policies would kill everyone just before an American election. Now, I hate President Clinton just as much as I hate President Bush, but there has to be some measure of fairness here. If nothing else, Clinton wouldn't have made those remarks during wartime, like his successor did.
If Bush can't sustain his shithead policies through an election, it seems that he'll damned do it in foreign relations.
I agree with most Republicas that Barack Obama is hopelessly niave regarding foreign policy. But I can't escapre the conclusion that Bush is, too, and he's actually been president for almost eight years. And the worst president since James Buchanan has done much more damage to his country and its relations with the rest of the world than even that closeted cocksucker and his cabinet of traitors ever could have hoped to.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: There is a War By: Leonard Cohen From: New Skin for the Old Ceremony
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Labels: Fun With Politics, The Department of International Relations
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Tuesday, May 06, 2008
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 JOHN BOLTON IS FEELING BOMBY
Never let it be said that President Bush is a humorless prick. In fact, his sense of humor veers toward the darkest corners of the human spirit - just like everybody's should - and this is best exemplified by his patronage of John Bolton. Bolton, who is clearly fucking insane, opined to the masturbatory Federalist Society in 1994 that "There's no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." I hate to be a fucking know-it-all but there pretty clearly is a United Nations. I know this because they actually have a building. Things that don't exist ordinarily don't have a headquarters. That was the bonus question on my poly-sci final in college, if you were wondering. Being the scamp that he is, the president of the United States nominated Bolton to represent his country at that very building. Before that, Bolton, who never really seemed to care all that much about arms control, was the Undersecretary of state for same. So dedicated was he to the principle of arms control, he destroyed a 2001 conference dedicated to the enforcement of the Biological Weapons Convention.  I think it's the mustache that makes Bolton so naughty. You should see some of the crazy shit I did when I had a shaved head and the world famous Saddam beard. I lot of people thought that I'd someday regret having Eva Amurri's tits tattooed on my chest. But I showed them by never sobering up. I didn't sober up and godfuckit, neither did Bolton. At least I hope that's what's up with John. Anyhow, the United States Senate didn't think President Bush was particularly funny and refused to confirm Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. Bush then used a recess appointment to ensure that Bolton could only do two years of damage. Well, now he's out of a job, and John Bolton's feeling the urge to bring the crazy back!John Bolton, America's ex-ambassador to the United Nations, has called for US air strikes on Iranian camps where insurgents are trained for war in Iraq.
Mr Bolton said that striking Iran would represent a major step towards victory in Iraq. While he acknowledged that the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming American’s overseas interests existed, he said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be "far higher" if Washington took no action. "This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we're not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do," he said. "Then the ball would be in Iran's court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops."
If you've never reached the pinnacle of international diplomacy like Bolton and me, I should tell you that only way to reverse years of bad trends in a foreign war is to bomb the country next door. It worked in Vietnam, didn't it?
And let's explore the possible hostile Iranian responses for a second. These could possibly include chemical or biological-armed ballistic missiles fired at Saudi Arabia's oil fields and refineries, flooding southern Iraq with Revolutionary Guard forces and swamping the already overwhelmed American force there, inciting Iraq's Shi'ite majority to agitate against American forces, and activating Hezbollah cells in the United States to launch massive terrorist wave attacks against the American homeland. Pretty trivial shit, actually.
 If John Bolton knows anything, it is that to win one war, you almost always have to start another war. If the second war you start is with a country that is three times as big and three times as crazy as the one you're already in, all the better. If nothing else, you'll eventually find somebody who sponsors international terrorism and has WMD and an active nuclear program. And that would be nice.
Here's the problem as I see it; if you merely bomb the Iranian camps, they will move and build new ones - preferably deeper into the country. That's sort of exactly what happened when al-Qaeda's Afghanistan bases were bombed in 1998. When they were bombed in 2001, the bases were merely reconstituted in Pakistan. Air power would only serve as an act of war against Iran and not a particularly effective one at that. Ground forces will almost certainly be necessary to accomplish much of anything. However, if the United States had the ground forces available to attack Iran, they would have secured the border and the Iranian-trained insurgents would never have infiltrated in the first fucking place. The interesting thing is that folks like Bolton and his Project for a New American Century cohorts spent years berating Clinton's bombing strikes as "pounding sand" and advocated an actual revolution in how international relations worked. But most of them - and Bolton in particular - were awfully shy about committing the resources necessary to change the world. I don't have a particularly big problem with attacking Iran, provided that it's done properly and done in such a way to minimize the possibility of negative consequences, meaning a ground force commitment of about 500,000 troops. After Iraq, no sensible person should trust this administration or any of its mouthpieces to do that - or much of anything - properly. What John Bolton is advocating is a bombing program that offers virtually no prospect of success and maximizes the potential of truly horrific consequences for the United States, its people and its international interests. But having a giant mustache and constrantly adjusting your glasses means never having to say that you're sorry, doesn't it? Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: November Spawned a Monster By: Morrissey From: Live at Earls CourtPermalinkLabels: The Department of International Relations
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Friday, May 02, 2008
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 FUN WITH WMD, DEMOCRACY, STUPIDITY & IRAQ
You will get different estimates about precisely how close he is. We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for instance -- into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to -- high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.
We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon. And we know that when the inspectors assessed this after the Gulf War, he was far, far closer to a crude nuclear device than anybody thought, maybe six months from a crude nuclear device. The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. -Condolezza Rice, September 8, 2002
My last post seems have really stirred the shit in the comments. I like it when that happens and I'd particularly like to thank Mook for being a psychopath. It keeps things interesting around here, particularly when my writing sucks, which seems to happen a lot. In the comments, Mook makes a couple of interesting assertions that underscore both how batshit fucking crazy he is and how goddamned dumb the Bush administration is. You have to work awfully hard to be that uninformed and I don't want him thinking that I don't appreciate his effort. When Bill O'Reilly finally has the good sense to commit suicide, Mook is more than capable of taking over that chair. First, he states "Vietnam is a fair parallel to Iraq in that it was a large scale war in which we were not seeking to conquer and rule the country," which is true for what it's worth. It just doesn't happen to be worth much. You see, Americans live with this adorable notion that people care what American motives are when the United States bombs or invades their country. I can assure you that they don't. Americans can get away with this because they consume half of the world's illegal drugs and possess half of its nuclear weapons. I learned a long time ago not to argue with heavily armed, stoned people and hopefully you did, too. South Vietnamese villagers didn't like having their huts burned down and accordingly worked with the Viet Cong more than they otherwise would have. The Filipinos didn't enjoy being waterboarded and their liberation from Spain did little to alieviate that dislike. And I'm pretty sure that your average Iraqi doesn't feel especially "free" when he can't go to mosque without getting blown up. Also, replacing Abu Ghraib with, well, Abu Ghraib was probably less than wise. Just sayin'. Americans like to point to the post-war occupations of Germany and Japan, yet neglect to mention that anyone capable of forming an insurgency in either country was fucking dead. Oh, and the allies had something approaching a proper force to population ratio in Germany and Japan, which they don't in Iraq. As you may have noticed by now, airplanes and smart bombs aren't particularly effective in civil pacification operations. Mook continues; "Saddam was a nutjob threat to the region with a history of producing and using chem(ical) weapons. That threat was successfully removed." Actually, that was true in 1998, as we later learned. As one can read about in Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, the Clinton "blowjob bombings" of December '98 were devastatingly effective in wiping out what remained of Iraq's WMD capacity while Republicans questioned the need for those bombings at all. Mook suggests that Saddam "had expelled weapons inspectors back in 1998", which isn't the case. The inspectors left because he stopped giving them access to suspect sites. After they left, Saddam refused to readmit them. Furthermore, the United States is the last country on earth that should bitch about the production and use of weapons of mass destruction. First, America actually invented most of those weapons and is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon. Second, the US government has excelled at (often accidental) proliferation and looking the other way when really scary countries like Pakistan get the bomb. You know who else has WMD and a history of using them, Mook? The United States, the United Kingdom and France. You might know them as a majority of the permanent members of the Security Council.  Second, the US had a complicated history with Iraq's WMD program. Specifically, they provided the original funding for it during the war with Iran with agricultural credits and dual use technology transfers from the Reagan administration. This is something that Donald Rumsfeld doesn't like to talk about much, but knows quite a bit about. Third, the idea invading a country that you presume has WMD and will use it on you or give it to terrorists is the single craziest fucking thing I've ever head. If Saddam did have them, the invasion would make it a self-fulfilling doom prophecy. Here's how it works. No national leader would pass along a weapon like that and expect to long survive. Someone would only do something like that if the destruction of his regime was a certainty. It seems to me that if you're announcing that you're going to take a guy out, you're assuring that he'll either use those weapons on your troops or pass them along to terrorists so that he can exact his revenge from beyond the grave. The Bush administration is goddamned lucky that Saddam didn't have WMD. If he did, Pittsburg might no longer exist today. That's not to say that Iraq shouldn't have been invaded, just that WMD was a laughably silly reason for doing it. Saddam seemingly couldn't get out of bed in the morning without making a monsterously dumb strategic miscalculation. "I'll invade Iran. What could happen?" "I'll invade Kuwait. What could happen?" With the cocksucker French and Russians determined to lift the UN sanctions, it was only a matter of time before Iraq went on a shopping spree and Saddam did something dumb again and the United States would inevitably have to come to the rescue. That being the case, better to take him down when he's weak than when he's strong. But that's a complicated argument to make to an uneducated public. It also lacks the peppiness of "mushroom clouds" and makes for a very busy bumper sticker. Then there's the matter of unintended consequences, which President Bush seems to be the poster boy for. In his 2002 State of the Union, the president and David Frum created an artificial "axis of evil" consisting of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and specifically cited the dangers of their weapons programs. Then the US invaded Iraq. Predictably, Iran and North Korea accelerated those very programs to deter the United States. They might be evil, but Iran and North Korea aren't stupid. The best part? Deterrence seems to have worked. At least against the United States. Once the Commies and Persians figure out how containment works, Bush is fucked. Mook took great exception to my contention that Operation Iraqi Freedom was "the most underplanned and undermanned military operation of its size in human history." Perhaps I could have stated that more clearly and I'll use this space to elaborate. When one country decides to invade another, it usually knows two things before proceeding. First, they figure out what it will cost. Second, they decide what should happen when they win. The Bush administration was unique in resolving neither.  Paul Wolfowitz famously had the balls to go before Congress and say with a straight face that the war would cost no more than $50 billion and that would be financed through Iraqi oil revenues. Both predictions turned out to be patent horseshit. Once you factor in the damage to the American economy and the continuing health care needs of the wounded veterans, this war is well on the way to eventually costing three trillion dollars. And that's three trillion in borrowed money, teenagers. For the first time in American history, a war is going to be paid for by the children and grandchildren of those who fought it. And to think that Larry Lindsey was dumped on his ass for suggesting that it was only going to cost $200 billion. And you know what Iraq has been doing for the five years since "Mission Accomplished?" Importing gasoline. They sit on the second largest patch of it, but they're actually importing it. Turns out that three decades of war and sanctions rips the tits off of your production and refinery capacity. Who knew? More importantly, the suggestion that the resources of a conqured nation could be exploited to pay for the conquest sort of undercuts the assertion that it was an operation where "invader does not seek to control the invaded country." The Wolfowitz plan would have been brilliantly original if the Germans hadn't thought of it first. But it does explain why the only arm of the fallen Iraqi government that was protected when the looting started was the Ministry of Oil. As to the planning of what "victory" would look like, the history is there for anyone who wants to read it. The planning of the war took a year and a half. The planning for the aftermath only started about 3 months before the invasion. America's two proconsuls, Jay Garner and L. Paul Bremmer arrived in Iraq mere weeks after their appointments and had no documented directives on what precisely they were expected to accomplish. That, in a nutshell, is how Iraq ended up with a fucking flat tax before it had anything that even remotely resembled security. It's almost as if President Bush invaded a country to decide whether Steve Forbes was right all along. Anyone who has read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's majestic Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone knows that the Coalition Provisional Authourity was little more than resume padding for budding young hacks from the Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign. If you once blew the guy who got coffee for the deputy director of lying in the Wyoming Republican Party, there was a better than even chance that you were going to rebuild Iraq's electrical infastructure. The results are obvious. Iraq still has no reliable electricity, but they do know all about the Bush vision of hack power. Of course, they already learned that from Saddam. Worse still, the CPA went about attempting to sell off Iraqi state industries in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, which explicity prohibit that sort of thing. That only further undercut the Bush administration's already battered reputation for competence and respect for the rule of law. Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . .
Q: If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties? Cheney: Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. . . . The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that. -Vice President Dick Cheney, "Meet the Press," March 16, 2003 The above quote by Vice President Hunty McShootaguy seems to be the total and full extent of postwar planning in Iraq. "They'll love us like the Japanese love Ratt," the thinking went. "We'll get the genetically criminal Ahmed Chalibi in there and everyone'll be happier than pigs in shit. Besides, who doesn't love a little sexual humiliation in jail?"  Anyone who knows anything about anything will tell you that you can't provide basic security with a ratio of occupiers to occupied that thin, let alone transform a society that is older than most, riven with historical sectarian divides, and is famously fucking cranky. The idea that you can take over a country as big and as crazy as Iraq with a force that thin and placate it with a guy who has actually convicted of a massive bank fraud right next door is worse than insane, it's criminal negiligence. Congress must have created a Department of Fairy Tales when I wasn't looking because I can't think of anywhere else that such "planning" could have taken place. On the other hand, it is perfectly representative of the entire Bush presidency. If you were curious about what I meant by "the most underplanned and undermanned military operation of its size the human history", now you know. No intellectually honest person would say that the occupation of Iraq is a a testament to superior planning, manpower and execution. Which leads me to the other points Mook has to make to make. "Name another large scale war in history involving 150,000 invading troops where only 4,000 were lost over a 5 year period in in-country battle. Whether you all are honest enough to admit it, those relatively minimal losses, miniscule by historical standards, are a testament to superior planning, manpower and execution." Oh..... I can't think of another large scale war in history where over 90% of the casualties occured after the mission was described as accomplished and the major combat operations were deemed "over." You see, Mook suffers from a case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, too. He conveinently forgets major policy statements from his masturbatory Jesus when they conflict with his hallucinatory world view. What Mook also doesn't work out in his retarded calculus is the number of Iraqis who have been killed in that 5 year period. Surely, you remember them, right? Those are the folks you liberated! Well, the insurgents have killed nearly a hundred of them for every American they've smoked. Of course, that number is just a guess since the Bush administration can't be bothered to acttually count how many of the people it liberated have been subsequently murdered. Also remember that the one of the only things an occupying power is legally obligated to provide the occupied is security. If you agree with the position that the insurgent tactics are indeed those of terrorists, you have to recognize what the point of terrorism is. And that's not to achieve a stellar body count, it is to instill fear. That's where the "terror" part comes in, see? And it seems to me that your average Iraqi is plenty scared. The Vietnam analogy is being bandied about quite a bit in the comments of my previous essay, and that's worth exploring. Mook contends that "we didn't deliver any semblance of democracy in Vietnam or in the entire region, whereas Iraq has had democratic elections. Sure Iraq's political alliances are fragile, but they are undeniably steps toward democracy like nothing we were able to accomplish in Vietnam. And so on. That progress in Iraq costing 4,000American lives vs. 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam." Categorical nonsense. South Vietnam had plenty of elections. They just didn't mean a whole lot because those governments were incapable pf providing basic services, such as security, to their constituents. Sound familiar? The Vietnam analogy also falls apart in the face of the "what if America wasn't there in the first place" test. If America wasn't in Vietnam, the north would have swallowed the south and bunch of people would have died. That's tragic, but ultimately what happened anyway. If America never went to Iraq, Saddam would be running a criminal government that targeted political dissidents and ethnic rivals. But since America went into Iraq the way that it did, anarchy has broken out where the violence is completely random and no one of any faction is safe. Worse still, a Kurdish declaration of independence remains a distinct possibility, which would provoke a Turkish invasion with the United States in the middle. That's your "superior planning, manpower and execution" at work. But you're right and I'm wrong, Mook. Bush is Clauswitz in a fucking cowboy hat. You finally got me. I'm the deranged one. George W. Bush will remembered as the greatest military mind in recorded history! I may be wrong and engaging in faddish "truth to power" rhetoric. But you're consciously and despite all of the available facts, speaking "truth" for power, which is usually infinately worse, son. Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Gimmie Shelter By: The Rolling Stones From: Let It BleedPermalink Labels: ... And Then You're Gonna Die, Fun With Politics, My Commenters Are Idiots, The Department of International Relations, The Department of Professional Outrage
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Thursday, May 01, 2008
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 BECAUSE "I AM NOT A CROOK" WAS ALREADY TAKEN
Every president wants to be remembered for something. Harry Truman will always be remembered for his "The Buck Stops Here" sign, the Marshall Plan, NATO and desegregating the military. Bill Clinton will always be remembered interrupting a blowjob so that he could masturbate into a sink and inspiring a government report detailing same. If you were to ask most Americans, they would tell you that Clinton was the more consequential president. This is but one reason that the American government should get out of education entirely.
George W. Bush is lucky enough to preside over what I like to call the O.J Simpson period of world history. It really doesn't matter what you're famous for, all you need is to be famous to win. It is for this reason that the Juice gets more pussy than I do and Saddam Hussein was probably getting pictures from Kurdish girls showing their cooters in the mail as he was awaiting execution. What O.J and Saddam were famous for isn't nearly as relevant as the simple fact that they were famous.
President Bush currently has an approval rating of 22% - lower than Richard Nixon's was the day he became the only man to resign the presidency and faced the very real prospect of going to jail - a new record. Most people would look at a number like that feel emotions like shame, disgust or anger. I feel bewilderment, if only because it tells me that 22% of Americans would vote for Bush again if they could. For that reason, I firmly believe that a quarter of all Americans should be randomly sterilized.
Today marks the day that things went horribly, terribly and publicly wrong for the second Bush presidency. Historians will someday detail how things went awry almost from the second that Prince Hal W assumed office, but his contemporaries will always point to May 1st 2003.
The first of May always struck me as an odd day for an American president to celebrate anything as it is traditionally a day for communists to remember thier misadministration of half of humanity. But as time went by, May 1 was as good a day for the president of the United States to declare "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. The only way that this war could have been more aptly framed is if it had started five days earlier.  President Bush's little stunt on the USS Abraham Lincoln was one for the ages. There was the president's crotch-enhancing flightsuit, his aerial dynamics and the declaration that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." The Democrats were of course hapless before such a spectacle. Everyone knows that liberals are afraid of heights and have tiny penises. Had things not gone as they did, we would have seen endless footage of it throughout the 2004 election season. The camera crews were there and ready, the jet was fuelled and the candidate had the single greatest backdrop in the history of political advertising. Best of all, the whole thing had been paid for by the American taxpayer. But things didn't go the way the way they were supposed to and major combat operations in Iraq were far from completed. As it happened, the removal of Saddam Hussein and his thuggish Ba'ath regime was the easy part, and the season in hell was just beginning. History's most expensive photo-op instead will be forever remembered as a monument to hubris, as garish and impractical as any of Saddam's many palaces. May 1st, 2003's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" was a fitting tribute to the most underplanned and undermanned military operation of its size the human history. And the signs of what was to come were already evident to anyone who was paying attention. After the April 9 fall of the Ba'ath government every city south of Mosul was racked by looting. Donald Rumsfeld called this a consequence of freedom, which is a "messy thing," but the Iraqi opposition saw it as something different. They saw that they could defy the United States with impunity. By May 1st, suicide bombing in the Sunni triangle had already started and the fearsome rumbling of the Sadrist militias were already being heard in the south. But it would be over a year before any administration official said the word "insurgency" out loud and a year after that before the phrase "geurilla war" was uttered. By the time the Bush administration recognized the reality of May 1, 2003 - which didn't happen until January of 2007 - the country was engulfed in a civil war. "Mission Accomplished" is something that should be forever remembered by those who care about history. May 1st is a day to remember not only the short-sighted foolishness of President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowiz and Douglas Feith; but it is also a day to remember men like General Eric Shinseki and Lawrence Lindsey, who didn't oppose the war, but knew what it would require. They turned out to be low estimates - particularly Lindsey's - but the were intellectually honest and they lost their jobs for their trouble. Today is "Mission Accomplished" day and the White House's minister of propoganda press secretary, Dana Perino, couldn't be more insulted that anyone would have the temerity to bring that up.
"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said `mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year." That begs an important question. What price, specifically, did the White House pay? After all, it did get re-elected, which is precisely what the big show on the Lincoln was designed to ensure. They took a hit on what little credibility they had left, but that's hardly comperable to the price being paid by the young men and women of the American military each and every day.
They are under-manned and under-equipped. They are fighting a war that their political masters spent literally years denying the existence of. One day they are told that they're fighting for Iraqi liberity and the next they're told that they're little more than terrorist flypaper. In fact, the White House even blamed the "mission accomplished" banner on the very people it was designed to celebrate.
 And Dana Perino has the gall to complain about the press pointing that out? For a pretty girl, she has an exceptionally large set of balls on her. To people like President Bush and Ms. Perino, this is about the troops, the war, or even American foreign policy. Instead, it's another exercise in "the press isn't being fair to us." It's whining from people who pretend that they're the only ones grown-up enough to to govern. During his last press conference as president, Dwight Eisenhower was asked if he thought he was treated fairy by the media. In response he said "I don't see what a reporter can do to a president, do you?" That's something that all of his successors forgot. Reporters don't destroy presidencies, presidents so. And this one more than most. That's something else that should be remembered on this, the fifth "Mission Accomplished" day. I'm not a huge enthusiast for what journalism has become. When Paris Hilton takes up more space than Robert Mugabe, journalism ceases to be something anyone should take seriously. But they got it right on "Mission Accomplished." That's precisely what they should focus on and that's precisely the debate the public should be having. For an administration that urges democracy and open dialogue is the sands of Mesopotamia, they sure don't seem to encourage it much at home. And that's something else we should take "Mission Accomplished" to mean. "Mission Accomplished" will ultimately be remembered by history as the 21st century equivilent of "I am not a crook." But they are different in that George Bush survived and Richard Nixon didn't. And nobody died because of Watergate. "Mission Accomplished" is the legacy that President George Walker Bush refuses to embrace but will haunt him through the ages. Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Thorn in My Pride By: The Black Crowes From: The Southern Harmony and Musical CompanionLabels: ... And Then You're Gonna Die, Fun With Politics, Journalists Are Swine, The Department of International Relations, The Department of Professional Outrage
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Sunday, April 27, 2008
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 BEN KINGSLEY SAVES THE DAY
Afghanistan suffers from all of the problems Iraq does, only more so. The same flawed, illogical and monsterously fucking stupid American policies that have turned Mesopotamia a waking nightmare were actually invented in Afghanistan.
Seven weeks after 9/11, the United States brought the fight back to al-Qaeda and their Taliban sponsors. And it was a striking success despite the notable lack of actual American forces in the field. It was a war fought almost entirely by proxy. It was directed by the CIA, but actually conducted by the Northern Alliance and rented local warlords.
After the fall of Kabul, a Loya jirga was convened and Ben Kingsley was named acting president. He was elected in his own right by the Afghan people in 2004. Kingsley had never run much of anything prior to his being named president, but he was exceptional in Gandhi and Sexy Beast, so he had the enthusiasic backing of President Bush, who is something of a film buff.
Then the United States went away. They said something about having something better to do. Or maybe it left a note. Who can remember?
Anyhow, Afghanistan was left with a government headed by an Academy Award winner, drug dealers, war criminals of varying dispicability and several thousand NATO troops. Oh, and all of the major figures in both the Taliban and al-Qaeda were still wandering about. But whar are you going to do? The Bush administration had other priorities several hundred miles to the southeast.
Amazingly, the Rumsfeld doctrine of underwhelming force turned out to be complete nonsense and things went badly rather quickly. It turns out that you can't build a government around opium traffickers and movie stars and expect things to go well.
The way I see things, NATO is militarily about where the Soviets were in Afghanistan circa 1985. We control the cities, but once you get out into the country, you start having problems. Other than Canada and the Dutch, most of the NATO force is too scared to even go where the insurgency is, which is a novel way of prosecuting an anti-insurgency campaign.
Ben Kingsley has decided to make the prosecution of that campaign more interesting still.
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has called on British and American troops to stop arresting Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, saying that their operations undermined his government's authority and were counter-productive.
(...)
Karzai is facing re-election next year and may be hoping to bolster flagging support with a populist stance. However, in recent months relations have deteriorated seriously, with Western officials openly doubting the ability of the Afghan president, who was heavily backed by the US and the UK in 2001 after the fall of the Taliban regime, to manage rampant corruption and combat drug trafficking in the war-wracked southwest Asian state.  I particularly love the part about combating drug trafficking. The United States sought the co-operation of local warlords who were known to be involved in the drug trade. Now the U.S wants Ben Kingsley to do something about it. I'm not sure how to break this to the American and British governments, but they have a monopoly on air power and can napalm the poppy fields anytime they choose. The president of Afghanistan, on the other hand, cannot leave the house with at least four assassination attempts occurring. I'd love to be in one of those summits, where Bush leans over and says "Hey, those drug dealers that we paid off for three years, can you do something about them?" Karzai said he wanted American forces to stop arresting suspected Taliban members and their supporters, saying that fear of arrest and their past mistreatment were discouraging them from coming forward to lay down their arms. 'It has to happen,' he said. 'We have to make sure that when a Talib comes to Afghanistan ... he is safe from arrest by the coalition.'
Efforts at winning over Taliban fighters or sympathisers are mired in confusion: Nato allies in Afghanistan are divided over the exact nature of the amnesty or 'reconciliation programme' for insurgents. British policy, despite official insistence that 'there are no negotiations with the Taliban', is to weaken the radical Islamic movement by splitting off foot soldiers tempted by money or misled by tribal chiefs, religious leaders and ideologues from a 'hardcore' of leaders. It appears that Ben Kingsley's policy is in direct conflict with NATO's. And it would be, but for the fact that NATO doesn't appear to have a policy at all. Having one would be a good place to start. After all, we've been there for six and a half years. Having said that, we're doing a good job of pretending that Afghanistan is a democracy. That being the case, we're sort of obligated to at least pretend to care what that country's elected president has to say, even though it is unmitigated nonsense. But nonsense or not, it is his country and he answers to the people, not NATO.  And that, teenagers, is where democracy and common sense conflict. It's also why I thought the Bush doctrine of spreading democracy is not just incredibly stupid, but dangerously counter to American long-term strategic interests. Let's take France as just one example. As you know, France is a democracy, although it has taken them no few than five tries to get it right. France is also famously difficult in its relationships with practically everybody. This is because the more democratic a society is, the more nationalistic it tends to be. There is no guarantee that a democratic Iraq won't eventually be as hostile to Israel as its Baathist predecessor was, and no one should assume that a democratic Afghanistan won't seek some accomodation with the Taliban. And that's where democracy directly conflicts with American national security and that of its NATO allies. The Taliban and al-Qaeda declared war on the West on September 11, 2001. And recent Afghan history indicates that there cannot be co-existence with the Taliban. Eventually, they will return to power as they did in 1996. They will destroy those that would cooperate with them because their religious fervor demands no less. Once that occurs, it presents a clear and present danger to the West. That is compounded by the return of civilian rule in Pakistan. With the fall of Pervez Musharraff in everything but name, there is no longer any realistic check on the military and, to a much more important degree, the Inter-Service Intelligence service. The ISI, more than anyone else, was instrumental in the creation and military training of the Taliban and assured their survival in power. And that occured under the civilian governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Because Musharraf, like Zia al-Huq before him, had unquestioned control of the Pakistani military and the ISI, it was generally assumed that they worked under his exclusive direction. And Zia and Musharraf knew that their policies had to be tempered with their desire to maintain healthy relations with the United States. But the military and ISI have never respected civilian rule and have acted on their own under civilian government. It is a matter of historical fact that the ISI was training fighters who would later constitute the Taliban and al-Qaeda to wage jihad in Indian controlled Kashmir. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif knew about that training, but lacked the power to stop it. And it very nearly led to the world's first nuclear exchange.  The ISI hated Bhutto, barely tolerated Sharif, and has no use at all for Ben Kingsley. Gandhi, as it happens, wasn't that well received in Pakistan. If history is any guide, the army and ISI will resume ignoring the Pakistani civilian authorities and resume their relationship with the Taliban. If that happens, all bets are off. The United States and NATO can't leave Afghanistan anytime if the forseeable future, lest the Taliban return to power. We also can't override President Ben Kingsley on his domestic political decisions, lest we undermine him with his constituents and demonstrate how ineffective he actually is. We also can't topple him for two reasons; first, we have nothing to replace him with. Second, making a big show of creating an Afghan democracy and toppling it less than a decade afterward would look sort of bad. So what do we do? Do we give Kingsley the berth he needs to fulfil his constitutional duty, even if that imperils our own security? Or do we recognize Afghan democracy for it is, fraudulent, ineffective and ripe for exploitation by the more unsavory elements of the Pakistani national security establishment? These are the questions that President George W. Bush and his failed and ridiculous "democracy agenda" leaves us with as he rides off into the sunset to establish some retarded democracy institute and "replenish the old coffers." Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner By: Warren Zevon From: Excitable BoyPermalinkLabels: The Death of Democracy, The Department of International Relations
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